Archive for the ‘Websites and Web Marketing’ Category

I remember, way back when I started my writing business, making the first “Clear-Writing” website. It was basically a left hand table for navigation, and right hand space to put the “stuff”. I coded it myself in notepad. It was nothing fancy, but it looked nice, and did the job.

For several years, my little homemade site worked well, but as I grew, I felt it really didn’t represent my professionalism, etc. I’m an “ok” web designer, but my skills are much more suited to 1998 than 2000-something.   And in looking at competitor’s websites, it was clear many others were “nicer” than mine. So I hired out – my friend Kelly Rao of Web-Eze did it for me (I basically had her code one page, and I took it from there.) It came out great – it looks wonderful, it’s easy to take care of, etc. In fact, it’s the site I’m still using today.

And that got me thinking – that website is more than 5 years old. Which is an absolute lifetime in internet years (internet years are like dog years on steroids.) So last month, I started thinking – “gee, is it time for another update?”  To answer this question, I looked around to see how I looked compared to others… and I was pretty surprised at what I found:

It is abundantly clear to me that web design is getting worse. Many of today’s “modern” websites, by and large, look like crap. The proliferation of the WYSIWYG / CMS-era of web design has churned out millions of cookie-cutter sites that just look bad.  They look blocky, the text looks awful, they can’t space anything well (you should leave a space in between bullet points, etc) – it’s just awful.

My five-year-old professional copywriting website looks infinitely better than any CMS site out there. Even this site you’re reading, which started life last year as a wordpress template (but uses traditional HTML coding in the meat of the pages), looks tons better than most sites out there.

I don’t want to sound old-fashioned, but the move away from traditional HTML coding has really changed the web design business. It’s likely opened the door to a lot of people who really aren’t skilled web designers, and I’m guessing CMS sites are a lot cheaper and easier for the end user as well, but I have to say, I’m not impressed with the look. It’s akin to a stately old house versus cookie-cutter tract housing.

Personally, I’m not using CMS style websites anytime soon. This blog is as close as I’ll get. All else being equal, I really feel a CMS designed site will hurt you business-wise.

Any web designers want to chime in?

Know what I do (or don’t do, to be more accurate)?

I don’t do business with websites that don’t provide a phone number. Not because I want to call (I don’t), but because it makes me feel like they are hiding something. I’ll make an exception for huge, well-advertised sites like Amazon.com (who has proven to be very adept at customer service), but otherwise, if you don’t provide your phone number, I’ll pass.

Why many companies feel they are too good to get away with not posting their phone number is beyond me.

So here’s a tip – not having your phone number on your website is almost certainly costing you money. Trust me – as disturbing as the thought may be, there are a lot of people like me out there.

This was from my old blog, but it’s still rings true now:

A funny thing happened today. I had a client send me an e-mail, and a very important piece of the message (what he wanted from me – a press release) was in the subject line.

I never saw it.

I never realized I did this, but if it’s an e-mail from someone I know, I typically just half-heartedly glance at the subject line and get right to the message.

I must have been doing this for years, and it never mattered much. I’d just say “Oh, an e-mail from Dave – let’s see what he has to say today.”

Today it mattered – a vital piece of info was the subject line, and I blew right by it. Imagine how stupid I felt when I later replied and he said “where’s the press release I asked for?”

I looked at the e-mail again…. what press release??? Ohhhh…. Errrr…. he must mean the one he mentioned RIGHT IN THE SUBJECT LINE.

I wonder how many other people do this? I wonder if YOU do this? Next time you check e-mail, pay attention to the subject lines from people you know – do you just glance at them and get to the message, or do you really read them?

I know what I’ll be doing from now on.

Just a quick thought on website landing pages.

I was having a discussion the other day on the Small Business Forum, and the topic was “landing pages”. One member seemed a bit confused as to what a landing page was and why one would need one. I posted the following as a reply, and I think it’s a succinct enough description to include here in the blog (the guy’s name was Fred, which is why it’s addressed to Fred).

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Look at it this way, Fred… say you’re a plumber. You have a ten page website. A few of those pages are for individual services (one for water heaters, one for remodels, one for new construction, etc)

Your home page, obviously, gives the birds-eye view of your business. The navigation bar will have links, and maybe the “services” link has a javascript flyout that shows the individual pages, etc. And maybe even your homepage copy has a bulleted list to a few of the services

Fairly normal so far, right? Despite that I used “plumbing” in my example, I’m really describing millions of business websites.

Now, say you run a google ad for water heaters. Instead of sending those clicks to your home page, why not send them to your water heater services page? And tweak the copy ever so slightly to “welcome” people as if this is the first page they are seeing (which to many, it now might be)

THAT’S now considered a “landing page”.

In other words, because you control the google ad and where the click ends up, why not send the people interested in water heaters to a water heaters page, and send the remodel people to the remodel page, etc etc? It falls right into the “solve the problem people came with” quite nicely.

When landing pages are discussed, the conversation is almost always talking about PPC, e-mail, or some other type of “direct” advertising. Because it’s very easy (and fast) to control who clicks. With organic, it’s nowhere near as timely – you might have to wait a year, making it impractical for testing products, strategies, etc. This isn’t to say you can’t tweak pages to welcome organic traffic, but it’s MUCH more scattershot, and usually not implied whenever landing pages are discussed in the context they usually are.

I recall some website writing I did for this one company. They advertised on Google adwords, and had a budget of $2 a day. For their business, that meant 2 clicks. 2 clicks a day, and they were done. And they complained after 3 days that my writing wasn’t bringing in business… well, it’s kinda hard to judge from 6 visits (to be fair, I didn’t know their PPC budget when starting the job – I just assumed they would deliver eyeballs.)

I told them they had to get more interested people to the site. So they changed their keywords, and made it so their $2 budget would bring in 10 people a day. No effect – now the problem was the keywords were awful. Yea, they were cheap keywords… and they were useless. The client actually expected the web copy I wrote him to “make up” for the fact that the leads were lousy. That’s not going to happen.

On the internet, you have to have quality visitors. Period.

You can’t fool around on the fringes with your Pay Per Click keywords. The fringes are great for filling out your marketing, but you cannot expect copy to make up for bad leads. If you are a local carpet cleaner, you need to have “{your city} carpet cleaning” as a keyphrase. I don’t care how much it costs. If you design websites for florists, you need to have “web design for florists” as a keyphrase. You can’t omit these in favor of, say, “flower seller internet design” because the latter is cheaper. You won’t get the same quality visitor. 

It’s this simple: No writing, no expensive design, no nothing will help you until your site is visited by people who want/need what you have/do.  

Great web copy can work magic with the right visitors. I prove it every single day. Give me people who are interested in your product and service, and I’ll sell them. It’s what I do. But you do have to deliver those eyeballs.