Click-Sniff-Click School of Web Design

Building your brand online

“Branding” is not something you’ll usually overhear family members talking about over the dinner table, yet it’s something that is ever-present in your life. No matter what you do, you are witness to branding. Drive down any city street and you’ll eventually run into a sign in the shape of a double-arch. Without my naming it, you know the brand.

Smaller businesses sometimes have difficulty defining their own brand. They make the mistake of wanting to describe every feature, talk about every benefit, and try to sell to every possible customer in every market.

What is a brand

Branding is the process of creating and associating a personality or identity with a particular product or company. Branding creates in the consumer a degree of comfort or familiarity with a product beyond the mere symbol. Once linked to this new symbol, the product or company becomes greater than the sum of the two parts.

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Why we don’t build web sites

We don’t build web sites. Our goal is to create a web presence. A web presence can be made up of a number of possible ingredients that contribute to maximizing your company’s goals and strategy.

A web presence always includes a web site, but it usually includes other features that create a compelling experience for current and prospective customers that invite them to return again and again for added information.

What is a web presence

Depending on your needs, a web presence might include:

A blog. A blog (a contraction of web log) is a self-published, on-line journal. It may be relatively simple and just include a series of stories. Or it may go so far as to include pictures, video, other people’s comments, descriptions of events, etc. When you have a particular expertise to share and the time to write ongoing articles, a blog can be an effective means for sharing valuable content with customers and engaging them.

A forum. A forum is a place for the owner and—to prevent spam, usually registered—guests to exchange information about a range of topics, usually related to a specific area of expertise. For example, one of our customers had decades of experience growing wildflowers and often received the same questions from customers.

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Before creating your first web site

An online presence offers you huge advantages if you think ahead. Here are a few things you should check into before getting started.

Understand the terms and conditions

When you buy your domain, verify that you are the domain name owner. Unfortunately, you can’t assume the registrar you are working with is honest. Some registrars will offer low prices, but put the domain in their name, not yours. Others may offer you a discount for multiple years and only register it for one year, pocketing the difference.

Verify the registration term

When you buy your domain, get a copy of the receipt. Verify that the number of years matches what you paid for. If necessary, use a third-party service like GoDaddy to verify that you got what you paid for.

Validate that you are the domain owner

Also get a copy of your domain registration record. You should always be listed as the domain owner and will usually be the billing contact. The company or individual who is hosting your site will typically be listed as the administrator and technical contact.

Buy related domains upfront

If you decide to buy wehavewidgets.com, consider protecting your brand by also buying wehavewidgets.net and possibly wehavewidgets.org. Don’t be talked into buying other domains with different suffixes for different countries, unless you will build an international web presence. They are rarely worth the expense.
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Scent of information: information pollution

It’s happened to you: you arrive on a web page and are presented with so many options, you don’t know what to do. Or however many options are presented, they all have equal prominence, and you can’t sort out which one is likely to lead you where you want to go. Or there’s so much information that you can’t absorb it all. That’s called information pollution: The content gets in the way of your access to the content.

You’re an expert, but do your customers care?

Business people are experts in their field, and they love to share that expertise with others. They forget that average people don’t really care about the details of how things work. The new car salesman may wax eloquently about the “V8 engine, displacing 427 cubic inches, producing 425 horsepower, with dual injection and turbo boost,” when all the customer really wants to know is, “Can I get on the freeway and avoid the big rig bearing down on me?” As business owners, we have to focus on features, advantages and benefits.

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Before you update or build a web site

When you decide to extend your brand onto the Internet, you are taking advantage of a 365/24/7 marketing powerhouse. An online presence offers you huge advantages if you think ahead. Here are some things you should consider before getting started.

Take charge of your content

You are the subject matter expert. You know your customers best. You know what differentiates your business from the competition. (Remember, once online, your competition is no longer necessarily in the same town.)

Focus on quality

Quality content trumps a pretty design every day of the week. A pretty face in the window might draw a customer in for a few seconds, but if you don’t have the goods, they are right back out the door. On the web, that means three things: (1) quality content; (2) quality content they can quickly find; (3) quality content that leads the prospective customer to a “call to action,” generating a lead, a sale, or whatever the goal is for your site.
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Acrobat causes usability issues

Linking to Acrobat documents can create unforeseen problems. Using Acrobat may create create significant usability problems and prevent visitors from accessing the very information you want them to have. Jakob Nielsen, a recognized usability expert, describes Acrobat as  Unfit for Human Consumption.

Possible usability issues

Presuming your visitors have Acrobat installed, there still may be compatibility, security, navigational, and document size issues that can cause the visitor’s browser to lock up and freeze.

Compatibility issues can arise when an information provider creates an Acrobat file using version 9, and the visitor tries to open it using version 5.

Security issues were surfaced when an  Acrobat flaw was uncovered that allows hackers to take control of a visitor’s computer. This may cause some visitors to be reluctant to open an Acrobat file.

Navigational issues occur when you force the visitor to switch from the navigational paradigm of your web site to the navigational paradigm inflicted by Acrobat documents. Users must shift their mental model from a link-oriented web structure to a linear book-oriented structure. This can cause mental roadblocks and breaks the rule of “don’t make me think.”

Document size issues occur because some users who do not have broad-band connections may not want to choke their connection with a multi-megabyte download.

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What makes your business stand out

One of the most difficult things we do is to help business owners, if they haven’t done it already, to identify and effectively communicate what makes their business stand out from the herd.

Competition down the street and online

To be effective, a web site must communicate what differentiates a business from its competitors. In today’s world, competitors come in two stripes: those in your physical neighborhood, and depending on the nature of your business, potentially anyone in a like business online.

Differentiation is less critical when your customers have fewer choices in a relatively distinct geographic area: people aren’t willing to drive that far for a slightly better deal.  Online, when all it takes to choose your competition is a couple of clicks, differentiation is critical.

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Scent of information: link text, page titles, and first headings

You’ve done it: clicked on a link and been delivered to a page that appears to be completely unrelated to your path of inquiry. You ask yourself, “What am I doing here? I must have clicked on the wrong link.” You hit the Back button only to find that you had in fact clicked on a link you thought would be helpful, but the page you got was from another planet.

One of the key hooks to providing a clear scent of information to visitors is to use links and page titles consistently. A link is the text used to prompt the visitor to click through. The page title is what is seen in the title bar of the browser. The first heading is the heading at the top of every page, announcing the subject of the page.

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Flash and search engines: like oil and water

Many business owners like the slick, high-quality, interactive nature of flash-based web sites, or Flash-based elements within a web site. Flash is a great tool for specific purposes if not overused. Unfortunately, overuse of Flash can make your site all but invisible to the search engines. Flash and search engines are like oil and water.

While Google and Yahoo have made some advances in trying to index content from combined Flash and text-based sites, a site built entirely using Flash still faces nearly insurmountable obstacles when it comes to search engine optimization. The minor indexing improvements have not turned into benefits for site owners. A site that uses Flash for specific kinds of graphical content will not be penalized like a site that uses Flash for navigational elements, possibly frustrating the search engines’ ability to follow links from page to page.

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Web design for its own sake

Some web site owners get entranced with Flash and a slick design. Unfortunately, Flash and search engine optimization are like oil and water. Furthermore, designers who work with Flash are rarely knowledgeable about search engine optimization, usability, or information architecture. They are, after all, designers.

Hiring someone who specializes in design to produce your web presence is akin to asking a designer of an America’s Cup sailing sloop to build you a motorized luxury yacht. Your yacht might look pretty nice, but you can be pretty sure that not all of the parts are going to be in the right place.

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