Persechini and Company

What makes a great website #1

phyllis — Mon, 07 May 2012 16:45:35 +0000

Like anything in the electronic/digital world, websites need to be made accessible and attractive to humans. We humans initially experience the world around us with our five senses.

True, you cannot smell or taste a website, even as sophisticated as our devices are nowadays. But what you experience can evoke a similar physical sensation.

TV and film have traditionally learned to do that well. The steaming salty (fragrant) popcorn, the aqua blue inviting (cool) swimming pool, are just a couple instances.

The written word is also a powerful stimulant for memorable experiences when crafted for that end, as you can see by the above paragraph.

When words and visual are combined effectively, your website visitors are more likely to have an immediate, visceral reaction that prompts further action.

That should be the first job of any web page. Make them want more.

Blogged down

phyllis — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 19:28:44 +0000

How many blogs do you find on the internet that have infrequent posts? What is the right amount of posts…daily, weekly, monthly? It depends on your audience and goals, not your availability to post. For our clients that are just starting out with a blog, we recommend some simple best practices to keep the thoughts flowing and the readers coming.

1. Keep a list of possible subjects as they occur to you. You’ll always be ready for a fast entry.

2. One topic per post is preferable. Your readers will find it more enjoyable than slogging through TMI.

3. Write, read, proof and read again. Edit as long as you think you can make it better. Good spelling, punctuation, and succinct thoughts are more pleasing. Especially for b2b.

4. Learn from the experts. Join a couple blogs you admire and note their style. Learn from the experts.

5. Posts can never be too short. But they are often too long. Control yourself!

Future posts:
What makes a great website.
Frightened by your CMS?

To scroll or not to scroll

phyllis — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 01:13:30 +0000

You can find some pretty diverse thoughts on this simple question: how long should your web pages be? Should web visitors have to look at the very bottom of your page to find needed information? Probably not.

But the lower part of any page (off the first screen) can have valuable functions in a website.

The biggest is aiding in search engine optimization (SEO). If you want search engines to find your website and rank it high in relevance (as in, on the first page of results) then you’ll need to have enough keywords (terms your customers search for) in your website. Sometimes it’s not easy to include phrases like ‘graphic design’ enough in normal text. So, you can add a description in the base of your page that is search-engine-speak. (Like we did.)

And more words of text are always better for the SE’s. Do keep your ‘must see’ information at the top of the page. But feel free to have more and longer text. Who knows, someone (besides the search engines) might be so riveted by your thoughts that they keep reading.

Just be sure to break it into short paragraphs. And add in subheads wherever possible. Subheads with keywords are dynamite (and easier for human readers too)!

Next post: Frightened by your CMS (content management system)?

Update the old

phyllis — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 10:24:37 +0000

Why our new website is just an update of the old.

You might think, that as web developers, we would demonstrate our proficiency with an all-out, new bells and whistles website. Instead, we present this humble WordPress site…an update of our 2007 site.

It’s an illustration for those of you who are thinking about upgrading to an SEO (search-engine optimized), CMS (content management system) website. We can accomplish these transitions fairly quickly, with a low cost, compared to a full on Drupal site (which we also build). With web updates happening at greater speeds every year, we predict the life of a website to be shrinking from the 3-4 years it was previously. And with each move, the management tools become more user-friendly. Stay tuned to our blog as we notice and talk about this and other web phenomena.

Persechini website 2007