www.golftravel.co.za

We are pleased to have launched a new website www.golftravel.co.za for the Golf Travel Company.

The Golf Travel Company specialises in outbound Golf Tours to various destinations around the world, from St Andrews in Scotland, through to less known destination such as Egypt and Turkey.

Macadams International Website Launch

We are pleased to have successfully launched the Macadams International website this week. The site has been performing extremely well so far with  visitors from over 38 countries visiting the website within the first 3 days of the launch. 

Please visit the new website at www.macadams.co.za

Finding Unique Ways to Connect with your Target Market.

The Internet presents endless opportunities to grow businesses. While some enterprises are clearly better suited for online business than others, I am a firm believer that any business can use the web to generate more business.

Building a website is really the starting point for capitalising on online business. To make a successful initiative, it requires a well constructed and managed marketing campaign. This involves the development of an online marketing campaign and the possibility of merging the campaign with some real world marketing.

But what really makes some sites more successful than others is the ability to present your products to customers in an innovative and problem solving format.

Identify your target market and try determine an effective and unique way of connecting with them.

A successful example of this approach was implemented by a popular stationery company in the United States. They realised that one of the greatest barriers for an employee ordering new stationery was the administrative hassle factor of obtaining the necessary internal approvals. To simplify the ordering process the stationery company designed an online system that allowed an employee to login to a website and order any stationery that they require. The smart bit being that as soon as their order was placed, the system automatically requested all the internal approvals from the various departments within the company before finalising the order. No Hassle or Fuss.

Besides the ease of ordering, the system was so effective that the stationery provider become the de facto supplier for most companies set-up on the system. Why? Because ordering with any other company just seemed too lengthily and complicated. Not only had they successfully created a new mechanism for ordering but they secured their relationship with their clients.

Web Design: Understanding Your Clients Customers

How various businesses connect with new customers in a sector is a fascinating subject and something I find myself discussing at almost every opportunity with business owners. While I am often a little surprised by the first results, they are all consistently obvious after some short analysis. Typical Hindsight Clarity!

Since my experience is mostly in Real Estate I can provide an example here. While almost all brokers, leasing agents or developers have websites to provide details on the properties they offer, typically over 70 % of enquiries that they receive are generated from “For Sale “or “To Let” signage on properties.

Why? Because it is very difficult for a website to compete with buyers' natural senses (Sight, Smell & Touch specifically) and of course that unbiased neighbourhood information they obtain by driving through an area.

So why mention this on a website development blog? I see it as an illustration of the importance of understanding buyer behaviour in a particular industry when creating websites that service a sector. In my opinion, a website should be built to support existing buyer behaviour as opposed to trying to revolutionize an industry with a complete rethink on how buyers and sellers could interact. Generally this approach has a far higher success rate, without discounting the importance of business model innovation.

To illustrate the point, websites are typically used by Estate Agents as a medium for communicating details on a property which would not be economically viable to include in a newspaper advertisement, or which is not practical to include on a signboard. This information could typically include the building plans, lease terms, zoning issues etc. This enables agents to direct potential buyers to a website where all the applicable information is presented in a structured format.

Understanding industry buyer behaviour is a natural role for a business owner. Being able to extract that wealth of information and utilize it to construct an effective website solution is the role of a good website developer.

Submitted on behalf of Nicholas Maunder

SEO: Balancing Quality Content with Keyword Density.

Writing website copy is one of the more strenuous processes for many entrepreneurs preparing to launch a website. As anyone with a little SEO knowledge should know, mentioning your selected keywords throughout the content (referred to as keyword density) is very important to ensure that you achieve a decent SERP (Search Engine Results Page) positioning.

So how does one maintain the quality of ones content while ensuring maximum exposure of ones keywords?

While many websites have strong keyword densities throughout their content, many webmasters seem very comfortable to trade off all those traditional copywriting principles qualities such as “Readability” and “Content Flow” for repetitive nonsensical keyword placement. I think this a awful approach to SEO!

It is often forgotten that we actually need to convert each website visitor into a buyer through persuasive content, which will reassure visitors that you are a reputable company, who has the correct product or service for their particular need. Also, writing natural content is much easier than overly keyword rich content, as it deals with issues that are well understood by someone in a particular line of business.

I would not be too concerned if your website keyword densities are slightly lower than your competitor’s website, so long as you offer high quality content which will attract readers who are really interested in what you have to say. I see quality content as being much more successful in driving visitors to your website and in retaining them once there.

This approach is an underlying principle in the Long Tail SEO strategy, (and if you agree with the principle it) is another reason to ensure all your website content is Natural.

How to know if your Website is beating the competition.

The recent launch of the Benchmarking service in Google Analytics is a major step forward in monitoring a website's performance and what I feel to be one of the most significant advancements for business owners in the area of website monitoring.

Ever wondered how your website is performing against the competition? Some of the most common question we are asked include:

1. Is my website successful when compared to others?
2. Are the users staying longer or shorter on my site when compare to my competitors?
3. What are the website users in my industry's normal pattern of behaviour?

These are huge questions with the smallest bit of insight into the answers revealing a great deal. So what is Benchmarking and how does it work in providing me with the answers to these questions?

Benchmarking is a feature which forms part of the Googles Analytics product. Analytics is a free service offered by Google to monitor your website traffic, and is by far one of the most powerful website traffic monitoring tools on the web today. Besides providing vast amounts of data on your users, when linked with other free Google products, the service becomes an very effective website performance evaluation tool. More information on analytics can be found on Wikipedia.

So what is Benchmarking?

Through the broad adoption of Analytics across various industry sectors, Google has been able to create the Benchmarking service which aims to share analytics data between website owners. Website owners have an opt in option to join the Analytics data sharing service which will add your website performance patterns in Analytics to the benchmark service. "Google will remove all identifiable information about your website, then combine that data with hundreds of other anonymous sites in comparable industries and report them in an aggregate form". Once opted in, you will have access to the benchmarking service which will provide you with industry yard sticks such as Length of Visits, Bounce Rate, Number of Page Views, Average time on set and New Visits.

In each instance the service will be able to tell you if you are ahead or behind in each metric. I have listed two examples from unrelated sites to demonstrate the end results.

A Poor Performance.

A Strong Showing.

These metrics are extremely powerful and although they provide some insight into the working of your site, interpreting the data is what will make the benchmark service valuable. Each website still has its own unique circumstance and this point should not be lost when reviewing the performance metrics.

Benchmarking was launch about 4 weeks ago and I believe that it will become a widely discussed topic on the web in the next few months. The biggest concern that any website owner and operator is whether anonymously sharing their performance data with a particular sector might be detrimental to their website in the long term. I am of the opinion that it would not, although with the service only being a few weeks old there is plenty of time for debate. Let's see how things unfold.

New Client | Fractional Places

Fractional Places is a Cape Town based company focused on developing and promoting fractional ownership property in South Africa.

Fractional Places offers fractional ownership products in the Western Cape with the intention of launching offshore projects within the first 6 months of launching the new website.

The website will showcase their fractional ownership portfolio and include a few unique features which we will reveal shortly. We look forward to the launch of the new website within the next few weeks (which will be viewable at http://www.fractionalplaces.com/) and wish them great success with their new projects.

Tanya