We are proud to launch a redesigned website for our client Scott Shaw of KLS Controls LLC! KLS Controls‘ website had many challenges. We turned those challenges into a website with several integrated features such as Blog Integration, Database Driven Web Pages and a Content Management System. With these new features, our client will be able to deliver up-the-moment company news and product updates in his industry. He will also be able to have exclusive access to make modifications to his website without relying heavily on a developer. These features will not only lower his maintenance costs for his website and marketing, but they will add value to his business.
At Gobie Creative, we want to wish Scott Shaw good luck with his business KLS Controls LLC, and remember as Scott perfectly states, “Keep Life Simple!”
We are very excited about some of our new developments this month! Some of these developments include a new website redesign for KLS Controls LLC and a logo design for a new company called Expert Car Care, Inc. We were very fortunate to take such important roles in the marketing for both companies.
KLS Controls is a company that handles product lines for automation manufacturing. It’s based out of Menomonee Falls, WI and is run by Scott Shaw. KLS will be launching a brand new website in the first week of December 2009. There were several challenges to implement into the new design. We wanted the website to be more user-friendly and updated with a sophisticated, clean style. We also had to implement Search Engine Optimization and a Custom Blog Integration along with some database pages.
Expert Car Care, Inc. is a automotive repair shop located in West Allis, WI. The owner Ben Marjamaa needed a logo that stood out from the rest. We created the logo in Adobe Illustrator using the gradient mesh tool. We didn’t want the logo to look flat, but rather with a more 3-d style to it…something that you can almost touch and feel the chrome texture. We will also be looking forward to designing new business cards and a website coming soon in January 2009.
We will keep you posted on these developments and more in the next couple months! Stay Tuned!
Ever wonder how many people are going to your website? Can they even find your website? How long do they stay on there to read all of your content? These are very typical questions asked by several owners of websites.
Google Analytics is a free and powerful traffic reporting system that you can easily find the answers you’re looking for regarding your website. It measures the amount of traffic and behaviors of your visitors each day. You can get in-depth results about your site on printable reports or you can e-mail them out to whomever. Using Google Analytics will save you alot of time and money figuring out where your audience is and how to connect with them. You can use it to your advantage for your marketing strategies and campaigns.
This tutorial will be an overview on how to get started and understanding the basics of Google Analytics. In future articles, we will go into more specifics.
Please check out this video on how to setup a free Google Analytics account first before reading on. It will show you step-by-step how to get started.
The Dashboard
Now that you an account, we can start analyzing your website! You have several features in the Dashboard section including what looks like a blue graph. Scroll over the dots. You will notice the date and amount of visits per day. If you want to see the amount of visits per week or month, click on the small square icons in the top right corner to change the views. Okay, let’s explore the other features.
The Site Usage section gives you a nice summary of Visits, Pageviews, Pages/ Visits, Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site and New Visits. Here’s each feature broken down:
1. Visits give you the number of visits within a certain time period. You start off with 30 days, but you can later change this number once you get more comfortable.
2. Pageviews is the amount of pages visitors viewed.
3. Pages/ Visits is the average amount of pages a visitor viewed when visiting your website.
4. Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors that realized after getting to your website, they were “bounced” out of your site. You can use this percentage to figure out if people are using the back button or realizing your website is not exactly what they had in mind. Use this to your advantage. Know what can attract visitors to stay and read your content. Try to keep you percentage below 30-25%. If it’s too high in the 50’s, consider doing some house cleaning on your website. Add some cool images, check you content, make sure your navigation is user-friendly and your search engine optimization is working.
5. Average Time on Site is exactly what the title says. It’s the average time a visitor spends on your website during a visit.
6. % New Visits is the percentage of visitors that are new compared to your overall count of visitors. You can see higher results especially when you implement a new marketing campaign. If the percentage is low, it just means that you have repeat visitors that keep coming back for more.
The Visitors Overview is a summary of who’s going to your website and how many in the last 30 days. You can scroll over the blue buttons just like in the top graph. It works the same way by telling you how many visits per day. To get more detailed, you can click on the “view report” in blue. In the report, you can see a breakdown of the action on your website. Feel free to take the time to look at each feature. We will go over these report in more detail in our next tutorial.
The Map Overlay is really handy because it gives you a geographical layout of your visitors’ origin. It pinpoints even down to the state/ city. You can use this tool to see where your market is coming from. Are you attracting more from your local area or is it globally? You can click on the “view report” to see more details and the breakdown of each visitor.
The Traffic Sources Overview is one of my favorites in Google Analytics. This gives you insight of where you traffic is coming from on the internet. Do you have more visitors from search engines or are your external links such as Facebook and LinkedIn doing their job? Again, you can click on the “view report” to see the exact websites that are helping you out.
Finally, but not least, Content Overview is one of the most valuable features to study. This overview will help you get understanding of your website and the people who visit. This feature lays out all your pages within your website to help you see who’s going where. Are visitors clicking on the contact page more than the services or are they just not even interested in contacting you? Do they get bored with you about page? These are vital questions you need answers for. This knowledge will help you design a successful website.
Thank you for reading our tutorial on Market Your Business Using Google Analytics: Part 1. We will be posting more articles that will explain each feature in more detail and how to use them to your advantage in marketing for your business. If you have any questions about Google Analytics, please contact us.
There many elements you need to remember when designing your website. Sure there are millions of websites out there, but are they good? Do they look nice? Can you navigate easily throughout the site? Here are some good tips to keep in mind:
1. Keep your text legible, but don’t make it huge. A good size font is 10px to 14px at the most. Sometimes search engines look at huge text as spam.
2. Use nice size buttons. Don’t use flashy huge buttons. It can tend to cheapen your website.
3. Focus on your main message. Don’t start listing a bunch of text just to fill spaces. Search engines hate lots of text and so do your readers.
4. Don’t bury your information. Use the 3-click method. It should usually take at the most 3 clicks for your readers to reach what they want to read about. Also, make sure your navigation is consistent and easy to find.
5. Carry same colors throughout your website. Keep a consistency going. It will bring all your pages together and give your website branding.
6. Use short, but capturing headers for your sections of text. Bring the reader in.
7. Make sure you use a nice background image that doesn’t interfere with your text or your images. Nothing more tacky than having some ugly distracting tiled background that takes the focus off of your content.
8. Have your links colors coordinate with the rest of your website. Also, don’t use “click here” for your links. Search engines hate that. Use the description of your content to create a link.
9. Make sure your colors you use on your images, website pages and text are web safe colors (hex colors). When making your images in photoshop, use RGB not CMYK.
10. Don’t use a lot of flash. A whole site built on flash can hurt your search engine visibility. Use it tastefully…maybe one element on your index page, but that’s it.
I hope some of these tips were helpful. You can find great books on website design everywhere or do a search.
Congratulations! You finally have a website you can be proud of and you want to tell the world about it. You’re wondering how can you get people to look at it? Is the content interesting enough for peo0ple to read? Believe me, people will read just about anything on the web as long as it interests them and if they can find it. Right now, your website is a store trapped in the middle of no where. You want to be on the main street where people can get to it and stop by. This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in. SEO is a series of practices you or a developer can do to help your rankings in popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. If you know how to do it yourself, you can reach those goals for FREE. Getting to the Top 100 doesn’t happen overnight though. It takes a little bit of time and effort to get there. Without it, you would be left in the dark still on the last few pages in a search result. We’ll g0 over some things you or your developer can do to improve your rankings and get you Top 100!
1. Make sure you have a good Title for your site. Use Keywords relevant to your business and content to name your site.
2. Include Meta Tags keywords in the head section of your code. Do your research and find out which keywords are used for a search.
3. Submit your website to Top Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.
4. Have a sitemap made for your site preferrably in XML file format. The easier search engines can navigate through your site, the more they like it.
5. Make sure all of your images within the website have nice short alt tags. Make them one word…don’t use phrases.
6. Let search engines “crawl” your site. Google is a “crawler”, but Yahoo is more human-based meaning it depends on more of users helping your ranks.
7. Use Backlinks. What are Backlinks? Backlinks are external websites linking to your website. For example, depend heavily on social media websites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to link to your website. It helps increase traffic and adds more credibility especially with Google.
8. Have Internal links. Don’t overdue it, but it helps to have some links within your website. Be careful to not have an overload….it can look like spam to the search engines.
9. Have good content listed. Make sure the information is information and not some generic story that doesn’t capture an audience. There has to be a reason you wrote about it and people will read it. Make sure the content is relevant. Don’t go on and on either. There’s nothing more hurtful to a site than long sections of text. I don’t know about you, but I hate reading a bunch of text sometimes.
10. Suggestion: Link to a blog better yet, have a blog integrated into your website. This way your content is always fresh and new. Search engines love new content. It keeps you competitive and updated.
Hope you found some of this information useful. There’s other things you can do to help your Search Engine Visibility. Do some research on it. It will save you money in the long run. The more people can find you, the higher your rankings and eventually, the more business you can get. Good Luck!
We were fortunate enough to be able to design a logo for Stella Maris Catholic Parish in Door County, WI about a month ago. Since then, we have received very positive feedbacks on it. The parish has implemented the logo in their website, outdoor signs, bulletins and mailings. Recently, it was published in the Door County Advocate which is affiliated to the Green Bay Gazette.
To give you some history on the parish, Stella Maris is the result of the 2005 merger of the Catholic parishes in Northern Door County encompassing churches in Baileys Harbor, Egg Harbor, Fish Creek, Jacksonport, Sister Bay and Washington Island. Reverend David Ruby, the pastor of Stella Maris, quoted, “When we requested new parish logo designs, little did we know we would have such wonderful responses? Sara’s design was ultimately chosen for the creative and prayerful way she incorporated the meaning of Our Lady Star of the Sea.”
We can’t thank the parish enough for such a wonderful opportunity!
