From planning to content, design, photography and more, here’s what’s involved in build a good business website so that you can be smarter about budgeting and understand why one guy wants to charge you $500 and the other is asking for $5,000.
Of all the questions I’m asked by customers and prospects alike, this one ranks in the top three. Even people who don’t check their analytics and barely know what analytics are have the presence of mind to ask how to get more people to visit their website.
I’m going to tell you one of the best kept secrets of increasing website traffic:
It’s easy.
I’m also going to share some tactics for doing it but there’s a twist at the end of the post, so stick around.
Building a customer-focused, lead-generating site is a lot of work. The “building” part of a website is the easy part. But knowing what to build? Not so much.
That’s why so many sites languish and turn into an expense instead of a business asset that makes you money. Today I share a short list of things that you can improve on your site – from the tiny fixes to the big-picture strategy – that will increase your chances of pulling people in, keeping them there and getting them to take action.
Quick: what’s at the center of your marketing universe?
Tick tick tick…
Do you hear that sound? That’s the sound of your marketing getting ready to explode if you’re not protecting your most valuable marketing asset.
Read on to see if you’re heading toward marketing disaster … and how to avoid it if you are.
Last week I started a discussion on how to prevent your website from being held hostage. If you missed that, you can read it here.
Today I’ve got two more scenarios that can really derail your web marketing, cost time, money, or worse, require a total do-over. These are things I’ve seen happen to real people, over and over.
I’ve got a pretty simple solution at the end. You might not want to hear it, but it’s the truth. Find out what these mistakes are and then make sure they don’t happen to you.
Over the past few months, my company been running a series of cost savings promotions to entice people to hire us.
The good news is that we’ve closed a bunch of new work. The bad news is that the work has come with some stress. Not for us, but for some of our new customers.
As it turns out, some of our new clients discovered that rebooting their marketing wasn’t so easy because their websites were being held hostage. In some cases, a fee was required to disengage from an old developer. In others an attorney had to be called in. In still others, there was nothing to be done and we had to start from scratch when our customers realized they would never be able to access their original websites again.
Here are the top four things that I’ve witnessed and how you can avoid them.
Today I’m starting a series dubbed “Don’t Make The Same Mistake Twice” about some of the mistakes that I see business owners make – smart, well-intentioned business owners – again and again.
They can be costly, both in terms of revenue and in terms of reputation. And sadly, not only do I see them made a lot but I see them made repeatedly.
Today I talk about web hosting mistakes that range from an expensive inconvenience to an unrecoverable disaster. I’ll tell you about just a few of the horrors I’ve witnessed and you can decide whether you’re willing to risk the same thing happening to you – or whether it’s time to take action to protect your web assets.
This post was inspired by the countless nightmare stories I hear from prospects about how they hired a designer or developer, spent money and were left in the lurch. Either their site was never delivered, or it was delivered in horrific condition, or the cost spiraled out of control or about a hundred other variations that ended badly. This post is a bit tongue-in-cheek but the consequences are serious. So if you’re in the market to build a site (or need a do-over), take this to heart and be careful about how you vet and hire a developer.
What do an expensive website and a 5-minute WordPress installation have in common? If you said “some really bad things that should be flogged and eradicated immediately” you’d get a big grand prize. These are just a few things that need to go, and if you find them on your site, they should be removed with prejudice. Some are annoying. Others can cost you business. Time for some early spring cleaning!
Bloggers know WordPress as the premier blogging tool. All businesses, however, should know that WordPress has evolved beyond just blogging. It has become a feature rich, intuitive and easy to use tool that is both blogging platform and website content management system rolled up into one. The magic of WordPress is that all of that power can be utilized even by the Little Guy without a fleet of human resources or a multi million dollar budget. The natural question then is, “How much will a WordPress site cost me?” That’s what we are going to explore.
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