Frequently
Asked Questions to Woolf Digital Media
Click on the topic to find out more information.
- FAQ on planning a web site:
- The "What"
- The "Why"
- The "How"
- What we need from you in preparing your site.
- Can you provide Web Hosting for my site?
- What is Web Maintenance and how does that differ from site design and hosting?
- What is Search Engine Optimization?
- Do you provide Web Site Statistics with your hosting or is it an extra cost?
- Does a site that does E-commerce need to be designed different from one that do not?
Remember, there is no charge for an initial consultation to discuss your needs. If you have a question not mentioned in the FAQ or would like more information
about a particular topic call us or just send us an e-mail.
Answers to Frequently Asked Questions Follows:
So, You're Thinking About a Web Page
It's the next step. You say to yourself, "I want a web page, but where do I go? Who do I talk to? Do I learn to do it myself? Do I hire someone to help me, or to do it for me? So, where am I to start?"
One of the most obvious place to start when thinking of a web site is with the web design firm's site. What is your evaluation of their site? If you find the site colors are hideous, the design confusing, or it takes too much time for the first page to load, don't walk, run to another web designer. Once you find a web designer you like, then, you start asking yourself these questions. (A good article on selecting a site designer appeared in Webmonkey, one of the Internet's most useful information sites about the web and web design.)
What do you want a web site for? Business? Personal?
If a business web site, what role do you want your web site to play? You need to decide on the role your site should play in your marketing program, before you order it. Do you want to educate the market about your products? Provide a 24-hour information resource for current customers or potentially new customers? Showcase your products? Generate requests for literature and leads? If you set objectives and stick to them, your web site will be a success.
If a personal web site, do you want it make it biographical? Include photos? Your "Picture Gallery" is typically the first link people click on. It gives people a better sense of whose web page they are looking at. So be sure to make a good impression here. Put up pictures of everything and anything to let them know who you are and what you're like. You may need this page for any home-based business stuff you do. Again, be very specific! Have fun! Links tell a lot about you. You can put lots of links to stuff you like!
Now that you have started thinking about what YOU want a web site for, WHY would anyone else want to see it?
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Now that you have started thinking about what you want a web site for, it is time to expand your thinking to who you want to look at your web site and why?
Why Should Someone Look at your Page?
If a personal web site, maybe you only care if your friends and family look at it, but even a personal web site can enjoy lots of web traffic. If a business web site, does it offer the web page reader a compelling reason not only to be viewing the site but to contact you. A web site visitor can be turned into a customer. You want those who visit your web site to buy. One way to accomplish the latter is to engage them in a two way dialog, so you can market to them on your own terms. Get them to volunteer their name and you can inform them of specials, product upgrades, events, and new products via e-mail or regular mail. How do you get them to volunteer their name? Offer them something! A free catalog, a free quote, a free analysis, a free reprint of an editorial article -- anything your buyers might find valuable. Other methods might include weekly drawings for free gifts (T-shirts, free product, etc.), or other promotional giveaways. Web sites are useful. They can make information available to your current and past customers as well as to potentially new customers. They are ideal ways to disseminate the latest information about your product -- you can include specifications, case studies, success stories, white papers, or testimonials. Be sure to include important contact information like your toll-free ordering line, customer service number, or how to receive technical support.
Now that you have started thinking about WHAT you want a web site for and WHY others would be interested in it, just HOW do you get the web site you want?
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Now that you have started thinking about the WHAT and WHY of web sites the final question becomes HOW to get people to view your web site?
1. Get To The Point.
People are not patient, they do not read long ads and marketing materials unless "something is in it" for them. Be concise. Be quick. Be interesting. This is true for both business and personal web sites. Don't beat around the bush with long introductions or unrelated information. Tell your web reader what they want to know, and they'll stick around for more! Your web site should appeal to the interests of your audience -- no one else matters! Who is your target audience? Direct your focus to your target audience. "Walk a mile in their shoes"... why would they stay at your web site rather than click away? If they're interested in your product because it saves them time or money, then focus on that. Don't start with a list of less-important features. Focus on the key benefits of your product and leave the details for later.
2. Let Everyone Know You Have A Web Site.
Would you open a sales office or store and then not tell your clients in the area that it had opened? Think of your web site as an automated sales or service office on the Internet -- and let the "world" of potential buyers know that it's available to them. Put your web address on your stationery, business cards, ads, brochures, and other sales materials. Rubber stamp older stationary if necessary. Send out an announcement of your web site on a postcard. Be creative!
3. Make It Easy For Viewers To Respond.
Now that you've told them about yourself or your business, can they contact you? This is obvious, but do not overlook it, many sites do. You must make it easy for a reader to express their interest in your web site. Plaster your 1-800 number across it, make sure there's a link to your e-mail.
These are just a few thoughts on developing a web site. It's not the final word, but a starting place for developing a web site. In addition, you can review our Frequently Asked Questions about such topics as e-commerce, web site statistics, and search engine optimization. If we can be of any help please feel free to contact us.
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What We Need From You In Preparing Your Site
- Having a scanned or already-online company logo saves us the time of either having to create one or scan it in and refine it. However, we can scan a logo in, if needed. It must be clear with at least a half inch of white area around it. Graphics unique to your company are useful, they would include pictures of products, logos for specific products, and such. These help to make the page more appealing and distinctive since the chances are smaller that other pages will have the same graphics.
- We will need plenty of information to make a good quality web site. We are not in a position to create the information about you or your company without your input. While we specialize in agricultural related businesses, each one is unique and your uniqueness needs to come across on the internet. Therefore, a few ideas from you make a world of difference. It saves time as well. If you have an old web page already online, please do not delete it! We need your help in preparing your materials for the Web. You supply the raw materials and we assemble them into graphically pleasing web pages.
- With sites that are multi-lingual, you furnish the text in all the languages (if you would like us to translate the text for you there is an additional cost for translation). However to insure the best presentation of your business or organization on the web we do have all text in every language edited by a native language speaker of that language.
- Your thoughts on the structure of the web site are very useful. You can provide us with a simple flow chart, with title, outlining what pages you want and what other pages would connect with them. A hand drawn flow chart is fine. Designing your web site is a cooperative adventure between you and us.
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You need to have a place to to put your web site on the Internet. The location of your site is where it is hosted. Web hosting is separate from web design and your domain name. The cost of web hosting varies considerably, from very expensive to free. It is your overall needs that should determine the decision of where to host a site.
We host sites with your domain name at very reasonable rates. You buy a domain name (You can also buy your domain name through us if you do not have a domain name yet) and then buy your hosting space. Your domain name is the site name. If you have pages people may want to bookmark, lets say, “Business-X Web Special of the Month” a client can bookmark page and the actual url with your domain and page will be saved not just domain name. Search engines will save pages under the actual url, so with own hosted space you own domain and the url is in the search engines as http://www.yourbusinessname.com/pagename.html.
It is not necessary or required for you to host with us when we do your web design. If you already have a web host and are satisfied with them then please continue to use them.
For business sites, where e-commerce is needed, the costs are more, but there are many sites that can fit your needs at a reasonable cost. Many times hosting can be part of the web design package. Ask us about your options.
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Once a site is designed and up on the Internet it needs to be maintained. For example, web pages may need updated. Many businesses have monthly, even weekly or daily, changes to their site, as well as the need to check and troubleshooting a site to ensure that the web pages are available 24/7. Our monthly maintenance package consists of minor updates to your web site as well as continued assistance with web site promotion such as search engine submission. Maintenance does not include graphics design. Maintenance packages can be designed around your needs.
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1. Which goals for your site absolutely need to be met, and which aren't worth the bother. When it comes to search engine optimization, it's easy to become obsessed with doing every little thing, but the rewards for that kind of attention to detail are far too small. You need to stick to the big picture.
2. With search engines, Yahoo directory accounts for half the traffic referred to most sites. So get your site listed on Yahoo, and your traffic can literally double overnight. Beyond that, most search engine traffic comes from two places: Google and Inktomi.
3. You need to get your site crawled. In order to that you need to submit it to search engines. You can pay someone to submit it or you can avoid the fees by simply submitting to individual search engines on your own. Be sure to submit to the big directories as well: Yahoo, LookSmart (which MSN serves under its logo), and the Open Directory Project (which powers Lycos, Hotbot, and Netcenter categories)
4. With some search engines you now pay from $100.00 to $200.00 to insure you get crawled, but no guarantee of a high ranking. Expect to spend $400.00 to $500.00 just to get your sites submitted. Yahoo still offers free submissions, except for business categories, which cost $199. But even the fee doesn't guarantee they'll accept your site, just that they'll decide on it within a week — with free submissions, you don't even get the promise that they'll ever get around to evaluating it, given the incredible volume of submissions.
Once you've submitted your pages, be ready to wait a month, two, or three before they're crawled and indexed. It's frustrating, but processing a billion Web pages takes time — at a non stop rate of one hundred per second, it would still take almost four months.
5. It is useful to make a crawler page. This is a page that just has links to all the pages you want crawled.
6. To help get your page ranked be sure to use title, and keyword and description tags. Use TITLE to specify the most likely search term that matches the page, and DESCRIPTION to provide a quick (50 words max) synopsis of the info on the page: your site will attract a lot more clicks. Keyword spamming is the number one favorite trick for search engine optimization. But many of the sites that stuff a zillion keywords into their pages are hoping to get clicks to their pages just to show ads — they don't care if they get any repeat business. But if you want to draw real customers, focus on the keywords you think your users will be searching for.
7. Just like with the lottery or the ponies, people get sucked in, hoping to find that magic META tag that saves them from ever having to work again, it won't happen. Success for your web site comes from being what people are searching for in the first place.
This discussion on search engine optimization was distilled from the, perhaps, best article on the net about search engines, Search Engine Optimization FREE! by Paul Boutin.
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What can we know about web site traffic?
I receive e-mail offers all the time about finding out about what my traffic is on my site. All I need to do is to pay some money and the company or program will be glad to send me monthly statistics about my site. Is it worth it? Does it really work?
The simple fact is that certain data which we would like to know and which we expect to know are simply not available and it is not helped by statistics programs and companies which claim to calculate things which cannot really be calculated, only estimated.
Basically, the only things you can know for certain are:
- The number of requests made to your server,
- When they were made,
- Which files were asked for, and
- Which host asked you for them.
What you can't know is:
- You can't tell the identity of your readers.
- You can't tell how many visitors you've had.
- You can't tell how many visits you've had.
- Cookies don't solve these problems.
- You can't follow a person's path through your site.
- You often can't tell where they entered your site, or where they found out about you from.
- You can't tell how they left your site, or where they went next.
- You can't tell how long people spent reading each page.
- You can't tell how long people spent on your site.
Defenders of counting visits etc. claim that these are just small approximations. Stephen Turner disagrees, for example, almost everyone is now accessing the web through a cache. If the proportion of requests retrieved from the cache is 50% (a not unrealistic figure) then half of the users' requests aren't being seen by the servers.
Why pay hundreds of dollars for this information? You don't have to. Monthly statistical reports are free and part of all web sites developed by Woolf Digital Media and hosted by Woolf Digital Media.
This look at statistics and web sites was culled from How the web works by Stephen Turner. Perhaps the best article out on the web for understanding web site traffic and statistics.
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An article in USA Today on August 28, 2001 stressed how small businesses are missing the boat by not using their web sites for e-commerce. Only 35% of small businesses let their customers buy online. Many small businesses think that sales are completed by telephone or in person. That means their sites are less likely to be able to compete with bigger firms that do offer e-commerce. Use your web site to disclose the specifics of what you have to offer. You do not need a salesperson to describe things and deal with the customers on the web. Providing multiple ways for servicing a customer is one answer, also provide what is convenient for them is another.
Half of all web sites built cost less than $10,000 to build, and 45% of the firms without a web site expect to build one within the next year. Business sites need to think carefully about NOT including e-commerce on their sites.
When developing e-commerce business sites it is the fulfilling business goals, not the showcasing fancy, breathtaking technology that is needed. When the right technology is used and then crafted to the needs of the business and the customer, a web site keeps traffic coming back.
It is creating the right mix of
- usability
- technical sophistication, and
- individuality in a web site
that makes Woolf Digital Media the solution for e-commerce.