Lori Culwell - Million Dollar Website: Simple Steps to Help You Compete with the Big Boys - Even on a Small Business Budget

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Table of Contents

PRAISE FOR MILLION DOLLAR WEBSITE

Lori Culwells insight has made DiscoverNursing.comthe award-winning website it is today. This book is an invaluable resource for anyone with a small business.

ANDREA HIGHAM, Director, Johnson & Johnson Campaign for Nursings Future

I have known and worked with Lori Culwell for six years on numerous Internet-related projects. I have been involved in the Internet since the early days and have found her talent, vision, and expertise invaluable. If an old Internet veteran like me listens to her, you should, too.

STEVE HAUBER, Publisher and CEO, Gannett Healthcare Group

Whether building your website from scratch or improving the performance of your current site, Million Dollar Website provides a thorough look at the world of website building and marketing and is a terrific resource. It is an insightful road map of best practices and a remarkably useful book for businesses. Lori Culwell has done it again.

SCOTT SCHNEIDER, EVP and Managing Director, Ruder Finn Interactive

For Stephan, and for The Rose

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, a huge thank-you to Stephan Cox, my husband, best friend, and partner in crime. None of this would be possible without you! Thanks for helping me work through ideas, proposals, drafts, and chapters, and for being generally awesome. Thanks to Dave Dunton for being a great agentone with whom I hope to keep working for many years to come. And let us not forget about Maria! Maria Gagliano, editor extraordinaire, whose excellent ideas shaped and molded this book into something better than even I thought it could be. Thank you as well to the many smart work colleagues over the years who have enhanced my knowledge of websites, usability, marketing, branding, design, and everything else you see here. These include, but are certainly not limited to, Andrea, Lorie, Owen, Amit, Crystal, Lee, Prayag, Scott, Brad, Bonin, Chris, Guy, Leslie, Julie, Megan, Nadia, Vince, Julie, Jenn, Jason, Larry, and Nancy.

Introduction

How to Make Your Website Compete with the Big Boys

Istarted thinking about writing this book one day while I was waiting to get something copied at Kinkos. I was standing in line behind a woman who was ordering reprints of a promotional flyer for her businessa retreat for older, single women. She kept saying to the Kinkos guy, I need more people to go to my website. Not enough people are finding my site, and when they do, theyre not signing up for my seminars.

I didnt want to pry, but she seemed at wits end, and so finally I introduced myself, explaining that I was a web consultant who helped Fortune 500 companies develop and improve their websites. We talked briefly about her site, and then I got the address and agreed to take a look at it for her. Im not the kind of person who bad-mouths other people, so lets just say her site lacked a clear focus... and was really outdated. Even if her seminars/retreats were the best thing since sliced bread, it didnt matter, because her website wasnt compelling enough to get people to sign up, or even to investigate further.

She clearly had made the site herself (good for her!), and although it did have many of the elements a good site needs (including interesting content about her company and the retreats), it did not have several important elements. For one, there was no clear navigational structure, a must-have for directing customers to the many different types of information on the site. For another, there was no way to pay for the seminars and trips online. There was no privacy policy and no way to capture email addresses for follow-up and future marketing purposes, and the company contact information was hard to find and incomplete. Plus, the site was very, very pink, which I thought some potential customers might find a little off-putting. While the woman claimed that her target audience was women age fifty to sixty-five, the pink was reminiscent of Barbie, and was more appropriate to a much younger, tween age group. The color alone might have been driving potential customers away.

What was this business owner to do? She really couldnt afford to hire an experienced web consultant to tell her how to improve her site. She certainly couldnt afford a team of Internet experts to actually revamp the site: an information architect to perfect the structure; a designer to make it look and feel better; a writer to set the tone, to make sure the content has enough of the right keywords so that search engines will find the site, and to consistently add interesting content; and a marketing specialist to position and promote the site properly.

Thats when I got to thinking.... The Internet, being the great equalizer that it is, should not be about the haves and have nots. Small businesses and independent contractors that create and maintain their own sites should have access to good information about what works and what doesnt when it comes to websites. They shouldnt have to pay a team of experts $100,000 for a redesign of their sites, or even $1,000 for a consultant like me to tell them whats wrong and how to fix it themselves.

But if you cant afford to hire a professional web team or an experienced consultant, how do you get the expertise required to create a site that does what you need for it to do? As I thought about this common dilemma, it occurred to me that anyone should be able to get information about the best available tools and strategies for creating and marketing a website... from an experienced expert, and all in one place. You, starting right where you are, should be able to build and grow a million dollar website, without the million dollar price tag.

This book is just thata guide to improving your website, based on my eleven years of experience working on websites for big companies.

In order to successfully compete for your share of the vast and growing online markets, your site must do and have certain things. These website essentials are the same no matter how big or small your business. The features and functionality that customers need and want from a large corporations site are the same as what they need and want from your site. The e-commerce marketing strategies that work for the big guys sites will work equally well for yours. There is no reason why your businesss website cannot be as successful as that of a much bigger enterprise. You just need the same information and tools that are available to them, and then your site will have the strength and power of the million dollar website, eventually becoming one in its own right (if thats what you want, of course). Depending on your goals for your business and the amount of time you have to spend on your site, its actually simple to employ a set of tools that will allow your business not only to compete with the big budget, big name sites, but to grow exponentially.

Before we go further, Id like to take this opportunity to emphasize that this is a guide to improving your site... and not only a guide to increasing traffic to your site, which is the main (or sole) focus of so many other books on websites. Yes, a huge amount of traffic can be great for your business, but only if the destination you are directing people to is a well-designed, interesting, and usable website. Otherwise, youve wasted money on search engine placement, Google AdWords, or whatever marketing vehicles youve used (and paid for) to drive traffic to your site. One hundred people who actually enjoy and use a properly developed site are much more valuable to you than ten thousand people who get to your site but havent a clue what the site is about or what to do there.

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