Unfortunately, our topic of the day is not Fergie’s really awesome song about how she is still keeping it real after all of the bling-bling and fame-fame. The subject of the day is style and design concepts for your website. What is too much and what is not enough?

What type of design should you use? Artistic, plain, flashy or even, um, glamorous? A complicated decision, no doubt, but fortunately for you, we can come up with the right mix based on a few key concepts from your targeted audience. Let’s break down some of these more commonly targeted classes and see what fits your business model. Ultimately, as we always say, it’s your website. In the end, though, what matters more: Pleasing your tastes or the people who visit your site?

Business to Business – Most business-to-business websites should be clean-cut and professional to a large degree. When you are catering to a business, your users want easy-to-find informational pages without going through a montage of collapsible pages, pop-up ads and large graphics that download at a glacial pace. More than the average consumer, business put a lot more thought into who they are going to do business with. Therefore, it is best not to try and blind them with fancy ads and words. Rather, provide them with the information they seek, and you are most likely to see a better return on your traffic.

Online Consumers – Online consumer sites can afford a little more glitz and glam than the average B2B site. However, your user range is far more diverse, including types of PCs used and connection speeds of those users. So, if you go too far on the flashy side, you are going to hamper the site usability for a large portion of your users. Not a great idea in such a highly competitive arena, where the war of attrition, in terms of conversions, is a battle you have to win. Try focusing on a user-friendly, graphically appealing yet theme-friendly design that emphasizes what you sell and do, but does not take away from your products.

Direct Traffic - This refers to the traffic where the users are specifically seeking your website, such as a restaurant, fan site or some other attraction. With this type of website, you are far more likely to have your targeted user narrowed down. This characteristic affords you the opportunity to be more creative and dynamic with your design. Your end goal is to provide users with information while captivating them by highlighting the uniqueness and more robust qualities of your business. This can be accomplished through flash animation design, scrolling colorful pictures and a wide range of other techniques to enhance the user’s experience while on your site.

Whatever your business model, remember design is vital on a variety of different levels, depending on your targeted user. View our design portfolio and see what matches your structure and desires. We’re here to help.

The subject of today’s blog is business names and nomenclature.

We might as well start with ourselves: lifeBLUE Media. Did we pick it because it sounds cool? Well, partly, but also because it has meaning to us, it is marketable and it exemplifies what we do. To its founders, lifeBLUE is about being a leader and setting the standards in the industry. We seek to help shape our client’s visions from daydreams and paper into reality.

So, what are we getting at?

We often hear people remark that a large part of picking their business name is determined by their ability to purchase a website domain. That alone can be a tricky business in this age of domain squatting, like the Sooners in the Oklahoma land rush. If you limit one of the most crucial aspects of your business because of available domain names, you’re probably starting off on the wrong foot.

Your business name should personify some or all of the following: Your particular industry, your business model or your ideals and beliefs. If all else fails, shoot for something that’s simply catchy and marketable. Pick the business name first, and then worry about nailing down a domain name. Luckily, there are plenty of books and websites out there offering expert advice on the intricacies of picking a business name. But, at the same time, let’s not overthink it.

In the end, find something that feels right. It’s your business. At some point, we’re sure someone wondered about the viability of the name “Walmart.” The bottom line is, the staff at lifeBLUE is always willing to give its input based on our significant experience in the web industry, especially when you’re building a new business from the ground up.

That’s the start of one of the most popular questions we’re asked. So, we thought it might be useful to explain some common and relatively simple web marketing words:

Referrals - Referrals are the pathways that bring a user to your site. It is very important to know if your potential customer came from a website where you are ranking for keywords, or if they have come from a link that you have established on someone else’s website.

Hits - Hits are when a web server requests a file be brought to a specific web server. In truth, they’re pretty meaningless. They do not show you how many people actually conduct business on your website. Think of it this way: What’s the point of having 1 million hits on your site if no one does what you want them to do once they arrive?

Page view - This is when a single page has been requested to be loaded by someone visiting a site. On the web, this would happen when a “surfer” clicks on a link that directs them to a certain site. This can be very useful to the owner of the website, because now you can alter site and see if those changes bring back potential customers more often.

Visits - Visits are when a person views all the pages of your website, or when that person has been on your website for a select period of time, usually somewhere around thirty seconds. To go a step further, a unique visit means that you are counting each person who visits your website only once.

Relevance - Relevance is the importance placed on certain words within a website by the search engines, namely keywords, pages and websites. There are three different areas of relevance, according to search engines: Content, keyword and link relevance.

If you are just starting out with a SEO/SEM firm, these are some of the basic keywords you need to know. It’s either that, or keep nodding your head and pretending to know what those Search Enginer Marketers are blabbing about.

The ease of online shopping is becoming ever more efficient for large retailers.

We’re still a bit uncertain about this ever-expanding trend for some items. There will always be some things that require a trip away from the keyboard: Think gas, milk and eggs for starters. Those highly perishable items can’t survive the Ace Ventura version of package delivery.

Yet, we don’t think there is a single business out there that could fail to benefit from selling its products or services online. If nothing else, remember that online shopping can be very impulse-intensive, because of its convenience and non-physical nature. However, the art and science behind operating and conducting an efficient online business entity is not easily achieved.

Online shoppers can be the pickiest of all shoppers, and a good website should cling tightly to this fact. A properly designed website, along with a well managed Internet marketing campaign, are just a few of the many facets to consider when aiming for a piece of that online shopping pie.

Mmmm….Pie! You can even buy those online.

We just covered the importance of having a good SEO-infused Page Title for all of your website pages. But let’s also take a moment and focus on the importance of having a good URL structure to go along with those page titles.

What do we mean when we say, “URL stucture?” Well, simply put, it is the way that the pages of your site are organized and labeled to show up in the address bar of Internet browsers. It is also a key piece of the puzzle that search engines use to crawl and subsquently rank your website.

From the moment you set out to develop a website, you have to think about its structure, from the home page to the products/services pages and down. At lifeBLUE, we always sit down and “map out” each page a website will contain, how those pages are related to one another and what paths both users and the search engines will find desirable. The key is to have a clearly labeled and keyword-rich site architecture that directs everyone along a logical line of progression through the website.

What does that mean for how you should structure your URLs? First, the home page should be labeled “index.htm,” “index.html” or “index.php.” Sitting on your home page, your address bar should not show anything beyond “www.mypage.com.” From there, it’s important to label your main pages and directories as succinctly and as keyword-richly as possible. If you have an “About Us” page and a blog, like most do, label those “about_us.html” and “blog.html.” Or, you can make the blog into its own folder and it will show up as “/blog.”

From there, be sure to group as many things as you can into related folders. If you have a large directory of hats you are selling, the best way to structure that, with SEO in mind, is like this: “www.myhatsite.com/hats/hat1.html” and “www.myhatsite.com/hats/hat2.html.”

Remember: Keep it concise, use keywords and group items into folders. Make your pages logical and navigable for both people and search engines. That will put you one step closer to top rankings.

The simple line of text that lies in between the <title> tag on every web page across the net is probably the most influential, and oft-ignored, factor that contributes to good organic search engine ranking. For all the clients that come through lifeBLUE, it is sometimes astonishing to see how frequently this simple “good web page guideline” tactic has not been implemented. Well, current and future clients, respect the love of the page title.

Google still reigns supreme as the most important search engine to consider in your marketing campaign. It should be no suprise, then, that Google is the engine where page titles have the greatest effect on good rankings. Having a keyword-targeted, unique page title for every single page of your website will help the search engine crawlers to identify and label each page accordingly, while also matching your page with a (hopefully) highly-targeted searcher.

For example, if you have a website that sells health insurance to Dallas-area businesses, labeling your home page with “Dallas Health Insurance Provider - My Company” is a whole lot better than “My Company - Index”. Repeat this concept throughout your website (if you offer specific products that have their own pages, label each page with a unique title) and you will be one step closer to top placement in the SERPs.

As the search engines have evolved to better combat web spammers and to reward websites that provide services or products that are directly related to a searcher’s query, the page title has become a beacon of importance that cannot be overlooked. Just think, as easy as it is for spammers to create 1,000 pages that are all slightly different when it comes to content and keywords, it is much more difficult to produce unique page titles that stand apart from each other and will garner trust. In that same light, webmasters that intelligently lay out their page titles to match their content will be rewarded when visitors coming in from the organic search listing are taken directly to a page related to their query and not the index page or some other root page within the site.

Here’s the best part: Editing page titles requires only an elementary understanding of .html. If you are smart enough to publish a website, you can enact this change for your own benefit at any time. Good luck.