Why is a website so important?
A website gives you a platform. You can tell your audience what you need to say and keep people up to date. The advantage of owning a website is that you can inform people of anything you’d like them to know, or show them anything you’d like them to see about your business. The web is an ever-evolving marketplace of highly competitive, and often fierce, businesses trying to get ahead of you to reach the same customer pool. To stay ahead you need a clear and focused vision for not just staying in the game, but leading out in front. Visitivity can help you achieve just that.
As an integrated marketing company, we build well designed, easy-to-navigate websites that focus on delivering the right message to your customers, making it easy for them to know what you sell and why YOU are who they should do business with. Our focus is to create effective lead generation opportunities for you. The fact is people enjoy the internet because it is a safe place for them to shop. No sales person in their face, no time constraints, and the ease of browsing lots of options in a short amount of time with no obligation. And, as any successful business owner knows, it takes time to build trust and relationships with people before they will jump at what you have to offer. Lead generation through your website becomes a critical way to build that trust and stay in touch with your potential and existing customer base on a regular basis.
Our job is to educate you as a business owner on how to get the most out of your site, what tools are appropriate to invest in and which are not. See, for us, you are as much a partner in our success as we are in yours.
We offer many ways to build a successful website:
• Content Management Systems that allow you easy access to your own site for edits, photo entries and updates.
• Low cost, stable hosting platforms, with plans to fit any size business.
• 24/7 phone support and email support.
• Search Engine Optimization services to support exposure and customer reach
• Lead generation and database development
• High quality video commercial/campaigns that drive traffic to your site
Tracking your website with Google® Analytics
Google Analytics, a free service offered by Google, generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Its main highlight is that a webmaster can optimize their AdWords advertisement and marketing campaigns through the use of the analysis of where the visitors came from, how long they stayed on the website, and their geographical position.
Google Analytic’s approach is to show basic dashboard-type data for the casual user, and more in-depth data further into the report set. There are currently over 80 distinct reports, each customizable to some degree. Google Analytics also offers three dashboard views of data, Executive, Marketer, and Webmaster.
Visitivity incorporates Google Analytics on ALL of our accounts, and send our contact at your company an email that allows them to login to the Analytics account and view all of their statistics whenever they like. This is just another way that Visitivity helps our clients to understand the internet and the impact their website can have.
Our Web Design/Development Process
Every project has its unique and individual needs. We custom-tailor our designs to match your specific needs. In order to keep consistency in all our work we have a guideline we follow to make sure that every aspect of the project goes smoothly and that we can provide you with the best possible outcome. Here are our steps for both print and web projects:
Initial Meeting
The first and most important step in creating a new website is planning. We start by understanding your target audience and then looking at what your competitors are doing. Once we have this information, we begin drawing up a site map. A site map is like a flow chart of pages that you want on your website. Generally they are home, about the company, services we offer and contact. This is the minimum that any company website should have. Once we have a full site map completed, we decide how you want the navigation to those pages set up on the site. Should one page lead you to the next? Should you have a main navigation bar? Should you use pop-out or dropdown menus? These questions are all answered in this step.
After the navigation is figured out, we need to decide how the pages should look. For this step we will create a template of the header and footer. This will keep consistency among all of the pages and make your visitors more comfortable as they navigate through your website.
The next step is the domain name registration. What is the domain name system? The Domain Name System (DNS) is used to help users surf the internet. Every web site has to register their domain name in order to have it. These domain names are given out on a first-come first-served basis by ICANN, the non-profit Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers. In order to register a domain name, a user has to visit a registrar, which is a company approved to register domain names.
When you visit a registrar and go to purchase your domain name, you will be asked for various contact and technical information that makes up the domain name registration. The registrar will keep the records and submit the technical information to a directory that can be visited by anybody. This directory is called the Registry. The Registry allows people to type in your domain name and find out all of the information about you that they need to get in contact with you. This information is available to maintain control on the internet and is often used to permit enforcement of consumer protection, trademark, copyright, and other laws. To search for the information you simply can go to a registrars site and do a “Whois” search.
The next step (which can be combined with the second step) is setting up your hosting service. When choosing a web hosting provider, there are many different things that you should consider. Below is a list of things to look for in a hosting provider:
• Reliability and Speed of Servers
• Ease of Maintaining & Editing Your Account
• Easy to Contact Customer Support
• Regular Backups of Your Data
• Affordable Price
You don’t need to host with us to work with us but we do offer very competitive pricing and can support your secure certificates, e-commerce needs, search engine submission, and much more.
Contract and Deposit
We will draw up a work agreement that details the procedure we will follow, the timeframe we anticipate, and the responsibilities of both our team and of our customer. We ask you to sign the contract and we will do the same. When the contract is signed, we will collect a deposit from you. We do offer payment plans in certain situations, contact us for details.
Outline
Many projects we tackle require us to put together an overall outline of the project as well as summaries of required content we will need from you. At this point we usually discuss text copy, photography, logos and graphics, etc. and make sure that we have all of the important topics covered.
Edits
Before we go too deep into the production phase, we will present initial design concepts for your approval. These may take the form of sketches or wireframes, which will convey the layout scheme to you without the time and detail required for a final layout. Depending on the terms of your agreement, we will usually allow 2-3 rounds of conceptual and layout edits of the drafts before we move forward. Client feedback during this stage is essential. It is important that we make firm decisions with you regarding the layout, design and direction, since once the design is decided upon, major alterations will require additional fees.
Working Examples
In a logo, print or website project, we will build your layouts to a point of completion where the client will be able to truly see what the finished product will look like. We refer to this as a working prototype or a “beta” version of your design.
Final Delivery
When the design project is nearly complete, the client may make 1 last round of content edits, depending on the terms of the agreement. We will then fine tune everything before the logo files are released, before the print designs go into production, or before the website is launched on the internet. Whether it is re-branding or new logo design, a new website design, a brochure design and other print solutions, or a new marketing campaign, our approach to your challenges will be as unique as your business itself.
How a Search Engine Works
Crawling the Web
Search engines send out automated programs, called “robots” or “spiders”, to travel the World Wide Web and crawl the pages and documents.
Indexing What They Find
Once a website has been crawled, it’s content is stored, or indexed, in a giant database.
Processing Keyphrase Queries
When a user searches for a term (keyphrase) on a search engine, the search engine retrieves a list of web pages that mention that term from it’s database.
Sorting (Ranking) Results
Once the search engine finds all of the matching web pages, it applies it’s algorithm to the results and displays the websites in order of the most relevant to the searched term. Every search engine has a different algorithm, which explains why they provide different results for the same searches.
