The Flash may not be a hero for your website.

With all the talk about SEO, PPC, Twitter, Flash and other web technologies, sometimes we overlook what is *really* important in a website.  Don’t forget the fundamentals!  Here is a quick list of things you should do that will help your online visitors once they find you:

1. You need an “elevator speech” – a short paragraph summarizing your organization. Imagine that you were in an elevator with someone and had only 1 minute to explain your company to them. It should be short, sweet and memorable  – and right in a user’s siteline above the fold.
2. Your site needs to inspire an action of some sort. What is your goal? Is it to have a visitor contact you? If so, make it easy for them to do so, but also give them a clear reason to contact you – Inspire them!
3. Have an “About Us” page. People like to know more about your company. The “About Us” page is consistently one of my most visited pages on my website. This is your best opportunity to build trust – why should someone trust your organization? Experience? Knowledge? What is it?
4. Most often, people on the web are hunting for specific information, and they want it QUICK. Waiting to see if that information is in a video or buried on a subpage is usually not an option – they will click on to the next site. Concentrate on making the key information available quickly and easily. Navigation at the top will help, and adding relevant textual info.  Don’t get too wordy – get to the point.
5. Don’t try to dazzle with Flashy intros, or moving graphics.  A) It is distracting, and B) it isn’t search engine friendly.  If it doesn’t help deliver information faster, don’t bother.  Depending on your brand, the days of cool Flash animations are over for most companies.  Information delivery is key.

1. Host all those big picture files!

For a lot of small businesses, there just isn’t a lot of room on your server to host all those pictures that you want to share.  If I uploaded all my pictures from my last Florida vacation to this server, I’m pretty sure I would fill it to capacity in no time.  Flickr is great because it will host all your pictures online for FREE – that is, you are allowed to upload up to 100MB of pics per month for free.  That is enough for most people.

2. Host there, Display anywhere!

Now that your photos are sitting safely and snuggly on the Flickr server, you now can “insert” them into your website.   The picture below is posted from my Flickr account – it is the scoreboard from the 2009 Monon Bell football game (my favorite sporting event)!

3.  Embed Cool Photo Galleries

You can also create cool photo galleries with Flickr.  By organizing your pictures into sets, you can export them as sliding picture galleries that you can share on your web page.  This aligns with one of the great services that we provide our clients: maximum functionality for minimum cost.  Check out this gallery below from the 2009 Monon Bell game that I attended last year:

So as you build your site – think about using some of the features available to you by free social networking sites like Flickr. They can improve the user experience for your web visitors, but they can also save you money in your pocket.

We managed to squeeze in a quick redesign of our site – this is our first real custom design project.  Mostly we have been doing slightly modified free Wordpress templates.  With the new Seven1 site, we finally got let our imagination go to work.

The best part though is that it is, in fact, still a Wordpress template – we just uploaded it into our existing Wordpress installation and – voila – a brand new website (although the underlying software never changed).

That is a great advantage to having a Wordpress website, you can change the look-and-feel of the site very easily without changing the underlying functionality.

So what have we been up to lately?  Well, we are perfecting some document management software that we have been working.  It does some pretty cool things – the main focus is that users can generate and organize forms with bar codes on them.  The form can be printed, filled out manually, then uploaded back into the system.  The software recognizes the bar code and stores it in a file system in the appropriate location.

Next up soon will be the Blue Crew Sports Grill re-design.  That will be a fun project – we have been sorting through some great pictures taken at the various Colts parties from the 2009-2010 season.  I think the site will be exciting and a reflection of the passionate Colts fans that love to eat and drink there.

BRANDSWAG provides several important services to its customers.  A big part of what they do is using social networking to build your client base.  Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn – they are important tools in today’s digital age because they easily push information to customers.  They enhance communication and build relationships.  Good stuff.

Another part of what they do is establish “brand”, which is a more technical term for defining what is unique and marketable about your business.

The Seven1 Group is still in its infancy.  We are defining ourselves and networking, networking, networking.  I believe we are at a point now where our brand can finally come out.  I was busy redesigning our website last night to match our brand: Professional, web smart, and an emphasis on web application development. 

As it stands now, our website is geared more towards web design and marketing.  That is part of what we do – but a brand is about marketing what we do *best*.  And I truly believe our strength is in building robust web applications. 

That’s how we got in the same room with Brandswag – they need what we do best.

So think about your brand, and make sure it is communicates your strengths to your potential customers.

One of the reasons I enjoy working with Indiana small businesses on their websites is the satisfaction of helping someone succeed.  Many businesses out there are missing the boat on getting a new website that integrates with all of the newest technologies – they are missing important opportunities to connect with their customers.

Consider our newest client – the Blue Crew Sports Grill.  We will be re-designing their website in the coming months.  Imagine the potential to reach out to customers through Twitter and Facebook during the Colt’s amazing playoff run!   For restaurants like Blue Crew, we can set up their site so that a simple update to their website will also update their most loyal customers through online social networks.  Harnessing new technologies that provide instant communication does one simple thing – it gets the word out.  And most importantly, it gets the word out to receptive targets – people who have chosen to “subscribe” to what you have to say.

My father founded a business on customer loyalty.  Great service bears great referrals.  Websites can help make that referral process easier.

The other great part of doing websites for Indiana small businesses is simple Hoosier hospitality.  I have made some good friends in my line of work.  One of my favorite clients to visit is Alex at the Delicious Bakery-Cafe.  Alex is the co-owner of the Delicious Bakery-Cafe, which is coffee shop/bakery/cafe in downtown Westfield.  Not only is the food and bakery items and amazing, but it is the friendliest service in town.  We finished up a very simple, cost efficient site for Alex just this month.  He is already reaching out to customers using Facebook and Twitter, and having him is a client is the perfect excuse to pop into his shop for a coffee and some pleasant conversation.

Alex, who is from Mexico, told me that once you do business with the Hispanic community, “it is like being family”. 

That, to me, sounds like a worthy way to conduct business.

The ultimate NFL Colts Fan community!

The Indy Blue Crew is the fan club for the NFL Indianapolis Colts.  They wanted a sharp looking site that really enhanced their sense of community, but also improved communication with group members.

The new site now allows administrators to easily post and categorize news, events and announcements.  They can upload video, pictures and other multimedia as well.

The site imports news feeds of interest (NFL and Colts news), and also generates its own RSS Feed for Colts fans.  The site also links to Facebook and gives users a chance to share favorite articles using their own Facebook page.

We are really pleased with the results of this Colts NFL fan website – and the feedback has been very positive so far. 

And our partnership with the Blue Crew isn’t over – we will soon be doing a website makeover for the Blue Crew Sports Grill starting soon.

Hopefully all this good karma for Seven1 will payoff big time – and by that I mean a Colts victory over the Jets in the AFC Championship on Sunday.

Real quick – let me tell you that we have been lucky enough to work on a brand new website for the Indy Blue Crew – the fan club for the Indianapolis Colts.  Lots of great new features will pop up for the club, not the least of which will be better functionality for getting informed – newsletters, news archives and more.

Also we have been hard at work for a custom web-based document management software, and a search and inventory application for a car dealership.

The last two opportunities have been the most significant.  As our company grows, we want to do more web application development.  Of course, we still have time to help small businesses get started on their web presence, but the future of the Seven1 Group will hinge on the heavy duty web applications, which is something I think we can do better than anyone else.

If you are a small business owner, you may have approached several different web design companies for price quotes and come away rather overwhelmed by the numbers being thrown around. At the Seven1Group, we think we have found a great solution for business owners and non-profits who want impressive web functionality but don’t want to break the bank on a web presence. The answer, for us, is Wordpress.

Wordpress is an open source blogging software. Open source means it is FREE. We can download it free over the internet and build websites by converting it into a content management system (CMS). A CMS lets you type your site content in convenient “admin” screens. It is easy, and most importantly, you don’t have to rely on your web designer to make updates to your site. You can do it yourself just as easily as typing it into a Word document.

The site you are looking at right now is built with Wordpress. We decided that we wanted to have our flagship site at Seven1Group.com to be reflection of the work we provide our clients.

So let me share with you how a Wordpress site can save you money:

1. Many website companies may sell you on their own custom CMS software. You will pay license fees, or additional monthly fees to use it. Why pay it? Wordpress is free!

2. Free site features. Do you want video? A photo gallery? Blogging? Chances are that Wordpress can provide free, downloadable site features. Again, why pay a company to develop cool interactive features, when hundreds are free options through Wordpress?

3. Design flexibility. Wordpress sites have “skins”, meaning that the look and feel – the graphic design – can be changed easily. Some skins are even FREE.

So here is the bottom line – by choosing Seven1Group to build your site, you get a free CMS and free features. How great is that? All you pay for is having us set it up and configure it for you and the extent of the graphic design work you want done. You may want a free template. Or maybe you want us to adapt a free template at an affordable cost. Or maybe you want a professional graphic designer to create an original, attractive skin for you.

As always, there are plenty of options for any budget.

Unfortunately, search engine optimization takes careful planning.  It takes research and time to find the best keywords to drive traffic to your site.  We didn’t have this luxury – we needed to get online fast – so we picked some basic keywords, did some basic optimization and got our web site up.  Now at least prospective clients can read about our services online. 

I’m actually happy that we waited to optimize, because now this gives me a great topic to talk about on this blog.  We now have a baseline to measure our success – a great case study to show potential customers.

I did my first evaluation of our baseline this morning.  I found that we ranked fairly well with some of the keywords we chose on the fly, but the problem appears to be that not many people are searching for those key words.

We decided early on to target our web design, web development, social network marketing and search engine optimization services to areas near where we live – namely Westfield and Carmel, Indiana.  Our thought was that a company located in Westfield, Indiana, might type “westfield web design” in a search engine.  So was our hunch right?

Not so far.  We haven’t had any hits for that keyword combination, yet.  And by doing some preliminary research on the handy dandy Google Keywords Traffic Estimator, we may not get many.  It just isn’t a popular keyword term.

This underlines the importance of properly researching your keywords – you need to guarantee that the keywords in your site are going to get hits!

On the flip side, I am encouraged that the keywords we did pick placed fairly well in Google at the outset.  Part of this is because the terms aren’t that competitive, but at least we know that our seo technique is sound.

When I talk to prospective clients about SEO, I mention that it requires time to do it right. It involves evaluating your progress and making changes until you are hopefully in the Top 3 to 5 result rankings for your chosen keywords.  Next step, we will closely evaluate the keywords we have chosen and replace them with keywords we think will be more effective.

Then we’ll sit back, wait for the search engines to index our site again, and evaluate the results.  It is not an exact science, but patience and dedication to the task should yield positive results.  I’ll keep you updated on our progress right here.  Hopefully, we’ll all learn something new!

For a new company, it is important to draw up a marketing campaign to get your name out on the streets. Since we are a web development and internet marketing company, it would make sense to “demo” our services through our “grand opening” campaign.  We have some ideas, and Jodi is busy drawing up our plan as we speak.  On thing is for certain, it will probably include the following:

• Twitter campaign – create an account and start getting followers. Not sure how we will use it – we recommend to clients that they should offer exclusive deals for Twitter followers.  We may do that, or we may come up with something more creative.  More to come.
• Facebook campaign – we will create a “group” and encourage our friends and family to follow us.  We’ll keep track of our success here on the blog and let you know what is working.  Our hope is that Facebook can work as a strong referral tool for us.
• Print campaign – people don’t think about marketing to friends and family, but this is actually a great way to get your name out.  Send out a letter and business card to the people close to you. One thing our company specializes in is a personal url campaign. This involves creating a personal website for each recipient of a print or email marketing campaign.  We’ll talk more on this in the future, but we believe this to be an exciting new way to market products.
• Link campaign – even if you have done a great job optimizing your site for search engine visibility (and if you haven’t, you need to!), you can’t ignore the importance of getting links out on the web that point back to your site.  Managing a links campaign is critical to search engine optimization.  Your search engine rankings are directly influenced by referrals from other sites.

So there is still a lot to do to get ready.  We are actually juggling a few project proposals right now, so it would be great to have a few work examples to show off when we “pull back the curtain.”