Websites Make Money

The ultimate goal of every website is to generate income. Many professional offering their services, can use a simple informational website to offer their services on the web, and potentially generate business from the website by encouraging interested visitors to initialize some form of contact. This contact can come by way of phone call or email, depending on the preferences of the website owner.

There are also E-Commerce websites. This is typically an extension of a brick and mortar establishment, but in todays market, that is not necessarily the case. There are many entrepenuers who simply resell products for a profit. They may benefit from search engine optimization to generate online sales or even use Google Adwords to pay for traffic.

Either way, the website you establish will determine your potential for earning income online. SgPro is a professional web design company based in Fort Lauderdale. If you understand the importance of a strong website, you should contact us for a professional evaluation of your needs, and the affordable solutions that we can provide. We are based in Fort Lauderdale Florida. We have worked with many small businesses in Fort Lauderdale, Miami, and the Palm Beaches, to help them improve or establish a strong internet presence. For more details on web design and search engine optimization please visit our website.

Web Design in Fort Lauderdale

I had settled on Babelfish, a free service from Yahoo, and easy to say, that this was not a good solution. Translations were inconsistent at best. As I was new to this, I tried to incorporate Google Translator, which led me to JQuery Translate. When I say led me to, I mean that Google was not independently offering the service for large amounts of text. Remember the goal was to dynamically translate an entire page. Needless to say I “googled” Jquery translate, and arrived here: http://code.google.com/p/jquery-translate/.

Needless to say, I cut my development time in half using this option. Let me know if you need some help setting this up. It should take about a half an hour or so to implement.

There are in house designers who are responsible for the great designs that this house is known for. I am blessed to be able to rub shoulders with the caliber of graphics that the guys are capable of. I have seen this as exactly what web design is all about. Web Design is the marriage of form and function. Great designs will encourage visitors to click through, great programming knows what to do with the clicks, and handle the customers visit appropriately. Web programmers are responsible for making sure that the path to conversion is clear and easy to navigate. This is of course cemented together by the desires of the website owner and the overall goal of the website. It takes a clear understanding of the objective in order to formulate a logical, intuitive interface that is attractive to a broad range of tastes.

For experienced web design professionals in Fort Lauderdale, you have come to the right place. Contact me through the sgprofl.net contact page.

FT LAUDERDALE WEB DESIGN

Screenshot of JayLenoShow.com before Jay Leno.

A few days ago, the Boston Herald reported that a domain squatter from Katy, Texas, owned the domain name “thejaylenoshow.com”. Former domain owner, Guadalupe Zambrano was using the url to redirect traffic to his real estate website.

I can’t imagine how this would help conversions. Hard to see how people searching for Jay Leno,  would be interested in going to a real estate website. The website at the url was not a typical domain landing page with links related to the search term (Jay Leno in this case). It was actually a full fledged real estate website.

When I first heard about this situation, I immediately thought the guy was a domain squattter who was trying to sell the url to the NBC show. Mr. Zambrano was acutally quite content doing business through this url and had no interest to sell the name, or at least, this was not reported. Judging by the website under the jaylenoshow.com url, I would tend to believe that the real estate genius from Katy, Texas, was not after money.

According to the Boston Herald report, The UN, World Intellectual Property Organization says the domain will have to be transferred to the comedian, Jay Leno.

Just  a note to anyone interested in starting an online business, and you are considering what domain name to buy, talk to a trusted web developer with regards to issues like domain name selection. I will write another article soon about using brand names in your domains. Contact me for more at http://www.sgprofl.net/.

Search Engine Optimization

Well another Monday has gone, end of the month, so Google crawl if it hasn’t happened already is now due. Hold on to your stats, another shift in the wind. No I haven’t heard something you haven’t.  I’m just saying, when “The Google” updates the index, there is a chance that page results may get affected, could be good, could be bad.

I have been obsessed with statistics, SERP (Search Engine Result Pages and positions therein), and the infamous Google Crawl. All of the above means nothing, if you can’t convert the thousands of visitors you have pouring through your site every day. I say pouring through because if you are not converting your website traffic, then are they just leaving? Surely you have some information that a search engine believed was relevant to the search phrase.

A good place to start would be to eval the exit pages. If you know not about exit pages…please use your friendly neighborhood search engine, and get some knowledge. Websites with high traffic volumes and low conversion rates, definitely warrant a once over.

First let me define what I mean by conversions, and the rates thereof. A conversion can be defined as getting a website visitor to perform a desired action on your website. The desired action may vary between submitting their email address, to purchasing a product. The idea is that your position on page 1 of SERP’s is sending your website traffic that is interested in what you have to offer. If your visitors are not doing what you hope for, or are not following a particular path to the conversion page, then you may need to re-evaluate your website.

In my experience, the primary reason for lack of conversions, can be one or a combination of several reasons. The basic underlying root cause of a visitor not “converting” is the lack of confidence in the site. Customer confidence goes a long way on the web, especially in the realm of e-commerce. One practical solution is to get a totally objective party to review the website in question,  without knowledge that you are a part of it , and give you an evaluation as to why they would or would not perform the desired conversion.

As a developer, it is often difficult for me to review a project objectively. I often enlist the help of friends and family, to offer some feedback. There are some simple things to offer your customers to improve customer confidence. Make sure that all applicable policies are listed, a privacy policy seems to be helpful in most cases where you ask for an email address. Businesses should list their full street address whenever possible. Including a phone number is always a big plus. These items, in text, not a graphic, will also help to improve your relevancy in local search results.

Bottom line is that conversions is also a game of numbers. It is almost a rule of thumb, that 10% of website traffic will convert in some way. Increase your traffic to improve your rate of conversion, and keep the customers happy! Nothing like return business to keep the wheels turning…

]]> http://www.sgprofl.net/blog/website-conversions-turn-clicks-into-cash/feed/ 0 http://www.sgprofl.net/blog/website-review/ http://www.sgprofl.net/blog/website-review/#comments Mon, 15 Jun 2009 23:45:28 +0000 sgprofl http://sgprofl.wordpress.com/?p=28 I have been parusing the Google I/O videos and found this gem. How hard is it to get an objective site review from those closest to us. Here is an interesting insight into how google looks at your site. enjoy.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecI_hCBGEIM&hl=en&fs=1&]

After SEO, then comes conversion. There are plenty of metrics to consider when trying to optimize rate of conversion. Interface appeal is probably the most important. Second would be the call to action. Is your message clear. Are you driving traffic to, product details page, for example? It is important to evaluate website stats at this point, if you haven’t been monitoring them already. Important information comes from the landing pages, entry and exit pages, as well as the keywords that brought the visitors to your site.

To help with this, I made a custom counter, then developed an interface that would drill down to each visitor. The interface also allows for you to view the entire path a visitor took that made it to checkout. This has proved very helpful for optimizing decisions as well as link structure.  This is just one of the many tools I use to help evaluate the overall performance of a website. This should not take the place of evaluating actual server log files. I have found evaluating log files, while time consuming, proves to be the most accurate source of website traffic information. Server log files have helped resolve many pay per click issues.

There will be more on the topic of converting site visitors next. Visit www.sgprofl.net.

Greetings.

Welcome to the new Blog by SGPRO. We will discuss topics related to websites, design, functionality and last but not least optimization.

Build it and they will come is great for the movies. Getting visitors to your online presence is not as easy as that unfortunately. I am a freelance web developer in the Fort Lauderdale area. I have been experimenting with different trends and techniques as it pertains to web design and search optimization.

I have been building websites for clients for over 8 years now. I can remember in the early days, how protective I was of my code and not willing to reveal my “secrets”. Ok. First, there are no secrets. If you don’t know, try to keep an open minded approach to seeking out the information desired. Its out there, you just haven’t used the right keywords in your search. I learned a great deal from online tutorials who freely share code and encourage creativity and growth of the internet. I have decided to give back some of what was given to me.

I hope the information you find here will be helpful and useful.

Blessing and Prosperity.