Articles
We are passionate about marketing & design and like to write about it.
What to do after the website is up
After building the website of your dreams, writing the text, collaborating with a designer and developer, and spending your time and energy to get it running perfectly, you may think that your work is over. Actually, it has just begun.
The process of designing a compelling website is 3 parts science, 4 parts design, and a just a pinch of dumb luck. But once the rain dance is over, it is time to put on the nerd hat and examining the data on how the website is faring. One cannot create a website and simply expect it to do well on its own. Just as a pilot would never fly at night without instruments, a website will not reach its full potential without quantifiable metrics in place.
Making a website is something anyone can do and everyone does. If your design is user-friendly and your content compelling, visitors will return again. But how do you get them to come in the first place? The answer is in two parts.
At Left Brain, Right Brain we ask two questions:
1. Where are the users coming from?
It is crucial to know how a site is fairing on key search engines. Unless the market is niche, our targets are Bing, Google, AOL, and Yahoo. Every month Left Brain, Right Brain checks our client’s website ranking for 10 keywords or phrases. From the data we extract from our program, we can chart a client’s progress on each keyword, whether they are going up or down. We can also see who else is ranking in the top 50.
This part is a key piece to the puzzle. Unless we see where a client is in their standings, we cannot analyze whether our website looks attractive enough to a search engine to rank them highly. This is called search engine optimization. SEO is simply the art of getting a website noticed by your target audience. It is crafting a website so that when your audience searches for something related to you, your website is near the top (or hopefully first).
The second question we ask is…
2. Where are the users going?
Vital data can be pulled from a user’s visit to a site, including pages visited; what got them to the site (also called referrer links); which pages they visited; how long they stayed; and if a search term was used, what it was. From this data you can extrapolate what pages are most popular, which ones are being ignored entirely, what search terms people are using to visit your site, and so much more.
I had a personal website where I blogged about local political news and one day veered off topic and posted a few images I took that were sized to popular dimensions for desktop wallpapers. From looking at the visitor data I discovered I was one of the top ranked in a certain dimension of wallpapers. So, in the interest of getting more visitors, I dedicated an entire section of my website to wallpapers that fit that particular size. The response was tremendous and in the end I got a few extra 10 thousand visitors and enough money from the ad revenue to buy a cup of coffee.
When these two questions are combined, it paints a clear picture of the health of a website. In subsequent posts we will be discussing what tools we use to find the data and how we use it to market our clients.
Why I need…um…want an iPad
I will be the first to admit I’m a recovering Apple addict. I owned every iPhone ever made, most of the iPods, and many of the laptops. I have an iPod in both of my cars and one on my nightstand. Steve Jobs should dedicate a room in his home to me — I’ve virtually paid to furnish it over the years. The good news is my therapist says I’m making great progress.
I work with them, play with them, and think they are all-round awesome, but the iPad’s advent failed to impress. As a power-user (and most critically, an arts-fartsy designer) I’m not sure that I want or need a computer that does limited tasks. So, I shrugged it off as something my grandmother could use (literally). Read More…
It’s not Twitter, it’s you
By now you can hardly find someone ambivalent about Twitter. Either they are enthusiastically for it or completely at a loss why anyone would want to share mundane details 140 characters at a time.
In a well-intentioned attempt to be hip and “down with it,” companies have signed on to accounts only to discover no one cares if their board meeting is moved from Thursday to Friday. The resulting lack of followers discourages them from posting ever again.
Whether it is the individual who does not care to share every waking moment with strangers or the business who is too enthusiastic about the banal, in each case the problem is not Twitter but the message being shared. Part of this is the fault of the company who created Twitter. There is a valid criticism that on the website above the place where you write your 140 characters of pure genius they ask, “what’s happening?” For the business aspiring to get the message out about their company, that is certainly the wrong question to ask.
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