More Traffic Better Positioning Greater Relevance

To do justice to this last post I contacted 10 website developers in our local area. I asked them all the same questions and listed the same criteria.

1. Ten pages all optimized for the search engines

2.     Ability to edit all pages my self

3.     Ability to add multimedia myself

4.     Ability to add ecommerce later on

5.     Social Bookmarking ability

6.     Must have a blog component

7.     Any training how to use the system

8.     Ongoing  support, hosting and marketing

The Quotes.

The quotes we got back varied from $500.oo to $7,000.oo so as you can see a lot of difference so it is best to shop around however lets narrow this down a bit more.

The three lower quotes did not allow me to do any changes myself or have a few of the other prerequisites. Basically they were going to build straight static pages so this was not acceptable.

Four of the most expensive quotes were going to add flash and lots of graphics (Brochure Style) and while I could work on the text myself the flash and graphics will not get me listed in search engines etc. Pretty but ineffective unless you are going to do a lot of branding.

So that left me with 3 companies that knew what was actually involved in having a website and making it work and their prices varied from $1500 to $3000 however these also never offered any ongoing training or packages to help me with marketing my website except the normal “we will add it to the search engines for you and do some SEO work”

One of these did understand that a website is an ongoing marketing system and offered an additional package for marketing but was very expensive.

A Few Tips:

If you can provide the textual content and have some idea what you want to achieve then your initial costs will diminish.

Remember a website can really only do one thing effectively.

It will either drive people to a sale or collect names and emails for later marketing. Your site can do both but it dilutes the overall marketing strategy. A domain and hosting a site is quite inexpensive so better to have two sites if you have 2 seperate goals.

Finally we investigated all the sites each business provided as samples of their work which looked nice but had glaring mistakes on them.

Things not to do!

a. They included the email address for the customer on the web site.

This is an absolute no no as there are programs that go trolling the net to get these addresses and then sell them to spammers so the poor customer will end up getting spammed and make their email address unusable. You should always use a form.

b. Many did not even have their details in the keywords.

Many of the sites had their company name as their domain name which means that unless you do some good content management they will not get found. Much better to have a domain if you are an electrical contractor in the south of Sydney like electricalcontractorsydney.com.au than companyname.com.au Now this is not a biggie but can help you get found almost instantly.

Also they did not have their service, location etc in their keywords. In fact nearly all had the same keywords and description on every page. This is just bad marketing and a waste of web design.

c. Nearly all had not added any new content since made.

Adding content on a regular basis even if it is just a summary on the different products and services you offer will not only get you ranked in the search engines a lot higher but also be a site your customers and visitors will come back and visit.

d. Alt Tags for their Graphics

Everything on your website is a possible link for a visitor to find you and adding alt tags to every photo and graphic will increase your visibility. Obviously some of these may seem like technical jargon at the moment but once you find out how to do it the process is very simple.

Summary: With no disrespect most web designers seem interested in building a website as a one time event. This is probably because they either do not understand the marketing process or they have come out of the traditional marketing industry, and while great designers, have no idea how the Internet works.

If you would like a free evaluation of your current website to see how it is working please fill out this form and we will process one for you and offer some suggestion on how you can get a better ROI on this underutilized asset.