Understanding Goal-Based Web Design

Most of us are taught from an early age that having goals is an important part of becoming successful at anything. Whether it's personal or professional success, more often than not it's acheived by setting, working towards, and ultimately accomplishing a goal. This same principle holds true for a website.

Defining a Goal

Much like in life, the first step in achieving a goal is figuring out what it is before you start. For a website, it may seem obvious, something we hear pretty often is "I just want something basic that's better than what I have now.". Vague as it may be, it's still a goal and one we feel we're perfectly suited to help someone achieve. But like everything in life, when it comes to goals the devil is in the details.

When we help our clients define the goals of their website we try to steer clear of any that are subjective in nature. For example, "something better than what I have now" could mean 100 different things to 100 different people. We need to "drill down" and get more specific before we're ready to tackle this goal.

How do we do that? By asking quesitons and more importanly, by listening to our clients' answers.

When you say better do you mean more modern-looking? Or, by better do you mean making the website more prone to capture new business? Or do you mean both? (most of the time they do). The answer to these types of questions can go a long way towards defining the goal of a website and subsequently, help us formulate a plan to achieve it.

Short Term vs. Long Term Goals

Generally, once a goal is defined, it tends to "sprout" new goals as a result. For instance, we recently started work on a new website for a client and intially, all they wanted was an updated look and feel for their website with some basic Search Engine Optimization. We worked with them closely to re-design their old site, performed some fairly straightforward tasks to try to get the website listed higher on search engines and launched it live.

Their customers liked it and for the most part it got rave reviews. This made them happy (as an aside, one of our biggest goals at DiscoverTec is making our clients happy). Then they started getting new business leads through the website, because when their customers searched for their services the site came up pretty high on Google. This made them even happier.

It didn't take long for a new set of goals to work their way to the surface. Now that more people liked the website, it made sense to create an e-Newsletter campaign to keep visitors updated. Also, now that more traffic and leads are coming through, it made sense to start talking about e-commerce. These long-term goals are a product of the initial short-term goals being accomplished.

For this particular example, the short-term goals for the website were to update the look and feel to something more modern and visually appealing, as well as provide a solid foundation to develop new business opportunities and increase traffic. The long-term goals were to create a consistent vehicle to keep their business "top-of-mind" with their customers (e-Newsletter campaign) and turns leads into sales right on the website (e-commerce implementation).

Combining a solid, cost-effective short-term goal strategy with a measureable, success-based long-term one is how we've always recommended leveraging the potential of your website. This case study is a great example of that.

Never forget the importance of asking "Why?"

This is an important one that I'm sure we can all identify with. Whenever we make a decision to change anything in life, we should always take a minute and ask ourselves why. Why? Because if we don't, we run the risk of setting a goal for the wrong reasons. This is especially true when it comes to websites.

"I want more 'wow-factor'"

"We need to rank higher on Google"

"I want a bigger presence on Facebook and Twitter"

Whenever we hear our clients come to us with goals such as this our first question is why. Why do you want more wow-factor? Because you think your visitors genuinely want to be "wowed" when they view your website? Or, it is because your biggest competitor is doing it?

Putting your website's goals through the wringer is great way to see if they're worth pursuing or a by-product of something that would be nice to have versus something that you need to have.

Ranking higher on Google is definitely a positive, but if your website is not designed to accomodate and effectively capture new leads it really won't do you any good. And if you're not going to develop an ongoing strategy to keep your Facebook and Twitter pages updated with quality information, it probably won't help your bottom line much.

Set the right goals and stick to them

Very few websites consider and set the correct goals and even fewer follow through on them. No big deal, it happens to us all. Think about how often you've slacked off on your New Year's resolutions.

The good news is when it comes to your website there's always a fresh opportunity to come up with and achieve new goals. Our industry is changing faster than ever before and companies that are willing to keep up can realize tremendous growth by taking advantage of new trends.

If you feel like it's time to knock the dust off your website and re-consider the goals you had for it, let us know and we can set up a time to talk. If you've got some stories you're willing to share about using your website to acheive your overall business goals, please tell us about it in the comment section below.

DiscoverTec's Landing Page Refresh Part 1: Introduction

It’s hard to believe that the first quarter of the new decade is wrapping up already. People are filling out NCAA brackets, the weather is finally starting to warm up and lately it seems like businesses are starting to move their internet marketing budgets from the backburner to the front of the stove again. Here at DT that’s a good thing, and after launching our re-designed website on New Year’s Eve last year, then refreshing it yet again just this past month, we’re going to tackle our Landing Pages.

What’s a landing page and why is it important to my website?

Being that this is Part One of an indefinite amount of posts on this subject it would only make sense to start with some basic definitions. Let’s start with the term landing page, in simplest terms a landing page is any page of a website that was intentionally designed to draw traffic from very specific sources. More often than not the most common source of this traffic is from a Pay Per Click (or PPC) advertisement on a major search engine. We use Google Adwords, and our ad shows up under the “Sponsored Links” section at the top and right side of the search results page.

In theory, the concept of landing pages is very simple: you design and build intuitive, straightforward webpages and drive visitors to them by advertising your products or services in very specific ways. Ideally, the visitors will be more prone to take action and you purposefully display your contact information in very prominent ways on the landing page to compel them to contact you and start the sales process. When used as part of a PPC strategy, the ideal result is to generate Conversions.

A website’s conversion rate is it’s barometer for success.

Time for another definition: a conversion in the internet marketing sense occurs when the intended goal of an advertising campaign is achieved. For an e-commerce website, a purchase is usually considered conversion. For a doctor’s office website, a conversion could be an appointment request sent through the contact form. Conversions can vary from website to website and even from page to page on a website, but the one thing that never varies is that the true measure of any successful internet marketing effort is the conversion rate.

OK, here we go with another definition, I promise this will be the last one.

The conversion rate is the ratio of users that achieved the goal of the marketing effort versus the amount of overall users that responded. For instance, if 10 people clicked on our ad on Google Adwords and 1 of them called our office to set up a meeting and 1 filled our contact form to come visit with us, than our conversion rate was 2 out of 10, or 20 percent.

DiscoverTec’s take on best practices for Landing pages

We’ve been using various search engine optimization techniques for years to leverage search traffic into new business leads. When we started with Google Adwords our strategy was very basic and for the most part, we either drove traffic to our homepage or to a page inside our website that matched the copy of our Google ad. For instance, if someone clicked on our ad for website development, we sent them to the web development page on our site. Overall it worked well and we were happy with the results, but over time as our market and industry become more and more competitive we had to really take a close look at what were doing.

We noticed that a trend was emerging and companies were setting up separate pages on their websites to receive traffic specifically generated from search engines. It seemed like a great idea because you could tailor these pages to appeal to very specific, targeted visitors. It was at that point that we started working on our landing pages, and we’re just about ready to roll them live.

Will our landing pages land us any new business?

Time will tell, but we’re excited. Stay tuned with us as we post updates on our strategy. And if you’re using landing pages already for your PPC campagins, please feel free to post your comments below and let us know how they’re working and what your thoughts are on best practices.

Press Release: Biker Blast a huge success

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (February 28, 2010) – It started 3 years ago with the first Rotary Club of Southpoint Biker Blast. The event was created as a way to kick start the notorious Bike Week in Daytona while simultaneously raising money for local charities. The first Biker Blast of Jacksonville was held at a local motorcycle dealership, less than 200 people showed up, raffle tickets were purchased to win a new Harley and the proceeds were donated to Wolfson’s Children’s Hospital.

Fast forward to February 27, 2010, add a few more hundred people, live music and the Jacksonville Landing, and you have Biker Blast III. After raising over $10,000 at the event, the proceeds were able to fund the first patient room at Wolfson’s Children’s Hospital.

“It’s been so exciting to see the Biker Blast grow every year and become as big as it is now,” said Donny Lamey, President-Elect of the Rotary Club of Southpoint. “Our goal was to create a fun, family event that was for a good cause that the whole community could be a part of and Saturday was a great success.”

As the President & CEO of DiscoverTec, a Jacksonville-based web design and technology company, Lamey has always made giving back to local charities a top priority as a businessman. As a motorcycle enthusiast that rides at least twice a week, the Biker Blast was a way to combine the two. Past Rotary Club President Charlie Sheppard, Karen Wolfson, Don Wolfson, Dr. Philip Aldana and Alex, a patient and Trauma Survivor at Wolfsan’s Children’s Hospital were key participants at the event.

“If it wasn’t for the dedication and support of the local Southpoint Rotary group and Donny this event would not have been a success,” Karen Wolfson said as Lamey opened up the event with a speech thanking local patrons for their support.

As luck would have it Donny himself was the Grand Prize winner of the 2010 Harley-Davidson Sportster Iron 883. He opted for the cash prize of $5,000 rather than the Adamac Harley bike giveaway and donated the entire amount to Wolfson’s Children’s Hospital.

“It was tough to give up that Harley,” he chuckled. “With the crunch we’ve all been feeling with this economy it’s harder to give back and it was my pleasure to donate the prize to Wolfson’s Children’s Hospital. I only hope that next year we can make the event even bigger and raise even more money for charity.”

If the smiling faces that filled the Landing last Saturday were any indication, the Biker Blast is set for another successful year in 2011.

New Website Launch: Parent Approved

This week we launched a custom-developed website that helps parent find quality childcare online. Parent Approved was founded in 2006 by Denise Coons and offers an innovative system for parents to search for accredited childcare facilities and accredited childcare providers to create and manage an interactive profile on the website.

From a design perspective, one of our main goals for www.ParentApproved.com was to create a look and feel that was fun, casual and helped to put parents at ease as they use the site’s features. In addition, we wanted to drive users to register with the Parent Approved and to that end we worked to craft intuitive, easy-to-use call to action buttons and a clean, natural user interface and process flow.

Each page of the website has a unique look and feel that features different color schemes and images of children and on every page it’s easy to register with the website. In addition to a user-friendly design, the other main piece of this website is the cutting edge, custom-built parent, provider and administrative portal. We implemented an advanced messaging system that allows administrators of the Parent Approved website to be updated real-time on any interactions that parents & providers have with the website.

All content that is posted by parents & providers must be approved by administrators and they can manage coupons, special offers and other content-based areas of the website. We also integrated the search functionality with Google Maps so that parents can view location-based information on the accredited providers and providers can upload photo tours of their facilities.

Now that the design and development has been completed on Parent Approved we’re working with their team to launch an aggressive Social Media Optimization plan as well as market their services through search engines with both paid and organic search engine optimization. Stay tuned for updates, and as always please post your comments on the site using the form below.