The Importance of Color in Your Website

When creating your website there are a lot of considerations, not the least of which is the actual design and color scheme itself. This can affect your sales, how people see your company and how they use your site. There is an entire field of study called color theory or the psychology of color, but you don’t have to go to years of school to pick the colors for your logo and/or website.

I’d like to introduce you to the field of color awareness by briefly going over the reasons behind color theory. First off, there are physical reasons behind why color affects us the way it does. I don’t want to get sidetracked on this as it isn’t necessary to understand why we see colors the way we do, it is only important to understand how they affect us and how they affect the way we buy. I do want to point out that most of color theory is what they call “soft science” in that it isn’t really provable by scientific method nor can it be explained by mathematical reference. That doesn’t make it any less true. Statistics in sales often “prove” something beyond a shadow of a doubt.

First we will look at the primary colors. Because there are only three primary colors, all other colors come from those, making the primary colors some of the most significant. The three primary colors are Blue, Yellow and Red.

Blue, the color of the sky and water, is associated with coolness, serenity, stability and solidity. It invokes a sense of permanence and strength due to its association with the sky and the sea. This would be a good choice in colors for a financial institution or a mortgage company.

Yellow is almost always linked with the sun. This is pretty universal throughout the world, so this color conveys the same message in almost every culture. It is generally associated with energy, happiness, optimism, warmth and heat. Yellow captures people’s attention better than any other color because of its brightness. It is usually a good choice for schools, daycares and creative enterprises.

Red is the color of blood, so can be linked with vitality, life and passion. It is an aggressive color in many ways and is a hot color because of its association with flame and blood. It can also be used to convey danger. This makes it an exciting color and one that is associated with thrills and energy. It is often used in association with fast foods, certain restaurants and anywhere people want to associate vitality and thrilling energy.

More tomorrow on this very important subject.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

Converting Visitors to Buyers

You’ve worked hard at creating your web site. It is now complete, live for everyone to see, and now you need to do some business. You want the site to pay for itself and become a benefit for your business. So you’ve worked equally hard to get people to the site, bring it into the public eye and make it visible to the world. However, all the traffic to your site means nothing if you aren’t converting those visitors to actual paying customers.

How do you accomplish this? Through a process called conversion. Conversion is the process by which you take browsers, or viewers, and turn them into a customer; someone who pays for your goods and/or services. Your conversion rate is the ratio of visitors to your site compared to how many of those visitors are actually buying. Without this all important conversion, the work and money you have spent getting those visitors to your site is wasted. So how do you change the viewer to a customer?

According to Forrester as of August 2007 the average conversion rate in e-commerce is 2.9%. Your target then is to match this or exceed it. Increasing the conversion rate of your online business makes sense in a lot of ways. You’re maximizing your efforts in marketing and making those dollars make more sense for you as well as increasing revenue without spending further marketing dollars or manpower. There are some simple ways to make sure you are doing all you can to maximize your potential in conversions.

First of all, make sure you’re providing great content in the site. I’ve talked a lot about that in earlier blog entries and can’t emphasize enough how important great written content is. Make sure your content is grabbing your visitor’s attention and that it tells them exactly what it is you want them to do immediately. Don’t make them guess. Along the way, think about ways to build customer loyalty – that way those marketing dollars not only get a onetime customer but build a future relationship that keeps bringing the customer back again and again. Some kind of reward for the customer to return usually works – maybe a coupon for a percentage off on their next visit to your site.

In short –

• Write and implement great content for your site
• Grab your visitor/buyers attention and hold it
• Make it easy for them to know exactly what you want them to do on the front page
• Find ways of building your customers loyalty

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

SEO Versus Paid Search Engine Ads

The best way to make sure your site has great ranking in the search engines is so simple it seems like it is too good to be true. Simply write the content in such a way that it is of most benefit to the customer/viewer you are trying to target. That’s it!

With that said, it does take some thorough research. You need to figure out what your customers/viewers will be searching for when they look for a website that has to do with your business, and then write the content accordingly. This should be fairly easy as hopefully if the customer is in fact searching for your type of business simply using the keywords about your business in the content of your site will go a long ways towards creating a site that is friendly to the search engines, and will help you get the positioning you need. Another great way of helping your ranking is to have sites that are ranked highly link to your site. Do not fall into the trap of thinking you can cheat the search engines, even with reciprocal links. Avoid linking to “bad neighborhoods” (sites that are known for spamming the search engines) or scamming links to your site in any way. It can ultimately lead to your being banned altogether. However, legitimate links are always helpful.

Another benefit of great content is an increase in your conversion of site viewers to actual buyers. If your site doesn’t make someone want to buy from you, getting traffic to the site ultimately means nothing. I will touch on this subject more in future blogs.

In talking about search engines as a marketing strategy, I would not be doing anyone a service by saying that relying on search engine traffic for your business is a good thing. Search engines are constantly changing their algorithms and if they suddenly change something that causes your ranking to drop, sales can plummet. This is something that is completely out of your control and can in itself be disastrous. Instead of just SEO, I would recommend a more conventional method by employing SEO as well as paid advertising on the web and search engines, such as Google Ads. The paid advertisements under the keywords of your choice that you bid on can be extremely lucrative and can often be worth their weight in gold.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

Creating Quality Site Content - Avoiding Mistakes with the Search Engines

You need desperately to market your site and have a limited budget. The natural alternative for you is the search engines. If you have a high ranking in the various search engines you have a better chance of getting traffic and customers to your website. There are a number of ways to achieve this, one of which is to do what is called search engine optimization (SEO) and get what is called ‘organic’ traffic to your site – in other words, traffic from natural site ranking. This can be a tough thing to do and takes a lot of work. It takes so much work and is such a tricky process there are companies that specialize in that and nothing else. But again, we’re back to you having a limited budget, and hiring someone to do SEO can be expensive. So the natural alternative is to do it yourself, but, again this is a lot of work, though worth its weight in gold if it helps your business succeed. What you do not want to do is try to cheat the results and have your site rank high by doing what the search engines consider to be dishonest. This is commonly called ‘spamdexing’ or ‘spamming the search engines’ and get your site banned from them altogether, and that can be a disaster.

The following list is directly from Google and can be seen in its entirety by going to Google and looking up Webmaster Guidelines or by going to http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&src=top5.

Quality guidelines - specific guidelines

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don't send automated queries to Google.
• Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
• Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.
• Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

I’ll have more tomorrow on the right way to create a user friendly as well as a site that is friendly to the search engines.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

Marketing Your Website

You’ve created a site – now you need to market it. If you don’t tell people about your site no one will know it is there. A website is just like a physical location. If you build a store on top of a mountain, no one will know about it. The same goes for the web. If you build a site, no one will know it is there unless you make a splash, bring attention to it, shout it out to the world.

A good way of doing this is all the usual, conventional, practical methods of advertising such as print, radio and television, as well as lesser yet effective methods such as magazines, billboards etc. That costs a lot of money however and some people just don’t have that budget. I would still recommend looking at these methods and trying at least some of them on a limited basis, depending on your budget. However, there is another method; one that is not as effective or as lucrative as other methods, but works none the less.

Search engines.

Now, if you are like most businesses you are going to have a lot of competition out there. All of your competitors want to be found under most if not all of the same search terms you do. This can lead to some pretty fierce fighting for position on the engines, especially Google as it currently holds the title of champion in the search engine arena. According to comScore Media Metrix Google accounts for 74% of all search engine traffic, Yahoo has 14%, MSN 9%, Ask has 2% and all other SE's share the remaining 1%. With the amount of searches going on every day in the world, even 2% with Ask is a large number, but no one can hold a candle to the top dog, Google.

This means you need to optimize your site, for the most part, for Google. That doesn’t mean you ignore the other engines, but with 74% of the traffic, Google is obviously the lion’s share and it only makes sense to do it with them in mind.

How do you optimize a site for the search engines, or more relevantly, Google? Well, there are a lot of ways to do it. What you do NOT want to do is what they call “spamdexing” or “spamming” the search engines. Doing so will be considered a scam and will get you banned from the search engines altogether. This is disaster and to be avoided at all costs.

More tomorrow on how to optimize and how to avoid spamdexing

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

What Is My Website Message and How Do I Write It?

You’ve decided your business needs a website, or possibly you have a book to announce, an event to promote or you need a web page to promote your resume…there are many reasons you need a presence on the internet and these are only a few. Regardless, at this point you know you need the website, and you’ve decided to go with a professional design company as the best option to get yourself to where you need to go. You have determined there are a lot of options out there for professional web design but you’ve sifted through all the available choices and you’ve picked a design company (hopefully you’ve picked HIT Web Design!).

Phew! You’ve done a lot…but now you’ve arrived at one of the hardest parts; written content and what message you need to convey. You need to define what your message is going to be with the web site, and how you’re going to get that across to the client/viewer. Luckily, you are the most knowledgeable person about what your message needs to be because it is your business. You know your business like no one else possibly could. That doesn’t make writing content easy, but it makes it a lot simpler than it might be trying to define a message with no knowledge at all. Many design companies such as HIT Web Design can provide professional help with writing your content, most of the time for a very reasonable, nominal fee. They need at least some guidance from you, but hopefully you have some idea at this point of the general message you want to get across. You can give the professional writer assigned to your project some guidance and a direction to go in. They will now work with you in the process of putting together a coherent, concise message to accomplish what you want with your site.

A list of criteria for your message should look something like the following –

• Your website should be custom, distinctive and innovative, something that steps out of the crowd of your competitors.
  
  
• Don't be too wordy with too much text and content. Get to the point concisely in order to hold your viewers attention.
  
  
• Your client/viewer should immediately know what they are supposed to do on your site or be able to find what they are looking for. Use bullets or outlines to make your points. They are easier to read and follow.
  
  
• You should give your customer a lot of opportunities to call you, write you, respond to you, buy from you…whatever you are trying to get them to do you need to make it obvious and easy for them to do it. This is called establishing a “call to action”.
  
  
• Once your website is live, consider how you will drive customers to it. How are you going to market it? If you don’t bring attention to your site, no one will know it exists. Unlike the Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will NOT come unless you shout it out to the world! (Use search engines, articles, advertising, yellow page listing, etc.)

If you want to write your content yourself, as stated above you know your business best. If you are unsure of your writing abilities or just don’t have time, a professional writing service such as HIT is probably going to be your best bet. They can write it for you or at least proof anything you write.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

What do I Need For My Web Site?

OK, so you’ve been looking at all the choices when it comes to web design, and after looking at all the options you’ve decided to go with a professional design company. There are a lot of companies and a lot of options out there for design. What is the best option? That decision can depend on what your needs are. Do you need a lot of programming, or some kind of a database? Do you need a store, the ability to sell your products online? Do you even know what you need? A professional design company can help you determine this, and the answers will determine how much you need to spend.

Many of the questions you have to ask yourself about your needs for your site are the same no matter who you decide to go with. What pages do you need in order to display all the information you are trying to get across to your viewers? Do you need to sell a product and if so how many products are you going to sell? Who is your target audience? A check list for these items might look like this –

• Who is your target audience? Are you trying to sell to your viewers and turn them into customers or are you just trying to convey information to the audience?
  
  
• The look of your site should be appealing to your customers – the viewers who will be most likely to use your site. It should look professional and attractive and not distract from your content. If you are selling a product you should make that obvious right from the front page so you make it easy for your customers to know what they are supposed to do.
  
  
• What is your written content going to consist of? The subject matter for your site should be specifically written to appeal to your target audience.
  
  
• Your site needs to be user-friendly, meaning the navigation and information you are trying to get across should be easy to understand and to use.
  
  
• The site should be constructed in such a way as to be easily visible to the search engines as well as easily marketable.
  
  
• Finally, if you have a store to sell from, it should be easy to use and understand – you want to make it as easy as possible for your customers to spend money with you!

Using these questions you can determine a lot about what you need in the way of a site. Looking out there on the internet you will see a lot of different prices out there. The rule of thumb for prices is – if it seems too good to be true then it probably is. HIT offers basic sites for a very low price, because we sell sites in bulk. All the designs and sites are custom. We also rely on building a long term relationship with you and making money in the long run by hosting your site. We lose money up front in order to establish a business relationship with you and invest in your site with you. We bank on your success with your site, which is why we can offer such inexpensive prices on our web sites. When you see our prices, many people think HIT Web Design is trying to scam them, but as explained above, we are able to provide inexpensive web sites due to selling in volume as well as our unique business model - investing in your site makes good business sense for us only if you are happy - so we strive to make sure our clients are not only happy, but satisfied that their website is all it possibly can be. We make sure you are aware of all the little extras that are available to you to make your website a success.

Make sure when shopping for a web site designer that they can answer the above questions and provide you with a site that is not only attractive, but meets your needs and the needs of your viewers.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.