I have set out some website planning questions on a mind map. These are questions that I need to cover to scope a website design project before quoting a price.
I thought that I would add this to my blog because I am certain that I will think of additional things to add to this mind map over time:
This article has 6 very incisive questions to ask the client before you undertake any project:
I today carried out a website review for Swan Architects of Stratford-upon-Avon.
I met the owner of the business whilst I was out walking our dog yesterday (both of our dogs are called ‘Poppy’.) We often see each other but I have never stopped to chat with him before.
I asked him what he did for a living and he told me that he was an architect. I then told him what I did and he immediately said that he needed to sort out his website. His current website was created by him from a site-builder system.
Many businesses do this to save money but it is a false economy because it will directly impact sales revenue if you don’t get your online marketing right.
(I learnt this lesson in a previous business, when we hired a professional photographer for a few hundred pounds to take pictures of our product, and subsequently sold over £1m of product from a brochure with those pictures in it. I know how difficult it is to risk money upfront on marketing with no guarantee of a return!)
I volunteered to carry out a free review and here is the result below – sit back and enjoy the insights.
I am posting this because I think many other small businesses are making similar mistakes with their online marketing and it should be instructional for those businesses too.
Here is a summary of the points covered in video:
If you would like me to carry out a free website review for your business, then please feel free to contact me.
In one of the sections of his book entitled ‘The Brutal Truth’, John Reese has a sub-heading or chapter with the headline:
When John Reese says something like this about website design, I listen.
Here is a brief description of his career so far:
[boxibt style=”gray”]In 2004, Reese astonished the online marketing world by selling $1,080,496 worth of his “Traffic Secrets” product over the course of eighteen hours. He launched a new product and made over a million dollars in less than a day without spending a single cent on advertising.
Reese realized early in his career that the best way to make money is to learn from others. The successes and failures of other experts in the online marketing field helped him learn to avoid gambling on new strategies with his hard-earned money.
For instance, Reese once sold a domain name for 900 dollars, and the buyer turned around and resold the same domain name for one million dollars in cash. Talk about a hard lesson learned!
In 1994, Reese created one of the first auto-responder services on the world wide web.
Since then, he has developed and launched over 100 projects on the Internet, including a free photography site for eBay users, which launched in 1998. Within the first 10 months after going live with his eBay photo hosting site, it was already ranked among the top 500 websites in the world for web traffic.
What did that mean as far as Reese’s bottom line was concerned?
He was making over 100 thousand dollars a month for a website that cost under 500 dollars to create and develop.
Reese is an eBay pro. He’s even made over 38 thousand dollars on a single eBay auction.
Reese has been sharing his expertise with other Internet marketers since 2004.
He is a pro when it comes to research and development, testing projects, tracking results, generating online traffic and conversion. http://john-reese.net[/boxibt]
He goes on to say:
[boxibt style=”gray”]Oh, I know, I know, but but but… you read about some split-tests where the ‘ugly’ design or ad converted higher than the ‘pretty’ version!
There will always be a place for simple, compelling copy-driven direct response mechanisms (i.e. ads, landing pages etc) in digital marketing. It’s the copy that sells people and always has.
But there’s a ‘bigger picture’ happening. And ‘YES, there may still be a few ugly sites online that are having success today, and some may even be making a fortune right now, but
A) those are the rare exception and
B) I believe their conversions will only continue to get worse.
It’s only a matter of time, because a major shift is occurring and I’ve seen it as clear as day in DATA THAT DOESN’T LIE.
With the worldwide increase in device usage (smartphones to tablets) we find ourselves using these screens more and more. Because of this behavioural shift it created an important focus on UI (user interface) design and user experiences.
If you haven’t noticed, graphical interfaces got cleaner. And easier to use.
There’s an entire design ‘evolution’ occurring across the Web, mobile devices and more. And it’s all about CONVERSION. More professional, easier-to-navigate design makes more money.
Design now matters. A lot.
As competition grew, companies competed by having better design and better user experiences. ‘Design’ is what people see and experience in the digital world. It’s now incredibly important.
If your business doesn’t have awesome design you’re at a huge disadvantage. PERIOD.
TRUST is a major factor with online conversions. Great design is one element of establishing ‘instant credibility’ with prospects that don’t know of you and your business. If you take two competitors with everything else the same, but one has better design than the other, the one with the better design wins – better logos, product packaging, use interface and more.
This wasn’t always the case online as just a few short years ago ugly marketing converted quite well (even for sales) and in some markets it still does. But things are changing fast. It’s still a ‘balancing act’ that the copy has to do its job, but more and more people feel better about doing business with a company that has more professional design and a better user experience.[/boxibt]
It was reading ‘The Brutal Truth’ by John Reese that made me continue down the track of developing my Photoshop skills.
Joh Reese and ‘The Brutal Truth’ have eventually led to the creation of my product ‘Easy Actions‘ (launching 3rd July 2015) which is an easy way in for anyone to start creating beautiful graphics for their website, product packaging and much more
I have created some demo sites for my website design business. You can take a peek by clicking the image below. This will take you to a page where there are links to each site – there are 5 or 6 sites in total.
I’ve just completed a classified ads website for a client.
The site is called Homestay Pals and is specifically to enable anyone with a spare room in their house to advertise for paying guests – a small home business opportunity which is quite common around the world.
The difficulty in creating this site was creating a secure registration process that enables both Homestay Hosts and Homestay Guests to upload their own information and contact each other through the website.
Rather than hire a coder, I’ve used an off-the-shelf solution called Classipress Theme. This has a lot of settings and functionality which makes it quite difficult to configure but it is far easier than starting from a blank piece of paper and coding the site from scratch.
My main concern, which has been voiced to the customer, is how he intends to get traffic to the site and how does he get the site up and running with a critical mass of ads that will drive and engage visitors.
Also, there are clearly security issues in inviting strangers into your home as a Homestay guest but Homestays are quite a common business model around the world.
Despite these reservations, my client wanted to proceed as he intends to put his own house on the site and invite friends and family to join him.
He is a Christian and believes that prayer and goodwill will assist him in his endeavour to help other people to earn an income from the spare rooms they have in their homes. It also provides the guests with cheap and affordable accommodation so that everyone is a winner.
If you would like to see this classified ads website that has recently been completed, then click this link or you can view some of my other website projects at Salmon Web Design.
I have just created Salmon Web Design specifically to sell my web design services in Stratford-upon-Avon. However, my services are not limited by geographical area as I can design websites for any English speaking customer.
I have created a website that showcases some of my web design talent at http://marksalmon.biz.
The reality is that I can take any WordPress design template and configure it for a client. That’s not really the difficult part, although some themes can be complex and fiddly to configure like the one I am using on http://marksalmon.biz.
In my experience, it is creating the graphics and content that is the most time-consuming aspect of creating a website design.
I am able to source and edit photographs and images – whether creating 3D marketing collateral like ecovers and product images, or indeed stylising photographs. Some of my stylised images are showcased at http://mark-salmon.com/images.
One of the innovative things I have done on my web design site is to create almost 1,200 blog posts from one post using a plugin that swaps out keywords so that each article is unique in respect of those keywords. I am using this technique to target each town through out the UK with my web design service. I used this technique for another client and it worked surprisingly well in attracting search engine traffic.
Take a look at Salmon Web Design and tell me what you think. Do you think my web design is good enough to get clients in Stratford-upon-Avon?
Work With Your Client
In this article I want to discuss web designer occupational hazards. This is prompted by the fact that I have just completed a difficult project that measurably increased my blood pressure by 30 points.
Right at the planning stage of the website we established the colour scheme that we proposed to use. Having completed the website, a flyer, a business card and various other marketing collateral, I was then informed by my customer that her mother had inadvertently changed the whole colour scheme by ordering the shop signage etc in a different colour of green!
I hate having to do the same job twice, particularly when the work involved is boring and a waste of my time! Hence, the rise in my blood pressure!
I regard myself as a digital artist and I took great care in selecting the colour scheme – to have it completely overturned directly impacts on the pride and care I take in my design work. I take satisfaction in the artistry of my work and I don’t do it just for money like an ordinary labourer. I do it because I want to create something of beauty.
Anyone can throw up a website but not everyone can create something that is aesthetically pleasing. This takes skill and hard work to achieve.
Truth to tell, I don’t create many website for other people and this is why. I want to retain full control over the artistic integrity of my work.
Also, having studied this stuff for literally years, I am the expert! I don’t mind constructive feedback but the final decision as to what, and what does not, work must remain with me. Otherwise, why employ me at all?
In fact, if my client imposes restrictions upon me and my creativity, I would prefer that they find another web designer because ultimately I am responsible for the end result.
This does not mean to say that I should not keep my client fully informed and involved in the process of building their website. On the contrary, communication and asking for feedback is critical. It would be disastrous to work in a bubble without communicating with the client, only to find that the final product is not fit for purpose!
One of the problems with web design is that everyone has an opinion and everyone thinks they have some level of expertise just because it is a visual medium. It is therefore very easy to keep finding things that you would like ‘to tweak’. I don’t mind tweaking if this is on the clients own time i.e. that they are paying me for the extra work. For this reason, it is important that there is provision for only limited revisions in the initial contract to build the website. After these revisions have expired, then the client needs to pay for any additional revisions.
With regards to completion deadlines, it is always better to under promise and over-deliver. Don’t accept work where the deadline is difficult to meet. One customer showed me a quote for a 5 page website from another web designer when negotiating the initial price for the web site, little realising that by having an ecommerce store they would need many more than 5 pages – it turned out to be 17 pages!
Failure to realise exactly what you are taking on can lead to the setting of unrealistic deadlines for completion. Better to walk away from the job than find yourself having to absorb a penalty for late completion of the site!
These conditions are there to protect both you and the client, so do not be shy about discussing them and the consequences that apply if they are not observed.
These are just a few of the web designer occupational hazards – oh and high blood pressure, of course!
In this article I am going to outline the process that I use for creating a website for a client.
This is the process that I have used to develop a website for Astles of Nottingham – this is a new florist and greengrocers shop based in Nottingham that also wishes to establish an online shop for both parts of the business.
Rather than base our domain name around keywords, we chose to use the name of the business – Astles of Nottingham.
We decided not to include the ‘of’ to slightly shorten the domain name to make it easier to put into the browser. Also the keywords are ‘Astles’ and ‘Nottingham’ – these are words that customers will put into the search box when the business is established.
We decided to use the ‘co.uk’ suffix because it is a UK based business but we did also buy the ‘.com’ and redirected this to ‘co.uk’ just in case customers put ‘.com’ into the browser (or a competitor decides to buy it and divert the traffic to their site -this actually happened to me in a previous business!).
Establish where the website is to be hosted. I own Reseller Hosting so in the majority of cases I set up my clients on my web host but it is important to ask first!
It is important for both branding and professional reasons to set up hosted email addresses and to forward these to my customers normal email inbox as appropriate. (This is in addition to their Google Gmail account which is set up when they create their Google account below.) This is important for the Contact Form on the website.
I asked my customer who the top 3 competitors are to her business and she gave me about 10 names. Most of these businesses have relatively poorly-designed sites although we did pick up some great tips from one or two of the sites!
It is a great idea to scope out the competition and in particular check out what keywords they are targeting so that you can get more ideas for your keyword list – see below.
My customer wants to make alterations to the site i.e. input products and also blog posts. I needed an easy interface and WordPress is ideal for this.
We decided to use the Avada Theme because this is the top-selling theme in Themeforest.net which means that it will be well-maintained and supported, most of the glitches will have been dealt with and it has loads of design options so the site can be created exactly as my customer requires.
I went through some of the demo design options, of which there are many, before we opted for a simple, clean design that is totally different to that of any of their competitors.
The downside of this theme is that, because it is fully-loaded’ set-up is comparatively complex and time-consuming as you need to track down the correct settings – and there are a lot of them.
I then discussed the required font and logo with my customer. As luck would have it, they had an old photo with a font on it that they wanted to use. This related to a greengrocery business that had been in the family many years ago.
It is quite hard to track down a font from a photograph because there are literally thousands of font variations!
We eventually settled on ‘QTCoronation’ which has been used to created the ‘Astles’ logo. This took quite a bit of time but was well-worth the effort.
With regards to font size, I increased all the default font sizes in the theme to make the site easy for customers to read.
We wanted a colour scheme to run throughout the business. The shop is very ‘green’ in colour so we settled on green. However, I recommended a ‘light’ feel to the site so we decided to use white, light grey, and green as our colour palette but use the green as an accent colour.
The important thing is to find a colour palette that is aesthetically pleasing (- there are plenty of colour-palette sites that can help -) and that the colour palette is used consistently throughout the business to reflect the brand.
One of my favourite sites is the Robert Welch cutlery site which simply uses white and black and shades in between!
Websites are a visual medium and graphics are an incredibly important element of website design. I therefore spent an afternoon with my customer trawling through graphics sites to find a home page graphic that reflected their business and my customer approve of. The home page is critical because it is the most used point of entry for visitors.
The best converting websites are those that do not have a lot of distractions and the customer can easily navigate to find what they want.
For this reason, the front of the website is a simple graphic that reflects what the business sells – vegetables, fruit and flowers. The customer can then do very little else other than to find out ‘About’ the business or visit either the ‘Greengrocers’ shop or the ‘Florists’ shop which is the whole point of the site.
From the website developers point of view, a significant amount of time can be spent on selecting and customising graphics. It is important that graphics are optimised for the web i.e. compressed and sized correctly to improve page-loading speeds.
This aspect of web-design is a major time-consumer and possibly not well-understood or valued by the customer.
I discussed the basic page structure for the site with my customer and we came up with a relatively simple starting structure. Also, with the addition of the online shop, many of the pages created relate to the efficient operation of the shop.
Because the business will sell a lot of products online, it is important to group the products into categories.
The two main product categories are ‘Florists’ and ‘Greengrocers’.
Within the ‘Florists’ category, we came up with the following sub-categories:
Within the ‘Greengrocers’ category, we came up with the following sub-categories:
Grouping products by category makes it easier for customers to find what they are looking for on the site and is a critical part of creating a website structure that works and is intuitive to use. Of course, categories can be added and deleted as required by the business.
This is the area where most of the competitors fall down and the reason why their websites receive less traffic than they might otherwise do – poor keyword research. As a result, their websites are optimised for relatively few keywords and often for keywords that they can never rank for.
For businesses servicing a local community, selecting keywords can be systematic as follows:
City Keyword
Keyword City
City State Keyword
Keyword City State
City State Abbreviation Keyword
Keyword City State Abbreviation
Keyword in City
Keyword in City State
Keyword in City State Abbreviation
State Keyword
Keyword State
StateAbbreviation Keyword
Keyword State Abbreviation
Keyword in State
Keyword in State Abbreviation
Using this methodology, and selecting the business name and products and services offered, and even suburbs of a city, it is possible to develop a more comprehensive keyword list with which to work with.
When I showed the keyword list that I developed for ‘Astles of Nottingham‘ to my customer, they expressed surprise at the size and scope of the list.
Each business needs to create a Google account. Why? Because around 85% of the search engine traffic is generated through the use of Google.
Also, I integrate my clients site with Google Analytics and Google Web Master Tools to keep a handle on traffic and to optimise the site.
Also, for local businesses, it is important to create a business profile in Google to get page one rankings in Google. Businesses need to verify that they own the business and fully-complete their profile.
The same process of creating a business profile needs to be followed for Bing because there are still many users of Bing as a search engine and it is important to pick up the additional 10% of traffic.
In addition to Google+, my customer has opted to connect her site to a Facebook page and a YouTube channel so that she can drive traffic through these media. She opted not to use Twitter and LinkedIn may be added in future.
It is important to consider a strategy for getting traffic to a clients website – possible options include:
In addition to SEO and social media, my customer will be running a monthly draw for a free bouquet or box of vegetables for new subscribers and registrants to her online shop. Once she has their contact details, she can then send them an email to bring them back into her website or store.
Plugins add additional functionality to WordPress. Using the Avada theme meant that I needed to download 4 plugins to make it function properly at the basic level – this included 2 slider plugins, Contact Form 7 and the Woocommerce plugin for the online shop.
The Woocommerce plugin is quite complicated and time-consuming to configure as there are a lot of potential settings to consider. For this reason, it is important to run through the settings with my client to ensure that they understand and agree with the settings that I have applied. For example, some products are zero-rated for VAT and others are not.
In addition to these plugins, I am adding the following plugins:
Plugins need to be selected with care as too many plugins can slow down the page load speed. On the other hand, you need the site to do what it needs to do!
I asked my customer whether she was affiliated to any Trade Associations as adding these to her site will potentially lend more authority and credibility to her business.
There are many online trade directories – adding my customers business details will improve search engine rankings over time
There are a number of options for creating the site content:
The ‘About’ page will be written by my customer as she wants to cover her families long history as greengrocers in the Nottingham area. This will include some vintage photographs to illustrate this history.
The ‘Delivery’ page was created by researching competitors sites – it will need refinement in the light of operational experience.
My client wants to be able to add and delete products from the online shop. To enable her to do this, I will create a video showing her how to do this so she can create most of the shop content although I will support her with graphics etc.
Blog posts – I suggest that my client creates these (another training video will be created) to cover the following:
Some of these articles will be created around the targeted keyword list that I have created for my customer to drive SEO traffic to the site and to notify existing customers by email to drive them back to the site with a view to purchasing more.
The point about ‘Content’ is to agree with the customer who exactly will create it and to agree deadlines for completion – for many customers, this may mean that I end up doing the majority of the work to ensure that it gets done.
My customer is opening her shop on the 5th February, in time to sell flowers for Valentines Day.
Understanding my customers expectations for delivery of the website is important because if the time-scale is tight, it enables me to prioritise my work e.g. in this case create the Valentines products in the online shop before anything else!
As you can appreciate from this article, to set up a business website requires quite a bit of work if your purpose is to build on strong foundations. Unfortunately, many so-called website designers skip some of the necessary steps – particularly those that relate to invisible benefits or are deemed future ‘upsells’ to the customer.
In my opinion, 95% or more of business websites are not for for purpose, receiving little or no targeted traffic and poorly designed. Without traffic, a website is just so much digital dust and almost completely useless to the business owner – web designers know this but do not explain this to the customer. Without results, a lot of websites become stale and out-dated because the website owner has no incentive to invest further time or money.
By covering the rigorous process that I use for creating a website for a client, hopefully this has been helpful for you – this is for a small local greengrocers and florists i.e. a local business rather than an authority blog, sniper site or membership site.
I have just created two new websites for my daughter who is working from home offering a number of health, weight and fitness products.
My sister has been working in the nutrition industry for a long time now and is an international speaker on all things related to nutrition and health. So when my daughter decided to work from home in order to bring up my young grandchildren (without being hammered by care costs) it was natural that she would partner with my sister in building up her business.
My daughter earns an income by earning a commission from the sale of products and also recruiting members to a network marketing opportunity.
She wanted a minimalist design for her website, so I set up http://emsparry.com for her using a spare theme available to me.
I have also set up a members area on a separate directory of the same site.
Here are some of the features of the sites:
The content on these new websites for my daughter is ‘holding’ content because she has not yet seen my designs at the time of writing this post.
If you would like to hire me to create a website for you, then please contact me with details of what you have in mind and I will give you a quote.
