7 Steps to Follow When Executing a Web Design Project

 

Website Design is vocabulary that even children in elementary school might be able to explain nowadays. This is because Internet technology has taken over the world and this is one of the most lucrative businesses today. People are starting Web design companies all over the world, and even with all the competition, they are not lacking clients because there is always a new client who wants to launch a website. The quality of services that you will get when you hire a website design company is heavily dependent on the company that you choose to work with.

Selecting a Web design agency is not an easy task owing to the fact that there are so many to choose from. You will be totally spoilt for choice when it comes to picking one to work with. Secondly, some of these companies will charge you an arm and leg for the services that they provide. However, that should not worry you because this article will guide you on the steps that you should take when you are hiring a Web design service provider. There are some website designers who are great in designing certain types of websites but not some other types. This is where you should start.

STEP 1: WHAT KIND OF SITE DO YOU WANT?

There are people who want a fashion blog while others want to create online auction businesses. Websites vary in their design because of their nature. There is not a single day that a fashion blog will resemble a finance blog. Mixing up the design scheme is one of the best ways to make sure that your site fails. Your audience will be confused and have a hard time using your site even if all the buttons are right there. Users won't be able to accomplish their goals if the website design is not fitting of its industry and the services offered.

STEP 2: GOALS OF YOUR SITE

What is it that you would like to achieve with your site or the Internet marketing activities that you engage in? Different types of sites have different targets to be achieved. Take, for instance, an e-commerce website. The focus of such a site is going to be conversion of sales, return on investment and growth and maintenance of a customer base. This is different from when you are launching a company and you have created a website for it. In such a case, the target will be to provide information concerning the services and/or products. Having a clear focus is very important.

STEP 3: BUDGET

This is the first thing that many people consider, and why not? With Web design services being ridiculously costly, it is important to create the budget that you will use for the project. One reason many small businesses end up spending more than they ought to spend on Web design is because of failing to budget.

It is not only about budgeting but rather the need for you to understand the difference between cost and value. You might spend a lot of money and get poor quality, which is just another way of saying that you will get no value for your money. The best way to make sure that you get value for your money is to consult with several companies concerning the value that they deliver and how that fits into the amount of money you are willing to spend (or can spend).

STEP 4: CHOOSE THE RIGHT COMPANY

You are probably wondering why this was not the first step. This is the fourth simply because it is made easier by the first three. When you know what you are looking for and you have a budget, then you should have a grand time selecting the right company to work with. Always go for a company with a proven track record. If it is a new company, you can ask to see samples of the work that they will do for you. Choosing the right company will make it possible for you to fulfill the first three steps.

STEP 5: KEEP COMMUNICATION OPEN

Hiring a Web design agency is not similar to placing an order for curtains to be made for your home. You need to keep the communication lines open at all times. The first thing to do is to ask as many questions before the project starts and then tell the designer what it is that you are looking for. Once this is done, the designer is supposed to get in touch with you every once in a while to notify you of the progress of the work you have given him. If there are modifications that they would like to make or alterations to the original plan that need to be carried out then it will be easier to do that when communication is open.

STEP 6: CONTENT VERSUS ART

This will come in somewhere in the first steps as well as while you are planning your website building project. A majority of sites fail to perform well simply because they do not have the content that many people are looking for. Take, for instance, someone who visits a site looking primarily for the contacts page but then it is lacking. They will definitely not be coming back to that site.

When you select a company that places value on art rather than content of your site's design then you should know that you are working with the wrong people. It is hard to hide an ornament behind decoration. This is just like manicuring a hen's nails, completely pointless.

STEP 7: MAINTENANCE

Once the site is up and running, you will need to maintain it at its best. Maintenance of your investment is important to ensure that you get that return you are looking for from it. A good web design agency is going to be of great help in this step assisting you with things like analytic reporting and even publishing of content.

MAY THE BEST COMPANY WIN

Hiring a website design agency is not such a simple job. There are several of them providing these services but the best will definitely be that one that helps you to meet your goals. There is something that you have in mind concerning your site, make sure that you get to achieve it and the site's design is the one that will help that happen.

Contact Virtual Focused Marketing for more information.

Via: http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2016/04/28/7-steps-to-follow-when-executing-a-web-design-project.aspx?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter

Is the Homepage Dead? 3 Reasons Not to Ignore It.

In Website Design the homepage was once a valued, integral website asset – the gateway to a company's brand and a driver of customer engagement. It was so important, there used to be employees whose sole job was to manage a brand's homepage.

Then came search and social.

For the past 10 years, the way content gets discovered has evolved dramatically. The rise of Google, and then social media, has created entirely new paths for website visitors to find content without ever navigating to a brand's homepage.

In 2014, leaked data from The New York Times showed a plunge in its homepage visitorsinstigating the now commonly accepted belief that this digital real estate has lost its value.

Based on internal customer data, just five percent of website visitors enter through the homepage. The other 95 percent are “side-door traffic” visitors, who land on a company's website via search or social media postings that direct users to a specific page. As a result, marketers are rightfully focusing their efforts on those channels, but should be wary of ignoring the homepage for their Web or mobile experiences. In many ways, the homepage is like the preferred customer experience found at hotel chains. While those customers make up a small percentage of the overall audience, it's an extremely valuable segment.

Here are three reasons not to ignore the homepage:

1. HOMEPAGE VISITORS SPEND MORE TIME ON YOUR WEBSITE.

Entrance through the homepage is a sign of loyalty. Based on our data, while only five percent of visitors come through the homepage, they account for 50 percent of page views.

Visitors who enter from search and social only view an average of three and 1.8 pages respectively per session. On the other hand, visitors who enter from the homepage are more likely to view 10 to 30 pages per session. Longer engagement with a brand's content leads to higher conversion rates, larger purchases and increased loyalty.

Brands are beginning to realize that the homepage offers an opportunity to improve engagement and convert occasional visitors to loyal users. The homepage can be easily personalized to provide visitors with content that will encourage more clickthroughs, based on their interests. First and third-party data can help develop visitors' profiles and allow marketers to showcase targeted content.

For example, if a consumer is a devout hockey fan who is constantly following the NHL, the homepage of her favorite sports news website can serve her more hockey-related content. That one-to-one experience will keep her coming back for more, while also broadening the scope of content available to her.

2. HOMEPAGE VISITORS HAVE A WIDER LATITUDE OF INTERESTS WITHIN A PARTICULAR TOPIC.

Visitors who enter a brand's website via social media or search are there for just one thing: that viral article their college friend shared on Facebook with a catchy title. Thirty seconds after perusing the article, the reader is gone.

When readers enter through the homepage, they may be looking for a number of articles pertaining to a particular topic. They have a wider scope of interests, which makes it easier for brands to showcase their content. While viral content shared on social media platforms is likely to be clicked because of compelling headlines, articles on the homepage are likely to be clicked because of their subject matter.

Publishers like ESPN are beginning to acknowledge the homepage as a largely untapped resource. Curated content featured on a homepage serves as an opportunity for businesses to provide readers with the most relevant articles, presented in a way that is tailored just for them.

Personalization should be elastic and adaptable, which is easier to deliver on the home page. For example, if a consumer is looking for a pair of running shoes, he may go directly to a specific brand's website because he likes those shoes. While on the brand's homepage, he sees relevant content from the blog, a video about new running shoes coming out in a month and a special promotion for returning visitors. Search can deliver a consumer to a brand's site, but a compelling homepage can nurture an ongoing customer relationship.

3. HOMEPAGE TRAFFIC IS A GOOD INDICATOR OF YOUR MARKETING SUCCESSES.

Publishers are focused on three things when it comes to their websites: audience development, acquiring new users and existing user engagement.

Today, one of the most difficult challenges for publishers is getting one-time visitors, also known as “flybys,” to come back to the website for more after stumbling upon a viral article they found on Twitter. Whether or not side-door visitors end up on the homepage is a good indicator of how well search and social campaigns are performing.

Investing in the homepage is good business. It may not pull the traffic numbers brands are looking for, but its value can be measured in other, long-term benefits that search and social can't produce. By personalizing a user's homepage experience, brands can make an extraordinary impact on user engagement, driving longer sessions and developing loyalty among visitors.

Contact Virtual Focused Marketing for more information.

Via: http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2016/04/28/is-the-homepage-dead-three-reasons-not-to-ignore-it.aspx?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter

9 Tips for Sharing Videos on Social Media

If you have a business, and you aren't using videos to promote your business on social media, what are you waiting for?

You are missing out on a big thing, and if your competition is using video, you are going to lose business to them. Many people think that they have to spend a lot of money in order to have great social video content. While this may have been the case at one time, today, anyone can create awesome video content without having to spend much at all. Once you have your videos ready, it is time to share them on social media. Here are nine tips to get you started in Video Marketing.

1. BUILD MOMENTUM

The most important part of a social video campaign is the beginning. You need to build momentum right from the start, and keep people hooked. This takes time and energy, but it is worth it in the long run. Promote it to the hilt, and make sure that it gets shared over and over again.

2. USE SEO

The metadata and descriptions of your video content should include keywords that people are searching for. You want people to be able to find your videos easily, and this is one of the best ways to do it. Remember, even YouTube is a search engine. In fact, it is the second largest search engine, next to Google and benefits from being owned by Google to ensure sophisticated algorirthms.

3. USE EXPLAINER VIDEOS

People like to watch videos that help them to learn something. You can use Powtoon to create awesome explainer videos that are interesting and captivating. This tool is a cloud-based SaaS for creating animated videos. Biteable and RawShorts are other tools that can be leveraged to create explainer videos as well.

4. OFFER A MISSION STATEMENT

For each video platform you have, there is going to be a different audience. Therefore, it is important to make sure that each platform has its own mission statement. This is going to help to keep you focused, and it will help to make your video even more shareable and effective.

5. KEEP IT SHORT

People are busy, and often in a hurry. They don't want to waste a lot of time watching long videos. They want you to get right to the point. Look at creating videos that range from 10 to 60 seconds in length. You would be surprised at how much you can pack into such a short video.

6. START OUT STRONG

If viewers aren't hooked in the first 30 seconds of a video, they are probably going to move on to the next thing. You need to be able to hook your audience right away. The sooner you hook them, the easier it will be to reel them in and keep them.

7. ENGAGE YOUR CUSTOMERS

Even though your brand is what you want to promote, do it in a way that makes your customers think it is they who are being promoted. Make your customers the heroes in your stories. Your videos should invoke a feeling of familiarity, with viewers seeing themselves in the story. The more involved they feel, the more likely they will be to share on social.

8. TELL A GREAT STORY

People come to social media networks to be engaged.

Every story needs certain elements to make it compelling: a beginning, a middle, an end, a conflict of some sort, a good plot, and a hero. Take advantage of tried and true story structures, because this is what people are used to seeing and what they expect, especially on social networks.

9. MAKE SURE IT IS SHAREABLE

Before you create a video, ask yourself why people will share it. The best way to get the answer is to look at what your social media followers like. Check out the videos that they are sharing, and use these videos as inspiration for your own successful videos. Not only will your followers share your videos, you won't be wasting time on videos they aren't interested in.

Contact Virtual Focused Marketing for more information.

Via: http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2016/04/27/9-tips-for-sharing-videos-on-social-media.aspx?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter

 

 

 

 

How does Curated Content differ from Duplicate Content?

Even though it's been addressed by a lot of professional SEO experts, including Google's Matt Cutts, this is still a Content Marketing question we get a lot. So let's review it in detail.

What is duplicate content?

Content is duplicated when similar content exists on 2 or more different URLs.

This can happen on your own site with only original content if your Content Management System (CMS) isn't configured in the right way and creates artificially new URLs for existing content. For instance if a blog post can be found through 2 different URL paths – something that can be addressed by using canonical URLS as explained by Google.

Another example – this time across domains – is when you syndicate content as Google will see 2 or more exact same posts at different locations. For instance, if you have an industry website syndicate all of your content through its RSS feed or if you republish your own post on Medium or LinkedIn.

Note that in both cases, we're talking about duplicating a significant part or the entire content to another web page or to another site. It's like saying: “I don't care what this content is but it seems to work so let's copy and paste it to our blog.” That's not what content curation is as we'll see below. But first, let's look at why Google doesn't like duplicate content and what it does with it.

Is duplicate content bad?

Not necessarily, says Google. As Matt Cutts explains: “It's important to realize that if you look at content on the web, something like 25 or 30 percent of all of the web's content is duplicate content. … People will quote a paragraph of a blog and then link to the blog, that sort of thing. So it's not the case that every single time there's duplicate content it's spam.”

Spam.

That's the important word here: the point Matt Cutts makes is that Google's objective is NOT to prevent one website from quoting another one – a practice which has been going on since the invention of the World Wide Web and which is at its core through the hyperlink. But, he adds, “It's certainly the case that if you do nothing but duplicate content, and you are doing in an abusive, deceptive, malicious, or a manipulative way, we do reserve the right to take action on spam.” So if you're doing nothing but that (if you've automated the process without applying any curation) and you're doing it to deceive Google, you're in trouble. And should be.

So Google recommends to syndicate carefully. In our own experience republishing to Medium, LinkedIn and other sites, we had great results in Google Search but we used different titles for each destination.

How is Content Curation different?

Though content discovery can be automated (and should be as it's time consuming), Content Curators apply judgement before selecting what they publish. They also add context by adding value to their audience by telling them what it means for them. It's like saying “Oh! I've read this piece of content and it's really interesting for my prospects because it answers a question they often have in our commercial discussions.”

Let's make this visual through a slide of our guide of content curation benefits for SEO:

So not only is the intent completely different (spamming vs educating) but the implementation is also very different – an implementation which is built in if you use a professional content curation platform like Scoop.it where all the above elements of a good curated post will be built-in: source attribution and link, short snippet (our system for instance limits it to a few words or the first sentence) and the ability to add an insight, one of our signature features that enables you to add context and value to your audience. But more fundamentally, you can see that in the above curated post, the original content is not duplicated: a sentence or two can be quoted but the original content has not been copied / pasted to create the new post.

Content Curation benefits for SEO

The above differences explain not only why content curation different than duplicate content but also how it helps bloggers, content marketers and great curators rank high in search results. Examples such as John Gruber's Daring Fireball or Upworthy show that large audiences can be built relying 100% on curation with great, well-deserved results in Google search. To add data to these examples, the Bruce Clay experimentdemonstrated how curated content with annotation ranked #1 for their target sentence. On the Scoop.it platform, we have data that goes beyond anecdotical evidence: Scoop.it traffic – which cumulates in hundreds of millions of visits – originates for about 40% from Google Search on average since we launched (and closer to 45% if we take the last 90 days).

Contact Virtual Focused Marketing for more information.

Via: http://blog.scoop.it/2015/03/10/how-does-curated-content-differ-from-duplicate-content/?

 

 

 

4 ways to convey urgency in your next email

Email Marketing

Chances are, your subscribers don't love making decisions (to buy, to attend an event, to try out a new restaurant, etc.) on the fly. And that isn't too surprising – who does? We all love mulling things over, debating options, making lists of the pros and cons… basically, delaying the decision-making process as long as humanly possible.

But marketers are a naturally impatient species – we all want our audience to do what we're asking them to do right away. After all, a delayed conversion is oftentimes a lost conversion, so it's important that you get them to act now rather than later.

That's why you need to convey a sense of urgency in your emails. Your subscribers are busy, distracted, and faced with an endless amount of options, so it's important to light a fire under them they can only put out if they act right away (figuratively speaking, of course). Here are four elements of your email you can inject with a sense of urgency to ignite your audience into action.

 

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Your subject lines

Used sparingly and in the right context, subject lines packed with urgency can do wonders for getting your audience to open your emails. A couple of methods you should consider trying:

1. Pick a deadline. Urgency relies on the sense that time is running out, so deadlines are the perfect way to increase the urgency of whatever special offer you're promoting. Times, dates, and phrases like “hours left” and “ending soon” do the trick. In this subject line, for instance, Minted makes great use of the phrase “expires tonight!” to compel subscribers to make use of a limited-time discount offer.

 

 

2. Use words in your Email Marketing that invoke (some) anxiety. Think “hurry,” “now,” “go,” and “final.” We're programed to get stressed out when faced with this sort of language; it tells us that we need to do a task right away and that waiting around isn't an option. And setting apart each word with a period (like in this example from Ann Taylor) amps up the urgency even more.

 

 

 

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Your CTA

This one might seem obvious, especially since the purpose of a call to action is… well, to call your audience to act. But you should pay special attention to the copy you use in your CTAs. Many marketers still turn to phrases like the dreaded “Click here.” (Remember: Over half of your audience won't be clicking anything, they'll be tapping on their phones.) Instead, keep your copy urgent and specific, like in these CTA examples from OrderUp and Loft.

 

 

 

 

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Your email copy

The body of your email is a great place to include all sorts of urgent phrases – “final hours,” “ending soon,” “last chance,” and so on. Make those phrases the star of the show, and keep the supplemental copy to a minimum. It'll take focus away from what you're trying to get your audience to do and potentially distract them from taking action. That's why in these examples, Express and West Elm keep the focus on big, bold phrases like “Final hours!” and “Gone in a flash.”

 

 

 

 

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Your imagery and design

GIFs are a great way to inspire action – after all, we all feel a little itch when we look at a countdown timer or a ticking clock. Images speak louder than words, so allowing your audience to see the time slip away right before their eyes is one of the most effective ways to convey an overwhelming sense of urgency to them. We're big fans of the stress-inducing GIFs utilized in these emails from Snow + Rock, Ann Taylor, and Boden – just looking at them had us wanting to act immediately!

 

 

 

 

 

Contact Virtual Focused Marketing for more information.

Via: http://myemma.com/content-hub?utm_source=4WaysToConveyUrgency&utm_medium=Nurture&utm_content=PrimaryNurturing&utm_campaign=4WaysToConveyUrgency-Nurture-PrimaryNurturing-4WaysToConveyUrgency&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWXpnMU0yUm1ZamM1TjJZMiIsInQiOiJFSjRtSEQxbWpEZzM1YnMrbnkxcU16M1lUelwvaHVYc3BKdk5DQnRhSUhyTVFkVkRtVzZXWUh0RDNDNXkrM3RKOXBPd2gwYmtVZWhNREhySlVuNVFvZ0swXC9MWUNUQ015TWdHc2RhV1BoWTZNPSJ9#ufh-i-245127157-4-ways-to-convey-urgency-in-your-next-email