Saturday, April 04, 2009

On Poor Design and Recommended Tools

Good morning, friends. Hope all is well on your end. Been
plugging away at proposals to stir up business for the
Spring and hopeful that this economy is not going to pull me
much further down. How are you doing? Have you felt the
impact? Are you working harder for less money?

I have a friend who was hoping to retire at 55 but may have
lost that opportunity due to downsizing and reduced budgets.
That would stink -- working for 25+ years towards an early
retirement -- only to find out you can't do it anymore.

The more I talk to people, the more I hear more of the same
types of stories: this one lost 65% of their retirement
income, this one lost their job, this one has to sell their
house. It's becoming a broken record and rather depressing.
At the rate the country is spending money to bail out
everybody, I'm wondering when they'll actually get around
to helping the middle class and small businessman that
keeps this country going by developing new companies,
products and services and creating jobs.

OK, enough of what you already know. Let's talk some more
about the biggest mistakes people make with their web
sites.

So far we've covered Poor Type Treatment and Poor Colors.
Today I want to talk about Poor Design.

I'm only going to say this once: if you are not a graphics
designer, don't try to design anything. I don't care if you
won an award in grade school or Mom still has your crayon
drawings hanging on the refrigerator. If you don't have
honest-to-God talent and mad design skills, you have no
business designing your own web site from scratch.

I know, I know. There are these great tools that make it so
easy a four-year-old could design a site. Just because the
tools are out there doesn't mean you should be using them.

Remember this: people -- your visitors and prospects --
judge a book by its cover. Once you design your own site,
you are the worst judge of your site's design. You are too
close to it. Start asking people to critique it, preferably
people who won't tell you what you want to here. Get some
real objective observations and criticism.

Remember this, too: you only have about 14 seconds to make
an impression on your web site's visitor. That means the
page has to load fast, it has to communicate the value
proposition, and it needs to suck them in to learn more. It
needs to be compelling visually and textually, it needs to
collect the visitor's contact information, and it needs to
educate them. It needs to get them to want to know more, to
lean in, and to pick up the phone or send an email to get
more information.

If your design doesn't accomplish all of this then you are
missing the boat.

I'll give you a concrete example. Start looking at the web
sites of your favorite restaurants. Based upon local
research I'd say at least half of my favorite local
restaurants have a really poor web site design and fail to
do most of what I have mentioned above. The object of a
restaurant's web site is to sell the food and ambiance of
their restaurant. If it doesn't show great photos of the
food and interior of the restaurant and show people loving
the experience, then it fails. Go do the exercise and see
what you learn.

Now there are some tools out there to help with design. If
you have no graphic design experience then all make sure to
get tools that come with professionally designed templates.

Templates can make you look better than you are and can get
your design started quickly. The temptation though will be
to tweak the templates to make them yours. And that's where
you can get in trouble. If you don't understand design then
you will most likely ruin the look and feel of the
professionally designed template. So my advice is to use
the template as is.

Two web design tools I like that include great templates
are:

Xara Web Designer
http://www.cooltoolawards.com/software/multimedia/xarawebdesigner.htm

XSite Pro 2.0
http://www.cooltoolawards.com/software/utilities/xsitepro.htm

If you are trying to design a look and feel for your own, then
I recommend a few different tools.

First, I recommend my ebook about design called Designing
Ebook COvers -- it's the only ebook of its kind that
deconstructs projects I have done for clients including
ebook covers, product boxes, banners and web pages, and it
explains the choices I made along the design process. You
will learn from this:

http://www.designingebookcovers.com

Second you should check out these tools which make the
rendering of 2D designs into 3D designs very effortless
without PhotoShop:

eCover Software Pro
http://www.ebookcovercreator.com/ecoversoftwarepro.htm

EZ Ebook Templates
http://www.ebookcovercreator.com/ezebooktemplates.htm

Web 2.0 Covers
http://www.ebookcovercreator.com/web20covers.htm

Quick 3D Cover
http://www.ebookcovercreator.com/quick3dcover.htm

Now if you need help designing other things such as
business cards, I suggest a good start would be here:

The Business Card Creator
http://www.cooltoolawards.com/software/multimedia/businesscardcreator.htm

Need a logo development tool? Try this one:

AAA Logo 2008
http://www.cooltoolawards.com/software/multimedia/aaa-logo.htm

One of the best investments you can make is in a good
collection of ready-made professionally designed graphics
which you can then combine into something new:

Web 2.0 Graphics Pack
http://www.cooltoolawards.com/software/multimedia/web20graphicspack.htm

Web 2.0 Headers
http://www.cooltoolawards.com/software/multimedia/web20headers.htm

OK, that's enough on the design subject for today.

A few last items for you to consider for the new week.

I really want you to start concentrating on how you get
your web site found. You basically have two choices and
both are expensive and time-consuming with unpredictable
results. You can either go with search engine optimization
or Google pay per click (PPC).

I have clients who have paid as much as $4K/month for
prominence via search engine optimization and $50K/month
for Google PPC. I just don't recommend it. You need some
seriously deep pockets for that kind of investment.

Now I know a little something about search engine
prominence. Search for me by name or any of my products and
services and I show up all over the place.

Look at my ongoing success with CoolToolAwards.com. My
reviews typically show up in top page one positions on
Google and other search engines and the site still stays
around the 140,000 top site on Alexa without me lifting a
finger. My sites get over 2,000,000 unique page views
collectively every year.

So when I recommend a new solution, I want you to pause and
listen. I can provide you with prominence in the sponsored
area of Google (at the top or along the right side) as well
as 900+ partner sites. You get to pick three relevant
keywords and up to 50 zipcodes in your own backyard you
want to target. This level of geo-targeting is particularly
important for local companies who depend upon local people
to buy their products or services.

If that's you, contact me so I can explain how it works.
Best of all the price point is amazingly low if you get in
now: $200/month and there's no cap on the PPC.

And if you would like to start offering this service to
local businesses in your city in the U.S., then you need to
go learn more here and sign up for free to become an account
representative:

http://spidy.localadlink.net/home.asp

OK, guys, I gotta go. Family's calling.

All my best,

Steven

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