Visits Report

The number of website visits is extremely significant particularly when you are tracking SEO results. Many site owners will be surprised to find out that they have an average of only 5 visitors per day. Ways to improve traffic is to optimize the website for search engines and run a low budget Google AdWords campaign. However, there is no magic to have a lot of traffic all of the sudden. Traffic is gained in time.

Bounce Rate Report

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that once they landed to the website they will not browse it or view additional pages. A high bounce rate means your website design doesn’t work or the information is not presented properly. The website fails to attract and engage visitors – they will not find anything that catches their attention and will move on. Big chunks of text are especially not helpful in quickly delivering the message.

Average Time on Site Report

Finding a balance between the amount of information and effectively delivering the website message is the key when designing a website. In an ideal world, visitors will read everything the website offers, but in the real world they will just scan the page to find things that get their attention. The usual average time on site is 2 to 3 minutes. How much information can someone read in 2 minutes?

Traffic Sources Overview Report

This report explains where web traffic is coming from. Visitors may come by typing the website url into their browser, by links to the site or from search engines results. If search engine traffic is really low, redesigning and optimizing the website will help.

Content Overview Report

This report provides information about what pages have the most page views. For example, if one of the main menu pages gets the most traffic that information needs to be enhanced. Vice-versa, if one of the pages doesn’t get much traffic, it means that visitors are not interested in clicking on it. Changing the page name might help.

Users Notice Quality

People use quality websites like Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter on a daily basis and therefore they are used to quality web design. Most people have a hard time describing why they like a website but they definitely know they like it. Is more like a gut feeling to them.

Users Don’t Read, They Scan

Analyzing a web page, visitors rarely read everything, they pick headers, images, buttons, links, bold text which would guide them through the content of the page. It’s like going through a store and looking over a shelf with 500 products – people do not notice every label in order to pick the best product.

Users Follow Their Intuition

Users don’t follow the quickest way to find out what they’re looking for. As soon as they find a link that catches their attention, there is a very good chance that they will click on it. Users choose the first reasonable option.

Users Don’t Like to Figure It Out

A web page should be as clear as possible. Users need to notice what a web page is about in a matter of seconds. If the web page is confusing, users will always click the back button.

Users Like a Call to Action

A call to action brings focus to a web page. The best way to accomplish this is with a button that is clear, stands out, and shows visitors the purpose of your website. It needs to be simple and valuable.

How a website is designed visually and how it is presented professionally will lean towards more potential clients. Potential clients are visitors interested in your products and services.

Failing to understand your visitors will either get you a poorly designed website that it will not rank in search engine results or the opposite, a top of the line award winning web design that most of your potential clients might have difficulties to use or understand.

Local Search Volume on Google

Are you a realtor in Raleigh? Here is what you’re missing:

Are you a restaurant owner in Raleigh? Here is what you’re missing:

Are you a dentist in Raleigh? Here is what you’re missing:

The list can continue. To find out how many searches you are missing, use Google Keyword Tool.

Typical Traffic Before & After Redesign

Here is one example (Windows Doors and More) of what you can expect after you redesign your website. Data is taken from Google Analytics.

Before Redesign

The client had 7 visitors from search engines for an entire month.

After Redesign

The new, redesigned website, has 450 visitors coming from search engines! Even if only 5 visitors become customers, in a year, this means 60 new customers coming from search engines.

At Better Image we don’t offer empty promises of huge amount of traffic. We do offer our clients websites with results.

Recent Testimonials From My Clients:

“Working with Better Image has been a tremendous success for us! They are experts at what they do – also extremely dependable and agile. We presented Better Image with several time-sensitive challenges, and they were able to come through every time with a fantastic product. They have directly impacted the success of our business, and we look forward to working with them on an ongoing basis.”
Dave McNasby, COO, Optimal Resume, Durham NC

“Thank you again for your great work on my website! You did a fantastic job with the optimization. I have gotten several compliments from people who seem to know when a website has had an excellent job of this done, vs. just average.”
Michele Moss, Owner, Natural Pain Relief

“Writing to thank you for the work done on our website. Our main goal was to improve SEO and in just these few short months we have been seeing positive results of that and it only gets better.”
Todd Gillespie, Owner, Windows, Doors and More

We are so happy that we found you and are still extremely pleased with the website you designed for us. Once you completed the SEO, you told us to be patient and we would start ranking higher in the search engines, and within only a few months we were ranking on the first page in Google and Yahoo for most of our search terms. We will continue to recommend you to everyone we know and wanted to say Thank you, again, for the amazing job you did!
Rachel Jett, DTF Mechanical, Inc.

For me, as a web designer, this is by far the most important measure of the quality and value I provide.

According to Wikipedia, usability means the ease with which people can employ a particular tool (a website in our case) in order to achieve a particular goal (a call to action in our case).

After many years of using Google Analytics to research how visitors browse websites, I can say that website design and usability is as important as the marketing campaign itself because it greatly affects the number of conversions (successful sales).

The following are some common usability tips that will affect any Internet Marketing campaign.

Do not assume that visitors will get to your site and they will know what you do or what you sell. They don’t. Your landing page has to be as clear as possible stating what your business is about and have a clear call to action. If you do business in Raleigh for example, mention Raleigh somewhere. Potential clients tend to trust local companies more.

Once visitors are interested and they decide to stay on your site, the navigation comes into play. Keep it simple and easy to use to help visitors determine what to do next. Identifying what section of the site they are in, helps guide visitors where they can go next. Most of the potential clients or buyers will want to browse a bit more before making a decision.

Remember, keeping the visitors on the site and guiding them to the call to action is extremely important. Do not bug visitors with unnecessary information hoping they they will remember it and eventually return. They really need a good reason to do that – some kind of special offer, to catch their attention.

Try and keep the contact forms as simple as possible. People do not like to give loads of personal information on the internet. Ask yourself if the information you’re asking for is so important that you’re willing to lose a customer.

Internet Marketing and good rankings are important, but these don’t mean much if you’re turning visitors away as soon as they click on your website. Does your website send the message you intended to send out? Do users enjoy browsing your site? These are the questions you need to ask yourself before starting an Internet Marketing campaign.

For local small business owners who want a professional, optimized for search engines website, here are some good tips and information about the time involved in a typical web design project.

Hourly Rate

Our hourly rate is $50 per hour. Does it seem too much? Not really. Almost all established web design studios charge $80 and up. Big, well known agencies charge $150. Some web designers might charge less though, but most of the time their work is not up to the task.

Design Drafts in Photoshop

Design drafts are images that show the website layout and functionality. For a typical small business website, this design stage should take 20 to 30 hours, depending on the client revisions. This means anywhere form $1000 to $1500.

Optimized, Valid CSS/XHTML Templates

This phase should take 10 to 15 hours. What you’ll get is top-of-the-line optimized code following the W3C Standards. This means $500 to $750.

Integrating Templates with a CMS

This phase should take 20 hours for Wordpress CMS and 40 hours for Expression Engine – depending on the functionality desired. This means between $1000 and $2000.

So, the total price for a simple, CMS powered website should be from $2500 to $4250. You’ll get a great looking, professional website that will rank great on search engines, have visitors and will be easy to update in the future. There are no ongoing fees. Of course, excessive revisions, additional features and e-commerce will drive the price up.

How Can Someone Quote a Smaller Price?

• They offer low-quality web design
• They have a smaller hourly rate
• They will slightly modify a previous design
• They will use old web design technologies
• They will not optimize for Search Engines
• They will not use a modern CMS

How Can Someone Quote a Bigger Price?

Explanations are many but here are the usual ones:

• They have a big hourly rate
• They will offer what you don’t need
• They are a big company
• You will pay for extra staff
• They spend time in endless meetings

If you want results for your website, you need a professional. After you get the quote, check the company portfolio to know what quality to expect.

Not Optimizing for Search Engines

Ask your web designer about search engine optimization. Ask him how he plans to optimize your site. Search engine optimization (SEO) is not rocket science, it’s better web design.

Search engine optimization will not bring you hundreds of visitors per day all of the sudden, but all the visitors will come to your site searching for a service you provide. If you do landscaping in Raleigh you should come up when people are searching “landscaping in Raleigh”. These are the kinds of visitors your website needs.

Search “Web Design Raleigh” or “Web Design Durham, NC“. If the company or designer you are considering for a web design is not there, don’t bother. If they don’t know how to get their company website to the top, do you really think they’ll do a better job for you?

Using Tables Instead of CSS (Style Sheets)

HTML tables are a thing from the past. Since search engines evolved to be such an important part of the Internet, websites started to optimize their content for search engines and CSS web design offers just that: is optimized for search engines, is faster, more reliable, allows separation of design from content and much more.

Not Being Clear What the Website Is About

Attention spans are very short these days. Visitors shouldn’t have to figure it out what your website is about. It should be specified big and clear in every page. In their eyes.

Have Confusing Navigation

The best, proven way, to please everyone is to make the navigation clear and simple. Design should help enhance the most important sections of the website. People are browsing websites in different ways. Redundant navigation actually helps. For example, on our website only 5% of visitors click on portfolio but 70% of them click on Recent Projects thumbnails. This helps drive more people to our most important part of the website, our portfolio.

Using Small Text

What is the point in using small text? Everyone agrees that crowded design doesn’t help, so thinking you show more information to the user is a mistake. You have all the space in the world. Use it wisely. Don’t be afraid of empty space. Give menu links breathing space. Text too close to the edge looks bad, not professional.

Using “Drop Down” Menus

Sometimes it is hard for users to notice all your main menu items. Hiding important information from them and thinking they will go on top of your menu expecting a rollover is a big mistake. Identify the most important sections in your website content, and structure the information accordingly so you won’t need rollover. And you don’t have to agree with me, but the most visited sites on the Internet (Yahoo, Google, MSN, YouTube, Wikipedia, Twitter) are not using drop down menus on their homepage.

When quality websites for low prices is your business model, it makes sense to use the best, most cost efficient publishing tool available, Wordpress. Because Wordpress powered websites are easy to develop, and from the design point of view you have flexibility, once you start to use Wordpress, you won’t even remember how you designed websites before.

WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are thousands of developers all over the world working on it. It also means that it’s free to use for any website you want, without paying license fees. Hundreds of available plugins extend what WordPress does, so the actual functionality is almost limitless.

When it comes to CMS, the vast majority of small business owners do not need a full feature e-commerce website or a complex online community website like Facebook. The vast majority needs a simple CMS where they can:

• update the content as often as they want
• add how many pages they want
• insert photos
• add news
• write posts in a blog
• have a full feature photo gallery
• have members that can sign up
• have a simple online shop
• have a custom contact form that protects you from spam
• have search engine friendly optimized website
• have a feed aggregator like RSS or Atom
• create a custom real estate site

Wordpress handles all this and much more. Why would we need something else if Wordpress works perfectly for almost all of our job requests? Why give someone who needs a Civic for his teenage daughter, a Cadillac?

Before you go to someone else for your next CMS project, ask for a quote here. Chances are $2,500 will get your website up and running on Wordpress. Well, we don’t talk so much as the other guys, yes, but we can save you $15,000. How about that?

Our experience with WordPress is recognized by the professionals. Our work was featured on many galleries showcasing Worpress Powered sites.

But what if your ideas and information do not fit with the template layout? Are you able to modify the coding behind the site, to make it work the way you want? As easy as it may seem, sometimes is complicated even to insert a meta tag, to modify the title tag, to enlarge a text block or to insert a menu bar. Customizing a template(or a Wordpress theme) requires knowledge and experience.

Many people are using free templates. Chances are that several websites are using the template you have chosen. Your site looks like a copy of several sites. To modify the color scheme, that works perfect for that particular template, you really need design skills. To insert great looking icons or images in your template, you need advanced knowledge of HTML, CSS and image editing. No mater how hard you try, the overall feel of the template will remain. Attention spans are very short and if you’re not grabbing your visitors attention in 2 to 3 seconds of getting onto your website they will move on. The last thing you need is that template feel.

When building a website you need advanced knowledge of SEO to create the proper website architecture in order to have the maximum exposure for search engines. If you don’t know how SEO works, your website will not have any visitors from search engines.

For some, a website template might be all that is required. For others, it is simply not worth it. If you want your website to have visitors, stand out in the increasingly competitive marketplace and have it’s own identity, you really need the help of a good web designer.

• They are not user friendly
• They do not respect usability rules
• They do not respect the web standards (valid CSS/HTML)
• They are not optimized for search engines
• They do not have a good identity

Realtors and real estate web agencies alike, treat real estate web design as if it is different from good web design.

Well-known Internet marketing companies advise real estate agents to offer value on their website like MLS Search, buyer and seller reports, info about a specific neighborhood and so on and do not focus at all on usability and on page optimization.

From experience I can tell that if a person wants to search for homes they will use established well known sites like realtor.com, fmrealty.com, remax.com, etc. They will not use small websites for searching. The same when they research, they will use zillow.com or the county tax bill records.

A small realtor website will never be able to compete against a big, established one that spends millions in web design, development and advertising.

All real estate agents want to present themselves as exquisite invaluable help in the process of buying a house. Excellence and experience are the words used most by realtors. How do realtors show this to their customers? An exquisite, top of the line website that uses the latest proven web design trends and technologies will definitely show their deserved online identity. They shouldn’t focus to much on virtual tours, search for homes, neighborhood reports and totally miss the point of excellence on the web. Real Estate agents should show their clients that are able to reflect their business philosophy in everything they are doing.

Being fresh by definition, a blog can be a great marketing tool today. Real estate agents can use it to build trust and offer the right amount of tips and information a home buyer expects to get when buying a house. It is easy to say “consider my website as your real estate information tool” but it is much better to actually offer this to your customers.

How real estate web design is going around Raleigh and Triangle Area? Are any of the real estate websites comming close to zillow.com the big web 2.0 hottie that is shaking the real estate business? Even if real estate agents do not agree, just remember that their clients, home buyers, made Zillow the success it is in just a couple of years. Is real estate business in Raleigh-Durham area prepared for the future?

The Internet is changing the real estate business fast. Neglecting their websites now can cost real estate agents a lot in the future.