To Jewelgirl and everyone looking for a web designer for their first business website,
Even if you're looking for the lowest cost vendor or to do it all yourself, the first thing you need to understand is how this website is going to help your business and your sales. There are so many myths and misunderstandings about this. And, as the web environment changes so quickly, what was true last year may not be true today.
So before you hire a designer or explore free or inexpensive templates or open source CMS (all good technical solutions for the appropriate situation) understand exactly what needs to be done to
1. bring targeted, pre-qualified traffic to your website
2. convert that traffic into buyers or solid leads
3. build a list of people interested in your products and services that you can continue to market to through an Email Newsletter that they ask you to send them.
Those are the three things you need for your website to help your business. Even if all you want is a place for your potential customers to get your address, directions and phone number and know a little bit about what you do and sell (brochureware), it still won't help you if 1. nobody finds your website and 2. once they see it they decide they don't want to do business with you after all.
Because successfully creating all three of those steps (or even one of them) is quite complex and involved, I highly recommend learning how to accomplish these three steps before you ever talk to a designer or look for technology to do it yourself. If you understand how to accomplish those three steps, you will know what to look for in a designer and what to stay away from and you will know which technology will best help you attain success in those three critical steps.
The goal of all businesses is sales. If you don't sell, you don't survive. The goal of every business website should also be sales, whether it's leads, pre-qualified foot traffic or phone calls, or direct sales from the website itself. If you are new to the web, you will find that a great many web designers and developers do not understand basic sales psychology and marketing. This is why so many beautiful looking websites get such incredibly poor business results.
Most of our clients already have a website. Often it's already gone through many revisions with many different web designers and developers before they come to us. And the website still converts less than 10% of its visitors and sales are no better than 2 or 3%. The sites look great, but there are so many marketing and sales mistakes. The copywriting is terrible from a sales perspective. And they leave out or mishandle almost every web marketing technique in the book.
That's why we're able to get such great results in so little time. We just increased conversions for one client 1,875% and sales 688%. And the website had just been completely redesigned by a leading web development company (for big bucks) a little over a year ago.
Why put yourself through years of frustration and misery as my clients have done. Start out knowing what you need to know. Ask any designer you're thinking of working with, not only how cheap they are, but what kind of sales results they get for their clients. It's a simple question. But it doesn't seem to be asked very often. And few designers offer an answer on their own. You can understand why.
You can find everything you need to know about creating a successful website that gets great results in a free 48 page e-book we offer on our webite. The Complete Online Sales System: 5 Proven Steps To Turn Your Website Into A Powerful Sales Magnet. It shows you, step by step, everything we do to get outstanding sales results for our clients. Feel free to download it, show it to prospective designers, and ask them to follow those 5 steps or help you do it.
Or use it to design your own website. One of the steps is devoted entirely to web design.
If you're interested here's the url:
http://studio525.com/special_report
There are many other places on the web to get information about web marketing and how to create websites and online sales systems that really work -- and why most don't. Some really good sources will cost you upwards of $1,200. But you can gather together all you need for free if you're willing to spend the time. The web is a very generous place. And you can get most of it for free in one place in our free e-book. You have a lot of good choices.
The important thing is that you do it. A web site that doesn't convert conditions your prospective customers
not to buy from you. This will hurt your business. You can read about this in our e-book. Good designers and developers will talk to you about technology, design trends, and even the latest research that proves what they're doing is right. That's exactly what the web development company did with our client above. And everything they said turned out to be wrong. And that's how we were able to get such great improvements.
Learn what really works and you won't be steered down the wrong the path. Saving a few dollars to get negative business results is not good business.
Do your homework.
Best of luck,
Peter
Peter Cutler
Principal / Creative Director
Studio 525
http://studio525.com
We don't just create websites.
We create
results.
