If you have a small business, you need a website. If you don't, you're missing the chance to tell potential customers how to buy your product or service.
It can be a simple, few page "brochure site" listing your services and contact info or you might need a complicated site, with hundreds of pages, that let customers buy your products and services online.
Whether you already have a website or you're starting a new one, this is the "make or break" stage. You need to know who your existing customers are, what they buy from you, and why. We'll use this information to help you create a profile of your "ideal" customer, then together, come up with a plan to make it easy for them to find you.
Even though this sounds simple, it can be surprisingly difficult to take a realistic, objective view of your business. Many owners are so caught up in day-to-day operations that they have no idea who their customers really are or why.
We'll suggest some free (and paid) tools to help you figure out what your "ideal" customer searches for, and the results they get. And, at the same time, make it easy for the search engines to find you and deliver the results you want. We'll look at your competition, see what they're doing right and wrong and figure out how you can stand out as the better choice.
You'll also want to think about the how the site is laid out, the colors and fonts, whether it works on mobile devices like an iPhone/iPad, Android or other smartphone, in different web browsers, and if it's easy for your users to find what they're looking for. Skipping any of these could send the sale to a competitor.
Your website is never really "done". You need the ability to easily update the content, announce specials, add products, change the layout or attract new customers. The best way to do this is to separate the content of the site from the design - in other words create a template for the look and then fill in the information.
The options range from free to thousands of dollars, simple to complex, and making a choice can be difficult if you have no experience. If you're just starting or have an existing site, we can help you pick a system that will be easy to manage, and can scale up to the size you need. If your existing solution isn't working we can suggest alternatives and help you transition into the new one.
And, probably most important, we can create a backup system for your site in case of disaster.
Once your site is on-line, to get the most value from it you'll need to monitor your traffic to see who's visiting and why. You can take this data and create basic metrics to see where you need to make changes in the site or what pages/products are getting the most traffic or sales.
There are many free tools and services that can show you:
Once you know who your visitors are and how they got your site, you can begin testing to determine the optimal design, colors or even fonts. You'll want to compare the results you get from changes or additions to previous versions.