When designing a new website, it is important to think about how your clients and potential clients will interact with your website. Design with click-ability in mind. Buffington Homes’ website is a great example of a home builder making it as easy as possible for home buyers to search new and available homes for sale. With one click, potential home buyers can search communities, available homes and interactive floorplans. This makes it very easy to find [...]

Finally Stein Mart wised up and launched a new website with online ordering. It’s hard to believe in the year 2011 until very recently Stein Mart didn’t offer online ordering! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to their website hoping to be able to find something online because I didn’t have time to get to the store. Each time I’ve left disappointed and ended up ordering online from somewhere else. The challenge of online ordering for discount [...]

If visitors to your website don’t spend time browsing and taking the action you require, all the time and money spent to create the website will be for nothing. It’s a good idea to install some type of analytics program, like Google’s free analytics tool, so you can monitor your bounce rate. A high bounce rate indicates that the information on the web page wasn’t relevant to the website visitor. How do you keep visitors [...]

In the early days of the Internet, many people treated business websites as nothing more than an online brochure. Today, marketers know that it can be your most important sales tool.  But if you want your website to effectively capture leads and drive sales, you’d be wise to keep these web design practices in mind. 1. Website should be simple, clean and professional – What image do you want to project online? If you want [...]

A website only has about 5-7 seconds to grab someone’s attention and compel them into action – whether it’s simply to continue reading, clicking on a link, or filling out a form. So, how do you grab that attention? Words and pictures The words on your website need to convey WIIFM, or “What’s in it for me.”  Explain what makes your company unique and what benefits your product or service has to offer. You also need [...]

Have you come across a great looking website recently and thought to yourself, “I wish my site looked like that!”  It’s natural to want the best-looking website on the Internet, but “looks” aren’t everything, especially when it comes to doing business online. The only reason you should consider redesigning your company’s website is if you want to get found by more prospects, convert more prospects into leads and customers, and possibly, for branding purposes, but [...]

We had nearly 100 entries for the contest! Amazing! I thoroughly enjoyed reviewing all the sites and was blown away by all of the creativity and hard work that obviously went into the sites. If you couldn’t attend the seminar today, you can purchase the audio recording from www.buildersshow.com. I will have my portion of the seminar available soon as a podcast. My criteria for an extreme website is: 1) “Killer” eye candy, 2) “Shred or [...]

Meredith Communications is looking for the best homebuilder Websites in the country. Nominate your own Website or nominate on someone’s behalf and if your site is judged to be the best win a $100 Ruth Chris gift card. Webites will be judged on six criteria: 1. Content 2. Design 3. Navigation 4. Functionality 5. Experience 6. Call to Action Special weight will be given to innovative use of interactive features, strong call to action and [...]

This post is an excerpt from Meredith’s new book “Click Power- Become the Master of Your Domain.” If you like what you read here, you will love the new book! I do a lot of Website evaluations. Most of the sites I review score very poorly on ”call to action” language and graphics. Web sites can be active sales vehicles if they ASK visitors to engage. Your site should compel visitors to call, chat, click or [...]

If you want your Website to WOW, content is king. Content refers to the copy, images, links and multimedia used on the site. Think about content in terms of building a house. The higher the quality of building materials, the higher the quality of the finished home. The same is true for Web sites. Consider this: if you had a retail store on pricey Madison Avenue would you merchandise the window display with old, damaged [...]