So let me tell you why WordPress is usually an amazing choice when you’re considering redesigning your website.

1. It’s free and open-source, with a large, active community constantly improving it.
2. It’s a Content Management System (CMS), meaning anyone in your company who can use Microsoft Word can update the website.
3. It’s incredibly versatile, whether you want a sparse, minimalist website or one that has all the bells and whistles.
4. It’s expandable. Need a new page? No problem. Want to add some new capability? There’s no limit.
5. It’s easy to make WordPress SEO-friendly.

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There is an abundance of hype around blogging. Some people claim to have made a fortune with their blogs, while others assert blogs are frivolous and a waste of a business’ time. For most small businesses, the truth lies somewhere in between. A well-designed and regularly-updated blog can be a great addition to your marketing mix and sales-generating activities.

This article will explain the pros and cons of blogs for small businesses and give you some expert tips for publishing a successful blog.

Why a blog is great for your small business

• Blogs are great for search engine optimization (SEO). You can incorporate your keywords, the content changes regularly, and other websites will likely link to your posts. Search engines love all of these things.
• If you do it right, you will become a trusted resource for your desired audience. Trust will lead to customer relationships. Relationships lead to profit.
• When a potential customer contacts you after reading your blog, you have the advantage of being a partner instead of a vendor.
• As an expert in your field (hopefully), you should easily be able to create content of value for your desired audience.

Why blogs are terrible for some small businesses

• You have to update a blog frequently for it to matter. If you aren’t updating once a week, any readers you gain will lose interest. Dormant blogs also do nothing for your search engine rankings.
• Your blog must be interesting to your desired audience, or you will be writing to an empty room (forgive the mixed metaphor).
• Blogging is a long-term part of your success. There won’t be immediate gratification, but as you build a reputation and body of work, you will see results.

Things successful bloggers know

Make your blog an integral part of your website. Don’t create a blog that no one can find. Replacing your home page with your blog is often a good solution for small businesses, especially if your home page currently says something generic like, “Welcome!”

Investigate blogging software to find the right option for you. For my clients, I use WordPress blogs. The software is easy to use and highly customizable—and free!

Blogging requires discipline. Make a schedule and stick to it. Create an editorial calendar. Set apart time each week dedicated to writing. If you have trouble doing this, find someone who will hold you accountable.

Get a professional editor who knows your goals. Regina Spektor has a song all about editing, and she sings, “You can write, but you can’t edit.” She might as well be singing to the world, because behind every great writer is a great editor. If you want proof, ask for my original draft of this article.

Work on finding “your voice.” Every great writer has a distinctive voice. Writers aren’t born with these voices; they cultivate them. A professional editor will also help with your writer’s voice.

If you have trouble getting started writing, or your sentences come out in an incoherent jumble, just start typing exactly how you talk. Imagine you are talking to a friend, potential client or your aunt—whatever makes you comfortable. Consider getting a voice recorder and speaking your posts before you write them.

If you want other bloggers to visit your blog, post links to articles and to comment, you have to do the same for them.  It’s as simple as the biblical advice in Proverbs, “A man that hath friends must show himself friendly.” Just replace “man” with “blogger.”

Learn about (or hire someone who knows about) search engine optimization. All the concepts from my post on growing visitors to your website apply. If you do SEO right, your blog will be tailor-made for helping the people searching for your products and services to find your website instead of your competitors’.

Write really useful articles for your desired audience. For example, if you are a caterer, consider writing about the top five appetizers to impress guests rather than the latest innovations in keeping food warm. A caterer wants potential clients to find her blog, not necessarily industry-insiders.

Thinking about starting a blog for your small business but still need more advice? Feel free to give me a call or email me with your questions—513.833.4203 or amanda@zooinajungle.com

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Google Analytics

Install Google Analytics on your website to track all sorts of nifty data, like how many visitors came from Anchorage, AK last month or the average time a visitor spends on your products page during your Tuesday Special Sales. Analyzing this data tells you how successful (or not…) your web initiatives are.

Google Local

Gain an edge in Google Search Results by signing up for a free Google Local listing. Your business address, logo, phone number and website address will appear on Google’s maps when users search for your products or services

Google Webmaster Tools

Get Google’s advice on how to improve your site for search with Google Webmaster Tools. See what other sites link to yours, upload your sitemap for Google to use, see what search queries lead visitors to your site and more.

Google’s Feedburner for your blog

Manage your blog’s RSS feed with Feedburner. Features include the ability to specify a delivery time, see how many email subscribers you have and customize the look and feel of your feed. Feedburner works with your existing RSS feed.

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Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)

Search engines such as Google and Bing offer companies advertising with a pay-per-click model. Each time a searcher clicks on your ad, you pay for it. Pricing is determined by an auction model where companies compete for higher rankings and more frequent showings of their ads.

PPC advertising is one of the most effective ways for a business to advertise. You only pay when someone searching for your keywords clicks on your ad. Keywords are words or phrases that describe your business, products or services. There is a high likelihood that someone will be interested in your products and company when he searches using your keywords.

Tips for small businesses already using PPC advertising

• Create relevant landing pages. When someone clicks on your ad, they are searching for a specific term. If they don’t see that term on your web page within two seconds, they will move on to a different site.

• With Google AdWords, use the “Search Query” report to discover new keywords that trigger your ad but aren’t in your keyword list yet. Add them for more results.

• If people searching for an irrelevant keyword often click on your ad, add them to your list as “negative keywords.” This will save your budget unwanted clicks.

About non-pay-per-click Internet advertising.

Many website directories offer non-pay-per-click advertising. They often use persuasive personal selling techniques to get companies to agree to monthly or yearly contracts. I usually recommend to my clients that they create the free listings offered by such websites as yellowpages.com and ignore the sales pitches. The directory listing websites can’t provide the same return on investment as pay-per-click advertising.

Caveat: Advertising on websites for a specific community can be helpful to certain businesses. For instance, a wedding photographer may want to advertise on The Little Wedding Guide or The Knot, places where couples gather and do research.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The process of making your website easy for search engines to find is called Search Engine Optimization. Essentially, you pick one or a few keywords and incorporate them into your website often. If you do it well, search engines will rank you higher in searches for your keywords, but your website will still remain readable for actual human visitors.

Tips on Search Engine Optimization for Small Businesses

• Choose to optimize for keywords that will have less competition but still be relevant to your customers. Instead of “financial planner,” optimize for “financial planning in Alaska.”

• Relevant anchor text is incredibly important to search engine rankings, but most business people don’t know what it is. Anchor text is the word or phrase that constitutes a link. Always make your anchor text relevant to the page you link to and ask others who link to your site to do the same. Good anchor text: Marketing for small businesses (tells search engines what your link is all about). Bad anchor text: Click here! (Search engines can’t determine what this links to).

• Blogging is great for search engine optimization if it’s done well. The first rule of any blog is to update it frequently—twice a week is a good goal. Blog entries don’t have to be long, just relevant to your chosen keywords and your customers’ interests.

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For most businesses, the ultimate purpose of web design is to encourage a visitor to become a customer. To achieve that goal, websites need to be visitor-focused. Every decision about the website should answer the question, “Will this be better or worse for the visitor?”

One person needs to be responsible for the outcome of the design, and that person needs to be visitor-focused (not CEO-focused or sales-department-focused or technology-focused). There is a snide response to the adage that a symphony can’t be played by just one person: No committee ever wrote a beautiful symphony.

Just like a composer learns music theory to help his symphony achieve his vision, web designers should use the body of knowledge we have concerning good design to meet your company’s goals. This article will discuss some of these essential principles.

As I wrote week, good design is passionate and purposeful. We have established that the purpose of website design for businesses is to encourage visitors to become customers. (We’ll visit how to grow the number of visitors to your site in a future article).

Donald Norman wrote The Design of Everyday Things in the 1980s. The book is so brilliant that his design concepts remain crucially important and can be applied to website design today. He writes,

“Design should… make sure that:

1. The user can figure out what to do, and
2. The user can tell what is going on.”¹

For example, if your website visitor wants to send you an email, you should make it easy for her. If your website is trying to load content for her to view, she should be able to tell what is happening.

“Okay, but how can I make things easy for my visitors?”

Design your website to behave in ways they expect and are comfortable with. Through research, we know the most viewed spot of your website is the top left corner. You can use this area to tell visitors who you are and what you do. Typically, visitors expect to see a “Contact” link on the right side of the top navigation bar.

Your website should be designed to allow visitors to use their web-browsing habits to discover content on your website.  Visitors refuse to learn a whole new way of browsing just to use your website. In his book Habit: The 95% of Behavior Marketers Ignore, Neale Martin makes a compelling case that most human behavior is driven by habits, and if a habit is broken, a person will experience a feeling of dissonance.² For something as basic as finding the FAQ’s on your website, a visitor should never feel dissonance.

Visitors also hate to be annoyed. Many companies, in an effort to help visitors learn as much as possible, will have every link open in a new window. After closing a dozen open windows, what the visitor really learns is to never visit that site again. A good rule of thumb is to have links referring to your own site open in the same window, and links referring to outside sites open in new windows.

We can please a visitor’s sense of habit by following more advice from Donald Norman. He advocates making the most common things visible, using “natural mappings” and giving the user feedback.³

Make Things Visible

Don’t hide the most important information in menus on your website. If you want visitors to contact you, put your contact information on the home page.  This is a very easy-to-understand principle that just as easily gets suppressed through design-by-committee antics.

Use Natural Mappings

Norman writes, “Mapping is a technical term meaning the relationship between two things, in this case, between the controls and their movements and the results in the world”⁴ In other words, if you want your car to turn right, you turn the wheel to the right. Unnatural mapping explains why so many drivers find it difficult to turn while backing up; you have to turn the wheel the opposite of the way you want to go.

Mappings are especially important on websites because everything on computers is virtual, not tactile. For example, if you have a slideshow on your website, make sure it behaves as quickly and naturally as flipping a page in a magazine.

The Apple Mobile Me service has an admirable slideshow feature,
which showcases the use of natural mapping.

Give Feedback

A visitor won’t know they have completed a task successfully unless you tell them. So, if they fill out a web form, direct their browser to a thank-you page. If they sign up for your newsletter or buy a product from your site, let them know it was successful.

There’s no need for fancy animations that take time to load. Visitors won’t stick around to see them. The average visitor will give your website one second to start loading before moving on to the next search result. If it takes longer than ten seconds to load, no one will wait for it.

For more detail on these aspects of design, read the first chapter of The Design of Everyday Things (or even better, read the entire book).

Website Design Examples

The best way to experience the importance of website design essentials is to visit good and bad websites. As you visit the links, ask yourself the following questions:

We’ll start with the bad websites.

If you can endure the rousing repetition of the “William Tell Overture,” this angelfire.com site is a great example of design gone horribly awry. Fortunately, it was intentional. Unfortunately for the rest of these companies, their website design was intended to attract visitors. Poorly designed websites can be found in all business sectors. Procter & Gamble is a global company, with a large marketing budget. It doesn’t matter how much money you invest in a website if you don’t design for your visitors.

	Brill Publications
	Web Marketing Magic
	Procter & Gamble
	Coastal Heritage Society

Now for the well-designed websites.

Ask yourself the same questions as you visit these well-designed websites. None of them are perfect, but they are all visitor-focused.

	Apple Shows good navigation bar design.
	Google Makes searching, the most important task, prominent
	Peter Yastrow’s Blog Lets the visitor know what Peter Yastrow writes about.
	Overnight Prints Easy-to-find contact info and prominent special offers.

Decide for yourself if the following sites are well designed or not. I’d like your opinion. Leave a comment or email me at amanda@zooinajungle.com with your feedback.

• AdGeo
• WordPress
• The NY Times
• The Drudge Report

Footnotes

1. Norman, Donald A. The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books, 2002. 188.

2. Martin, Neale. Habit: The 95% of Behavior Marketers Ignore . Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Press, 2008.

3. Norman, Donald A. The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Chapter 1.

4. Ibid., 23.

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