Strategy, strategy, strategy

Be strategic when you decide to launch (or redesign) a Website. Don’t just throw something together or you’ll end up with what you started—nothing. Always start with a purpose—the most compelling reason for your Website to exist. It must be compelling or you’ll die a silent and painful death on the Internet.

An effective Website has goals branching from its purpose that are—

• Specific—Avoid vague like the plague. Be clear to the people involved in building your Website and the people using it so everyone is on the same page to create a solid brand presence.Here are examples of specific goals:
  • Blogs—Inform American college students aged 18-25 about the personal finances
  • Insurance—Obtain leads for agents to personally contact
  • E-Commerce—Sell green consumer products through contracted agents

  With a specific purpose in mind you can put measurements in place.

• Measureable—How will you gauge the success of your Website? You will spend your time and money to launch a Website and you’ll need a way to show it was all worth it.Here are examples of measureable goals:
  • Blogs—Grow subscriber count by 20% monthly
  • Insurance—Influence 25% of visitors to submit for a quote online
  • E-Commerce—Attain a $5 return per visitor
• Realistic—Have you ever heard someone say “I know it sounds to good to be true, but it’s true and it will be BIG!” I have, and it never amounts to anything. If it’s too good to be true, then it probably is. Don’t expect your blog will be Mashable overnight or your e-commerce site an Amazon killer. You allowed to have a vision, but set attainable goals please. Don’t set yourself up for failure, set yourself up for success.

Conversion–oriented

Okay you’ve set goals to fulfill a purpose. How will you achieve those goals? Effective Websites are designed like a funnel—people come for many reasons and need guided to specific actions. Those actions should lead to or be a conversion process that fulfills your strategic goals.

Here are examples of how to fulfill strategic goals through conversion:

• Blogs—Grow subscriber count by 20% monthly
  • Add clearly visible subscribe links
  • Encourage new visitors to subscribe
  • Encourage subscriptions at the end of each article
  • Create quality content that appeals specific industries
  • Encourage readers to become fans at Technorati
  • Write articles on a clear and regular schedule
• Insurance—Influence 25% of visitors to submit for a quote online
  • Add a link to a free quote at the end of every product page
  • Advertise free quotes online in direct mail
  • Add a link to a free quote as part of the top level menu that stands apart from standard navigation
• E-Commerce—Attain a $5 return per visitor
  • Add related products to each product details page
  • Offer discounts on low-selling products
  • Upsell higher quality products
  • Feature highest selling products on homepage

Design as a call to action

As I’ve said before, Website users have the attention–span of goldfish. As soon as they complete their task, they want to know what to do next. It is up to us to provide them with a next step and to not leave them with nothing to do. If you leave your users with no clear next step what do you think they will do? With a simple mouse click they’ll leave your site forever. Lost opportunity.

Every design element should be thought of as a call to action. Navigation calls upon the user to find what they want or to explore the site. Headlines call upon the user to read the copy. Your copy should lead to a call to action, such as encouraging feedback or asking for a donation. Any design element that does not engage the user is clutter. Eliminate it.

Personas

Visitors to a site can often be grouped into an encompassing profile based on common behaviors and goals. A persona is simply a defined profile of a likely user to your Website. A persona can include:

• Behaviors—How do they use yours and other Websites?
• Demographics—Who are they?
• Geographics—Where are they in the World?
• Psychographics—What do they believe? More importantly, what drives them to act?
• Purpose—What is their goal?

Once you have a set of two profiles that encompass the majority of your visitors, design your Website so that people who fit these profiles can complete their tasks as easy as possible.

Here are a few loosely defined example personas:

• Blogs
  • Subscribers who come from RSS readers to comment on your article (opportunity for pingbacks/comments and social bookmarks)
  • New readers who found your article on a search engine (opportunity for subscribers)
• Insurance
  • Shoppers looking for the best quote (opportunity for new customer)
  • Policy–holders looking for insurance information (opportunity to cross–sell)
• E-Commerce
  • Current customers looking to check shipping (opportunity for customer feedback)
  • Shoppers browsing music (opportunity for purchase)

Landing pages

Landing pages are pages custom designed to fit the needs of a visitor to increase conversions. Landing pages often have a special URL to which visitors who fit the profile are directed. Because of the extra resources involved in creating landing pages, they are typically reserved for circumstances associated with already high conversion rates and high dollar values.

Here are example circumstances that warrant a landing page:

• You send out a massive direct mail with a special offer for your new coffee bean. The direct mail piece refers them to a page on your Website that talks solely about the coffee bean and the special deal with a clear purchase process.
• You run a TV ad that promotes the environmental–awareness of your products. The TV ad directs them to a special page with a sweepstakes to win a hybrid car in exchange for information that you can use for an upcoming product launch.

That’s all for now

I hope you enjoyed this extensive article that I think of as the intersection of marketing and Website design. To read similar insights read my other entries and subscribe to my blog. Please leave a comment and let me know your thoughts!

“Guidelines for highly effective Websites” was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 9:47 am

The first couple are to create rounded corners for boxes in the website. They are extremely easy to use and come in very handy for those that don’t know how to write the code from the top of their head.

The third is CSS menu creator to allow you to have fly out or down tabs. I haven’t used this one and I’ll have to admit, it does have a bunch of fields for values to input. But it does look interesting.

The last one is as simple as the first two. Just select the colors, fonts and sizes and it gives you a real time preview of how the form looks. Click on the “Your CSS” button and it allows you to download the stylesheet to your computer.

We’re already into our 9th week of tools and tips and it’s getting hard to remember which ones’ were posted already without going back to the site page to see.

I guess I’m going to have to organize this resource list a little better because I don’t want to start duplicating some of the tools and websites that I’ve already posted.

Maybe an Excel Spreadsheet or a Word Document to keep me organized is something I need to set up.

Anyway, for all of you who read these posts, have a very Happy New Year and let’s all strive for prosperous 2009.

I’ll have to admit, though. With the holidays coming up, my time has diminished to almost nill. What we really want to do is create a video for the tools we posted and show how to use them. But, that will take time. Time that certainly is limited. But, we will get to those “How To” videos to help everyone.

The one thing I noticed is, there’s a lot of visitors every week, but not too many leaving comments. That would help us tremendously. Not only would it help us to provide more content, but it would help you by providing the content you are looking for. So, leave us some comments. You can leave it anonymously.

Thanks again and enjoy the tools this week.

Others, on the other hand, have moved on to more intricate software like Dreamweaver. I know some that continue to use Microsoft Frontpage, even though it’s been discontinued and is no longer supported. They’re just still comfortable using it.

There will be some cheat sheets available for you coders and a place to search for the lines of code you’re looking for.

I’m envious of you coders that can write code just by typing away on Notepad. Not only that, you seem to indent it perfectly as you go along.

Well, I hope these tools can help you. Enjoy!

The tools available out there are truly amazing. The simplicity of website design has increased dramatically in the last few years. No longer do you need to learn HTML, CSS, php, etc. Although, it wouldn’t hurt to know any or all of them.

Microsoft stopped selling Frontpage a few years back and no longer supports it. I know it wasn’t the most popular web development software. But, I have to wonder if, maybe they just knew something ahead of everyone and foresaw all the tools coming out and decided not to compete with them.

Regardless, the website tools provided this week will definitely help create some nice sites.

Again, please sign up to win a copy of Seth Godin’s book, Tribes. We have two copies and two lucky winners will get a copy each. So, sign up at the top/right of this site.

Not only are you going to setup a free website, but some of these sites also provide free hosting. That means zero, nada, zilch coming out of your pocket.

There are so many websites out there providing these services that it’s hard to filter out most of them. I only chose a few of these by the first few that came up on the search engines. I’m not saying they are the best or that I recommend them. I’m simply trying to help some of you who don’t want to go through the effort of learning how to program a website.

Check them out and let me know what you think.

Also, don’t forget to sign up to win your FREE copy of Seth Godin’s book, “Tribes.” We actually have two copies and will be selecting two lucky winners in the next couple of weeks.

As mentioned yesterday, Jay and I recorded about two weeks ago and his podcast is available at his website and on iTunes, episode 31. I had some scheduling with this website for the last couple of weeks but should be able to catch up with Jay’s requests. I made some of the changes Jay recommended but not all.

The main challenge will be to write the press release and submit it to the press release service. I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know how to write one, but have been reading a lot about it. Also, the sequence Jay instructed me to take was somewhat confusing to me. I may have to wing it or shoot Jay an email to see if I’m doing it correctly.

We’ll see how it goes in the next few days.

Also, due to some scheduling, the Free Resources will be delayed by one day. I appologize for that but it was unavoidable. I should have it up by Tuesday morning. I appreciate your patience.

If you are trying to build surveys, invitations or online forms, then you’ll be happy to find two of the tools included in this weeks’ list. You can use both of these tools, Wufoo and Icebrrg, to perform these tasks.

And finally, if you travel a lot, you can use 280 Slides to show your Powerpoint presentations. If you forget your media stick or the file gets corrupt, no problem. As long as you have an Internet connection, you can display it online.