Set Your Goals.
Before approaching a development company about website development you should set clear goals
you want to accomplish by going online. Make more sales, accumulate and qualify leads,
reduce customer support costs, attract new job applicants. Once you identify your goals create
marketing messages that helps your customers quickly and easily realize why they should do
business with you.
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Functionality Functionality Functionality.
The web site is a communication medium, not just a static brochure. Companies need to
collect user information, analyze which pages users are viewing, be able to conduct transactions,
and support products. Gathering feedback from clients with the purpose of enhancing marketing
and getting customers involved in your products are some of the advantage of having a web site over
an add in a magazine. Unfortunately there are many sites that are not taking advantage of this benefit.
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Know Your Audience.
Your site is being build for your target audience. It is very important that the audience is
recognized and that their expectations and needs are incorporated into your design. You need
to understand the technology, conditions and environments that will affect how your audience
will be accessing your web site, because this plays a crucial role in the quality of their
on-line experience. Some things to consider are: browser versions, connection speeds, the
amount of user-experience and familiarity your audience may have with the Internet, etc.
Researching these parameters will help you answer the critical question: what new services
will your web site make possible that will benefit your customers and what will make them
want to return to your web site?
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Represent Your Brand.
Your web site should and will represent your brand. Images must be sharp, navigation
intuitive. Everything about your site, right down to the colors and fonts, must
invoke specific feelings and demonstrate certain characteristics about your business.
More and more business owners are finding out too late that bad web design is stopping
them from effectively extending their brands online - or worse, giving customers a
bad first impression of their business. Fixing the damage will cost the business more
than having the website correctly developed the first time.
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Complement Existing Promotional Materials.
Your site should be congruent with your existing advertising and marketing materials.
To do otherwise invites confusion and reduces the impact of your online presence.
If your existing materials are not consistent and well designed you may want to
consolidate them. Either way, make sure that you incorporate the key elements of your
visual identity into your web site.
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Three Clicks
Content shouldn't be more than three clicks away.
It is very frustrating to the visitors if they have to click through too many pages
to get to the content they came to the site for. Making the information no more than
three clicks away from any point in your site is another way for your site to be
well received.
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Navigation vs. Graphics
Navigation is critical to the use of your web site and is one of the priorities we
incorporate into our development. Your site can have the most interesting content and best
graphics on the Internet but without good navigation your visitors will leave
frustrated. It is best to keep navigation consistent across pages, meaning to keep the
navigational elements in the same places on every page. It is also important to provide
navigation on pages with a lot of text. "Back to the top" button or links that take you to different
paragraphs on the page help visitor effectively find the information.
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Promoting Your Site
Once your site is launched you have to let people know that it is available. Having
a website without marketing could mean that no one will see it because no one will know
it is even there. Here are some ideas on promoting your website.
List your site with the search engines and directories, issue a press release to
announce your site, use free banner-ad exchange programs, consider paid banner
ads on well-targeted sites, consider advertising in magazines, newspapers, etc.,
approach other sites about cooperative marketing, send direct mail to a targeted
list of potential buyers, spread the word, through customers, friends & associates.
RealEffects.Com usually includes registration with search engines as part of the
contract. If you are interested in other ways to
market your site, we have marketing contracts under which we create the best strategy
to market your site and then implement it.
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Want to Spread the Cost of Your Site.
You may need your website ASAP but your money is momentarily tied up in your
inventory or you made a down payment on your office space.
RealEffects.Com will provide low interest financing to qualified clients.
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