Web Design Budget: Revenue
July 26th, 2008
If this is a revamp of your current website, I bet you wish to see some improvement. Sadly to say, face lit upgrade has becoming the de facto measurement to the result of the revamp. Key important parameters including number of visitors and conversion rate are not taken into consideration.
Ask website owners around you, most of them do not even have a solid idea of the goal of their website. Make sure your goal is measurable. Number of online order or inquiry are good example of goal.
Ok, now if we have a goal, it would be much easier. If you have 100 visitors a month, and 10 out of them make an online order. That means, you have 10% conversion rate in that particular month. If you are revamping, you should have some figures in mind. Example, you might be looking at 1,000 visitors after the revamp and probably to increase the conversion rate to 20%.
If everything works (no shortcut, lot of hardwork for sure), you will be getting 200 orders a month. If each new sales generates RM10 revenue, that means your monthly revenue would be around RM2,000 a month.
See, it is never hard to estimate a budget. Just make sure you are clear about the purpose of revamp, in a MEASURABLE way!
(Using website to reduce your operation cost is another way to determine your budget, we will talk about this in my next post)
Blog Kills Web Developers
June 12th, 2008
WordPress is a free publishing platform. It will turn 5 years soon and you will be amazing of how many people are using it now, especially as Blog. Blog works so well for everyone to share personal journal on the web. You can sign up one for free and start blogging almost instantly!
Yes, Blog is free! Free is not good - at least for businesses. That is why, blogging spread like fire among individual users than businesses. It has becoming a New Marketing way for most businesses. Old corporate managers do not want to miss this new marketing opportunity, ended up setting one official corporate website together with an official Blog.
It was never easy to tell my customers that Blog and corporate website are the same. Fancy design still remains as the top-most-wanted feature for most of my customer. It was designed as like to please just the corporate website owner than people visiting it. Or, it may be the idea of web developer to push for beautiful layout, which in most case, the same result can be delivered by a page simple as Google main page.
WordPress has done so well in keeping the design separated from the content. It works like the theme in you Nokia Phone. You can choose to change the look and feel of your screen without entering all your contact in your address book again. This sounds simple but challenge is everyone has to adapt to a single format (post title, post slug, categories) of content, yet work in any page!
We have changed the look and feel of our corporate website several times, without worrying about rebuilding the content. But, you will be surprised with number of corporate websites still built with both content and design combined and ready to have them built from scratch again in their next revamp.
Bloggers are paving the way for the change of corporate website. They take the risk of change, trying up how the new format of content definition should work. Bloggers do not have website in the past. Creating a Blog is not a revamp to them, but something new.
But, for a company with already spending so much in the past in their website, it is hard for them to make the change. They choose not to make immediate decision. They are still on the look-and-see state, but will eventually follow!
There are three things happening now,
1. Businesses are starting to understand the importance of the goal of creating a website. A goal must be measurable, it can be number of order, number of people downloading your location map, number of support email received, except branding :)
2. The platform of Blog, such as WordPress, after a long 5 years of development are now ready to prove that the technology is mature yet simple to user now.
3. All of us are no longer limiting to our own job of scope. My partner just login to our corporate website, edited one of a page posted months ago and approved some comments. In that 5 minutes works, he turned himself into editor, proof reader, comment moderator, etc. The rules changed. You are taking over works of airline booking agent because you know it can be done online, faster and cheaper.
Business will soon no longer need a web developer!
Are you a web developer?
Free WordPress theme for your business
Website is expensive!
June 6th, 2008
By simply looking at the amount of work involved to build a website, I can not stop thinking why most of my customers believe that website can be done in one or two thousands or even less! Perhaps, the magical brochure emerged from the red ocean works, or simply because web design companies are not doing the job right!?
How can you tell if you have just chosen another one-man-show company or a team?
1. Graphic designer talking to customers directly. Only project manager understand both the language of customer and designer. Designer should get less distraction.
2. Programming logics starts before the HTML interface ready. This jump over eventually sacrifice the user intuitiveness!
3. Designer turn your mock up into HTML version with what-you-see-is-what-you-get tools.. chances is that you never get what you want :)
To be fair, creating a website is really not an easy task, it is kind of design work plus technical skill to make everything fully integrated and right!
A must-have feature for your website!
May 1st, 2008
Most of the website owners are able to tell us what they want when come to the design of their websites. Their preferences run wild from font-size to the colors used in the web layout!
We started by asking them who and what is the reason for someone to visit their website. Not everyone, please. Until now, they seem to understand pretty well about their visitors.
They continue to propose features which they want. This is where they stray away from their objective. Sadly to say, it sounds that those features are of what the site owners want, than their visitors.
It comes into a long list, from content management system to online payment. If your customers are businesses who prefer dealing with you by check, or group of people who never buy online - how much would this online payment help!?
The simple rule is, starting from something simplier. Do not worry about what features your customers might want to have, because they are the one who will let you know. The site owner, only represents one of the visitor, not everyone!
If there is only one feature you will need to include in your website, it would be how to make the life of customers easier!
