Web strategy: Standing out

Your brand

Your brand is what defines your business, both visually and emotionally to your consumers.

A good brand has a strong suite of visual tools, which not only includes a logo, but also a colour palette, font set, images and design style which all visually reflect the core values of your business. A really good brand is a set of values and ideals that are expressed through everything a business does and comes through in the language it uses, the way it interacts with customers and the products and services that it provides.

Your website is one of the most important outlets for your brand, being a dedicated visual communications channel which is all about YOU! The opportunities for strengthening your brand and getting your name up in lights through a really well executed website are endless.

Captovate understands the mechanics of branding from all angles with our unique mix of talents in media and screen design, communications, management and technology. We can provide cutting edge online campaigns with the unique functions and features that will get your website talked about and bring your brand to life.

Search engine optimisation

Consumers expect to find you at the click of a mouse these days. If your business doesn’t appear at or near the top of the list on a Google or Yahoo search, you may as well not exist! Luckily there is a way to get your business up the lists – part science and part art – but definitely possible.

Search engines scan your site for the words people type in when they search, so having your content written with a variety of keywords within the text, as well as in coded headings and meta-tags, will greatly improve your chances of being ranked highly. Valid internal and external links are the other important factor in getting your website ‘Googled’ successfully.

If your site is new or you’re not ranking highly for all your keywords in the ‘organic listings’ (the results on the left hand side), then a ‘pay per click’ listing (on the right hand side) may be a cost-effective form of online marketing that will get your site onto the results page in the meantime.

Analytics and monitoring

Searching for a product or service online is almost like walking along a street with anywhere between 50 and 500,000 shopfronts all selling the same thing and all vying for the same customer.

Competition is fierce, and to achieve success, you need to monitor exactly what’s going on with you (and your competitors) online. How are people getting to your site? How and why are they leaving? When and where are they completing transactions? This kind of market research is simple to set up using web analytics software.

Monitoring and interpreting your web analytics results will give you powerful insights into what works and what doesn’t, especially if you also use some nifty tools to see what’s working for your competition. This will ultimately improve your business, both online and off.

Online marketing

There are plenty of techniques, both free and paid, to grab a web user’s attention and bring them to your website, and this is collectively known as online marketing or e-marketing.

Search Engines like Google are of course a critical source of traffic to your website, and you might want to consider paid listings as well as the crucial Search Engine Optimisation. You should try and develop links from other related websites to yours (and vice versa), and you can take advantage of social media to promote your website where relevant, although outright advertising won’t be appreciated here.

Email marketing is a popular way to get people to your site, but be careful not to SPAM your potential customers! Only use valid mailing lists and only ever send emails with relevant, enticing messages. An E-Newsletter is another good way to keep drawing people back. Online banners on sites that your potential customers are likely to be visiting are another great tool, but as with all marketing, it helps if you know your target audience well.

Website audit & competitor analysis

If you already have a website and are thinking of updating it, or even replacing it completely, a website audit will help you assess what’s good and what’s bad about it, and how you can change this into something that’s truly state of the art!

Through a process of testing and analysis you can discover how well your site is doing in achieving its purpose and how it currently stacks up against all the elements of a good web strategy. This includes design, functionality, content, compatibility, SEO, usability, accessibility and plenty more!

It’s also helpful to get a good idea of what your competitors are doing online, and what’s working for them. This could include immediate, actual competitors who are vying for the same customers in the same region as you; or it can be other businesses like yours from around the world whose websites are really successful (or whose mistakes you can learn from). There’s no need to re-invent the wheel in web strategy – just improve it!

What is usability?

Usability is the term commonly used to describe how ‘user friendly’ a website is, in other words how easy it is for a person to find what they are looking for or perform a task.

Your users should be able to work out how to do things easily, achieve their goals quickly and they should find this a pleasant experience that doesn’t raise a sweat in the brain power department. It’s all about aligning the technology with the human being!

There are some definite rules that make a website usable and some general guidelines that will help too. Good usability can be achieved by applying these rules and guidelines throughout the information architecture, design, functionality and content of your website.

What is accessibility?

Accessibility is the term coined by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) to describe websites and applications that can be perceived, understood, navigated and interacted with by people with a disability or some level of sensory impairment. All websites should have a basic level of accessibility, and some sites (especially in government) are required to comply with certain accessibility standards to avoid discrimination.

An example of an accessibility feature is content in a text format that can be interpreted by screen reading software for vision impaired people. This needs to include ‘alt tagged’ images, meaning that images are assigned a specific label in their coding which a screen reader uses to describe the image to the user. Alt tagging has the extra benefit of helping with your Search Engine Optimisation.

Next stage: Bells and whistles