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The website features an opening flash slideshow, newsletter sign up, and a blog.
Visit: www.bejewellednz.com
Most businesses know they need a website, and often get one designed so they can tick it off from their list of marketing requirements. It’s very tempting to send through lots of content and a few thoughts to your web firm and tell them to ‘go for it’. If they’ve got a good understanding of your business and a marketing mind then you may well get back a website that will really add to your marketing efforts. But why take that kind of chance? Depending on the size of your business, it could take up a considerable chunk of your marketing budget. So you want to get it right. Without a clear purpose it’s also impossible to measure the site’s actual effectiveness. Once you know the purpose of the site you can come up with a number of ‘calls to action’ to get your visitors completing the goals you have. Examples include: join your mailing list, pick up the phone and call you, print off a voucher, request more information via a web form, or buy an item online.
Most websites have multiple audiences, and one of the best ways to plan for their requirements is by using ‘personas’. A persona is a fictional character who has a background story. You can then brainstorm on how the persona (for example, Jane Smith, 32, professional, lots of disposable income, socially and environmentally responsible) will use your website. You’ll be surprised at how quickly ideas will spring forth from this exercise, as it really helps to say things like ‘Jane would like that we are carbon neutral and donate to good causes’. Personas are part of what is termed user-centric design, which at its most basic is designing a website around the needs of your users.
Getting traffic from the search engines should be one of your top priorities. Your corporate pages (About Us, Services) should rank highly for your main keyword phrases (the terms that describe your offer). You will also want to capture traffic from what is called the ‘long tail’ of search. These are search phrases that are very specific. An example long tail search might be ‘what is the weather like in New Zealand in June’. The best way to attract this type of search traffic is by writing articles or blogs on a regular basis. This can be hard work as it’s not always easy to come up with new ideas on the spot. But once you have one idea, it’s not long before you have a dozen. We recommend that you set some time aside for idea generation. You don’t have to write everything at the same time, but having a content plan for the next few months (at least) will take some of the pressure off.
Phase your website development, as doing everything in one go increases the complexity of the site and the development time. It’s better to have a site live now rather than delay it by trying to make it perfect from the get-go. A website is always a work in progress, and once you have some metrics on what is going on with your web visitors you’ll find you are in a much better position to make intelligent and well-informed improvements as you go. And lots of small changes can really add up to large changes over time.
If you’ve got questions about developing your next website give us a call on 03 366 33 40 or email info@tmlwebdesign.co.nz. We are happy to answer your questions and discuss your requirements with you.
The website has been designed very much with the target audience of young travellers in mind. It features a corkboard background, flash image slideshows, handwriting fonts, and images with a polaroid styling. The site imports an RSS feed direct from the Rotorua tourism website, has it’s own blog and RSS feed, and a highly engaging and interactive image shuffle gallery.
Visit: www.rotoruaplanetbackpackers.co.nz
“Kitty, it would be a pleasure to give you some positive feedback on your website design that you did for us. The help you personally gave me was very much appreciated, for some one who had limited experience in this type of thing your patience and understanding was amazing, I am sure without your experience in handling some quite tricky situations would have caused further frustrations.
The comments I have had from people visiting my website have been very complimentary even some large overseas booking engines have expressed their compliments on the presentation of the website and have asked who designed it so Kitty you are now internationally known. The activities and attractions that we have on the website have all expressed their delight on how their business has been promoted, so all the credit goes to TML and you Kitty, once again thank you for your help.” Regards Graeme
Thirteen minutes after publishing our most recent blog post on ‘how to market your restaurant online’, we ran some web searches in Google.co.nz to see if the post had been picked up by Google. As you can see from the screen shots below, the blog was ranking for keyword phrases within 13 and 18 minutes respectively.
Now that’s impressive.
Found in Google after 13 minutes from publishing.
Just 18 minutes after publishing the post we're number two in Google.co.nz
The website features hundreds of New Zealand tourism operators with travel content targeted specifically to trade professionals who are looking to advise their clients on travel to New Zealand.
