We have completely redesigned our website and are getting ready to enter into the year 2007. In addition to redesigning our website we have increased our prices and now do website marketing and search engine optimization in addition to website designing.
The guys are also working on bringing our forum back home and adding a couple pages to the site that talk about our new services. I’m about ready to get back to posting on the forums but wanted to do some final touches on our design first.
Right now the most valuable piece of property in Armenia is inside the new mall. This is nothing compared to places like Manhattan and the corner of 57th St. and Fifth Ave. which is suppose to have the highest trafficked intersections in the U.S but it’s still our own little mall and demands a nice little price for a small little space.
As I walk through the mall I notice that every store is nicely designed, with their products on display and three or four salespeople ready to help me the time I walk through the door. We may be in Colombia S.A but each of these store owners understand the value of a customer. It’s ashame the same can not be said of the Internet.
As the price of advertising online begins to rise we will start weeding out a lot of the half ass attempts of running an online business. At this moment in time the traffic is cheap and the site owner feels that there is no need to try and improve his visitors experience. But I’m already starting to hear the whining as the cost of traffic begins to rise.
There are some that will cry about the cost and others that will understand the free ride is over and it’s time to start improving their websites. The ones that improve their designs, fix their shopping carts, clean up their copy and look for new and better ways to improve their visitors experience. These will be around in the coming years. The ones that continue to look for free or cheap traffic will continue to find that there is never enough traffic to convert their visitors into customers.
My prediction for 2007 is that we will slowly begin seeing the cost of advertising online becoming more like the prices we see off line. This is a good thing and will improve the overall experience of the Internet.
Here’s why
1. People will start paying more attention to their advertising dollars.
A. This will cause people to stop bidding on keywords like Jewelery and start bidding on more defined searches like 18 kt gold bracelets.
B. Because of the changes in the way people bid on their products there will be less money to be made with AdSense sites and we will start to see less of them.
2. People will start building sites for the customers and a lot of the ugly hard to read sites will begin disappearing.
3. Conversion will become equally as important as getting traffic.
4. People doing marketing will be able to demand a higher price for their services. But due to the increase in competition they will also have to spend a lot more time improving the site.
Moving right along, the next thing is our text. Out text needs to tell the site visitor why he needs our product. If your text starts off telling me where you’re located, how long you’ve been in business or anything else about yourself or business, then I could really careless.
I want to know what’s in it for me. Tell me what your service or your product can do for me. How is it going to make my life better, more complete and happier by owning your product.
We have picked out our colors and have gotten our logo and tag line, now it is time for the page header. Just like the logo and tag line the header needs to tell something about the business. If we are selling swimming pools then the header needs to have some pictures of swimming pools. We may even have some people grilling out next to the pool.
We want the header to show the visitor what they are missing out on by not having our product. We want to create a desire in them to purchase our product, while at the same time letting them now what the site is about. The header should match the rest of the site perfectly while displaying our logo, tag line, phone number and address.
Now that we have our logo finished, it’s time to move on to our tag line. The tag line is normally a three to seven word phrase that goes along with our logo and express the company’s most impressive benefit. We want these words to linger in the customer’s mind.
While tag lines appear to be created with very little or no effort, they, like your logo, do take time and planning. When you hear, Just Do It, you immediate think of Nike. The Real Thing, makes you think of Coke.
If your trying to create the perfect image for your business, it starts with the tag line and logo.
