Small Business Design Resources

What to look for in a Web Designer

There are tons of people claiming to be web designers, the following are specifics of what to look for and what to look out for when choosing a web designer to work on your business website.

Skills

The number one thing that you should look for in a web designer is for their web site. You can usually tell what skills they have by just looking at their own website. Some web designers make excuses that they’re so busy on client’s projects that they don’t have time to work on their own website. How can a web designer say that they can design your business website if they can’t make the time to design their own? If a web designer doesn’t have a website or has only one page that says, “coming soon”, LOOK OUT!

Style

Each business has a certain style, so you want to make sure that the web designer you choose can design for your business style. For example, if you own a skateboarding shop, you would look for a web designer that is capable of creating grungy and sporty designs. Check the web designer’s portfolio to see their style. If a web designer doesn’t have a portfolio, LOOK OUT!

Testimonials

Anyone can rave about their work, but can they back it up with customer testimonials? Look for authentic testimonials! These can be written, but must be accompanied with at least a full name. The best authentic testimonials are in a form of a video recording, voice recording, inside a 3rd-party widget or found on a 3rd-party website. When someone has the capability to edit the testimonials the testimonials become less trustworthy, so LOOK OUT!

Expertise

You started to look for a web designer because you understand the importance of a business website, but you either don’t have the skills and/or time to design it yourself. A web designer should be able to steer you in the right direction and provide suggestions/support along the design phase of your website. Hiring a student or someone who can just throw a website together, isn’t really beneficial for your business image. Look for a web designer who has the expertise to showcase your business online and design a website that provides valuable experience for your target audience.

Keep in mind that most web designers are not programmers and vise versa, but many work together on website projects. Ask about your needs; don’t assume that they should know how to do everything. One can’t be an expert in everything, so LOOK OUT for those that say they are.

Social Media Presence

A web designer should be out and participating in some sort of Social Media activity. They could be writing blogs, interact in forums, be active on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube or any other social media platform. The whole point is that a web designer should know and grow with the online media to be able to keep up with the constantly evolving website demands and techniques. You can do a search in Google for a web designer’s name or business and if you don’t see any social media references LOOK OUT!

Quick Tip: Remove Yourself from your Analytics

Using an analytics program such as Google Analytics to track your website’s performance is necessary to determine what works and what parts of your website still need improvements. To make sure that you have clean result, you need to remove yourself from your analytics program. You and everyone in your company could possibly be accessing your website hundreds of times a week and therefore skew the tracking results drastically.

If you’re using Google Analytics, you can simply add a filter to exclude your IP address, but there’s a better way described in the article Count Me Out!

Website Critique: Factory direct craft

Factory Direct Craft, a family owned craft supply business was started by a stay-at-home mom. Now for over 20 years in business, the company has an online presence www.factorydirectcraft.com and ships their products worldwide. Striving for perfection in customer service, they wanted a video website critique with suggestions on how to improve their website.

Branding should be the priority of every business small or big. Having a consistent identity throughout your print and online marketing materials will make your business more recognizable. Studies have shown that it takes at least 7 times for a prospect to interact with a business before they buy something.

Overall Improvements

• Make sure that your store, blog, and forum all look the same. You don’t want to confuse your customers with multiple identities. Not all your customers enter your store directly from the home page.

• Update the look of the website to bring it to today’s standards. Keep in mind your target audience at all times. Remember that you’re selling to creative people, so don’t shy away from bringing some creative style.

• Let a professional design your business logo and apply it across all your marketing materials.

• The top navigation should consist of the main categories that are on your website to make the shopping experience easier. The current buttons on the main navigation at the top are not the primary places where your visitors will go to shop on your site. These buttons could either be moved to the bottom of the website or made smaller and moved up next to the phone number.

• Create consistency with all your images in size and style. You can also make the images on your multi-product pages a little bigger, this will let your visitors scan the products easier (seeing details) and in return shorten the time to add to cart. To the right is a sample of a subcategory view from www.sortingwithstyle.com.

• Move the description text that you have on each category below the products, this will bring the products higher up on the page. It’s great for search engines to have descriptive text on all your pages, but the reality is that most customers don’t actually read that information.

Homepage

• There’s a lot going on and nothing is calling attention of the user to dig dipper in to the site. It’s best to focus on one main thing or offer and give a call-to-action, it’s sort of like telling the user I want you to do “this” next.

Shipping page

• Make it more organized and easier to read. For example take a look at the Macy’s Shipping Information page, it’s easy to read and to scan to find the specific shipping information.

• Personally I think that your shipping and handling charge is too high. You can have great products and they might be priced right, but just having a high shipping cost can make your buyer turn to your competitors.

More website critiques
Of course there are more things to review to make this website better such as search engine optimization, but this is a whole different subject and will require it’s own review.

If you’re reading this review and want to add more suggestions, please add your comments below.

Disclaimer

The video website critique and suggestions are for you to review and take what you feel will better your business website. There’s no guarantee that the suggestions mentioned will improve your business. Design Leap is not held responsible for any negative outcome.

Using Social Media For Your Business

Flickr photo - Mouthing off by demi-brooke

Have you been following the Celebrity Apprentice? On Season 8 Episode 6, the objective of the game was to create the best viral video. A viral video is one that is emailed from person to person, thus spreading the word about your product. In this case they were advertising laundry detergent. Before the dawn of the Internet, companies spent some percentage of their advertising and marketing dollars on TV, radio and magazine commercials and depended to some extent on “Word of Mouth” advertising. People use to say that if you impress a customer, they will tell 3 other customers and if you disappoint a customer, they will tell 10 other people. Businesses often used to, and still do today, offer additional discounts to existing customers when they bring in new customers. Word of Mouth advertising is a tried and trusted fundamental cornerstone of business marketing.

Word of Mouth Goes Digital

Today, the concept of Word of Mouth advertising has grown to advertising via any means of communication, especially electronic communication, and we call it social media. Websites like twitter, facebook, myspace and youtube, started out being the domain of young adults, especially college students, and now are featuring prominently in mainstream company website strategy. That’s because the networking opportunities that are empowered by social media are huge.

In the case of a viral video, imagine how this works. Most of us forward emails of this type to more than one person, in fact, many of us have ever-growing distribution lists. If you forward to a distribution list of, let’s say 10 people, and each of them forward to 10 people, in just 2 forwards the viral video producer has just reached 110 people. If each of those people forward to 10 people the video reaches 1100 people. You can see how the numbers grow exponentially to reach thousands in just a few forwards.

How does this help the small business owner?

Small business can leverage the same ideas in their discussion forums hosted on their site to generate useful discussions about their products and services, get customer feedback, and get new information out to customers. The trick is to make your site interesting so that users will get the word out by sending links, messages, etc. and draw their friends to your site. Many businesses, including big businesses, are also putting links to twitter and myspace and other sites right on their website. Of course, you need to sign up for each of these services, but they are generally free. All it takes is time.

In the case of facebook and myspace, and similar websites, users aim to collect as many friends as possible on their webpage. Then, whenever they post message to their site, all their friends will see it.

Not Just For Customers

Website forums are not just for drawing customers. They are also useful for networking with merchandisers and others in your industry. They can help you stay informed about what your competitors are up to, where your business is going and what direction you may need to take it in the future. As a business owner you should be engaging actively in social media for generating partners and affiliates as well as creating an environment in which your customers can participate on your site. Don’t just have your own. Join your competitor’s forums and see if you can find their twitter page or their facebook page.

You can start by following me on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/designleap

Website Critique: Elegant jewelry and crafts

Lorraine Davis, a jewelry and crafts designer has decided to start her own business and set up www.elegantjewelryandcrafts.com website to sell her designs. Designing jewelry and designing websites is a totally different art, below is a video website critique with suggestions on how to improve her website.

In business, first impressions can make or break a sale, a connection, or even an opportunity. Websites are impressions of our business when we’re not there in person. Below are some further explanations and examples from the website critique video on how to make this website more professional and elegant as the name says.

Overall Improvements

www.displayimporter.com

• Set a style for your business and apply it everywhere. Let a professional design your business logo and include it on all your pages. Keep a unified look and color scheme that appeals to your target audience.

• Double-check, triple-check your links to make sure they are working and going where you intended them to go.

• Take professional photos of your products. If you don’t show your products as their best, how can you expect people to see their quality. Buy some jewelry stands and take photos against a white background, your images will look clean, unified and professional.

Homepage

• The homepage needs to have a call-to-action that prompts the visitor to do something: sign up for a newsletter, view gallery or anything else that you expect them to do. If you don’t tell them to act, they won’t.

• Remove 90% of the body text and replace with relevant information that the visitor wants to see.

Order Here page

• There’s no point to have a separate Order Here page. You need to combine your Jewelry page and Order Here page. When people browse your inventory, they want to know how much each item is and it’s information, they shouldn’t have to look for this information on a separate page. You can have a link from your gallery page that goes directly to individual product when clicked for more information.

Other recommendation

You might consider to sell your items on www.artfire.com, it’s a website where people buy and sell handmade products.

More website critiques

Of course there are more things to dive deeply into making this site better such as search engine optimization, but this is a whole different subject and will require it’s own review.

If you’re viewing this review and want to add more suggestions, please add your comments below.

Disclaimer

The video website critique and suggestions are for you to review and take what you feel will better your business website. There’s no guarantee that the suggestions mentioned will improve your business. Design Leap is not held responsible for any negative outcome.