Why Graphic Designers can kill your web business

Yes, it's true - graphic designers can kill your web business.

Now, I can hear all graphic designers taking out long ropes and throwing the same over high beams.

Before the crowd turns into a mob, let's analyze this.

Let me start by saying that no-one will be able to design a better looking website than a graphic designer - why? Because that's what they do, what they've been trained and taught to do.

BUT - it's time that people start realizing that a website needs to be a functional, integral marketing tool, part of your overall marketing strategy and plan and NOT JUST AN EXTENSION OF YOUR EGO.

The moment you start looking at your website as an extension of your ego, is the moment you will start losing sales.

WHEN IS A WEBSITE EFFECTIVE ?

When it sells the product or service and not all of your own achievements in life. Really, if you want to sell a product, internet shoppers are not interested in who you are or what you have achieved thus far. They want to know the features and benefits of your product or service.

Will they benefit from buying this - and do you believe enough in your product / service to offer a money back guarantee for instance.

This is where it all goes wrong. People let graphic designers design a beautiful site for them, selling all of THEIR OWN good points and then totally missing the point.

IS YOUR WEBSITE FUNCTIONAL ?

This is really the only question. And it can be broken down as follows :-

1) Can surfers find your website when they do a search on the Search Engines? And not a search for your domain name, a keyword or keyphrase search. For instance - if you have a guesthouse in Moscow, will your site be found when someone searches for "affordable luxury accommodation Moscow" ?

2) Is your site surfer friendly ? Is navigation easily found, is navigation easy to follow, is there a natural path through your site, leading the potential customer to the next step and towards the sale ?

3) Is the layout of your site done correctly? Do you know about the Golden Triangle and where 85% of searches look when opening a site?

4) Did you capture your audience within 10 seconds? Did you know that the majority of surfers click out of a website within 10 - 15 seconds. If you do not grab their attention within that time-frame, you have just dropped a sale.

5) Do you know how search engine spiders crawl a site? This is very important when designing a website. You need to know what to put in the coding of the site to ensure it is "search-engine-friendly."

These are just a few of the major issues that 1000's of website owners realize after having a website for a couple of months.

My argument is as follows :- if your graphic designer cannot or did not tell you these things when they designed your site, you have a 90% chance of having your web business killed by your graphic designer.

If you cannot give positive answers to the above questions, maybe now is the time to speak to a SEO expert.....

Search Engine Optimization

Did you know that we have left the Age of the Information Economy behind and are now well into the Age of the Attention Economy?

What does this mean? It means that if you rely upon the Internet to conduct your business, the age of putting up a web site and getting instant results are long gone.

Now you must clamour for the attention of web surfers, your prospective visitors and customers, who are lured by the frantic actions of the billions of pages currently indexed on the web.

To give you some perspective, Google alone indexes over 7 billion pages.

Therefore, to survive means to grab people's attention and you do that by using good digital rhetorical skills.

The importance of tracking your website

How often do we not start an extremely nice marketing campaign and then never keep track of it?

Money well spent? Or is it the foolish ways of the uninformed ?

However it may seem, it is very wise to keep track of where you spend your money and on what. There is an age old saying that goes "it is madness to keep on doing the same thing but expecting different results." This is unfortunately what happens in everyday life and everyday business. A business owner will place an ad in 3 different newspapers or media, but never keep track of said campaigns.

These campaigns will run for months and sometime even more, with the owner just paying the bills, but never really knowing if the ad was really an investment or not. The same goes true for your website. Treat it as a "hobby" and you can expect a hobby's results, but treat it as a major link in your marketing campaign and strategy and you WILL see drastically improving results in your sales.

How then do you keep track? Well, the same way as you should with customers to you business...you ask these customers where hey heard about your business. If I get x hits per day on my website, but I do not know how they heard about me or where they came from, how will I be able to better that specific part of my marketing strategy?

"How do I ask visitors to my site where they came from ?" - I can just see you frowning about this statement......The secret is :- a reliable tracker - note - not just a counter telling me how many visitors I have had, but a tracker giving details regarding which search engine/s they came from, which keywords were used in finding mysite, from which countries I got these visitors and more. Only after careful analysis of these statistics will I be able to set up the next smart move to ensure I place myself, my website and hence my business in a more suitable position for sales. This is really one of the key factors in determining your next move.

We have added trackers to a couple of our customer's websites over the last few months with amazing results - we have been able to track visits to there sites down to the last detail and this has put us in a better position to advise customers of the next step. In some cases we changed some of the technical "meta tags" on the sites, in some cases we realized we had to change keywords as the original keywords we used for the site were not the ones attracting the visitors. All of this has enabled these clients of ours to get better rankings in the search engines and in most cases we have rankings in the first 10 in Google !!!!!

But, it would not have been possible if we had not been able to gather these detailed statistics.

Isn't it time you get your tracker today ?? Visit http://www.o5webdesign.com/services.html for more info re all our services.