Filmed at Sunset Harbor Bar & Grill in Fairport Harbor, Ohio. 625 Prospect St, Painesville, OH 44077. (440) 350-0500
Show Notes:
The Sunset Harbor Bar & Grill: Great food, prices and views. Edwards Communications is currently re-developing their website with a June, 2014 rollout scheduled.
Why would a business want to redesign their web site?
One of the biggest reasons is the site needs to responsive and render properly on a desktop, a laptop, a tablet and of course a phone; it needs to be mobile.
In the 90’s web sites were essentially an online brochure, what does a business need to think about in terms of web site functionality now in 2014?
Today, we expect our websites to WORK for us – to be a growing and changing online presence. Today, a website is never “done”, and today, websites serve a few highly important functions:
1. e-commerce: we can obviously sell our products/services with e-commerce functionality,
2. resource libraries: many companies SMARTLY use their site to develop large resource libraries of content that is used for marketing and training purposes – this increases SEO dramatically, and adding online training for your products replaces hundreds of man-hours.
3. Lead generation: Today, websites can truly be the HUB for companies – meaning that the site is dynamic – the blogs can be linked to their social media platforms and used for client interaction and inbound marketing efforts.
How do you use this dynamic, interactive site for Lead Gen?
A lead generation site gives away for free a certain amount of valuable content- verbiage and/or video, photos, etc. to the general public.
But by creating another level of content that is richer, the business now asks the user to Opt In, or provide their email address to receive the more valuable content.
And there is the beginning of that valuable LIST that we often talk about. Ok, you’re online – great. Now how do you intend to get new visitors to the web site?
“If You Build It They Will Come” certainly doesn’t work in 2014. You can start out with an Adwords campaign if you want a quick spike. We’ve done this for a few sites. People will give you a very wide range of prices on this, but it should cost you about $500.00 for initial set up and then you have to decide how much you’re willing to spend for your clicks from there. But I’ve found a good balance with about $200-300 per month.
Or you can create an organic, content driven approach feeding your appropriate social media outlets quality, thoughtful content that gets them to your site.
Yes. And answer questions on blogs that are complimentary to your business, and in LinkedIn Groups.
We touch on branding from time to time. A lot of people think it’s just a logo, but it’s so much more than that. How does branding affect your website design?
Branding is much more than just a logo – but I don’t want to downplay the logo’s importance-because it is the first impression of your company. But branding includes everything that forms the feelings that a person has about your company, and I want to know at this point what the company stands for -slogan, mission statement, vision statement… These are the things that I design around. These define what makes the company unique.
What about an e-commerce web site? How does that work? Is it safe and secure? How does the business get paid after an online purchase?
Most b-2-b’s can simply use PayPal standard. It’s free and easy to implement and you get to use PP’s secure server for CC processing. Consumers are a different story. If you expect to do a pretty decent volume of selling online, its worth putting together your own system: purchasing an SSL certificate to secure your site, then choosing a merchant and gateway to process the payments. .
