The more websites I build, the more I learn. So time for a little sharing.

Here are the top five things that have to be on your website, in no particular order. These are all aimed at wedding professionals. The list may not be the same for other markets.

Images.

Your target market is visual, very visual. I once had a young lady stand up in one of my seminars as I was talking about tagging your images and how GenY mostly surfed for pictures. She stated straight up that she was firmly Gen Y and truth be told, they ONLY surfed for pictures, rarely ever reading a word. So, add them to your blog posts and include large galleries of eye candy. Bue sure that you images are added in a way that the search engines can read them, in other words, don’t use Flash. Be sure to annotate and tag every single image with any relevant keywords, paying special attention to include subject matter and location.

Local Content

Most of my readers are based locally, by that I mean that even though they would love to book wedding all over the world, most of them are in their home town. With that in mind, be sure that you put a lot of local flavor in your website. If brides are looking at your site they want to know that you know all the best places and faces in your location. Remember brides search locally for their vendors. The other part of getting local on your site is that it give you an excuse to use the name of your town or neighborhood frequently. Why is that important? If you want to come up high for wedding planners in Washington, DC you need to have the actual words”Washington, DC’ appear in your content for the search bots to see. Search bots read words, only words; so the more often you can logically mention wedding & Washington, DC in you site the better off you are. (assuming of course you are a planner in Washington, DC, but then you know that)

Testimonials

As many and in as many ways as possible. Give them their own page, add pictures of either the smiling couple or the service that you provided. If they are complimenting you on the flowers and décor, add a picture of that.

Get the Wedding Wire Review widget and put that on your front page. Not only will brides read your reviews but it will make them more likely to give you a review themselves.

Add endorsements from other vendors. Those carry a lot of weight as a bride tries to decide if you are stable and reliable. Any one can get one or 2 good reviews from clients but it is the people you work with week in and week out that can really speak to what you are made of! Incidentally, I spoke with Wedding Wire last week and in their next revision they are adding a widget to add your endorsements just like the review widget. Yeah!

Prices

The number on thing that brides ask to have included in their online experience is pricing. This is something that hasn’t changed in as long as I have been at this. They want to know if they can afford you before they fall in love with your work.

Lead Generator

Right there on the front page and even in the post sidebars, you have to have a lead generator to collect email addresses. You never know when you are going to need them. Email marketing should be an important part of your overall marketing plan. Read why here. You can use it to promote any events you have coming up.

Of course there are other things that will be specific to you, but these 5 things are a must have for any wedding vendor.

This website that went live last week was a little outside of my usually area of expertise, but I think it came out nicely.

The client wanted a place for teachers to post their stories.The mandate was to create a site where anyone could add submission that could them be edited and moderated by the site admins. The client also wanted a fun, masculine look to the site; something that said, we are here to have fun, not share saccharine.

I look forward to seeing how it develops as he starts the process of gathering followers and interesting posts. If you know any teachers, please pass this along. Thanks.

I just handed off the new site for Front Porch Farms.

This one was a blast to work on, Kathy Best, the client knew exactly what she wanted. Her venue is simply beautiful and the images she sent made it easy to capture the fabulous look of the house and grounds.

I am always telling people that you need to know how to read the stats on your website. Today I want to share a great practical application.

I was chatting  with Sarah. Last year I designed a new website for her bridal salon. It seems that she has been watching the patterns emerge in he web stats. She can now tell by her traffic on Tuesday and Wednesday how busy her shop will be on Saturday.

She tells me that she now uses that information to decide how to staff her shop for the weekend. How cool is that?

Tracking your stats is really all about patterns. I have been uploading all the member content for Think over the last few weeks, every time I do my stats skyrocket. So now I am uploading a couple a day instead of spending a day and uploading in bulk.

If you follow the pattern, you can adjust the way you do thing to maximize the benefit.

I thought you might like this site that went live over the weekend; Healthy Solutions Medical Weight Loss.

I know it a bit outside the wedding industry that I usually deal with but still fun to do.

The site went live on Sunday and by Tuesday they already had new patients coming in with their forms already printed out and filled in! The staff loves it, especially the ones that answer the phone.

I love happy clients

What could a new website do for you?

I had an interesting conversation with a new client recently. Part of my review of his marketing strategy included asking him when he last updated his website. His answer startled me; he hadn’t updated anything in over a year!

I’m sure you are thinking big deal but this really is a big deal. In the case of this particular client, a caterer, he hadn’t even changed the prices on the posted menus. If you have bought anything in the last year like oh say food or gas then you know what has happened to prices. What do you think having to live with year old prices did to his bottom line? Exactly.

When he told me why he was doing that to his business I was even more stunned. He hated to call the webmaster to change anything because it cost an arm and a leg. Sound familiar? I am dealing with the same situation with an organization where I am a member of the board. This is lunacy.

In today’s culture a website has to be a dynamic, current, ever changing entity. Today’s bride can smell outdated at thirty paces. I’m not necessarily talking about changing the over all look of a site, although that should be done every 2 to 3 years. I am most concerned with you keeping the information up to date.  Are you a wedding planner that only has pictures of weddings you did 4 or 5 years ago on your site? Why not the images from last weekends wedding? I know, the webmaster again, right? What about you florists, those bouquets look a little out of date do they? Are you representing your business to its best advantage? Probably not.

With the tools and products on the market today there isn’t any reason why you should have a website that can’t be quickly and easily updated BY YOU at the click of a button. If your web designer is telling you different he is holding you hostage to old technology and stuffing his wallet at your expense.

I also have clients that have come to me with a perfectly good site that was in fact built so they could update it but they never learned how. WHAT??  Come on, that’s such an easy fix I almost feel bad telling you. If you need to learn how to use the website you have, call whoever built it, offer to pay them for their time and have them sit down with you and teach you how to use it. How do you think I started learning all this stuff oh those many years ago?

I’ll tell you something else, most web designer will get a kick out of showing you all the nifty bells and whistles in your site. Remember, they are techies, this stuff excites them as much as that new source for the perfect ribbon or staffing solution or newest gown collection excites you. Let them show it off. Something else to think about, if you buy a new website make sure that a complete one on one tutorial is part of the package. That site doesn’t do you a bit of good if you can’t use it to its full advantage.

Technology is moving at light speed. The days of building a website and forgetting it are over. Remember, that is where you potential customers are looking for you.  Can you afford to show them you are outdated and out of sync with their world?

If you would like me to review your website, just drop me a line. If I get enough of them I may just do a column reviewing them next month, with your permission of course.

I talk a lot here about social networking and word of mouth marketing.  I ran across a recent report from BIGresearch that finds that 94.2% of consumers regularly or occasionally give advice about products and services they purchased, and 90.8% regularly or occasionally seek advice about products and services before making a purchase. Are you doing anything to harness the power of WOM advertising?  Or are you running in horror that someone might post a negative comment?

When you go online to research a product or buy something don’t you always look at the customer reviews? I know I do. I wouldn’t even think about buying something on EBay without considering the Seller’s rating. When was the last time you bought a book on Amazon and didn’t read the customer reviews? What are you doing to give brides a way to check out your fabulous reputation? Hoping they post on theKnot.com? Asking them to tell all their friends? Come on. The only time most people are going to go out of their way to post about you is if you made them mad. “Going out of their way” was the key phrase in that sentence. How about making it easier for them?

Let’s look at EBay and Amazon. When I buy something on EBay I quite often receive a follow up from the seller to post a positive review to up their rating. They always include an active link where I can post my rating. Do you do that? If you did, where would they post?  Look at any book on Amazon and there is a link to “Review this Book”. It is right out there, easy to find and for the world to see. Even blogs do this. At the end of every post is a cue to “Post your comment”. It is all about making it easy for the people you please to spread the word. Trust me, the ones you anger will find a way no matter how hard it is. (More on that later)

I met with my web designer and am having him enable comments on each one of my columns. I’m making it easy. I want to know what you think and I want you to know what my other readers think. You should be doing the same. You need to have a comments page on your website. It needs to be easy for everyone to find to both post and view. Since it is on your website you control it and have the ability to delete something if you need to. You also need to follow the lead of the EBay sellers and send a follow up email with an active link to each of your clients encouraging them to share their experience. You have to prod them to post. . By having it on your website, front and center, it lets your potential clients know that you have nothing to hide. “Yes, please review me. I have ever confidence that you will be happily satisfied.”

I have said it often enough that you should know it by heart now; today’s brides trust personal recommendations far more than advertising. How far are you going to use that bit of information? A marketing site I read made the comment that anyone can post one or two positive testimonials, but who can argue with one or two hundred? Give your potential clients the personal recommendation of as many happy clients as possible Yes, there is a good possibility that the random negative comment will show up. I want you to know two things about that. First, like I said if it is on your site you have control and the power to remove it. Second, I hope you will read it and learn from what was said. It may sting but you need to know what is being said so you can fix it. It is how we improve. Better that a disgruntled bride limits her negative comment to a site you can control rather than go completely off the deep end like this young lady did. http://angrybride.proboards107.com/index.cgi Yes I buried that url as far into this article as possible but feel free to post there. I’m all about transparency.

I just handed off a new site to a wonderful client, Sarah Morris.  We had recently built Sarah a new site for her company, The Something Blue Shoppe and this was a sister site for her prom shop, Something Blue Too.

Sarah wanted a site that carried the basic look of SBS but with more punch for a younger audience. Since she loved the way the first site worked she asked that we use the same CMS for the prom site. Both sites were built on the same Premium WordPress theme with a ton of customization.

Here at the Agency we build websites for small, very small, businesses that are sick of paying some web guy to update every little thing on their site. We build websites for clients that don’t want to spend an arm and a leg but know they need a great site, which is connected to social media and does amazing things for their search. We build these sites for clients that aren’t web-heads, some of our client have barely mastered sending an attachment with an email.
So therein lays the one thing that makes us different: our sites are beautiful and functional on the front and elementary on the back.

The Proof is In Our Clients Reaction
Last night I had a client meeting to do the final tutorial and hand off on a site we had built for a wedding association with over 200 members. Everyone involved is an over worked small business owner that volunteers what little time they can to run and grow the association. One of their goals was to have a site that they could mange themselves. The also wanted some fairly heavy backside integration with membership subscriptions, a private blog and an integrated email newsletter system.

At the meeting was a florist, a transportation company owner and the associations one paid employee, a part time accountant.(hardly the most techie bunch) I had created a manual for the association with all their passwords and the how to information on all the different parts it took to put the site together. In under an hour, all three of the attendants were blown away by how simple the whole thing was to manage. From managing the member roster and the email newsletter to pulling reports about subscriptions (the money part) to updating and adding new content to the site my clients were having an “I could have had a V-8” moment!  Why had they not done this sooner?

We had already blown the rest of the members away with the look and functionality of the public side, now we had blown away the association officers with the stunning ease of the backside. SCORE!

“Thank You For Making This SO Easy”

That is what I love to hear and that is what they said when we were done. What your website looks like is only half of the battle, the real beauty of a website from the Agency is what you can do with it all by yourself.  For a long time I struggled with my
consulting clients trying to get a website that worked for them, so we began to build them. We know who our clients are and that is why we build them the way we do. We know their skill level and we know how little time they have to devote to their site. We don’t build sites for geeks; we build site for small business owners that already have their plate full and are sick of getting their pockets picked by traditional web design firms.

Let me know when you are ready to move your site to this new way of thinking.

See for yourself. TWESA.com

There are so many things that go into propelling your blog or website to the top of search. One of the things that so many people forget is the basic structure that supports it all. So hung up are they on keywords and shiny new tools like Facebook and Twitter that they think that site structure itself isn’t important. Maybe that explains why so many people are still struggling to make their flash site search. You can keep throwing money at self proclaimed SEO experts but unless you have the proper foundation it won’t really make any difference.

You know by now how strongly I feel about using WordPress as the content management system for not only your blog but your entire website. There is more to it than just that. Not all WP themes are created equal. As they say “the devil is in the details”

You need a team that understands all the nuances and details behind all of the themes and what makes a great WordPress blog/website. A team that knows how to find the one theme that will not only work for you in terms of look and content layout, but more importantly how each of them is inherently optimized to behave and react in a way that the search engines expect. You need someone with a deep understanding of how the search engines work. Additionally you need someone that knows which plugins, set which way are going to add to your search mojo. And most of all you need someone who can create a great look, so that you grab the interest of the visitors the search engine delivers.

Let me tell you a little story. Last Friday we set the Wedding Dish to maintenance mode and rolled it to a different WP theme. Over the course of the next 24 hours we dressed it up, added a plugin here, tweaked a bit there and set it back to live. By Sunday, the unique visitors had increased by 20%! What’s more, the number of page views per visitor and time on the site went through the roof. That is overnight folks. We did nothing, not one thing to the content. This is purely the power of the right theme, optimized correctly with a look that engages the site visitors. Those numbers have continued to climb each day since and I don’t foresee that changing anytime soon.

Here at the Agency, we have assembled a team with the experts that understand the power of WordPress and how to build a site that can harness that, an award winning graphics team that can give you the look you need to keep you visitor engaged and express your brand and the deep background in the wedding industry to understand how to appeal to today’s brides.

So tell me, what is stopping you from rebuilding your foundation?