Web Site Design Virginia

Starting a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising program can be intimidating, especially if the concept is new to you. But with a little foresight, discipline and persistence, you can build a network of sustainable campaigns that will serve as a solid foundation for your PPC strategy.

How PPC Advertising Works
Regardless of whether you use Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing or Microsoft AdCenter to drive your PPC ad program, the basic principles are essentially the same:

1. A potential customer types a search term (aka a keyword or keyword phrase) into a search engine.
2. The search engine holds an auction for that term among you and all the other advertisers who have bid on that term to determine ad placement on the search results pages. (Your ad position is based on what you’ve bid for the term plus the quality of your keyword-ad-landing page unit compared with that of other bidders; a new auction is held each time someone searches on the term.)
3. If your ad resonates with the searcher, he clicks through to a landing page on your Web site. If your landing page (and other supporting pages) provides what he needs, he might convert to a lead or customer.

Now, how do you get started? Here’s what it takes in Google AdWords.

Start with a Well-Planned Structure
Within an AdWords account, you can create up to 25 campaigns, each of which can contain as many as 100 ad groups, which in turn can contain up to 2000 keywords and 25 ads.

“Whoa!” you might say, “That sounds pretty complicated.”

Fortunately, just because you have that many options to work with doesn’t mean you need to use them all. You can start small with just one or two campaigns and a few ad groups. What’s most important is to plan your initial strategy well enough so that you can manage your program easily and adapt and grow it as you determine what works most effectively for your business.

AdWords offers the following hierarchical structure of “campaigns” and “ad groups” around which you organize your ad strategy:
 

When you create an account, you provide an email address and password for accessing the account and billing information for your ad-spend. You next set up your individual campaigns, establishing global properties such as the daily maximum spend, geographic targeting, and an end date for each campaign. At the ad group level, you create ads, choose keywords to trigger those ads and set your bid levels.

Let’s look at a simple example of how to use this structure to organize a PPC ad program around a set of services that a company might offer.

Think About Your Business
Suppose you own a marketing company that offers both traditional and Internet marketing services, and you want to promote specific services in each area through PPC advertising. In particular, you want to tackle your traditional marketing services first: advertising, logo design, brochures and similar services. Here’s one way you might plan your AdWords strategy:

I. Campaign1: Traditional Marketing Services

    A. AdGroup1: Advertising
        i. Keyword variations: advertising agency, advertising agencies, print advertising agency, print advertising agencies, advertising agency in washington dc, advertising agencies in washington dc, …
       ii. Ad:
           Advertising That Works!
           Advertising Agency—DC, VA & MD
           View our work—then call for a bid!
           www.yourcompany.com/adsamples

        B. AdGroup2: Logo design
        i. Keyword variations: logo design, logo designs, modern logo design, modern logo designs, corporate logo design, corporate logo designs, logo design washington dc, logo designs washington dc, …
       ii. Ad1:
           Fabulous New Logo Designs
           5 design concepts—fast delivery.
           Call for a Free Consultation!
           www.yourcompany.com/logodesign
      iii. Ad2:
           Logo Design Washington DC
           5 design concepts—fast delivery.
           Call for a Free Consultation!
           www.yourcompany.com/logodesign

        C. AdGroup3: Brochures

       [ ... ]

II. Campaign2: Internet Marketing Services

    A. AdGroup1: Web site design
        i. Keyword variations relating to Web site design
       ii. Ad(s) relating specifically to Web site design

       [ ... ]

 About Your Plan
Within your ad groups, be sure to group similar keyword terms together, write tightly aligned ads for those terms and keep your lists compact. You’ll find it much more effective to manage, say, 10 lists of 20 highly related terms with very targeted ads than 2 broader lists of 100 terms and more general ads.

Two- or three-word keyword phrases tend to draw in a good quantity of targeted traffic; more specific terms draw in lower numbers but higher-converting traffic. (Searchers tend to use more specific terms when they’re further along in the buying cycle.) Be sure to use a tool such as the AdWords Keyword Tool to research highly relevant keyword phrases and identify those with good traffic volume and low competition to place in your ad groups.

For each keyword term in an ad group, one of the associated ads will be displayed. So in our example, for every keyword in the Advertising group (AdGroup1), AdWords will display the same ad. But how does AdWords decide which ad to display if an ad group has multiple ads? Let’s say you do well enough in an auction for the term logo design washington dc (a keyword in AdGroup2) that AdWords places your ad at the top of the right-hand column on the search results page. Which ad will appear?

Google’s goal is always to have the best ads display when a searcher searches on a particular term, so by default, AdWords is set to “optimize,” which means it will display your best-performing ad based on its historical data. But you can also set up AdWords to rotate through your ads for a particular term. You’ll find this option useful when you want to test different ads to see which is more effective for a particular ad group.

Just the Tip of the Iceberg
Understanding how AdWords and other PPC programs work and planning how you’ll organize your PPC strategy are two big first steps to getting your PPC campaigns off the ground. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. The more you learn about PPC advertising, the more confident you’ll feel when you take the plunge—and you’ll be better prepared to use the tool to your best advantage. Google provides some great information and tutorials on its Adwords Web site, and be sure to watch for future posts about PPC in this blog.

“What are you doing?” asks social-messaging/micro-blogging service Twitter. And you have 140 characters (max!) in which to answer and send a real-time update (called a tweet) to your followers and the Twitter community at large.

“What? Why would anyone care?” you might be tempted to ask in return. “How can such a tiny bit of information possibly help me market my business? I don’t get it!”

The KISS Principle at Work
Twitter is astonishingly simple to use, and perhaps that’s the fundamental reason why the service has caught on so well with consumers and business men and women alike (current statistics show that 4 to 5 million people are using Twitter). Of course, the fact that you can send and receive updates via your favorite browser, email, IM client and your cell phone doesn’t hurt either.

From wherever you are, 24/7, you can quickly reach out to your audience to direct attention to good news about your business in a casual—or official—way. It also means that you can monitor the conversations that are taking place about your company, products and services; respond to specific queries; solve customer problems and altogether put a very human face on your business.

How Much Is 140 Characters?
Surprisingly, 140 characters lets you report more than you might think! To put that character-count in perspective, here’s what 140 characters looks like in the context of some familiar messages:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands: one Nation under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all. (Pledge of Allegiance)

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. (Gettysburg Address)

My fellow citizens: I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors. (President Obama’s inaugural address)

And if that’s not enough, to help you out with Web site addresses (which can be very long) for links you might include in your post, you can use a service such as TinyURL to free up more characters for your message.

What Can You Do in 140 Characters?
You might be surprised at the power 140 characters can give you. Since Twitter’s launch in July 2006, businesses have devised all types of uses for the service, working within the 140-character limit. For example, you might

1. Provide pointers to interesting articles you’ve read: “Found a great article on trends in Internet marketing, Washington DC, at www.somewebsite.com”
2. Answer a question: “Yes, we can help you redesign your Web site so you don’t lose your Google PageRank”
3. Ask a question of your audience: “What do you think are the advantages of working with local Maryland graphic designers?”
4. Announce an event: “ACS will speak at the Virginia Web Designers user group next Thursday—hope you can join us!”
5. Connect with people offering special skills that can help your business: “We’re looking for an experienced PHP programmer for a special project”
6. Test something: “I need your help! Check out www.somewebsite.com and let me know how it looks in your browser”
7. Respond to a dissatisfied customer: “Thanks for letting me know about this problem. I’ll direct-message you with more details about what to do next”

Convinced Enough to Give Twitter a Try?
If you’re intrigued enough to give Twitter a try, you’re in good company. Numerous businesses report excellent results from the time they’ve invested in developing a Twitter-driven community. Here’s how some well-known businesses use Twitter:

• H& R Block (@HRBlock)—provides lots of good tax information to all who follow them
• Zappos (@Zappos)—provides insights into one of the most customer-centric companies on the Web
• Comcast (@comcastcares)—a leader in providing customer service and support—they don’t post, but they listen deeply and respond immediately to customer concerns
• Baskin Robbins (@BaskinRobbins)—a favorite and open to customer suggestions
• Dell (@richardatdell)—puts a human face on one of the largest technology companies in the US
• JetBlue (@jetblue)—known to add flights when Twitter customers express the need

What do you have to lose? It costs you nothing (right now) to start a Twitter account, listen in, provide insights about your industry and start to build a community around you and your business.

Besides inviting your current customers to follow you, you can use Twitter’s search function to find like-minded people who will understand and value what your company has to offer. And who knows, maybe the relationships you build today through Twitter conversations will convert to valued customers who trust and evangelize your brand.

So, what are you doing—right this minute? In 5 minutes or less, you can let the world know. What are you waiting for?
 

What is good Website design? If you Google good website design, you’ll find 35,600,000 or so results that you can peruse for helpful—and in some cases entertaining—information about how to make your Website just that—good.

Well, here at Affordable Creative Services, we discuss and explore good website design all day - everyday.  Working with clients from start to finish to ensure that their web properties provide the best possible user experience.  But rather than start out by foisting our opinions on you, we thought it would be an interesting exercise to see what wisdom might turn up in that aforementioned Google search. So, my strategy for this introductory post about good Website design is to do precisely what you might do: Search on good website design, check out the listings on page 1 of the search results pages and see what nuggets of information rise to the top. It's amazing that so many of these sites take only a "do as I say ... not as I do" approach to good Website design. Despite that peculiarity, here are the nuggets (in no particular order):

1. Amy Zipkin, writing for the International Herald Tribune (the global edition of the New York Times), provides the why, if not the how: Good Web Design Can Mean Good Business.

2. eBizwebpages.com warns that if you “make a bad choice [on layout and design], it won't matter how great your content is or how much advertising you do. If your site looks bad, no one will visit and those that do won't stay long or buy anything.”

3. Taking a more can-do approach, Smashing Magazine’s article, 10 Principles of Effective Web Design, teaches you (among other things) how the folks you’re designing your Website for think:

• Users appreciate quality and credibility
• Users don’t read, they scan
• Users are impatient and insist on instant gratification
• Users don’t make optimal choices—they choose the first reasonable option
• Users follow their intuition
• Users want to have control

4. Vincent Flanders, who has studied bad Web sites for 13 years to formulate his ideas about what makes a site good, offers the following perspective:

“Great Web design is an art and occurs when design and content are seamless and you don't notice its greatness. With great web design, it's easy to find the information you need. The content makes you want to return again and again and, most importantly, great design gives credibility to the company/organization.”

5. Author Robin Williams, known for her style manuals The Mac is Not a Typewriter and The Non-Designer's Design Book, takes a similar approach. She claims, “It is easy to make a dorky web page. It's also easy to make a very nice, clean, professional-looking web page even if you don't have much design experience. Often the difference … is simply a matter of eliminating certain features that are guaranteed to make a page look amateurish. … Keep in mind that the point of eliminating bad features is not just to make the page prettier, but to communicate more effectively."

6. Ben Hunt, from ScratchMedia, offers these practical pointers about current Web style:

• Simple layout
• Centered orientation
• Design the content, not the page
• 3D effects, used sparingly
• Soft, neutral background colours
• Strong colour, used sparingly
• Cute icons, used sparingly
• Plenty of whitespace
• Nice big text

7. Matt Brown, the Dreamweaver Community Manager for Macromedia, states (in 3500+ words, mind you) that the key to good Website design is usability.

8. Usability is also the topic that has occupied the mind of Jakob Nielsen since 1994 (at least). Dr. Nielsen is an industry-leading author, researcher, and consultant on user interfaces, especially Web usability and Web design strategy. He’s the expert that many people love to hate because he doesn’t practice what he preaches on his own Website, UseIt.

Nevertheless, Dr. Nielsen’s research-based approach to Website design has provided the industry with some valuable insights about how “regular people” (not yourself, your company peers or your CEO) interact with the Web. In an Alertbox article, Aspects of Design Quality, he observes that a Website user’s experience is no stronger than its weakest link. “If any one usability attribute fails, the overall user experience is compromised and many users will fail.” The usability attributes he identifies are

• Navigation—how users get around your site
• Content—what they’ll find there
• Features—what they can do
• Homepage usability—users spend 30 seconds or less here and only 50% will scroll down
• Search—the user’s lifeline for complex sites
• Accessibility—site ease-of-use for people with disabilities
• Web presence—how easily people can find you

9. Collis of PSDSTUT offers no fewer than 9 Essential Principles for Good Web Design because “Web design can be deceptively difficult, as it involves achieving a design that is both usable and pleasing, delivers information and builds brand, is technically sound and visually coherent.”

10. At goodpractices.com, the recommendation is threefold, though vague:

• Choose a Web site design standard for your pages like “world wide accessibility” versus something less universal.
• Test, test, test to make sure your design features degrade gracefully in diverse Web browsing environments and screen configurations.
• Use commonly accepted good site design practices

Beyond Page 1—But Worth the Read
An excellent, timely article that did not show up on the coveted first results page (or on any of the top 10 results pages, for that matter) for good website design is the BNET article Obama v. McCain—Online! by Danielle Novy.

Curious about Website design tactics that the top two presidential campaigns pulled off the best, BNET asked CBS Interactive Art Director Marc Mendell to click through the Barack Obama and John McCain campaign sites and analyze their effectiveness, from a business point of view. His conclusions, well-supported by examples from the two sites, offer a blueprint for effective Web design today—an integrated approach to content, community and marketing: