If you build it…
The online world is no Field of Dreams. Building a website is not always sufficient to meet your business goals. You need some sort of analytics suite like Google Analytics to help you gauge your success.

Once you have a measure, you can start to manage your site – but you still need to know what to test. Here is a sampling of what we look for. If it doesn’t seem like you measure up, try changing something (the bigger the better) and see how your traffic changes.
Design
Does your site look industry appropriate? …

January is a time of new beginnings, and since mb/i is all about quality, business-centered websites, we thought we’d take a look at 10 reasons you might want to build a new site.
10. Haphazard Growth
Some times a website won’t grow according to plan because there never was a plan to begin with. Poor navigation and uneven development are the hallmarks of an unplanned site. Some pages remain under development for years while others grow, and branch, and twist until even a modern Daedalus would get lost in their digital halls.
9. Hard to Update
If you need to call up …

Over the past couple of decades, Internet users have learned that not all websites are created equal. There are a few things that the web savvy browser will look for without even realizing it. If you do not provide the answer, your visitors will come to their own conclusions.

Who wrote this page?

Remember that not everyone will find your website by typing it’s URL directly into their web browser. Most new visitors will follow links from search engines or other sites. One of the first things they’ll want to learn upon arriving is whom they are …
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Before asking a site to include a link back to your home page,  take a moment to check it out. Remember, your URL is something like your address. You want clients to know where to find you, but you probably don’t want to extend that invitation to online con artists and pushers. Try and make sure you know which you’re dealing with.

What to look for in a legitimate site:

Whether or not someone is a competent professional in the real world, if they do not convey their professionalism online, their site will not be a good place to …

As business owners, we all know we need to keep marketing during these tough times. The key is to focus our marketing efforts to yield more results without increasing total dollars spent. One of these marketing efforts should be your website. In my experience developing websites for over 13 years, most businesses do not use the internet to its fullest potential.

It’s easy to decide to invest on your website. It’s more difficult to determine exactly what to do and how much to spend.

First, you need to answer the question: do you have a traffic or a conversion issue to solve?

A …

Unfortunately it’s very common to hear from a website owner that his website is not bringing in business only to find out that the site’s traffic and performance is not even being tracked.

How do you know how your website is doing if you don’t put the right tracking mechanisms in place?

Many people know about tracking traffic by using Google Analytics. It is a free service and easy to install. Google analytics does tell you a lot about your visitors, traffic sources, and content… but there’s more than you can do.

For example, have a unique email address on your website that …

At MB/I we present our clients with two different home page designs to start with. The idea is that one of them will be picked, and after 1-2 rounds of revisions on the chosen concept, we will have an approved design and be able to move forward.

The key to evaluating a new design properly is to look at it from the user’s perspective. The website is not for the CEO or the Marketing Director. It’s for the user. When evaluating a new design, consider the following:

1. Does it look like what your users think it should look?
Users will have expectations …

We have clients that come to us wanting to re-design their websites. The main reason they give is that their sites “don’t work”. What does that mean?

No marketing?
Sometimes the website is just fine. It’s designed well and it works well. But no marketing efforts have been made to drive traffic to it. A site like this one does not need a re-design. What needs to be determined is how to market it. Don’t blame the site. A site with no marketing plan is just like a physical store with no marketing plan. The only ones aware of it are the …

You launched your site, got some traffic, and maybe even some business. But is your site all that it can be? There are several good analytics solutions (like Google Analytics) that give you all of the information you may ever want about who is visiting your website, what other sites those visitors are coming from, which pages are browsed the most, and even which pages visitors leave from.

You basically get the “what”, but you don’t get the “why”.

• Why do visitors leave the site without clicking on any of the navigation links?
• Why do visitors add items to their carts but don’t …
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