Small Business Web Design

Michael Oliveras is a long-time union carpenter making the entrepreneurial jump and starting his own business: Mike's Precision Carpentry, serving the New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware from his shop in Hammonton, NJ. He came to me looking for a webpage to advertise his new enterprise.

It's a simple design, a typical small-business site of half-a-dozen pages. The color scheme matches his business cards for a bit of branding. Oliveras faced a problem typical for new businesses: a lack of good photos. The work he's done for many years is not technically his own (per the employment contracts) so for now the pictures are a mix of the few jobs he has done on his own and a few stock images. I'm sure he'll have a well-rounded portfolio before long and we'll be able to fill out the site with his own work. In the meantimes, he added a couple of great pictures of him and his family on the "About Us" page to give it that personal touch.

See it live: www.mikesprecisioncarpentry.com

A potential client recently came to me with an existing site. It certainly was slick: the homepage featured a Flash animation of telegenic young professionals culled from a stock photo service, psuedo-jazz techno music, and words sweeping in from all sides selling you the company's service. Unfortunately the page had no useful content, no call-to-action and no Google PageRank. It was an expensive design, but I didn't need to look at the tracking stats to know no one came this page.

So you're ready to ditch a non-performing site for one more dynamic, something that will attract customers and interact with them. Here's five tips for building a self-marketing website!

One: Useful Content for your Target Audience Give visitors a reason to come to the site. Text-rich, changing content is essential. In practicality, this means installing a blog and writing posts every few weeks. You'll see measures like "keyword relevancy" increase instantly as excerpted text shows up on the homepage. Add videos and photos if your company or team has that expertise, but remember: when it comes to search, text is king.

Two: Give away something valuable or useful Many smart marketing sites feature some free giveaway right on the homepage: a useful quiz, professional analysis, a PDF how-to guidebook. A builder I worked with went to the trouble of posting dozens of floor plans & pictures to their website and compiling them into a PDF book, which they gave away for free. The catch in all this? You have to give your contact information to get it. Once the free material has been compiled, the site runs itself as a sales lead generator!

Three: Ask yourself the Three User Questions! It's amazing how focused the mind gets when you actually sit down to define goals. Just about every website can benefit from this three-step exercise:

1. Who is the target audience?
2. What would draw them to the site? 
3. What do we want to get from them?

Get a group together to through your website page by page these questions. Brainstorm a list of changes you could make. You'll want to end up with Defined Goals: what quantifiable actions do you want visitors to take? It might well just be the successful completion of a contact form.

Four: Test Test and Test Again Many small businesses now get a lot of their customers from their websites. Your website is an essential piece of your marketing and publicity and you need to be smart about it. Compile together your favorite site-improvement ideas and make up  alternate designs incorporating the changes. Then use a tool such as Google Website Optimizer to put the alternatives through their paces. Which one "converts" better, i.e., which design gets you higher percentages in the Defined Goals you've set? Once you've finished a test, move on to the next brainstorming idea and implement it. Always be testing!

An extensive series of tests of one site I worked on doubled it's conversion rate: imagine your company doubling its internet sales? It is completely worth spending the time and effort to go through this process.

Five: Don't Be Afraid to Get Professional Help If you need to hire a professional to help you through this process you'll almost certainly get your money's worth! A recent projects cost the customer $6000 but I was able to document savings of $100,000 per year in his publicity costs! See my piece What to Look For in SEO Consultants for my insider-advice to how to pick a honest and competent professional web publicity consultant.

Many Friends will know me from my active involvement in the Quaker world. I've been dubbed the "Quaker Blogfather" for my Quaker Ranter (site) blog and my work in pulling together QuakerQuaker (site), an online magazine and blogging community with over five hundred members and 10,000 visitors a month. I am also a frequent Quaker workshop leader and published writer.

I started building websites in 1995 with an award-winning Nonviolence.org hub site and was a social media pioneer when I redesigned its homepage to a blog format three years later. Before going independent as MartinKelley.com in 2006, I served on the staff of Friends General Conference (site) for eight years, where I worked in the FGC Quaker bookstore and built the Quakerfinder, FGC Gathering and youth ministry sites. I also worked for Friends Journal (site) for two years, putting select articles from their Quaker magazine online every month. Since then I've been privileged to work with Quaker organizations such as Friends World Committee for Consultation (site), Friends Council on Education (site) and Haverford Friends Meeting (site). I've done some exciting media work with the Philadelphia Penn Charter School (site) and built personal sites for well known Friends. I bring our testimony of integrity to every business transaction and when I address topics such as search engine optimization or pricing philosophy, I try to do so from a Friends perspective.

Web Design Specialties:

A local client from Tabernacle in Burlington County came to me with an interesting project. He's owned a commercial cleaning company for a number of years and has heard his share of horror stories about the cleaning services clients hired before finding him! This experience led him to write a PDF e-book about how to hire the right cleaning service. What a great idea and a what a useful book this is for small business owners.

The site's on a bit of a budget so it's a simple design, with colors and general look-and-feel borrowed from a site the client likes. Simple editing comes via CushyCMS. When customers click to buy, they are sent to Paypal for the actual transaction and then forwarded to E-Junkie, which provides the automated and integrated PDF download.

Visit the site: Office Manager's Guide to Hiring the Best Cleaning Service

I follow the tech world closely. I'm not particularly interested in the who-bought-who world of venture capitalists. Instead, I'm interested in the lived world where people are adopting new ways of communicating online and the practical implications that has for small businesses and niche marketers.

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I spend quite a bit of time in Vineland New Jersey (08360, 08361). My wife hails from an old Italian Vineland family (yes you're probably related) and work, family and friends brings me down there all the time. I recently launched a site for the historic Alliance Cemetery in nearby Norma. If you have a small business or project you want to get online, call or email. Initial email and phone consultations are always free; if you decide to use my services then I'd be happy to come visit with you in person.

Martin Kelley is a web designer in the Philadelphia area. Here's the story of his evolution from activist book editor to social media web guru!

MartinKelley.com, 364 North Street, Hammonton NJ 08037
Email: martink@martinkelley.com
Phone: (609) 365-0123
Instant Messaging: martinjkelley (Google, Yahoo, Skype, AOL, Live/MSN)

Free Initial Consultation:

Initial phone/email consultations are free: I'll work with you to figure just what kind of website you want and what sort of features you need. I take this information and pull it into a proposal with price quotes. I only start charging after we agree on the general outlines. I cover my pricing philosophy in some detail over on my design blog.

If you need an on-site visit, you can set up a consulting house call. If you subsequently decide to use my services, half of this charge will be credited toward your project deposit.

Rates

Projects are billed at $75/hour.

House Calls

Need help with your website? Want to meet before committing to a project?

Local House Calls: $100 first hour, $75/hr additional.
Philly Metro House Calls: $150 first hour, $75/hr additional.
My Kitchen Table: Just the $75/hr.

Local is South Jersey within about a half hour's drive of Hammonton, NJ. Both rates: one hour minimum. Additional time charged by the half hour.

Typical costs:

• Basic blog set-up: $600
• Analysis of a commercial site's SEO: $1200
• Small business or nonprofit web redesign: $2000
• Customized social media networking or news aggregator site: $3500

Payment:

If we've entered a contract or you need to pay off a balance you can pay by credit card (payment processed by Paypal).