No matter what level of expertise you have, we are happy to provide additional resources, to collaborate, and to plan – and then to launch the best version of your concepts.  From there we will help you track the results (ROI) and work to improve what we invented.

This quiz will give you an idea of your current knowledge level on the basics of using the web for you. 

While you will likely score high because it is a relatively simple quiz, low scores do not mean you can’t make money.  Some of our clients that have made the most money would have scored a 0 before they began to work with us.  They usually had great ideas to begin with, that we helped shape into money making success. 

At the end of the quiz we will link you to several testimonials and references (that you can verify!) that will demonstrate that anyone who wants too, can utilize the internet to improve their business with the right team of web design consultants.  That means you!

Let’s Begin!

We are here to provide you with insight into industry happenings, and more particularly we are here to keep you abreast of changes and opportunities you can take advantage of to grow your business.  Want a website you can change the content on?  Want a website you can add pages too?  How about if it also allows you to post articles regarding your company’s latest news, seasonal offerings, or new coupon specials?

What is the latest technology we are talking about? 

Wordpress Blogs as Full Blown Business Websites w/ built-in Content Management

It would be hard to argue that business is getting any less competitive in our era – especially on the internet.  99% of everybody would of course tell you the opposite, so now is the time to have high quality websites.  Now is the time to take advantage of technological improvements, and this one is big.  The website you are viewing now is a Wordpress Blog.  You can tell this a couple of ways, but to the untrained eye – this is just a good looking website.

Blog Theme Customization

This site, not including the time to write the articles in it, took about 15 hours to create, approximately.  The theme is free thanks to the team at Revolution 2.  The background graphic took about about 25 minutes to perfect, and the logo about another 25.  As you can see, we are using three keywords in our domain, what we call a “Keyword Domain Website” which gives us a leg up in the search engines for that keyphrase.  Customizing the rest of the link images (side and bottom) is going to take a considerable amount of time – but we like the opportunity to visually represent the other sites we would like you to see so we will invest the time.  Different themes can take less time to customize, others more.  Take a look at our specifics page for our business blog customization services, and more look at the following special -

Northwest eSource is offering a tremendous blog special, Keyword Domain Websites on Wordpress Blog engines for a small investment of $750 – which includes your first year of hosting, domain registration and consultation, graphic customization, internal search engine optimization, basic content, 3 articles and additional plugins.  It’s time to blast off!

Northwest eSource New Year Blog Special

RSS Feed + Great Blog Plugins = SEO and More

Wordpress comes with its own featureset including a file naming convention good for SEO.  The category and tag hierarchy also contribute; what’s more an SEO All-In-One plugin is available and standard on our New Year Blog Special.  The RSS Feed component of blogs is another SEO contributor that helps considerably.  It is basically a syndication of sorts where your content is pushed to blog content networks, picked up by blog distributors and ends up garnering traffic on its own.  Google crawls the site to determine its organic search rankings and all of those features add up and are somewhat easier to implement by the blog owner than they would be for the website adminstrator.

Other good plugins and features include the ability to use gravatars for branding and authority across all blog publishing and commenting, the comments themselves which allow others to publicly confirm your expertise, and also (among others) are the plugins that allow users to bookmark your blog or article on their social bookmarking profiles like Facebook and Myspace.  Plugins are being developed constantly and we watch to make sure our clients have the best of breed at all times.

Business Blog Websites – The New Generation

The fact is this may be the best option for small businesses to get more options for less money than the prior build everything from scratch generation of web design.  This is an incredible shift in the industry.  We have been watching for point and click web design, which is coming.  Once a site is engineered, web design software like Adobe Dreamweaver can help you make edits easier, but it is complicated.  Plus, with CSS styling, Dreamweaver’s ability to display the site as you would view it in production diminishes rapidly.

Content management systems, including Wordpress Blogs, still require a significant setup investment.  But once they are up, the business owner or the secretary can edit and create all new pages, posts, news and links – which brings the power back home.

Northwest eSource is offering a tremendous blog special, Keyword Domain Websites on Wordpress Blog engines for a small investment of $750 – which includes your first year of hosting, domain registration and consultation, graphic customization, internal search engine optimization, basic content, 3 articles and additional plugins.  It’s time to blast off!

Northwest eSource New Year Blog Special

Web Design Vision – do you have it?  What is it?

Bringing your ideas to life is where we do our best work.  Utilizing the internet for your business is about vision.  It’s about seeing opportunity and having what it takes to convert the opportunity to a real-life product or process.

Do you see opportunity for business growth on the web?

The vast majority of businesses can benefit from (better) use of online tools, processes, partnerships, product placement and marketing.  Expanding your business to utilize newly available technologies can be a painless process, if done the right way.

A staged implementation gets things done at the right pace.

We understand you and your business are unique and so we are aware that the goals and objectives will be different for everyone, as well as the process and pace.  Our endeavors seek to increase your bottom line: this we do by helping you hold your prospect’s and client’s attention better and longer, with greater interactivity, customer service and targeted marketing.

Do you want the ability to make money 24 hours a day?

What do you see in the future for your company?

Picture your clients logging in to your website to view the status of their project.  Picture people searching the web for your company’s services, and finding you number one on Google. Picture people paying you via your website at all hours of the night, perhaps as they opt-in to an option you didn’t even have time to explain in person.

This Is Light Speed Information

The business landscape is transforming quickly.  Increased productivity means higher profit margins for you or lowering your prices to be even more competitive and to take on even more business. 

Don’t be afraid of change: embrace it. 

Challenge yourself to be the first in your industry or area to pioneer utilization of new tools, processes, partnerships, product placements and marketing methods based on new technologies.

Challenge yourself to invent new tools and processes, partnerships and product placements.

We help put rubber to the road. 

What is your web design vision?

Contact Us, the eternal call to action used by web designers everywhere to bring the audience to initiate a connection.  How has it changed over time?  How can it be altered and better utilized in a modern setting?  These are the questions we will answer and also add in tips you need to utilize in your websites for user friendliness.

Contact Us: The Page Title

Contact Us is usually the title of the page that a user clicks to find the contact information for the business.  Here may be the most important tip in this article:

•   Tip 1 – Keep your contact information on every page.

By keeping your contact information on every page, your prospects and clients are never wondering how to get ahold of you, wasting time with an extra click, or worst of all, searching for the information.

Contact Us: The Email Address

Listing an email address on a website is the oldest way of assisting your clients in contacting you (after the phone number of course).  It works well for causal interaction and the [mailto:] code in a link is a handy way of assisting clients in opening their email programs. 

But their are two issues with this method:

Issue 1 – Your email address is visible for any old ‘robot’ spam mechanism to come along, collect and abuse.

Issue 2 – What if your client’s mail program isn’t configured or is configured incorrectly?

What if your client or prospect has Outlook, but hasn’t set it up?  What if they use a web mail interface?  And worse yet,  what if their computer is barebones, lacks ram, and/or they have 101 programs open leading to the deadly computer stall, or even worse: the crash.

You really don’t want to be a part of that.

Contact Us: The Contact Form

•   Tip 1 – Get as little information as necessary.

Do not make the common mistake of using a bulky contact form.  Too often we see ridiculously long contact forms with more information than anyone can use, and how many times have you had submission of a form, or worse yet an entire paragraph you wrote on a web form, misfire?  That is a nightmare.  Plus you want to make it easy for the client to initiate a relationship with you (even if the relationship continues via email), then you can request more information from them.

•   Tip 2 – Use these in targeted marketing pages to request free information, a quick call, to download a form, or other – but again, make them simple. 

Contact Us: When You Don’t Want to Be Contacted – FAQ

When a website gets extremely popular, then the owners will look for ways to address issues WITHOUT contact, interestingly enough especially with the questions that 90% of the users are asking.  This data usually comes through accurate call tracking, and then those issues can be answered before they are asked. 

•   Tip 1 – Keep your FAQ’s organized and up to date with answers to current issues.

Searching an FAQ is generally easier than searching a forum or submitting a trouble ticket, so keep it easy.

Contact Us: Stay In Touch A Little Longer – RSS Feed and Email Subscription

Great new options exist that are simple for the client, highly informative and non-intrusive – and are even easy for the web administrator or business owner.

The first one is the RSS Feed, which is a website content publishing system that comes integrated into blogs, and can be added to most other websites.  Users are able to use feedreaders to view the feeds they subscribe to and can view the information anytime without leaving that program.  A couple examples of feedreaders are Google and Yahoo’s own, NewsGator and others.

Issue 1 – Only tech savvy people utilize feed readers today.

• Tip 1 – Suggest your favorite feedreader with a link.

Email Marketing is clearly growing, and the key is offering unique valuable information.  Out of the 5/10 subscriptions I have, only 3 do I truly value at this point.  I could find more with value, but in my ‘browsing’ and subscribing this is what has landed in my primary box.  Two have good product information as they are retailers with wholesale prices (www.Newegg.com and www.TigerDirect.com) and the other is a marketing statistics reporting service from a marketing company (www.emarketer.com).  For our clients and ourselves, we must truly offer value in every communication and this is our goal – more on that later… Email marketing has some unique abilities when you use the right program.  We use iContact ourselves, and it tells us who opened the email, who clicked on a link, and who responded what to our surveys – so it is very powerful.

• Tip 1 – Make every email you send out truly valuable.
• Tip 2 – Do not overbombard your client list.

Contact Us: The Technical Options – Forums and Trouble Tickets

The most common new and technical ways for clients to contact you through your website are are through frequently asked questions pages, forums for issue research where issues are widespread and their is community participation, and trouble ticket systems for issue submission to technical support teams.

•   Tip 1 – Brand your forum well, moderate it heavily.

Forums can generate a lot of traffic to your website, help build your brand, and create a community involvement with your company in new and powerful ways.  But they can also attract a lot of naysayers which can hurt your brand if you don’t keep the forum topics positive and goal oriented (for issue resolution) and visually appealing.  Without moderation and brand building, forums can become a haven for the naysayers of your products or services – especially if their problems go unaddressed.

•   Tip 3 – Trouble Ticket Systems are great, just don’t take to long for a human response.

The client feels important when they are issued a real problem # of their own.  It assigns a necessary individual response to their issue, and they feel like someone is going right to work on it – as they should be.  These great feelings can be megated when a human response to their inquiry takes too long.

Contact Us: The Conclusion

So with all of these contact options, displaying them all on every page becomes less of a possibility especially with any explanation.  The menu system should of course have links to the FAQ, Forum, Support, etc.  But again it becomes clear that the contact page should have a good layout and explanation of the customer’s best options to get ahold of your company to effectively resolve what they need personally.

Also we hope this article has cleared up some confusion about and/or offered tips on how to use some of the contact tools availble on the web.

Consider These Options For Your Contact Us Page:

• Phone Number
• Email
• Locations
• Mailing Address
• Feed link
• Subscription Box
• Easy Contact Form
• FAQ
• Forum
• Support Page

This site is dedicated to helping you achieve oustanding web productivity, and the first step along that path is understanding and creating your road map to web marketing success.  Important to say, but almost negative in nature (which we avoid at all costs) – not all Portland web design companies are the same.  Make sure you pick a company with proven success and an eye for artistic detail.  The finishing touches make all the difference.

High Power Web Presence – 1.0

With that said, your first goal should be a 1.0 High Power Web Presence, which is bulleted out below.  Simply put, it is a great looking, high quality website with well written content and strong organization that leads clients to contact your company either through the web contact form or a phone call.

• Represents your core business – Corporate home page.
• One High quality Website
• High contrast graphics
• Solid information with solid appeal
• Converts visitors to leads or assists in sales process
• Comments Form
• Contact Form
• Some organic web presence
• Your clients can find you
• Occasionally new prospects find you

High Power Web Presence based on Web 2.0 Technology

Each new step advance in computing power is usually 10 times stronger than the last, and the same is true for the second level of web presence you want to achieve for your business.  It is the difference between having a great looking billboard (the bare minimum in our mind) and having television commercials.  This level of web presence can have multiple websites, or multiple tiers of pages within your main site.  The point for more pages is more message diversification – so that your prospects and clients are able to find exactly what they are looking for – and then understand what you provide have your guidance, on the web, to utilizing the service or product that will best fit their needs.  A solid web 2.0 presence will also have tools and technology that can follow up with your clients and prospects almost automatically.  Your Web 2.0 Presence will enable you to speak to many through a single voice.

As you can see, a Web 2.0 Presence requires engineering.  The details in outline form follow:

• Guided approach, more specific information
• Multiple types of contact forms
• Interactive and targeted email marketing
• Multiple websites dedicated to individual target markets, products and prospects.
•  Targeted traffic marketing
• Paid Google Advertising generating leads and/or web sales
• Landing pages or Landing Websites for specific search terms
• Sub-websites dedicated to individual products within your lineup
• Potentially optimized to gather targeted web traffic

Web 3.0 – Online Business Streamlining

Web 3.0 is taking web engineering to the final level.  It involves finding and creating opportunities to streamline and enhance your business through online integration. Your target audience will always be new prospects, from allowing them to login to your forums where their questions may already be answered to instant customer service via chat technology.  Your second audience will be your current clients, allowing them to login and see their account information - how much money have they spent with you on which products.  Just knowing this information may encourage them to spend more because they know you are tracking it and will share that information with them.  On top of that your current clients should be able to spend more money with you ANY TIME OF THE DAY – when they choose to.  Utilizing e-commerce is a very important step for your business.  Your third audience will be your own employees and you will be giving them opportunities to collaborate, increase productivity as they work from the field, and perhaps save you time on minor administrative changes.

• Client database-driven website login
• Allow your customers to start, monitor and manage projects online
• Accessible account information
• Accessible support information
• eCommerce – sell products and services online - take payments 24 hours per day

Define ROI = Return on Investment

= Profit Derived from Website (Return) minus Website Cost (Investment)

Website ROI Example

If a site costs you $3,000 and results in $15,000 in profit, then the Website ROI is 400%.

15,000 – 3,000 = 12,000

12,000 / 3,000 = 4 x 100 (%)

=400%