I spend most my days talking to potential clients on the telephone and through e-mails. And I love my job, I love what I do and I love the fact that I am pretty damn good at it.

However, there is one question I should ask clients that I never do.

What makes you different from your competition?

What are 25 interesting things about your business that would make me want to do business with you?

When it comes to making a living online, you will be competing against a lot of people. You need to know why someone should do business with you instead of your competition.

For example, when I started my business I did not look for what unique abilities we brought to the table. However over the years I slowly began to standout from the crowd.

Let’s see if I can name 25 things that make my Web Design business unique.

1. I am one of the only Web design companies that offer unlimited design changes. I do not limit the number of changes a customer needs to make to the design to get exactly what he or she is looking for.

My goal is to make the customer happy. We do this by not limiting are charging more after a certain number design changes.

2. I’ve got people here 7 days a week 15 hours a day to answer the telephone. We try to answer all business e-mails within one hour.

3. We’ve got people whose only job is studying and understanding conversion. This means that when it comes to building websites to convert traffic were on top of the game.

4. We have designers that do nothing but design and programmers who do nothing but program. And this allows them to be on top of their game.

5. We offer a 100% Money Back Guarantee. At any point in the process the customer can get their money back. This means we have to work extra hard to keep the customer happy.

6. We do our best to be efficient in what we do. This allows us to get the websites back to the customers in a timely manner and allows us to keep our prices low.

7. We not only understand how the search engines work, but we rank for some of the most competitive keywords in the industry.

8. I’ve got no problem giving away free information or trying to help someone make money online. Whether it profits me or not.

Their posts all over the Internet that I have written giving free advice on what works and does not work online.

9. We practice what we preach. Unlike most Web design companies, we make our total living with our website we do NO off-line advertising of any kind.

10. We’ve been building and designing websites for the last eight years and have been able to make our total living online throughout that time. This gives us knowledge and understanding of the Internet and the Web design industry that most people do not have.

11. Our desire is to make our clients happy. We don’t care how many hours on the phone it takes, how many e-mails we have to send, or how many design changes are needed. It’s all about and for the client.

If you don’t know what makes your business unique and different from your competition maybe you should take a minute and try and come up with something.

Making a living online is a difficult thing to do and it’s something that 98% of businesses that are currently online are not successful at. There are a lot of reasons for this and those reasons increase when websites leave the US.

To start with websites outside the US do not have as many people purchasing items online and for this reason the marketing and the website design have to be much better than those in the US.

A website needs to build trust, guide the visitor in the direction we want them to go and help them to make the purchase.

A major problem in any country is finding a web designer that understands marketing, web design, graphic design, programming and most of all conversion.

Let’s take a look at asicamericas.com.

The website was designed for smaller browsers which are rarely used today and what makes it worse is that the design is not centered. It hangs in the top left corner of the screen like it’s scared to be seen.

Every time someone is forced to click the mouse to find information there will be a percent of visitors that will leave the site never to return. By not having contact information on every page of the site we force visitors to click links and hunt for information.

If it’s a real business then the phone number and contact information should be in the header of every page. And the header and design of the site should tell me something about the business before I ever read the first line of text.

You’ve got less than 3 seconds to get me interested in your product and this is done on the graphical side of the website.
And colors will affect my reaction and the action I will take on your site.

Red indicates anger. It’s a strong color that conjures up a range of seemingly conflicting emotions from passionate love to violence and warfare. Red can have a physical effect, increasing the rate of respiration and raising blood pressure.

Blue would have been a better color to use. It is often associated with depth and stability. It symbolizes trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth, and heaven.

Blue is considered beneficial to the mind and body. It slows human metabolism and produces a calming effect.
Another problem with the site is the scrolling text; it causes your eyes to be pulled in that direction and forces us to read the information at the speed the website decides.

The website has no call to action and in no way tries to get me to purchase any type of product.

On the SEO side of things the website has less than 8 links pointing to it and not meta tags. Meta tags are used by search engines like MSN who will be spending $100 million on advertising their search engine. By ranking on their search engine you get some of the benefit of the 100 million they are spending.

Java script and other coding was left on the site, it should have been pulled out of the code and placed in external folders to make it easier for the search engines to read and understand the site.

It doesn’t take long to come to the conclusion that this site has never made money online.

Your Website Design is one of the most important elements for an effective online marketing campaign. The art and science of web design involves strategically designing a website that promotes a person, product, business, opinion, or idea, with the ultimate intention of having the visitor take some
form of action.

So, whether you’re looking to sell something or to build traffic to your website, you’ll need a web design that can tell a compelling story that grabs the attention and connects with the website visitor in a way that will get them to respond the way you want.

Another words, you need a powerful and emotional website that will show the site visitor that his/her life would be more complete, better, easier, more productive, more profitable and happier if they owed what it is that you’re selling.

This type of website can only come from a professional web designer and they aren’t easy to find. If you are living in Ann arbor and just did a search for Ann arbor web designers you’ll be hard pressed to find a good one.

However, keep in mind that just because you live in Ann arbor doesn’t mean that your web designer has to be located in Ann arbor . Other words, if you want I can build you a custom designed website that will do everything you want and more for an extremely good price.

But if you are just stuck on working with a web designer from Ann arbor maybe the list below will be of some help.

• Ann Arbor Web Design and Ann Arbor Graphic Design, by 3.7 Designs 3.7 Designs is an Ann Arbor based web design company. Focusing on conversion based website, or websites that achieve business goals.

• Michigan Web Design – Professional Web Site Development From Ann What began as a quest to make the web a little nicer-looking has become a full-service Ann Arbor web design shop, delivering your ideas to the web from …

• TwoLipps Graphics and Web Design in Ann Arbor Michigan provides …
Ann Arbor web designer serving Washtenaw county, Saline, Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti small businesses with custom, affordable freelance website services …

• MetaSpring | Ann Arbor Web Design and Development
MetaSpring is an Ann Arbor based website design firm. Specializing in Ruby, Website Design and Marketing.

• Ann Arbor web design: find professional web design firm, company …
Ann Arbor web design : a directory of Ann Arbor web designers, web design companies and firms, providing professional, affordable and custom web design …

• 352 Media Group Ann Arbor Web Design – Web Design Company in Ann Arbor
Our Ann Arbor web design and development experience is extensive. The 44 Addy Awards we won in 2004-2006 are a result of the excellent web design and …

• Michigan Website Design, Web Strategy & Online Marketing Agency Stone Interactive Group – Ann Arbor, Michigan based Professional Web Design, Development, Search Engine Optimization and Online Marketing Services Company.

• Inti Raymi – Ann Arbor (USA) 2008 :: OtavalosOnLine.com :: La …
Inti Raymi – Ann Arbor (USA) 2008. un evento unico se va a realizar por las fiestas del … Web Design: Diseño y construcción de soluciones y servicios Web, …

• Michigan, Ann Arbor Website Designers – Website Company in Michigan
A comprehensive list of local Web designers in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The top Web design companies serving clients in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

• Snapdragon – Ann Arbor Web Design, Print and Video Services
Snapdragon provides high quality web, print and video services targeted towards serving the needs of small to medium sized organizations

I was reading a post today about how ranking on page two or three in the major search engines will convert better than a page one ranking.

This may be true as long as all your competitions websites suck.

However, if the competition has a powerful and emotional website that is able to show the website visitor that his or her life would be more complete better, easier and more productive, more profitable and happier, if they owned what it is that site is selling, chance are they will never make it to the second search result, much less the next page.

Rankings are good, but your website has to be able to convert or the site visitor will be off the site and on to the next one.

People focus on ranking more than website conversion and it’s the only reason someone would have to go to page three in the search results before making the purchase.

I read somewhere that 98% percent of all sites online are not turning a profit. The only reason those numbers are that high is people do not fully understand how to make a website convert.

And the sad truth is that I see more web designers pointing out really cool flash sites, then I see web designers pointing out websites that convert. The web design industry needs to spend more time educating their clients and less time trying to add the next cool thing to a web design.

“Breathing Life Into That Old Web Design”

While the global economy has hurt many businesses, it has caused others to flourish. It could be said that 2009 is the year for web designers; in recent months business owners have trader money for traditional media and the ‘real world’ for that of the internet.

The internet is supposed to provide the ability to reach the world’s largest audience, at a fraction of the price spent to reach a much smaller audience, in the real world.

It all sounds good in theory but what’s really going on behind closed doors?

“Web Designing Gone Terribly Wrong”

Most web designers lack a real understanding of conversion and how it should be used, while most site owners are looking for a total redesign, when all they really need is to tweak their current design.

Going in and tweaking your current design allows you to see what’s working and what’s not. I’ve seen color changes in checkout buttons cause an increase in conversion.

Small tweaks can make big differences.

The problem is that most people do not understand the difference in an expense and an investment.
Your website should be an investment and not an expense, done correctly you should be able to get your money back within a month or two.

“Don’t Make Me Think”

Now days it’s more important than ever before to understand how your content, graphics and call to action are going to work with one another. A site visitor is looking for information and they want it quicker than ever before. If your site is the least bit confusing then they’ll be off to try out the competition.

A site visitor needs to have access to the most important information on your site without having to look for it. And you need to keep in mind that since most people will find your site through the search engines they can be entering the site on any page, so all your pages need to have information about your company on them.

“Content Is Not King”

In the online world there is an overload of information and too much of it can negatively affect your website. Everywhere we look there is more and more information, by the time we reach your website we could be to tired to care what it is you have to say.
It’s important to get to the point and not try and paint me a picture.

Don’t get me wrong, some sites need a total redesign but others just need a few tweaks.