Small Business Website Blog

Answering Your Customer’s Questions Before They Even Ask Them

Josh — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 15:00:49 +0000

Once you’ve figured out who you’re designing and writing your business website for, you need to check off the things that they are asking about.

Let me lead with an example.

Potential customer Fred has a problem.
Fred goes to google and searches about his problem.
He finds your website where you are talking about his problem.
Fred discovers that you have a product/service which will help with his problem.

What now? What goes through Fred’s head?

What usually happens is a critical evaluation.

Fred will consciously or sub-consciously evaluate if buying your product or service will actually help him solve his problem.

Copywriting – the art of addressing your potential customers – is damn challenging. One of the principles of copywriting is learning how to address objections and that’s what I’m referring to.

The critical evaluation our fictional friend Fred is going through is raising questions in his head, these questions need to be answered on your website.

The ideal place to answer customer questions (before and after they ask them) is in your blog posts, your product information, your sales pages and anywhere else they would look for answers.

A great “cover-all” is to build up an FAQ section. Frequently asked questions about your product and services.

If you’re not currently doing it, you should have a way for customers to ask questions (eg. providing an email point of contact or even filling in an anonymous form).

How do you address your customers questions when they come through? Do you update your pages to answer the questions they had? Maybe even turn it into a blog post?

Want to read more?

Merry Christmas!

Josh — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 15:00:25 +0000

Merry Christmas everyone from the Small Business Website Blog!

There’s no post this week or next week, we’re on holidays. Enjoy your time off – recharge, and we’ll be back into it in the new year.

Photo by Annie Mole

Want to read more?

Really Knowing Who Your Audience Is

Josh — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 15:00:19 +0000

Photo by Martin Kingsley

I was writing a post for one of my other blogs recently about writing techniques for business blogs and it came to me that when you’re writing for business websites you need to really nut out who it is you’re writing for.

I came up with three different kinds of visitors for business sites:

Existing Customers
Potential Customers
Suppliers

Obviously sometimes it’s not always clear cut and people can cross over into more than one category (repeat customers?) – but for simplicity sake, let’s just assume these are separate categories.

What do existing customers want from your website?

Existing customers want information about what they can do with the products/services they’ve already paid for.

The want to know special offers and things to take advantage of by being a repeat customer.

And surprisingly, they also want to help you spread the word about your products and services. They want people to know they’ve made the right choice, and provided you’re doing a good job, they want to be able to spread the word far and wide.

These existing customers are more likely than other’s to spread the word of your site by becoming regular readers (blogging for business FTW!).

What do potential customers want from your website?

Potential customers are a bit trickier. Turning “browsers” into “buyers” is no small feat and it’s often not as easy as you think over the web.

The advantage of doing a sale face to face is the fact that it’s easy to respond to people’s reactions and change your approach. This is a luxury we don’t have on the internet, it’s largely a one way communication and they’re going to be evaluating your every move. Enter the challenge of copywriting.

Potential customers do want to know about product information first and foremost, but they also want information about how your products/services are a good fit for them.

Answering their questions directly is something that you need to do. Often it’s good to actually involve your customers at this point. I’ll leave that as a topic for another post.

When potential customers are ready to buy, they’ll only want one thing: Contact Information.

What do suppliers want from your website?

Designing for suppliers is probably the easiest out of the lot.

Most suppliers want to know about press releases and products or services that involve them (or their competition) directly. While this information may not be interesting to suppliers for smaller companies, it’s important for larger companies that do high turn over.

Want to read more?

5 Christmassy Reasons To Launch Your Business Website Right Now

Josh — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 15:00:31 +0000

Photo by apdk

Leading up to Christmas, traditional businesses garner publicity by doing ridiculous specials, getting sprukers to stand out the front of their store, and generally putting themselves out there even more than usual.

The holiday season is a special time for business and it’s often the time of year that brings in the most revenue as customers are in spending mode.

Sound like an inconvenient time to start a website? Think again.

Piggy backing your business website launch on any event is a great strategy and can gain you instant publicity that would normally take months to gain.

There’s plenty reasons why you should launch your business website this time of year and here’s my top 5:

1. It’s a great time to run specials

Specials are excellent at bringing in those extra interested customers. Use your website to deliver them and they’ll poke around while they’re there.

2. Lock in browsers with Post-Christmas discounts

Everyone knows the best time to buy is straight after Christmas. Collect emails using a service like AWeber and build up a list of people interested in taking advantage of your post Christmas bonuses.

Building a list of prospects is a great way to start collecting dedicated readers and fans of your business. Offer them a little present or gift as a reward for signing up.

3. Quiet time for developers

Most developers experience a bit of a lull during the holiday season and businesses aren’t really up for making drastic changes to their web sites this time of year. Take advantage!

Make small changes to your site in the leadup to Christmas, test different marketing techniques, or even get onto that big website project.

4. Writing Christmas related articles

Gain natural search traffic from the hundreds of thousands of people searching for Christmas ideas. Anything Christmassy is on fire this time of year and can bring you extra customers and subscribers.

5. Everyone Loves Competitions

An enticing way to lure people to your new site is with a competition. While this is a tip that can work at any time of year, this is especially effective at Christmas time.

The excitement of potentially winning a cool prize is reason enough to sign up to a newsletter, take advantage of specials, or even buy some product.

6. Celebrate!

What a great time of year to reflect and celebrate all the wonderful things you’ve done this year. What worked well and what didn’t work?

Because Christmas is a quieter period of some service based businesses it’s a top reasons to work ON your business instead of IN your business and brace for the busy times ahead.

Want to read more?

Why Website Substance Trumps Design Style Every Time

Josh — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 15:00:49 +0000

Photo by tensafefrogs

I always live by the motto that substance beats fancy pants design hands down. Mostly because fancy pants design is usually the key problem that hampers people actually using websites that could otherwise be a lot more friendly.

Organisation

Content makes a website interesting – but it’s only good when users can find it. Can your customers find your content easily when they land on your page?

Make your navigation menus as simple as possible. For godsake do not use flash for navigation. It’s bad, bad, bad for a number of reasons.

So how do you keep your visitors sane?

Put things in obvious positions!

For example, the most accepted menu positions are under the header in a horizontal line, to the right of the header in any format, or vertically down the left. Customers will be looking for it in those locations – making them look too hard will piss them off.

What do pissed off customers do? Leave and never come back.

Appropriate Imagery

Flashy or blinking graphics, rotating “new” buttons, stars, and anything else that could fall into the tacky category will turn people away.

If you’re serious about your business website representing your business, it pays to use real photographs and professionally designed graphics and logos.

These items, although they cost something sometimes, are well worth the money for building legitimacy, trust, and professionalism.

Spelling and Grammar

It’s surprising how many professional websites (blogs not included) include extremely poor grammar and spelling.

A simple proofread will eliminate 99% of these and gain you back the 99% of credibility you lost.

If you’re having trouble getting this right, try reading your content aloud. Yes, actually out loud. I find it gives my brain a new way to absorb the information and for some reason it feels like it’s easier to find mistakes I would have otherwise skipped over.

Plus, my cat likes it.

Whitespace

The final point – even though I could probably talk about this for hours - is the use of whitespace.

Whitespace is all about leaving breathing room between elements and text on your page. It doesn’t have to be white, that’s just the term used to describe it.

Whitespace provides clarity. It makes your layout look clean, organised and easy to use. Which is great for business sites because you don’t want your layout to be confusing in any way for your customers.

Conclusion

What’s that? You want a Rule Of Thumb?

“When In Doubt, Leave It Out.” – a true quote by some very sage designer I can’t remember.

Want to read more?

Do Not Use Flash Navigation Menus

Josh — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 15:00:43 +0000

Photo by dullhunk

Many people want to make their websites look super fancy by embedding flash based graphics in their website.

I can’t really blame them, Flash is pretty damn fun and certainly adds a little sparkle to the page with cool animations that you can’t acheive in other ways.

I’ve got three main gripes with using them for functional sections of your website, namely navigation menus:

1. Many people can’t view flash in their browser and they won’t be able to see your menu without downloading a plugin (what a pain) – don’t mistakenly hide your menu from them.
2. Search engines can’t crawl flash animations – so essentially, you’re blocking them from surfing your site via the normal navigation which could lead to crawl errors.
3. They’re annoying and I don’t like them.

No flash means you don’t have to worry about leaving a lot of people stranded with no navigation or broken elements on your page.

While I concede to Flash’s coolness (seriously, have you played those punch the president games?!) – your business website will be a lot better off without them.

Want to read more?

The Best Design Decision For Local Movers and Shakers

Josh — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:00:17 +0000

Photo by La Citta Vita

For small businesses that mostly trade with local customers the best focus for your website is going to be getting customers to call.

“Your website exists to whittle out the customers that aren’t really ready to buy and just bring you the people that are.”

It’s kind of like a non-threatening way to precondition your customers for you and you’ll get the right customers if you implement it right.

You best design decision therefore is linked straight to your goal:

Getting people to call.

Design studies show that the top right hand corner of a website is the most accepted place for contact information and is where users will look for it.

I recommend making the barriers of whatever you want your visitors to do (in this case contact via phone or email) as low as possible to avoid them clicking away to a site that’s easier to use or more straight forward.

Once you get them on your site (the hard part), all your focus should be on getting them to that comfort point where they feel the want to make contact.

When they’re ready for that, your contact information needs to be right there where they expect it.

Want to read more?

Adding Fuel To The Fire

Josh — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:00:42 +0000

Photo by byrne7214

Here’s a quick little post just to remind you about what you’re focusing on with your business website.

“Can my business model support more customers or would it just be adding fuel to the fire?”

If you’re business model isn’t adjusted well enough to accept an influx of customers you might want to take a look at it quick smart.

A website often brings a pretty consistent amount of customers per year – however – if you’re lucky and one of your business articles gets picked up by a news source, another more popular website, or is spreading virally on websites like facebook or twitter you can potentially experience a massive influx of customers.

To cope with that influx, you need to be flexible and able to adapt to a large amount of queries for your products/services.

So what would you do if you had 500 new customers at your door tomorrow?

Want to read more?

Refining Foggy Website Goals

Josh — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:00:02 +0000

The first question I always ask my clients: What do you want your website for?

“More Customers.”

This is the most common answer – and Of course it should be! We could all do with more customers right?

To refine this answer a little more you may want to question what particular type of customer you want to attract. Are you looking to appeal to students aged 20-25? Couples with kids? Pet owners?

More customers is a good goal, but by considering who you are trying to attract you can start to draw solid conclusions about design, usability, focus for your products and more. If you attempt to cater for the masses you will end up catering for no one in particular.

The success of expanding your business online, be it selling products online, selling services online, or simply getting customers to call hinges on the question “What’s in it for me?”.

If your website’s proposition is too broad – the answer won’t be strong enough to give them reason to take action.

Want to read more?

Analytics Before Design: A Case Study

Josh — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:00:57 +0000

Sometimes it’s really easy to get gung-ho working on a sweet looking design for your business website.

I was talking recently with a photographer that did our wedding and naturally I asked how their website was going.

She’s mostly happy with their current designer but she referred to him as “more of a programmer than someone with design flair”. Looking at her site I could immediately see what she meant.

When you type their website address and land on their site, something immediately struck me as a barrier to entry. It presents a page with two options Corporate or Weddings.

My first thoughts were, that seems like something people would get confused about and leave so I asked the question “Do you know how many people don’t get past this page?” and the response was “Uhhh I have no idea.”

I was a little bit shocked. I normally set my customers up with analytics as part of their whole package of website design.

“So do you run any sort of analytics on your website? Do you know how many visitors you have?”

“No, we don’t have anything like that, I didn’t even know it was possible.”

Using Analytics To Make Informed Design Changes

Collecting visitor data about your website allows you to make informed decisions about your website design instead of guess work.

In this scenario, before making any further design tweaks, I would run analytics for a couple of weeks to get an idea about which parts of their site people leave from.

I’d bet money on that front page being a big barrier to entry.

Outdated Techniques

While the site doesn’t look outdated, the SEO techniques used are. Lots of keywords are stuffed into the bottom of the landing page – an old tactic that was used to game the search engines.

At the moment the site isn’t doing very well in the search engines and it’s not because of the content.

Analytics can help you determine where most of your traffic comes from. For a site that is nearly 9 years old I would expect that most of the traffic would be organic search results, but again, I would bet money this isn’t the case here.

Paying For Service

I’m not sure really how much my photographer is paying their website designer, but he’s not giving her any way to judge just how much return for their money they are receiving.

As With any service, you should be asking yourself two questions:

What am I getting for my money?
How do I know it’s giving me a good return for my money?

I offer private website appraisals email me your frustrations and we can look at what’s good and bad with your current website.

Want to read more?