Thursday, January 28, 2010

5 Easy Ways to Enhance Your Website

Feel like your website is starting to look a little bland? Want to make it a little more interactive? Well one option is of course to redesign it...but unless your website is really old, it may not be in your budget to redesign it. Or maybe it's a new website and you like it but you are just looking for that "Wow" factor...well here are some easy tips to either implement yourself or ask your web developer to do for you:

1. Insert a photo gallery.

There are a lot of really nice looking photo galleries available for free. And you don't have to be a wizard at HTML either, just use the code already provided.

If you're looking for one that is a popup, checkout Lightbox. It's really easy to implement with any web design already in place. If you want something a little more fancy check out this one - it's a little more difficult to implement but is really nice.

2. Add a countdown feature

What am I counting down to exactly? Well the answer is anything you want! Announce that you're having a massive sale, and put a countdown calendar on your home page counting down the hours, minutes and seconds remaining until the spending frenzy begins! Or if you have a major event coming up, or a new product...really anything of interest.

3. Add Facebook and Twitter

Social media is all the rage right now...it's almost an expectation of any legitimate business to be on Facebook and Twitter. Give your users a little link on your website so they can follow you and become fans. Another good idea is to add a Facebook Badge.

4. Add a survey

Everyone loves to have their voice heard - let them express themselves on your website by voting! Of course it totally depends on your product/service but this is especially easy to do if you use a CMS like Joomla or Wordpress which both have survey plugins. But if not you can either have your developer set one up for you - or worse case scenario use SurveyMonkey.

5. Add a video

This is really easy to put on your website, the hard part may be figuring out what to make a video of. YouTube and Vimeo both let you embed your videos on your website and I would recommend using one of them. Make your video fairly short, and focus on making it either fun or informative...and ideally both!

Good luck!

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

I have a website, why do I need a blog?

A website is a great tool to have, however while I believe it is the most important tool of your online marketing, it should not stand alone. Social media, and specifically a blog should be used in conjunction with your website.

What does a blog do that a website doesn't? Well for one it's much easier to update. Not everyone has the time or money or content management system in place to easily update their website. Anyone can update a blog.

Also, Google and other search engines LOVE blogs. Especially if you include links to your website from your blog. It all becomes part of SEO.

It gets your users involved. The greatest part about a blog is the comment section below. Your users can add their comments, ask questions, interact with both you and other users. The possibilities are tremendous.

Here is a great little powerpoint presentation I ran across that gives some really nice tips on blogging. Really I think the best way to become a good blogger is just to do it, which I have to learn myself, being more of a website guy.

The point is, your business needs a blog. There are lots of options out there, and actually I've read some things recommending not using Google's Blogger.com which is what I currently use. Meh - it's free.