I see a lot of otherwise successful businesses that have underwhelming websites. It's clear to tell right away that the business owner threw it together themselves (or with the free help of their newphew or neighbor), with lots of technical jargon, unsightly layout and zero usability. This says to the browser "This company is cheap and unprofessional".

The user experience is everything. It's like the old retail store philosophy of "as long as we carry what they're looking for, it doesn't matter how the store is laid out". But once certain savvy retailers figured out that an intuitive and easy-flow store design made for an easy customer experience, they thrived while the rest died. For some the lesson was learned too late.

Why put time, effort and money into your website? Because it is fast becoming the face of your business or organization. Keep these statistics in mind:

43% of all retail sales are expected to be influeneced or made on the Internet by the year 2012*

83% of businesses currently use the Internet to research and find potential vendors.**

75% of web users admit to deciding on the credibility of a business or organizations based on its website appearance.***

Here are some points to keep in mind for a website that will turn a high ROI.

Get their attention ....FAST
Even if your browser does not have an attention deficit, you have roughly 5 seconds to get their attention, communicate exactly what it is you do, and entice them to take action.

Don't make them think.
In the design elements of your website, make buttons look like buttons. Make links look like links. Provide clear direction. Don't use cryptic symbols as the sites main navigation.

Don't make them read (if they don't have to).
People generally do not read on a computer screen with the same comfort and patience as reading a book. Paragraphs of text (especially on the main page) usually get scanned or skipped altogether. Bulleted lists are more effective in getting your point across. Providing long content for those who do want to read further, bold the words and phrases that get the main point across like "make more money" and "gain efficiency", etc.

Just as an effective website can invigorate your business and turn a stunning ROI, an ineffective and unusable website can be a detriment to your business and a serious liability.



Sources for Stastics:

* Forrester: "The Web's Impact on In-Store Sales: US Cross Channel Sales Forecast 2006 to 2012" and U.S Department of Commerce.

** Enquiro "Business to Business Survey 2007"

*** Fogg, B.J., Stanford Guidelines for Web Credbility. Persuasive Technology Lab. Stanforrd University, 2002 (revised November 2003).

Seasoned entreprenuers will tell you that the most important people you have are your lawyer and your accountant. Add "web/email host" to that list!

A new study from Dimension Data shows that Email is now the primary method of communication in the workplace. When your email is down, clients and prospects can't reach you. Imagine if a prospect emails you, and gets a bounceback error that your domain could not be found. That prospect will most likely assume you are no longer in business. In today's world, if your email is down for an extended period of time, you might as well be.

Not only is working email important, but quick responsiveness is just as important. With email now being the number one method of communications, you need not only a solid host, but a sharp SPAM control in place. Some companies boast fierce SPAM filtering. Think twice before subscribing to this idea, because the more stringent your SPAM filtering, the higher possibility of legitimate emails will not get to you, and when that happens, you can't respond, which means you're as good as down, which means you're as good as out-of-business.

Email should not be taken lightly, or cheaply, now more than ever.

The old and familiar term "You get what you pay for" is alive and well in the world of web hosting, as is the term "There's a sucker born every minute".

Hosting should be thought of as space to rent on the internet. Your website is much like a brick and mortar building. You had a webmaster design and construct the site, and you also need a place to put it (the website and your email) on the internet. This is where hosting comes in. Paying for hosting is a recurring expense, and as expenses go, most would like to minimize this one. Web hosting is one expense you do not want to simply minimize without knowing all the facts.

There is an abundance of web hosts out there that charge miniscule amounts to host your web site. Here is why you should avoid them like the plague.

Cheap Hosting = Cheap Service

Most cheap hosting services are completely self-serve. Self-serve is OK if you are competent in web hosting. You decided to go with discount hosting, you got discount service. However, most people just see the cheap price and go for it. They find themselves in a bind when something goes down, or they don't know how to access something, try to call someone and lo and behold, no phone number exists for this hosting company, only an email address! If the reson you need to contact them is because your email doesn't work, this is a deadly catch-22. Now, even if the company has a phone number, the service usually isn't very responsive, because at such a low price, you are at a low priority for them.

Here's my cheap hosting customer service nightmare. When I first started this business I had 8 customers on one very cheap web server. I am of the type that whenever something is down, my anxiety levels are code-red until it is completely resolved. One day, all sites were down. I understand that things do go down now and again, so I went to call my host provider, but found they had no phone number. Anxiety is in the orange stage now. I saw they have a support form on the web site. A little calmer. I fill out the form, mark it "URGENT" and wait for response. 1 hour goes by, 2 hours, 10 hours...12 hours later, I am absolutely furious, and having sent several emails to the provider, turns out the hard drive crashed and they will "work on to fix of this soon". Luckilly I had backups of all my customers data and bit the bullet and got with a more service-oriented hosting provider. I paid a lot more, but ever since, our hosting has been rock solid.

The Overselling Scam

Overselling is a sadly popular method of attracting customers. The basic idea of overselling is that most of the host's clients are only going to use a fraction of the resources available, so there's going to be a lot of wasted/unused bandwidth and diskspace. The host is esentially gambling and selling more than they have under the assumption that the unused portion will provide the insurance. They further this insurance by stating the legal agreement that they can delete your account without warning.

I've seen many hosts offer 300 GIGABYTES of disk space for $9.99/month. To put this into perspective, most servers come with entire hard drives smaller than 300 GIGABYTES. It would be physically impossible to allocate enough (or even ONE) accounts at $9.99/month to even cover the expense of the server, let alone make a profit, or pay technical support people. Simply put, it's a lie. Well, maybe lie is too strong of a word. After all, if you read the host's Terms of Use or Terms of Service, in most cases they will plainly say (in the fine print) that your account will be terminated if your disk space increases beyond a point that they deem too large. Well whats that number? They don't say, and I assure you it is well below 300 GIGABYTES. At this point you may be wondering if you're reading this correctly. You are. They offer 300 gigs, you upload 50 megs (possibly) and your website, email everything dissapears without any warning or backup. You are offline and your customers assume you're out of business. You're in blackout, and they owe you nothing, no money, no explanation, nothing. You're just done.

Your business is too crucial to be in such a volatile situation where it can go away without you knowing about it, and for no reason.

Don't be that sucker. Don't build your most powerful marketing tool on a spoiled foundation.

Due to our high Google pagerank®, our clients are now reaping the benefits of their easily found websites. One of the benefits of a BizMarquee designed, hosted and managed website is the constant monitoring and honing of your site to be found at the top of Google, Yahoo, MSN/Live and more.

Recently we've gotten feedback from our clients that they've gotten not only responses, but results from their websites. What this means is they've gotten calls and inquiries that have turned into sales from what we call "passive Marketing". You do nothing and people find you (from a search engine optimized site), desire your services (from a professionally developed website) and contact you (from a highly usable website) and you make sales from letting your website sell for you! Contact markting, even while you sleep. Many of our customers have made enough sales to pay for their website's design, hosting and maintenance for several lifetimes.

Look bigger, get more clients and DESTROY your competition.

Contact us today and be another success story! Nothing makes us happier than your success.

Happy 4th!!!!

You can now add the ability for user to search the entire contents of your web site for certain keywords and/or phrases just as if they were searching the internet through google or yahoo! You can control the indexing of your site, and even gain access to valuable statistics like what keywords were searched the most, and which words have the most (or least) relevance on your site! This is a grand slam for raising the usability level on your site. Contact us for more information!