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 Today’s bride can smell outdated at thirty paces.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 What about you florists, those bouquets look a little out of date do they?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.

Your target market is talking.  Do you know what they are asking for?  I do.  They are asking for information.  Are you giving it to them?  At the last bride’s panel one of the questions concerned websites and what brides wanted to see.  An online portfolio was nice.  So was a blurb about your experience and credentials.  But what they wanted and weren’t finding was answers.

Brides tell me that they put together a list of vendors in a specific category by asking friends and relatives.  They look through local wedding magazines and attend bridal.shows.  This is where you first hit their radar.  But once you make the big list, how do you survive the cut to the short list?  At this point it is all about your website.
They will sit at the computer, either at work or in the late evening, and go to website after website.  The ones that answer their questions get a second look.  Do you offer what they are looking for, such as fondant on a cake or two cameras for a ceremony?  Do you carry a certain line of gown or invitation or what ever it is that they are looking for?  Are you available for their date?  Can they afford you?  If you answered the questions, then you  get a call.  Remember, today’s bride has been on the Internet since the 1st grade.  Researching a product or service online is an everyday part of life.

One of the big things brides want, but are not finding on many websites is pricing.

That’s a tricky one for most of us.  I know it was for me.  Everything I did was a custom design.  There were a million variables.  How do you put a hard price on that?

All brides really want to know at this point is if you are in their price range.  They don’t want to fall in love with your work or waste their time on a meeting if they can’t afford you.  And you don’t want them to waste your time either.  Do you really want to spend an hour with a couple only to find out that their entire wedding budget is in the neighborhood of your lowest package?

Like me, you may not be able to put a hard and fast price on your website.  But if your don’t put some indication of a range of your prices, many brides will see the beautiful images of the best you have to offer, and write you off as too expensive.  So give them some info.  Give them an idea of where your pricing starts and how it works.  If you normally include a few freebies in your deals, shout it from the rooftops.  The more information they can access from their desktop, the happier today’s bride is.

Think about this when you do the annual review of your website. (You do that, don’t you?) Oh and if you need help, just call.

I promise, it will boost the conversion rate of qualified brides.  Better hits, fewer misses.  And isn’t that why you have a website?

Your product is boring and your marketing is boring and you wonder why nobody is talking about your business! So what the heck are you doing to make yourself remarkable?

Slightly different won’t get it. Slightly cheaper won’t get it. You have to be outrageously different and so does your marketing.

I ramble through a lot of websites on a daily basis. It doesn’t matter if you are a planner, a photographer or a florist. Almost all of the websites look alike. When it really gets me is when I am starting work for a new web design client and I ask them to send me a few sites they like. They all look alike. Why are you all so committed to looking just like everyone else? Is it safe or are all you really just like everybody else? You are part of the creative class; you create for your clients every day. Why can’t you create for yourself?

Sorry if all that sounds harsh, but I want you to set yourself apart. I want you to be remarkable! Make this the year that your competitors question your sanity. Be different, be amazing, and discover your brilliance, your uniqueness, your personal flamboyance!

As you know, over the last year I have been emphasizing the web design part of my business. As a result I have had to do what I am asking you to do: really figure out what it is that makes me remarkable. Web design is a very crowded field. I have to be remarkable to stand out. Just tweeting or working Facebook isn’t going to do it. Everybody is doing that. I have to do what I have been telling you to do: find out why the clients that love me love me and then exploit it!

So what are you going to do? What is it that you do differently? Please don’t tell me that it is something as boring as that you prepare Excel spreadsheets for your clients. Please! We are thinking REMARKABLE here folks.

I could tell people that I build pretty sites that have remarkable SEO. Nope, not remarkable enough. I sell my work based on the fact that I can teach anybody, ANYBODY how to manage one of my sites themselves. Boom, Done! Buy your site, I stick around as your tutor, no more paying someone else to do your updates. Now people think I am crazy not to charge for all the support after the fact; but you know what, I have some of the loyalist client evangelists in the world. That IS my marketing!

What makes you remarkable? I can’t answer that question for you. You have to do the soul searching needed to find it out for yourself. If you can’t come up with anything then you had better start thinking why not? If there is nothing you do that is truly, really mind-bendingly remarkable then why should anyone hire you over your gazillion competitors?

It’s January; you can take a day off and do a little navel gazing. Here is what I want you to do. Nothing. Stare out a window. Float on a raft. Turn off the electronics, ship off the kids and spouse and let your mind drift. Focus on your uniqueness. Why do your clients hire you? Why do they give you their money and trust you with their event? Why?

I would imagine that by now you know you have to be online and that you have to do it right. It is pretty competitive out there and having a website designed isn’t exactly cheap. So here are a few tips to getting the best website for your needs.

1. Know what you want and need before you approach a designer. Have a clear idea in your mind about what role you need this site to play. Is it simply an online brochure? Do you want to use it to build a community? Do you need it to be an e-commerce site? What do you want this site to achieve for you? If your answer to that last one is “more business” tell me how it will do that.

1. Know what you want it to look like in terms of style.  Bring up 5 or 6 sites you like and really give them a good hard look. What is it you like about them? Is it the visual elements or the functionality that caught your attention? They don’t have to be in the wedding industry, feel free to think outside the box a bit.

1. Know what you want to include. Do you offer multiple services that can all be included or would they be better served with individual sites?  For example, someone that plans both weddings and corporate events may be better served with two sites, each with a very different look. Ditto for the photographer that does both weddings and sports photography. The people seeking sports photography are going to be instantly turned off by the style that would attract brides. Not so for the photographer that does weddings and family portraiture; those two would easily blend. Think about your target market(s).

1. Find a designer that understands your industry.  Someone that understands your industry will understand your target market. I can’t over emphasize how important this may be. They are crafting your online presence, if they don’t understand your target market they won’t have a clue how to reach it. The may build you a technically spectacular site and still miss the mark.

1. Don’t micromanage it. Trust me; you are the only one that the minutiae will make any difference to. Yes it is important that the overall look is right, that colors and graphics are spot on to your branding and that the functionality is flawless. Moving an image 10 pixels to the left isn’t that important. Trust that your designer does this for a living, they know what works. Just like you would not want your brides to micromanage you, don’t micromanage your web dude.

1. Don’t rush it. Take your time in making the decisions in the first 4 points. Don’t put impossible deadlines on your designer. Every site is different and there is always something that has to be worked through. Better to let them work through it and get it right than to have them slap some band aid on it to hit your deadline. Be patient; remember right is better than quick.

1. Admit what you don’t know and ask questions. Yep, we tend to be a bit techie but a good web designer should be able to answer your question with an explanation that you can understand.  The key here is in the admitting what you don’t know. Just tell them it went over your head and to explain it to you.

I hope this has helped. I wish I had had a list like this when I had my first site designed. Wow, was I clueless. Jesse, if you are reading this, I am so sorry.

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?

We just completed another social media dialogue website for The Something Blue Shoppe, a full service bridal and prom salon located in Hartselle Alabama.

Sarah Morris, the owner, contacted me after hearing a presentation I did on Doing Social Media Right for 2Be University in St.Louis. Sarah wanted all the advantages that goes along with our all WordPress based websites, including:

• Easy do it yourself content additions, upgrades, and site maintenance.
• Complete automatic interaction and cross posting with Facebook and Twitter
• Integrated blog
• Low cost hosting
• And the truly best SEO that only WordPress based websites can deliver.

We updated the look and layout, while still keeping the established branding of The Something Blue Shoppe

After just one lesson, Sarah is doing her own updates like a pro. I wish you could have heard the excitement in her voice when she realized just how easy her new site was to manage.

Please take a look.

Announcing release of Kertesz² our new WordPress based full dialog website for Professional Photographers. Featuring an easy to configure landing page and impressive dynamic image content gallery Kertesz² offers style and ease of use. Kertesz² is an excellent full featured stand alone website, or ideal companion configured to enhance and increase the search rank of Flash based photographers’ template sites like Bludomain. Kertesz² is provided to you fully setup, tested, SEO optimized and integrated on the webhost of your choice. It can even allow your existing site to remain in place, while your new site is being completed.

Take advantage of our introductory special between now and July 20th For this limited period you can buy Kertesz² for only $297 not the regular $397. Be quick this offer expires 11:59pm 7-20

Click here and use coupon code KERTESZ2INTRO

Photographers have long been considered visionaries of our industry in terms of internet marketing. They were among the first on the web and the first to see the value in the heavy use of images in marketing to brides. But in choosing their website platform they have faced a dilemma, select a Flash template like Bludomain for its optical appeal or choose a standard HTML type site sacrificing optics but getting much better search engine traffic. They know they need a visually beautiful site to show off their images and talent. But the brides, over 90% of whom use Google to help plan their wedding, never see the photographer’s website in the search listings. Kertesz² is the remedy

Building on the inputs of our clients and the advancements in WordPress over the last year we have totally reinvented Kertesz, with Kertesz². The code base is all new! (and 30% larger.) Fully compatible with WordPress 2.8 and using all the 2.8 features. Compatible with the past and even better, it takes advantage of today’s new features in an even easier to use and customize theme. If you are currently using WordPress it is easy to add Kertesz².

Using the technology of Kertesz² we have increased our clients website traffic 500% in less that 4 weeks. We have even taken brand new domains to front page Google search search results, also in less than a month.

Kertesz² retains all the features of the old Kertesz, updated. Better, more interactive, easier to design main page options, improved photo galleries and contact forms. Easier to style and with more impressive graphics. If you already have a Flash based website, like Bludomain, with the inherently poor search potential, Kertesz² can easily replace your splash page, making it easy to add search friendly content, integrate your blog and Twitter and Facebook feeds and rapidly move your existing Flash site towards the front of Google.

Regardless of your situation Kertesz² will increase your site traffic and prospective clients. If you have any questions just send me an email.

Today is the last day to take advantage of the $50 off coupon on the Kertesz Blog/Website for Wedding Professionals.

If you haven’t seen Kertesz you are missing the boat.

We all know that today’s brides love eye candy. They spend hours online looking at pictures of weddings and wedding details. If your website doesn’t give them great visuals they aren’t going to waste their time on it. Kertesz offers the ultimate solution for today’s Wedding Professionals to reach today’s bride. Its capacity to showcase big beautiful images in both galleries and your blog gives you the visual edge that you need.

Now, add in the integrated blog with its capacity to show images up to 900 pixel wide and you have a real winner. Built on the fabulous WordPress platform you have a blog that is dynamic and ever evolving. The way the system works is ever time you add content, you add a new page and one more place for brides to look. Are you stuck on an old school five or six page website that never changes? Are you married to a totally flash site that has the search capability of a brick and that you can’t easily update? It is time to move into the new way of life on the web. One of the advantages you have as a small business is to be capable of rapidly changing to meet your markets needs; shouldn’t your website have the same ability?

Speaking of change. We have just added a new service to our Kertesz family of products. At $297 ($247 if you use coupon code AGENCY) Kertesz is an amazing value; but not everyone is completely confident that they can handle all of the customization by themselves. While we offer great customer support in our video tutorials and forums sometimes that still isn’t enough. Since Kertesz is so highly customizable you may want to do more, like change the size of the Flash Banner or something that no one else has thought of yet. Not to worry, we are here for you. We have added an hourly consulting service to handle as much or as little of your build out for you as you like. We will take care of any little bits and bobs you want us to tackle. Easy, done! What’s more, is our crack team has customized so many of these fabulous site we can do it quickly and efficiently. So if you find yourself getting bogged down or just too darn busy to finish some of the details just give us a call and we can take care of it for you. There, now doesn’t that make you just a bit more confident?

Don’t forget, use the coupon code AGENCY at check out and get your new site started in time for the January rush.

Happy New Year everyone.