Please feel free to browse the website and let us know what you think.

Pay for only what you really need.
Please make sure you are getting the services you want. I have heard stories where companies only want a simple Paypal integration for the couple of products they are selling, but the solution provider keep asking them to get a full e-commerce solution. The resulting price ended up about 300% higher than what it would’ve been, and the customer had gained nothing as a result. In addition, there are a lot of companies boosting that they can do SEO. Make sure SEO is really what you need before agreeing to pay for it. If your website is just your online portfolio which you want to show off to your friends, then you probably don’t need SEO.

Make sure you are getting what you want for the package.
Never assume what you are getting as a part of your package. Once the agreement is signed, it is rather a difficult (and unwilling for most solution provider) to change the requirement for free. Make sure that if you need web hosting or domain registration, you need to ask if it is included in the package.

Make sure you remember these points, even if your solution provider is Beamstyle Web Design Hong Kong

A point card machine with a mess in front of it.

You may think this is wierd, but actually there are so many websites which does similar things.

One time, I just want to check the minimum requirements for a PC game which I wanted to buy. I went on their website and they presented me with an intro movie. It took more than a minute to load, and I was forced to watch the entire thing. I don’t like that.  Neither do most customers, as they just want the information.

Marketing on the web is different from television.  For a television advertisement, a catchy and pretty animation much give a good image for potential customers.  For Internet advertisement, potential customers just want a quick and easy way to get all the information they want.  In other words, we want to increase our conversion rate, not decrease the conversion rate.

For marketing purpose, I don’t suggest anyone to put a large flash animation in the opening page. Even if you do, please add a link to skip it.

Having a list of customers on your e-mail subscription list gives your company a chance to show your latest products and sell them.   However, this list of customers is only useful if it contains customers from your target segment.  Please don’t think that having the biggest list win.  DON’T!!  The following is a bad example on how you can increase your email subscription list.

Yesterday, I receive a text asking me to vote for a baby on this website.  The contest is a vote for the baby with the best smile, and the number one place’s baby will get his/her picture shown in a baby magazine.  So let’s see the votes:

Let’s look at number one’s vote.  4072 votes.  Wow.  And that is within one day.  Clearly, you can tell the votes are clicked by the same people repeatedly.  I don’t find him particularly cute.  I’ll pick Chole Pang over him anyday.

The problem with this voting system is that, at the same time, the website collecting its subscription list by asking the voter to input his/her e-mail.  What happens when the same people keep on voting?  They either just input the same e-mail again and again, or worse, they will input a fake e-mail.

What’s bad in having a list of fake e-mail?  The simple case, the emails will get bounced back.  The severe case, if you have enough fake e-mail addresses, the ISP (Internet Service Provider) will think you are a spammer and all e-mails going to that ISP will be marked as spam.  It’s tough to get your mail server off the spam list (trust me… I know).

So please create your subscription list more legitimately by providing double opt-in.

I had finished optimizing a part of my website’s content using a text analyzer and keyword density.  I showed it to my partner for his opinions.  It turns out that he is not satisfied with the content.

My partner told me to think about our target customers (also known as personas),which are generally start-up companies or small companies.  He is right about the fault of my content.  I had all the technical contents listed out.  For a CEO of a small company, he wouldn’t care if we use PHP for our solution.  He won’t care if our pages are written in XHTML instead of HTML.  He won’t care about which e-commerce script we use or the huge list of payment gateways we support.  Heck, they don’t care if we optimized our images or we minimized all the JS/CSS scripts.

Instead, we should step in our customer’s shoes and think about what they want to see in the website in order to buy your products or services.

The purpose of a website is to attract potential customers to do target actions.  For an online shop, an action might be selling a certain product.  For a services oriented company, it might be asking for further inquiries.   In Internet marketing terms, a trigger to a target action is called a “conversion”.  The “conversion rate” is the number of customers who did a target action divided by the total customers who visit the website.

In order to boost the conversion rate to increase the return on investment (this is the primary purpose we want a website, right?), we must build a clean and well-structured website to lead the potential customers to the target actions.

A week ago, there was a huge lottery draw for the Chinese New Year and it is the chance of my lifetime to get rich.  Not knowing where the closest Hong Kong Jockey Club (HKJC) is, I was hoping to find a list of HKJC branches on its website.  I went to their website, and here what it looks like:

At my first thought, the address would be located under contact us.  Nope.  There is just form to fill out.

Well, I thought it would be somewhere inside the site map.  I clicked on it, and I was greeted with this long list.

Wow.  Not only this is long, it also confused me.  After 10 minutes, I gave up.

Lesson learned:  Build a clean and well-structured website to keep your conversion rate up.  Web design is important for Internet marketing and time must be spent to design it well.

Have you guys experienced this before?