Web
When it Comes to the Web – We Are All World Wide
First Impressions. We all know how critical they can be to our immediate and long term success. But for some reason very few people take their websites as seriously as they should. Realize this — In today’s digital marketplace, your website will most likely be the first impression of your company and/or product for a great deal of people. Studies have shown that most individuals make a decision on how legitimate a business is in mere seconds of hitting the home page. If you don’t believe that, just look to all the fake sites that look just like Paypal where people day after day enter sensitive information and get robbed. On the web you are international, you are as large a company as you want to be and as legit as your design and development appear.
If you went cheap on your site and hired someone with only basic layout skills, it might be time to re-evaluate your online strategy. If your web developers’ first question was “What do you want on your site?”, hire a new developer. A site without a strategic plan, both short and long term, will never provide you with the results your business needs. Just because all of the technical t’s have been crossed and the navigation i’s dotted, that alone will not guarantee market success. You need to look at your site from the outside in just like your potential customer. Does your site simply state facts about your company or can the user find themselves and something they want to be a part of in the experience. In other words was it designed because of “what you wanted on it” or was it designed to help your customer find what he or she needs.
Search Engine Optimization
There are multitudes of beautifully designed websites floating silently all around the Internet unnoticed. Companies who desperately need awareness and recognition are so easily misguided by attractive design elements and lost in the matrices of search engines. Perhaps brand names like Nike, MTV, and Budweiser can get away with entirely flash websites for which everyone will look and be able to find first on the list when entering “Nike” or “MTV” into the search engines. What about the rest of us? How can small and/or new businesses and brands steal share via the web? It comes down to building a strategy that is based upon the ingrained artillery of the web and the needs of the online consumer. It comes down to a careful optimization of your web presence.
What is involved in optimization? Web optimization typically involves copy changes, key word exploration and implementation, front-page adjustments, and individual customization involving the target market and strategic brand identity. It is crucial to be detected by the web crawlers in order to move up in position within the search engines and, in turn, visible to the consumer searching through Google, Yahoo, MSN…etc.
The look and feel of a website is indeed important and complimentary to the business; however, being able to reach the consumer is the number one concern for any brand working toward stealing share from the competition and increasing brand awareness. The web optimization process through which we will take you, explaining every step along the way, will not only enhance the positive charges of your current site, but will also create a new and better awareness of your brand.
Art Versus Commerce
For years this battle has been fought with a great deal of passion from the opposite factions. Which is more important, art or commerce? Art is what makes us human. Commerce is what makes us profit. Most interactive development companies do one of these very well and the other enough to get by. Always pushing their client in one direction or the other. Further toward their competency and farther away from what they will say, in their expert opinion, is of little or no real importance. You get a beautiful site that doesn’t have a message and can’t lead a visitor from the front page through to a sale or you get a great shopping cart that looks like it was put together by lab monkeys using standard templates with no look, feel or attitude that represents your brand position in your customers preceptive beliefs.
We look at this as a non-issue. Neither one of these are more important than the other. They are both critical to your success on the web. Great design should always work hand in hand with a good SEO and marketing strategy. Our strength lies in the fact we are right there at the beginning of the research, not a third party brought in at the 11th hour. The message we deliver will be strong, clear and consistent with your overall strategy. It will enhance your brand, not detract from it. We realize that in this day and age, the very first impression someone gets about your business may be from your online presence. We make sure that impression is a good one that reflects your brand positioning.