Graphic Website Design & Marketing

Dallas Texas wants Granite Countertops

2011-09-08T14:25:00.000-07:00

Between the cattle ranches, the cowboys and the oil fields you find thes fantastic homes and some of them are in need of a face lift. One way texans are improving their lives and their homes is to upgrade the kitchen countertops with granite

This is not only in texas that the craze for granite is going on. Its all over the US. From Maine to Florida to California to Washington.. Granite Granite Granite.

You gOTTA GET YOU SOME!

Is granite Affordable In NH?

2011-09-08T14:16:00.000-07:00

Granite Countertops Sales Fabrications and installation all done inhouse by Affordable Granite & Marble In northwood NH. This company website is really nothing to special to look at until you look under the hood and at the response rate.

When the site was originally created the owner had a vision and this was not to have the flasshy showroom and that intern needed to translate to the website. he also did not want to look like all the other do it your self websites but wanted to focus on clearly defining his business objectives. A quality Product with quality service at a great price.

Well its bang on if you look at the numbers. these guys have the formula for success all ironed out and things run like a well oiled machine.

Check it out for yourself. They provide granite countertops to NH ME MA VT
If you are looking for a really nice product at reasonable prices ... cut out the middle man like the kitchen shops and the box stores and give them a call.

Ktichen Renovations on the rise

2011-09-08T13:59:00.000-07:00

I am in the business of marketing and adverting granite countertops fabricators. The service I provide is to drive business to them through strategic online marketing, Response tracking and brand management. When the right customer comes along is just briliant how well this program works. It's like a license to print money. The key is to have the right company on the other side.

My company has 15 year of online marketing expereince.. Yes we started when the internet began to be the internet and we are so pationate about what we do. We focus on stydying the market and tracking market conditions to help our client maintain the work flow they are looking for.

Bootstrap Plan for the startup small business.

2011-03-27T04:21:00.000-07:00

The Bootstrap plan.

Just got off a call with a potential client and I was very intrigued by what "I" was saying to this guy who wanted to put a brand on his custom jewelery business. In the back of my mind this was a waste of my time but I would never leave anyone hanging. But I had a plan for him that just came out of my mouth as we were talking and I understood that his budget was next to $0. A typical small business budget is 6-10% of sales for marketing your business. Stick with that and you will grow if you spend the money in the right places. If you spend more than that you are being aggressive and that's fine at first but dont go too far in the hole.. if you can tie the budgget to sales you can grow at a healthy rate.

BRANDING:
So here is it. You have to start somewhere right and the best place to start is with a brand and a message. without this you will just be noise on the internet. You need to have a clear message and that starts with your logo and a mantra or tag line that states you basic mission. This can and will evolve over time but you must put your best effort forward. Cost minimal if you have done some of the leg work and some decision. Also, have a story, a cause or charity to associate your start-up with. depending on your product or service you need an edge. In this case so many people are making jewelery out of the home the only way to get an edge would be to create a story and sell the story as well as the jewelery.

Fish where the fish are:
On a boot strap budget leverage word of mouth and Social media to friend your clients and build your relationship with them and there friends. Start generating some clients so you have some cash flow based on these happy customers.

Building a website: (Landing page)
Keep it simple at first, get a domain name and put your logo on it as well as you links to facebook and twitter as well as other social networks that you use. have you mission as well as your story of who you are and what you will be selling. also provide contact information the way you want to be contacted. This is you phase one website. cost minimal.

Building a website Phase 2: (inventory management)
You should be in control of your inventory. Your website should be up to date with your current inventory and these changes actually help to show that your website changes and therefor is maintained. this gives you higher rankings than a website that never changes. Selling one of a kind jewelery no 2 pieces are alike so photography and descriptions are essential.

E-commerce:
I see people all the time that have invested thousands of dollars in ecom and do very little sales. Think about it for a second, would you feel more comfortable putting your credit card into joesfireplace.com website or into paypal.com. One my relationship with has been for the last 5-15 minutes and the other has been around as long as e-commerce has. I suggest starting with a well know brand at first so that you don't loose the sale at check out.

For under a grand you can put this process in place with a professional and start building your business the right way.

Enjoy!

White Hat Link Building Help

2011-03-13T06:33:00.000-07:00

Building quality links is tough. If you buy into the Quick build scheme you could get burned.

To combat that and my own issues with developing and managing links I came up with Local Linker. Local Linker is a White Hat link building service designed to ease the pain of locating proper links and managing them on the website.

Here is how this Free Service it works.

Create your account - This is a business listing that will be hosted on Local Linker. (we currently have over 1800 listings in Google today.)
Once you have created and account you will want to start a linker session. This means that you will be searching our directory for others to link to.
Once you have created you linkers you will either copy the linker HTML we have created for you and add it to your website or you can automate this by consuming the RSS feed or using the script provided.

It's that easy.

Now behind the scenes your listing is presented to others to now link to you.

Things to keep in mind when you are creating your listing:

Use your business name and a couple keywords that you are targeting - This will be your anchor text on all other sites. This anchor text gives you link credit for those keywords.
Choosing your Linkers carefully. You want to link to like businesses outside your target region, You want to link to businesses that would typically consume your services, you want to link to business that you provide services to.

Are you sure this is white hat? - Of course it is .. nothing is automated here other than the management of relationships that you create. You are putting in the logic and we are simply managing the links for you. This service is very powerful when you use the RSS feed to automatically ad links to your website. The links on your site are managed by the business owner and the links directly reference the site of the end user. From your website perspective local linker is a silent partner.

Check out the beta release of this service http://www.locallinker.com

What's in a website design?

2011-03-11T07:10:00.000-08:00

When someone is looking for a website design they are actually in need of many things. The website designer has to be aware of these topics in-order to provide a quality service.

Competitive Analysis

in marketing and strategic management is an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and potential competitors. This analysis provides both an offensive and defensive strategic context through which to identify opportunities and threats.

Competitive Analysis

Why do I need one?

A competitive analysis will help you understand your position in the marketplace. It will help you to define who you are, why you are different and why a customer will want to work with you over the other guy. This is an important step in the process because it helps to identify strenghts and enables the website designer to focus on the proper message with visuals and design.

Define Competitive Advantage

occurs when an organization acquires or develops an attribute or combination of attributes that allows it to outperform its competitors.

Competitive Advantage

Are your costs Lower, Is your product better, Is your quality of service higher?

I am sure you have some idea of this. As the opportunity of sales decreases and the competition to attract customers becomes more more difficult it is imparitive that you know what makes you more attractive and be sure that your customers know it. This is a ongoing process of understanding your customers and the competion. Providing this information to your website designer will help them to evaluate these differences.

prgdesign´s Competitive advantage is that we provide agency level service at reasonable prices, We are the one stop shop for everything you need online and we don´t outsource so their is no markup on our service.

Branding

People engaged in branding seek to develop or align the expectations behind the brand experience, creating the impression that a brand associated with a product or service has certain qualities or characteristics that make it special or unique.

Branding/logo design/ corp-ident

to brand or not to brand is the question

To decide not to brand is to actually branding your company. This is not the recommended approach but it is an approach. Defining your mark, colors and content are all exercises in branding. The more time you spend here will define you better for the future but remember that your brand will evolve and all decision you make today will help you to determine your overall brand strategy.

Communication Strategy

identifying a market niche for a brand, product or service utilizing traditional marketing placement strategies (i.e. price, promotion, distribution, packaging, and competition). Develop content based on these considerations and deploy a keyword strategy.

Communication Strategy

You said what?

Are you ""Shock and aw"" or are you ""Straight to the point"". How you communicate your business in a successful sales call is how you want to communicate your products/services online.

Keyword Analysis

Where are your customers? What keywords do they use to find you? Keyword analysis is the process used to gather information concerning keywords commonly used to locate a product or service on the internet.

Keyword Analysis

Blah blah blah.. i've heard it all before

Stop and think about it for a minute.. when you look for something .. what do you do? if you are thinking about upgrading your kitchen with granite countertops do you do a search for watermelons.. no. You search for granite countertops and sometimes you even add your values to that search like quality or sale or cheap or price. These words need to be placed in specific places on the website and in the code of the website and are key to increasing your exposure in organic search.

Domain Selection
based on many factors above careful domain selection is a critical step. The domain is tied directory to the branding of the company and future SEO strategy.

Domain Selection

Why does my domain S*ck?

Unless you have a million dollars to spend on branding to educate people on a new word you have created or BobAndSons has relevance in your current market. Your domain selection should contain your some keywords. We like to suggest a geographic identifier with product or service word. This almost immediately can pop you to the top of organic search when available.

Hosting Email
Setup the hosting and mail serving systems for your website.

Hosting & email

You have to have it.. can't avoid it.

@yahoo.com, @gmail.com are just not acceptable for a business contact email address. This points right at your branding and indicates that you don't value your domain name. We operate multiple dedicated servers in a co-location facility with 99.95 % availability. These servers host the websites and provide email processing of your domain(s).

Content Development

Collect content from relevant sources, Link to sources, Incorporate keywords into client supplied content.

Content Development

Content is King and will always be king.

We do not provide your websites content. We will make suggestions and provide sample content that is good but we do not write content. We do however, help you to understand what content we will need from you and can help to craft the content to help with SEO on the website. In this case we will outsource this for you if you so desire.

Call To Action
Everywhere. Tell your website visitors what to do, Always. on every page, Always. Don't assume that your ""Main nav"" can be their guide. Define the path through the site for them.

Call to Action

Just Have One on Every Page.. Please!

Tell your visitors to your website what to do.. Don't make them decide for themselves. They have never been to your website before. Be kind and direct them to the action you want them to take. Drive them through 3-5 pages and then ask for the sale.. and ask often. Clearly define the action.. call during normal business hours.. x-x m-f or complete the contact form.

This is a very simple process but helps to navigate the visitor to the information you want them to consume. Once they have consumed the information ask for sale or the lead as I do below on this page and every other page of the website. Go ahead.. Fill it our .. Or just give me a call ;)

Social Media Strategy
Have one! social media can be a very powerful tool for maintaining your audience. Look at the values and define how you will use it.

Socail Media Strategy

Sorry but Social Media is here to stay.

You can have a social media strategy to not have one but you will loose the race eventually. I like to incorporate into our website which ever social media website that you use already. If you don't use one we can manage one for you. Facebook, twitter, myspace, its all about being where your customers are and communicate with them in the way they want to be communicated with. Some of these services can be tied to text messaging and can allow you to update your social media account and your website at the same time."
End if

WEBSITE DESIGN

is the skill of creating presentations of content (usually hypertext or hypermedia) that is delivered to an end-user through the World Wide Web, by way of a Web browser or other Web-enabled software like Internet television clients, microblogging clients and RSS readers.

Website Design, Graphic Design, Online Marketing, Brand Management, Strategy Development, and More!

Website Design & more... Much More

So you need a website... or you need to take your website to the next level. You have come to the right place.

Social Media Integration
The social solution should incorporate a content feed for your website. The idea is to create an audience and drive them to your products or service. Search likes dynamic content."
Social Media Integration

Socail media again... WT..

I talked about this briefly before.. Use social media to incorporate images and text into your website from a mobile device. This facilitates real-time updating of content to your website which search engines really like and customers view this content like you care about keeping your website up to date which ties into your branding and customer loyalty

Online Marketing Strategy

is a process that can allow an organization to concentrate its limited resources on the greatest opportunities to increase sales and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.

Online Marketing Strategy

This is not a Ark, Just because you build it does not mean they will come.

This website process list is a strategy, the prgdesign vision for constructing a website. We also provide ways to drive traffic to your website. Set a budget that makes sense for your business today. Track your return on your investment and be sure that you are maintaining your target return. Adjust your budget accordingly. Once you have this in place you should be able to control new business like a faucet, the more you spend the more sales you make, once the ROI is stabilized.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.

Search Engine Marketing

Pay per click advertising

Some have the perception that this does not work for them. For the most part all this really means is that you did it wrong or the wrong person was doing it for you. This is an extremely powerful tool for monitoring the success of a website. It is also very powerful way of generating traffic to your website. Our strategy is to provide a program this is tied to your success, we talk to you about your goals, objective, and cost per sale and based on this information we look at the market and set some targets for the first 30 days. If we are not able to meet your targets we will know in the first 30 days, if not before. - We even have a guarantee. Call for details.

Business Listing Submission
Part of SEM will be to put your information on other sites to link to you.. drive visitors to your website.

Business Listing Submission

they are everywhere...

We want your website listed and linked to from as many of these places as we can.. although google does not appear to count anything that is classified as a directory website in PageRank other search engines do value these and they also will place high in search for certain keywords. Some Directories are more important that others.
Linking

Part of SEM will be to put your information on other sites to link to you.. this is process tends to be the last and most neglected part of an online strategy. One-way Links from reputible sources is the goal.. drive visitors to your website. Gets some Google Love ;)"

Linking

Yawn.. what's my ROI

It is so hard to measure your return from linking. So hard to manage and grow and the objective is to have someone with a quality website link to you without linking back.. how do you put a value on that. This is why it is more than 40% of what search uses to determine where you come up in the results. Search engines frown on the link farms and Link building services. They even monitor the number of links into your site over time and can drop you if things look fishy.

Search Engine Submission
Tell the search engines who you are and provide them with robot.txt files and xml sitemaps to check out your content.

Search Engine Submission

You have to tell them where you are or they will never find you.

Part of the website development process is to notify the search engines that you have arrived and you want to be spider ed(list my page).

Web Analytics Reporting
We must monitor our success, where are customers are coming from, which sources drive the best traffic. many decisions can be made by watching the habits of your visitors.. once you have some. "

Web Analytics Reporting

tell me what to do oh crystal ball.

Free services like google analytics will tell you what your visitors are doing on your website.. where they are going on your site or not going and gives you information on what you need to change. You just have to be willing to look at it or have someone look at it for you. This is the way we are able to tell if the website is functioning properly. Delivering your message and presenting the Call To Action. These reports will tell us that we are doing the right things or not and can tell us when changes are in the right direction."

As you can see from this list, Website design is only part of the process.

Please comment let us know what you think!

Lets talk about design

2011-03-11T04:50:00.000-08:00

Post your questions, comment or tips here concerning design

Post a link to your website design firms website

2011-03-11T04:22:00.001-08:00

Please comment and post a link back to your website design firm. Linking is a very large part of the equation when it comes to your ranking. This domain is about 10 years old and will gain ranking quickly as you all help me add cool content.

hint: html is allowed in the comment box.

<a href="http://yourURL.com"> Your anchor text your comments</a> description

Please don't spam or use copyright content.
Hint: The spam detector is automatic so only put one link in your post. dont multi post etc.

What are the best Electronic design resources on the web

2011-03-11T04:15:00.000-08:00

Please comment and provide a list of the best online resources for graphic designers and website designers

Welcome to the graphic website design community blog.

2011-03-11T03:46:00.000-08:00

This is a community site. You are welcome to comment on any blog and include links back to your site(s) Spam will be removed so please don't abuse this. If you would like to author blog posts on this site please contact me and I will add you.

Help me build a community to support the graphic design and website design community.