Design To The Finish Line � Web Content Tips

Now You Can Have Web Content That Sells

Forward Motion Studios — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 23:35:30 +0000

When I open the discussion of website content with my clients, often they tell me all the great things they love about their company, but not why their clients come to them specifically. Try as I may to steer my clients away from giving me brochure-type content for their websites, sometimes they are too afraid to deviate from their comfort zone of telling their clients who they are, instead of offering their clients solutions to their problems.

Please remember this one thing, if only this one thing about web content: The goal of your website content is to get your visitor to take action.

You want your website visitor to say yes to something on your site. Clicking forward on something on your website is the web version of saying yes.

In order to engage your visitor with your content you have to be able to tell them what’s in it for T H E M. Once you’ve hooked them by telling them how you solve their problem, you then tell them where to click, or how to contact you immediately. With this in mind, it’s important to remember that reading a computer screen tires our eyes. People read 25% more slowly on the web than they read print material. So your problem-solving web content has to be 50% shorter than print.

Let’s break this down -

Page Title: This should include the major keyword you want to be known for – not “home”, “welcome”, or “hello”. The title should not be any longer than 70 characters, including spaces.

Your USP: Your USP is the very essence of what you are offering to your potential customers and website visitors. Your Unique Selling Proposition needs to be so compelling that it can be used as a headline that sells your product or service on its own.

Product or Service Description: This should be benefit-focused. You should also understand your clients personality and what they feel comfortable with because you will want to write content that appeals to their personalities.

This is where you think like your customer and write content that answers: What do your customers want from you? What are your customers worried about? Why won’t potential customers buy from you?

Benefit-focused content is all about the customer and should answer the question for them, “What will this do for me?” or “Why should I buy from you?” Features-focused content are about your product (which can be your services) and answer the question for them, “How does your product or service operate?” You must always take your features-focused content and turn it into a benefit for your customer.

Start each paragraph with a bang. Use words like “Careful”, “Warning”, “Caution” – something that grabs the readers attention. Keep your paragraphs short – no more than three sentences per paragraph and use font sizes that your target customer can read. A simple list of three to five bullets or a set of headings works great fro targeted content – it’s easy for your customer to read and they are more likely to pay attention to what you have written.

Contact information: This should include telephone and electronic contact information – address and a map if you want people to visit your location.

Call To Action: Every page on your website should have a call to action – something you want your visitor to do. Do you want them to call you? Buy a product from you? Sign up for your monthly newsletter? Then tell your potential customer “What’s included” if they do what you want them to do. Make them an offer they can’t refuse.

Use testimonials: Always have testimonials. Always.

And remember -

Jargon is sin – don’t use it.
No “tech-speak”.
Don’t use humor unless your product or service is humor.
Offer a guarantee.
Keep it short and simple.
Images don’t sell unless you are a travel site.

Be sure that everything you do with your website content is geared towards achieving one thing: increasing your business.

Writing effective web content that engages your visitors may seem difficult at first, but as you work with us on the creation of your web content, it becomes easier. If you don’t understand how to successfully write effective content for your website, then we can help you by writing the content for you.

Call us at 707-578-1390 today and we can help you decide what type of web content will bring customers to you and your business.

Our continued success to you,

About Forward Motion Studios -
Forward Motion Studios™ is a Santa Rosa Web Design company that builds, hosts and supports custom websites for businesses. This includes simple, brochure-like web pages to highly complex, software and database-driven eCommerce websites with B2B shopping carts. You can catch their Tweets at twitter/forwardmotion and connect with them on Facebook at facebook.com/forwardmotionstudios.

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How Important Is Your Visitor To Your Website?

Forward Motion Studios — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 22:33:23 +0000

This video features John – a designer at Google and Matt – a co-founder of Feedburner discussing the importance of user experience online. Sometimes clients forget about how important their client experience is to their website design.

They cover the following tips that any business owner can use when working with a designer on their website -

1. Make your website work quickly
Focus on latency. Users should get immediate feedback if they do something. Mozilla optimized their download page by 2.2 seconds and saw their download conversions improved by 15.4%. Speed is important to Google. www.webpagetest.org offers free web page testing. It’s OK that part of the aesthetic does not load quickly, as long as the content loads quickly. Visitors don’t care about how hard it is for your website to work, they just care that it works fast.

2. Make your users fast too
Provide shortcuts – small things add up over time and make the experience frustrating for your users. Focus on the first field in any sign up form. Saves 1/2 a second, saves a click.

3. Be Yourself
Make sure engaging with you on your website is fun for the visitors. Don’t have to be all corporate about it.

4. Engage in conversations with your visitors
They see you as being on their side and are more likely to forgive you if something goes wrong. Listen to what people are saying about your product/company/brand. Monitor blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. to see what people are saying about you. When you respond, do it with honesty and humility.

5. Surprise your visitors
Use “schwag” wisely. It’s a great way to build your brand. Provide your own support: It’s a good way to see what’s going wrong and to fix it immediately.

6. Be willing to give up control
Listen to what your visitors want and share free advice, white papers, learning tools.

7. Be polite
Be friendly to visitors, try to understand how your website might annoy visitors.

8. Be reliable
This brings the talk full circle. Speed and reliability are both critical. Stakes are higher for certain websites (banking) and an unreliable site can affect your brand.
Commit as a team to making your service as reliable as possible.

If you are not getting the results from your website, or you are not sure your website is providing the right experience for your visitors, we can help. Call us at 707-578-1390 today and we can help you determine how effective your website is to your visitors, and your business.

Our continued success to you,

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What Everyone Ought To know About Website Images

Forward Motion Studios — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 22:44:37 +0000

Another area of confusion for clients is what we web design companies mean when we refer to “web ready images” and “prepping images for the web”. There is also confusion on “file types” and what these file types mean when a client is using them for print or web.

Let’s first start with image file types and what they mean. A file type is the extension that follows the file name. For example, you might have a word document saved as filename.doc, the .doc part is the file type. If you are used to Excel files then the .xls is the file type. Images have the same file type structure.

The most common file types for images are -

1. TIFF
TIFF stands for “Tagged Image File Format”, which is a format for storing digital versions of paper documents because it is a standard format for most scanners and software applications. Scanned paper documents are stored in an image format. TIFF is not widely supported by web browsers, and should be avoided for use on the web.

2. PNG
PNG stands for “Portable Network Graphics”. The PNG format was created in response to limitations with the GIF format, primarily to increase color support and to provide an image format without a patent license. 5

3. GIF
GIF stands for “Graphics Interchange Format”. If an image has fewer than 256 colors, GIF can render the image exactly. GIF is more effective for scanned images such as illustrations rather than color photos.

4. JPG
JPG stands for “Joint Photographic (Experts) Group”. JPG or JPEG is format for publishing Web graphics since the JPEG compression algorithm significantly reduces the file size of images. Files are converted to jpg to control image download time.

5. BMP
BMP stands for “Bit Map Picture” and is an uncompressed proprietary format invented by Microsoft.

6. PSD
PSD stands for “Photoshop Data file” and is the preferred working format for editing images.

In order to prepare your images for web use, we first begin by some assumptions about who your web visitors will be. We think about your average visitor’s bandwidth (line speed). Will your website be targeted to visitors who use high-speed Internet connections?

We then make decisions about what size (in pixels) your images should be in balance with your web content and page design. Once this is decided we bring your images into Photoshop and begin to prep them for use on your website.

This is typically what we do with your images to prep them for your website -

1. Crop. We often crop what isn’t working in your images.
2. Adjust levels working with contrast, hue, brightness and sharpness.
3. Sizing. Adjusting the images to the size we want it to be online.
4. Saving for Web. This is where the images are saved for use on the web at the greatest quality at the lowest load rate. this is where we look at image resolution or DPI. Many monitors can only display up to 72 DPI.

We also try to encourage our clients not to use stock photographs, but use photographs specifically from your business and actual pictures of you. If you are not getting the results from your online web pages and images, we can help. Call us at 707-578-1390 today and we can help you with your imagee styling and photographs and help you determine how effective your images are to your overall business message.

Our continued success to you,

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How To Write Website Content: Know Your Target Market

Forward Motion Studios — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 22:58:53 +0000

One of the most important parts of writing good web content for your website is understanding your target market and how to solve their problems.

Sometimes we come across videos which adequately encapsulate what we are constantly helping our web clients understand.

This biweekly video comes to us from Amy Posner, copywriter about understanding your target market –

If you are not sure how to write compelling web content or you are not sure what is the top problem you are solving for your customers, we can help. Call us at 707-578-1390 today and we can help you with your web content and help you determine how effective your web pages are to your Internet marketing plan.

Our continued success to you,

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Understanding Web Analytics And Why You Should Care

Forward Motion Studios — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 00:21:40 +0000

Website statistics are a business owner’s friend. Web statistics help you know the number of visitors to your website and what they are doing once they land on your site. These figures, when analyzed help you understand what is an isn’t working with your website and your Internet marketing plan.

Unique Visitors
A unique visitor is an individual person who views your website within a specified time period. Each person visiting your site is counted only once during this time period.

Hits
When visitors visit any page in a website, the page they land on counts as one hit. In fact, every page they click on counts as a “hit”.

Number of visits
This is the number of times that your website has been visited. Compare it with the number of unique visitors, and you will get an idea of the number of people who are returning to your website.

Referring URLS
The website address where your visitor was before they came to your website. It is good to pay attention to where your visitors come from, either by search engines, email addresses and websites so you can determine if your marketing efforts are paying off.

Duration of Visit
How long people are staying on your website. If they are not staying long you may need to review your content.

Page impressions
How many people are visiting each page. You may find people are only visiting your home page and not going any further into your site.

Exit Page
The last page requested by a site visitor – the page least persuasive in keeping visitors at your website.

Keywords
The words visitors are using to find your website.

Understanding your website statistics is important part of your overall Internet marketing strategy. They can alert you to which web pages on your website are more popular than others and which ones need some attention – or aren’t important; where your visitors are coming from; what keywords are being used from your content and if you need to consider re-writing your content to include more keyword phrases.

If you are not sure how to access your website statistics or what they mean, or do you even have them installed? Call us at 707-578-1390 today and we can help you with your web analytics and how effective your web pages are to your Internet marketing plan.

Our continued success to you,

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Design To The Finish Line � Web Content Tips

Now You Can Have Web Content That Sells

More From forwardmotionstudios

How Important Is Your Visitor To Your Website?

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What Everyone Ought To know About Website Images

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How To Write Website Content: Know Your Target Market

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Understanding Web Analytics And Why You Should Care

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