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Posts Tagged ‘business website’

Some smaller businesses have a thorough recognition of the marketing possibilities that the web offers; others languish in the online world.  Indeed, some businesses have no online presence at all.

This article will concentrate upon those service businesses who are failing to use the Internet to its real, vast potential.  If you business is dedicated to providing your community with professional plumbing services, reliable heating system and air conditioning repair or hair care, do you simply rely upon a classified listing on an advertising site to bring your enterprise to the attention of the ever growing community of web users?

Increasingly your potential customers are turning away from print advertising media and using the Internet to locate services when the need suddenly arises, when they move into your community or when they move into their first homes.  Do you really believe that a small, classified listing which lists your phone number and address is sufficient information about your business for them to make an informed decision?  A barber shop could promote on the web quite efficiently in the same way that a large business does.

A beginning point is with your own business website. 

Establish your professionalism in the minds of your site’s visitors by publishing informating articles on your website.  The focus of those articles should be related to the services you offer.  If you offer plumbing services, you might write about how to keep drains running smoothly.  A hair stylist might write about maintaining healthy, lustrous hair.  Someone who runs a child care center could post parenting tips.

Develop a newsletter for your site’s visitors.  The purpose of the newsletter is to develop a continuing relationship with your customers and prospects as much as it is to promote your business.  Keep most of the email letters informative rather than promotional.  If you keep your blatant advertising messages infrequent, they will become more powerful.}

Find ways to promote your site so that it rises to the top of the search engine listings for relevant searches made by your prospects.  Just having a website isn’t sufficient.  Your prospects must be able to find it at the time that they are looking for a solution that your business provides.  One very effective way to promote a website is through a process called article marketing.  If you don’t have the time or the talent to write the necessary articles, there are businesses that provide this service very affordably.

You may want to begin on a small scale and ramp up your efforts as you start to experience increased revenue as a result of your online marketing efforts.  You will probably be pleased by how many new contacts your online marketing efforts bring over time, especially as you grow.

In business, even seemingly tiny details can make a big difference. Your business’s website design is a public presentation of yourself to the world. Here are five urgent guidelines to check to assure that your business website will perform in the way that it should.

1) Avoid splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Eye tracking studies indicate that, while such banners might distract visitors to a website, modern visitors are accomplished at not noticing the content that the banners contain. Unless your business plan is advertising, the last thing you want to do with your visitors’ time on your site is to direct their attention away from your content (and the action that the content is designed to achieve).

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Let your visitors see where they are on the site

If your site is well designed, users will easily flow from one page to another. However, along the way, they may feel like returning to a previously visited page to read it more carefully, to remind themselves of details or to compare one set of features to another. Provide a way for them to retrace their steps or to know how to get from “point g” back to “point c.” Using a breadcrumb trail serves this purpose very nicely.

5) Use audio only for clear purposes

If you are determined to have sound automatically load, be sure that it a) makes a genuine contribution toward meeting your objectives, b) allows the site’s visitors to control and volume levels and c) is not on a page on which all of their attention needs to be focused upon reading the exquisite copy. If your audio does not meet all of these criteria, play it safe and disable it.