web design Archives - Beasley Direct and Online Marketing

Web Design & Optimization

wpadmin — Mon, 24 Aug 2015 20:21:46 +0000

Web Design and Optimization

A good web designer is both an artist and a technician. They must be skilled in communicating ideas visually, with a tone and level of sophistication that meets the expectations of your audience. Website developers need to be able to translate their ideas into pixels and the RGB color spectrum, and to adjust their designs for a variety of screen sizes and formats. A web designer needs to stay up to date on the latest coding languages, web usability trends and electronic creativity tools, and be able to push the design envelope without breaking the underlying code or straying from your site’s mission.

At Beasley, a web design company, you’ll find web design that meets all these requirements. We can design your entire site from scratch, or provide top-level pages as templates for your in-house team. We can also create a website in WordPress which can be maintained by your internal content creators.

Our website developers win awards, but they also win you new business through effective communication and strong selling imagery. Talk to us about web design, and consider a creative and usability audit of your current site which will help you optimize for best results. Beasley is your web design company.

We needed a brochure that would give a great first impression of credibility and expertise. It came out great with a twist to make is stand out. Next, we needed an email program that would tie with our CRM and Beasley Direct guided us through a complete integration with templates for e-mailings and a newsletter that looked very professional. Creation of a new website with a content management system dovetailed with our lead management system. They made it all painless.

— Jan Carozza - Founder - Center for Direct Marketing

WordPress Website Design

Beasley, a WordPress developer, offers WordPress site design for a very specific purpose: to meet the requirements of our clients who want a well-designed, high-performing website they can maintain in-house using built-in content tools.

Typically these clients want to change to WordPress web design for its ease of use in managing and updating content, a wide set of templates and tools in WordPress theme development, and SEO and mobile friendliness. Or they may have an existing WordPress site which isn’t working for them because it wasn’t designed with their brand and their audience base in mind. We make the required updates and upgrades and they get a site that serves them well.

Although WordPress sites are easy to build with off-the-shelf themes, plug-ins and widgets, they’re not necessarily simple to deploy. As a professional WordPress developer, we start with an understanding of your business and then we propose an appropriate solution. We’ll recommend only those themes which can be modified to give you an exclusive identity (and, when necessary, build themes from scratch using WordPress theme development) and endorse only those plug-ins that have a history of reliability and compatibility.

We’ll also ask you a question you won’t hear from most WordPress web design developers: what metrics will you use to measure results? Our goal is not to build just a pretty site but a business-appropriate, SEO-friendly site. We’ll talk to you about back-end security best practices including disaster recovery, automated backup and defense against external threats. And we’ll ensure you have adequate built-in reporting, done to a consistent standard, to help you measure and achieve your goals.

When we’re done, we can make a hand-off to your in-house staff which can include training or support as required to insure a trouble-free, orderly transition. And you’ll have a WordPress site which will communicate well, be easy to work with on both the front end and back end, and enable ongoing updates without waiting for your IT department.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing is very responsive to requests for updates and changes needed for our website. We have worked together to maximize the site’s SEO and evolving look and feel. Our newsletter goes out timely and accurately and exceeds industry standards for open and click rates. The people at Beasley are always helpful and courteous and we enjoy working with them.

— Julie A. Richards, Finance, Contracting & Administration, Freed Associates

Website Creative and Usability Audit

Is your current website meeting your objectives for attracting new business and serving existing customers? Does it represent your brand appropriately? If not, what do you need to do to fix it? A Beasley Creative Audit / Web Usability Audit can answer these questions in a methodical, actionable way, based on best practices from award-winning creative practitioners.

We start a website audit with a discovery process including stakeholder interviews and a clean-slate review of the user experience. We want to understand what you’re trying to do with the site and what constraints may be holding you back from achieving it. Does your audience have needs you’re not currently addressing? Is your competition beating you up with a better designed or technically superior site? And, realistically, what are your priorities and available resources for improving your site and maintaining it in the future?

Once we’ve established a benchmark, we dig deeper with an examination of visitor traffic patterns vs intended pathways and heat maps of individual pages. We’ll also review placement and quality of graphics, legibility and communicability of typography and colors, and the quality and tone of copy for both desktop and mobile viewers. At each step of the website audit we’re looking from an independent perspective for potential disconnects between what you want to accomplish and what exists on your current site. Offer placement, interactive mechanisms and priority of information on each page are also considered as are technical issues such as broken links, navigation and duplicate content.

At the end of the website audit we’ll provide a detailed written report accompanied by a live presentation. We’ll analyze our findings and make recommendations for refreshing, removing or replacing content as required along with upgrading creative and technical issues. We’ll show examples that achieve what you’re trying to accomplish and advise how you can get there. From this point, you can retain Beasley for further creative work if you like, but you’ll also have plenty of information to proceed on your own.

Mobile/Responsive Design

Responsive design refers not to the success of your website in attracting new leads and customers (of course you want that as well), but to a coding convention using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). The elements of the page are built following the principles of Mobile First web development, starting with a narrow viewport experience. The design is then scaled up and converted for viewing on larger screens. Two modules which are side by side on a desktop screen might shrink on a tablet, and then be stacked on a mobile device. This allows you to control the user experience so that it is easy to get at your content and offers are presented where they need to be instead of pushed to the bottom.

We recommend responsive website development for all new websites and encourage our clients to apply responsive design retroactively, usually starting with your landing pages. In addition to the technical coding skills required, Beasley’s responsive website development team brings a business perspective in which the most important elements will always get the highest priority.

A responsive design tune up is also an opportunity to review the overall interface for your site. Are buttons the right size for a mobile audience? Are individual links easy to press, or are they too close together? Is it easy to find the most useful or important information, or do your pages need reorganization? Does your content reflect the demographics of your audience? Baby boomers might prefer larger type, while millennials like shorter doses of information.

Above all, we can keep you from looking archaic and out of touch by serving up miniature pages with tiny type on a mobile device. That’s reason enough to engage Beasley as your mobile website builder for mobile/responsive design.

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Live Online WordPress Training Certification Workshop Offered in December by the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California and the Online Marketing Institute

Laurie Beasley — Wed, 08 Nov 2017 18:06:08 +0000

Live Online WordPress Training Certification Workshop Offered by the DMAnc and OMI

The Direct Marketing Association of Northern California (DMAnc) and Online Marketing Institute (OMI) are offering a Live Online WordPress Training Workshop on WordPress this coming December 8th.

WordPress Training Course: The Smart Marketer’s WordPress Workshop

(Friday, December 8th, 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM Pacific Standard Time)

In one session, get a better understanding of WordPress and what it can do for your business. Learn why over 74 million websites use the powerful WordPress CMS today, and the right or wrong reasons to use it for your business and marketing. This workshop skips technical jargon to share truths and myths about moving your site to WordPress. You’ll gain real-world insights, tips and warnings important for marketing decision makers. Learn more.

About the DMAnc (www.DMAnc.org)

The DMA of Northern California was formed to educate, inform and provide networking opportunities for Direct and Online Marketing professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We hold monthly luncheon meetings, workshops, periodic half-day seminars, and provide opportunity for the best in learning and job networking in the Northern California marketing community.

For More Information, Contact:

Laurie Beasley
Chair, DMAnc
President, Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.
408-782-0046 x21
lbeasley@beasleydirect.com

For free web design and optimization resources, click here.

The post Live Online WordPress Training Certification Workshop Offered in December by the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California and the Online Marketing Institute appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

Creative Best Practices for Landing Pages: Plus the all-important OFFER

Laurie Beasley — Tue, 22 Aug 2017 15:00:01 +0000

What Are Creative Best Practices for Landing Pages?

Designing and writing a landing page is like setting a trap for your prospect, in a nice way. You want to entice them in, encourage them to go deeper, and once they’re inside make it virtually impossible to get out without taking the desired action.

Direct the prospect through creative design:

Match the colors, font and other design elements of the ad that got them here so they know they’ve come to the right place. (This isn’t always relevant; for instance Google AdWords Text Ads are all text, so no formatting.)
Use eyeflow design to pull the reader to one key image (usually a depiction of the offer) and place call to action copy next to it as soon as they reach the page.
Repeat the call to action multiple times so it’s easy to respond when they’re ready.

Copy should be brief, but compelling:

Be BRIEF in describing the offer, especially if they’ve already read about it in an ad or email that caused them to click through. Repeating what they already know will lull them to sleep or, more likely, bore them so they’ll click away.
If it’s free, say so, multiple times. Repeat the selling proposition that brought them here. If you’re fulfilling Google AdWords ads, consider matching headlines to the keywords in the ad.

The Nomadic Systems landing page copies the design and color palette of the Nomadic website home page. But, omits internal links which would allow a curious prospect to click away without registering.

Use bullets if you have room to highlight the benefits of the offer they’re about to accept. This is often done in a sidebar so it doesn’t get in the way of core selling content.
Use benefit/reward language in buttons such as “Get my FREE report” vs just “SUBMIT”.
Include testimonials and guarantees to reassure that there’s absolutely no negative consequence to taking the desired action.

And about that all-important OFFER:

You absolutely need an offer on your landing page because you’ve agreed to a quid pro quo. You’re going to “reward” people for their time in learning your selling proposition. Landing pages without offers are destined to be very poor conversion vehicles which don’t come close to paying for themselves.

An informational offer is usually the best way to incent people for business-to-business lead generation landing pages. These readers need information to do their jobs properly, so give it to them in the form of white papers, third party analysis, webinars, videos, fact sheets or all the above (since you never know what informational format is most appealing to a given audience). An info offer should actually be informative. Don’t promise a fact kit or industry analysis, and instead load them up with sales material.

“Freebie” offers include actual merchandise giveaways, either directly or through entrance in a sweepstakes. These are far less prevalent than they were at one time, because they tend to produce many unqualified leads (who responded for the giveaway, not because they are interested in your product). However, there are exceptions to every rule and a high-value offer, carefully targeted, will cause the right prospect to go to considerable lengths to get the reward.

Limited time offers should be used in addition to, not instead of, other offers. Especially if it’s a merchandise offer, the sense of urgency in a temporary discount or a today-only add-on item will give prospects a reason to make a decision. Even if it’s a webinar, you can let people know attendance is limited, first come, first served; if it’s an analyst paper perhaps you have authorization to distribute only a certain number and no more.

Author

Laurie B. Beasley

Laurie B. Beasley is co-founder and president of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc. We are a Silicon Valley direct marketing agency that has managed search, email, online, and demand generation campaigns for nearly 100 companies. Ms. Beasley serves as President of the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California. Laurie manages the eMarketing Roundtable for the BMA Northern California. She also instructs online marketing at UC Berkeley Extension and teaches for the Online Marketing Institute. Ms. Beasley frequently speaks on online marketing and demand generation topics for marketing organizations, including the DMA, BMA, AMA, Tech Council, and the Online Marketing Summit.

Our agency brings the latest marketing strategies to online and direct marketing. The company provides services in email marketing, search engine optimization, social media, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, website design, media planning, direct mail marketing, lead generation and nurture campaigns, and database management. We help clients in both B2B and B2C marketing. Beasley Direct is privately held and headquartered in the Silicon Valley suburb, Morgan Hill, California. For more information, go to www.BeasleyDirect.com or call Laurie Beasley, President, at 408-782-0046 x21 or email lbeasley@beasleydirect.com.

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