Keeping viewers involved in your website is very important to most businesses.  The last thing you want your potential business to do is forget about you.  Having a calendar of events is a key component to increasing the number of contact points with this group of people.  Actually, this post doesn’t limit itself to just a calendar of events.  It encompasses any reoccurring communication that you plan to have on your website.  It can be tips and tricks, a newsletter, or just informative literature. 

There are two things to consider if you want to have a calendar of events on your website.  One, will it be possible to keep the events current and correct?  Two, will it be costly to maintain and will there be a positive ROI?

If the design and maintenance of a calendar of events is built correctly, it can greatly reduce the effort of keeping the events current.  However, if there is a place for upcoming events, and no events exist, viewers think the website is not current and question the validity of anything on it.  If you plan to have a calendar of events on your website, plan to make the investment in maintaining them.  If you don’t plan to commit the time to maintain it, don’t include it on your site to begin with.

Having a calendar of events on your website assumes that your viewers have the time and will remember to visit regularly for updates.  Although you will have people that do this, by and large, the bulk of viewers will return very infrequently, if ever.  To maximize the return on the time spent maintaining this content, have the option for your viewers to sign up to be notified by email.  By doing this, you will inform those visiting your website as well as those that have visited it before. 

Although email is a far more effective tool for disseminating reoccurring information at this time, RSS will be the next big thing to accomplish this.  RSS is a common format to deliver regularly changing information from a website.  RSS Readers come in all forms (websites, cell phones, iPhones, etc.).  RSS Readers can include any number of RSS feeds and display summary information with the option to open the detail.  It is used heavily on news sites and BLOGs.   For example,  I am a Columbus Blue Jackets fan.  I have the CBJ news feed in my RSS reader.  At my convenience, I can open the reader and see recent headlines related to the Jackets.  I also have RSS feeds for weather, local news, sports, and even the hockey schedule for my 9 year old son!  As feature rich as RSS is, it is still growing.  The number of non technology people using RSS is still way to low for me to recommend this as the only method of updating people about changing content.  It should definitely be integrated for those who do use it.

The goal of any website is to drive viewers to action.  Action can be a phone call, purchasing a product, or donating money.  To support action, a website should stimulate certain thoughts and emotions.  It is a web designer's job to create action through the layout and color.  If the psychology of these attributes is mastered, the odds of your website being successful dramatically increase.

Web designers often refer to the white space in a website layout as negative space.  There is an underlying urge to fill that space with as much content as possible.  White space is not wasted space.  It is an integral part of the design and psychology of the design.  It is required to achieve balance.  It can promote elegance and organization.  If you walk in to somebody's office and it is cluttered with paper and empty drink bottles, your initial reaction is to get out.  It is also more difficult to focus.  If the seats are filled with paper and you have no place to sit down, your emotions drive you to leaving.  A website promotes these same types of emotions, and the last thing you want a visitor to do is leave. 

Once balance is achieved with white space, the critical task of choosing colors is next.  Color can instill trust, honestly, competence, and value.  Red is an emotional and intense color.  It can increase the viewer's blood pressure and heart rate.  Yellows can create a warm and cheerful place to be and stimulates muscle energy and mental activity.  Green can represent the earth, and often symbolizes harmony, fertility, endurance, and stability.  It is the most restful color for the human eye.  Blue is popular for corporate websites because of its association with stability, wisdom, and confidence. 

Be careful in choosing not only the colors for your website, but the shades of those colors.  The contrast in your color palette is a critical component.  Don't under estimate its value. 

A component that is often overlooked is the entry point of a website.  Years ago, the entry point was the home page. With advancements in search engines, the entry point can be any page on your website.  The actions you want to generate should be fostered by textual and graphical cues, and these cues should become the primary purpose not just your home page, but every page on your website.

Getting a cheap and basic online presence takes little money these days, and little time.  The initial small investment may seem attractive, but can portray an image that you may never recover from.  Before you decide to go this route, understand that a professionally designed website doesn’t have to be expensive or time consuming to put together.  Take a step back and evaluate your goals.  Make sure your website can react to market conditions and changing business goals. 

Contact Goodfriend Solutions today for a free evaluation.  We can evaluate your existing website or work with you on designing your first online presence.

How many of you are on a Realtor’s distribution list and get notices about new listings, or market conditions every couple weeks?  Do you get email specials from retailers, such as Best Buy, or Mace’s?  Do you ever look at them?  Most of us don’t.  Why?  The information in them is rarely of interest to us.

I learned a long time ago that if you email people about information they don’t care about, they won’t get the email they do care about.  I worked in an environment with over 300 clients.  They were on an email list for updates to changes in financial reporting, planning, and forecasting databases.  Most of the team had a specialty, and cared little about the majority of emails that were sent.  Since 70% of the emails were irrelevant to them, they just started ignoring all the emails we sent, defeating the purpose of sending the emails in the first place.  After this was discovered, we instituted segmented distribution lists.  Each person could identify their specialty, or area of interests.  When emails were sent, they were sent to only those who requested to be notified about the topic in question.  The level of our communication significantly increased after we put this methodology in place.

This example is related to client support, but the same phenomenon occurs on the sales side as well.  If your organization is using email for marketing campaigns, it is critical to segment your distribution lists to boost ROI.  If you don’t, your emails will fall on deaf ears.  They will be a point of contact to generate sales, but will it be a positive one? 

It is extremely easy to segment email distribution.  Goodfriend Solutions has a cost effective process to that will improve your ROI and inspire your customers to action!