The content of your Web site is crucial and should be developed to quickly answer the basic questions and needs of your specific target visitors. Research shows that you only have a few seconds to entice your visitors to stay so it’s vital that you present obvious choices for them to find the information they need. In addition clear and compelling navigation options need to be present that allow your visitors to easily recognize where they should click to proceed through the sales/information process.

If your visitors become confused about what your site is about or how it applies to them, they are likely to just leave and look elsewhere. The goal of your front page is to allow visitors to qualify themselves as prospects for your business or organization and to proceed through the sales process by accepting a call to action that you offer.
Actions can include purchasing online, contacting you for an appointment, subscribing to your newsletter/blog or whatever the specific next step is in your sales process.

The Essential Questions Visitors to Your Site Will Need Answered:

• What do you do? One of the most common mistakes that sites make is not being clear on exactly what they are providing. The more complex of solution you offer the more important it is to provide this answer in easy-to-understand language. The essence of what you do should be the basis of your organization’s mission statement, but answering the “What you do” question will also include the specific products or services  you’re offering.
• Why you do it? This is related to an organization’s vision statement but needs to be expressed in concise language free from industry jargon. Telling visitors “why you do it” is a means of establishing credibility and positioning yourself as an expert adviser for recommending a solution to their needs.
• Why are you the best choice? This question is the most vital for new prospects and should be answered by your unique value proposition. Your unique value proposition is simply a concise statement of how you
  meet their need better than anyone else.  In addition to stating your unique value, you need to back it up with real-life examples. The most effective support will be testimonials, portfolio’s of your past work, and third party reviews or endorsements if available.
• What can I do? This is the question you want most asked because it means your visitor is satisfied (or at least intrigued) with the answers to their first three questions. They are asking how to proceed through your sales process. This doesn’t mean they’re necessarily ready to buy, but they’re willing to take a step closer. Your site needs to present unambiguous action items for your customers to answer their question of “What can I do?” by providing conspicuous “call to action” links in the body of your front page and the navigation menu.

How To Provide the Answers

Here are a few key principles for answering your visitors’ questions :

1. Be concise. Paragraphs of text on your front page will bury the answers to your visitors’ questions and result in a high abandon rate. Your front page, and navigation bar, should be thought of as a map that clearly directs people to more detailed information on the destination of their choice, without them having to think twice about their choices. While, supporting pages will provide more detailed answers the still must avoid verbosity to be effective.
2. Communicate in layman’s terms and avoid your industry’s jargon. Realize that much of the internal language your organization uses may have no relevance for your visitors.
3. Provide clear call-to-action choices for all types of visitors. The fundamental questions presented above provide answers for newly aware prospects through “trial” or first-time buyers. If you anticipate clients, customers with an ongoing relationship with your organization, to be frequent visitors you need to accommodate the needs of these visitors. Other visitor types can include press, investors or employers. The answers to each type of visitor questions need to be presented in proportion to the importance they have towards achieving the overall goals of your site.

It may seem strange for a Web development and graphic design firm to be providing guidelines for how its customers can spend less with us, but really it’s not from our perspective. We believe applying the golden rule not only benefits our customers but also us in the long run. We might make less money in the short term, but we gain the more valuable benefits of building trust with our clients and playing a small part to insure their long-term success. Such clients will spend more with us over time and become invaluable sources of quality referrals which is how a vast majority of our new business come to us.

So, with that preamble, here are a couple easy ways to reduce your Web development, technical service and graphic design costs:

Maximize the value of each change request

Like almost all Web development and design firms, we have a minimum 1/2 hour charge for any job. This is due to the fact that to switch to a new client’s project, for even a small amount of work, compromises the efficiency of our day’s work flow and imposes an opportunity cost. We have to transition from another project, “retool”, login to appropriate accounts, backup data before changes, post changes, often test the changes (for example in different browsers) then communicate back to the client regarding the work.

The key for clients to realize is that once we have initiated a change request, the incremental cost is much lower for us doing other small changes while we’re already working within a client’s account. For example take a client who sends over three Website content change requests during a week. Each change may take 10 minutes of actual coding, but if they send those requests at three different times they would get billed 1.5 hours. If they save those requests and send them all at once they would only get billed for 1/2 hour or 66% less.

This strategy of course has the most dramatic effect for small changes that are not extremely urgent, and can most commonly be applied for changes for Website content. So if you find yourself with numerous small changes throughout the month, simply try holding them in an Outlook folder or whatever and sending them in groups.

Save 15% by prepaying

We now offer prepaid hours with a 15% discount off our standard rates. There is no minimum quantity, you can use them immediately, they never expire and unused hours are 100% refundable. You can also track your prepaid balance real-time through our online client portal.

Save up to 40% through our flat-rate retainer plans

For any client who regularly gets at least two hours of service from us a month you will save a significant amount of money through our flat-rate retainer.

Skeptical?  Download our Retainer Savings Calculator and run your own comparison scenarios. (If you need help running scenarios just let us know).

Not only do you receive a substantial discount on the number of hours in your plan, you are also entitled to a discount on additional hours each month if you should need them. Flat-rate retainers are paid in advance of each month. Additional hours are billed at a discounted rate of your hourly retainer rate + 20% and payable net 15. Unused hours in flat rate plans are not refundable nor carried over to the next month. Retainers automatically renew but can be canceled at any time.

If you have any questions or would like us to personally review your ongoing service needs and provide recommendations please feel free to contact Doug Case by phone at 208.475.3192 or through our online contact form.

A common request we get from clients is that their Website be developed using a specific font (or typeface). Unfortunately the answer is usually “no” . . . in Web publishing there is a very very small set of font choices available for text rendering.

Unlike print publishing, soft-copy (digital based) publishing relies on the recipient of a document to have the same font installed on their system as the designer. If the recipient’s system does not, a substitute font will be used that will cause the document to appear quite different from what the designer intended.

You likely have received a PowerPoint or Word document which when opened had strange spaces, line breaks and page breaks. More than likely, this document looked much better when put together, but the author failed to embed the fonts before sending off the document to your system.

Embedding a font means including the font files within the Word document (or whatever) thus allowing the recipient’s to view your publication with its intended fonts, even if they don’t happen to have those fonts installed on their system.

No embedded fonts for webpages

While embedding fonts is a great solution for insuring design integrity when emailing Word, PowerPoint and Adobe Acrobat documents, it’s unfortunately not an option for HTML coded Webpages. This means that while there are estimated to be up to 100,000 digital fonts (see: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/links/ ) there are only a handful of fonts suitable for body text; fonts that are common to 90%+ of all PC’s and Mac’s in the world. My short list of those typefaces is below:

Windows font name / Mac font name

• Arial / Helvetica
• Trebuchet MS / Helvetica
• Verdana / Verdana
• Georgia / Georgia

The good news is that deciding which font to use for your Website body text is going to be easier than you thought.

The case for Helvetica (or Arial for Windows)

The Arial / Helvetica combo of typefaces is the de facto standard for professional Web presentation. Helvetica is an icon of contemporary design that is synonymous with professionalism. It’s an undisputed fact that a majority of professional copy is presented in Helvetica typeface (or a close variation). Look at any major magazine, sign, or advertisement; the publications of design leaders like Apple and the New York Design Center; the productions of polished professional brands like Crate and Barrel, Target, Macy’s, or Nike . . . Helvetica is used in their marketing material a majority of the the time. Helvetica is so prevelenat within marketing, it recently became the subject of it’s own full length film.

Helvetica is a great typeface because it so efficiently achieves the goal of graphic design. It provides an unpretentious backdrop of credibility to your unique value message without drawing attention to itself (and thus drawing attention away from your message). Helvetica provides a great “off white” canvas on which your message can be communicated professionally and concisely.

Selectively using other typefaces as graphic elements within your Webpage

While there are only a few font choices for body text, we can selectively create text using other fonts by converting that text to a graphic and then embedding that text as a graphic in a Webpage. With a neutral body font like Helvetica, the “feel” of the featured graphic font is conveyed quite well. For example we can set the font face of headers, menu-items, front page “ads” or call-out text sections in a different typeface.

I hesitate to say that “any” font can be included with this method into a Webpage. One of the tell-tale signs of amateur design is the inclusion of too many fonts of differing styles. This is fine for personal home pages, Facebook or cottage industry newsletters but if our goal is producing professional grade best-practice publications the rule of thumb is to use as few typefaces as possible and then use those variations sparingly.

Only choose to use an alternate typeface set as graphics if you can articulate the reason this addition would add value to your design and increase the clarity of your value proposition. Graphic rendered typfaces have some downsides, namely they add to the load time of your page and the text within the graphics is not indexed by search engines.

In conclusion

Be aware that unlike other types of publishing, you really don’t have much a of font choice when it comes to the body text of your Website. Unless there is a compelling reason, Helvetica / Arial should be your default choice. The other options listed earlier (Trebuchet, Verdana and Georgia) are also viable options.

Any typeface can be converted to a graphic and included within your Webpage, however this method should be used with caution and in consultation with a professional designer.  If you have questions or comments on this article, please don’t hesitate to share them.