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Eliminating the Clutter on Your Website

At first glance, your site might not seen cluttered to you. Now you need to take a step back a pretend you are a visitor who has never been to your site. Is your message being conveyed easily or is it difficult to find among all the various changes and upgrades through the years.  This isn’t meant to say everyone’s website is a disaster.  I want to you to see if you can eliminate some of the useless clutter that has accumulated over the years.

Here are two areas you need to focus on if you want to remove the clutter.

Header/Logo

  • Does the header clearly show your logo and display who you are? This is your brand. Its needs to be clear and concise.  Without this nobody knows who you are.

Nav-bar

  • The navbar needs to be simple and direct.  Minimize the buttons. Take complete advantage of the dropdown menus, but keep it organize.  One of my favorite examples of a simple, well-organized nav-bar is Best Buy.

How do we remove the clutter? Not as difficult as it may seem.

  1. It is important to design the site from the customers perspective.  They don’t know where everything is like you do.  Ask a friend to take it for a test drive and try to break it or get lost within the site.  If a first time user can navigate from start to finish without getting lost, then the clutter has been removed from the navigation.
  2. The Nav-bar requires some basic data crunching to decide if its organize properly.  Use analytic’s to see what pages your visitors enter and exit on.  Also keep an eye on the visits by page breakdown.  This shows the most important pages to your visitors. Making the top pages easy to access is a key factor.
  3. Use WordPress.  Makes quick adjustments easy. Need help getting started?
  4. Do not make the logo so it dominates the valuable screen real estate.  I like to make the max height of a header/logo 160-200px.
Now head over to your site and look at it like its the first time you have been there.  Write down your thoughts.
Filed Under: Business Model Innovation, Digital Presence, Innovation, Weekly Innovation, WordPress Design Tagged With: , , , ,

Seven Words

Challenge.

Engage.

Interact.

Innovate.

Live.

Learn.

Connect.

Filed Under: Business Model Innovation, Digital Presence, Innovation, Journey, Weekly Innovation

Create a Website Base and Set Up Your Outposts

Devín Castle Outpost
Why do you have Facebook or Twitter?  To engage and interact with your audience.  Lets look at a model of engagement that is very similar to the one used by our military in various parts of the world.  This post will avoid the political aspects of our foreign policy.  It is only meant to compare your digital strategy with the one used by the finest military in the world.

First thing that needs to be established is the main base, i.e. your website.  Its main purpose is to supply content and establish a presence in the digital world.  Contains EVERYTHING that is important to your digital presence.

Next focus is getting your content to the population.  Set up your outpost in the various social media worlds.  Get your valuable content out to your audience.

Now that you have gotten your content out there, you need to listen. Use the feedback to rework and perfect your content.  What is the point of having an outpost if your not going to listen?

Think about this strategy and IMPLEMENT IT.

Filed Under: Digital Presence, Innovation, Journey, Weekly Innovation, WordPress Design

Hello Bar First Impressions

HELLORecently added the “Hello Bar” by digital-telepathy and I am impressed.  Its a huge improvement from the annoying opt-in pop-ups.

Here are my first thoughts:

  • Doesn’t disrupt.  Do you want your visitor to read about your service completely through or get disrupted half-way?
  • Customization. You can easily configure it to mirror your site.
  • Send the visitor to a sign up or landing page.  It is basically a mini landing page in itself.
  • Integration. Easily and quickly integrates into WordPress (Genesis made it easier).

Do you see it helping your click through and increasing lead conversions?

Filed Under: Innovation, Weekly Innovation, WordPress Design Tagged With: , , , , ,

Feedback On My Mission Statement

I received an email today that made me sit back a evaluate my mission statement.

“NLI will take your idea and create a beautiful, innovative website”

Does that explain how my services will help your business? It doesn’t.  A beautiful, innovative site needs to be secondary to functionality.  The MAIN purpose of your website is to attract more customers and convert the leads to business.  Who cares if you have the fanciest slider and the brightest colors.  You need to sell your widget and convert the visitors to a customer.

Round 2:

“NLI will create a fully functional website with the purpose of improving your business’s digital presence and performance.”

Filed Under: Innovation, Journey, Weekly Innovation, WordPress Design

If Time Wasn’t an Issue…

Army Arts & Crafts Contest deadline is June 30 090616
If time wasn’t an  issue this child theme probably would be complete now.  Maybe.  I could just use a few more hours in the day.  From a time management point of view I have seen some improvement though.

Good news is I will have two clients sites up and running this evening, so extra time should be flowing in now (hopefully).  What would you do with the extra time? I am going to fill it with some reading and cosmetic work to my site and the soon to be released child theme.

This brings me to a thought, what is the best practice after completing work for your clients? During the work with clients you learn new techniques, but you also want new business.   I think its important to sit down if time allows and review your previous path of work before you  move forward to a new client.  Set the new client search to a passive mode until your ready to rock again.  WordPress is growing and evolving every day, so giving yourself a chance to catch up, learn, and try things out is important to your clients and your business.

The new info you learn may create some time savings… Something I would enjoy.

Filed Under: Business, Innovation, Weekly Innovation, WordPress Design Tagged With: , , , , ,

Two days of Tracking My Time Usage

After two days of keeping track of my daily life, it has become pretty evident that distractions are everywhere.

Here’s the breakdown of Monday and Tuesday since they are similar:

  • 630am – Wake up
  • 800am – 430pm – “Real” Job
  • 500pm – 700pm – Various errands
  • Rest of the Night… FULL of  distractions (no need to detail at the moment…)

I will get into more details later on, but so far I know I need to implement a more effective method to balance my life.  If you have any good articles or suggestions let me know.

Next step is to break down the week.

Filed Under: Innovation, Journey, Weekly Innovation

How to Create Repeat Website Traffic

If you’ve done your homework on website traffic, then you’ve been optimizing your website to attract your target audience.  Once they arrive, an aesthetic design, fancy copywriting and possibly some attractive photographs greet them.  That’s all well and good for your new visitor, but what do you have planned to bring them back?

Whether you are selling a one-time product or an in-demand service, your chances of gaining repeat visitors and/or referrals are greater the more you can stay in front of your target audience.  You’ve paid your dues to get them to your site, now how are you going to keep them coming back?

A website that is dynamic and interactive commands attention.  A website that is constantly evolving and changing with new offerings commands that same attention over and over again.

To give your website visitors a reason to come back and visit your site, try some of these simple tips:

1.     Make sure a ‘join our email list’ is front and center on your site, this way you can email your audience whenever anything new is available or sales are taking place. That always brings them back for a peak.

2.     Do the same thing with links to Facebook and Twitter. This is the age of social media.  Connect with your audience online and now you’ve got instant access to get your message in front of them.

3.     Make it easy for visitors to contact you with contact forms.  Many times website visitors have questions. If they can’t find the answer or figure out how to contact someone at your company to ask, they will surely leave your site.  This interaction builds trust and credibility.

4.     Update your website frequently with new photos, announcements and sales.  Get your consumers in the habit of checking back often to see if their favorite product is on sale or if something new that might spark their interest has arrived.

5.     Attach a blog to your site and update it frequently.  Blogging is a great way to create a captive audience.  Reading blogs keeps consumers on your site longer and allows you to deliver a concise message that is free from clutter and competing ads.

If you need help with any of these steps, the professionals at Next Level Innovation can help.  Simply drop us an email at mh@nextlevelinnovation.com and let us know how we can help you create repeat traffic to your website.

Filed Under: Weekly Innovation, WordPress Design Tagged With: , , ,