So my calendar now says I’m having lunch with Brian. Not as helpful as I’d like. Now I have to open up the invitation to see who it is that Brian is dining with.

And a lot of businesses treat their customers the same way. They start off with the perspective that if you’ve arrived – either in person or online – then you’re “in” and they skip over foundational parts of the relationship. It becomes all about “us” – the company, rather than being all about “me” – the customer.

We experienced that today with a software company. We received a username and a password for the software we purchased. There was no mention of how or where to use this information. Just the codes. After some not insignificant searching, we discovered that once we had created an account on vendors site, we could use the codes to get access to the software and registration keys. Ooops. No one told us that.

So what is a business to do? Review your process from beginning to end and test it. Make sure it is customer friendly every step of the way. And a lot of businesses take this step. But this is only the first step. Every process gets changed over time. It gets “improved” when a new manager changes one part of the process but when another manager changes a different part of the process, bad things can happen.

What you need to do is build in a continuous review of your process. For example, if you sign up for EduNotes (our newsletter) you’ll likely be told to expect it weekly when in fact it is now only twice a month. Oops. That is a process that we are reviewing (should be fixed by the time you receive this) so that we are creating the correct expectations for people.

Obviously this applies in every aspect of business but here are just a few of the processes you should check on your web site:

• First and foremost, the sales funnel – are you guiding visitors down the best path for them to do business with you? Are calls to action clear and prominent?
• Is the sign up for your email newsletter smooth, clear, and setting the right expectations?
• How can I find your contact information?
• How can I find your physical location?
• If your site is set up for ecommerce, is it easy to put things in my shopping cart?
• Is it easy to check out?
• If your site is generating leads, are the forms easy to fill out? Are you asking for too much information?
• Are the images on your site appropriate and do they facilitate your processes?
• If you have complex activity (users in forums, members interacting, data being shared) are the instructions clear?
• If you want people to engage with you via social media, are the links prominent and working? (I clicked a Twitter link last week that took me to twitter.com instead of to a user’s page)

Let me close with one last example illustrating the need to review and streamline your processes.

1. I received an email from a vendor saying I need to renew a service for a client.
2. I clicked the link they provided in the email and filled out the form.
3. I received an email saying I filled out the wrong form and directing me to the right form.
4. The next time I got a similar email, I remembered the link was wrong but couldn’t find the correct link.
5. I started a chat with the vendor and was directed yet a different form.
6. Suspecting something was amiss, I did a Google search, and found the form I’d used previously.
7. I asked the support person about this other form and was told either one would work!
8. I requested that the correct link be put in my emails moving forward so that I wouldn’t have to go through this again.
9. I was told that would happen. Stay tuned to find out if it does.

If a company with such well known characters as Superman, Batman, Flash, Aquaman and Wonder Woman can do it, so can you.

Here is what DC seems to be doing right:

• They are keeping the familiar characters
• They are delivering their content old style (in comic books in stores) and new style (digital delivery)
• They’re bringing the stories that were started in the early to mid 1900’s up to date.
• They’re introducing some new characters along with “refreshing” the old characters.

What does this mean for you? Take a look at your brand. How is it evidenced in your logo? In your print materials? In your web site? In your interactions with customers?

How have your customers’ needs changed? What do they need now that they didn’t when you started your brand / business? How can you meet this new need?

Keep this discussion at a high level and paint in broad brush strokes. Consider how you want people to interact with your brand – should they be buying branded clothing? Downloading your app? Friending you on Facebook? Commenting on your blog?

Take this information and carefully consider whether you can meet the needs of your current consumer by: making small changes, doing a remodel, or doing a radical refresh that will bring out a new vision of what you company does and how it responds to customers.иконииконописikoni

New features include an automated ticker showing recent calls so die-hard fans of the fire department can stay up with what is happening and where; instead of having to hunt for key documents from the fire marshall’s office they are now available on the bottom of every page. Also, if you’re trying to find one of the stations, use your smart phone to capture one of the QR Codes (Quick Response Codes) at the bottom and you can get there easily.

Check it out at www.wrfire.org.

A recent imedia article only served to confirm my thoughts that Groupon can cause more harm than good. Most business owners understand the value of incentivizing customers with a coupon or discount. Frequently something like $10 off or even 5% off are the incentives.

But when you use Groupon you are offering a STEEP discount usually 50% or more. And then Groupon gets ½ of that! So instead of giving a small discount to perhaps introduce new customers to your business, you are practically giving away your goods or services. And this is available to your existing customers. As the writer from imedia explains, you are showing your customers, new or old, that what you are selling isn’t really worth as much as you were saying previously.

So what happens after a customer gets your goods or services for 50% off the normal value? They likely enjoyed it and especially at that price. But now they know they can have it at that price, why would they pay twice as much for it? I’ve noticed, for example, that a local paintball place seems to do two to three Groupon specials a year. In their case, they still make money  at a 50% discount so they just keep doing them – which shows that you’re not getting and keeping new customers. It shows that the only way to get those people to come back is to once again go ½ off the price.

Our conclusion: If you are trying to grow your business and set an expectation of high service or high quality, avoid Groupon and look instead towards marketing that accentuates quality.

1. Not having a call to action
   The biggest problem we see is web sites that don’t have a clear call to action. Without a next step, people will visit, view and leave. Without contacting you, buying from you, becoming your customer. Sometimes the next step is to click to the next page – that’s ok. The key is to have a next step and many very reputable sites don’t have this crucial feature.
2. Having too many calls to action
   Having too many calls is just as bad as not having any call to action. Two to four choices is best. If you cram 32 calls to action (I know a site that has that many), you lose people. Divide those 32 calls into four groups of eight each and present four calls to action on the home page and then perhaps give them all eight on the next but you’ll also likely see that you can combine two or more of the items into one, giving your visitors fewer choices. Remember the key is to not make the visitor have to think.
3. Making the site all graphics
   Print designers make beautiful web sites. But they are often all graphics or flash which might make the website less usable and will definitely leave it ranked lower in search engines. The dirty little secret is that search engines index content and the best content to index is text. Putting the text into the graphics give you (or your designer) complete control over the look of the site but also makes it highly likely that Google won’t index that text, thus hurting your search rankings.
4. Not providing context – navigation or breadcrumbs
   Many web site owners envision their site as all visitors starting on the home page and navigating through from there to the next level and the next is a logical progression. However with search being what it is, visitors coming through search may end up deep into your web site as their first page. Therefore it is incumbent on website owners / developers to clearly show the context of what page you’re on. This can be done through navigation devices such as highlighting the page you’re on in the navigation or even through breadcrumbs – displaying towards the top of the page where you at and the way back “home”.
5. Providing too much or duplicate information
   Just last week I was on a site that looked like it was a lot bigger than what it was. There were lots of different calls to action but they all took me to the same form – a basic contact form. Having all kinds of differently labeled links going to the same place is not useful. Providing a lot more information than is necessary is not useful. Cut down on the prose and shoot for bulleted or numbered lists to get your point across. In the same way that you don’t want lots of different links pointing to the same place, you don’t want to have the same information in more than one place on the site. We see businesses making this mistake frequently. It becomes embarrassing when one section of the site mentions a conference on Thursday and Friday and another refers to the same conference but says it is on Friday and Saturday. People don’t know which to believe and it ends up hurting your credibility. Remember to Keep It Straight & Simple (KISS).

If you can avoid these five mistakes on your web site, your visitors will be much more likely to have a productive and enjoyable experience and you will be much more likely to capture their business.

Click happens when your internet marketing goals converge perfectly with your web site design. For each industry and even for each business the click is something unique that occurs when we connect what they want to accomplish (more customers, bigger customers, “stickier” customers, etc.) and the plan we have for designing their site come together just so.

While usually the “Click” seems to be an intuitive thing, there are steps you can follow to help you focus on what will click for your web site.

1. Determine what sets your business apart from the competition. NOTE: Superior service is not what sets you apart. EVERYBODY says that. Consider niches or vertical markets that you work particularly well with.
2. Ponder or brainstorm with others how you can leverage your unique selling proposition (what sets you apart) be highlighted or leveraged through your site. We recently did this with a tourism related site and came up with a unique trip planner that fits very nicely with their business goals. When we came up with the idea, we could almost hear the “Click” as everyone realized that happened.
3. Look at what the competition is doing on their sites. Look especially at what they’re doing well and brainstorm how you can do it even better.
4. Consider every area of what your business does. Too often all the attention is placed on customer acquisition when customer retention or customer engagement may be a better use of web resources. For example if your existing customers can log in and check the status of their account, that frees up more man power to be out acquiring new customers.
5. Look at what your web site does now. Is it clear? More importantly, is it easy for visitors to take the next step (whatever that next step is)? Obfuscation in the name of design is a common mistake we see in web sites. It doesn’t matter how pretty your site is if it drives people away. Consider how you can streamline it – thinking about what steps or pages can be eliminated or combined.

While sometimes “Click” happens while working on one of these steps, as mentioned in step 2, it is more often considering all of these steps together when it happens.

If Click hasn’t happened on your site yet, take some time to work through these steps and see what happens.

How does this happen? It’s simple actually. A stunningly beautiful or moving design is put together. And it looks really good. But when it becomes the web site two things don’t happen:

1. There is no next step. It looks good but the web site visitor has no idea what to do once they get there. Every good web site and even every good web page should have a next step. But with just a nice design, there often is no call to action or next step for the visitor to take. So they leave.
2. There is nothing for the search engines to see. With a design that has complete control over what the user sees, there is no content for the search engines to index. With a heavily graphic web site, even written content becomes a part of the image – that way you can show the precise font – but then the search engines either don’t index it or index it differently than they do written content.

So don’t let a good design get in the way of a great web site. Instead incorporate the elements of your good design into the site but also make sure that it is usable (has a next step) and that it is searchable (search engine optimized). Then you’ll be on your way to success.икони

First let’s examine why it is important to choose a good domain name.  Say you were a church called Mt. Zion Christian Church. You decide to go with mtzionchristian.org. Seems pretty straight forward at first. But then once you start telling people you realize they’re going to mountzionchristian.org. Oops. So it is important to get a domain name that is descriptive of where you are or what your business does.

We had a client whose last name was one of those difficult to pronounce east European names. Though that was the name of their company, we went with a much more generic denvertreeservices.com for their domain. This served them well when they later changed the company name. And “Denver” “tree” “services” rolls off the tongue much more easily. It is more memorable as well.

Sometimes it is OK to have a long domain name if it is descriptive. Imagine if you worked at the Colorado Historical Society and decided to go with coloradohissoc.org to make the domain shorter. How would you say that domain? “Colorado” “his” “sock”? You’d spend all your time trying to spell it out and folks would undoubtedly still get it wrong. But if you went with coloradohistoricalsociety.org it is easy to say and easy to remember.

Not long ago I strongly advised a client to not use hyphens in their domain name. So instead of two, they used one hyphen and thought that was a pretty brilliant idea. Then just the other day while we were meeting with them, they realized how the domain doesn’t roll off the tongue when they have to insert a dash. Just listen in your head: “mybusiness” “dash” “mysecondbusinessname”.  Or, to reuse the example above – “Colorado” “dash” “historical” “dash” “society” “dotorg” doesn’t roll off your tongue very easily.

So here’s what we recommend for choosing a domain name:

1.       Do NOT use dashes or hyphens

2.       Do NOT abbreviate

3.       Do NOT use a name if it is easily misspelt

4.       Do use longer names if necessary and if memorable

5.       Do use something descriptive if the company name is not a good choice

6.       Do consider whether to buy other top level domain names such as .biz, .net and .org to protect your brand.

Many of our clients are uneasy with building a web site using a template – seems like anyone could do that, right?

The answer is ‘ You’re absolutely correct.” Templated web sites abound. I live in Wheat Ridge, Colorado and they city just implemented a program where you build your own web site from a template program. Here’s why we don’t build websites using templates:

1. Templated web sites tend to all look the same
2. The template programs used to create these sites are generally built without any way to customize the site.
3. A template website builder limits creativity and options.

Having said that, I will proudly tell you that we build template web sites. What’s the difference?

Simple. We don’t start with a template. We start with a look that is customized to your needs and business goals. Once we’ve got the look designed to your satisfaction, we turn that look into a template. So it is sort of a chicken and egg deal. We design the look first and then create a template based on that look. We don’t start with a template and try to make your ideas fit.

But it is very important to turn the design into a template. We can then manage the look of the site from one or two files rather than having to touch (edit) every page of the site when we make a minor change to the look.

A good template for a good program is very powerful. Last week we converted a client’s site from a non-templated site to a simple template within WordPress. Last week the site wasn’t ranked at all for any of the targeted key words. This week we’ve already got 11 key words that the site is ranked for and one is already ranked 11 in Google. We’ve still got work to do but simply by creating a good template within WordPress, we’re already helping this client be successful.икони

The single most important aspect of web design is focus. We need to be able to focus the web visitor on something. EduCyber has chosen to focus that attention on the call to action. By first creating a focus – many web sites don’t really have a focus – and then having that focus be on the call to action, we help web visitors determine whether the site provides what they want.

We’ve all heard that we only have a second or two to capture people’s attention. Why waste that time showing them something unrelated to you or your business? Often the home page call to action is simply an invitation to click deeper into the site. A realtor might feature one prominent link for buyers and another for sellers. An insurance company might feature one link for homeowners, another for auto and a third for life insurance. Whatever the call to action is, the design should focus on that.

The second most important aspect of web design is depth. In this case, I’m speaking of visual depth. This makes the web site more visually engaging and is more likely therefore to pull in the visitors attention. Providing depth in a site can be accomplished in a variety of ways from drop shadows to juxtaposition of elements to arrangement of lines and objects.

Often depth is one of those intangibles that make a visitor say “I like this site” if it has depth or “This site just doesn’t work” if depth is lacking.

There are many facets to good web site design but getting these two points right will set you on the path to a good web site that is good for business.Икони