1. The Anonymous Friend Approach
   

   “I had a friend who thought your site was horrible. Me personally? Oh, I didn’t think it was that bad, just needs a little oil on the hinges if ya know what I mean.”

2. The Apologetic Approach
   

   “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, I mean I don’t want to hurt your feelings. Not that you’re overly sensitive or anything! I just thought you might want to consider making some minor changes, not that you have to, if they’re not to difficult…”

3. The Brutal Approach
   

   “Your site looks so bad a kitten dies somewhere in the world every time it’s pulled up!”

4. The Clumsy Approach
   

   “I thought your grandmother did a fantastic job with your site!”

5. The Oblique Approach
   

   “Have you considered revamping your site to adopt more of a 21st century look?”

6. The Optimist’s Approach
   

   “This site has huge potential! With some new colors, images, layout, and content, it could go citywide!”

7. The Friend Approach
   

   “I wouldn’t tell just anyone this, but your site is really horrible. I just wanted you to know before everyone starts laughing at you behind your back!”

8. The Intervention Approach
   

   “We’re all here today to tell you that we love you, but we can’t bear to see you ruining your public image with such an awful site! It’s not fair to you, it’s not fair to the people who have to look at it, and it just has to stop!”

9. The Exaggerated Approach
   

   “Dude, I’m sitting here at the emergency room, and it’s all your fault! I pulled up your website, and felt strangely compelled to stick a fork in my eye, repeatedly! You’ve got to do something about that site, PLEASE!!!”

10. The Technical Approach
    

    “After extended analysis, it has been determined that your site is less than optimum in several key areas, thus imperilling the conversion efficacy within the combination of social, financial, and age-based demographics that define your potential market. Of considerable interest is the lack of initial positive feedback regarding the overall aesthetics of the site. This is further exacerbated with the lack of current information, and generally confusing arrangement of said information. This general confusion combined with the poor aesthetics is theorized to generate a considerable amount of mental and emotional stress for visitors, who promptly vacate the site, resulting in the less than stellar results from the site in question.”

Whatever your approach, be sure to use it soon(at your own risk!), and feel free to append the following statement to the end:

“If you want a professional, affordable website, you should contact Andrew Trivette Design!”

(Tailor it to sound natural of course

Together we can make the Internet a better place!

(Originally posted on http://blog.andrewtrivette.com)

1. Virtual Office
   Your website provides your potential customers with a first impression of your business, similar to them actually coming to your place of business for the first time. It offers 24/7/365 availability, and customer support. A website for many people is a low pressure, time-efficient way of gathering pertinent information about your business, such as business hours, directions, contact method, and general product/service information.
2. Expanded Services
   With a professional site, you have the ability to offer your customers a whole range of additional services for their convenience, and ultimately your profit. Whether they be basic features like directions, and contact forms or more custom features such as application forms, progress reports, order tracking, weekly ads/coupons, client discounts, or weekly newsletters, these features provide for many small companies a whole new level of professionalism for a relatively low cost.
3. Enhanced Marketing
   Promotional websites offer a unique opportunity in marketing. A product or service can be fully expounded upon on a website much more than practically any other form of marketing. It is for this reason that websites are increasingly the intermediate goal for many other marketing campaigns. Many tv, newspaper, mail, and radio ads are referring their customers to their websites for more information. This tends to work better long term for sales, due to the inherently low pressure, information rich nature of the web.
4. Efficient Services
   Web based services can bring a critical element of efficiency to many small businesses. Communications can be simplified, and everyone is kept in the loop so much easier than with traditional memos, and time consuming conference meetings. You and your employees are then free to do what you’re there for – to make money. Online applications and forms for clients and prospective employees can reduce the time from request to implementation, further making your company look good.

1. Consultation We’ll set up a meeting to discuss the scope of your new/re-designed site.Items to cover include:
   • a. Site purpose(What’s it for? Who is the target market?).
   • b. Site theme(Corporate, Modern, Nature, Grunge, generally defined by the site’s purpose).
   • c. Budget(including site creation, maintenance, and any marketing costs).
   • d. Site Content(who’s creating it, what’s needed: copy, pictures, logos, video, etc).

   Once the scope of the project is established, a general timeline to completion is established, and I will give a bid estimate, and define the deposit necessary to begin the project. I also give you a list of the content needed from you to complete the site.

2. Design Mock-up and Approval Within a couple of days of the project beginning, I will present a design mock-up for your review. Once any revisions are made, I re-submit the design for your final approval.
3. Client Content Submission This step should run concurrently with phase 2. During this phase you, the client, collect all the content requested, and deliver them to me.
4. Site Creation on Test Server Once 100% of the content is provided and the design is approved, then everything is ready to begin building the actual site. From this point the average site can be finished within 7 business days. Obviously this can vary based on workload, or site scope. Naturally, I can present a more accurate, project specific timeframe during the consultation phase.
5. Final Approval The site is completed and ready for you to review, and approve. Changes are minimal at this point, since all the content and design have already been approved.
6. Final Payment Now that the site is finished, we explore the favorite color of every designer: green!
7. Site Goes Live! The site is moved from the testing server to a production server, and the project is completed to the satisfaction of everyone involved.

It is important when looking at the value of a website, to not equate the size of the site with it’s value. The intended audience, number of features, and degree of maintainability are just a few of the variables that affect a site’s value. Let’s look more in depth at a few of the most important site attributes.

No two websites are the same.

Much like a house or a car, a websites quality can be measured on several different levels. A house with a nice looking design, interior and exterior, tells you nothing about the foundation, plumbing, wiring, and overall integrity of the house. You could impress your friends and family with such a house, and end up spending a fortune repairing it’s most important, yet hidden, functions. In the same way, a website that looks cool, or trendy, or exciting, tells you very little about the overall stability and quality of that site. You will enjoy it until it starts crashing under moderate loads. Or you might be forced to redo whole sections(or even the whole site), in order to add new features in the future as your business grows. The ability to expand your site in the future, is an oft overlooked consideration in building a professional site.

Good impression from start to finish.

“…your guests aren’t coming to see your site’s incredible design, they’re coming to find information…”

So what does a good site look like? A good site not only provides a good visual first impression to your (potential) clients, but leaves them informed and pleased when they leave as well. Good first impressions count for little if one can’t follow through to the end. What does this mean for a site? 1. Clean, easy to use site layout. 2. Fast loading site. 3. Simple navigation. 4. Consistent layout throughout the site. Factors such as these play an overwhelming part of your guests overall experience. It is important to remember that your guests aren’t coming to see your site’s incredible design, they’re coming to find information, or to contact you to begin a business relationship.

Building a strong foundation.

With a professionally produced site, you are getting a site with an excellent foundation on which you can expand. One of the measurements of a good site is whether or not it follows the code standards set up by an organization called the W3C. Essentially a site that meets these standards is most likely to display correctly across different browsers, operating systems, and most importantly, future browsers and operating systems, and other internet enabled devices such as mobile phones.

Investing in a long-term solution.

When a website can be built by an amateur with a minimal investment in time, a professionally built site might not seem like a good investment. But considering the amount of time that can be saved in maintaining an enterprise level website, not to mention the potential increase in business inquiries/transactions, your investment in a good site can pay off tenfold.

The Challenge:

The site initially lacked significant branding, or cohesive design. The existing site design consisted of a highly compressed logo as the header, and a number of disjointed text and background colors. The navigation on the left consisted of 50+ categories. The number of links combined with the standard underlines, closely spaced links, and serif fonts combined to render the menu largely unusable from the perspective of user convenience.

Modifying an existing, high traffic site without experiencing any disruption of service also presented it’s own significant technical challenges.

The Solution:

The site was modified slowly over time to avoid any site down time, and to allay any potential customer concerns that might stem from an overnight overhaul. Constant major changes to an existing e-commerce site does not present an image of stability, or professionalism to it’s customer base.

Due to the high server load that a site like this can experience, it was important to keep the overall size of each page to a minimum. The average page size was reduced by 1/3, without removing any information.

Tackling first the menu sidebar, a range of subtle changes significantly increased the usability of the menu. These changes included changing the font to sans-serif font like Arial, removing the underlines that show on links by default. By adjusting the font size, color and vertical spacing, we were able to transform a rather unwieldy menu into a usable, albeit still long, menu. Then we re-organized the menu into a 3 level drop down menu with 10 main categories. This allows customers to get to any product on the site in as few as 2 clicks from any other page on the site. It also allows people to quickly find the appropriate category without needing to read all 120+ categories and sub-categories.

The header was addressed next. A Header is often one of the primary features in a site that can be used to enhance brand recognition throughout every page of the site. A site such as an e-commerce site does not usually have the luxury of having the majority of its visitors enter through the front page. Typically customers arrive via search, or ads, which almost always send them directly to the product page of their interest. Therefore it is imperative to set a ‘visually compelling’ header that will be your minimum first impression, regardless of where they are on your site. For Grower’s, the header was slowly modified over the course of two months to become a more significant focal point on the site, while keeping a familiar feel to the site. Additionally, the new header also boasts a search bar, to allow for instant searching throughout the entire site.

Before

After

Thirdly, the home page content was addressed. The existing content served primarily as a search engine ranking content, and provided minimal value in promoting sales. To enhance the functionality of the home page, the content was removed, and a dynamic list of best-selling products was placed as a sort of suggestion box, thus providing a more functional service to the visitors.