Austin Website Design Firm – Kagan Creative

Successful websites starts with the design. First impressions last.  Your website is your image to the world.  It is often the only image of your company. And it is important to note, that a website is often much cheaper than remodeling a place of business or rent for one year. And a professional website design will last three to six years. Many of the websites Kagan Creative have designed were built 5 years ago such as bartoncreekliving.com, avalonrealtyaustin.com, carportstructures.com, roguerunning.com. Of course the sites have been updated to keep up with the new technology and trends. So, if you are ready for a new website or would like to update your existing website you must be knowledgeable what every website must have:

1. Content – Fresh, new content has become increasingly important. It helps the readers understand your business, services and products. Content helps dictate the design and drive traffic to increase conversion rates. And, it is important in search engine placement.

2. Social Media - Social media has become necessary to reach existing and potential clients. More and more people are using social media to read reviews, get referrals and search companies. Statistics have shown an upward trend that web users are searching on social media sites to find companies.

3. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – SEO starts with the code of the website. It must comply with the W3C standards. This allows search engines to easily crawl the site, understand the hierarchy of the site and find relevant content easily. Secondly, every site must have a robots.txt file and an xml sitemap file to guide the search engine bots to crawl every page. And finally, it is important to setup tools, such as Google analytics and Google Webmaster Tools to monitor your site.

In conclusion, a website is your face to the world and a professional, up to date site will last for years and save you money in the long run.

Social media is a great avenue for businesses to connect to hundreds and even thousands of people. And a big plus to social media is the price unless you count the time it takes to update your social media pages. Here are a few tips to use your time wisely.

• Post relevant content about your business such as an event or a special. This will attract fans and followers to read your posts. (More postings may be good to get additional keywords in text, but you may lose important fans and followers)
• Offer a social media only special by posting a code word or phrase on Facebook and Twitter.
• Tell clients to become fans on Facebook and follow you on Twitter
• Ask loyal customers to write about their experiences with you and your business

Social media is a great tool to promote your business, but the most important marketing tool is word of mouth. So, scroll through your friend list, ask them to mention your company in their social network on the computer, on the tennis courts, at the restaurant, or at happy hour. So, be social and spread the word.

Design Over Content

Content has become an important part of websites. Every website needs to focus on SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Not only does a website need to have good content, but people need to find the content. Every website needs to have analytics to monitor the traffic and learn what keywords Google, or other search engine crawlers deem important. A well formatted XML sitemap will lead the crawlers through the site to find the relevant content. And always remember that if the website is not professional, then visitors will think that your business is not professional. Thus, the content is great for search engines, but doesn’t help to retain clients.

Websites have become much more than creating a nice design. Every website needs to focus on relevant content to increase search engine rankings. A great design today incorporates areas for content that can be easily updated and expanded within the design. A design can incorporate recent Twitter posts, news articles, Facbook posts, a featured project, a case study or other call to action items to convert web traffic visitors into clients.  It is important to keep your website content fresh and up-to-date with relevant information. At the same time, the design must be professional and clean to make web visitors stop, pause and read the content. With a great design and relevant content, your search engine rankings will climb and you conversion rate will increase.