Tips for Designing a Business Website for Women Viewers

If you are targeting your marketing efforts to capture women viewers, common sense will dictate that you need to design your site for the female shopper. You may think you're not targeting women but, don't forget, women are often the decision makers in the home and may be the actual family members deciding on whether or not to buy from your company. According to a great website that teaches how to market to women: "women make 83% of all consumer purchases in the U.S." That's a powerful statement, folks!

One way websites become popular is through word-of-mouth referrals or testimonials from others, either in person or online. Here is a great blog post from author Holly Buchanan that describes the differences between how men and women perceive word-of-mouth testimonials. The bottom line is that women focus on relationships and men focus on the authority or credibility of the person giving the testimonial. To benefit from this information in designing your website, make sure you include a video testimonial of a woman that is full of anecdotal stories about why she likes your company.

Another fabulous web site article about marketing to women versus men points out how a woman's brain is hard-wired to notice detail and, more importantly, to CARE about the details. In addition, women anticipate the needs of others and truly appreciate it when someone else anticipates their needs. How does that help you when designing your website? Consider using the right details in the right place with little effort on your site. In other words, don't use a lot of clutter and useless information that doesn't pertain to the product or service you are selling. Make it obvious where your viewers need to go to get the information they need from your website. Women are multitaskers so they may be surfing the web while making important phone calls. The simpler your site is to navigate, the more apt they are to visit it often and tell others about your site. Bottom line, keep it simple, clear & concise and anticipate the needs of your viewer.

Happy Surfing!

Dr. Sandi Eveleth
"The Digi Doc"
KISSyourWeb.com
KISSyourWeb.com/KYWBlog
twitter.com/KISSyourWeb

5 Ideas for Creating and Marketing Your Videos on Your Website

1. Promote a Product or Service

Instead of doing the usual text explanation of your product(s) and/or service(s) that may take several lines of boring text, why not demonstrate them on video? Just imagine how useful a video would be to make it easy for your website visitors to figure out exactly what it is your company does or sells?

2. Provide Happy Client Testimonials

One of the strongest marketing tools you can use to promote your business is to provide word-of-mouth testimonials. The impact of happy customers describing the wonderful service you provide on your site's home page is definitely worth the small effort to create the video. Using a simple FlipTM Video or other video camera on a tripod, you can produce a fairly decent video to place on your site. If you are still a bit nervous about producing the video yourself, there are many companies that provide this service at competitive prices locally.

3. Demonstrate How a Product Works

Why not demonstrate how a particular product works, especially if you receive a lot of phone calls to your company about this issue? Your instruction booklet may not be enough. Many people prefer to have something shown to them directly and visually.

4. Introduce Yourself and Your Employees

Make sure you portray yourselves professionally and don't forget to smile when talking! If you are a local company and expect visitors of your web site to visit your company in person, think about how they would want to be treated and carry that over onto your web site video introductions. Is there an employee with a special talent that is relative to your company? Show some of the personality of your employees.

5. Walk Through Your Company

Create a virtual tour of your company, especially if the physical location is an important part of your company's product or service, such as an ice cream parlor or amusement park. Or, if you manufacture special "widgets" and the manufacturing process is part of the charm of the product, why not video a part of that?

Whatever reason or reasons you choose to add video to your web site, make it fun, informative and, above all else, engaging to entice your visitors to want to stay on your site and tell others about it (make it "viral").

5 Facts About Having Video on Your Website or Blog

1. It Increases the Amount of Visitors (Traffic) to Your Site and Improves Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

When your website contains a video, your web designer includes important industry keywords, phrases and your website or blog URL address along with that video to help elevate your ranking on the Google™, Yahoo! and other important search engines. One of the most common ways to insert video into your site or blog is to upload it to YouTube (giving you even more links back to your website) - not as daunting a task as it may sound - then embed the url link into your blog or site. YouTube has videos and great help links to guide you through this process.

2. It Gives Your Overall Internet Presence More Interactivity, Credibility and Traffic

Website surfers expect to see photos at the very least but, even more importantly, now expect to see and even share videos with others. This helps to create loyal fans and make videos "go viral" (watched by many).

Consider creating a "how-to" video on something useful for your customers or about your products and services rather than writing 500 words of text. Other common uses for video uploaded to company websites are testimonials given by your enthusiastic customers. Your video doesn't even have to be more than a slideshow presentation, as is demonstrated here in this video I created for the Empowered Networking Blog!:



3. It Can be Easily Embedded into Your Social Media Sites

Your friends and networking connections can view these videos on your Facebook and MySpace pages, YouTube channels and more. This gives you added visibility for your company or cause at no extra charge. It also gives you more useful links back to your own website or blog.

4. It Sets You Apart from Your Competitors

Many companies are still not up on the latest technology when it comes to web design and website usability. They are not aware of the lost opportunities from relying on old website technology and websites that are difficult to navigate. By including a well-designed, thought-out video, you are most likely providing something your competitors are not. If you can make that video "sell" for you, it's well worth the time and effort you put into it.

5. It Allows You to Reach a Completely Different Target Market

You may be tapping into an entirely different audience than you ever imagined. There are people surfing the Internet who only want to watch videos. How they find your video will be determined by the keywords that you use when uploading the video.

As more mobile phones and other devices become equipped with the ability to display videos, the size of your audience may be growing exponentially.

Watch for my next post on ideas for creating and marketing videos to post on your website and/or blog.

5 Reasons You Should Consider Creating A Wordpress or Blogger Website

1. Using the Best of Both Worlds

By adding just a few extra “pages” to your Wordpress or Blogger blog (a feature that is available to all users), you can turn your blog into a fully functional website. This may seem trivial, but it is extremely powerful to have the ability to update your site's content at a moment's notice, which also improves your site's search engine optimization (SEO) tremendously. In the past, most companies had to rely completely on their website designer to make any changes to their site, which could become very costly. Nowadays, websites are being built with content management (known as a Content Management System - CMS) as the main focus with design becoming a secondary thought. This works just fine, as long as website usability does not get abandoned. Typically, with a site from Wordpress.org (used for business), Wordpress.com (for personal use), or Blogger.com, content management, design and usability are given equal importance.

2. Great Plug-Ins

Wordpress and Blogger do a great job of providing many third-party, user-friendly plug-ins that offer a great deal of functionality, adding more value than many regular websites at no or very little extra charge. Another nice feature about these plug-ins is that they are updated routinely and easily.

3. Great Templates

If you are not a website designer but are willing to stretch your creativity a bit without much effort, Wordpress and Blogger offer hundreds to thousands of free templates that are easy to install. It gets a bit tricky if you want a custom-designed template and don't know the language of website design, namely .php, css, and xhtml (don't worry if these sound like something out of Star Trek). This is where a web designer can offer some help.

4. Free or Low Cost

Depending on whether you go with Wordpress.com, Wordpress.org, or Blogger.com, your fees will differ a little. The bottom line: you cannot beat the price of a Wordpress website if you can design it yourself. If you still decide to hire a web designer to customize your site, you will pay a design fee that can vary widely depending on the design firm and how much customization you would like to have done. Most good firms will give you an estimate based on your needs.

5. User Friendly Mobile Platform Automatically Formatted For You

As we get increasingly dependent on our smart phones for web applications and instant information, web designers have become aware of the importance of designing two sites for each client - a computer version and a mobile version. This can take a lot of time, effort and money to complete. This is not so with a Wordpress site/blog (this may not be true with Blogger, however). The platform automatically creates a mobile version that can be easily seen and navigated from your mobile phone.

If you need a new website or want to “dust off” the old one, consider using Wordpress or Blogger for your entire site.