We are proud to announce the launch of a new website for Building Engineering Consultants, Inc.. You can check out the design in our portfolio or visit the site at www.be-ci.com. Congratulations BECI!

We are proud to announce the launch of a new website for Rocco’s Sub Shop. You can check out the design in our portfolio or visit the site at www.roccossubs.com. Congratulations Rocco’s!

We’re especially excited about it because at the same time we are launching our new branding. We’ve been working on updating and improving the identity for Firestorm for about a year and a half now and we’re happy to say we’re happy with it.

We started from scratch on this version of the portfolio site – redesigned everything, we even rewrote all the page content – keeping nothing except for some blog posts from the old site. We wanted a much simpler, cleaner, faster and more useful site that would make it easier for our visitors to find what they were looking for, see what we’re all about, get in touch with us and request project quotes. No more downloading project planners documents and emailing them in, we built 4 streamlined and kick-awesome forms to make it WAY easier to submit a new project to us.

We’ve added over 30 new projects to our portfolio, some that we are super excited to share because we had so much fun working on them.

We built it on WordPress (of course) and taking advantage of some of the latest features like custom post types we created a much more maintainable portfolio so we spend less time when we have an update to share. Hence the reason our old portfolio hadn’t been updated since 2009! For shame…we know.

So, check it out and we really hope you like it!

What do you need to do to make your website start bringing you business?

So you’ve invested into a new website or spent countless hours learning to build it yourself and you just haven’t seen a return. You set up your new website because your customers and potential prospects keep asking you for your website address. You’ve heard stories of other business owners receiving significant increases in business from their websites and of course you want in on that.

Unfortunately, your story hasn’t been the same as those other businesses who’s websites have garnered them such success – on the contrary, your website has not generated one stinkin’ sale since you launched it!

What happened to build it and they will come?

Prepare yourself to take a cold hard look at your website – better yet – get a friend to look at it and tell them not to hold any punches. You need an unbiased and brutally honest review to know whether or not your website comes across as a professional production or an amateur attempt.

Are the graphics professional quality and crisp? Are your photos blurry, stretched or pixelated? Are your fonts and font colors consistent across the entire site? If your site displays any of these symptoms you need to take immediate action:

• Stretched, squeezed or pixelated photos
• graphics or sprites that are spinning, twirling, flashing or otherwise irritating
• inconsistent type for headlines and body text
• lack of contrast, your text is difficult to read against your background color or texture
• obnoxious or busy background graphics (i.e., repeating your bright orange and yellow logo or your cat fluffy)

Your website is your first handshake with potentials customers and likely the first impression they will get, and thus immediately forming their opinion of your company. You should strive to portray a professional and appropriate image for your website to cater to your market and target audience.

A call to action is exactly what it sounds like…it is an element on your website (text, button, graphic, etc.) that urges a visitor to take an action. That action on a website is more times than not clicking on something to complete a task that is associated with a goal based on your website strategy. Ideally, you want your calls to action to be very strong and contrast heavily (color, size, spacing etc.) to the other content on your site so that it is obvious to visitors that they should click it.

Your strategy maybe getting users to make a donation, or buy a product or even to simply fill out a contact form. Whatever the action you ultimately want your visitors to take needs to be obvious – people don’t like to think.

Building on your calls to action, now that we know what they are let’s make them easy to accomplish.

Do you want visitors to contact you? Fill out a form? Sign up for a newsletter? Make a purchase? Download something? Attend an event? Get clear on what your target actions are and make it very easy for people to complete them.

For instance, if you want your visitors to like your Facebook fan page, don’t hide a tiny icon in the corner of your page – make it big and obvious! Write some copy revelling in all the fun that is happening over on your Facebook page, as well as the benefits of joining your social circle.

The same goes for Add to Cart links. Make them obvious. You can’t make a visitor click on it, but you can definitely make sure they don’t miss it!

People visit websites for content period. Whether it’s a how-to article, video or a product to make their life better they are searching for relevant content to the issue at hand. Make sure you have  a specific purpose for publishing the content you do and that it’s context is correct for your website’s target audience. In other words if you are a construction company you probably shouldn’t have a page talking about gardening because your target audience is looking for someone to build them a house not talk about tulips. You don’t want to waste your visitors time on frivolous content when you should be funneling them to what your selling.

Your titles are hugely important to your website’s usability and relevance for a few reasons: first, and most importantly, your page title should be a one line descriptive summary of the pages content. It should give your users, at a glance, what they are looking at so they can decide to spend their time reading further. Secondly, your page titles give search engines clues as to what each page of content is about and weighs heavily in ranking a page’s search relevance . This is part of the process of optimizing your website for search engines or Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Make sure to give each page a title that describes what it’s content is about. In other words, don’t use your company name and slogan for every page title. If a given page talks about the widgets you are selling, your page title should include the widget’s name, and briefly describe the widget. Easy peezy.

This one should be a no-brainer but it’s worth mentioning. If you don’t have your contact information available people can’t contact you! Have a primary navigation link that says “contact us” and then put all the information your visitors will need to make contact in the method they are most comfortable with. Include a simple contact form, phone numbers, fax numbers, even your skype and instant messenger usernames if you want.

Put your primary contact information in your footer or header so that it’s available on every page. If you don’t want people to call you make sure you provide easy to find and easy to use contact forms and email addresses.

Give your users ample opportunity to make a purchase from you and make it easy. Don’t hide or camouflage your “buy it now” or “add to cart” buttons make them obvious. If you have an online store, make sure your shopping experience and checkout process is as easy as possible and ideally have a one page checkout. The fewer steps there are between your customers cash and your products, the faster and more often you will see sales.

There are plenty of things that will cause your site to load slowly and ultimately discourage visitors from sticking around to see what you sell. If that’s not bad enough, slow loading sites will not rank as highly in searches as those with clean optimized code, images, and graphics that load quickly.

Large images and graphics are the primary culprit for a lot of websites. While professional, clear and focused photos and well designed graphics help support and illustrate what you’re selling, make sure their file size is as small as possible while maintaining image quality.

“If you build it they will come” doesn’t work for websites and could be what led most of you to read this post to begin with. Building a site and letting it sit there with no promotion is like setting up a lemonade stand in the shed behind your house – no one is gonna buy your lemonade if they can’t see your stand or don’t know you’re selling lemonade.

Taking advantage of pay-per-click advertising as well as other Search Engine Marketing strategies and techniques will help bring visibility to your site and improve your rankings in organic search traffic from search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. This is something that you can do yourself (with some time and research) or hire a professional (eh, hem…) to assist you.

Social media is one of those things that a lot of business owners don’t understand and so therefore don’t use. The internet has made it very easy for people to learn about companies – positive and negative – using social media allows you to participate in this conversation and tell them what you want them hear as well as respond to things you’d rather they didn’t. This transparency will help you build trust with your customers and well as attract new customers to your brand.

Your audience is using social media in their daily lives whether they use Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, or any combination of these along with hundreds of other social platforms available today. Meet your customers where they are, participate in the conversation – let them know who you are and how your company can improve their lives with your products or services.

And one final tip is to make sure you talk about your website and promote it. Put it on your business cards and brochures, put it in your email signature, on your post cards, Christmas cards, well you get the idea. Any time, any place you get the chance plug your site DO IT – don’t be shy. If you can drive interest and focus on your website as the hub of communication and marketing for your business you’ll be able to begin to harness all of it’s value potential.

Custom Website Design Costs

As the title eludes to, this article is focused solely on “custom website design“. So, we aren’t taking into consideration using templates, or out of the box solutions.

So how much should custom website design cost, really? The true cost of a website design project isn’t really something you can determine from a quick search on your favorite search engine. It’s one of the hardest topics to find true information about online probably because most companies are afraid of scaring clients off up front.

Regardless, it’s an important topic to explore because most businesses who need or want a website have no idea what they should be budgeting. They may know what they want to spend, but is that number realistic? Here, we’ll explore this with you and break down what a professional custom website design entails and what it should cost. Be prepared to discover a few things that will surprise you and probably even shock you a bit.

The first thing you should realize is that your website budget needs to be part of your overall marketing budget. So establishing a realistic and appropriate marketing budget is the first essential step to setting a proper website budget. A marketing budget, according to industry experts, should range between 2% and 12% of your gross sales.

So for example: If your company has 1 million dollars in revenue per year then you should be spending in the neighborhood of $20,000-$120,000 per year on promoting and marketing your company. This will vary, of course, on your industry and various other factors.

Think of your website as an integral part of your brand, not just your website or a stand-alone marketing tool. It’s likely the first impression  potential customers will have of your company, so making sure it’s giving the right impression is crucial to the success of your company.

It’s also going to be the place most potential customers will go to form their opinion about you and your company before they take action and make contact with you. In order to truly build your brand you need to budget for the branding you need not only your “website”.

When most people hear branding the immediately think “Logo”. While that is an important element of your brand, it’s only a small part of the whole.

Look at what you’re competitors are doing – before you begin to build a website you need to know how you compare with those who are competing for your customers. This will help you form a web marketing plan to better place yourself in your customers path.

By the nature of the word custom, a “custom website” is tailored to your specific “custom” needs. The design, layout, features and functionality match your company’s brand image and work flow to make it an extension of your company. Defining your requirements and how you want your custom website to help your company generate new business is crucial to it’s success.

Above all the major contributing factor to a custom website’s overall cost is time. The time involved here is comprised of the collection of tasks that a design studio is asked to perform, the complexity of those tasks, and amount of revisions those tasks take to complete to your specifications.

Here is a list of tasks that are typical of a custom design:

• Discovery Process - learning your business, your competition, what is working and not working in your market, etc.
• Site Map - a visual, hierarchical representation of your websites pages and organizational structure
• Visual Direction and Messaging - based on your marketing objectives, brand positioning and target audience
• Custom Design – a digital representation of your visual direction and messaging agreed upon based on discovery and marketing objectives that shape the “look and feel” of your site
• Copywriting - or content optimization (yes, you need it) which allows your prospects to scan your content and drive them to your calls to action
• Flash Animation – stimulate interest, communicate large amounts of information in compact areas
• Content Management System (CMS) implementation & Coding – building & coding the pages and programming & configuring the CMS to manage your content
• Custom Email Templates – compliments your online brand. email marketing is the best ROI in marketing
• Custom Designed Blog - this is a critical element, a free PR powerhouse and SEO staple right on your site
• Internal site search engine - Research has shown that users will abandon a site if they can’t easily find what they’re looking for. Site search enables your users to quickly find information.
• Online Forms - easy for visitors to contact you, gather information and convert users into leads
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - your site needs to be design and constructed in a way that allows search engines to easily decide what it’s about. By thinking ahead, you’ll be able to more easily place highly in search engine rankings.
• Calls to Action/Landing pages – the crux of your website, the reason you have a website to begin with is to elicit an action from site visitors. Tell them what you want them to do with visuals and destination pages that lead to specific conversion goals

This list could easily go on for days, but this should give you an idea of some of the tasks that go into planning and executing a custom website. Most of the items on the list above cost anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars each. So you can see how that could quickly add up to a serious investment to build your online brand.

You have to consider your website and investment because that’s exactly what it is. Any site that is built correctly, and marketing wisely, will grow revenue and visibility for your company as well as awareness for your brand. So, in essence, it’s not about how much you spend, but rather how much your investment affects your revenue growth.

Here’s where it gets tricky – there’s not one easy answer for pricing custom website design. The bigger your company is, the more you should invest in your online brand. If you are a $1 million company, don’t invest like a $250,000 company or you’ll get left behind by your competitors who know better.

High profile design and advertising agencies will charge well into the mid to high six figures for a custom online brand. In contrast, you can hire a freelancer that will build you an online brand for a few thousand bucks. The vast majority of companies can’t swing a quarter million on their web presence, and settling for a freelancer would likely do more harm than good.

So what’s left? The best solution for most small to medium businesses is a local full-service agency. Companies like our Fort Walton Beach Website Design Company offer high quality and professional services just like the high priced agencies, but for a much more reasonable cost.

A reasonable average fee from a local full service agency for visual and marketing direction, messaging, design, coding and CMS implementation, etc would be between $8,500-$30,000 depending on the project requirements. This may shock you and sound outrageous, but think back to our list and imagine (dream really) that each item costs only $500 – you are already up to $6,500 and remember that the list is limited to only a few elements. While $500 isn’t realistic for most items mentioned above, you get the idea.

Hopefully if you’ve made it this far in the article, you understand what it takes – and what it costs – to build a custom, and effective online brand.

If you’ve planned ahead and everything was done right you can expect:

• Increased confidence in your brand from not only clients and prospects, but also your employees
• Increase in site visits and conversions
• Site visitors will be more likely to engage you regarding your products and services
• To be able to measure your results and apply those metrics to further improve your site
• To Receive more leads and referrals
• Increased sales and revenue

Take the first small step to owning your powerful and profitable website.

FirePress is our answer to the need for affordable, high quality design and printing services for small to medium businesses and even to corporate customer accounts. We now offer industry leading printing for a full line of great products including full color business cards, post cards, rack cards, brochures, banners and more. Call today for a free quote 850-362-6001.

What’s the Point?

Obcidio’s creators saw a need for businesses to grow outside their local and regional box: to make new contacts, form business relationships with new suppliers and find evasive capital funding in a dry economy. Obcidio does just that. It allows businesses to form strategic alliances with businesses, capital investors, service providers and resource providers then enables them to collaborate in a private or public shared “Board Room”.

Enter DPAL

Obcidio’s core focuses on investment and opportunity, allowing individual and professional private investors such as Venture Capital Investors and Angel Investors to find opportunities in otherwise obscure places. OBcidio’s deal finding power is based on DPAL, a proprietary search algorithm that enables Investors to quickly filter through thousands of opportunities and find the Deal that fits them perfectly. But DPAL has other uses as well, including comprehensive RFP system and Invoice Factoring deal types.

When’s It Coming Out

Obcidio is currently in the last stages of development and will be moving to Private Beta within weeks. The road map from Private to Public Beta is relatively short, so expect a public launch of Obcidio sometime in the first quarter of this year. If you’re curious about it, visit obcidio.com and watch the video to get a quick explanation of what it can do. And leave a comment, we’d love to hear thoughts about Obcidio.

Ever since i upgraded my my iPhone software to 3.1 and my iTunes to 9.0.1.8, i haven’t been able to get my iPhone to sync successfully. I tried every single thing all the disgruntled people said they’ve tried thinking maybe, prayerfully, some how it would work, but nope. Nada – not even a glimmer of hope. Nothing, would allow me to sync my iPhone.

Finally, after spending two and a half hours troubleshooting today and feeling extremely bummed and pretty frustrated, i decided to try the only thing i could think of that i hadn’t already tried: run the diagnostics tests from iTunes.

It worked!

Not sure if this is the ultimate fix, or if it’ll even work the next time i try to sync my iPhone, but here’s what i did to get it to finally connect:

First, I uplugged my iPhone, closed iTunes (by closed i mean ended the unresponsive process) and then re-opened iTunes to run the diagnostics.I started the diagnostics dialog before plugging in the iPhone to get it ready, then i plugged it in and started the tests. Somehow, and it’s beyond me, but this actually worked! Maybe it’s a fluke, but i wanted to share just on the off chance it may work for someone else.