Health information continues to be one of the most researched topics on the web. According to a Pew Internet Project, 80% of all Internet users have searched online regarding health topics such as a specific disease or treatment. This translates to 59% of all adults.

The purpose of an optometry website is to attract new patients, retain existing ones and to increase the frequency of office visits. People will come to an Optometrist website looking for information and someone they can trust. They will judge the practice by the look of the website. What are they looking for?

1. Design: Build trust and credibility with a professional website design. Use trust building images such as a friendly doctor in a consultation coat or a doctor performing a vision exam.
2. Easy to Read: People seeking an optometrist have weaker eyes. Make your website easy to read with larger fonts with black text on white pages.
3. Content: Include the key information people come searching for such as office hours, directions and services offered. Your About-Us page is there to build trust and credibility. Include short bios on your staff.
4. FAQs: Include frequently asked questions along with your answers. This helps people decide to use your services when they discover you online.
5. Video: Use video to inform and educate. It is a powerful influencer that helps you communicate your message and build trust with your website visitor. Create a “meet the doctor” video that is warm and personal.
6. Action: A major reason for having a website is to attract new patients. Make it easy for people to schedule an eye exam online. Make this prominent and highly visible on your home page. This also makes it easy for returning patients to book an eye exam.
7. New Patient Forms: Include printable new patient forms so they can complete them before coming to your office.
8. Email: Have a newsletter signup on your home page. Write a periodic newsletter and send it out via email. Use your newsletter as a reminder to refer friends and family.
9. Coupons: Include special offers available only on your website. Create printable coupons such as 50% off their first eye exam so they book an appointment and become a patient.
10. Search: Optimize your website to attract local people interested in your services. The top three search terms are optometrist, eye doctor and eye doctor followed by the city name. This brings in people searching for a local optometrist.

You have been tasked with creating a new website for your organization. You need to assemble the team. Some may be internal staff, others will be outsourced. What are the team members that you need? This will vary based on the complexity of your project.

Website Project Team

Strategist: This person plans the purpose of the website, what produces and services are being marketed the target audience, and how the buying decision is made. They compare the competition and craft the central message for the website. They establish the goals for the website, call to actions on the website. More on website strategist.

Project Manager: They keep the project on track and on schedule. They have the overall responsibility for the successful planning, execution, monitoring and control of the project. They manage all the moving parts and continually steer the team toward completing the website. If left on their own, website projects always seem to stall.

SEO Specialist: Your website needs to attract interested visitors. A skilled search engine optimization person will pick the right keywords, advise on website structure, do page optimization, establish link popularity strategies and set-up metrics to measure success. The SEO person will work closely with the content writer.

Content Writer: The writer is responsible for creating all the website content. The writer takes the message and crafts interesting and exciting text, weaving in the keywords keeping the audience and search engines interested in the website. Creative writing will create the emotional spark that causes visitors to take action.

Site Architect: They organize and categorize the website structure and content. They create the sitemap and wireframes. They work with the strategist to organize the pages into a selling sequence. They are responsible for usability and shape the user experience as they interact with the website.

Graphic Designer: The designer is responsible for the visual appearance with designs that encourage visitors to take action. The design establishes trust and credibility and is more than just “pretty.” A good designer is an artist, understands visitor interaction and is a good marketer.

Developer / Programmer: This person codes the website and adds the interaction functionality to the website. They turn designs into an interactive user experience. Programmers add custom database applications programs that allow your site to sell products and interact with the web visitor.

Many times one person on the team will fill multiple positions. For very large projects, each role may be filled by a team of specialists.

As a marketer you want your visitors to interact with your website in a certain way. This may mean buying a product, requesting information or joining your mailing list. Designers on the other hand will want to have creative, eye catching designs that show off their talent.

eCommerce conversion is about building trust and shifting the visual emphasis to the products that you sell. A professional, credible design that is “boring” will outsell a creative, showy design. Think of your website as the frame or holder of the content and the canvas are the products that you sell.

Initial impression: The design must be professional, but use subdued colors. Use white backgrounds with gray accents. Avoid strong and oppressive colors. Design with a minimum number of different fonts. Your design should instill confidence and trust.

Rotating Banners detract from product navigation and conversions. Visitors will notice the first image in the sequence, but will quickly move on to search what they need. These rotating banners (Flash or JavaScript) take longer to load and this increase in page load time will hurt Google rankings.

Wider Width: 1024 is the absolutely the narrowest screen to design for. Most visitors have wider displays. Narrow designs usually mean more scrolling down to see your content. Studies have shown that only about 15% of visitors will scroll down to the bottom of a long page.

Product Navigation: Avoid a long list of categories that extend down the left sidebar. The human mind will not easily track more than a dozen categories. If you have 20-30 categories, reorganize them into higher level categories. You want to reduce the number of options a visitor has to choose from. Seven is optimal, but never have more than twelve categories.

eCommerce conversion optimization is about prioritizing the visual elements so visitors will quickly notice your offer.

What is that first impression that your website communicates about you? People quickly evaluate a site and your business by visual appearance alone. Do you have a professional image that shows trustworthiness?

Your website is a reflection of your brand. You wouldn’t want to market an upscale restaurant with a poor quality design. Your website needs to capture the atmosphere and the dining experience.

A good brand has good visual imagery and emotional impact.

If your business differentiates itself with a high level of service and customer care, don’t simply show products and technology. Show photos of people that show how people react to your service and demonstrate people-to-people relationships.

First Impression: This includes layout, typography, images and consistency. The visual design should be consistent with the site’s purpose. Do they see the most important things first? Use placement of graphics and headlines to determine what captures your audience’s first impression.

Credibility: Your website should have a professional appearance. Does it have the image and branding that people expect. This is much more than design; it is organization, layout and messaging. If you are marketing to large corporations, does your website show you as a credible supplier? Make your offer clear and identify the benefits that they will get by using your product or service.

Trust: Your website should have a professional image. Include trust logos on your home page such as BBB, certifications and affiliations that you have. Include your phone number on every page. Create a good about us page. Including a blog helps build you up as an authority in your field.

Make sure your site represents you well. Remember that according to a Stanford University study “75% of web users admit to making judgments about the credibility of an organization based on the design of its web site”

For many people, keyword research and SEO are some of the last steps in building a website. That is completely backwards. When I am going to create a new website, keyword research is my very first step.

You want a website to have maximum appeal to your market niche. You not only want to attract the right visitors, you want to engage them once they arrive. You do that by designing your website content around what they are searching for. This is the process i follow as I work on a brand new website (or even a website redesign).

1. Topics: Create a list of topics, services or market niches that you are planning to cover in your website. This is your list of what you want to talk about on your website. If you are a sales consultant, you may want to talk about sales coaching, sales management, sales process and lead generation.
2. Intuitive keyword list: Create a list of about dozen phrases that describe your topics in step one. These are the phrases you believe people would use to search for your topics. They could be the same as your topic list or they could be slightly refined. These will become your “seed keywords” that you will use in your research. You will want one or possibly two keyword phrases per topic.
3. Keyword research: Using a keyword research tool like Market Samurai, perform a search on each of your seed keywords. Each search should yield 400+ search phrases. Export your list to Excel and refine your list to the 25 best phases for that topic. Repeat this for the remaining seed phrases. Combine these onto a master spreadsheet.
4. Relevance check: Rate each phrase on a scale of 1-3. 1 = Our best buyers are looking for us. 3 = this is a low probability that they would convert into a customer. About 25% of the phrases should be rated as ones.
5. Analysis: Using just the phrases rated as a “1.” Look at the number phrases in each category as well as the searches per day, calculate how many pages of your website should be weighted for each topic. This gives you a rough content plan that your visitors want to see.
6. Next Steps: You are now ready to plan your website. Refine this into a structured sitemap. Define what actions we want visitors to take (Sign-up, request quote, buy, etc). Identify examples of website you like (reference websites for design). Create a wireframe.

Goals: Start with your business goals for your website. Your website, like your business needs to have a clear purpose with clear measurable results that you expect. Will your website generate leads, sales, build a community, or?

Visitors: Do you understand why your visitor is coming to your site? What problem are they looking to solve? You want to present a website that clearly solves their issue.

Content: Write first for your visitors with the search engines in mind. Make your content original, engaging and useful to your visitors. Targeted keyword phrases are weaved into marketing text so search engines take note of the important phrases. Use keywords as a central theme in your messaging, your page headlines and your hyperlinks. Stay away from having duplicate content.

Call to Action: When they first arrive, they need to immediately see your sales pitch, your offering and even your order button. Don’t make them scroll down or switch pages. End your page by asking for some sort of action. Have questions? If you need answers call, email, click on live chat or?

Navigation: Use the page headlines and navigation to communicate your offering. The navigation should be SEO friendly HTML links rather than JavaScript links or an image map. Use keywords as much as possible in the navigation links. Keep important pages within 3 clicks from the home page.

Sitemaps: Create HTML and XML sitemaps to make it easy for search engines to index your website. Create a separate mobile sitemap and submit to Google Webmaster tools under the mobile sitemap section.

Link Structure: Create a flat file structure and keeping the number of levels to a minimum. Extensive use of subdirectories and sub-subdirectories is harmful to rankings. Cross-link to relevant internal pages using your keywords. Providing HTML navigation links so that search engines can easily crawl the website. Eliminate broken links.

NoFollow: Add a nofollow attribute to pages that are not important or pages that you do not want indexed. This could include member login pages, duplicate content or pages you do not want indexed like a privacy policy.

Today we are all exposed to vast amounts of data and information. The challenge is to communicate this data in an easy to understand way. Infographics is the visual representation in a way that goes beyond simple graphs. Infographics quickly communicates complex information in a highly visual easy to understand format.

Infographics is a data visualization mehod using graphics. These graphics are used where complex information needs to be explained quickly and clearly.

Examples

Elliance created a great infographic on the search benefits of the blogosphere.

TurboTax created an infographic about how early filers receive more tax refunds.

Use of infographics involves using talented graphic artists that can simplify and visually present data and information to communicate complex concepts.

Staffing or employee recruiting websites are a special case. One website needs to market to two distinct audiences, each with very different needs. There are employers looking for people. Then there are job seekers looking for work. The key is to divide these two groups so they can easily see the information that they need.

The website needs to visually guide each group to the correct section of the website with a strong call to action. Examples: “Employers find qualified and fully screened workers”. “Job seekers locate the high paying career of your dreams”.

Employers are the direct customer of the staffing firm. They are searching for a reliable and easy way to locate new workers that will quickly become productive. The selling sequence will be centered around how the staffing firm will fill their staffing requirements in the fastest way. They may provide guarantees and then have a way for companies to request workers.

Job Seekers are the resources that are needed for these jobs. People looking for work want to see available jobs and have a way to leave a resume of complete an application. They are looking for reassurances that they will be matched with the right employer.

This staffing website really becomes two websites in one. Each of these website sections is very separate in their content, messaging and selling sequence. Each of these supports and adds credibility to the overall website.

Your website needs to communicate your message in the first few seconds. Your unique selling proposition and your opt-in forms need to be easily seen without scrolling down.

People search on the web to answer a question or solve some need. A visitor will arrive to your website and look around to see if your website will answer their question. If they don’t see what they are seeking, they will just leave.

What is the fold? This refers to the upper portion of the web page that can be seen without scrolling down. This term came from printed newspapers and referred to the upper half of the front page. This was the premium space reserved for the most important news articles.

Benefits: Visitors arrive wanting to know what’s in it for them. How will you make your customer’s life better? Spell your benefits out clearly on your home page.

Message: Make your central message clear. You have only a few seconds to communicate your benefits, how you are better than your competition. Use your page headlines, your graphics and your navigation to communicate your message.

Call to Action: You will want visitors to arrive and then take action. This could be to sign-up, join, call or buy now. Place your primary call to action where it can be easily seen and above the fold. It needs to be highly visible to arriving visitors.

Where do the eyes go first? Do they see the most important things first? Use placement of graphics and headlines to determine what captures your audience’s first impression.

No more using fonts embedded in images or PDFs to get the look you want on your web page.

Instead of depending on a few web safe fonts that are installed on a website user’s local machine, you can now expand the fonts you use to any font in the Google Fonts Directory and apply it to any web page. You are able to do this using style-sheets and the Google font API.

Google Fonts was launched last May. These Google Web Fonts allows you to choose a font and add the font to any web page, blog or web application by adding a snippet of HTML and CSS.

Instead of being limited to Verdana, Times or Arial fonts, you now have access to a huge variety of fonts. These fonts are served up by a browser request instead of having to exist on a user’s computer.

Browsers: The Google Font API is compatible with most browsers. This includes Mozilla Firefox (3.5+), Microsoft Internet Explorer (6+), Google Chrome (4.249.4+), Apple Safari (3.1+) and Opera (10.5+). These fonts also work with most mobile operating systems including Android 2.2+ and iOS 4.2+. Unsupported would simply see the alternative font you specify in CSS.

Cost: All fonts are open source and you can use them for free. You can also elect to pay for a font which is used to help compensate font designers. Google uses these donations to commission even more open source fonts.