ACS Blog

What Visitors Expect from Your Web Site

Have you ever wondered what visitors expect to find when they come to your Web site, whether through search or inbound links or by directly entering your site URL? Recent design and usability research completed by OneUpWeb shines a light on what’s important to people when they visit particular types of Web sites. Let’s take a look at what the findings reveal that might influence your next site redesign.

Great Expectations

In How Well Does Your Web Site Cater to Your Customers? we identified the general attributes that customers require—and desire—from a business Web site. This new research adds specifics for common types of businesses. Table 1 summarizes the findings about visitor expectations for ecommerce, B2B and travel and hospitality sites. Continue reading →

Embracing Change to Continue Survival (and Growth)!

I worked for a rather affluent gentleman as a “handyman” throughout my high school years. His name was Mr. Jorgenson and he had a big house in the rich part of town. I would go to his home every Saturday morning and he would have list of jobs for me for the day. Stock his wine closet (I grew up in Florida and we did not have cellars), take his boats down to get fueled up, clean the spa and pools, and – my favorite job – organize and catalog the books and publications in his library.

He had thousands of books and over a four year period I cataloged them ALL (and without a computer, mind you). And, in his collection he had EVERY single copy of National Geographic from the time he was a child. I still stand in amazement at that accomplishment.

Now, what took him a life time of subscribing, receiving, storing, moving, preserving and cataloging, is being offered up for $199 on a 160GB hard drive (plus every other issues that he did not have prior to and after his life) from National Geographic. Continue reading →

Find the Right Web Design Firm for Your Next Project

Designing or redesigning your business Web site should be a positive experience that results in a finished product that looks great and performs superbly to meet your business goals. But with so many design firms in the marketplace, how do you find the one that’s right for you? With a little preparation, you can narrow the field and find a perfect match for your business needs.

Professional, Appealing Style

When considering a design firm, first check out its Web site. Do you like what you see? Is it appealing? Professional? Easy to navigate? Does the company provide a portfolio of work that you can readily find and browse through?

When you study the portfolio, look at the range of designs and the variety of businesses the company has designed for. Are the site designs unique to each business? Do the designs bring each business to life? Do the sites in the portfolio demonstrate that the design firm has experience creating features—shopping carts, custom Web applications, mobile accessibility—that you have in mind for your site? The portfolio provides examples of past work, so also ask to see examples of recent work to be sure that the company can deliver what today’s businesses need. Continue reading →

How Well Does Your Web Site Cater to Your Customers?

“Technology is changing your customer, and your customer will change your company,” reports Forrester Research CEO George Colony in a recent blog post. “The 2009 customer is unrecognizable from the 1999 customer. … If your business looks the same now as it did in 1999, you are risking irrelevancy.”

How different is your business today than it was in 1999? And more specifically, how different is your Web site now than a decade ago? Because online technologies and consumer use of them has grown rapidly in the past several years, if your Web site looks and acts the same as it did even just a few years ago, you might not be supplying what your customers require—or what they desire—to do business with you. It’s a good time to revisit exactly how well you’re catering to your customers online. Continue reading →

Who’s Driving Your Social Media Efforts?

Social Media 101 author, Chris Brogan, once blogged, “Social media is a set of tools and tactics that people use as part of their larger business communications efforts. … What are people doing taking titles like “Social Media Manager?” To me, this is a scary thing. Why? Because it’s like being the fax manager or the email manager. You’re naming yourself after a tool.”

But if your business is just starting to incorporate social media into a conversational marketing strategy, establishing a point person to spearhead your efforts can make all the difference between “merely functional” and “highly successful.” Let’s look at the type of person best suited for a social media manager role and the responsibilities that person must tackle to successfully drive your social media efforts forward. Continue reading →

Your Competitors Are Doing WHAT on Their Web Site?

An important part of maintaining an effective business Web site is keeping an eye on what your competitors are doing. Not only can you get ideas for improving your own site, but you also might discover niche opportunities that can elevate you above your competition.

What areas should you look at when you review a competitor’s site? For starters, try using the same criteria that the Web Marketing Association uses to judge entries in its WebAward Competition. Let’s take a look. Continue reading →

Pay Attention to Good Website Design!

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 ACS Creative, 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): Continue reading →

Convince and Convert Your PPC Ad Traffic

Successful pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns rely on superior interplay among three key components: relevant keywords; specific, focused text ads and well-optimized landing pages. Finding the right keywords that resonate with your target audience and writing compelling ad copy that get searchers to click your ad on the search results page affect how well you generate traffic to your site. But the job of convincing and converting that traffic into leads or customers falls on your landing pages. Are yours up to the task? Continue reading →

Don’t Overlook the Power of Local PPC Advertising

If you’ve shied away from targeting your PPC advertising campaigns for local search because you want to reach as many potential customers as you possibly can, now might be the time to rethink your strategy. People typically use local search because they have a problem and they’re specifically looking for someone in a particular geographic area to solve it. Furthermore, according to SearchEngineWatch,

• 54% of Americans use Internet and local search instead of phone books
• 90% of online commercial searches result in offline transactions
• 61% of local searches result in a transaction

Isn’t it time to reconsider local PPC advertising?

Ideal Candidates for Local PPC Campaigns

Localizing PPC ad campaigns can prove useful for local businesses that don’t want to attract customers outside the region they service. For example, if you’re a plumbing, heating and air conditioning company in Washington DC, you might create a local PPC ad campaign based on a 25-mile radius from your office location. Anyone in that area (as determined by the location of their ISP) who searches for your keyword phrases would see your ad; people outside your service area would not. So, you get in front of the most relevant prospects with a specific (and likely immediate) need for your services. Continue reading →

Strategies to Strrrretch Your PPC Budget

Ever wish you had a bigger budget for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising or that your existing budget would go farther and produce better results for your business? If so, then it’s time to charge up your routine with some deliberate actions to stretch your budget and pump up the return on your PPC investment. Here are 10 strategies to set you off in the right direction.

1. Let ROI guide your spend

Suppose the PPC advertising cost for one of your keywords is $40 and produces $130 profit from sales, while a second costs $75 and produces $150 from sales. What’s your best strategy? Because the first’s ROI is ($130 – $40) / $40 = 2.25 or 225% and the second’s is ($150 – $75) / $75 = 1 or 100%, you can benefit from directing more of your budget to the first keyword to take advantage of the higher ROI. Continue reading →

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