Branding Tips to Increase Sales

How do you know if you need a website redesign?

This is a big question that must be answered in a few ways. The first problem people make when doing a search for help for a website redesign is putting someone on the clock to do RESEARCH for web design companies. Typically these people are not seasoned business people so they are looking for someone who can create a beautiful website. The next thing they do is contact several design firms getting pricing.

I've had a happy surprise today.

So you may have seen the movie Field of Dreams with the lesson "Build it and they will come".

You know the movie where Kevin Costner builds the baseball field and soon meets his dad and has superstar ball players of the past playing on his field.

I was talking to a client the other day and he told me he was frustrated with his website performance.

Keep in mind this is a small start up that needed some drastic help to look much more professional. He had some sort of godaddy built website or some equivalent template site. The site had 3 or 4 pages. All of them were very "me" focused talking about hiring this company, request info and included data collection forms. There was truly nothing of value on any page for the visitor. Beyond this it was built so poorly that it was not going to get found in search engines. So you can see they broke some of the biggest rules for online marketing…

There are a few things you really need to know about the use of images or photos on your site.

If we work with a client, build their website and then hand over the keys… often times they will run into problems managing their images. Let me give you an example. I recently built a restaurant website. This client was paying for SEO and paid a web designer to develop the previous site. Sadly the site was nothing more than a digital brochure site with 8 pages and no blog, and really no way for the client to manage the site. Obviously we changed that by building the site on wordpress giving the client the ability to manage things. The current site now has 107 pages, mostly descriptive menu meal item pages and full menu listing pages. These pages are great for SEO, but can be great for customers (visitors to the site) as well. That is if things are managed properly.

Everyone needs a website right? Of course they do.

So with millions of people creating websites, how do you know if yours is performing? I was talking to someone the other day who was doing a lot of great things with their online marketing. They had a active blog, great use of social media so are they doing great? Yes and no.

Back in the 90's I remember designing websites and the importance of Hexadecimal Color Codes.

In the early days we were limited to 256 colors and so you can probably imagine what this was like. Especially since the colors were bright colors most people would never use.

For those of you running a business and questioning the best blog tools, you might want to look at a few different issues. Paid tools vs free tools. Wordpress has this great, huge user base and resources all over the web to get help. Wordpress is free so what's not to love?

In the 90's I remember how important it was to make sure 90% of your website design was above the fold and laidout for either 640x480 or 800x600 pixel dimensions. Then we moved into the 21st Century and many monitors started becoming 19" and larger which allowed us to edit the dimension size of websites.

Over the years we have done a few ecommerce shopping cart related websites. As a matter of fact before I started Brandwise, I worked for a large corporation that did nothing but ecommerce websites. Anyhow, although we have experience doing these sites, they seem to be peppered over the years. Recently though there has been a shopping frenzy on shopping carts and ecommerce websites.