Michael Oliveras is a long-time union carpenter making the entrepreneurial jump and starting his own business: Mike’s Precision Carpentry, serving the New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware from his shop in Hammonton, NJ. He came to me looking for a webpage to advertise his new enterprise.
It’s a simple design, a typical small-business site of half-a-dozen pages. The color scheme matches his business cards for a bit of branding. Oliveras faced a problem typical for new businesses: a lack of good photos. The work he’s done for many years is not technically his own (per the employment contracts) so for now the pictures are a mix of the few jobs he has done on his own and a few stock images. I’m sure he’ll have a well-rounded portfolio before long and we’ll be able to fill out the site with his own work. In the meantimes, he added a couple of great pictures of him and his family on the “About Us” page to give it that personal touch.
See it live: www.mikesprecisioncarpentry.com
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ design
Five Tips for Building a Self-Marketing Website
September 7, 2009
A potential client recently came to me with an existing site. It certainly was slick: the homepage featured a Flash animation of telegenic young professionals culled from a stock photo service, psuedo-jazz techno music, and words sweeping in from all sides selling you the company’s service. Unfortunately the page had no useful content, no call-to-action and no Google PageRank. It was an expensive design, but I didn’t need to look at the tracking stats to know no one came this page.
So you’re ready to ditch a non-performing site for one more dynamic, something that will attract customers and interact with them. Here’s five tips for building a self-marketing website!
One: Useful Content for your Target Audience
Give visitors a reason to come to the site. Text-rich, changing content is essential. In practicality, this means installing a blog and writing posts every few weeks. You’ll see measures like “keyword relevancy” increase instantly as excerpted text shows up on the homepage. Add videos and photos if your company or team has that expertise, but remember: when it comes to search, text is king.
Two: Give away something valuable or useful
Many smart marketing sites feature some free giveaway right on the homepage: a useful quiz, professional analysis, a PDF how-to guidebook. A builder I worked with went to the trouble of posting dozens of floor plans & pictures to their website and compiling them into a PDF book, which they gave away for free. The catch in all this? You have to give your contact information to get it. Once the free material has been compiled, the site runs itself as a sales lead generator!
Three: Ask yourself the Three User Questions!
It’s amazing how focused the mind gets when you actually sit down to define goals. Just about every website can benefit from this three-step exercise:
- Who is the target audience?
- What would draw them to the site?
- What do we want to get from them?
Get a group together to through your website page by page these questions. Brainstorm a list of changes you could make. You’ll want to end up with Defined Goals: what quantifiable actions do you want visitors to take? It might well just be the successful completion of a contact form.
Four: Test Test and Test Again
Many small businesses now get a lot of their customers from their websites. Your website is an essential piece of your marketing and publicity and you need to be smart about it. Compile together your favorite site-improvement ideas and make up alternate designs incorporating the changes. Then use a tool such as Google Website Optimizer to put the alternatives through their paces. Which one “converts” better, i.e., which design gets you higher percentages in the Defined Goals you’ve set? Once you’ve finished a test, move on to the next brainstorming idea and implement it. Always be testing!
An extensive series of tests of one site I worked on doubled it’s conversion rate: imagine your company doubling its internet sales? It is completely worth spending the time and effort to go through this process.
Five: Don’t Be Afraid to Get Professional Help
If you need to hire a professional to help you through this process you’ll almost certainly get your money’s worth! A recent projects cost the customer $6000 but I was able to document savings of $100,000 per year in his publicity costs! See my piece “What to Look For in SEO Consultants” for my insider-advice to how to pick a honest and competent professional web publicity consultant.
Cornerstone Fellowship
July 28, 2009
Cornerstone is a relatively new church plant in Smithville, Atlantic County, New Jersey. They’re site is a simple design built in Movable Type using off-the-shelf templates to keep the budget down. The most exciting part of the site is the podcast sermons and the ability to ask Bible questions and make prayer requests from the homepage. I’m most happy to see the church using the site and updating it regularly!
Pastor Fred Schwenger also has a new local connection: he and a partner have just opened Superior Automotive here in Hammonton at 880 S White Horse Pike!
Alliance Cemetery
July 28, 2009
I was hired to redesign the website of a cemetery that represents a fascinating slice of South Jersey history. In the 1880s, a group of Jews escaped Russian pogroms, came to America and started a “return to the soil” movement that led to the establishment of an agricultural colony in the small Salem County crossroads of Norma, New Jersey. Before long they established Alliance Cemetery.
The new Alliance website highlights the entrance gate. The cemetery has hired a surveying company to do a detailed map of the plots and we hope to add this in with a Google Maps mash-up when the data becomes available. A detailed history and photos are also in the works.
The design is hand-coded from scratch and is probably the most tasteful design of my portfolio. The pages themselves are editable by the client using CushyCMS and the Directions page has an integrated Google Map.
Visit: AllianceCemetery.com
Salem County Special Services School District
November 22, 2008
The mission of the Salem County Special Services School District, a regional educational service agency, is to provide high quality, cost-effective programs and services to the schools and districts of Salem County and Cumberland County, New Jersey. This site built with what are for me fairly generic tools: Movable Type as CMS, with Flickr intergration. The design style sheet was built from scratch using CSS.
Visit: Scsssd.org
Focused blogs and side trips
November 23, 2007
Over on Eileen Flanagan’s Imperfect Serenity, there’s an interesting post on blog publicity, “Blogging dilemmas,” inspired in part by Robin M“ ‘s recent “How did you get here?” post. Both bring up interesting questions about the role of blogs in community building and the location of that line that separates good blogging from mere self-promotion and pandering.
Readers will probably be unsurprised to learn that I use Technorati, Google Blog Search, etc., every day to keep track of the Quaker blogosphere. I act as a kind of community organizer and my searches are for interesting posts talking about Quakers (until reading Eileen’s post I hadn’t check my Technorati “rank” in months). Many people’s first introduction to QuakerQuaker.org is getting linked from it, and I suspect I’ve accidentally outed a few beginning bloggers who hadn’t told anyone of their new blog!
I have a professional blog on web design and analytics (with a somewhat off-topic but satisfying post on top at the moment) and separating that out has allowed me to use this personal blog, QuakerRanter, for whatever I like. Most regularly readers would say it focuses on Quakerism and cute kid pictures and while those are the most common posts, the most read posts are the minor fascinations I indulge myself with occasionally. Quaker plain dress is something I practice but don’t think about most of the time (806 readers in past month). My wife and I love to bust on bad baby names and unfairly unpopular baby names (627 visits). I’ve also detailed some outings to semi-legendary South Jersey haunts (317) and score high on searches to them.
The conventional wisdom of the blog-as-publicity tool crowd would probably say these off-topic posts are distracting my core audience. Perhaps, but they’re infrequent on the blog and long-lived on Google. Besides, I think it helps people to know I’m not just obsessed with one topic. Being a part of a real community means knowing each other in all of our quirks. I’m more tender and forgiving of other Quaker bloggers when I know more of their story: it puts what they say into a context that makes it sound more lived, less ideological. There’s certainly good reasons for tightly-focused professional blogs (I’d drop Techcrunch from my blogroll if they started posting kids pictures!), but as more people read posts through feeds and aggregators I wonder if there’s going to be as much pressure for personal, community-oriented blogs to be as single-minded in their focus.
We all have diverse, quirky interests so why not indulge them? I have seen blogs that try too hard to pander to particular audiences and boy, are they boring! A certain degree of idiosyncrasy and subjective orneriness is probably essential. Personality is at least as important as focus.
PS: I’m also interested in making sure I don’t loose the core audience with all my side trips, hence the “latest Quaker posts” at the top of the page. I have at least one request for a Quaker-only RSS feed and will eventually get that going.
PPS: As if on queue, the next post in Google Reader after Eileen’s is Avinish Kaushik’s Blog Metrics: Six recommendations for measuring your success. Parts of it are probably a bit technical for most QR readers but it’s useful for thinking about blogs as outreach.
Site update
October 25, 2007
Warning: Geek to follow: Thanks to readers for their patience these past few days as I’ve transferred QuakerRanter to a new web host. My old account had multiple sites on the same server, including QuakerQuaker.org and MartinKelley.com and every time there was a problem on QR it would take everything down. After probably a year of troubleshooting and never quite fixing the problem QR is off on its own (on Bluehost.com, I wanted to see what CPanel was like).
I’m also rebuilding the site to be more compliant with the new Movable Type template structure, which motivates this new look. I still like the old minimalist design ripped off of Kottke and might bring it back or might experiment with something else that fits the new stream-of-life direction the blog has been taken with its Twitter integration.
I can’t really blog about the most interesting financial development of the day, which has to do with the end of a certain witness of fifteen years but if any F/friends want to know feel free to drop me an email.
Off now to see if the town Halloween parade has been washed out by rain again (today is the rain date and it’s pretty soggy if not actively raining). Expect pictures of cute boys in matching butterfly outfits…
Simple Design does not mean simple execution
August 23, 2006
Every
website should try to serve a clear set of purposes. Even a personal
blog has a target audience, one’s friends or family perhaps. While a
good site looks simple, it is often very complicated “under the hood.”
Google
went from being a grad school project to the world’s most important
search engine by ditching the design clutter of its competitors for a
very clean homepage with maximum white space. This effect focused one’s
attention on the search function. More PhD’s are said to work at Google
than at any other company in the world, yet the complicated engineering
and the tremendous computer infrastructure that brings that logo and
search box to your computer is invisible to the average user.
Even websites without PhD designers need to marry a simple outward
appearance with a more complicated set of calculations around intended
audiences. The average visitor looks at one or two pages on a site and
then hits the back button. Often they’ll be following a search link and
looking at a page buried deep in your site. They’ll be there seeking
out specific information and you only have about twenty seconds to
pitch your site and keep them there. You need to give them a very
concise description of yourself or product and you need to entice them
with related material.
Any site that consists of more than three pages presents visitors
with more information than they can handle. Good design works to funnel
visitors to the specific content they are looking for. It’s relatively
easy to get a first-time visitor but successful websites keep them on
your site and give them reasons to return. The key to this is defining
your audience and presenting your material with them in mind.
Once you’ve identified your constituency and built your design, the
next step is release. You don’t want to pander to a potential audience,
but instead converse with them. It’s fine to mix different elements of
your life together and to write creatively off-topic once in awhile.
There are a thousand generic websites crammed full of useless bu
zzphrases and unused featured. What you want is one that will have a
voice, that builds a niche that no one else might ever have identified.
When it comes time to produce content, forget all the slick marketing
calculations you’ve done and let your quirkiness shine.