In the world of digital marketing, even the smallest details can have a significant impact. One such detail is the favicon—a small icon that represents your website in browser tabs, bookmarks, and search results. Recently, Google updated its guidelines to recommend higher resolution favicons, emphasizing their role in enhancing brand recognition and user engagement.
Favicons are the tiny icons displayed next to your website's name in a browser tab. They serve as a visual identifier for your brand, helping users easily recognize and navigate back to your site among multiple open tabs. Originally introduced to improve user experience, favicons have become an essential part of a website's branding strategy.
Google now recommends using favicons with a resolution of at least 48x48 pixels. This ensures that your brand is represented clearly across all devices, from desktops to smartphones. A high-resolution favicon enhances the professional appearance of your site and contributes to a consistent and recognizable brand presence.
Real-World Impact: Consider a local business that revamped its online presence by updating its favicon alongside other branding elements. This small change led to a noticeable increase in user engagement, as customers could easily identify and return to the site.
A well-designed favicon can significantly improve click-through rates (CTR). When users search online, visually appealing results naturally attract more attention. A distinctive favicon makes your website stand out, encouraging users to click on your link over others.
Designing for Impact: Think of your favicon as the face of your brand in the digital space. A vibrant and reflective design not only captures attention but also conveys the essence of your brand, making it memorable to potential customers.
To ensure proper display, favicons must maintain a 1:1 square aspect ratio and be crawlable by Googlebot-Image. These technical requirements are crucial for correct indexing and visibility in search results. Ensuring compliance with these guidelines helps maximize the SEO benefits of your favicon.
Staying Current with Standards: Keeping up with Google's evolving standards is vital for maintaining an effective online presence. Regular updates ensure that your site remains compliant and takes full advantage of new opportunities for visibility.
Consistency in branding builds trust and recognition among users. A favicon that aligns with your brand identity reinforces this connection each time users encounter it in their browser tabs or search results. This consistency aids in brand recall and strengthens user interaction.
Emotional Connection: Familiar logos evoke emotional responses from consumers. A well-designed favicon is another tool to ensure your brand remains top-of-mind, fostering loyalty and encouraging repeat visits.
For business owners and marketing professionals, understanding the role of favicons in SEO is crucial. While they don't directly affect rankings, their indirect benefits—such as improved CTRs—are invaluable. Optimizing favicons enhances online presence without overwhelming audiences with technical details.
Integrating into Broader Strategy: Favicons are part of a comprehensive marketing strategy that includes various digital touchpoints. They contribute to a cohesive theme that enhances overall brand recognition.
Creating high-resolution favicons involves more than resizing an image; it requires thoughtful design to ensure recognizability at smaller sizes. Our team guides businesses through this process, ensuring favicons meet Google's guidelines while enhancing branding strategy.
Guided Implementation: We offer step-by-step support from concept to implementation, helping you design a favicon that reflects your brand and resonates with your audience.
In today's competitive digital environment, every detail counts. Adopting high-resolution favicons can enhance your website's visual appeal and SEO performance. Reach out today to start improving your brand's online presence and stay ahead of the competition.
Favicons play a crucial role in the technical ecosystem of your website by contributing to overall metadata and ensuring brand visibility across platforms. In our multi-device world, having a high-resolution favicon ensures consistent brand representation on desktops, tablets, and smartphones.
Mobile Optimization: With increasing mobile traffic, it's essential that favicons look great on smaller screens. Users expect quick, visually appealing results; an optimized favicon enhances professionalism across all devices.
User experience is critical in web design. The favicon is one of the first visual elements users notice; it appears in tabs, bookmarks, and browser histories. A high-quality favicon makes it easy for users to identify and revisit your site among numerous open tabs.
Navigating Digital Noise: In a crowded digital landscape, a memorable favicon helps users navigate back to your site easily, driving repeat visits and increasing engagement rates.
Real-world examples highlight the benefits of high-resolution favicons. For instance, a tech startup revamped its favicon during a website redesign. The modern icon improved user recognition and engagement significantly compared to competitors.
To gauge the impact of favicons on SEO and branding efforts, track key performance metrics using tools like Google Analytics. Analyzing user engagement related to favicon updates allows businesses to refine their digital strategies continuously.
Data-Driven Decisions: By tracking how favicons influence site interactions, you can make informed adjustments across your entire brand strategy, fostering continuous improvement aimed at increasing engagement rates.
Favicons contribute to the broader SEO picture by influencing user engagement metrics like CTRs and repeat visits—signals that indicate value to search engines. An optimized favicon can positively impact these metrics, benefiting overall SEO performance.
As digital standards evolve, so will favicon guidelines. Businesses must remain adaptable to these changes. Future designs may trend toward interactive or dynamic favicons that engage users more effectively.
Staying Informed: We are committed to ongoing education about these trends, ensuring strategies reflect best practices to keep businesses at the forefront of the industry.
High-resolution favicons play an essential role in digital strategy by enhancing brand visibility and user experience. Investing in an optimized favicon improves online presence amidst growing competition in Reno and beyond.
Consider how these updates can benefit your business through improved visual branding. Start with small steps that define larger strategies for success—partner with us on this journey toward remarkable online achievement.
In today's digital landscape, the importance of a robust, eye-catching, and functional website cannot be overstated. For small and medium-sized businesses looking to create a memorable online presence, your website acts as your digital handshake with potential clients. Where should one start when considering a website overhaul or a fresh design? Enter OCG Creative, a titan in the field of web design and digital marketing.
OCG Creative’s Unique Approach
Before the advent of the internet, businesses thrived on personal connections, understanding client needs, and tailoring services to fit those needs. OCG Creative brings that personal touch to the digital realm. They don’t just whip up a website. They dive deep, taking time to learn the intricacies of your business, your industry's nature, and the goals you're striving for.
The experience isn’t just about creating a website; it's about forging a partnership. The team at OCG ensures that from the moment you decide to work with them, your experience is not just efficient but enjoyable. Working with a dynamic team of designers and digital marketing professionals, they bring fun and functionality together.
The WordPress Advantage
So, why does OCG Creative swear by WordPress? WordPress is no longer just a platform for bloggers. It's the powerhouse behind a staggering 41% of the web. Its popularity isn’t coincidental. WordPress boasts scalability, meaning as your business grows, your website can too. It promises security, ensuring your data and your client’s data remain protected. Furthermore, its portability is unmatched. Unlike other platforms, a WordPress site isn't tethered to one host. Should you wish to move your digital space, WordPress allows a seamless transition without starting from scratch.
Mobile-Friendly Design: Seamless and Responsive
In an era where smartphones are virtually an extension of ourselves, ensuring your website looks impeccable on every device is non-negotiable. OCG Creative understands this. Every website they craft is designed to be viewed from any device, whether it’s a desktop, tablet, iPhone, Android, or any other device in between. This responsiveness ensures that your business is portrayed in the best light, regardless of how a client chooses to access your site.
Unpacking OCG’s Plans and Pricing
Value for money is a term often thrown around, but with OCG Creative, it’s a commitment. Their packages, starting with the Bare Essentials plan and going up to the Premium Essential, offer a plethora of features, from a foundational 5-page website to extensive SEO and social media services. What's more, each year-long contract comes with the promise of a complimentary website. Their tiered approach ensures businesses of any size, and budget can find a package that’s the perfect fit.
The Power of SEO and Digital Marketing
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has become a buzzword in the business sphere, and for a good reason. OCG Creative harnesses the power of SEO to elevate your online visibility. They don’t stop there. Understanding that the digital marketing landscape is vast and varied, OCG offers services that span from email marketing, social media, advanced analytics, and even lesser-known gems like marketing automation.
To navigate the intricacies of the digital world, a business requires a seasoned guide. OCG Creative positions itself as that guide. Their cross-channel marketing strategies ensure that your business doesn’t just find its voice online but that it resonates, loud and clear.
As the digital realm continues to expand and evolve, having a strong ally by your side is paramount. OCG Creative, with its blend of expertise, dedication, and cutting-edge strategies, is poised to be that ally. Whether you're a startup or an established enterprise, remember that in the vast world of the web, your website is your beacon. Make sure it shines the brightest.
There are literally thousands of ways to ruin a website. A website can be beautiful, perfectly branded and use all the latest browser technology—and yet still suck in a profusion of ways. Let’s examine a few favorites.
Topping the list is a website that’s too slow to load. Not only will your slow loading website turn away visitors at a rate of about 12% for every second you make them wait—you’ll also be signaling search engines that your website offers a poor user experience. As a rule, a bad user experience equals bad rankings.
Next up, your website has to be mobile friendly. All major search engines place priority on a website’s mobile experience over the desktop. And for good reason. Over two thirds of online searches are mobile. Desktops don’t even make up the remaining third.
Coming in at number three—hard to find contact info. There’s no point putting time and energy into the perfect web experience if your website visitors can’t figure out how to contact you. Put contact info on every page, and encourage users to reach out to you using whatever method they prefer. Forcing visitors to fill out a web form might just force them to look for somewhere else to do business.
Perhaps more important than being easy to contact is giving your visitors a reason to contact you. Not providing enough information on your website encourages your visitors to continue doing research. In the end, they’ll probably choose a competitor that provides lots of details about their company and the products and services they offer.
Finally, it is impossible to overstate the importance of organic search engine rankings. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of making your website content the best candidate for coveted top spots in Google among others. Earning the number one position for the right keywords is a competitive advantage you can’t achieve any other way.
To recap, your website should;
Wherever there are businesses, dozens of web designers will be fighting to win them as clients. Unfortunately, way too many business owners sink a lot of hard-earned capital into what turns out to be series of bad ideas—executed badly.
So, exactly how does a business owner get online without getting burned? To answer that question, we need to examine the industry.
To begin with, anyone can call him or herself a web designer. There are plenty of educational opportunities—colleges, certifications, online study… …you name it. However, most web designers teach themselves and quickly succumb to their own bad ideas.
It’s easy to be taken in by a web designer who uses all the right words, and confidently explains how their design is your ticket to online abundance. Sadly, their path down the information superhighway way too often turns out to be a World Wide Waste.
Your first line of defense should be developing an understanding of the Internet landscape and how various elements fit together. You don’t have to be a web designer to know the kind of online experience your customers expect. Mostly they want information, and they want it right now.
So, give it to them—right now. Web designers love to design. As a result it’s easy for them to put their priorities ahead of yours. They’ll propose all sorts of things that seem really cool, but come at the expense of page speed. Recent data shows that users will give you 2.6 seconds to decide whether or not they like your page. If that page takes more than 2.6 seconds just to load…
The best way to illustrate that is to experience it…
We've all experienced award winning websites that are miserably slow to load. The designer and the owner of the business are no doubt very proud of the online spectacle that’s been created. Everybody loves it…
…Except customers. They simply give up and move on to a competitor’s website that’s less frustrating.
The designer missed the mark because the designer’s priorities were given preference over the needs of the customer. It happens all the time.
Often, the designer simply has weak skills or obsolete ideas. A good web designer won’t ask you to live with website “quirks.” Everything should work exactly as you or your visitors expect. The entire user experience—as a customer as well as site administrator—should be natural, obvious and error-free.
Web technology moves fast. It is easy for a web designer to become out of step with the latest standards and best practices. This is particularly true with online search, or SEO. Many methods that were standard practice two or three years ago, can get your website de-indexed today. “De-indexed” basically means getting kicked off the Internet.
Spend some time researching current sources, including Google’s own documentation, to learn about SEO. You’ll not only feel empowered, but will likely learn many so called experts aren’t experts at all.
Most web designers have a poor understanding of business fundamentals. For this reason, the best “web designer” is usually a web agency with experts in consumer behavior, product positioning, conversion path optimization, engineering, security, and other critical business areas.
Web design doesn’t have to be expensive. It just has to be right. Your business and your sanity depend on it.
If you have questions, don’t hesitate to call or drop us a note.
Who is Gary Vaynerchuk?Starting as a born entrepreneur, Gary Vaynerchuk has been a part of many businesses throughout his career. He started as most kids do selling lemonade and then brought his business skills to the schoolyard. Through his high school career, he managed to sell tens of thousands worth of baseball cards. If you are suddenly thinking you spent your high school days wrong, you’re not the only one! Finally, as he moves from high school business, he starts to build his father’s local wine business into an electronic empire. With this expansion of the business, he decided to expand in the video industry and did a long series on youtube, the WineLibraryTV. As he spoke more he became more well known. He moved up in his career, focusing his books on media, communication, and marketing. Obviously what he was doing was working, he started another business with his younger brother. Making VaynerMedia a flourishing business today with over 800 employees. Not only is Mr. Vaynerchuk an exceptional businessman, but he also is known for his writing and public speaking skills. He has written 5 best selling books about business and can give valuable advice on the internet marketing industry. 
When you find the right platform/platforms to start internet marketing, you also have to provide the right content. Make sure it fits the platform and gets the message you want to send across. Giving the right content will have your target market interacting more frequently with your business.
Knowing your market goes across all business criteria. However, you have to know your target demographic when marketing online. You should know which social media platform they are spending most of their time on. This way you can create the perfect stories that match this platform.
No matter which platform you are using, you should give quality information and content to your viewers. Give them what they are asking for because they will want to spend time interacting with your site. Once they feel comfortable with your brand and company this is when it is acceptable to ask for their business. Know since you are giving your customers a lot, there is no need to feel guilty about asking for customers.
To learn more about internet marketing techniques, read about other internet marketing experts that OCG Creative has provided.
Designing a website for website lead generation is a tough business. Pulling together a great visual design with interesting content is relatively easy, but doing these things in a way that encourages people to fill out a contact form is a different story. The trick to creating great lead generating websites is designing a site flow that makes sense to a user and caters to the process they use to decide whether to contact a business. With a site that makes this process easy and that operates in the way website visitors are expecting, web lead generation becomes an inherent process of your website. If you’ve ever taken a marketing class, you’ve likely heard of the AIDA model - a purchase funnel with 4 stages:
This model walks through a consumer’s journey to making a purchase. While the model has historically been used for modeling physical purchases, it just as aptly models a consumer’s journey in web lead generation. So, how do you design a website that works for web lead generation? Focus on the funnel.
In the awareness stage, consumers are looking for initial information about a service. Today, this almost always starts with a Google search - most often on a mobile device. As a company interested in grabbing the awareness of consumers, SEO is the place to begin. Blogs are often one of the first ways that consumers find your website in Google’s SERP. Craft educational, relevant blog posts that will answer your visitors' questions.
In the interest stage, site visitors are looking for more detailed information about how you could help them - often resulting on them landing on a service page on your site. This transition from a blog post to a detailed page happens most easily through a Call to Action. Strategic CTA placement is key to good web lead generation, including:
So your site visitors have information about the service they were searching for – and after visiting a detailed page on your site, understand whether you’re a good fit for them. How do you build credibility and trust to ensure that the visitor picks YOUR brand over someone else? Your About page. The best way to do this – a genuine About page on your website. Only after you’ve established trust and credibility with the site visitor will you see them convert to a lead.
While the first three stages of the AIDA funnel are based in a certain piece of content on your website, the fourth stage – Action – happens throughout your website. Taking action should be made as easy as possible for website visitors to increase web lead generation opportunities. Getting visitors to take action includes a number of techniques:
Designing a website and content for web lead generation is tricky. The best way to optimize lead generation websites is through testing. Try to vary the placement of CTA’s to see which has more click-throughs. Continue to create content around your user’s thought process and with fine-tuning, you’ll see an increase in your website lead generation effectiveness. OCG Creative is a Reno web design adn internet marketing agency that can help you to design a website or internet marketing content to move visitors through this decision process - and bring you more qualified leads! Explore our capabilities or call 775.324.1644 - we'd love to help you better your business!
When you work in a web design company, in digital marketing, or in SEO, Google Algorithm updates are often a trigger for mild panic attacks. You hold your breath as you start to see the effects of the change. You cry a little if your traffic starts to tank, or you jump for joy if your traffic sees a large rise. The good news, though, is Google’s Penguin 4.0 signal change might just work as well as a meditation ritual for reducing your stress.
Google’s Penguin signal has been focused on the effects of spammy links since 2012. Like the rest of the internet, the signal has evolved a lot since its original release - and for the better. The largest complaint for prior Penguin versions was the intermittent and inconsistent penalization of bad links.
As it ran the Penguin algorithm in waves, Google only assessed and removed website penalties periodically. Meaning, if you were a site that had disavowed your bad links, you may not see any removal of your penalty for several weeks or even months down the road. Your site’s rankings, in the meantime, we're still being penalized. In your web design and content strategy, you then were stuck waiting for Google’s next wave before you saw results of the positive work you had done since the disavowal.
Painful timelines aside, Google’s older Penguin versions also implemented a one-size-fits-all policy towards spam links. If you received link penalties on one page, your entire domain was penalized in the rankings. Now this small problem, on top of the long timeline before your penalty could be removed, became a massive migraine for web design companies and strategists.
Penguin 4.0 was slowly released throughout the fall of 2016, and has now been made core to Google’s algorithm. The new release, deemed the ‘Real Time’ update, seeks to expedite the link penalty process. Operating in almost ‘real time’, Google will now assess and remove penalties for websites much more quickly. If you have a poor web design company who with many spammy links, this update may have killed your traffic. Sorry. While you previously may have been able to go for longer periods before penalties were assessed to your site, this is no longer going to fly with Google. If you have a great web design company and a solid set of credible and clean backlinks, it’s your turn to jump and cheer. Google can now reward your good behavior by quickly decreasing the rankings of sites with spammy links, thereby increasing your rankings. Free traffic without additional effort - just for doing the right thing in your web design to start with!
Penguin 4.0 also removed the one-size-fits-all policy and removed the automatic penalty to the entire domain. Now, Google will not confirm that this means only the page that the link appeared on will be penalized. But, it is likely that your entire website and rankings will not be penalized for one page with bad links. Google also has become smarter and more selective around reviewing and interpreting your links. For example, if your website is in an industry where spammy links are plentiful across competitors, rather than knocking all of these website’s rankings, Google may just decrease the weight of the links in its ranking algorithm. This is just one part of how Google has become more semantic and understanding of the subtleties of linking strategies that a web design company uses.
The trick to adapting to Google’s changes and staying on top of your rankings is often by utilizing a creative Reno web design company. With a full-time team of designers, developers, and strategists, a web design company can stay in the loop with Google’s changes. They can also keep your site and link strategy evolving with the Penguin releases. OCG Creative provides a full team to help you with Reno web design, content strategy, SEO, and ongoing internet marketing initiatives. Call us. We’d love to help. (775) 324-1644
Picking colors may seem like an easy chore that can be done in five seconds, right? Wrong, picking a great and impactful color scheme requires some planning and thought to how well the colors work together.
“Colors must fit together as pieces in a puzzle or cogs in a wheel.” - Hans Hofmann
To help you with your own palette, I've put together examples of website color schemes, to take for inspiration, as well as a few things to think about when you go to pick your website's color scheme.
Using warm colors with cooler ones will create a complimentary color scheme that is bound to impress viewers whether you choose a deep blue and bright orange, or a dark purple and vibrant yellow. Something to write down so you'll remember is, warmer colors are going to pop more than cooler colors, so you'll want to make the highlights and features of your site the warmer color of your palette.
Purples, blues, grays and sometimes green.
Yellows, oranges, pinks and sometimes green.
Forest green is a cool color, and lime green is a warm color.
Keeping things simple is always a good thing when it comes to building website color schemes. Using tints and shades of two colors will add dimension to your website's design while keeping a minimalistic look that won't overwhelm readers.
A high contrast website color scheme is a great way to direct readers' eyes through your website. Having a contrasting palette will allow you to highlight the key points of your website by using a pop color that stands out above all the other colors.
Keeps things professional, while also picking a palette that is fun and modern. Grays are neutral tones that compliment any color, having some grey in your website will set you up for any color combination you choose for your professional color scheme.
A color scheme that has one POP color paired with neutral colors is an easy way to build a dynamic palette in less than a few minutes. Neutral colors offer a professional look, by adding one bright color like cyan or a punchy pink you can have a sleek yet playful website that is bound to impress.
Having an impressive website color scheme will keep viewers on the page, as well as aid to the branding of your site and the business you've worked so hard to build. If you're not sure if the colors on your site are hurting your site's overall performance, let OCG Creative check it out. Our Reno web design and internet marketing team can help make your site more impactful and effective.
The best creative web design for clients all have one thing in common; image quality. Images are the number one visual way information is communicated and in the day and age of increasing demands for quick information, images do a great job at telling a story quickly for site visitors. Images are crucial for efficient web design because they break up content on pages which can be overwhelming for visitors. Essentially, people want information fast, and when they don’t get the answer to a search phrase, they leave the site (contributing to high bounce rates, low conversions, and lowered SEO scores). What better way to convey information quickly than through pertinent images paired with good keyword-heavy content aiming to match a visitor’s search phrase?
Efficient use of images can be hugely beneficial to a site and can add to a business’s branding, their tone toward visitors, their business’s image, efficiency in converting visitors, guiding efficient site-navigation, SEO, and much more. Images work hand in hand with creative web design and are increasingly recognized in their importance in conveying information:
“A common finding is an observed processing superiority of pictures as compared to words, suggesting that pictures have a faster and more direct access to meaning, while words are discussed to require additional translational activity...” -Schlochtermeier, et al. (2013).
Given the importance of images to visitors, it is good to know what constitutes as good images for a website to make the most of creative web design.
When people think of the best web design they typically only think of a site’s layout. However, most people forget that a large portion of layout is where to place high-quality images and content. The best web design is unique for each client and their business. However, there are similarities with site layouts and how images are arranged:
Simple and effective designs use layouts with images that do not confuse visitors, help them navigate the site, sell your unique message, and help convert visitors into a customers. Good layouts also use images to guide visitors toward pertinent pages or locations on their site.
There is a misconception that images need to be small for a website. Images need to be as big as possible to get high resolution, only their file sizes need to be small. Thankfully OCG takes care of all file compression so even if you give us massive photos, we ensure they are optimized on your website. Images that are too small are 'pixelated' or 'low-res' and look bad on websites and can hurt your online appearance and brand identity.
High Res Image
Low Res Image
The images need to be well lit. Avoid using a flash because it tends to wash out all images. The main source of lighting should not be behind the subject either and you should avoid highly contrasted images that add a lot of distracting patterns. This is very important because many images on a website have text over them and high-contrast images make it difficult to read the content and can be strenuous to look at on their own.
Good Lighting
Bad Lighting
Having everything in focus can make the image too cluttered and distract from what you really want to viewer to see in the image. A ‘soft-focus’ pulls the viewer’s eye toward the object you want site visitors to pay attention to while softly blurring the rest. This can also help de-clutter busy images.
Good Focus
Bad Focus
Many people think that if you want to draw attention to something it needs to be centered in the image. That can get repetitive with many images on your site. Take images from close up and far away with the subject in different places. It can be a mistake to take all of your images from one perspective using one composition, unless you are taking product shots.
Good Composition
Bad Composition
You may hear web-designers or account-coordinators talking about ‘mastheads’. Mastheads, banners, or site headers are the images that display at the top of each web page. These images need to be large (to work with a responsive website) and need to be ‘landscape’ not ‘portrait’. Additionally, because visitors only see a tiny part of the whole image, it is a good idea for the image to capture 'depth’. For example, instead of taking images from a top-down angle on a subject, try taking shots from different angles that emphasize perspective. A good way to do this is taking a series of images starting from the ground-level and moving up.
Good Perspective
Bad Perspective
Many clients find sites and ask what we can do to make their site more like the example they choose. The most common site people tend to ask for is Apple or other sites for technology companies. So what do they do that makes their layout work so well?
Creativity reigns supreme right? It is common knowledge that only the coolest websites get top exposure. Part of me, as a web designer, hopes this would be true. However, creative web design only takes a business so far. Ultimately, there are thousands of terribly designed websites that get more traffic than award-winners. If you want your website to work for you beyond a cocktail party talking point, then you need to know that Web Design is a part of Internet Marketing and not the same thing.
As cleverly explained by the cartoon, you can have the most creative and interesting website in the world, but if you market it horribly, then not many people will see it and you won’t get a very good return on your investment. OCG Creative’s team of dedicated and nerdy Reno web designers and developers work hard to produce these award winning sites. We have done this for numerous clients for many years. Part of the creative web design also involves the user’s experience with the website, which is why an analogy of a website being a poster is only part-true. In reality, a website is a fluid document – it changes with input from the user and looks different on different devices. OCG works to build the coolest website imaginable for our clients, but we know at the end of the day that it is essential to market it correctly, and websites should never stop when the design is completed.
As a secret confession, I used to wonder this question all the time. There are plenty of online tools to build a website, and before I became a web designer, I even built my own portfolio using one of these tools. The issue with all of them… they’re awful. Even discounting the fact that all of them stop at the end of web design, the web design itself is clunky, confusing, and very limiting. I didn’t realize this until I experienced it first hand. A website should never stop at the end of creative web design. Instead, it should be a rocket-powered branding piece pushing the client forward to more exposure and spurring the start of a comprehensive effort to convert website visits into leads. OCG custom designs each website so it is beautiful and branded, but most importantly, they are scalable and sturdy for expansion in traffic and tailored to convert site visitors into customers.
After website design is completed, many people stop and never touch it again. It’s similar to making a cool poster and then never posting it anywhere. Why? Internet marketing takes effort, DIY site builders don’t have the resources to market each site created and the sites themselves are cluttered and reject efforts to market them. A lot of this is due to lack of on-site SEO support in addition to other elements such as effective landing pages and lack of Conversion Rate Optimization. It is much easier to stop after finishing the web design part.
The point is, OCG Creative is a dedicated and experienced Reno web design and internet marketing agency that has the resources. Websites should be built to be optimized for internet marketing. The issue with DIY site builders, is the website's inability to integrate with a meaningful and comprehensive marketing campaign for individual clients. This is because DIY sites purposefully exclude any means of integrating with an internet marketing plan, it is simply too much effort for DIY site builders to accommodate these features. Internet marketing takes time and a sturdy website foundation specifically built for internet marketing. Additionally DIY site builders don't want to manage campaigns because they take time and constant tuning. Hard work with SEO, Landing Pages, CRO, and other services, take time to gain traction. OCG maintains these campaigns, constantly tailoring our client’s Internet Marketing plans to coincide with optimal conversions including tracking page visits and valued keywords to get them ranking higher. You can’t get that level of detailed attention with do-it-yourself websites. It takes significant time, specialized data collection, and informed decisions to be implemented after data collection to market a website correctly.
If you’re not sure where to go from here knowing all of this or if you still think an awesome looking website is the most important thing for you or your business, give us a call or browse our other topics. We’ve been doing this for a while and know the internet marketing world front and back.
Last month I conducted an email survey asking one simple question: Given the choice, which of the following is more important for your business website? There were only two possible answers: Your website's design, or search engine rankings. Here are the results:
Although the survey was unscientific, the results show that website owners clearly understand the importance of search engine rankings. With few exceptions, I believe search engine rankings are the most urgent factor contributing to business website success. Simply put, if people can't find you, it really doesn't matter how great your website looks. That's not to say website design isn't important. It's vital. However, it is easy to get wrapped up in design and put everything else on hold. Here, we design around search. By that, I mean literally putting ranking factors above design elements and publishing content around specific search terms. We predict visitor volume based on specific keyword rankings and known search volumes. Our goals for design are to provide an elegant, polished, branded experience for users that is lightening fast on any device. That happens to be Google's goal too, so favor is being given to sites that meet these criteria. In many ways, I think it's time to rethink design. In the old days, the goal was to keep the total weight of a webpage under 100K. Even better, under 65K. As broadband became widespread, that kind of went out the window, although I personally never bought into the idea that a page could be as big as you want. With something like 2/3 of Internet searches being conducted on mobile devices, that 100K limit makes a lot of sense. So, while web design is critical, it is important to keep things in perspective. Rankings and user experience are what drive sales. Design complexity is fun, but frequently stands in the way of other critical goals.
Having spent most of the last two decades planning, developing and marketing websites, I've learned a lot about what works and what doesn't when marketing your business online. For the most part, I can sum up website planning in one word: relationships. Thousands of books and articles have been written about building relationships online. In the end, it isn't any different than building relationships offline. Business relationships are often compared to dating. The metaphor works in the sense that you start by talking a little, then maybe go out for coffee... Over time, a lot of other stuff happens until, shazam! One day you get married. The point here is that beginning a relationship with a marriage proposal pretty much never works. And if it does, your odds of marrying a desperate, toxic nut-job are pretty high.
I think a better comparison is a student-teacher relationship. Outside of our marketing agency, I teach scuba. I am passionate about diving, especially deep diving, using exotic breathing gasses and hundreds of pounds of highly specialized equipment. Although a student brand new to diving has no need to understand the effects of high oxygen partial pressures on the human body, my expertise is never questioned. The rationale being that if I can survive dives in excess of 100 meters, breathing gasses I mixed myself, surely I must be qualified to teach a new diver to swim around in the top 60 feet or so. When that same diver is ready to buy equipment, who do you think he/she goes to? My students won't even consider making a purchase without talking to me first. That concept translates to virtually every business relationship and should form the basis of your website planning. Reno web design and website planning is relationship planning.
The absolute first rule in website planning is to make sure the right people see it. 7/11 stores are located on busy neighborhood intersections because people who like Slurpees live there. In today's world, 'busy intersection' means Google's search engine results page (SERP). If you stop reading right here, take away this one concept: Make a plan to reach your audience in Google search before you even think about website design. I see it over and over. Clients toil over every pixel and make countless revisions spanning months to make their websites "perfect" before allowing us to take them live.
Meanwhile, not one human being is exposed to their business online. With this in mind, website planning essentially means Google planning. I've never been comfortable with the term, search engine optimization (SEO). Partly, that's because so many of the people and agencies that claim to be SEOs fall somewhere between incompetent and crooked. I just don't want to be lumped in with that group. I also don't think SEO is as hard as it is time consuming. At least, not for most businesses.
After over a decade resisting the term "SEO," I've grudgingly come to embrace it. If you want your website to bring you customers, you have to play by Google's rules. That means the written text has to take priority over design. Yet, I'm told over and over, "people don't read online." Really? Scores of bloggers make their living writing content people read online. It is more accurate to say, "people don't read boring crap online."
The fact is, people DO read online. They read a lot. It's just that they are very choosey about what they read. If you are a sucky writer, don't expect people to read your sucky writing just because you want them to. Be the expert in your business, but hire pros to do the writing for your website. A website writer must understand how to write engaging content for humans that also supports the relevancy requirements for search engine rankings. Writing for SEO purposes is an essential website planning strategy.
The myth that people "don't read on the internet" is partly made believable because large blocks of text are miserable to read online. You can solve that problem by making content readable. Unless and until we (we being OCG Creative) bring it up, typography never enters the conversations about website planning we have with our clients.
Typography includes all the elements related to your website's written content. The creative use of headings, type styles, font choices, sizes, color, italics, bolding, lists, etc. all contribute to the readability of your website content. Website text must be well-sectioned and scannable by the reader. Online readers will scan your page for specific terms in about 2 seconds before deciding whether to read it or go back to Google and search some more. Therefore, it is essential that typography be central to your website planning.
Right from the start, accept that your website will never be done. Your planning process must include a strategy for ongoing updates. In nearly every instance, websites that are easy to update get more attention than those that aren't. Generally speaking, the more complex the website design, the more difficult it is to make changes. Plan your website for your visitors, not your designer, or worse, your ego.
It's funny. Our Reno web design team ask new clients every day to describe what elements they feel are most important to their websites. 9 times out of 10, the first word they'll use is "clean." Yet, 9 times out of 10, the same client will want everything he or she can think of thrown in once the design phase begins. At the same time, all attention shifts away from content and search engine rankings in favor of graphics.
By now, it should be clear that search engine rankings and speed win out over everything else about your website. Once you make it to the top of Google, you'll have the luxury of dialing in your website for conversions. At that point, you can make all the design changes you want. But early on, plan your website around rankings. I promise you'll thank me later.
