It’s finally done. After months of work, design, development and programming, it’s finally done. Santa Maria College is finally live!
For those who don’t know, Santa Maria College is a prestige School located in Attadale in Perth Western Australia.
I’ve spent many hours designing the site and it uses the Joomla CMS interface. It’s one of my best works and I’m very proud of it.
Check out the site here:
http://www.santamaria.wa.edu.au
Judeth Wilson is a famous world class speaker who regularly travels the world and has also appeared on Channel 7 the Morning Show. Judeth is the owner of the successful company called “Upfront Communications” (http://www.upfrontcommunications.com.au) which trains companies and staff on increasing people’s potential. She is also known as the Millionaire Maker in Australia and speaks professionally in Seminars and numerous events. She is also happily married and currently living in New South Wales.
I’ve been working with Judeth for the past few months and I would like to say that she is extremely down to earth, very easy to work with, organized and business savvy. She has coached me with a lot of business strategies mainly in the areas of speaking and has definitely helped put money in my pocket just by critiquing my presentations and offering her wisdom. I’m also very fortunate to receive a great video testimonial from her below:
I highly recommend having Judeth Wilson on your team if you’re serious about increasing your wealth and potential. You can find out more information about her on the following site:
Yesterday I met with a client who owns a successful website that promotes books online. He regularly recieves emails from famous book authors over the world in appreciation of reviewing their books. His website is www.readingbooks-4fun.com.
I met with Pete Ryan to help him setup and market his website more effectively using various search engine optimisation techniques and marketing strategies.
As a result, Pete kindly recorded this video testimonial for me.
Thanks Pete!
Whenever you are building a website, there are certain parts of a webpage that will give you the most effective result.
A recent study was conducted that analysed over 500 people’s eye movements whenever the person would view a web site. What they did was they presented a typical two column website that contained content and a few pictures. As a result of 500 tests and infrared anaylsis, they found that people’s eye movements usually go from left to right and then scan downwards.
People usually scan a web page … not read the entire web page in one go.
So what can do you to take advantage of this? It’s important to place all of your most important assets near the top of the web page and a few going down. So take for example, the goal of your website is for them to contact you. You can place a small contact banner or form near the top of every web page, by doing this, people are highly guaranteed to click on your contact form.
Think about your most favourite website? How do they place their content? Is it full of content with no pictures? or do they sprinkle the content and make it easy for you to read? You will find that most News websites, they have good positioning of their news, pictures and content.
People these days are very busy and don’t have time to digest alot of information. Always keep this in mind when presenting your site to the audience.
Now this one is a biggie. Before I explain to you what constitutes effective website branding, let me ask you a question:
What colours do you see when you think of:
Now close your eyes for a moment and see those colours that belong to those brands.
What you just saw in your mind is worth hundreds of millions of dollars in a split second. Those companies spend millions of dollars to get you to remember those colours and their brand.
The reason why branding is so important is because it sets you apart from everyone else. It defines YOU, it makes YOU rememberable and it sells YOU. That’s it!
Lets say you build a website and your main choice in colours is green. Now lets say you build a product and make it red. If people see your product and go to your website, they become slightly confused about you. This also applies to your style and design of your products.
For example, Apple. Think of all of their products and how their design and colours are very similar to each other. Yes, they change colours on their iPods but their design is the same, with slight variations to their iPod collection.
When you spend years building your brand, people come to remember you and respect you in your industry. Eventually, your brand becomes a quality standard and people will pay alot for it and your competitors can’t steal it from you (well, not that I am aware of these days)
Think of Bill Gates, how he dresses, notice how strikingly consistent he wears his clothes. This is no accident, your style, your website brand, your choice in colours is what defines you. People want you. What about the Harry Potter books, a book series that maintain the same brand, how else can you identify it with? What if there was one Harry Potter book that had the correct title but different font, different positioning, different wording and style, this would confuse you. You may begin to think “what’s going on here?” and JK Rowling may begin to loose a fan…. millions more were that came from tho!
If you’re just starting out in the buiness world, it’s worth the effort to focus some attention on what choice of colours you are comfortable with to brand your products and services.
If you brand your website effectively enough, your brand will have it’s place amoungst the many other companies who spend millions to sit in the mind of others.
When you’re designing a website, there is a lot of things you must consider before taking that big step into the online world. Whether you’re building a website yourself or hiring a web designer to do it, you must first do some homework first.
It’s like building a house. Firstly, you must work out where your ideal location would be, how big the house would be, 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom, backyard, front yard etc. This also relates to building a website in order to be successful online.
The first step you make take is to ask yourself “What is the goal of my website?” Is it to demonstrate your services or products? Is it to simply get your business on the web so you can showcase it to your clients? Do you want to sell products through it? Do you want to use it as a backend to your businesses? Do you just want to make more money with your website? These are some of the questions you should be asking yourself when you’re starting to design a website.
Your answers may vary. When you begin to ask these questions, you get a clear understanding of what result you should expect when you finish building it.
For example, lets say that the goal of your website is to simply showcase your portfolio so people can get a better understanding of what you do. A great design for this website would include more focused information about you, about your attributes and photos about you. The next step is, picture your ideal visitor going to your website. What age group are they in? Are they married, single, corporate, unemployed, income ranging between 30k - 40k, 100k - 200k etc.
Once you figure out the goal of your website, you can match your website design to suit with the type of category of people you want to target. For example, your portfolio website would be showcasing you and you want to target the corporate market. Corporate markets are very business oriented and have stable incomes, they are exposed to alot of business terminology and also maintain a very professional standard.
So now you’re armed with better information and now you can begin designing your website. If you want to appeal to the corporate market, you will need to design a site that is professional looking, incorporating business elements, photos of people in suits, office environments and meeting rooms. Your website copy should incorporate professional language not slang or inappropriate phrases that may offend business oriented people. If you’re unsure of what the business oriented environment is like and you need to appeal to them, you will need to do further home work and research that type of environment.
Dan Kennedy calls this matching the right message to the right market using the right medium. Remember your not designing a website for you, you’re designing it for everyone else, what you think of your website is not important, it’s the visitors that are the ones who are going to be giving you the results you want.
With just a bit of due diligence and homework, your new home will be built on solid foundations and not on unstable ground.