Why a great website isn't enough

Recently, someone on one of my lists posed the question: "How many of you get business from your website?" In my mind, this is the wrong question to ask. Rather than posing it this way, what I think you really want to ask is "how do I get people to my website so they can learn about my business?" and "how do I set up my website so that, once people end up on it, they'll be inspired to work with me?"

A website isn't a magic bullet that will make all your business dreams come true; it has to work in concert with all the other things you do to promote yourself. For example, many of my customers (almost all, in fact), have seen my website by the time they hire me, but they don't just randomly happen upon it. They find me through one of my various online communities, or meet me at a networking event, or find this blog. They connect with something I've said on a forum, or taught in a class. That intrigues them to look at my site, and since it's well-built and the work is good, I get business.

But if I didn't do all these different things to promote my site, people wouldn't find it, and I wouldn't get business from it.

If you want to get business from your website, you need to put in the effort to build it well, to create a professional presence with engaging content, and to promote it - otherwise, it just becomes another bit of noise in an already-polluted Internet.

The trouble with Templates

If you're a business owner on a tight budget, pre-designed web templates might look like a great answer for you. And there are a ton of them out there, ranging in price from free to $500+. In addition, there are plenty of companies that let you build "custom websites" without having to hire a pro designer, at relatively inexpensive rates. Pretty great deal, right?

Well, it can be. But more often than not, templates are not your friend, for several reasons:
• They're not as "customizable" as you think, especially if you don't know HTML already. Sure, there are some things you can do, but for the most part, you're stuck with what you get... and as your business grows, this lack of flexibility becomes even more annoying, not to mention bad for business.
• Support is often insufficient or non-existent. Some companies that provide what's often billed as "website solutions" do provide a high level of service, features, etc. for the price you pay, and can be a good option if you really don't have the cash to spend right now - but most of the lowest-cost options offered through these services are still a Do-It-Yourself situation, which gets frustrating quick if you haven't done this before.
• It takes time away from activities that you're already good at, and takes you away from growing your business. When you went into business for yourself, was it because you wanted to learn HTML, SEO or logo design? Unless your business is graphic or web design, the answer is most likely no. Forcing yourself into a situation where you are doing all of the marketing, logo design, etc. for your business not only takes your valuable time away from your business, it forces you to do a lot more work with a lot less results than if you had found the right designer to partner with on your materials.
• It sends the wrong message to your customers. Let's face it - you're a professional, and want to be viewed as such. When you do your own website, it shows.

As a fellow entrepreneur, I completely understand the desire to keep costs down - when you're first starting out, it's hard to shell out the bucks to have a professional do your stuff. But a good designer does more than just put together your website - they can provide support and encouragement, and help you separate the things that will work well for you from the "great ideas" that, um, aren't so great. So while a template might get you by for a while, it's worth it to make the investment in your business and work with a professional.

Can a blog replace a promo site?

Recently, someone on one of my lists had a question. While he knew that it was important to have a website and he'd heard a lot about the SEO goodness and other associated benefits of having a blog, he wanted to know which was more important - the blog or the promo site? Could you just go with a blog instead of a more static promo site and still get the same results?

The answer is a bit complicated, but I'm a firm believer in having both - for a variety of reasons.

Blogs are great for SEO and getting recognition for your business (especially establishing you as an expert in your field, which is marketing gold). The challenge with using blogs instead of a more basic promo site is the fact that a blog, while it can give lots of great information about your field and things you do within it, doesn't accomplish the main goal of a company's website - to outline their offerings and show a potential customer why they should choose them over the competition.

While you can use a blog to provide information that enforces the points made on your company site (as I do with this blog and the zen kitchen's site), the promotional site, to which the customer can turn for basic information about the company, its mission, contact info, etc. is still an important piece of the puzzle that shouldn't be overlooked.

The goal of a promotional site is to make it extremely easy for the customer to get the information they need to know whether they want to work with your company - that means contact info, client case studies/testimonials, a breakdown of what you do and why you do it better than the competition is right there in front of the customer, and extremely easy to find (preferably in the top navigation, which is where the average user will look). Traditional blogs, with their emphasis on throwing all the most recent posts on the first page, make it harder for folks to answer the key question a user will ask when they visit your site: what is this company, and why should I work with them?

Given this, you can use most blog software to create a site that accomplishes both goals, and updating content regularly (for example, posting to the attached blog) will enhance the SEO of the site, as will being active on other blogs and social networks. So, unless you're looking for special advanced functionality (which would require custom programming and can drive costs up), a talented designer can create a site that maintains the structure of a promotional site while having the SEO benefits and (relatively) easy updating of a blog.

New Work: Kitchen on Common Website

It's been crazy with the work-finishing lately; just crazy, I tell you! The most recent addition to this flood of productivity is also one of the most exciting for me: the unleashing of the Kitchen on Common website (click the link to view in all its glory). Kitchen on Common is a new restaurant located in Cushing Square, just a stone's throw away from my office in Watertown MA (literally, I can walk there - and do. Quite often. It's just that tasty.)

Chef Joh Kokubo, a Lexington MA resident and owner of Kitchen on Common, is committed to using fresh, local ingredients whenever possible - no small feat in New England! But he does an amazing job, providing a terrific meal at reasonable prices, and creating food that's worth going back for as long as it's available (since much of his cuisine is dependent on local growing seasons, items don't stay on the menu for too long).



This design came together with fresh, simple imagery (much like the food at Kitchen on Common itself), and elegant typography. In order to make it easy for Joh to update the frequently-changing menu, a simple template was created for both the lunch and dinner menus that Joh can simply export to PDF and replace in the site files, saving both time and money on frequent updates.

In addition to the recently completed website, the zen kitchen designed the identity, business card, signage and menus for the restaurant, and will be helping with ongoing marketing in the near future.

New Work: Christine Tetreault Website

Christine Tetreault, a freelance journalist and copywriter based outside Boston MA, needed a new web presence to help her focus her work away from the technical copywriting and editing she had been doing and lean towards more travel, outdoors and wellness/spirituality writing, her current passion. Working with Dani Nordin of the zen kitchen, a comprehensive identity package and website was created to help her showcase her work.



Feedback has already been positive for the new site. Says Christine, “From my first meeting with Dani, I found it impossible not to be energized and inspired by her positive energy and willingness to share her learning and experience as a creative artist and successful small business owner. Dani's business and design guidance have been invaluable in helping me to craft my writing goals and web site style, format, and content. Dani is a breeze to work with as a business partner, be it in person, by phone, or via email -- comfortable, open creative exchange, diplomatic artistic discussion, and above and beyond results! I highly recommend Dani and The Zen Kitchen for any creative graphic design, marketing, web project. Her green commitment is an added bonus to her exceptional talents.”

Check out the site here.

SEO: Some more basics

Lately, I've been getting a lot of questions about SEO - what it is, how to do it, do I do it, can I help them? To be honest, I don’t do what some people call SEO – I don’t submit sites to search engines, or buy adwords, or any of those other things that people who publicize their SEO services. But what I do - well, do - is build well-put-together websites that Google seems to like very much (for example, my website is currently #4 for Somerville MA Graphic Designer) using clean code and web standards with appropriate keywords, descriptions and indexing calls so that search engines can find it. I also consult on content to make sure that the appropriate keywords are actually in the body of the website – this convinces search engines that you legitimately fit with that keyword. Just to give you an idea, I’ve seen sites where “photographer Boston MA” is a keyword, for example, but nowhere on the site did it actually say that he was in Boston MA. Result? No Google.

That said, SEO is an ongoing process – you can buy adwords to get to the top of Google, for example, but if you want to get there for free, there’s a lot of sweat equity that goes into it – most of that is getting your URL in as many other websites as possible. Blogs and forums actually make that pretty easy, but it does require reading blogs/forums that are relevant to what you do or what your audience needs and leaving insightful comments on the posts. The software gives you a free, easy and completely legit way to insert a link to your website, and you’d be surprised how much traffic I get from that method. Also, getting in as many appropriate (and legit!) directories as possible is always a good thing. I’m listed on quite a few directories, and gotten work from all of them.

Some things that I’ve learned along the way in terms of SEO:

• Search engines like well-built sites, especially sites that are built using standards. Since standards naturally separate content from presentation, it’s easier for them to figure out what a page is. This means higher rankings.


• They also love pages that are updated frequently (note, this DOESN’T mean dynamic. Search engines often actually have problems with dynamically-driven pages). This is one of the reasons that blogs are so popular – they’re always well-built, have tons of content to search through, and they’re updated frequently.


• Search engines HATE FLASH. They can’t read it, they can’t use it to figure out what the page is or what’s on the page, and unless your average user is a teenager with way too much time on their hands who wants to sit there playing web games, users don’t really like it either. The average user wants to get in, find the information they’re looking for, and find out how to get in touch with you. This is one of the problems I tend to have with a lot of designer websites – it’s all Flash with no substance.

The best way to draw people to your website, ultimately, is by advertising it everywhere – in your e-mail signature, in your signature on posts in blogs and forums, and on all your marketing materials. E-mail newsletters are also good ways to keep your site top-of-mind. The biggest myth people seem to buy into regarding their website is that a) people are just going to “find it” once it’s built and you don’t have to put any effort into promoting it, b) metatags and keywords are all you really need to promote your site, and c) once they find it, they’ll stay on it and pore over every page. They just aren’t. You need to make the content interesting, and you need to spend the time promoting the site through giving people the URL and talking about the site.

Pushing the web envelope

I just happened across this incredible site for author Miranda July's new collection of short stories, Noone Belongs Here More than You. What's great about this site is the concept - a story told on the top of the author's appliances with dry-erase marker, and links to outside sources to actually purchase the book and read more about the offer. It's brilliant - simple, entertaining, and it fits the author's personality (and the personality of the book) perfectly. If you have a second, definitely check it out.

SEO Made Simple(ish)

Today, while catching up on the Marketing Mix Blog (because every once in a while, I do have time to do such things), I was pointed to a great post on Search Engine Optimization by Joan Damico of Integrated Marketing Minute (a new subscription is in order, methinks). In the post, she goes over some of the basics of writing copy with search engine users in mind, and discusses some great ways to set up blog posts, websites, etc. for maximum Google juice.

A quick excerpt from the post:

it's not just about sprinkling keywords throughout, it's a strategy for placing them effectively in the right places. Search engines crawl a page hierarchy from meta data to header tags to body copy identify keyword matches.

You can read the full post here.

All of this is great advice, but I have a few things to add, from my experience as a web designer. Search engines like Google give a lot of precedence to sites that are built well. Back in 2004, when I switched from old-school table-based layouts to using web standards, I saw the Google ratings for my sites fly up within a week. Part of that is because standards-based layout forces you to separate presentation from content, which means that content flows smoothly for search crawlers without being forced into odd places to satisfy the designer's whim. When you look at the page, you see a beautiful layout, with everything where you want it to be. When you look at the code, you see all the content arranged in a logical order, which makes more sense to the search engines - hence, it looks like a good page and moves up a bit in the rankings.

Another thing I've noticed is that <alt> tags on your images and <title> tags in links make a huge difference; when I changed the tzk site to include appropriate alt and title tags (which mentioned the fact that the work was done by the zen kitchen in Somerville, MA), I noticed an instant jump in my Google ratings.

Adding these tags is easy. If you're creating a link in a post, for example, you'd type the code:
<a href="http://tzk-design.com" target="new"> link text </a>

To add a title to it, you'd just type: <a href="http://tzk-design.com" title="the zen kitchen, Somerville MA: Graphic and Web Design with a Touch of Green" target="new"> link text </a>

and it would look like this:
link text

The same is true with images. For example, if I wanted to put a picture of my cat, Persephone (because why not?) in a post as the tzk mascot, I'd type the code:

<img src="http://tzk-design.com/f/pers.jpg" alt="Persephone, the zen kitchen's mascot" />

and that would look like this:


It looks just the same as if you didn't include it, BUT adding the title or alt text adds an extra hit of keywords for the search engine to notice. One quick caveat, however; whatever the title or alt text you insert, it's important that it be relevant to what the link or image actually is. You need to make sure that it represents what you're actually referring to; otherwise, search engines get irritated and knock you down a few pegs.

web usability and social networking

So, as I read through my latest copy of Yoga Journal (which, finally, I've made some time to read), I see an ad for zaadz, a social networking site (think MySpace) for spiritually-minded, conscious-capitalism type folks. Think MySpace meets a yoga/nature retreat. Great idea, I thought. So I started clicking around, checking things out.



Overall, it's still a great idea. One small problem, though: it's really hard to use.

Don't get me wrong; things work the way they should. It's not like my issues with Gather, which kicks you out every time you leave the site even if you tell it to remember your password and makes you go through three steps to delete a single e-mail. This is more an issue of someone in marketing getting the better of the design team.

For one thing, the visuals of the site don't really say what the site is about. Instead, there's this massive pile of copy that explains to you what the site is about that you have to read all the way through to actually get it. Then, you have to deal with the navigation. Instead of just telling you what everything is with names that actually make sense, the navigation is populated with rather annoying marketing speak: "zPods." "zPages." "zaazters." (what the heck are "zaazters"? Is that a real word?)



While I appreciate the desire to be unique, I have a pretty fair amount of web experience at this point in my career (after all, I build sites as part of my living), and even I didn't know what half of that stuff meant. Or at the very least, I had to think about what it could be a lot longer than I should have had to.

Mind you, it's still in its early stages; hopefully they'll be able to find and fix some of these things before they fully launch. And I'll probably still end up joining, even if I don't end up spending much time on it. But some advice for them, and for anyone building a site for that matter: if you want more people to stick around on your site, don't try to give things clever marketing names. Name them what they are.

Which reminds me, I have to change some things around on the tzk site. More on that in January.

Feedback request: how can I improve the zen kitchen's site?

I’m gearing up, now that I have a moment to breathe, to revamp the TZK site, and I’m thinking it needs a bit of a re-design; I’ll likely keep the same color scheme, and a few other things are going to stay consistent, but I want to clean it up a bit; maybe move things around. So, in the interest of market research, I’d like to ask you, my humble friends, for your opinions on what works about the current site and how I might improve things in the next version. If you have a moment, I’d love it if you’d take a look and give me your feedback.

The site’s at tzk-design.com; some things I’m definitely thinking about already:

• Keeping the portfolio broken down by client, but changing the way that case studies are displayed to showcase the images more than the text (haven’t quite figured out how that will work yet, but if anyone has a suggestion, it would be appreciated.)
• Changing the navigation to be more clear and text-oriented;
• Breaking up the “fun stuff section” into photography and recipes (I think I can get rid of the stuff I do for fun, since I don’t do enough of it)
• Switching the recipes into a food blog that has recipes and general foodie notes.
• Cutting some of the copy;
• making the sample sheets, resumé and client questionnaire more easily accessible.

Thanks in advance for your help.