Take a look around the site and let us know what you think. If you are using Internet Explorer 6, 7, or 8 you there might be certain areas of the site that don’t work properly. We will be modifying the site over the next few weeks to accomodate users who have older browsers (although our advice is to always use the most current browser possible).

Let us know what you think of the site in the comments below!

1. Familiarize client with hosting and support costs and our terms of service. Releasing work to a client is a big deal. In most cases, they have paid us a substantial amount of money to do work for them, so before the work goes live the client needs to have an understanding of what will be covered in the future.
2. Check to make sure contact forms forward to the correct person. The client has purchased a website from us to improve their marketing. If contact forms aren’t going to the right person, then it kind of defeats the purpose.
3. Turn search engines ‘ON’. WordPress has a feature where you can ‘hide’ your site from being indexed by search engines. We generally enable this feature while we are building the site so that no one accidentally comes across unfinished work.
4. Cross-browser check. Different browsers often display websites in slightly different ways, so before we launch a new website we need to make sure that it performs acceptably in the current releases of Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer 8 and 9.
5. Install Google Analytics. It is really important to us that we have an accurate record of website traffic from its very beginning. Even if a client isn’t planning on using traffic data right away, if they need it in the future, it will be hugely helpful to have a long-term record.
6. Check email settings. Launching a new website can occasionally reek havoc on a client’s email settings. Before we launch a new site we always take a look at how their email is set up and take any necessary precautions to avoid any disruptions.
7. Modify DNS records to point the site to the appropriate domain name. This is the part where we tell the domain name to stop pointing visitors to the old website and tell it to start pointing to the new website.
8. Check images and links. Once the domain is pointed to the new site there is always the chance that some of our images or links might not work, so we always double check to make sure that everything is still routed correctly.
9. Install Google XML Sitemap plugin. WordPress does a great job with search engines, but one thing it doesn’t do is ‘ping’ the major search engines when new content is added and it doesn’t create an XML sitemap to help search engines prioritize pages. This plugin does both, and is a great first step towards getting a new site established with search engine indexes.

It doesn’t have to be this way! Today’s websites are typically built using a Content Management System (CMS) which allows website owners to easily add and change pages, engage visitors and search engines, and keep the website alive and vibrant. WordPress, which is the CMS that we use for all of our clients’ websites, because it has the largest development community, is flexible and secure, and is extremely efficient and easy to deploy websites on the platform.

This list is not WordPress specific. Most content management systems will allow you to perform the marketing functions listed here. However, if you don’t have a website that is built using a CMS, you can always contact us and we can get you all fixed up.

Okay, enough chatter. On to the list ->

1. Add Pages for ALL Your Services

Lots of websites have a ‘services’ page. It lists everything the company does, and for an average website this is totally fine. But, if you want to have an above average or GREAT website, you should create a page for each service you provide.

Why you ask? Having unique pages for each service is great for your visitors and for your SEO (search engine optimization). If someone is searching for someone to perform a specific service for them, a long list of services is fine and dandy, but a page specialized for EXACTLY what they need is much much better.

2. Start a Blog

The key to maintaining an active user base on your website is to be constantly creating new and interesting content. The best way to organize lots and lots of content is through a blog. Blogging creates tons of high quality content that engages visitors and search engines. Blog content can also be repurposed for email marketing, print media, ebooks…

3. Create Landing Pages

What is a landing page? definition via wikipedia

In online marketing a landing page, sometimes known as a lead capture page, is a single web page that appears in response to clicking on an advertisement. The landing page will usually display directed sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link.

How about a real world example… You own a company that does professional floor cleaning in Bloomington, Indiana. You buy an add on Google adwords that displays whenever someone searches “Professional Floor Cleaning Bloomington Indiana”. When someone sees the ad and clicks on it, they’re taken to a specially designed ‘landing page’ on your website. You’ve optimized this page to sell your services to the customer so it is likely that you will convert them to a customer.

4. Market Your Site via Social Media

Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have millions of users. These users are constantly sharing links and discussing brands. Isn’t it time you got some skin in the game?

The first way to start getting visitors from social media sites is to build up your own following and share links with that following, but that’s not exactly scalable. The next thing to do is to include sharing buttons like the ‘Facebook Like’ and ‘Tweet’ buttons that are prevalent on the web. These buttons allow your visitors to share the pages on your site with their followers, then some of their followers will visit your page and share with their followers. Creating feedback loops like this can be a powerful source of traffic to your site… so why not do it?

5. Perform Some Simple Search Engine Optimization

Search engines are complicated. They’re basically designed by mathematicians and computer scientists. However, properly optimizing your website is NOT rocket science.

If you’re serious about marketing your business, you need to be serious about marketing on the internet, and if you’re serious about marketing on the internet you need to get serious about search.

Today’s content management systems provide tons of tools that help you adjust content, title tags, keywords, internal links, and all the other things that effect how search engines rate your site. There are also tons of SEO blogs that tell you exactly what to do to get traffic.

This is a list of some of the top SEO blogs on the web. I found it by doing a simple Google search. Everything you need to know is on these blogs. Don’t have time to learn SEO? Hire Tribeswell to do it you.

6. Post Videos

2 ways to leverage video on your website:

The easy way: Repost cool videos that you find on the web (like on Youtube) on your blog or website and write your own commentary. Your visitors will appreciate that you found something cool for them.

The hard way: Either learn to create and edit video (and trust me with today’s technology it could not be easier) or pay a video production company to help you create videos for your website.

7. Create Photo Galleries

A picture is worth a thousand words. Therefore a gallery with 10 pictures is worth 10,000 words. There are tons of great-looking photo gallery tools that can display galleries on websites. Most cell phones now take great pictures. Put the two together and you’ve got a great compelling reason for people to visit your website.

8. Let Fans Connect With You via Social Media

Every visitor is a chance to connect with a future customer. However chances are they won’t buy from you the first time they’re exposed to your brand. But, they might fan your business on Facebook or follow your company on Twitter.

Your website should make it EASY for visitors to become fans and followers so that down the line they are more likely to become customers.

9. Run Surveys

Want to give your customers an incentive to visit your website? Why not ask their opinion? You’ll get people to come to your site, you’ll get valuable information about how your business is performing (in the eyes of your customers), AND they might even share your site with some friends via social media.

There are great tools available to do this including: Simple form-building tools like Form Assembly, form building WordPress plugins, or purpose-built solutions like Survey Monkey.

10. Convert Visitors to eMail Subscribers

The #1 fastest cheapest and most effective way to build traffic to a website is email marketing. But, are you making it easy for people to get on your mailing list? Are you providing incentives so that people actually WANT to join?

The great thing about having a website that’s built on a CMS is that you can do cool things like offer eBooks or other downloads in exchange for signing up for your email distribution list. You’ll keep your email list growing and vibrant and your visitor will receive the added value of premium content.

If you do it right, it looks like this…

What do you think? What types of things would be good to add to this list? Have you tried any of these strategies? Are they working?

Most of the people we currently work with worked with someone else before they worked with us. I would guess that about 60-80% of the business we have came from wooing the client away from another design shop or marketing firm. So, I don’t get mad when it happens to me.

I DO get mad when a web designer contacts me out of the blue and says “So-and-so is now my client, I need ftp access, DNS settings, wordpress logins, etc.”

I get really mad.

This is incredibly unprofessional! If a client wants to work with someone else they should contact me DIRECTLY and let me know that the new company will be contacting me and authorize me to release their information.

Here’s the thing…. Client’s don’t know that they should do this, because they’re not in our business. You have to TELL them the right things to do and not just go shooting off emails.

Be a professional. Think about how you would like to be treated. Give some respect to the other guy (or gal). It’s our job to make sure that things are done the right way and that our industry maintains a hight degree of integrity.

WordPress

I wouldn’t have a business without wordpress. World class CMS, thousands of amazing plugins that do almost anything, a massive development community… WordPress just keeps getting better and better. At this point there are few websites that make sense on any other platform.

Mailchimp

Eight words… Free accounts for lists up to 2000 people. This is the killer app for email marketing. It is beautifully designed. It has tons of unique and useful features. It’s actually fun to use. Beautiful templates. I can’t say enough good things.

Facebook

Have you heard of it? There are amazing things that you can do with Facebook pages these days, and amazing ways to integrate Facebook into your website for marketing. Facebook continues to be a great source of traffic for this site and all of our client’s sites.

Youtube

If Youtube were JUST a place where you could upload HD videos (in an incredibly intuitive way), and embed them on your website, it would still make this list… But, it also has an awesome social community, it’s the world’s second biggest search engine, and is supported by every major mobile device. For me it is the only solution for online video.

Google Analytics

There are a lot of ways to track your website traffic, but few that are this good, and NONE that are this good and this FREE. There are very few sites that need more features than you get for free with this product.

Hubspot Website Grader

Need a quick snapshot of how effective your website is at any given moment? Go to www.websitegrader.com. I use this tool every time I start working with a new client. It pulls data from all over the web to let you know exactly what you need to do to start increasing your marketing effectiveness.

iStockPhoto

If you’re going to be doing a lot of Internet marketing, you’re going to need a steady supply of quality stock photography and artwork. iStockphoto is the biggest and the most cost effective.

What’s the difference between a great blog and an okay blog? Great blogs have great content.

Here are a few quick questions to help you figure out if you are creating great content for your blog.

1. Does it break news? If you have access to news that no one else has (or news that no one else is making available online), then you’re in a great position to engage your visitors.
2. Does it teach people how to do something? One of the most valuable things you can do for your visitors is to teach them something new.
3. Is it genuinely interesting? Are you writing about something that’s already been talked about on a million other sites? If so, why?
4. Is it high-quality? If you’re creating videos, are they well produced? If you’re writing text, is it well written? Is your website well-designed?
5. Is it funny, sad, unnerving, or otherwise emotionally stimulating. If you engage your audience emotionally, you’ll be more effective.

The problem with the vast majority of the fonts in the directory is that most of them have only 1 or 2 font weights (a regular and a bold). When you pick a typeface to use across your whole organization for all documents, you really want to have a variety of font weights and variations.

With that in mind, I decided to go through and pick through the few fonts that do have several different weights and pick a few that I think are really strong. I focused on sans-serif fonts, because I feel like serif font’s aren’t as versatile for as many uses. Who knows, I might do a post in the near future featuring my favorite serif fonts as well.  Anyway, here is my list.

Lato

Whether you know it or not, you’re already at least a little familiar with Lato, because it’s the same font that you’ve been reading in the previous paragraphs. It’s the font I use for most of the text on this website (not including the headlines), and I also use it for all my corporate documents including invoices and proposals.

The first thing I really like about Lato is that it has 10 different weights that are all really strong in their own right (with the exception of the hairline weight… not sure I’ll ever use that one).

It’s also very clean looking but also a little bit quirky. I absolutely love the lower case ‘g’ as well as the lower case ‘a’. My organization isn’t too formal, but we’re also serious about design, so I thought Lato was just a great choice.

Click here to find out how to download Lato

Open Sans

I feel this is just a great all-around simple font. It’s one of those typefaces that just looks good for lots of different applications. The light and extrabold weights are very well done and would look good in trendy print ads or web banners. The regular and semibold weights look great for simple text documents.

This is a great neutral typeface that really shines on the web as well. This would be a great open alternative to Arial or Helvetica, and it’s different enough while still maintaining its neutrality.

Click here to find out how to download

Ubuntu

To me, the Ubuntu font has always looked kind of ‘technical’ (kind of like Lucida). It’s definitely not neutral like Open Sans. I decided to include it in this list, because it comes in a variety of weights and it would be good for certain organizations that want a more alternative look.

In the example below, I really like the angle at the tops of the lowercase ‘l’, ‘b’, and ‘t’. It gives it a unique character. I also really like the way the rounded elements meet the strait elements in the lowercase ‘b’, ‘n’, and ‘g’.

Click here to find out how to download the Ubuntu Font.

PT Sans

The cool thing about PT Sans is that it not only comes in several different weights, but also that there are also ‘caption’ and ‘narrow’ weights available which really adds to its versatility.

Sometimes combining a narrow version of a font with the regular or bold version can produce some really cool effects. I can see this font being useful for a wide variety of applications.

Like, Open Sans, it is fairly neutral. It also has a PT Serif variant, which would further add to its versatility.

 Click here to find out how to download PT Sans.

Client: So… why out of all the fonts in the world do I have to choose between these 5-6 lame generic options?

Me: Well there just aren’t that many fonts available for use on the web. You have to use fonts that come installed on most of your user’s machines.

Client: And there’s no way around this? Arial is a really lame font, and Trebuchet, Tahoma, Lucida… don’t even get me started.

Me: I don’t know what to tell you. We can use a Flash/Javascript program to replace the fonts with better looking ones, but it’s going to screw up your page load time, annoy some of your users, and probably decrease the effectiveness of your site.

Client: Ummmm… Okay I guess I’ll take Arial.

I’m excited to say that I never have to have this conversation ever again. With the WP-Google Fonts plugin, I can use any of the dozens and dozens of fonts available through the Google Fonts API on my client’s websites and implement them quickly and easily.

Here’s How the WP-Google Fonts Plugin Works

First you install the plugin (it’s available in the wordpress plugins directory), which takes about 30 seconds.

Then you have to configure the plugin. It lets you go through all the different text elements on your site (like <p> tags, <blockquote> tags, and all your <h1>, <h2>, <h3> etc.) and pick which fonts you want for each element.

You can do this for up to 6 different fonts, so it is really super flexible.

The best part is you now have all these great font options, it doesn’t slow down your page-load time, and I get to have much more exciting conversations about fonts with my clients.

The Next Step is a personal training and fitness company owned by Jeff Sidwell with locations in northwest Indianapolis and Carmel, Indiana. Jeff contacted me after seeing some of our previous work, and we put together a plan of action to create a website to showcase his brand, drive new customer acquisition, and provide value for his existing clients.

Branding, Colors, & Typography

The Next Step worked with a graphic designer to create a logo and branding package for the business, and we really wanted to extend that brand to the web and create an online atmosphere that suggested motion and fitness.

After studying several fitness sites on the web, we decided to use a dark background composed of black and dark gray areas. We also chose to use light typography for the page headers and menu items to give it a sense of motion and lightness (the visitors presumable want to lose weight, so light typography subtly emphasizes this).

I also chose to carry the light orange color from the logo into the sidebar headers and used white and light gray for the page text.

It is common on websites to see Serif fonts used as headers and Sans-serif fonts used for body text. I decided that Sans-serif fonts (with the lighter font-weight) would work well for headers to provide a sense of lightness and motion, and to provide contrast I used a serif font for the body text (so I basically reversed what you would commonly see).

The Homepage

For the homepage, we used the same page style as all the standard pages on the site, but added an unusually fast-moving (3 second) slide show.  We carefully crafted the copy and chose images that would tell the story of The Next Step (primarily that through planning, goalsetting, and the right help you can reach your fitness goals).

We also added some copy under the slider to help guide the user to other areas of the website as well as to balance out the design.

Interior Pages

For the interior pages we chose a pretty standard ‘right-sidebar’ orientation with clean lines and defined boundaries. Most of the pages use the standard ‘light-weight’ headers found throughout the site and standard paragraph text, however on the ‘testimonials’ page we used the <blockquote> attribute to create clear divisions between the various client stories, and on the ‘resources’ page we used the blog functionality from the wordpress software that the site is built on.

The Sidebar

For the sidebar we decided to offer a few posts from the ‘resources’ section, a client satisfaction survey, and a sign-up for an email newsletter. The resources area is powered by a standard wordpress ‘recent posts’ widget. The client satisfaction survey is a PDF document designed by Tribeswell to look great on screen and in print. The eNews signup was created in Mailchimp and feeds to a ‘leads’ list within the Mailchimp software.

Contact Form

For the contact form, I used FormAssembly and their wp-formassembly plugin. This is a great formbuilding service that I frequently use for websites, because it is extremely flexible and easy to use, and it allows me to easily and quickly insert forms into client websites and it automatically backs up any form responses so if you need a list of everyone who has filled out your forms it is super-easy to do a simple export.

What do you think?

Here’s what Jeff had to say…

“‘Wow, you do great work with the little money you invest in marketing.’ my client observed the other day. I clued her in to the fact that it was my web designer more than myself. It has been fun to see Colin’s mind brainstorm countless ideas for my company. More refined in marketing than myself, I simply had to convey my thought, and he processed it in a way that reaches the masses effectively and succinctly. As a small business, I’m very grateful to find someone passionate in his field at an affordable rate. Thanks Colin, for building credibility in my company through a great website!”

This has been a great project to work on and we’re really excited about how it turned out. Let me know your thoughts in the comments area, and if you want us to do an awesome website for you, just contact us.