My approach

I have a clear process to deliver your website project. During the process I will produce a custom website that blends modern design with technical expertise. Together we will discover, build and deliver a complete solution that reflects your needs and goals.

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Discover

Together we will dive into your business, needs and opportunities to identify strategies and tactics that can be utilized in your website. We will define concrete goals, a plan and timeline for the project.

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Design

Based on interactions with you, research of the field and best usability practices, I will create a design that is unique to you, geared towards maximum conversion and reflects the desired style and feel.

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Build

I design and code to the highest standards, keeping up with industry trends and standards, to build a compatible website that is a joy to use on a computer, tablet or smartphone.

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Launch

I assure high quality of your website through a quality assurance review and warranty. I will setup your new site, and help migrating the content. Using your new site will be easy with trainings and guides provided.

Ingredients of an
effective website

For your website to truly benefit your business, you need to consider quite a few aspects from defining your online strategy, to designing and building the site, and to launching and continuously working to improve the business output of your website.

Traffic
Conversion
Automation
Social Media
Strategy
Design
Programming
Launch
Measurement
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Quality Traffic

You want to have more traffic on your website, but that is not yet good enough. What you need to have is quality traffic. By quality I mean visitors that are interested in about what you have to say or sell. These visitors are much more likely to become new or repeat customers.

There are many ways to drive traffic to your website. Basic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tactics guarantee that your website can be found through internet search. Creating valuable content (blog posts, instructions, reviews, etc.) make it even more likely that your website will rate high in Google search results. Visitors will also spend more time in your website.

The best way to get quality traffic, i.e. traffic that converts, is by building an email list. You get people to sign up to the list by offering something they value, something that is also related to your business. When you use the list to provide people more of the content they value, or even using it for a marketing campaign, you will get a large boost of quality traffic to your website.

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High Conversion

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take a desired action. That action can, for example, be contacting your, registering to your email list or making a purchase. The conversion rate can be greatly influenced by website's design, content and usability.

Designing for high conversion rate takes into consideration human psychology, content of the webpage, usability and desired goals. Your have only 8 seconds to convince new visitors to stay on your website. If, during that time, they don't see anything of interest they will leave.

Therefore also the technical performance, i.e. loading speed, is crucial for a high conversion rate. You need to consider a number of factors that impact the loading speed of your website.

Designing a website that converts well requires iterations. You need to measure the conversion rates and do testing to find out, which changes to the design benefit your business most.

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Save Money with Automation

Automation can save you time and money, while increasing your revenue.

Obviously you should share information through your website. You can provide text, images, videos or files that will not only help you by answering many questions your customers will have, but can also increase your sales and customer satisfaction.

Through your website you can receive bookings or sell your services or products. Your online system can take care of inventory management, payments, billing, record keeping, and even fulfillment.

You can interact with your customers by providing them an option to contact you through a message or online chat.

And of course, you can automate building your marketing lists, combined with auto-responder messages, so that you don't need to respond to every sign-up manually.

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Social Media

Social Media is big. It is also fragmented with various services operating in different segments or niches. Facebook and Twitter we all know for sure, but then there are Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+, Tumblr, Flickr, Instagram, Foursquare and dozens more. If your target market is outside of North America, then there are a plethora of other social media sites that can be hugely popular locally.

What you cannot do, unless you're a huge corporation, is to be in all of these social media sites. You need to pick a small number, maybe just 1 or 2, that you focus on and decidedly ignore the rest.

When you start working more seriously in social media space to promote your services and products, there are tools that will make your work so much easier. For example Hootsuite helps you to monitor the activity in multiple social media sites, and plan ahead and schedule your posts.

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Online Strategy

The question with your online strategy is 'what do you want to achieve in the web', or 'what is the purpose of your website'. Typically you shouldn't have many primary goals for your website. Through the goal-setting it is always clear, if a section, feature or content is absolutely critical. This will lead to a focused approach with your web presence, which will lead to increased conversion rate.

Is your goal to sell services or products in your website? Or provide information on a specific topic and entice people to take a specific action? Build a community and list of followers for a specific purpose or a later goal? Generate a crazy amount of traffic to your website, and monetize through that? All these objectives require a particular approach when you define and build your web presence.

Your website is not the only online element that you need to consider. What is your presence in social media? How do you make sure that people find your website through Google search?

It is critical to define your online strategy and the purpose of your website before you start building it. To do that you need to consider everything in your business through the scope of the web and its opportunities.

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Design and Style

Designing a website is more than just nice looking visuals. Every design decision needs to have a solid reasoning behind it.

When creating a design for a website the designer does his best to merge your directions and inspirations with the best usability practices and conventions, human psychology, design rules and principles, latest technology trends, and learnings from best websites in the field.

Designers will also take the purpose of the website into consideration. What is the primary goal of the website? What are the secondary goals? Placement, hierarchy, contrast, colors are all combined to support the objectives.

Good looks and style will definitely benefit a website, but they need to supplement usability, structure and objectives, not the other way around. A great visual style alone will not make your website a success.

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Programming

Programming, or development, of your website is a means to an end, but it can also make or break your website. A good programming guarantees that your website behaves like expected in all situations, loads fast, does not consume too much bandwidth and is easy to change later.

Modern websites often integrate with other online services, or have interactive elements in them. Developers often use different plugins or frameworks to add this kind of functionality, but there is always programming and customization involved.

Quality assurance is always an integral part of programming. Programming the logic, looks and behavior of your website is error prone work. A good developer always reserves time to test your website in different browsers and different kind of devices (desktop, tablet, smartphone). Due to a large number of changing variables, even a good testing is not a 100% guarantee against bugs. Therefore a warranty period after the website launch is critical to protect your rights.

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Website Launch

At launch you will put your new website out for people to find and visit it. Before the website can go live you need to have your domain (the address of your website) purchased, and hosting (the internet server where your website's files are located) service agreement made. After you have these, your web developer will typically help you setting up your website.

Before actually putting your website out, you need to test that it is working according to your agreement with the developer.

You also need to have all the content ready and entered in the website.

Your developer should provide you with a set of trainings and instruction materials about how to use various aspects of your website.

Now that your website is live, it is critical to get people to notice it. With help of online and offline marketing, and search engine optimization strategies, your website will become more popular and rank higher in Google search results.

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Measure and Review

Now when your website has launched, the next phase of building your web presence begins. In addition to working hard to get more traffic, you need to find out how well your website is performing and benefiting your business.

Google Analytics allows you to measure and view how well your website is doing. It will provide you with visibility over who are visiting your website, where they come from and trace their paths on your site. From the reports you can see, if your website attracts the kind of people you expected, how do they find your website, if they stay or leave, or if the visits turn into purchases or contacts.

Armed with this information you can adjust your marketing efforts, find ways to attract more traffic, and start tweaking the design and content of your website.

To help keeping people on your site and directing them to take desired actions, you can use A/B testing to compare impact of changes you make on the site. You can play with different page layouts, placements or colors of your action buttons, or different navigation options, and see reactions and actions of visitors in these variations. This way you will be able to move forward with a design that converts better.

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