Relationship Marketing

The key goal of marketing is to develop deep, enduring relationships with all people or organisations that could directly or indirectly affect the success of the firm's marketing activities.

Thus relationship marketing paves the way for attaining this goal.

Relationship marketing is the process of attracting, maintaining, and enhancing relationships with key people.

In good times and bad, savvy business people have but one focus --- the customer. They know it's much more cost-effective to sell more services to an existing client than to fund new customer acquisition. Their client list is their most valuable asset, but more than that, they develop long-lasting relationships by keeping in touch -- in good times and bad.

Relationship marketing delivers many benefits to a firm, big or small. Slowly but surely, as you build your client and prospect list, you'll be able to reduce marketing expenses, build referrals, and grow your business in step with your clients' needs.

Your marketing dollars will go further if you use it to build, nurture, and develop your customer relationships. This isn't as difficult as you think. Building these relationships just means treating your customers and clients as if they truly are your strategic partners and showing them that you truly care about them. It's important to try to satisfy them with the right products and services, supported by the right promotion and making it available at the right time and location. Customers can easily detect indifference and insincerity and they simply will not tolerate it. Long-term client and customer loyalty is a long-term challenge that you must strive for every day and with every transaction no matter how big or small.

While a growing business needs to constantly capture new customers, the focus and priority should be on pleasing your existing customer base. Companies that fail to nurture and retain their customer base ultimately fail. You will also spend twice as much to get new clients as you will in maintaining your existing customer base.You will also be limited in your ability to attract new clients if you can't hold onto and satisfy your existing customers and clients.

The bottom line is that one of the key components in marketing and business growth is to spend the majority of your time and effort nurturing customer relationships, so that you get business from existing clients and customers. This is a strategy that will move you forward in increasing your sales without increasing your budget.

1. Change your Perspective from "Here's what I do" to "What do you need?"
   
   The cornerstone of successful relationships is to discover precisely what your clients need and want. When you meet with them, you listen to their problems and recommend solutions. When you contact them after a meeting, you suggest resources for helping them address the issues you discussed. The solutions and resources you recommend may include your products and services, of course, but you don't stop there. You also offer answers that don't involve hiring you.
   
   The impact of this kind of generosity on your prospective clients can be dramatic. Instead of considering your calls or e-mails an interruption, they will welcome hearing from you. They will no longer count you as a salesperson or vendor, but rather as a valuable resource and important person to know.
   
   This requires a shift in your attitude, to being of service instead of selling a service.
   
   
2. Recognize your Vulnerability
   
   In the midst of a project, you might be in touch with your client several times a week. But it's the time between projects that is crucial to relationship-building. Once the work is done, you drop out of that enviable top-of-mind awareness position. Over time, your client isn't as likely to think of you as their first port of call for a solution to their problem. This is when you're most vulnerable to replacement by a competitor.
   
   Fortunately, an affordable solution can help you retain those clients you worked so hard to acquire.
   
   
3. Keep in touch
   
   It's such a simple concept, but keeping in touch often sinks to the bottom of the 'to do' list. The single easiest way to keep in touch is to publish an email newsletter. Ask clients to subscribe and insert a subscription box on your site to capture email addresses of prospects who like the look of what you're doing.
   
   The secret to a good newsletter is to avoid blatant self-promotion, and instead offer valuable information to your subscribers. With their permission, you have the opportunity to drop into their email boxes every month with news, tips, case-studies, FAQs, and other relevant info that subtly promotes your services, reinforces your brand, educates your clients, and builds trust.
   
   
4. Position Yourself as an Expert
   
   Words matter. Prospective clients are looking for more an elegant portfolio of sites you've built. Your job is to tell them how you can meet their needs. Your Website is the perfect place to start, but the focus must be on the client, not on you.
   
   Include white papers, special reports, case-studies, and links to other resources that will educate your clients on the best solution to their needs. Be careful to avoid jargon, overly technical concepts and acronyms. If you're publishing an email newsletter, use it to introduce this new content and bring subscribers back to your site.
   
   When you are perceived as an expert, you become attractive to prospects who use the Web to research. They see you as someone who has answers to their questions, and who can help solve their problems.
   
   
5. Grow to Meet Client Needs
   
   Websites are hardly stand-alone entities that need an occasional tweak. For most businesses, they're but one tool amidst many that are used to build brand, increase revenues or minimize costs. And by offering more tools that help your clients reach their goals, you become more valuable. Build affiliations or strategic relationships with specialists whose talents will benefit your clients.
   

The Payoff

The benefits of a relationship marketing approach go both ways. Your client views you as a valuable consultant, rather than a cost center. Your potential for increased revenues and a long-lasting relationship is real.

There's payoff for you, too, including reduced marketing expenses measured in both time and money. If you can retain more clients for longer periods, you'll trim costly space advertising and other marketing costs.

If you ask, you'll get more referrals from your clients. Priceless word-of-mouth endorsements from satisfied customers will result in new business which magically walks in the door.

You won't even have to request client testimonials. You do include several on your Website... right? Start by recognizing when you receive a spontaneous testimonial, whether it's in an email, thank-you letter, or a conversation. Ask your client if you may use his words and name in your brochure and on your site, with a link to his business. Most often, the answer is yes. Testimonials are a critical piece of successful service marketing and worth their weight in whatever precious metal you value.

Case-studies will be a breeze and add a powerful marketing tool - perfect for your Website or for inclusion in printed marketing materials. Follow a 'situation -- problem -- solution -- benefits' flow to highlight how you solved the client's problem, stressing the benefits the client now enjoys as a result of your work. Use a handful of client case studies in industries you're targeting for new business development. Examples of "just like me" situations help prospective clients understand exactly how useful your services are.

Relationship-focused marketing isn't something that will happen overnight. It requires a change in thinking and some discipline along the way. Your email newsletter won't do much good unless you publish it regularly and the content is valued by your subscribers. But the rewards can be significant. And the truth is that no matter how wonderful you are, clients go away. Their businesses close down, change focus, or are sold.

But if your objective is to build relationships instead of Web application software, you'll be one of the designers in business for the long run.

SEO Best Practices

Image via Wikipedia

SEO best practices have been constantly evolving since the advent of the search engines themselves.

The following SEO best practices should provide you with a secure strategy for building organic traffic to your site for the long term. They can be broken into 4 major categories of activity:

1. Subject-Matter Expertise: If you are not an expert on the topic of your Web site, then invest the time to become one, (or employ one).
   
   
2. Information Architecture: Design a site that enables users to find the great content you have in a fast and effective manner.
   
   
3. Technical Implementation: Learn how to deal with the idiosyncrasies of search engines to get the best results.
   
   
4. Marketing: Formerly known as "link building".

Subject-Matter Expertise

You need to have great content. Building a large organic traffic stream will not happen unless you have great content. You need to offer something on your site that people want to read about, and link to. In addition, you just won't close business well unless your content is seen as high quality by prospects.

There are many ways to show expertise on a Web site. Here are a few basic ideas:

1. Write great articles about your area of expertise (but don't burden these articles with sales pitches for your products or services)
   
   
2. Offer great tools that people will want to use
   
   
3. Create a unique and valuable community on your site
   
   
4. Be a major source of news and information in your area of expertise

The key thing here is to think about high quality content for users, instead of "link bait." Where link bait seeks to get quick and easy links from any source, a better plan is to build trust with your audience. Trust building is not a gimmick or a trick. Trust is something that you earn and will keep your business growing for years to come.

Information Architecture

Wikipedia defines information architecture as the "practice of structuring information (knowledge or data) for a purpose". In broad strokes, think of this as user-centered design. (By the way, bots will eat this stuff up too.) The basic elements of an effective information architecture include:

1. Understanding how your users think about the topic area of your site.
   This is where keyword mapping exercises come into play. Keyword tools such as Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker are useful. Tools such as these can help you find out how users search for things related to the content you have, or plan to have, on your Web site. Map your navigation and pages to the things you learn during this exercise.
   
   
2. A well defined and clear global navigation scheme.
   Make it easy for users to navigate your content. The menus on your site need to be consistent in structure and location. It's helpful to implement a "bread crumb" bar showing the structure of a site, to help the users remember where they are and how they got there.
   
   
3. Leverage common UI practices.
   This is no time to implement a new paradigm. Users have been conditioned by other Web sites to look for things in certain places on a site. Take advantage of this and make life easier for them.

Technical Implementation

While the search engines urge us to "design for users," not search engines, the reality is that the search engines have certain basic requirements. Failure to meet these requirements can spell certain doom for your site's prospects. Here is our list of 5 things that you need to do to put together a solid technical implementation for the search engines:

1. Implement a clear navigation scheme that can be fully crawled using text links.
   
   
2. Minimize the number of clicks to your key content.
   Search engines look to site owners for clues as to what is important on a given site. If a piece of content is 4 clicks from the home page, what are you saying about its importance?
   
   
3. Implement pages that are rich in search engine visible content.
   This means text based articles and descriptions, and text based links. Give the spider something to chew on.
   
   
4. Effectively link related content within your own site.
   This is a great tool for reinforcing the relevance of pages on your site.
   
   
5. Write effective meta description tags.
   This will not help your ranking at all. However, these descriptions often get used by search engines as the description they show for your site in their results. So write something here that is likely to get a user to click through to your site.

Marketing

Getting people to link to you remains an important component of the marketing effort. We're not suggesting that you buy links, or swap them by the bushel. We mean getting people to give you links without giving them anything in return.

Since people won't generally link to you for the express purpose of making you money, why would they do it? Because they care about their visitors, and they think your site has something of value for them, such as great content. This also happens to be the profile of the sites whose links to your site are likely to have the highest value in the eyes of the search engines.

For years, our industry has thought of this process as "link building". It's time to change our thinking. Not that there is anything wrong with link building, or its close cousin that we all talk about, "link baiting." Links still drive higher search term rankings. But a few things have changed:

1. Since we need to think about search phrase-specific Page Rank, we must get highly relevant sites to link to our sites.
   
   
2. Since swapping is now heavily discounted, this type of activity has become virtually a waste of time. The exception is swapping links with highly relevant sites. The best guideline to use here is: Would you link to the other site even if they didn't link back to you? If the answer to this is yes, then go ahead and do a swap.
   
   
3. Link purchasing is a practice that works really well for lots of people. However, it comes with significant risks, so get over it. Why would you want to do this with any business that you are building for the long term?

Subject-Matter Expertise

You need to have great content. Building a large organic traffic stream will not happen unless you have great content. You need to offer something on your site that people want to read about, and link to. In addition, you just won't close business well unless your content is seen as high quality by prospects.

There are many ways to show expertise on a Web site. Here are a few basic ideas:

1. Write great articles about your area of expertise (but don't burden these articles with sales pitches for your products or services)
   
   
2. Offer great tools that people will want to use
   
   
3. Create a unique and valuable community on your site
   
   
4. Be a major source of news and information in your area of expertise

The key thing here is to think about high quality content for users, instead of "link bait." Where link bait seeks to get quick and easy links from any source, a better plan is to build trust with your audience. Trust building is not a gimmick or a trick. Trust is something that you earn and will keep your business growing for years to come.

Information Architecture

Wikipedia defines information architecture as the "practice of structuring information (knowledge or data) for a purpose". In broad strokes, think of this as user-centered design. (By the way, bots will eat this stuff up too.) The basic elements of an effective information architecture include:

1. Understanding how your users think about the topic area of your site.
   This is where keyword mapping exercises come into play. Keyword tools such as Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker are useful. Tools such as these can help you find out how users search for things related to the content you have, or plan to have, on your Web site. Map your navigation and pages to the things you learn during this exercise.
   
   
2. A well defined and clear global navigation scheme.
   Make it easy for users to navigate your content. The menus on your site need to be consistent in structure and location. It's helpful to implement a "bread crumb" bar showing the structure of a site, to help the users remember where they are and how they got there.
   
   
3. Leverage common UI practices.
   This is no time to implement a new paradigm. Users have been conditioned by other Web sites to look for things in certain places on a site. Take advantage of this and make life easier for them.

Technical Implementation

While the search engines urge us to "design for users," not search engines, the reality is that the search engines have certain basic requirements. Failure to meet these requirements can spell certain doom for your site's prospects. Here is our list of 5 things that you need to do to put together a solid technical implementation for the search engines:

1. Implement a clear navigation scheme that can be fully crawled using text links.
   
   
2. Minimize the number of clicks to your key content.
   Search engines look to site owners for clues as to what is important on a given site. If a piece of content is 4 clicks from the home page, what are you saying about its importance?
   
   
3. Implement pages that are rich in search engine visible content.
   
   This means text based articles and descriptions, and text based links. Give the spider something to chew on.
   
   
4. Effectively link related content within your own site.
   This is a great tool for reinforcing the relevance of pages on your site.
   
   
5. Write effective meta description tags.
   This will not help your ranking at all. However, these descriptions often get used by search engines as the description they show for your site in their results. So write something here that is likely to get a user to click through to your site.

Marketing

Getting people to link to you remains an important component of the marketing effort. We're not suggesting that you buy links, or swap them by the bushel. We mean getting people to give you links without giving them anything in return.

Since people won't generally link to you for the express purpose of making you money, why would they do it? Because they care about their visitors, and they think your site has something of value for them, such as great content. This also happens to be the profile of the sites whose links to your site are likely to have the highest value in the eyes of the search engines.

For years, our industry has thought of this process as "link building". It's time to change our thinking. Not that there is anything wrong with link building, or its close cousin that we all talk about, "link baiting." Links still drive higher search term rankings. But a few things have changed:

1. Since we need to think about search phrase-specific Page Rank, we must get highly relevant sites to link to our sites.
   
   
2. Since swapping is now heavily discounted, this type of activity has become virtually a waste of time. The exception is swapping links with highly relevant sites. The best guideline to use here is: Would you link to the other site even if they didn't link back to you? If the answer to this is yes, then go ahead and do a swap.
   
   
3. Link purchasing is a practice that works really well for lots of people. However, it comes with significant risks, so get over it. Why would you want to do this with any business that you are building for the long term?

So what does this mean? It means you have to get your links by different means (you have to "earn it"). Great content. A reputation as an open business that builds relationships with its customers and partners. In short build trust. This is what will get people to link to your site.

Summary

No doubt that there are many opportunities to drive up search engine traffic using techniques that are not in keeping with their terms of service. You need to view these techniques as both a risk and a distraction. It's a risk because the traffic you get from these techniques will go away when the search engines catch up to them, or you can get banned in the worst case.

It's a distraction because it keeps you from focusing on building the trust in your business. The trust is the enduring asset that you are trying to build. When you spend time working on other things, you are building a weak foundation for your business. If you are thinking about building your Web site as an asset for your business, there is no time for distractions.

But you can't ignore the technical requirements of the search engines. Getting these right is critical. Don't think of it as designing your site for search engines. Think of it as designing your site for users, but being search engine smart at the same time.

Free spell checkers in HTML Forms

A few days ago, some friends on toostep asked a question about doing a spell check in the postings and edit and do spell check in the comments. This post is in response to that question.

In this post I want to suggest you five interesting and free spell checkers for HTML Forms (input and text area) ready to use in your web projects. I also provided some suggestions regarding how to implement them on your pages using a few lines of HTML and Javascript code. Try them!

Any suggestion about this topic? Please leave a comment, thanks!

1. Spellify

Spellify is a script.aculo.us based spell checker, released by Nikola Kocic, for form fields that utilizes Google as its spell check engine. Spellify can also be configured to different languages (refer to spellify.js for more information regarding language settings) and requires:

- PHP 4+ with CURL library installed (developed using PHP 4.4.6)
- script.aculo.us 1.8.0 (only effects.js and scriptaculous.js required)
- Prototype JavaScript Framework 1.6.0

To install Spellify on your pages add spellify.js, prototype.js and scriptaculous.js on the tag of your page:

<script src="spellify/prototype.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="spellify/scriptaculous.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="spellify/spellify.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

...and copy the HTML code you find in the step 3 of this page. Then add a form with some fields like these:

<input type="text" id="search" name="search"/>
<input type="text" id="city" name="city"/>

In this way, all fileds will be cheked while an user types a word into them. Spellify can also ignore a specific text field by setting its class attribute to spellify_ignore. For example, if you want to ignore the input field "city" use this code:

<input type="text" id="city" name="city" class="spellify_ignore" />

Take a look at the spellify official page for a live preview.


2. GoogieSpell

GoogieSpell is a Gmail like spell checker that you can use in your own web-application. It support for around 27 languages; well tested and works on IE 5.5, IE 6.0, IE 7, FF 1.0+, Safari, Opera etc; generic, extendable and easy to install; AJAX based (without page-reloading; Lightweight (around 50 KB); Well documented and with GoogieSpell Multiple it's possible to spell check multiple text fields at once. Take a look here for the demo and for the code.


3. Ajax-Spell

Ajax-Spell is a useful spell checker for HTML text area which requires at least PHP 5 and either pspell or aspell. The only thing you have to do to work with ajax-spell is to include spell_checker.js and the MooTools javascript library in the tag of your page and add the class spell_check to any textarea you want to have a spell checker added to.

For example, add mootools and spell_checkers.js in this way:

<script src="mootools.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="mootools.js" type="spell_checker.js"></script>

... and add a text area like te following:

<textarea class="spell_check" rows="12" cols="40" name="text"></textarea>

Take also a look at this page for other information about this script.

4. ActiveSpell

ActiveSpell is a free ajax script to implement spell checking on any text box. It's maintained by ActiveCampaign, Inc and is based off of Ajax-Spell by Garrison Locke. You can fina download it here.

5. PHP Spell Checker
This simple PHP Spell Checker is used to spell check any of the input field of the HTML form. It is useful for webmasters who want to add spell checking to any text box (textarea) on their website or corporate intranet. The script is designed not to mess any way to your main script processing of the form. It just return modified (already spell-checked) text into any input field. It is written on PHP and using JavaScript as minimum as possible. Take a look at this page for more information.

Hope the toostep team will use these free resources to meet the needs of its users.

Why Small Business Needs a Web Solution Not a Website

Just a few years ago, small companies flocked to the web in droves, rushing to post their first website, anxious at the prospect of low-cost instant exposure. The web was going to be the great equalizer, putting small business on par with the big brand names, dangling the promise of visitors flocking to a company’s site to purchase its wares or partake in its services. Sound familiar? Unfortunately, for most small businesses and organizations, the promise fell short and company sales did not skyrocket from an unending march of site visitors.

So, what happened? For one, the web quickly became ultra competitive. Millions of sites sprang up in every business category making it virtually impossible to be found in the search engines. What little bit of traffic the businesses may have enjoyed when the site was first launched began to dry up. Also, as the web evolved to become a more interactive user experience, it became more technologically complex and many small business websites did not keep up. The other part of the problem was in the approach; not understanding that just putting together a website, even a pretty one, and finding some faceless company offering cheap web hosting services is not likely to make you the next great success story. A large hurdle that many small business owners and managers face is the tendency to compartmentalize the web into a few oversimplified tasks: grab a cheap domain name, find a budget small business website design and development person, look for some impossibly low-priced website hosting, and then expect their website to magically appear on page one of Google. Unfortunately, this ends up being a waste of time and money.

A Solutions-Based Approach with Professional Guidance

To create an effective web presence requires a solutions-based approach with clear ideas about what you want to accomplish and who the audience is you are targeting. The right elements have to be present; a well orchestrated website design with cohesive branding, solid technical acumen, clearly defined objectives for the organization, reliable small business web hosting services and some method of marketing your site and tracking the results. The web is constantly evolving and search engine competition is fierce. Being successful on the web requires consistently evaluating the site’s effectiveness based on your objectives, understanding the latest technologies and trends, having a dynamic website marketing plan and constantly fine tuning.

While you don’t have to spend a fortune to create real value on the web, you should also be realistic. Understand that being successful will require an investment that you should plan for and a clear vision of how your website fits into the goals and objectives of the organization. If you don’t have the experience and technical resources in-house, working with a professional web solutions provider, preferably one specializing in small business web design and development can provide great benefits. A good starting point in the process is to have an understanding of the core elements that are part of a successful website strategy and how they fit together.

The Elements of a Web Solution

1. Domain names – Choosing the right domain name is an important branding decision which impacts how your organization is perceived and also how it is found in the search engines. Purchasing from a cheap bulk registrar or choosing can spell trouble.
   
   
2. Website Design & Development Services – Find a provider that specializes in small business web design and development. An organization that offers a solutions-based approach can assist your company in doing thorough needs analysis and in designing all of the elements to work well together. First impressions count!
   
   
3. E-mail Management – E-mail is a key communication tool for your business. The right system will help you maximize communications within the company, on the road and with your customers.
   
   
4. Social Media – Social media such as blogging, Podcasting and other web 2.0 tools can greatly enhance customer communications. Your web services company should be able to help you evaluate how social media tools can best benefit your web presence and business objects.
   
   
5. Small Business Website Hosting Services – All web hosting is NOT created equal. There are many nuances and technical consideration involved with hosting solutions. It is best to stay away from budget hosting companies. Look for a managed hosting provider who can help you select the right plan for your web solution goals, get your website up and running and support you as it grows and evolves.
   
   
6. Website Maintenance – How will your site be maintained and updated? Having both small business web development and managed web site hosting as a package is immensely helpful for maximizing web server resources, identifying problems and keeping the site maintained and updated.
   
   
7. E-Commerce – Will you be actually selling on your site or using it for lead generation or information dissemination? If you are selling products, who will create and maintain your product database. How will transactions be handled? What about web server requirements? Working with a professional can help ensure you make the right choices for your e-commerce site.
   
   
8. Business Process Interaction (database development, customer relationship management, integration with your business management systems) – A website needs to be more than just an ad on the Internet to be effective as a business tool. There are many ways the web can be used to improve your business processes and integrate with your existing systems such as accounting or contact management.
   
   
9. Website Marketing – How will people find you on the web? Will you optimize your site for organic search or employ paid marketing techniques or a combination? What directories should you list your site in? Search engine marketing has evolved to be a complex specialty. It’s critical that you understand the tools available for driving traffic to your site and if needed, know how to evaluate and engage a web marketing specialist.
   
   
10. Website Analytics and Conversion – Having a great site isn’t enough if your visitors aren’t doing what you intended; buying something, contacting your company or using your site for an information source. Does your site have usability issues? What kind of reporting will you use to track site visitors? What do you need to know and do to convert your visitors into action-takers?
    

It’s a Process and a Work in Progress

While there is certainly a lot to think about, creating the best possible website solution for your business doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Your website can and should be a work in progress, evolving as your business grows. Because most small businesses do not have an internal IT staff to handle the technical elements of web development and planning, working with a web solutions provider that specializes in small business website hosting services and small business web design and development is a good start. Such an organization can help you identify your goals, manage the technical aspects of your site and guide you in your marketing efforts. They can also help you work within your budget to develop a plan that combines all the elements into a cohesive whole for creating and maintaining a successful web presence.

Conclusion

The web has grown up to be a terrific marketing medium for small businesses and organizations. Done right, it can be the most cost effective and powerful marketing and communication tool in your arsenal. The promise is still there. However, to truly leverage the power of the web, it is important to take a good, hard look at the website you currently have or the one you are thinking about creating. The elements of a successful web presence: small business web hosting, website design and development and web marketing are only the framework for a well thought-out web solution designed to reach your customers and truly benefit your business.

Understanding the Fundamentals of Web Site Design, Part 1

It starts with an idea—not with a technology: In today's Internet-obsessed world, far too many people are becoming more focused on the latest and greatest Web 2.0 buzzwords than on the fundamental purpose of the Web site.

Whether that purpose is to provide information or allow for the purchase of a product or service, there is a main purpose for the site and that needs to be identified.

Building the Blueprint: How to Plan Your Web Site

Creating a Web site is not that far removed from other traditional marketing campaigns in that a thorough initial analysis is crucial to the overall success of the project.

Simple sketches to identify your information flow and user interface become the building blocks of how you will position yourself online.

The Web site design should be based on the content, not the other way around. If you look into any successful Web site, its structure and information architecture likely entailed a good amount of planning and research.

Having an understanding of this concept, you should blueprint your Web site with the following elements in mind:

• Objective: What are you trying to do with this Web site? It's crucial that you identify your objectives and goals in order to determine the direction the site will take.

• Competitive analysis: Understanding what your competition is doing will help you compile a knowledge base that can be used in strengthening your brand and creating a differentiation that will help you compete in your market. Marketing professionals will sometimes refer back to Marketing 101 and talk about SWOT analysis—a strategy used to quickly evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats involved in a project or business venture.
  
  
• Vocabulary and message: Whom are you trying to communicate with? Is your message being heard by the audience you are trying to reach? This is where graphic design and fundamental marketing concepts matter. You have approximately eight seconds to captivate your audience before they grow tired and leave a page. Web site visitors that leave your Web site in eight seconds or less are considered a "bounce." It is reported that the average bounce rate is close to 50%. Web sites that heavily exceed this number are in drastic need of attention. When you are creating a Web site, always keep in mind that the content you are delivering on any page within the site will be a determining factor as to how long the user stays on the page.

• Sitemap and wire frames: After gaining a solid understanding of your message, it is important to lay out the road map of how your information will flow throughout the Web site. A wire frame is the road map of your Web site and defines how visitors travel throughout the site. To reduce clutter and to streamline usability, be sure that your navigation and site flow are consistent with good navigation and usability practices. Wire frames also start to show "classifications" on a Web site. Information architecture exists all around us as users of the Web and various interfaces:


• Lexicon classifications: A Lexicon is simply a complex way of describing labeling systems and classifications. The lexicon breaks up a Web site into various sections and labels the sections with popular verbiage such as "Resources" and "Support." These are functions of the various navigation systems, but these labels also help define and segment various pieces of information.


• Organizational classifications: This is how the Web site's information is presented to the user with respect to organization—for example, how various navigation elements are grouped together.


• Search: These tools, similar to how Google would search the web for content, give the user the ability to search the Web site and the content within the site.


• Navigation: This is how we help users move through the content, digging deeper into the site as they visit the content areas of their choice.

• Look & feel: Despite popular belief, having Photoshop or Dreamweaver doesn't make someone a graphic artist or user-interface designer. Having the "dorm-room" designer build your Web site can have a profound negative effect on your bottom line. Granted, you can cut costs by working with template-based solutions or hiring an inexperienced web developer, but this is not the route to take if you are serious about your Web site and the success of your business. Identifying the look and feel that will send the proper message to your target audience will have a direct effect on how visitors respond to your Web site.

• Content: Have you ever visited a Web site and clicked on a number of things only to find the famous "Under Construction" message? Content, or should I say lack thereof, is one of the main reasons that a site fails or is never completed. You can have the best concept and layout in the world, but if there is no quality content to place into the site, at the end of the day all you are left with is dead air.

From Paper to Web:

Graphic Design and Web Page Creation

Once you have created the blueprint of where you are going to take the Web site, you now have the necessary pieces to get started on the "Concept Phase."
Depending on the designer, various applications may be used to compile the Web site design concepts. The most popular software suite by far for doing so is the Adobe Creative Suite, which contains applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. In addition, many users still use Macromedia/Adobe's Fireworks for Web site layouts.

By using a combination of the content and information presented in the above-noted wireframes, you can start to compile how the Web site will look and feel.

Generally speaking, it is best to finalize the look and feel aspects of your Web site before spending time and resources on having it programmed. Design concepts that will play a big role in your Web site creation include traditional design composition elements such as point, line, form, texture, color, and type.

Keeping in mind those various elements will ensure that your Web site possesses the needed attributes to clearly and concisely deliver your message. A clearly defined Web site message will result in a lower bounce rate—and more people will actually see and read your Web site.

The Importance of Color in Successful Web Site Design

The use of color in Web site design has a profound impact on the viewer experience. Colors affect people in a deeply psychological, and often completely subconscious, manner and have the power to make the Web site experience overwhelmingly positive or negative. Most professionals recommend choosing up to five colors and using them consistently throughout the Web site.
Color choices provoke different responses for different people. The color palette of your Web site should consider the age group, gender, and culture of your intended audience, while also reflecting the emotional response you wish to stimulate in the potential customer. Certain colors have the tendency to create calm, excitement, happiness, or distaste... again, depending upon who the Web site user is.

Another major factor in Web site color scheme is readability. The choice of background and type color should contrast well for readability without being harsh and glaring to the eye. Color can also be used to make certain phrases stand out within your site content or to indicate links within the text.
Following are some color choice basics to consider when planning the palette of your Web site.

Color-Choice Fundamentals

• Use colors from nature. Using forest greens, sea blues, and the reds and yellows of flowers and fall leaves is much more alluring to viewers than harsh colors not seen in the natural world (such as shocking pink, electric blue, and neon green).

• Color preference differs from men to women. Men prefer blue and orange while women are drawn to reds and yellows. Women also are capable of perceiving a much broader spectrum of colors and sense subtle shade variations much more easily.

• Viewer age plays a role in color choice. Young adults and teens are often excited by bright, vibrant colors and contrast. Older people tend to be more interested in Web sites that have more conservative color schemes such as blues, grays, and browns, without glaring contrasts that can tire the eye.

• Culture and nationality affect response to colors. In the United States and most European cultures, the color white symbolizes purity and marriage. However, in Japan and China, white is a color of bad luck and red is the traditional color of new brides. If your Web site is aimed at attracting international customers, make sure to research the cultural color beliefs of your target audience.

• The universal safe color. Blue seems to be a universally safe choice among different cultures, ages, and genders, evoking feelings of peace and calm for most everyone.

• Choose background and text colors for good contrast and readability. The best choice for readability is a white background with black text. Other good choices include gray or black backgrounds with a well contrasting text color. Avoid harsh contrasts such as red and green or blue and yellow, which have been shown to cause eye fatigue.

Keep in mind the most common meanings and emotions associated with color. Although different people react differently to colors, there are some common meanings and emotions associated with certain colors. Here are a few examples:

• Red: Excitement, power, passion, or anger.
  
  
• Yellow: Joy, happiness, light
  
  
• Blue: Cool, peace, trustworthiness, loyalty, or sadness
  
  
• Black: Sophistication, mystery, or evil
  
  
• Green: Life, nature, health, wealth

Consider Web site viewers with color-perception problems. The most common form of color-blindness, most common in men, is blue-green colorblindness; that is, a person cannot differentiate between these two colors, even when they are next to each other. A blue background with green text will be completely unreadable to such a person.

Google eye-tracking studies drive website changes

Website designers have used eye-tracking equipment for years to learn how visitors interact with their sites. Companies like Eyetools perform studies for clients including Yahoo and the New York Times. But the results of these studies are usually kept confidential.

Today, a pair of Google employees posted a video to Google's company blog that shows an eye-tracking study done on Google's search results page. The study's goal was to determine if adding thumbnail images to the search results page distracted users, or helped them.

The study found Google's thumbnails didn't confuse users. Great, but a more interesting blog post would've been an example of how eye-tracking data caused Google's interface designers to make a major change, rather than validating their genius.

Still, the video is worth watching. As you follow the red dot bouncing around Google pages, remember that a larger red dot means the user's eyes paused there longer. The video is in real time, which surprises some viewers. We humans can scan a page full of information much faster than you might think.