3 Essential Elements For A Successful Website

Today’s article will be rather short and concise. I just want to go over the 3 most essential elements of a successful website. It’s what many business owners miss out on and yet this should be the foundation of their website.

1) Your website should be designed and laid out in a way that helps convert your visitors into customers, clients, members or partners.
2) Your website should be easy to navigate, manage and update on your own without asking your designer to do something as simple as adding a gallery, an article, a title, a price change or something you could already do in Microsoft Word.
3) Your website should be planned and developed in a way that promotes better search engine placements/rankings and even more search engine traffic.

If your website does not have these 3 essential elements, your website is treading water and not making you more money. In fact, you could be LOSING money.

The $2,500+/m Thief

Statistics indicate that businesses in the U.S. are losing $50 BILLION a year to employee theft. However, there is another thief that is causing probably DOUBLE that. This thief could be in your company at this very moment. This sneaky thief does not care what color skin or hair you have. This thief does not discriminate what kind of business you are in nor show mercy when you are at your weakest.

Rain or shine, snow or sleet, this thief will continue to take money out of your business EVERY SINGLE DAY. Hell, they’ll steal it right from under your nose even when you’re looking at ‘em. All that time you spent training them and even paying someone to get them trained, they’re just back-stabbing sinners taking your money day in and day out. So who is this darn thief anyway?

Let me introduce you to…
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YOUR WEBSITE!

Your very own website could be responsible for stealing $2,500/m or MORE out of your business. That’s actually a very modest number. The majority of businesses may be losing closer to $10,000 or $20,000 depending on industry and by having a very unfitting, ugly, outdated, clumsy, cluttered and unfriendly website.

You know what I mean. If your website still has “.html” extensions, you have an 80% chance of having a thief.

If your website:

• is using really old-fashioned flash graphics and other flashy text
• is using more than 7 different colors
• takes longer than 10 seconds to LOAD
• is consisted of mostly centered text and images
• cannot be easily modified without knowing HTML
• is using “.php” file extensions and it’s NOT on a content management system like Joomla

Then you have a 90% chance of having an unwanted thief.

They’re considered thieves because they are driving your visitors and customers AWAY. We are in a very technology-conscience society.

We want only the best. We want it fast. We want it instant. Just look at the fitness and health industry. They’re all promising fast results in very little time. Will they deliver? Most likely not. Look at how Facebook.com is worth $96 BILLION dollars. It’s due to REAL-TIME social interaction – we want instant delivery of satisfaction.

Your customers are more mature and educated. They’re visiting your website, researching you and comparing you to other vendors in the same industry of services/products. So if your company looks OUTDATED, so does your products and services.

According to Dr. Brent Coker from the University of Melbourne, “As aesthetically orientated humans, we’re psychologically hardwired to trust beautiful people, and the same goes for websites. Our offline behaviour and inclinations translate to our online existence. As the internet has become prettier, we are venturing out, and becoming less loyal. With websites becoming increasingly attractive and including more trimmings, this creates a greater feeling of trustworthiness and professionalism in online consumers.”

It’s not about having a PRETTY website, but having a professional and APPROPRIATE website. According to Dr. Coker, “The biggest source of frustration is the inability to find relevant information on a website. The best way to stop defection to other websites, and increase loyalty, is to be interesting. Being pretty, but with nothing to say, is not enough.”

Basically, if you’re in the mindset of finding an insurance website designer, a real estate website designer, a nail salon website designer or any focused design group, you’re setting yourself up for failure because your website will look just like any other insurance agent, real estate agent, nail salon and so on.

Let me give you a scenario. There’s 10 black cars and 1 red car. What would stand out to you? The abundant number of black cars or the red car?

OF COURSE THE RED CAR!

It’s about standing out in the crowd, hence “Rank Above Others”. Our company name is not to be a sign of arrogance. It’s a way of life.

Every store/business has to rank above others in order to get their customers. Every student who wants to be valedictorian has to rank above others. Every employee that wants to go up the ladder has to… rank above others.

So if your website does not rank above others in terms of professional appeal, search engine ranking, social interactivity, or lacks the content/services/prices you will lose the customer.

With all this being said. It’s very likely you’re losing $2,500/m due to a poorly designed website. Question now is… what are you going to do about it and what’s it worth to you to regain that $2,500/m?

Mobile Apps Getting Out of Hand

How often are you getting pitched that YOUR business needs to have a customized app for your customers? How many restaurants and other store owners do you think are trying to have a mobile app developed because some marketing consultant said they can reach more customers? The mobile apps craze is getting exploited and over-used. It’s a sad epidemic that needs to stop and it probably will soon.

Majority of smart phone users spend most of their time playing games, texting, talking and communicating on social networks. Those that try to shop locally use a search engine. On top of all that, can you imagine a consumer having 10 different apps for 10 different restaurants, 15 different apps for 15 different stores and actually USE them often enough to be worth your time and money? No. The answer is “no”.

The market is going crazy about developing apps for EVERY business owner out there, but really it’s an over exposure of apps that basically don’t really do much more than provide information about your business and services/products/menu. They could do that on your website! Yes, a MOBILE website.

No, you can’t do “push notifications” with mobile websites, but they’re more likely to visit it and use it than your app. Even if you were able to convince them to download your app, it’s likely they will quickly remove it because it doesn’t serve a NEED or real purpose for them.

There is of course a better solution. One we are working on now that will save business owners hundreds and THOUSANDS of dollars. For example, why pay $2,000, $1,000 or even $500 for an application that will simply be removed? Why not distribute an application that actually brings you ADDITIONAL customers even if they didn’t download the application from you?

More details on this technology in the future.

Bottom-line (or point of this blog post) is steer away from customized application for just your business. You will quickly find out how costly it is and how much time/money you’ll be wasting.

SplashAll.com – The New “Simple Client Manager”

After much debate and contemplation, we have decided to proceed with a new product/company name that is more suitable to go public… yes, “Splash All”. It metaphorically corresponds to covering all aspects necessary in a very much needed CMS (client manage system).

“Splash All” is a management system that will help you manage clients, workers, contractors, clients (comes with an ID system to track clients), projects (allows very in-depth project collaboration), billing/invoicing system, package/services planning, automatic task/events scheduler and sales rep management.

Unbelievably, it is more robust than any other CMS program you will ever encounter. Our private version is just about ready for beta. We will then get to work on the public version shortly after. This will allow many business owners and service providers like us to efficiently and effectively run their business online.

The service levels are Droplet, Dribbler, Splasher and Streamer (arranged from smallest packages to largest). The prices have already been determined, but will not be publicly shared at this moment in time. We will reveal all necessary details and also the beta version very soon. Stay tuned.

Simple Client Manager Update

Wow, the last update we had on the Simple Client Manager was in November 2010, that’s 5 months ago. So much has changed since then. In fact, we decided to scrap the previous development and re-wrote the whole thing COMPLETELY from scratch.

Why? Because we had a new vision of what we wanted to create. This project has been ongoing for about 10 months now. We are about a month away from releasing a public version that is comparable to BaseCampHQ, Wrike and Huddle.

Our program differs greatly in how we manage workers, clients and projects. Technically, we’re not really competing against those guys because of our true target market: other marketing and design firms.

We have created the ultimate service program that caters to other website designers and marketers. What our program does, our competition cannot compete with. Our program has evolved to literally become intuitive.

It will allow other firms like ours create, manage and complete projects for clients more effectively.

How??? Just how will we do that?

Imagine this:

As the marketing firm, you create new project for a client. That in turns create an invoice for the client to pay. Once it is paid, the project goes into review for approval by your project manager (PM) or upper management.

Once it is approved, it automatically notifies workers (designers, coders, marketers) specifically related to THAT type of project at hand. Those that confirm the project first will be the only person (or people) to access the project details. No one else will get in.

No only that, as soon as the project gets approved, the program will also automatically setup any and all required daily, weekly and/or monthly tasks specifically for the type of project created. Your workers, project managers and clients will be able to monitor and track the progress of the project.

No more falling behind. No more paperwork/tasks/schedules to print out. Check’em off with a click of a mouse. You can even add manual tasks as necessary.

Just these features alone separates us from the pack.

We look forward to adding other outrageous features and functions into our SCM.

If you think about it though… our concept is not limited to just our industry. Anyone that needs to create automatic schedules/tasks based on specific types of projects/services rendered, this is the perfect program to do that.

Stay tuned.