Effective Blog Design Services
To say the least, I have a rather unique approach to designing websites. I believe that above all, they should produce results. For most small businesses, results equals qualified sales leads.
I don’t really care about pretty sites or fancy flash images but because first impressions do count, a site should be presentable and easy to navigate. Beyond that, as far as I’m concerned, a small business website need serve only four purposes:
- Provide visitors with information about your products or services
- Capture the contact information of interested prospects
- Automatically deliver something of value in exchange for contact information
- Attract quality, free traffic from search engines and other sources
Recently I’ve been using blogging software to create sites. I’ve chosen to go this route primarily for 5 reasons. First, a blog is easy to update from any computer by anyone regardless of computer skills. This is allows the site owner to update, change and modify the site whenever he or she wishes at no additional cost. This is simply not possible with sites built in Flash or HTML where all changes must go through a programmer.
Second, blogs are looked upon favorably by the search engines - especially WordPress blogs. In other words, if two sites are identical except one is built as a blog in WordPress and the other in traditional HTML, Google, Yahoo and MSN would rank the blog higher. I wasn’t sure if this was true or not but after testing both side by side I am now convinced that blogs are favored and I’m converting over all my static sites to blogs.
Third, because blogs are all built around themes (or templates) that dictate the entire look and feel of the site, the look of a blog can be customized with a single click of a button rather than programming each page on a site. This is especially useful if you wish to change the appearance of your site to correspond with special occassions such as holidays or big events. If your hockey team wins that Stanley Cup you may wish to commemorate the victory with a hockey-themed site for a short period of time and then convert it back when the excitement fades. A better example may be Mother’s Day or Christmas but the point is that a blog allows you a greater degree of flexibility.
Fourth, blogs allow the owner to build more personal relationships with site visitors. This is accomplished in two ways. First, visitors can post comments on your blog, making them feel as if their opinion counts. It also gives you valuable feedback you can use over your competitors. Second, you can step out from the corporate image of a tradition, ‘brochure-like’ website and let your personality shine through. Because blogs are so easy to update you can let your customers know what you’re doing by posting more often. Remember, people do business with other people - not with faceless corporations.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, blogs allow you to leverage web 2.0 and social networking sites. Social networking sites such as Digg.com, FaceBook, MySpace, YouTube, etc. are huge now and they will continue to be for a long time to come. The reason that they are so popular is because users control the content and they can interact with other users to decide what stays and what goes. By leveraging blog technology, you can reap the benefits provided by posting on web 2.0 sites. You can post your story on Digg or Technorati and ‘boom!’ just like that you have a link back from an authority site to your own blog.
This is a huge benefit.
Please contact me if you’re interested in having a site designed. We can add a blog to the site you already have or we can build one from scratch. Either way you will end up with a marketing tool that you can update yourself and one that will be very attractive to the search engines as well as all the other social networking sites.