Nashville Web Design, Graphic and Logo Design

If you're into professional golf, you're no doubt aware of the excellent play (and demeanor) of Kenny Perry. Mr Perry is a 14-time winner on the PGA tour and a really down-to-earth guy. Nashville Interactive was recently contracted to perform the development of Kenny's site, and we're very proud to have been awarded this opportunity. Working with the provided design, the site was built on an open-source content management system to allow for user update-able content. The site contains tons of great info about Kenny, his interests and what he's up to so stop by kennyperry.com and see why Mr. Perry is one of the most popular golfers on tour.

In the first post of this series – Building an Online Presence – Part 1: The Website – I discussed the importance of having a well designed and user-friendly website as the first step in creating a solid online presence. In this post, I'll give you my thoughts on social media and how it can help build a brand that your target demographic will identify with.

Pick The Proper Vehicle For Your Message

If you own a small town butcher shop, you probably don't need to post on Twitter every 15 minutes. (I can see the gruesome tweets as we speak!) Your clientele has probably never heard of Twitter and they could probably care less about how many pounds of sausage you just ground anyway. On the other hand, your customers are probably much more likely to log on to the local newspaper's website to check the weather, classified ads or read the forums. Your valuable time would be much better spent focusing your advertising and marketing efforts on local business websites such as your local newspaper's website. Being an active member of the discussion forums on these sites will benefit you much more than Twitter and Facebook ever would. For instance if there's a cooking forum on a local online hot spot, you could answer meat related questions using the business as your username/identity. Just be sure to speak in a tone that is familiar and comfortable to your demographic. There are many different social vehicles to get your message across including, Linked In, blogging, message boards, Digg, YouTube, StumbleUpon and many many, more. Remember to pick the outlets that your users actually use.

Speak The Language of Your Target Demographic

Everyone and their brother is on Facebook these days and it's a great way to keep your brand in a potential customer's mind. However, you can't just throw up an Acme Widget Corp. facebook page, post once per month and expect to see results. Users want something of value and if they're going to spend five minutes interacting with your brand online, do you really want them reading irrelevant internal company news? nope. Ideally, potential customers would be engaged with the brand through an appropriate message that evokes the desired feelings and responses. For example, if you're running an animal rescue and targeting animal lovers (who are generally a kind-hearted folk), you'll want to tug at the heart strings a bit more. Post relevant content about the injustices happening in your town and stories about beating all odds. Another scenario would be that of a large company selling wholesale rubber gaskets. You can bet that your target demo is going to be a bit more responsive to blue-collar humor and they'll be looking for something to brighten their day (I can't imagine that the world of rubber gaskets is terribly exciting without a little help. Though everything is relative I suppose!). Perhaps in this situation, you might post a joke of the day or even tweet about how Doug just tried to use a 3/4″ gasket at the convenience store by mistake.

Don't Tweet Too Much, But Don't Let Things Get Stagnant

There's a fine line between being active with social media and being obsessed. Conversely, if you're only updating your status or engaging in forums once every two months, you loose customer/user interaction and interest. Some users will update their Twitter status or their facebook photos every 15 minutes. I have to wonder how much a person can get done while constantly thinking about and looking for their next tweet or kitschy photo status update. On the other hand if you're too busy to interact with social media on at least a semi-regular basis, then perhaps you should focus your marketing efforts elsewhere or hire someone to help out. There are many freelance copywriters and social media experts who will help out on an hourly basis.

The ROI of Social Media

Return on Investment (ROI) of social media is often a hard metric to track. You may spend 20 hours per month focusing on social marketing and not see a single lead. The key thing to remember is that your brand is in front of people and when those people need your services, you'll at least have a portion of their mind share. You can always track click throughs and keep track of referring sites that lead users to your website and ultimately to your goal whether that is an online purchase, user education or anything else. Having proper analytics running with assigned goals is a crucial part of measuring the ROI of your social media marketing efforts.

Keeping all of these things in mind when working with social media in your marketing plan will help you successfully market your brand to your target demographic in a very valuable and personal manner.

Up next: Building an Online Presence – Part 3: Knowing The Competition. Subscribe to the RSS feed or signup for spam-free email updates to get notified about new posts immediately.

What does it mean to have a good online presence or "web presence"? It means having a firm grasp of how your target demographic uses the web. It means taking that knowledge and putting it to work in your favor by utilizing the tons of online resources that are available to you. Recognizing which of these resources will benefit you the most, is key to a solid online presence.

In this series of posts, I'll be discussing thoughts on how to create a better online presence through various channels.

Start With Your Own Website

The vast majority of people I talk to aren't happy with their website (the ones that have websites anyway). Web users are much more savvy than they were even 3 or 4 years ago. Even less "savvy" users know the difference between a good website and a terrible one. People are much more likely to respond in a good way to a well designed website. Aesthetics are important but website design involves much more than making a site look good. It also involves Information Architecture, User Interface Design and User Experience Design. What the heck does all that mean? Put simply, it means that when users come to your website, they get where we want them to go and they feel comfortable enough to hang out for a while. This is hard to achieve when your site has no continuity in it's presentation of information, navigation, links, styling etc. Would you enter your credit card information to make a purchase on a website that looks like it was built in the late 90′s using free templates that have been hacked together? Would you put much stock in a company that isn't willing to spend time and effort on their own website? Probably not.

Hiring the right person (or people) to design your website is key to building an online presence that gets results. Although your nephew may be able to put a website online and he works for peanuts, is he really the best person for the job? (Nothing against using relatives for web design. I have relatives too!) Do your research and figure out who will work better for you. More often than not, smaller web design shops hold advantages over larger agencies: agility, speed and quality of service.

Some things to look for:
- the designer's/company's portfolio. Are there example projects that fit your vision or is there evidence of being able to create many different aesthetics? Is there a wide breadth of work even though you don't see something exactly like what you have in mind?
- available services. Is there a wide range of services available that can fit potential future projects like print advertising, logo design, SEO/SEM, marketing, etc.?
client testimonials. (if available) Are there happy clients singing the praises of this potential website provider?
- SEO services. A website with no traffic isn't a good tool. Can this company/person get your site found via search engines? Did you find them through a search?

All of these will help you get a feel about whether or not they're a good fit for your project.

Up next: Building an Online Presence – Part 2: Using Social Media. Subscribe to the RSS feed or signup for spam-free email updates to get notified about new posts immediately.

The battle is pretty much over between Facebook and Myspace and Facebook took the title hands down. Myspace still has many millions of users but Facebook is the heavy-weight these days. So what does this tell us about the average web user today? It tells us (or me anyway) that people prefer a good user experience over complete freedom of expression through their own personalized web page design. Myspace gives you the freedom to create a completely unique webpage of your own, including custom images, Flash animation and control over styles via CSS (cascading style sheets). That's pretty much all the average user could ask for in a social networking page. But apparently most people don't care about complete freedom of expression through page design; they'd rather have a better user experience in a controlled environment. Of course Facebook's "better user experience" is just an opinion but the numbers seem to justify that opinion.

Another factor is that people who aren't artistically inclined can be intimidated when confronted with complete freedom of design. It could be that the average user felt that Facebook's simpler approach leveled the playing field. No longer are users forced to "compete" for the cooler looking page. With Facebook, everyone is playing by the same rules. It's more about the content than the unique presentation of information. Both Facebook and Myspace have powerful platforms for social interaction though Facebook is very easy to use and has much less clutter than Myspace which in my opinion is why it has become the leader in online social networking.

Earlier this week Nashville Interactive launched pisinc.org. Petersen Insurance Specialties is a Nashville-based insurance company focusing on providing solutions for entertainment industry professionals. The site was built using the wonderful WordPress for website development. The design speaks to the target demographic through relevant imagery. Check out the live site at pisinc.org or via the web design portfolio. Nashville Interactive also handled creation of the PIS logo as well. The logo can be found in our portfolio under logo design.

First thing's first. Content does not create itself. (good content doesn't anyway) In order to make the most of your online marketing potential, you have to create quality, stand-out content and update it often. People need a reason to come back to your site or follow you on twitter or friend you on facebook. Having solid content is paramount to keeping people interested and coming back for more.

You should identify your target audience immediately and speak directly to them in an appropriate tone. Slang and LOL's are fine for facebook, but a user base of potential and current customers might write you off as being unfit for professional use. Do a little research and tailor your site content to your target demographic.

Sounds good but how do I do that? Via a content management system.

A good website should empower clients to create and update their own content. Content management systems are all the latest rage in web design for good reason, they're great for frequent content updates. However, CMSs are like any other piece of software and require some effort and time to learn. All too often Content Management Systems go unused by businesses and individuals because of the lack of training or effort to learn how to use them properly. Everyone wants users to come back to their site right? In order to do that, the site has to have fresh, relevant and useful content. While a CMS can give site owners the capability to create and edit content, a huge percentage of those site owners don't take full advantage of the tools available to them. All too often, I get calls and requests to make site updates that can easily be handled by a CMS.

If you're running a website with a content management system, (and you should be in this day and age) make sure that your web design firm provides you with at least initial training on how to use it. If that's out of the question, most open-source CMSs have documentation and forums available online. The open source community is very good about helping people learn.

So the moral of the story is: a CMS is a terrible thing to waste.

NashvilleInteractive.com has been redesigned! If you've been to the site before, you may notice that the look is actually similar to the last version (background image mostly) but the site is much more user friendly and has expanded to better represent where NI has been in the last year and also where we're headed. Notably the design portfolio has about 6x the content and is now sortable by category. For instance website design, logo design, artist website design etc. There's much more detailed info about services offered and a Q&A style about page. So have a look around and as always, feel free to let us know what you think.

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