Web Design & Programming
This is no small matter. Your site is the face and voice of your company on the internet. How you look, what you say and especially…how your site works…are more important than ever. Think of your website as your very best sales person.
Smart, creative web design and programming are among the ways we help our clients reach, attract, and persuade their audiences to do business with them and to buy their products and services.
Good creative web design is simply good marketing. It’s a powerful way to make a positive impression on your customers and prospects. When done well, creative design propels your marketing efforts… enhances your image…and generates awareness. Most of all, good creative design helps sell… your product…your services…your company.
Really effective website design and programming goes beyond how a website looks. It’s the face of your company on the internet…and it’s also how you talk to customers…and how they talk to you. Your website should be the best-trained salesperson you can imagine…ready to sell, ready to answer questions…ready to take orders.
What are the important elements?
If people cannot navigate throughout your website, they may quickly leave.
Designing effective navigation on your Web site is critically important.
Information
What needs to be on your site? More importantly perhaps, what will visitors expect to find or hope to find? Before you start to plan your navigation, you need to identify your site's information content.
Content
The content should be clear, easy-to-read and familiar to your visitors. Good content, including the integration of search-friendly keywords, can help you with your efforts in search engine marketing.
Organization
Once you've determined your site architecture, you need to decide how to organize it. Think about how your customers might wander through it. You want to encourage your visitors to use the site.
Navigation Design
Once you have an idea of the information you want to display and the organization, you're ready to think about the design of the navigation. There are several things you should consider in deciding on your navigation design:
- Make it accessible. The navigation of your site is possibly the most important part of any given page.
- Make it meaningful. K eep your navigation meaningful. Someone who has never been to your site before should know immediately where they are and where the links will take them.
- Make it understandable. If you want to use images for your navigation, make sure that there is some text associated with them.
- Make it prevalent. Your navigation should appear on every page of your site so that clients can browse easily among the subjects that interest them.
Graphics
Photos and graphic elements can enhance your website. But the opposite is also true. A bad photo or image on your website, whether it's a logo, a product photo, or poorly designed graphics, can undermine your site's credibility leading to lost customers and sales.
E-tools
Utilize user-friendly e-tools that help visitors. Include a keyword search tool that enables them to search your site for anything that interests them. Build a shopping cart that makes it easy for them to buy from you. Use display modules to show products and highlight those that are new or featured. Consider Flash animation and video players to show product demonstrations and operations.
Visit these websites to see these principles in practice:
- Continental Press, Lancaster County, PA
- Diamond Credit Union, Berks County, PA
- Heartland Settlement Company, Berks County, PA
- Imageworks Film and Video, Berks County, PA
- Lehigh Coal & Navigation, Schuylkill County, PA
- Precision Realty Group, Philadelphia, PA
- Surplus Shed, Berks County, PA
- Trypillian Village, Berks County, PA
Manage Your Own Website Content...and More
February 27, 2009
You can manage your own website. No programming, no technical know-how required. Today, there are user-friendly tools that enable you to control your website simply and efficiently based on your needs, not your technical know-how.
In the past, web development typically required a specialty skill set with a fairly complex knowledge of programming and a variety of other technological capabilities. That’s why most businesses turn to a web development company to design and often maintain their website. Plus, many businesses may not have an internal web development staff member who can constantly be tweaking and keeping your website up-to-date.
The Alternative
There is, however, a solution that alleviates the need to hire an internal web development employee, or pay outsourced developers to continuously update your website content. The solution comes from initially designing the website in a way that allows it to be updated using a self-managed, web-based administration tool. The design of this tool needs to be simple enough so that anyone with the most basic knowledge of a computer and an internet browser can update all relevant content on the website from anywhere in the world with an internet connection.
At Tower Marketing, the Content Management tool is called Maestro. With Maestro, Tower’s clients can control anything they choose: from product inventory and customer accounts, to e-mail newsletters and image galleries. And they can instantly add, delete, and modify information on their site from home the office, or on the road.
Payback and ROI
The payback on a tool like Maestro can begin once you establish the fact that you've got the wrong kind of website in place and it needs to be replaced by a more efficient site with self-administration tools. The up-front cost of deploying a website designed in a way that enables in-house editing is a more costly endeavor initially than designing a stagnant site that will require costly developer-intensive updates down the road. It takes more thought and initial work to develop a web-product of this caliber.
But the lifetime of the site will be greatly extended by this approach and the long-term costs can be dramatically less than the standard developer-maintained model now widely being employed by small to mid-size companies.
A system like Maestro, combining efficiencies and cost-effectiveness, leads to a very significant return-on-investment.
What About the Future?
This isn’t the end of web developers. There's a good chance that a developer will be needed to fix a feature that may not be working as intended or as well as one might like.
More significantly, once clients see the potential of what their website can do, they often ask for more and more features to extend the functionality of their already powerful back-end management tool. The excitement over at last gaining control over one's own website is nearly universal.
Tower offers several products that interface with Maestro to make client control over their website even more powerful and effective.
Newscaster is an online newsletter tool that lets companies communicate with their customers as often as they wish. Because it’s a self-administration tool companies can create as many e-mail campaigns, send as many newsletters and add as many contacts as they choose.
Shopkeeper is an e-commerce administration tool that enables a client to self-manage an online store from processing safe, secure purchases, to maintaining inventory, to managing fulfillment, returns and customer service.
Pagecreator is an online page creation tool that enables users to quickly and easily transform any online database of products and services into a catalog, book or print-ready file in a fraction of normal production time. Using this tool, clients choose what products and services to include; add photos, highlights and specials; and even customize pages.
With the advent of powerful content management tools like Maestro, the days of the static website...and the frustrations, delays, and costs of outsourcing updates are gone. The future for many businesses is a content management system that’s as easy to use as shopping online.
Tower Marketing is a central Pennsylvania advertising agency and web design firm specializing in traditional and interactive advertising, graphic design and marketing while providing services to clients in Lancaster, Reading, Harrisburg, York and Lebanon, as well as Philadelphia and its surrounding counties in the Delaware Valley and Tri-State area.
Tower offers smart, creative approaches to all forms of marketing communications
ranging among traditional methods such as advertising, printed materials and sales promotion and extending to interactive strategies for web design, development, content management, e-commerce and online marketing.
Website is a Marketing Advantage in Philadelphia Commercial Real Estate
October 14, 2007
Precision Realty Group (PRG) is a full-service commercial real estate brokerage firm headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. National in scope, PRG handles a significant number of transactions in eastern Pennsylvania and throughout the Delaware Valley and the Tri-State area.
PRG wanted a web design from Tower Marketing that would promote PRG as the area’s most aggressive broker offering a high level of professionalism and expertise in assisting developers and investors in the acquisition and disposal of real estate. The tone of the website was intended to assure clients that PRG offers them maximum value from each real estate transaction.
Tower Marketing is a central Pennsylvania advertising agency and web design firm specializing in traditional and interactive advertising, graphic design and marketing while providing services to clients in Lancaster, Reading, Harrisburg, York and Lebanon, as well as Philadelphia and its surrounding counties in the Delaware Valley and Tri-State area.
Tower offers smart, creative approaches to all forms of marketing communications ranging among traditional methods such as advertising, printed materials and sales promotion and extending to interactive strategies for web design, development, content management, e-commerce and online marketing.
