Divine Wedding Center is a local wedding resource site for the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas.  Its goal is to provide specific information regarding weddings and events in our local market, as well as a directory of local businesses in the wedding industry.

The business featured in the wedding center directory represent some of the most talented, well-respected and established wedding vendors here in the Rio Grande Valley.

This is yet another great example of how WordPress (as a content management system) can be customized for just about any purpose imaginable.  Another great feature implemented in this site is the advertising management system, OpenX (openx.org).

Thanks for looking!

1. Keep it simple and to the point
   Information and/or graphics presented to a potential customer need to be simple to understand and completely relevant to the product or service your business provides. Website users are generally picky and have little tolerance for overly complicated websites or information.
2. Think about how newcomers to your business will fare when viewing your site
   Coordinate your web design and content accordingly.  Again, keep your information simple and presented in a manner that is easy to understand. When in doubt, find the least technical person you know and ask them to review it for you.
3. In the spirit of simplicity strive to make your pages elegant and uncluttered
   Have you ever browsed a website that gave you a sense of information overload? You want to avoid this at all costs.  It is a sure way to lose a prospective customer.  Are we noticing a theme here?
4. Make certain to place navigational aids consistently in the same place
   Nothing is more annoying than when you attempt to browse a website that does not provide convenient access to its content. No one should be forced to use his or her browser’s back button to navigate a website. Be sure to present links to your website’s top-level pages in a way that is easily noticed and understood.
5. Maintain a blog with current and relevant content
   Blogs are a great way to engage your audience in a more personal fashion.  They have also become a very necessary aspect of Search Engine Optimization and Marketing.
6. Use relevant keywords and tags in your SEO strategy
   This is of utmost importance if you have any hope of being found through a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or MSN.  Simply speaking, this means that all of your website’s content (text and links) is full of words and phrases that specifically target the audience you want to reach, while providing the highest quality possible.  Not only does your prospective customer want you to provide the most relevant, useful and interesting content, but the search engines will rank you higher for it.
7. Make certain that all content serves your business, not just a “gee whiz” technology
   There are plenty of web sites out there with this problem.  A prime example: Animated Intros.  Don’t use them!  Yes, they were popular at one point, but those days are long gone. Slick (intro) animations are a distraction from your message.
8. Contact references from a web design firm’s website to verify the degree of their customers’ satisfaction
   When you hire a web design firm for your project, do yourself a big favor by contacting some previous clients (often listed in a portfolio) to be sure they were satisfied by the level of service and results that were provided.  It’s an effective way to gain some insight into the caliber of company you are dealing with.  Considering you will probably be spending a significant sum with these folks, it’s the least you can do for your due diligence.
9. Commit to keeping your content fresh, removing dated content
   A website is virtually a continuous conversation with existing and potential customers. Ceasing to keep your message fresh is an invitation to your viewers to go elsewhere.  Keep your products and services up to date and continue to distinguish your business from your competition.  Get permission to add recent testimonials from happy customers.  Use your blog to write articles relating to your business to influence new customers in your direction.  The bottom line is:  Don’t let your website collect dust.
10. Check and double check for typos before publishing
    We are often judged by our ability to communicate clearly, accurately and professionally.  If you let typos or other inaccuracies slip by, how confident will your customers be in your ability to pay attention to detail, or worse, cause them to question your integrity?  Most word processing programs have built-in spell checkers. Use them.  And then review your text for anything that may have been overlooked.  Get a second set of eyes to review your content before publishing.

Don’t:

1. Buy from a company that is selling you a template
   Most savvy Internet users will quickly recognize a website that was built from a template. The ensuing impression is not good.  If your business is represented by a design that has been used by many others, how can you hope to stand above the crowd?  What’s more, it sends a subtle message to the viewer that your business is not original, i.e. a follower and not a leader. Your website is key to the success of your online marketing strategy.  You cannot achieve uniqueness using a cookie-cutter design.  A prefabricated website will not be effective in driving customers to your door.  The way you communicate with your customers should be unique to your business, not a copy of someone else.
2. Use cheap (or freebie) stock photos
   No photos would be better.  Once again, there is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to images in marketing your business.  On and off the Internet, there is a reality that holds true: You get what you pay for.  So don’t skimp on the visual presentation of your website. It’s one of those intangibles that viewers of your site will notice, and images say something about your company.
3. Load up your home page with a lot of dribble that really doesn’t have anything to do with your business
   Does your company sell blue widgets? Then don’t waste your valuable home page real estate talking about anything else. Your website should always have a clear objective.  It should guide the viewer down a path to an ultimate action.  If the information and path to that action are not clear and concise, it’s going to be ineffective.
4. Place flash graphics on your home page that cause the viewer to wait while loading
   Internet users have grown picky about how they spend their time and have little patience with poorly designed sites.  Page load times are important.  Don’t make your viewers wait with unnecessary graphics or animation, or they will likely move on.
5. Use any sound that plays automatically
   Being forced to turn down your computer’s sound in a business environment is not cool.  Let the website viewer choose to play a sound or video, don’t shove it down their throats.
6. Use clichés, be original
   It’s tough to be original, but definitely worth the effort.  If your message is just a copy of another, what advantage will you have over your competition in attracting new customers?  People like originality because it’s compelling.  It will position you as a leader, not a follower.
7. Try to look or sound like your business is bigger than it really is
   Sincerity will attract the kind of customers you want.  Besides, it doesn’t take long to discover the true dimension of a business.  How embarrassing would it be to create an impression you are a large corporation, only to have a potentially good customer learn you have a small team of people.  It’s OK to be small.  Just be the best at what you do.  If you’re good at what you sell or do, smart customers won’t care how many employees you have.
8. Ever consider that your website is finished
   Treat it as a living, evolving presentation of your business, a virtual conversation with your customers and the general public.  If your communications cease, people will assume your business has too.
9. Ignore your competition
   Keep abreast of your competition’s online presence.  If they’re getting more business than you are, find out why.  How they manage their web presence will tell you a lot about them.
10. Give up on having an effective web strategy
    If you think you’ve failed before, learn from your mistakes, and get it right this time.  Remember, you haven’t failed until you quit.

A Divine Studio is a web design, development and internet marketing company based in McAllen, Texas and serving not just the Rio Grande Valley (RGV), but also Houston, Austin, all of Texas and the USA.

Get in touch with us today to schedule a free consultation.

OK, so much for our unpaid endorsement of the superior-in-every-way-possible Macs over PCs, ’cause that’s not the real reason we’re writing today, though as with most PC users, we could go on writing volumes about our frustrations.

What we really want to emphasize here is the importance of testing every page on your website using as many browser platforms and their prior iterations as possible.  Now, if you are a seasoned web designer, you already know this.  But still it can be, and almost always is, a real hassle to make everything work just right on Internet Exploder (a.k.a. Internet Explorer “IE”), especially if you’re adhering to the standards used by the rest of the world’s browsers.

Still, we see plenty of websites out there that behave differently, no badly, depending on which iteration of IE a user has.  Oh, that Microsoft would get its act together, instead of ignoring standards used by the rest of the world!  Oh well, what are you going to do?  At least in the name of innovation they’re consistently inconsistent.  And don’t we all love surprises anyway?

The point is whether your are a seasoned webmaster or someone in charge of making sure your web designer delivers a site that can be viewed by a majority of web users, make certain you or they haven’t overlooked this best practice:  Test your website to the max across all the major browser platforms.  Hey, if we all had Macs, with the time we could save, we could all go on Safari (yark, yark!).  Happy testing!

Oh, and don’t you just love how Microsoft Office introduced “docx “,”xlsx” and “pptx” as the default file formats where you have to intentionally select backward compatibility with prior versions of Office, so you can still share your documents with friends and colleagues, since you’re not certain if they’ve upgraded?  Surely, this can’t be construed as an attempt by Microsoft to annoy us and force us all to upgrade. Right?  Such a great company! What can I say?

If there’s one thing seasoned web designers dislike, it’s rank amateurs representing themselves as professionals, only to give their industry a black eye.  Victims of these masqueraders usually wind up abandoning any plans they may have had for an online marketing strategy, because the experience demonstrated websites do little, if anything, to generate more business.

So before you plant that entrepreneurial stake in the ground and launch your new web design business, you might want to get answers to some questions that run a little deeper than uploading a few cool looking web pages:

Have you developed an approach for learning enough about your clients’ business to create and implement an effective online marketing strategy?

Do you understand the client’s target audience enough to know what resources and practices to apply to the site in order to make it effective?

Have you learned best practices for search engine optimization and content development, so it might have a chance to be found a little sooner than on page twenty of a Google search?

Have you familiarized yourself with some analytical tools for continuous evaluation of your maintenance strategies?

Are you prepared to support your client’s online acceptance of debit and credit cards?

Does your client have a back-end database to be queried for customers or other users of the site?  Oops.

Frankly, these are only a few fundamental questions for which you should find answers long before hanging out that shingle and potentially mucking up the industry with more victims.  Unfortunately, many small business owners don’t know enough about an effective online marketing strategy to properly evaluate a proposal.  That’s not a slam on the owners.  It’s just a fact.  Most are too busy running their businesses to garner enough expertise for recognizing the genuine article.  All the more reason that as a web design guru you should be equipped with knowledge and skills that at a minimum address the aforementioned issues, so you can do a credible job.

Thanks for listening!

“How” you may ask, “can I be certain I am getting the best results from my website?”  The answer to this question resides in whether certain design techniques, content management and maintenance practices have been applied for your site.  Obviously, getting this right is a crucial first step.

What do they see?
When people find you on the Internet, your website is the first contact they will have with your business, so its imperative to make a good first impression.  Quality content and professional presentation are crucial in reaching this objective.  This may surprise you, but we see websites for businesses with recognizable names and with years of success, putting up websites that look like amateurs created them, tarnishing the very reputation they have worked so hard to build.  Frankly, these businesses would be better off without a website at all.

This condition often happens when taking a do-it-yourself or we-can-do-it ourselves approach, where an owner or manager has been convinced it’s easy to build a website with the new tools available today.  Sometimes pride of authorship clouds a better judgment.  Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s easy, or that anyone can do it.  The web has become an extremely competitive environment where users are more sophisticated in their ability to judge quality content and professional design.

At the very least you should have your site analyzed and scored by an independent professional firm with demonstrable experience in creating effective websites.  Then you can make an informed decision as to whether your website is delivering the best results.

How many are seeing it?
Getting lots of people to see your message is another challenge and requires experienced assistance from a professional in getting more eyeballs to your website.  There are many techniques for accomplishing this, all requiring the experience of a professional.

Both of the above questions have answers, and professional presentation of quality content combined with getting your website seen by more potential customers are crucial to getting the best results.

This is the mission of A Divine Studio: We deliver results.  Our mantra is underscored by our belief that we simply can’t afford the price of an unhappy client.  We simply won’t be satisfied until our customer is.  To that end we pride ourselves in first understanding our clients’ businesses, then we produce an effective, professional design with quality content, followed by maintenance practices that will get eyeballs to your website.  We use a variety of techniques including Search Engine Optimization (“SEO”), Social Media Marketing, Inbound Marketing and a host of other methods for getting you the best results.