Some of us can visit a car dealership online and in person, find a car to fall in love with, and drive it off the lot after providing all the needed info and signing the documentation.

Others may find something they like at the dealership but not get the features or color they want. They have their car special ordered from the factory so it’s just what they want.

Still others will buy the make and model they want and then get to work customizing the body, motor, suspension, wheels, lights, etc. until they build the “hotrod” they’re happy with for all it’s customized look, feel and performance.

There you have an automobile analogy to sum up the different ways website clients go about designing new sites.

Some websites come together quickly, such as when clients articulate their design preferences, have written page content and provide an image library ahead of time. They see their new site design and are excited to launch it.

Other client sites take some time to fine tune a few of the design elements, write new or additional content and gather images.

Finally, some clients will buy a web design as a basic shell and customize it from header to footer and margin to margin, clarifying their message and evolving their brand in the process.

In the end, all these clients get what they want and the latter two ways add progressively more time to the process, and oftentimes more money. That’s reasonable to expect and completely okay. A good web design company will communicate up front what post-approval changes and add-ons cost, and improving the user experience is usually well worth the extra development work.

What kind of website client are you?

Choose an agency or designer who will accommodate your style – ideally one that works well with diverse client types. That way, you’ll work with someone well accustomed to how you like to be treated as a customer.

That’s how Chuck Sink Link works with each individual client. We have experience serving so many different professionals over the years that we know how to listen, understand and accommodate practically everyone.

So whatever your work style and web design preferences, feel free to speak with us and get an estimate for your next website project. We’ll ask the right questions and provide what you need for a sound decision and ultimately the best results.

The post Website Design – Realistic Expectations for Unique Clients appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Startups build brand strategies into their business plans. Established companies review their brand strategy every few years and if needed, retool and rebrand to suit changing markets. It should be obvious that branding is an essential element in any successful business plan.

Some may think of branding as a time-consuming exercise and added cost on top of already expensive marketing programs. When talking about traditional branding strategies, they’re right!

Did you know…?

You can save time and money on branding while making your brand stronger at the same time.

Project-Integrated Branding

Branding is an effort that can be blended with a concrete initiative such as a new business card, brochure, ad campaign or website design. This makes sense because you can see the brand come alive in its first execution, even in the development phase.

Branding is included!

If your website designer happens to be a trained and highly experienced brand strategist, then maybe you could expect branding or rebranding to be included in your web design project. Your branding strategy can be naturally integrated into the process rather than extra work added on to the job. This happens to be one of our firm’s key differentiators.

We designed a new brand concept concurrently with a website project for a Massachusetts retailer & distributor. By integrating this creative work, the client saved a ton of time and money while launching an entirely new, fresh and lively brand that’s growing and has become quite popular in the local market.

If your brand identity is drab or outdated, we will help you improve its look and feel as well as its relevancy in any project we touch.

Is It Time for Rebranding?

Do you own or manage a small business? Does it make sense to hire a branding agency when you can work with a senior brand strategist in the design and launch of a new marketing piece?

More Branding Success Examples

• How about a refreshed brand identity without paying for an expensive branding strategy? This client just got one and loves it! Click to experience their brand powered on!
• Another client never asked for a brand strategy but did indeed rebrand their company just by hiring us to design business cards, truck signage and a new website.
• And for another client, a new website design project morphed their brand into a completely refreshed image and identity in all of their other marketing communications.
• We transformed a CPA’s brand from “bookkeeper & tax preparer” to “trusted CPA and business advisor” with a new website. The client described her experience this way: “Thanks for coordinating the website. It is by far the best one I’ve ever had, and it sends the right message about what my business is all about.”

Does your business look, sound and feel the way you want it to? Want to feel great about your brand? Project-integrated branding might be ideal.

Redesign your website, brochure or ad for the price you would expect to pay and you will receive a professional brand strategy review and upgrade free.

Click to get started! Or, just call 603-345-7223 to talk with a senior brand strategist and design expert.

The post Get a premium brand identity without “branding!” appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Every online platform except for one can modify, add to, or even ban your company messages. Your brand can be all over the place; Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Google, YouTube, directories, blogs, guest landing pages, etc.

You can maximize your presence in all these online media and the brand experience visitors have will be limited and in many cases disappointing. Why? Because these spaces don’t belong to you and you are being used by them, not the other way around!

The hard truth of social media marketing: Your company information and, very likely, personal employee information are actually the product of social media companies, sold through advertising to other marketers. Your data (which is cumulatively collected with each login) belongs to them as much as it belongs to you. And if you want more than 5 or 6 people to see your posts, you must pay to have it distributed, even to your own friends, followers and connections!

So where is this one place on the Internet that you control completely? Hopefully, it’s the one in which you invest the most time and money – Your Website.

Your own Company Website gets top priority in all matters concerning online marketing. You can totally customize the experience for your specific target audiences. Social platforms, search engines and other channels are fine for distributing Your Website content, but they are not where your brand resides. Metaphorically, you should be entertaining your customers right inside your Home rather than having a quick chat inside a Starbucks.

Content Marketing at Work

I suggest getting busy writing about how you solve specific problems better than your competition. Take pictures and shoot video! At a minimum, hunt down some appropriate stock images for your campaign messages (just know how to choose them).

My company website has been producing higher quality leads in recent months following a content marketing campaign that resides, guess where?  Right where your eyes are focused now. This blog.

Questions? Ask a content marketing expert at
Chuck Sink Link.

The post Online User Experience: How much do you control? appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

The more thinking and engineering that go into technology, products and services, the better they will perform (or be perceived to perform). But when it comes to marketing, sophistication and complexity muddy up your messages.

If you have an important message to convey, keep it simple, even if there are nuances. Why? Because the rest of us are mostly babes in the woods. Remember that only you think exactly the way you do and can perfectly connect your own dots. Your job is to simplify it all for the rest of us!

What about the nuances that really differentiate us, you might ask? If nuance is what differentiates your product or service, then your messages should be all about nuance. If a unique aspect of your business must be fully understood by your audience for them to take action, make it the primary message.

If complex, build your message in stages.

Be prepared to articulate every granular detail of your value delivery but save those details until your audience wants or needs to know them.

A Simple 4-Step Approach

If you need to make your message understandable and actionable, there’s a methodology you can use called AIDA (Attention – Interest – Desire – Action). To apply AIDA in your marketing messages and throughout your selling process, take your prospect through these communication stages:

Attention – Make your audience notice and listen. Make a bold, singular promise.

Interest – Once listening, build interest in how you will enrich your customer. Reveal some key features that will help them. You can further differentiate your offering with nuance and sophistication as long as your prospect wants to remain engaged. This is really the make or break stage because interest can be lost as quickly as gained. You must move them into wanting your product, or there’s no sale.

Desire – One way to know if your prospect has reached the “desire” stage is by the questions they ask. If the questions focus on recommended service levels, budget ranges, or what implementation involves, you and your prospect have reached the closing stage of the sale and are ready for…

ACTION – Unless your message is acted upon, why bother with branding, great web design and advertising? Why have salespeople? Your calls to action can be anything from e-commerce or contact links on your website to full-blown contract negotiations, depending on what you’re selling.

It’s best to hold your most sophisticated or complex product/service benefits for when you may need them, such as convincing a senior engineering team that your technology is superior. Give them the building blocks to decide for themselves.

Provide the Navigation

In marketing, the complex features do belong somewhere on your website with a clear navigation path. If your home and landing pages have a strong primary message, your visitors will go deeper to learn what they need to know, and hopefully place an order or call you with questions.

Content is gold.

You have limited mind space and attention spans to work with. Avoid muddying the water by keeping your initial marketing message simple. A powerful first impression can set the ball rolling from attention to ACTION faster than you expect.

The post Keep marketing simple! appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Great marketing design, whether digital, print or environmental, has one thing in common. For your marketing messages to be effective, all you really need to start with is this one thing. Without it, people will gloss over your web pages, eblasts, brochures social posts and ads without caring whether your message registers in their mind or not.

But you care!

You can put a ton of effort into writing your messages but you need the key supporting element to give them enough life to make people stop and interact – to engage or be called to act. Your brand needs this desperately and so does mine; bright, high quality, high-resolution visuals – Photographs and Videos!

Through the eyes is where most marketing magic happens. So it doesn’t help when you cut corners on photography and video production.

Impressive cameras on phones are a blessing and a curse to marketers. While you can sometimes capture a great image just by pointing and shooting, people become convinced that they’re great at DIY photography. As they scroll through nice photos they took on vacation or out on a walk, they think they can shoot pictures of their location, people and products for their website. The odds are very low that you’ll get anything truly marketable with an impromptu session using your phone.

Caught you looking!

Now you know this is true about pictures. When you “see what you’re looking for” what do you do? The right image tells a story in proper context within the viewer’s mind. When you are perusing anything, it’s the most striking and high-quality images that arrest your attention; make you stop, look and pique your interest.

One of the fundamental reasons that iconic brands are successful is they take their image seriously and they execute visuals with consistency. You’ll notice how leading companies that you can immediately recognize, whether local, national, B2B or consumer, all invest in creating great looking images and they produce them professionally across all media.

The Social Classroom

The quality photography phenomenon is demonstrated over and over in Social Media. I was recently trying to figure out why a self-promotion post on LinkedIn got so much more interaction than most of my other “interesting” stuff. Then it hit me. It was the beautiful picture. That is all. The link content wasn’t really all that impressive so I’m convinced that people just liked the photo, so they hit the like and share buttons. Social metrics always prove that pictures and videos draw!

About 5 years ago on Facebook, I shared a beautiful bed image with a giveaway promotion for a furniture store client. It went viral! The Facebook Page went from just over 200 Likes to over 20,000 Likes within 2 weeks. To this day, they enjoy a very large Facebook following originating from the impact of one high-quality photo!

If you must do this…

When you decide to go Do-It-Yourself with website and promotional photography, take the time on every snap to be happy with what you see on the screen. Shoot each subject at various angles and keep lighting bright (or focused) and above as well as behind you. Sometimes a good designer can work with non-professional photography as long as it has high resolution. Zooming and cropping can be beneficial here.

Do you want your website or print designer to wow you? Provide excellent photography and graphics or else let them help direct a professional photo shoot. The best way to distinguish your brand in website and marketing design is to start with high-quality visuals.

Remember that video adds another dimension and it’s just as important to keep video production value up to your audiences’ expectations. For more about implementing video in your marketing, click here.

If you don’t have a big photography budget and you still need a great website design, have no worries. There is a superior approach to website design that creates an excellent user experience even if your graphics and photo assets are limited. Read about this extremely cost-effective approach.

We’ll close with a sincere wish to you and everyone in this audience: Thank you for reading this post about photography. I hope your day started out pretty as a picture and ends in a photo finish!

The post Your Website’s Hook and Anchor appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Whenever you hear or read the phrase, “marketing best practices” think of it as a series of tactics that have worked well for a collection of businesses at a recent point in time in a specific industry.

In my own industry, digital marketing, I’ve been seeing a saturation of self-marketing that looks dangerously similar among competing firms. It tends to focus on selling a defined process that includes Web Design, SEO, SEM, Social Media, Email and lead generation/sales funnels. The very same process tends to be applied to very different companies so effectiveness varies from one client to another.

I recently made the mistake of referring to my company’s approach to website development as a “best practice.” While we can be the best website services choice for many businesses, calling ours the “best practice” excludes too many other possibilities influenced by dynamic marketing factors such as vertical industries, culture, demographics, technologies, innovations and trends.

Coming full circle, this is why I love our own approach to website design, development and maintenance. It lets those who know their markets best (our clients) better control the messages and their targeted online distribution.

Best-for-Brand Practice

It would probably be better to call our web development methodology a “best-for-brand practice.” Your website should be designed and maintained around your brand – your audience preferences and their preferred business style. It’s all based on user experience (UX).

Does every business want their website to function as a lead generation machine or a sales funnel? Clearly, the answer is no, yet so many digital marketing agencies seem to push this model as THE best practice in online marketing.

Before you decide on the best-for-brand website development approach for your own company, ask some basic sales questions:

• Are you selective concerning the new customers your firm wants to attract?
• Do you want qualified leads to call your phone number so you can better guide them?
• Do customers require product demos with multi-phase sales cycles?
• Is your product or service easy to order online?
• Should prospects download your content and subscribe to news & events? Why?
• Are you looking for more Social Media interaction? How will that help you?
• Do you need a steady stream of inbound leads to keep an inside sales team busy and productive?

Each of these and other sales & service needs can benefit from a strategically compatible website design and maintenance plan that caters to audience preferences. Our advice is to carefully consider the nuances that make your brand and customer experience one-of-a-kind and design a customized User Experience around it.

If now or in the future, you are thinking about your company’s next move regarding its website, we invite you to our new Website Services Page to learn about a fresh air approach to managing your website and online marketing campaigns.

The post Online Marketing Best Practices: What’s Best for You? appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Responsible executives are accountable to shareholders, employees and other constituents, so they apply due diligence in choosing the right website partner, at a price that’s fair and for which they can expect a reasonable ROI.

Building a website that makes money needs to be within your budget reach. The question becomes, how can you accurately communicate everything your site needs to function and perform at a level that serves your visitors and drives revenues – within the cost range that you can strategically allocate? Answering that question requires that you answer a number of other important questions in the right order.

Your agency/web designer/developer will never understand the complexities of your business like you do, and conversely, you probably don’t understand some if the intricacies of UI and UX design or technical back-end development as well as your experienced web design partner.

Rarely does a single party direct strategy, create content and implement production alone and get everything right. High performance web designs require team cooperation and accurate, timely communications. Now when both teams get on the same page with a common goal and start working together, a little magic happens. Client and agency/developer are on the same project team. Mutually assured success becomes the only option for every member on both the client side and agency/developer side. Great work comes out of this arrangement, so how can you best assure that everyone on your web project team cooperates and performs at this high level and stays within the budget? Apply the “4 C’s.”

The 4 C’s of Project Management: Contacts. Clarity. Completeness. Continuity.

As we go through our punch list below of the Top 10 Web Project Team Attributes, you’ll recognize that the “4 C’s of Project Management” are present in every item on the list. Notice how we’re dealing with Contacts (people), Clarity (accuracy of information), Completeness (thoroughness of details) and Continuity (current functionality > future growth > scalability). Communication is the big C word that is really the key to project success.

How well do the involved parties communicate? High performance websites (or any other successful vendor-enabled projects) are the result of great collaborations between partnering organizations.

Here’s the “Top 10” list of Web Project Team Attributes you need to get right from the start:

1. Project leadership is established and respected by all team members.
2. Project goals are clearly defined.
3. Team member roles remain clear throughout project duration.
4. All strategic & production related communications are recorded and indexed.
5. All project assets & files are inventoried and labeled clearly.
6. Primary & secondary target audiences are known and understood.
7. Design concepts include branding, content strategy, promotions and calls to action.
8. Technical specifications align with site usability requirements.
9. The design and user interface are adaptable to growing user needs.
10. The work scope and budget are determined and agreed upon.

This list covers what most website owners need in order to build an effective site and compete online today. So at what point should you start planning this information-gathering and workflow process for your website’s development? The short answer is yesterday!

A consultant or manager with strong project management skills adds significant value to the end website product. How? He or she can fully envision the broad scope of the project and coordinate strategy, creative concepts, content and technical development downstream to all the right team members according to skill sets, managed expectations and clear directives. People working on the same page deliver better ROI results for the specified budget.

The post Website Project Management – Keys to Collaboration appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

There’s nothing wrong with any of the steps taken in this scenario but there’s a vital ingredient missing which often leads to client disappointment. Being focused on graphic design and showing something artistically pleasing, web designers will rush off to design a website without client-reviewed content, save perhaps an established tagline and some corporate identity. Let’s take the simple example of a coffee shop. In all the zones where the right words are needed to convey your precise message, you see something like this…

Image source: hilecreative.com

Now, you the client are expected to fall in love with the colors & visuals, approve the “look and feel” and begin the hard work of replacing the meaningless “Lorem Ipsum” placeholder text with your own expertly written, compelling messages so the designer can develop a functional website.

The ball is in your court and the process is stalled. 

You may not even like the initial design visual because the verbal messages for the website were glossed over and not provided for in your meeting. The designer’s incomplete understanding of your business and brand identity can result in a design do-over with frustration on both sides.

Do you have time to write your entire website – headlines, storytelling and bullet points – or would you expect your agency/designer to help produce a strong message in both words and visuals… at a minimum, something to kick start the process with the initial design comps?

You may wonder at this point why the website design process isn’t better defined – particularly in the small business arena. Small web boutiques and freelance designers often struggle with the content provision aspect of web design during the early development stage, instead relying on their clients to come up with it.

Need a good web designer? Ask a content specialist!

Great web development firms apply consistent processes and systems to their clients’ projects which includes specifying responsibility for launch-ready content. This manages both expectations and workflows. But for many small businesses, affording the top tier services of such firms can be an issue.

There’s an alternative web design approach that allows small businesses to work with talented web design pros combined with the creative direction and business acumen you find at elite marketing agencies.

You begin your design process with content. 

A website design that begins with the actual words and messages that it will ultimately display, rather than a bunch of placeholder gibberish, is starting out much more true to the brand. When you see the words and images working together from the get go, you will be further on your way to approving the design, completing development and launching the website. Editing text and images here and there on a live website can be done on the fly.

Finalizing the design becomes enjoyable as you see it all come together in a beautiful and fully functioning website. You cannot wait for your customers and the public to see it, engage with it and act on it’s messages.

The post Reverse engineer your website design appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.