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View our Web Portfolio
| 85% to 95% of all customers will visit your website before calling you. With that trend increasing every day, having a website should be a no-brainer. The next step is to make your site easy to navigate, in-line with your marketing direction and brand, as well as make information easy to find. Circore Creative offers website development, design, e-newsletters, and web marketing. According to Gerry McGovern, "Having a deep understanding of the gut instinct of your customer is the number one skill of managing a website. The web is a self-service environment, and self-service is about convenience, speed and price." People read on the web, but they read like they're driving down a road. They are reading at high speed; they are reading by gut instinct. What kinds of questions do customers ask you? What kinds of concerns do your customers have? Those are the kinds of questions we want to build your website to answer. According to Dave Chaffey, web trend and marketing expert, "The increase in (web) use means that digital marketers, in particular have to develop a competence in analysis, modeling and using web analytics tools which was not required 10 years ago." We at Circore have that ability to analyze data, making it easy for us to tell you what content areas are most likely to be of interest to your customers. Let Circore do our magic in helping you reach your ideal customers with your Internet presence. For more web marketing trends visit: Demographics of Internet Users Search Engine Registration and Site Promotion To E or Not to E - That Isn't the Question! Domain Name: First off, you will need a domain name. That is the www.yourname.com (or .net, .org, etc) address that users type into a browser to see your site. When building a new site we usually include domain name registration for one year in your price. Although unlikely to happen, someone else can buy your name! If you register your own domain name, we will need your password and username. Hosting: Next, we arrange for you site to be "hosted". A host puts your web page information on a special computer called a server. This computer can be accessed around the world by various browsers to see your website. You are essentially paying to rent a certain amount of memory - or real estate - on one of the host's servers. When setting up a new site we often recommend you host with a company we recommend. If you want to host somewhere else you may, but you are required to set it up. Either way, hosting allows your site to take up real estate space on the world wide web. Having a host also gives you access to email addresses like contact@yourname.com. When we contact the host to set up an account, we will give you the name of the server. This is a name like name.server.net or a number like 10.0.0.1. This tells the world "I own www.myname.com and the information for this page is located on the server named name.server.net. Keep this information in your files. When setting up the hosting you can also set up your email accounts. Even if there are only 1 or 2 employees at your business, you may find it useful to have email accounts such as info@yourname.com, billing@yourname.com, jobs@yourname.com, etc. These can all be separate accounts or all forward (empty out) into one account. Take full advantage of having an email with your domain name in it. Nothing looks more unprofessional than having a great new web page (ProfessionalAccountingServices.com), but a hotmail or aol contact email (fuzzybunny1234@aol.com)! Once hosting is set up, the host will give you a FTP (file transfer protocol) login name and password. Remember to write these down. We will need this login name and password to put your finished site on to the server and to make changes. As a side note: Remember to keep track of all your hosting, domain name and design invoices and receipts. They are all tax deductible as business expenses. Using you and your employees as a resource we will research your site's content. We will look at competitors. We will contact suppliers for your industry. We will study products and resources and come up with a recipe or outline for your site. We will first have you OK all content. We write content first and you must edit and approve the text. Your ability to collaborate with us will determine how unique and amazing your site becomes. Things we consider for your site:
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Site Creation: We will first have you OK all content. We write it first and you must edit and approve the text. After the text is approved, we will design 2-3 rough (main page) designs. You will link to these on the Circore website. We will refine and tweak the initial page design until it meets your approval. We will then create web ready artwork from this design. Following that, we may spin off a similar template design for the secondary (sub) pages. Once your template is created, we place your text, pictures and artwork into these pages. The site will be available to you in a hidden directory to read and approve before it ever becomes live or able to be accessed to the public. We will test the site on various browsers and platforms. Once your page is ready to launch, we will put the new site on your host's server and register it in the search engines. The page will then be "live" and anyone in the world can see it. Search Engine Registration and Site Promotion: At present, there are about 300,000 new sites added to search engines like Google, Yahoo, Dmoz and others every hour. The main browsers still accept registrations of new sites for free. However, it may be 6 weeks or more until your site has filtered into the system. There are other ways to become listed and visited. This first is to pay for a listing. Sites like Yahoo charge a few hundred dollars to list you. This may not be the best use of your advertising dollars. The majority of people searching on the web now use Google. Google both lists sites for free and also offers a "pay per click" program. You can chose what words you want your site to show up for and how much you are willing to pay for it. You can offer to spend anywhere from a few cents a day to hundreds of dollars. If you belong to any professional associations, make sure your page is listed. You may also want to consider paying a small fee to be listed on various local business listings. Far from being dead, print is actually one of the best ways to get noticed. Most potential customers expect a company to have a site. They will look for the web address on letterhead, business cards, print ads, phone book listings etc. While you still need print advertising, the web site can save you money by: Offering a private way to get to know you and your company. Your customers/patients can learn about services you offer without having to know a lot of terminology to ask thoughtful questions. Spending less employee time on the phone giving hours, directions, rates and more. Allow for forms like customer data, medical histories to be printed off ahead of time. Show a wide variety of products in full color, without the cost of printing. Collect information from forms and emails when the business closed. Offer printable forms, brochures and other documents to be downloaded. This saves you the time and cost of printing and mailing them. Quickly make announcements, offer sales or coupons, newsletters and other up-to-date information without waiting for a publication to go to press. Web Updates Your site's placement in the search engines will go up the more frequently your site is updated. While this isn't the only factor search engines like Google look to see if your site is relevant. It measures relevancy by how often your site is changed. Clients who are on retainer with us often enjoy frequent site updates as we help in writing content. You telling us about breaking news in your industry will help us keep your site fresh. Non-retainer clients can pay our hourly rates to have their site updated as well.Last, but not least, take a big breath. This is a lot of information to take in. Don't worry about understanding it all at once - that is what Circore is here for. Feel free to call or email for help or with questions. We will be glad to explain anything that doesn't make sense, and help to make your web and e-marketing as successful as possible. To E or Not to E - That Isn't the Question! Despite the economic dowturn, the Internet has changed consumers' "origin instinct" forever By Laurie Windham Excerpted from: http://www.intelligententerprise.com/010524/customer1_1.jhtml Consider this: Before the Internet, where did you begin to find out how to contact someone, learn the answer to an obscure question, check prices on something you're considering buying, obtain directions to a new destination, pay bills, or get a job? Before the Internet, those activities involved a broad array of interfaces. You went to encyclopedias to get answers to obscure questions. You used the telephone book or directory assistance to find someone's phone number. You went to retail stores, catalogs, and ads in newspapers to find out price information. You used a street map to get directions. You read the classified ads for employment opportunities. But the Internet changed all of that. The Web has become the place where millions of consumers instinctively begin their tasks, and that trend will continue gaining momentum. So, the Internet has shaped our origin instinct. That's a dramatic change, not only for consumers who migrated their routines to the Web, but also for the businesses that serve consumers in the old ways. |
