Question

Topic: Website Critique

I Need A Web Site

Posted by Anonymous on 6/30/2011 at 4:17 AM ET 25 Points
I need a web site targeted to 55 to 75 year olds thinking about retirement. We help produce an income they can't outlive (Indexed Annuities), Long Term Care Insurance and Medicare solutions.

How best to develop state of the art site? Software, direction?

Thanks,

Bill
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by AdsValueBob on 6/30/2011 at 9:07 AM Accepted
    The primary purpose of a web site is to communicate to the visitor that your business can satisfy their want or need, and to direct the visitor to perform an action you desire - such as call for an appoint or more information, or download a free brochure. It should be meaningful to their wants and needs, should be user friendly, beneficial, intuitive, and build trust.

    A GOOD website is a blend of many professional disciplines - marketing (message), graphic design (appeal), content (information and purpose), coding & hosting (security and reliability), and human factors (usability and features). In addition, you should plan and integrate into the design how you're going to promote your site.

    Your question implies that you should hire a professional company to build your website. Site builder software packages have pluses and minuses (great on the technical site - zero on the more important marketing side). Your budget, schedule, and personal involvement you can devote to building a site are large considerations to your plan.

    I assume your primary goal is to get interested persons to call your company. Without hearing your design ideas, "state-of-the-art" is probably not functionally necessary, as it is perceived as being primarily an informational site (non-ecommerce), maybe with a couple videos, some what-if calculators, and a form or two. Your older audience tends to want things as uncomplicated as possible.

    It means that you can make your new marketing machine in a simpler, custom, professional manner on a smaller budget while maximizing the ability of the site to generate leads, and integrate it with your promotion methods in one effort. A site builder direction may not be the best direction unless you have notable project constraints.

    Call me personally if you want to discuss your ideas.

    Bob
    AdsValue.com

  • Posted on 6/30/2011 at 10:35 AM Accepted
    AdsValueBob has laid out the issues quite well, IMO. I doubt that you really need "state of the art" anything for your site, and doing it yourself is not likely to work very well unless you are an expert in all the areas he lists.

    What you may want to do is NOT create a robust website, but instead a series of very simple landing pages that offer each segment of your market exactly what it needs, and each would have a very clear and compelling call to action.

    That will eliminate much of the cost for technical/software investment and place the emphasis on marketing, which is where it belongs. Creating a website shouldn't be the goal. Selling stuff should be the goal.

    Question: How are people going to find your site? Do you have a marketing plan? Just having a website doesn't do much good if nobody ever sees it. Once you have a marketing plan, then it will make sense to decide on whether you need landing paths/pages or a full-blown website.
  • Posted on 7/3/2011 at 6:55 PM Accepted
    Before you consider hiring someone to design a website, you should experiment a little on your own. That will put you into a much better position to know what you really need, what you are buying. To register a domain name, consider

    1) www.namecheap.com and
    https://order.1and1.com

    (GoDaddy is commonly referred to, but some Internet gurus have warned that transfering a domain name out of it to another host can be tough, and that if you do not properly cross the t's and dot the i's, GoDaddy could wind up owning your domain name.)

    To experiment, and as a back-up:

    2) Start with the simplest (and not very pretty) Googlesites and enter some content: https://sites.google.com/

    Now look for some free or reasonable website offers on the basis of template designs. These include:

    3) https://order.1and1.com

    4) www.homestead.com - with about 2,000 designs, but now it asks for your credit card before you look at the designs, which I do not like.

    5) www.wix.com quite a good offer

    6) www.webnode.com nice designs, quite easy to use, but if you want to make serious changes to the templates, you will need to find someone who knows CSS.

    There are other possiblities, but the above should be plenty to get you started on the website design. A seperate issue is SEO - Search Engine Optimization. When you are further along, google it and read up about it a bit. I believe some of the members of this forum will have expertise in this area too.

    Regards,
    JH
    P.S. Do not use tiny print on your website! Also, have a LARGE FONT option your viewers can click on.
  • Posted by AdsValueBob on 7/4/2011 at 12:13 PM Member
    JH offers an optional track that should be performed in a controlled environment - not by an inexperience brother-in-law who built his own looks pretty site for faucet washers.

    SEO folks don't like this because once a domain / website is up, it gets indexed by many search engines (submitted or not). If it is a minimalist site, it doesn't receive "respect" from the search engines. It can take months once you real site is created to overcome the "non-respect" of the search engines. The best for SEO / your domain is to start strong.

    If you create an experiment site, it needs to address points mentioned before or it's performance will more than likely not provide a good decision-making model and data. Bad data in = bad data out. An experiment site has to have 85% of the expertise build in to work - so why not just go the other 15% and do it right. It's like shooting a 45 caliber gun at a SCUD missile - shooting something is the right idea but the resulting conclusion would be it doesn't work.

    The web is the Super Bowl of business testing. A good website is an integral part of a marketing system and a good business model. The web is strewn with graveyards of marginal websites built by persons using site builders and not addressing the full system.

    Anyone can build a site but it takes persons trained in the dynamics of web design to build a cohesive system. Items like eye path, directed flow, landing page format, graphic design, SEO, marketing message, and trust building are just a few items you need to consider to build a good experimental site.

    I'm not trying to scare you - and JH's suggestion is good in the right trained developer environment - just not for an amateur. Why are there professional gardeners, or auto mechanics, or house painters if anybody can do this? They know the right way to do the job the first time.

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