Web Designers: Getting Tight With Your New Team

Original Article from IntelliSites, the smart choice for web design (and SEO!)
Keeping a solid relationship between you and your web designer can make the web design process a lot easier. So how can you keep the relationship strong?

• Know your likes and dislikes. Do a little homework before you meet with your web designer for the first time. Look at websites of other companies in your industry and see what you like about their sites. Do you dig your competitor’s photo gallery? Do you hate another company’s color scheme? After you’ve seen a couple of existing websites, think about what you want your site to look like and what capabilities you’d like it to have. If you have clear ideas and expectations, it will make our work a lot easier.
• And stick with those likes and dislikes. The relationship between web designer and client tends to get a little strained when the client gets fickle. Stick to your instincts - the first ideas that came to you were probably the best, and if you keep changing your mind about what you want, your web designer is going to have trouble keeping up.
• But be flexible. Although web designers like their clients to know what they want, web designers also need the freedom to run with the ideas and adjust them to make them realistic. We want guidance from our clients, but we also need our clients to trust us to fine tune their ideas in order to make them work.
• Buy your web designer expensive gifts. One of these would be nice
• Communicate. With any relationship, communication is key. Once in awhile, we have a client that is tough to get a hold of, and that makes the design process very difficult. The quicker you can return our calls and e-mails, the stronger our relationship will be (and the better your website will be).

Work with us on these things, and we promise to deliver the creative problem solving and great design you need to make your business stand out on the web.

Make Them Remember

Original Article from IntelliSites, the smart choice for web design (and SEO!)
Next time you are bored at work, here's a little experiment to help you procrastinate.

Approach a coworker and recite a random list of words. Something like, “Stethoscope, pickle, muffin, charisma, snapdragon, encyclopedia, jiggle, lawnmower, pretzel, sandcastle, Aristotle, pancake, damsel, bridge, magnesium, pediatrician, chihuahua” would be great. Then, ask him to tell you what words you said.

If your colleague is anything like the subjects of similar experiments that have been conducted by actual science professionals, you'll find that he'll remember the first item or two maybe the last one. You'll also find that he has trouble coming up with the items in the middle. Real scientists call this the “primacy and recency effect,” and it basically just means that it's easiest for folks to remember the first and last things they see or hear.

How This Can Make Your Website Better

Since important scientist people have established that the primacy and recency effect theory holds water, we can use this information to design effective websites. We know that on a typical web page, there is some semi-important information and some SUPER important information. If we know that an average person is likely to have the strongest memories of the first and last thing he reads, we can make sure that the SUPER important information is strategically placed in a spot that is likely to be read first or last.

We've actually got tons of little tricks like this up our sleeves. We not only design websites that look good, but we use our knowledge of human behavior to make sure websites get their messages across in the strongest way possible. It's all part of a day's work here at IntelliSites.

By the way, now that it's been a couple of minutes since you read our sample item list, try to remember what the items were without looking.  We'll betcha you'll have the toughest time with the items in the middle of the list.

How'd you do?

Are You Maximizing Your Search Engine Marketing?

Original Article from IntelliSites, the smart choice for web design (and SEO!)
How's your search engine optimization going?  Good?  That's super!  If you've been cleaning up the pages of your website to make them more attractive to the search engines of the world, you have taken a really important first step to getting noticed on the web.  Give yourself a cookie!

But while you're chomping away on your Chips Ahoy, take a minute to read about a couple of other things you might want to be doing as well.  (And if you're doing them already, feel free to reward yourself with more nummies!)

Pay Your Way to the Top...Or at Least, to the Side

If only you could bribe Google the way you sometimes can bribe the maitre d' of a restaurant!  It would be great to slip Google a $20 spot and get a place at the top of the page in return.  Since that's not possible, Pay Per Click (PPC) ads are the next best thing.  You write ads, identify the relevant keywords, and wait patiently for people to type the keywords into Google.  When someone does, your ad will pop up on the side of his screen - and you pay nothing unless he clicks on it.

Setting up a PPC campaign is a great supplement to SEO because it can address issues that SEO can't.  You can set up temporary PPC ads for special sales or promotions.  You can also identify many more keywords through PPC than you ever could with SEO.  PPC + SEO = Lots of visitors to your site.

Analyze Those Analytics

Google Analytics are, in a word, amazing.  When you have analytics installed on your site, Google will track a ridiculous amount of information for you.  Want to know how many people visited your site?  How they got there?  How long they stayed?  What town they're from?  It's a little scary, but you can find out all that information, and more.

And once you have that information, you can use it to improve your site and make it more enticing for the 289 people from New York, 28 people from Connecticut, 12 people from Maine, and 2 people from Japan who you now know have visited your site!

Help Them Land

In addition to using SEO strategies for your whole site, you might want to set up landing pages for special purposes and make sure those are search engine friendly.  For instance, if you were a cookie baker who wanted to advertise his holiday cookie line, you could set up a special page for that and make sure everyone Googling "holiday cookies new york" finds your site.  This will help pull visitors through a "back door" of your site, and directly to the page that's most relevant for them.

If you're on target with all of those, you deserve a real treat.