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Our philosophy:

• Do the job right and 'as promised'.
  
• Honesty ALWAYS.
  
• Give it your all.
  

We've built a business on that philosophy... and look forward to meeting many more individuals and businesses who are looking for an online presence with a company they can trust.

So, you’re a small business. But is your website a main component of your marketing and branding efforts? If so, have you looked at your website lately . . .from a client’s point of view? If not, you may want to start right away. Your website could be a reason you are losing business.

Small business can attract potential customers via their business website. To make sure your website continues to do its job, you need to make sure that the content, appearance and usability are near perfect. In fact, getting your web design wrong can have negative effects on your business.

Here are common mistakes small businesses make with their websites:

1. Poor Navigation
People visit websites for specific information and if they cannot locate it quickly, they will seek it elsewhere – probably your competitors. The chances of them visiting your site again is slim. A good navigation structure should be seamless and will keep visitors on your site longer. Don’t make your visitors think about how to navigate your site; it should be obvious.

2. No Call for Action. .  What Should the User Do?
Ever seen a brochure with nonsense information? This is the same for websites. The fundamental error of many small business websites is the lack of a clear call to action. You need to make sure you are asking the user to do something like buy a product, tell someone something, read a book or visit somewhere. People like to take direction. Make sure you tell them to take action before they leave your site.

3. Design and color
Website should be designed with a balance of color and contrast. This is not a priority for the average small business owner. But it should be. Take a look at your website and determine if the text is difficult to read due to the color and contrast. If readers can not read the text because it is too dark or too light, they will move on. 

4. Nonsense or no information
The most important reason why people will visit your website is to get information, and if you don’t have it, they will, once again, leave your website. Small businesses often offer too much information that the user is overloaded and can’t find the simple fact they are searching for. Keep text simple but informational.

5.Websites that have clutter
Some small business owner’s websites are so cluttered that users have a difficult time trying to figure out where to go. Keep websites clean looking and easy to read. Visitors won’t return if they can’t understand or follow the content because it is just too messy. Unfortunately, this will lead to low traffic, a high bounce rate and possibly a poor page rank.

So step back and take a fresh look at your website. By creating some slight changes to your website, you may increase business and the overall positive image of your small business.

Ask yourself these questions: 

• Are you satisfied with your current website? 
  
• Is your website user-friendly and easy to navigate? 
  
• Do you have control over updating and editing your site?
• Are your visitors turning into customers?
  
• Does your website comply to current web standards? 

If you answered No to ANY of these questions, Let us give you a FREE Quote on getting your website updated.

In our last blog post we talked a little bit about the ROI of web design. I'd like to elaborate on that a little bit in today's post.

Again, we'll compare a brochure with a website. If you print out 1,000 brochures at a fixed cost of $500, your unit per cost is $2.00. A single brochure that earns you more than that can be said to have earned you a positive ROI, but you know that you are not going to make money on every single brochure. Most recipients are going to toss it away.

Industry standard is a 1%-2% response rate. Let's say you experience a low response rate of only 1%. That's 10 people who call you based on receiving your direct mail brochure. Now let's say you close 50% of those sales and an average sale for your business is $200. You've earned yourself $1,000, or a 100% ROI on your investment. That's not bad.

The difficulty in judging the effectiveness of print marketing is that sometimes you don't realize a sale for a long time. If you send out your brochures today, what is a reasonable time period for receiving a response from that brochure? 3 months? 6 months? 1 year? It really depends on your business.

How Web Design ROI Is Different

Judging web design ROI is different. As mentioned two days ago, your website has an unlimited distribution. That means you can't put a "per unit" cost on it. Not per se.

If that website cost you $500 to produce and you get 1,000 visits per month to that site every month for 10 years, you can break down your "per unit" cost for the time period, but that doesn't really help you in terms of determining the overall ROI of your website. In truth, you can't get a realistic number the same way you can with a print brochure.

It is best to judge your ROI for web design in terms of time increments. For instance, we'll look at traffic numbers for one month. If you got 1,000 visitors to your site this month and your site has been active for 10 months, divide the cost of your site ($500) by the number of months it has been active (10). Your cost per month is $50. Now, you could try to figure the cost per visitor for this month, but don't bother. Instead, count your conversions.

A conversion is the number of people who bought something. Let's say you sold something to 1% of your site visitors (that's 10 sales). If your average sale is $200, then you've earned $1,000 for your business this month. Is that your ROI?

In a word, no. Your ROI is the total return you've received over and above your total expense. You spent $500. Anything over and above that is your ROI. If you earn $1,000 per month on your website every month for its life, then your ROI is that total minus the $500 you spent. Remember, you're looking at the total life of your website. Your "per unit" cost is likely going to be so small you can't measure it.