Use our experience and knowledge to your advantage! (Image: Miika Kumpulainen)

In my 12 or so years in the exciting, yet often wild and rugged terrain of the Creative Management landscape, I have become all too accustomed to the regularity and reality of working with clients who have very specific, highly subjective ideas about how they want their website to look.

Being a former business owner myself, I completely understand the intense relationship one can have with one’s business.  There are undoubtedly certain parallels that can be drawn between owning a business and having a baby – particularly if it is your ‘brain-child’ and the recipient of a large proportion of your life savings, the new and likely unwieldy tenant in your house or the relentless force responsible for keeping your brain ticking away throughout the night.

That said, as a Designer, I do feel an obligation to stand up for and vocalise the virtues of my vocation, just as any other trained, experienced and knowledgeable professional would and should.

Whilst it can be argued that ‘design’ is in itself not a skill that can be officially labelled or accredited (although I personally believe the introduction of an official, widely recognised accreditation program for Designers would be worthwhile) in such a publicly resonant way as say that of a Doctor, Accountant, Solicitor, Chef or even Hairdresser, being a good Designer involves amassing an awareness of, and an ability to do a multitude of things.

We are so much more than technically-apt personnel through which creative solutions are realised, and can and do often wear multiple hats including those of psychologist, philosopher, business advisor, anthropologist, mathematician, problem solver and project manager, amongst many others.

Design is all about finding the right solution that will help an individual or business exceed their clients expectations.  And in doing so, it is fundamentally important that the solution is not just highly functional, but that it delights in delivering to the client or user an innovative experience, or a means of communication, that not only takes them where they want to go but inspires them to want more.

It is this amassing of experience – of searching for, experimenting with and exploring new ways of resolving communication problems, that provides us with the expertise that you – the client – come to us seeking.   It is also what we pride ourselves on offering you.

Next time you come in to Salsa, I’d recommend coming equipped with three things to ensure you get the most value out of our expertise.  Firstly, do develop your own ideas about what sort of interactive design solution you’re looking for.  In doing so though I suggest you ask yourself the following questions:

1.  Does this tie in with my branding?
2.  Will it resonate with my target audience(s) and make clear the objectives of my business?
3.  Will it differentiate me from my competitors? If so, how?
4.  What is the functional basis for my aesthetic decisions? (Ie:  If you think pink should the predominant colour used throughout the site, why?)

The second thing would be to adopt a willingness to be challenged. After all, you are paying us for our expertise, so get the most out of us.  We have worked with clients with requirements and demands similar to yours time and time again, so keep this in the back of your mind.  We also have a thorough understanding of the bigger picture – what design trends might be better to steer clear of and what other creative approaches might be worthwhile investigating.

Thirdly, have fun and remember good design has been proven to place you in a position of significant competitive advantage!  I highly recommend checking out the Design Victoria website for a great (and practical) read on how this does so.  Amongst many other resources and tools, you can also assess how well your business is embracing innovation.

I had a meeting today with a potential new customer, and they were just getting out of a bad relationship with their previous developer.  They mentioned that he’d “oversold” them on the capabilities of his organisation.  In fact, he didn’t even have an organisation – it was only 1 person.  His website, and the way he presented his business, made it appear as though it was a more substantial business.  Anyway, it turns out he’s going on a long holiday, and their site is supposed to have gone live in 2 weeks, and is not near ready… needless to say, they’re now looking for a new developer!

I  guess the point I’m making in a round about way, is that your site can be used to allow people to see who you are (in the above example he was lying, but let’s assume you won’t do that!).  It’s not only my opinion, but I’ve seen it time and time again – if your website visitors can see who you are, what your team is like, and get a feeling of comfort that they’re dealing with real, honest, people, your enquiries will go through the roof.  Not only that, the quality of the enquiries will be considerably better.

E.g. We run a marketing site using another brand name (email me if you want to know what it is).  This particular site is a brand that only generates leads for Salsa – there is no real business behind it.  The site itself ranks its butt off in the search engines – gets twice as much traffic as the Salsa site, however the leads are generally very bad in comparison.  There are about the same number of leads (in fact maybe even more) but they are much, much lower quality, and equate to about 5% of our sales, while the Salsa site generated about 40%.  I butted my head against the wall for years trying to work out why, and one day a client actually told me – after mentioning they’d actually come across the other site, but decided not to enquire; I asked why they did choose to enquire with us?

Their response was “because I felt like I was dealing with real people.  The other website didn’t look real”.  The site itself is as well designed as the Salsa site, however it does not contain any people – no staff page, no photo’s of clients, not even a stock photo of one of those ladies you see on every 2nd website!  Nothing that gives the user the feeling they’re dealing with real people, and so they don’t have any confidence, and don’t waste their time enquiring.

Get your staff onto your website, and watch your enquiries improve.

Here is our staff page: http://www.salsainternet.com.au/about-salsa-staff.html

A couple of years ago, users didn’t want to be “engaged” online – they wanted to go to a website, do something (enquire, sign up), fix something (solve a problem) or buy something (shop!).   We’ve seen an incredible shift in the way people achieve this over the past couple of years with people now spending so much more time online.  Users now want more from their website browsing experience.  The introduction of social media (I still don’t like that term, anyway…) tools means that people have now become used to using the internet as more than just a tool, but as a part of their life. And so, they naturally expect a website to be more than just a tool – it needs to make them feel at home, make them feel like they’re part of something – not just enquiring, problem solving or shopping.

How many times have you checked your web enabled phone today?  How many times a day did you check it 2 years ago? We spend a LOT of time online now.

Your clients and potential customers now want to know who you are, what you look like, what your office looks like, what you did at your last team event, what was the name of your first pet!!  They want to build a relationship with you, and feel that you’re actually interested in telling them about yourself.  It needs to be genuine of course, as any relationship needs to be, so you do need to be careful, because this new world of online transparency means that if you’re not honest, it will easily show.  Marketing hasn’t really changed, it’s still about being able to genuinely connect with the people who care the most; however the tools we used to make us look like someone we weren’t (websites are so good at making small businesses look like big companies) are not enough – there are just so many ways to find out more about a person or company now, that you can’t hide behind a website – so you might as well come out and tell the world about who you really are. If you don’t, someone else probably will.

An interesting side note: the staff page on the Salsa website is one of the most popular (top 2%)

Take the following examples (thanks to Avinash Kaushik from a “6 Pixels of Separation” Podcast I recently listened to).  2 competing companies in Canada, both selling laundry products.

www.vim.ca - not all that engaging, imo

The first example is quite a simple site – shows some products (ok, good start), has a voucher to save $1 (wow!), then the standard marketing spiel (“makes tough cleaning easy”). They have content on the site about how to use their products, cleaning tips,  and home decorating ideas. Yawn. www.vim.ca

seventhgeneration.com - incredibly engaging

This example is not only a much more beautiful site (an enormous part of the ability to engage in my opinion), but also absolutely tells the website visitor all about who and what they’re dealing with.  They become part of something much bigger. “Protecting Planet Home”.   One of the major menu items is “Learn”.  In here you can educate yourself on the bigger ‘green’ issues they’re passionate about, read an active Blog, visit the Forum, watch video’s.  You can also see where people have “Asked Scienceman” a question, and can read his response.  They of course also connect via Facebook, and Twitter – you can actually see in their Twitter account that they’re interacting with their customers, answering questions and solving problems! Oh, they also have some product information on the site of course. www.seventhgeneration.com

I can’t wait to re-design our website.  Keep your eye out for it.

Unfortunately we see it fairly often – clients come to us with visions of grandeur about their website marketing, and their plans to take the world by storm with their enormous marketing budget to drive thousands of people to their website every week, which in turn is going to bring in loads of new business.  I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t give my honest opinion, that unfortunately all that investment in online marketing is not even likely to return real value, unless the site or landing page the campaign is directing them to, is fantastic.  It’s something that some clients (or prospective clients) are pretty sensitive about, but it’s generally accurate – we’ve seen it time and time again.

When we launched a version of our website about 2 years ago, we made some fairly important changes, which increased our enquiries online by about 35%!  The changes were mostly aesthetic, but we knew that our prospects were looking to learn more about our client base, and how we differentiate ourselves, so we created a short flash animation to tell a bit of a story, and also improved the aesthetic.   You can see the difference below between the old site, and the new.

http://old.salsainternet.com.au

www.salsainternet.com.au

Recently we also implemented a new home page design for www.equusconnect.com.au (recruitment website for the horse racing industry), and their online registrations for job seekers went up by about 60% overnight!  Imagine what that could do for your business!

In most cases, the changes are only aesthetic – you don’t need to change the structure of the site, or the layout.  Just give it a ‘refresh’, if you like, and you’ll likely see an improve in results. And it will be much, much cheaper than just about any online marketing campaign.

Then, if you still need more business (let’s face it, who doesn’t), then consider investing in online marketing.