Your web site...is it time to re design?

Re-design is a natural cycle of having a web site. What worked well ...say eight years ago, may not be performing up the mark for you today. While many changes can be made by a little web maintenace here and there, there comes a time when only a full scale redesign is going help you accomplish your objective.

But how do you know when that time has come? Here are four tell-tale signs that the time has come to re-design.

1. Your Business has grown or changed
   While any good web site will be designed so it can accomodate moderate business growth, if your business is booming and you have extended your service offering it is likely that your original web site is not doing you justice. The same goes if you have changed the direction of your business.



2. Outdated Design
   You only get one chance to make a first impression and if the overall look/feel of your site is radically "behind the times" you can lose credibility. If your site features animated clipart, is coded as frames or looks like a "Front Page template you are the victim of an outdated design!



3. Your information lacks organization
   If you have been adding to your site over the years it is likely that your navigation has become a little confused. Making your visitors "think" when navigating will not engage them to the same extend as a well thought out navigation and information structure.



4. Poor Performace in the Search engines
   Poor rankings in the Search Engines can be a result of not optimizing your site well. Poor search engine ranking can also be a result of bad design choices or coding on your site. Make sure that your site isn't designed using frames and that the text is coded in HTML. Flash sites are also more difficult to optimize for Search Engines.

If any of these senarios describe your web site contact us at info@indigoimage.com to see how we can help bring you up to date in the web world.

Blog widget: The web poll.

Blogs are becoming an increasingly popular marketing tool for companies, both big and small. They allow you to update your readers with company news, offer tips, tricks, promote products. The list is endless.

Blogs can now also be enhanced with widgets.Widget are small applications which have a specific function to perform on a blog or web site.For example some widgets allow you to show videos play music, and while this might not be relevant to a business blog there are plently of widgets out there that are.

For example a web poll widget.

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Widgets like increase the interactivity with your readers just that one step further. They require little technological know how to add...cut and paste some code and your are ready to go.
What's more most of them are free.

iGoogle and search results

I read an intresting article recently on the ranking of search results querried from a personalized iGoogle home page. The article described how a small business owner had been such a frequent visitor a competitor's site that when he typed in an appropriate key phrase the competitors site was out ranking his own. However using the same key phrase on a unpersonalized Google search his site outranked his competitor. The clever iGoogle algorithm was assuming because of the multitude of visits he had made to his competitors site it made sense to display it higher up the list.

To illustrate the effect I did a serach using the keyword "counterfeit" to see how our site on "counterfeit detection" faired. As you can imaginge it is a site I visit more frequently than most.

My iGoogle search ranked the site as second while a standard Google search ranked it as third ... I got the reult I expected the personalized iGoogle search ranked the site higher then regular Google ... not a hugh difference but a difference all the same.

This personalized ranking of sites creates an intresting senario when measuring the success of an internet marketing campaign! Any ideas on the approaches to take?

Managing your AdWord Campaigns

Purchasing Pay Per Click advertising (AdWords)with companies like Google or Overture, can be a great way to ensure your site is displayed for a particular keyword or phrase and can be an important component of an Internet marketing plan.

Adwords are the advertisment you see along the top-left and right side of search engines like Google.com and Yahoo.com. They are powered by a Pay per Click account which allows you to set up the ad, select the key words or phrases associated with it and bid on a price for each keyword or phrase. Every time someone clicks on your advertisement you are billed.

The bids for keywords can vary enormously depending upon the popularity of a keyword and you must outbid your competitors to remain "on top". Paying $1.25 per click will list you higher than another bidding $1.00

Selecting your key words and phrases wisely will give you the best ROI. For example: you have an e-commerce store that sell all kinds of red shoes. Purchasing the key phrase "shoes" is going to cost more than say "Red Shoes" because the competion for a generic keyword like "shoes" will always be more costly than something more specific like "Red Shoes". "Red Shoes" also has the advantage that more geared to your target audience.

Managing an Adword campaign over time is also very important as the internet is a dynamic animal ... maybe the market place has been swamped with "Red shoe" retailers and they are outbidding your keywords!

If you need your adword campaign assessed we can help contact the St Louis web designer today

What is SEO?

A good web design company will never bombard their prospects or clients with techo jargon ... and the industry of creating web sites is full of it.

One such technical term I have been recently asked about by confused prospects is SEO.

SEO is an acronym of Search Engine Optimisation ..which often poses just as many questions from my prospects!

Search engine optimisation is the process of increasing the ranking of a web site in the search engines. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user. In simple language a web site that ranks on the first page of a search is likely to get more visitors than one that ranks on page 5.

Search engine optimisation is a vital component of a web project. If you are looking to improve the postition of your site in the search engine give us a call today for a free anaylsis of your site
Call: 636 273 6746