We’ve just launched a redesign of one of our long-time clients, Nstyle Fashion Xchange. They first signed up way back when I was doing all the design work. We’d tweaked their design a couple of times since then, but this is the first time they’ve had a complete make-over.
Compare this to my original design from back in the day, and you’ll be glad I’m not doing the design work anymore:
Here at T&S, we’re in the process of launching our new, low-cost websites that run just $99/month. You can read all the details here.
We came up with 99 reasons you should buy this new, affordable website option from T&S, and thought we’d share those reasons with you.
1. inexpensive
2. easy
3. effective
4. domain name included
5. hosting included
6. unlimited # of pages
7. T&S takes care of initial setup
8. no setup costs
9. T&S fills in initial pages
10. no special software on your computer
11. Easy updates
12. 1 hour training included
13. up to 60 email addresses
14. unlimited email support
15. only 1 year commitment
16. hundreds of designs to choose from
17. no hidden fees
18. T&S speaks english, not techno-babble
19. save money compared to other advertising
20. increase professionalism
21. compete online
22. don’t pay thousands of dollars
23. content management system is expandable
24. customizable with your logo
25. content and template checked for compatibility
26. one central location online
27. more room than a business card
28. more space than the phone book
29. did we mention unlimited pages?
30. establish online presence
31. supplement traditional advertising
32. no technical knowledge needed
33. create a hub for your social network marketing
34. blog is included 35. quick gallery updates
36. upload any file type
37. more room than a magazine ad
38. no more newspaper ads
39. add features without changing monthly cost
40. easily advertise specials
41. provide better customer service
42. it’s your answer to everything
43. be accessible 24/7
44. update site anywhere, anytime
45. replace traditional advertising
46. get customer/client feedback
47. look better than competition
48. widen customer base
49. compete internationally
50. expand your business
51. save money
52. give favorable impression
53. generate leads
54. more room than a brochure
55. get customers’ business
56. strengthen brand identification
57. simplify your marketing
58. make info available about services
59. no more phone book ads
60. yearly payments available
61. appeal to target market online
62. user friendly
63. very low risk
64. quick setup
65. make your small business look better
66. receive setup assistance
67. blogs increase traffic
68. blogging helps you learn
69. advertise your business
70. it will help grow your business
71. receive flexible service
72. communicate better with clients
73. no html knowledge needed
74. ecommerce capabilities
75. control your updates
76. keeps prices competitive
77. establish customer trust
78. if you don’t exist in search engines, you don’t exist
79. establish word-of-mouth
80. try unique marketing ideas risk-free
81. easy to fix snafus
82. use an award-winning content management system
83. no print costs
84. no color matching with print items
85. update content quickly
86. expand your target market
87. templates are professionally designed
88. no more mail-outs
89. increase your credibility
90. more room than a flyer
91. make product info available
92. inexpensive redesigns
93. easy to add new pages
94. your customers expect you to have one
95. professional installation & setup
96. it’s green
97. you can’t afford not to
98. allows for easy payment
99. if you don’t exist online, you don’t exist
Thanks for reading, and contact us if you would like to meet to see if our $99 per month website would work for you.
Well, in the very, very early hours of this morning, we launched our new website’s design. It had been a traditional “shoemaker’s children” type problem, where our quality of websites and design in generally has continuously improved over the past year, but our site stayed the same because we were busy work on other people’s websites and print design.
After putting it off for much too long, we all pitched in and worked really hard these last couple of weeks to get our site done. And it’s really paid off.
Take a look above at our old site on the right compared to our new site on the left, and you’ll see what I mean about our drastic increase in skill over the last several months. Although the website we designed for ourselves at the beginning of last year was solid, it was no longer reflective of our collective capabilities.
Major kudos goes to Dave, who spent hours and hours working on the site, getting it done phenomonally fast while still doing an outstanding job. And to Eric, who still plans to redo much of the coding his boss threw together to get the site online quicker. Eric, please don’t cry when you start looking at my code.
Please, take a look around. We would love any feedback on the new design.
This week was a very exciting one for us here at T&S Web Design! We’ve launched three new websites this week. Check them out and let us know what you think.
Avanti Skin Care Center of Norman
Associate Medical Professionals
We will be working with Diabetes Solutions of Oklahoma, the February winner of our free non-profit website. We are looking forward to helping Casey Bottoms and Kim Wilson in the overhauling of their current website.
We’ll be giving away another website in March. You can fill out an entry form on the details page.
Fireworks is often overlooked. Many (most) web designers today use Photoshop to design their websites, and a lot of them have never considered or (*gasp) even heard of Fireworks. Adobe Fireworks is made for creating websites. That is what it was built for, and it does it well. Fireworks enables you to rapidly prototype and design for the web. With it you can create a clickable PDF that will act as a prototype. Also, you can quickly create export and optimize slices (Fireworks is better at optimizing images than Photoshop).
Now don’t get me wrong, Photoshop is an extremely powerful tool and is amazing; it has way more features than Fireworks, but if all you are doing is designing websites, then you should use software that was specifically made for doing just that. Another excellent feature to note about Fireworks is that it is compatible with Photoshop. For the most part, you can open a psd in Fireworks, and it will recognize all of your layers and styles, and with CS4, compatability between Adobe’s programs have been further improved.
If you are a web designer and have not looked into using Fireworks, you should at least try it out and see for yourself how efficient it really is. There are hundreds of other excellent features Fireworks has to offer, read more about them at Adobe’s site.
No, I’m not trying to put my designers out of a job. I just know that many people starting a business have time to set up a website themselves, but not all the skills. Here are a few websites you can use to get free designs. Warning: You will still need to modify some code to fit these to your specific needs.
Finally, we’re going to talk about the best way for a website to turn a profit, and that’s making actual money.
There are a many, many ways for a website to make money, and we’ll talk about a few of those.
First, you can sell advertising on your website, either directly or through a broker like Google AdSense, where they find the advertisers for you and automatically place them on your site. Direct selling of advertising on your site cuts out the middle-man and can, therefore, be more profitable. However, Google makes it very easy to set up AdSense on your website. AdSense scans the content of your site and links to relevant sponsors that pay Google when someone clicks on those links. Then Google pays you when someone clicks on the links, taking a cut off the top. The ads can be placed anywhere on your website. You can see in the screenshot to the left where ads were placed at the top of the website.
A website can be a lead-generating tool. You can find people who are possibly interested in your product by offering an e-book or report on a topic related to your business that potential clients and customers would find interesting. Just ask for very basic contact information and have your website automatically email them the report for free.
You generate leads similarily with giveaways, newsletters, or even with a simple “Get a Quote” form. Anything that collects very basic contact information and offers a benefit can help you to capture leads with your website. And the less information you request, the more likely people will be to sign up.
When you link to any such form, make sure the link is prominent on your website. It needs to be one of the first things that visitors to the website see. Website visitors tend to start looking at the top right of the page, then they look to the right, then down the page. So towards the top is generally a good place for the button. You can see good button placement on the website screenshot to the right.
The last method for making money on your website is probably the one people think of the most, and that is selling product directly on your site.
The key with selling anything on your website is to make it as easy as possible for people to buy. While there are both free and paid shopping cart solutions you can install on your website, those are often not necessary if you only have a few items. PayPal and Google Checkout both offer easy to integrate shopping carts. All you do is create an account with them, copy their code for “Add to cart” buttons and your website is ecommerce capable.
Of course, it helps if you also have items in your store that are appealing and easy to ship. While you may not want to list all of your available inventory online, your best bet is small items that are $20-$50 dollars. People are generally pretty comfortable buying something online in that price range, and will be that much more likely to impulse buy.
Now you’ve seen how websites can give you a great return on your investment when you set them up to save time, save money and make money. You should not be satisified with a simple brochure website that gives you an “online presence.” Instead, the website needs to be actively contributing to the bottom line of your business, or it’s not worth the money you spent on it.
While it’s certainly important that your website looks good, the real goal for your business’s website should be for it to benefit you financially. There are three main ways this can be done.
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be writing about each of these categories, and some ways different clients of ours have accomplished these goals. But let’s take a quick look at all three of them right now.
Save time
If you’re like many small business owners and dedicated employees, you’re spending plenty of time on your business. For some, the only real way they can make more money is if they can save time somewhere. A website can be a huge help in this area. At the least, it can be marketing for you day and night. But realistically, every single business has something process or task that can be sped up with the help of a website.
Save money
A website can actually save you money as well. I can’t count the number of people we’ve sold websites to that made their money back within a year just by cutting back or eliminating other forms of advertising.
Make money
Done well, a website has the possibility of being a money making machine. While this can, of course, vary greatly based on your industry, there are few who can’t actually make money with their website.
Stay tuned over the next few weeks as we go into more details about turning a profit with your website.
As I’ve mentioned before, we check our websites in six different browser / operating system combinations. Just the other day, my programmer asked me if we could stop checking in one of Opera. For Internet Explorer 6.0, there’s even an IE Death March website dedicated to telling others they should stop checking their websites in that browser.
To make things even more confusing, Wikipedia’s page of browser comparisons lists a whopping thirty-five current web browsers. Which ones should you check your website on?
Although we do take into account usage, as I mentioned before, we also take into account how easy it is to code for that browser. It’s a balance between the two. There are currently seven different programs on the browser usage list at w3schools.com. We check five of those seven. I’m going to talk about a three that are outliers in either usage, ease of coding, or both.
Internet Explorer 6.0
IE6 is a pain to code for. Thus the previously mentioned IE Death March website. However, it still has a significant market share, somewhere around 25% of the web surfers out there. Although it frequently frustrates our programmer (and many other programmers around the world), we continue to make sure our websites work in IE6, because we don’t want 1/4 of the website’s visitors to get less than the full intended effect of the website.
Internet Explorer 5.0
If you can imagine that IE6 is hard to code for, just imagine how much harder IE5 is. Combine that with the fact that it has less than a 0.5% market share makes it obvious why we don’t bother checking our sites in IE5.
Opera
Opera has a relatively small market share at 1.9%. However, it is fairly “standards compliant.” Simply, this means that once you code for other browsers that comply well with the web standards, (Firefox and Safari in our case), 99% of the time the website works correctly in Opera as well. So the low cost in terms of time means that we still check in Opera, despite its low market share.
Hopefully this gives you some indication why we check in the browsers we check in.