I am not a designer, but having been in marketing for many years, I always recommend that clients use a designer for anything that touches the customer. Whether it is business cards, brochures, a trade show booth, or a website, you want to convey the proper image.

A professional designer can help you identify with an audience and project an appropriate image for your company. Even small details like font type, font sizes, colors, and ease of navigation all come together to set your company apart from the crowd and can make a huge difference in how your business is perceived on the web.

Remember when you attended trade shows?

This point was really driven home years ago when much of product marketing was done at trade shows. When walking the aisles of a large trade show it was easy to spot the homemade designs. Sure, sometimes the product was so compelling or unique that the homespun booth design didn’t get in the way, but more often than not, it just identified that company as a minor player in a much larger market.

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SEM Huntsville designing a website, SEM Huntsville, web design

I just read a great article by Ian Lurie at Coversation Marketing titled Things You Don’t Know About Your Customers. Perhaps more aptly named Things to remember when designing a website, its a great read with clear points we all need to remember. In summary:

1. Reading onscreen is hard, for everyone.
   • Use short paragraphs.
   • Use short lines.
   • Use wide line spacing and nice margins.
   • Use dark text on a light background. 
   • Scrolling up-and-down is OK
   • Use lists.
2. They browse in an F-shape
3. They can’t remember your web address (being at the top of search results for your name means nothing)
4. They don’t search for your name (they search for answers to problems)
5. They don’t want to log in (or anything standing between them and their goal)
6. They don’t want an ‘experience’ (simple is better)
7. They do want your newsletter (make it prevalent and easy to sign-up)
8. They don’t care how clever you are. (just the facts please)
9. They aren’t enticed by mystery.
10. They get lost a lot (make navigation easy, redundant, and extend to your 404 pages)
11. They aren’t using cell phones  (at least not in big numbers)
12. They still use Internet Explorer (so be sure it works in IE)
13. They’re using big monitors. (so don’t create 800 X 600 layouts)
14. They need to want (create desire)

SEM Huntsville, SEO Huntsville content tips, designing a website

As I mention on the SEO page, key word data is very important for architecting the navigational structure of your website, writing copy, and building your SEM campaigns. There are several good sources for phrases, I look a web logs, Google Analytics data, and the words most often used on other high ranking web sites in the industry. 

If you are looking to expand the words in your SEM campaigns you should examine the ”long tail” of your logs. What you will find is that some of the more specific phrases that occur less often (and are therefore in the tail of the data) actually turn out to be good conversion phrases, and because they are very specific can be inexpensive to bid on.

SEO Huntsville designing a website, keywords