Free Website Design Tips

I just returned home from BarCamp Orlando 2008. BarCamp is an informal conference (very, very informal) for web developers and digital media specialists held at — you guessed it — a bar, or in this case several bars in downtown Orlando. Maybe it was the thought of spending your weekend with 200 or so web techies or maybe the near constant rain dismayed you from attending, but through all the tech speak, there are two things that came out of BarCamp Orlando that every business trying to make its website generate more sales should consider. The first is it truly...

If you accept the premise that your website now plays a vital role in determining whether or not someone will do business with you, then you have to start looking at your website for what it is at the most basic level — it is an advertisement. So that means you have to analyze it like you would analyze an ad. What is one of the most important (if not THE most important part) of any print ad? The headline. And what is one of the most important parts of your website front page? The headline. Now think about how many websites you visit that have some variation...

A couple of months ago we met with a gentleman about his website and his biggest complaint was that few people signed up for his newsletter. He was a plumber. When he said that, I thought, “What possible information that could positively impact my life could I ever expect to get from, and seek out from, a plumber?” National television networks and major market newspapers are all suffering because consumers are no longer turning to them for news, and this nice man expected people that went to his website to request some form of news from him. I had to politely tell...

I have in front of me the Google Analytics reports for 10 of our clients at Sales Growth Group, and as I stare at the reports, I start making some rough calculations. (32) From those calculations, I think I can predict when you will stop reading this article and when your website visitors will stop reading your website. (57)   Each of the websites in these reports are relatively new and reasonably strong designs. Most of these are companies marketing to consumers; some are marketing to businesses, but none of them are e-commerce sites. (91) When I add up the average time spent...

For the second time this week, we met a wonderful small business and exposed to them to a fact that shocked them. They did not own their URL. They thought they did. They were paying for it monthly and simply concluded it was their possession. A look at their domain ownership revealed that the domain re-seller they used had registered the company’s URL in the name of the re-seller, and not their company. I would have to say that over the past four months, perhaps 1 in 7 companies that met with us at SGG regarding their web development did not own their domains and were quite...