Responsive Web Design Critical to Your Bottom Line

Have you re-designed your web site in the past couple of years? If not, you are likely in urgent need to update it to a responsive web design. If you’re a digital marketing person, you already know what that is. If you’re not, you may be wondering what I’m talking about and why I say it is critical to your bottom line.

Why Responsive Web Design Is So Important

A while ago I shared data on the shift of consumers to mobile devices to find information. I blogged about it in Mobile First Marketing. I also blogged about what I called Mobile Meltdown Day earlier this year when Google was updating their mobile search rankings. (Others called it Mobilegeddon.) Mobile Meltdown is just beginning. The reality of the initial impact was less than expected. About 17% of non mobile-friendly sites saw their mobile search ranking decline significantly from page 1 results. But that shouldn’t make you complacent about mobile-friendly sites that use responsive web design.. Mobile searches are already over 50% of total searches and continue to increase.

Failure to make responsive web design a priority will put your business at risk moving forward. You will be missing out on customers if they do not have good experience with your web site on mobile devices. In the short-term they may continue to find you in search results. But they will likely abandon you when your site is shrunken, un-optimized, unreadable, and difficult to use. Depending on your business and the typical age ranges of your customers you may already be at risk of losing new customers. The potential impact to your bottom line is huge.

What is Responsive Web Design?

I primarily use three different devices for accessing information on the Internet. I have standardized on Apple (don’t get me started on my poor experiences with past Microsoft products!). So I use an iPhone, iPad, and Macbook Pro at different times and locations. At work I am using my desktop browser(s) on a large screen. If I’m relaxing in the family room, I usually have my iPad open checking social media, reading news, using apps, and searching for information using the browser. If I am not at home I am using apps and searching for information on my iPhone while I am on the move. You may have fewer or more devices than me, but you get the idea. No matter what device size I am using I want to be able to read and interact with information from your business. If it’s unreadable, too slow, requiring me to go to a separate mobile site, or otherwise difficult to use, I just go to the next of your competitors. I personally don’t have time or patience to deal with your business if you don’t make it easy for me to learn about or find you. And I’m not alone!

Responsive web design is the approach to deal with this situation of multiple devices to have a consistently satisfying customer experience. It is a way of designing and developing web sites so that they are easy to read, interact with, and navigate across a wide range of devices. It is an approach for your web site to adapt and adjust to the customer, based on which device they are using at the time. There should be minimal re-sizing and side-to-side scrolling required. Mobile customer experiences should be optimized for speed and for minimal page switching.

How You or Your Web Designer Implement Responsive Web Design

You may use tools or frameworks such as Webflow, Bootstrap, Foundation, or Skeleton if you are Web developer into the technical details. For a WordPress-based web site, I like to start with a theme that already incorporates principles of good, responsive design. That way I can focus more on the customer experience and compelling marketing content.

Principles and best practices continue to emerge for Responsive Web Design, but these are some to consider now:

Start by designing for the mobile customer
Use images that are flexible and workable on retina displays from small to very large
Compress images and videos to improve performance
Get rid of non-essential content and site decorations
Present more information that can be seen scrolling downward rather than requiring a lot of back and forth between pages
Get rid of Flash on your site
Minimize navigation menus
Have important information at the top of your site
Use bigger buttons
Look at whether you should have an app in addition to a web site

Small and mid-sized businesses are particularly lagging in the move to responsive web design. If your web site is not yet using responsive web design it needs to be on your priority list of things to do. You’re probably already losing some customers who are trying to interact with you on mobile devices. But this will increase significantly over the next 1-2 years. The time to act is now before you see a negative impact to your bottom line.

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Let me know any comments or questions.

Kauai Business: Using Kauai Marketing Talent?

I have been blessed to meet many wonderful and talented people on my home island of Kauai. One of the things that has also frustrated me is that I have also met business people who went off-island or to the mainland to hire marketing projects and services rather than use Kauai marketing resources.

One of the weaknesses of our collective culture with word of mouth referrals for awareness is that you may be missing out on a great marketing partner in your own backyard.

Yes, with the Internet, we are a global village and web design and other digital marketing work can technically be performed from anywhere. So there is no technical reason not to hire your sister-in-law in Oregon, your friend’s cousin in Minnesota, or a marketing agency in Honolulu.

However, I would argue that their marketing expertise can also be found on Kauai. And they likely lack the day to day intimacy with our culture, values, and unique characteristics.

I understand that in past years there may not have been the maturity and wealth of digital marketing expertise that there is now. Some of it is home grown and some of it has been imported.

Through the Kauai Chamber of Commerce and in other venues I have met a number of the other people on Kauai who have marketing, web design, graphics, email marketing, blogging, and social media marketing expertise.

I would hope after speaking with me that I might be a good fit to assist you with your marketing. But in some cases, I understand there may be a better fit with one of my competitors.

I encourage you to do some web searches, talk with Chamber of Commerce members, and have exploratory conversations with some marketing people you may not have met before. You might be surprised at the wealth of talent you will find!

Did you know there is:

a former Fortune 500 worldwide marketing executive providing consulting, training, and a range of digital marketing services?
an Emmy-winning graphic designer on our island?
someone who was the CEO of Japanese subsidiaries for major companies?
a marketing executive with specific expertise in ecommerce?

For a small island I have found there are actually a lot of us who can design custom web sites at affordable prices. Which one is right for you depends on factors such as

time constraints and availability
integration with other external systems
a one-off web site project versus ongoing marketing assistance
personality and fit in working styles and vision
recommendations on how to develop a brand and a marketing strategy and plan
is up to date with latest web design and online marketing trends

I believe a rising tide lifts all boats. Wouldn’t it be great if local Kauai businesses supported other local Kauai businesses and independent contractors? We also provide world-class freelance marketing projects and ongoing marketing services.

Let’s market Kauai with Kauai marketing…..

Who Owns Your Kauai Web Design?

I have been in business a long time now. I have seen and heard a lot of different situations and worked through many challenges. But I was shocked by a couple of stories in the past month from business people located here on Kauai. In both cases, they had learned that their domain name registration and Kauai web design were not owned by them. Do you know who owns your domain and web design? Is it you or someone else?

Two Stories of Unclear Ownership

One of my clients was recently telling me how she used a web designer in the past who also registered her domain name and set up web hosting for her. When she wanted to change the web design, web designer, and hosting, the original web designer refused to transfer her domain name to an account in her name. He told her that he “owned” her domain. Eventually she got him to change the name servers so that she could create a new site and use a different hosting company. And she created her new web design without him. But she is still beholden to him to pay her domain registration to him each year and hope that he will continue to update name servers when needed.

Another local business manager told me the story of why they had to change their domain name a few years ago. Today when you type in the name of their business with a .com, you are redirected to the blog of someone who no longer lives on Kauai or focuses on web design. When they wanted to create a new website a few years ago with a different web designer, the original web designer told them he “owned” their domain name. He also refused to transfer the domain registration to an account in their name. He did offer to sell them their own domain name for several tens of thousands of dollars. Rather than pay ransom for their own domain name they made the hard decision to change it and use a longer name. He still maintains the domain registration of their name and has it redirecting traffic to his personal blog. How is that for vindictive?!

Business Components of Setting Up a Website

You may recall that there are three major components to having a website for your business. First, you need a domain name registered. This is your URL, your brand on the Internet, and the way people access your web site. You have to find an available domain name and pay a yearly registration fee for you to “own” and use it.

Second, you need a company to host your website. This is the company running the computers and network for your web site. You want a hosting company that has stable, secure, and high performing servers that are optimized for serving website content.

Third, you want a web designer or web design company that has both the graphic and marketing skills to develop a web site look, feel, plus the content that creates a great user experience for your customers and prospects. It also provides the navigation to support your customers and prospects wherever they are in their purchase decision making process.

These three things may be supplied by one, two, or three different companies. Or one person or company may arrange all three on your behalf using other vendors for one or more of the three major components.

There are lot of free lance graphics people who offer web design. They may or may not be good business and marketing partners to help you grow your particular business. And they may or may not be advising you and looking out for your business interests in addition to their own.

How to Protect Your Brand

There are a couple of things you can do:

Set up your own domain registration and web hosting accounts in your company name and separately from engaging your web designer. Many companies offer both domain registration and web hosting. You may not run into a problem with that if you are dealing with a large company with ethical leadership and well defined contract terms. But to really protect yourself it is a recommended best practice to have your domain registration and web hosting with two different companies. If you find you need to change web hosting, then you have the control instead of the company you are trying to sever ties with.
Make sure you have a written contract with your web designer or web design company that outlines not only the scope of work to be done but also who owns what. The time to ensure you will maintain ownership of your domain, hosting relationship, and website content is before you sign an agreement and begin work. I would not set up a domain or web host on a client’s behalf and then tell them I own it. But obviously there are people out there who do. They may not even give you access to the content in your website if you decide to terminate the relationship with them. A written contract will protect you if in the future something goes wrong in your relationship with your web design company.

On the beautiful island of Kaui it seems that the spirit of Aloha doesn’t always hold true in business relationships that fail. Your domain, your website security and performance, and your website look and content are all part of your brand. They determine the experience of your customers and prospects. They either help or hinder your ability to gain new customers or maintain your existing customers. It is critical that you ensure these elements of your brand are owned and controlled by you.

Have you run into difficulties with domain or website content ownership? Do you know who owns your domain, hosting relationships, and web design?

Is Your Web Designer Good or Great?

I’ve seen multiple presentations on what defines a great web designer. These presentations will tell you that there are specific things that define a great website and a good website. They mention–sometimes quite emphatically– that great websites are never created from templates and that a good website design and a great website design are vastly different. I would argue that a great web designer is one who understands your audience and your business objectives to create a visually appealing design that produces results.

Good design and great design are two very different things. By the same token, what separates a good web designer from a great web designer isn’t quite so pat or so easily distinguished. There are a few criteria by which you can tell what is and what is not a good website design. In fact, you’ll read a great deal about what defines a good design and how it is different from a great design.

Good design, it’s said, has some tells. In a presentation at Webmaster Jam in about 2005-2006, website great Cameron Moll told the world that the differences between good design and great design were these:

Good designers decorate while great designers communicate
Good designers believe less is more while great designers felt that less and more could effectively co-exist.
Good designers fixed problems, while great designers prevented them.
Good designers treated text as content, while great designers treated text as a user interface.
Good designers use good typefaces while great designers use good typography.
Good designers redesign while great designers realigned.

With all due respect to Mr Moll, there’s a little more to it than that. The things that qualify as great design in this presentation are things that can be taught and imparted by a good school and ample practice. What makes a great web designer are things that usually cannot.

You don’t often find something that tells you what a great web designer does that makes him great. Most of it has to do with quality, timely, outstanding website design.

Some of it, however, does not. .

Does the man who has clients out the door and around the block, whose every design is spot on qualify as a great designer? Does he hold that status if his work is always late and his attitude is always bad? If he cares more about his fee than he does about your brand, does he get to keep the great designer status?

Not if the customer is wise, he doesn’t.

Does a good web designer whose work is solid, speedy and timely, very good, but perhaps not outstanding qualify as great? Do they achieve that status if they bring with them a wonderful attitude, a willingness to listen, and a work ethic that sees them completing their work on time and under budget?

They probably do qualify as great in that instance, but if the design isn’t precisely right, we’re not going to give them the name.

Can a good designer produce a great design? The answer is of course they can. With the right practice, the right tools and the right input from the customer, a good designer, one who has less than perfect skills can give you a great design.

Just as any other skill can be enhanced by learning, can be built on by practice, website design can as well. Breaking out of your normal routine, exploring and expanding your horizons can produce a great design from a good designer. In fact, mediocre designers can produce top quality “excellent” designs.

What do you look for in a great web designer?

If you’re looking for a quality web designer, what you define as great will have a lot to do with how you select them. For the most part, and in our personal opinion, a great web designer has specific qualities that make them not only someone who produces consistently high quality designs, but someone who is a pleasure to work with and with whom you can communicate easily and readily.

A great designer brings you:

A web design that is visually appealing, easy for your audience to use and achieves your desired business results.
The ability to communicate and a response within a reasonable time span.
A good quality design for a cost effective price.
An outstanding ability to work with you until you nail down exactly the look and feel and business results that you want from your website.
A speedy, reliable, attractive, well coded website that offers your users a great user experience.
Someone who understands SEO (search engine optimization) and factors that into the web design
A timely completion of the website.
A quality experience with someone who is concerned about your brand and your business.

In short, the difference between a good and great web designer is often in the fine details.

In part, it’s in the speed of your site, in the customer experience that the website offers. In part, a great designer is someone who is willing to go the extra mile, to provide you what you need, when you need it, to work hard to please you and to provide you with a few little extras as you need them.

A great web designer does all those things on time while providing you with a unique and enjoyable experience while building the website.

You Know Your Web Site Design is Outdated if. . .

Is your web site design outdated? In the old days, we “Let our fingers do the walking.” The phone book was the go-to place for finding what we wanted so far as goods and services. Today customers don’t normally opt for the phone book when they are looking for goods and services. If you’re like most businesses out there, your website is likely the first point of contact for customers seeking your services.

What is the first impression of your business? What do your potential customers see when they land on your URL? Is your website contemporary and modern or does it provide a dated look that doesn’t show you or your business off in your best light?

Worse still, does it load in several minutes instead of several seconds? If it does then you’ve got to do something to change it all.

Take a long look at your website. Here are a few ways to determine whether or not your website might need a little renovation to be appealing to your customers?

Is your information outdated? If you’re showcasing the employee of the month from 15 years ago, it may be time for an update. If there are staff members on the staff pages whose retirement party you attended 10 years ago, it’s probably time to redesign and while you’re at it, get some updated content to replace the slightly moldy stuff that you’re currently showing to your visitors.

Do you have blinking links or scrolling text? While done in small amounts, it can be effective, the old school sites from the mid nineties offered blinking text, animated images and text that scrolled backward and forward across the site. If there’s enough blinking on your site to bring on an epileptic attack, it’s time for an upgrade. There’s nothing more certain to turn off visitors than an old and obviously outdated website.

Are you showing a splash page? You know your web site design is outdated if you’ve got a splash page as your opening credit. If you’ve got the old school look of a logo and a single page telling your visitors to click here, it’s well past time for an update. Those are one of the best ways to prove you’re a well dated company who has neglected your website. In addition, Google tends to frown on splash pages or doorway pages, so you’re probably not doing as well in search as you could be if you spent some time to update and speed up your website.

Do all of your in-site links tell your visitors to “Click here to. . .” If that’s the case you’re using a 90s method that is not the best way to accomplish what you want from your website. The website links today offer information about the pages that you’re going to be visiting or they offer anchor text. Click here is a sure sign of an outdated page that needs a revision.

Is your entire site built in flash? Do you have an entire website built in flash technology? A few years ago, full sites created in flash were the be all and end all. Today we tend toward easier and faster sites such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal. These are easier to update and load more rapidly. If you’re using an all flash website, flash is difficult to read so the odds are good that your customers are waiting for the site to load and you’re lagging in search. Time for an update to something a little more modern.

Are you sporting a custom visitor counter? While a visitor counter was a wonderful thing in the old days, today they are considered amateur night. Counting our visitors is considered a private thing and we do it using analytics or other methods that aren’t quite as public as the traditional digital watch style visitor’s counter displayed proudly on every page. If you’ve got one on a new site, get rid of it. If you’ve got one on an old site, get a quote on a new site. Chances are that you need one.

Last but certainly not least, are you using coding that hasn’t been in use since Homer was a pup? If you’re using fortran, basic or html to create the pages of your site, there’ s a better way for both you and your customers. Getting an updated web site design means that your customers are going to have a better, faster and more modern site that will give them a much better experience. Make it sleek, make it clean, and make it easy to use.

An updated web site design is going to help you to rank better, to draw in more visitors and to bring you a great return on the investment. If you’ve kept the website that you have more than two years, it’s well past time for an update. Take a look at all of the great new designs and themes that are out there and pick one… and hurry.

How to Hire the Right Web Design Company for Your Business

Hiring a web design company that fits you and your business is key to your success. You’ve heard the old saying, “you only get one chance to make a good first impression.” That stodgy old proverb is as true in the internet age as it was before the advent of computers. So far as the website user is concerned, the face of the company is that website they see when they surf to your URL.

The website, how fast or slow it is or what it has to offer, is the only thing that they know about your company. It’s representing you. How do you hire the company that is going to design and create that site? In short, how do you hire the company that is going to be responsible for the growth and success of your online presence?

It may be the wrong decision for you and your company to use the first web design company that a friend mentions or that you see in an ad.

Here are a few tips that may help to guide you in the right direction. As you read these, bear in mind there are exceptions to every rule, but they are few and far between. Make sure before you hire your company that they really are the exception.

Review sites they have created. Check out the sites that they have created and how fast or slow they are as well as how well they work. You’re looking for quality of work. Do the sites load quickly? Do they make use of modern web design trends? Is navigation simple and clear? Is it easy to find desired information? Do they work on mobile devices as well as desktop browsers?

What type of websites have they designed? If the site is designed in custom code, or in code such as Flash ( a very poor choice for SEO purposes incidentally) it’s going to get quite costly for you to have them update the site every time that you require a small change or a photo added. CMS or content management systems such as WordPress or Drupal are the best option. Find out if they are willing to design in this type of platform to allow ease of use for you.

Ask them a few questions about search engine optimization and marketing. SEO is imperative today and knowing something about it means creating a site that will rise more quickly in search. The ideal designer has done at least some rudimentary studies in SEO and can offer you solid insights. Those insights are invaluable when your site is designed. Having the site reflect best practices in SEO from the ground up can make a huge difference when it comes to how well the search engines receive the site.

What other marketing expertise do they offer in addition to web design? Maybe you only need a designer to execute your vision. Or maybe you would be better served by someone with marketing expertise who can challenge and add value to your thinking and plans. Do you have a winning marketing strategy? Do you have a consistent brand across traditional and digital marketing? Do you have a social media marketing plan? How will you develop and populate content to your site? Will you have a blog? What will you use for email marketing?

How Reliable are They? Find out how long it took for them to create other sites from start to finish. Do you work with the same designer from beginning to end? How responsive were they to the needs of the customer and how long did it take them to respond to questions and concerns regarding the design or the process?

How do they communicate with clients? Do you want someone who can take your vision or brief, go away, and come back with a completed product? Or do you want someone who can discuss, iterate, and review with you the direction of the project and make any mid-course changes or corrections? How often will you hear about and see progress on your web design? What will be the checkpoints and milestones for you to review and approve? How will changes to the original project be handled? Do you feel comfortable with the amount and style of the communications?

Check references. A good web design company –even if they are relatively new in the web design business– will be able to offer you references from both individuals and businesses.

The Cost of the Work. Other considerations in choosing the right company will of course be the price. Is it fair and how closely does it fall into line with other designers. Regardless of where you are located, the designer should at least be close in price to other designers in their area and of their experience. If they are a great deal higher, it may be that they are far more skilled, or it may be that you’re paying for the name and not the actual cost of their work. If they are a great deal lower, you should be asking yourself–and them–why that is the case.

Last, but certainly not least, take a look at their own site. Chances are that if they didn’t take great care in selecting the style, designing the layout and creating the text, they aren’t going to do that for yours either.

Taking the time and doing the due diligence that it takes to get a well made website says a lot about you and your company. Unwieldy or poorly constructed websites speak volumes to those who may be considering doing business with you. If your website is going to speak about your company, make sure that it’s saying what your prospective customers want to hear.

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