Website Design

Responsive Website Design

We just completed a new responsive website design and development project, which you can see here: https://jointsupplements.info/

This project was a fast development, which of course keeps costs down. Using the StudioPress base theme – Genesis, we were able to develop a website that was fully mobile responsive right out of the box. Because I am seeing up to 33% of traffic coming from mobile devices, having responsive website design is now of paramount importance. It has become somewhat customary to have a seperate website design for mobile but with the wide range of devices, each with a different screen size, it is far better to have a website that responds to the device settings where it is being displayed. One thing that I would recommend to any business owner is – update your website and place it on a fully responsive platform.

This project also was also an interesting because we developed all of the copy for this nutritional based website. As we normally work with dental websites, this was a fresh challenge and developing compelling copy was a large part of the project. Take a peek, I would love to hear any feedback.

Dental SEO – A Case Study

In early 2013 I was contacted by a dentist who asked me for a full website development. This was for a brand new dental practice website. Normally a brand new website takes a while to show up on Google Search and rarely does well without specific dental SEO.

If you are interested in what makes for good seo in general, check out my explanation of how to get a high seo ranking.

When I build dentist websites, I am aware that my clients are not looking for a showpiece, they are looking for clients and a financially viable practice. This is never more so than with a brand new practice. So for me a full website development includes base SEO. When I started building websites I would just put a website and judge myself on how good it looked and if it worked as expected. I was shocked to find clients disappointed with my services. It took me some months, but I finally realized that if a website does not get SEO done right from the word go, it does not perform well, does not attract much traffic and generally is considered a flop, no matter how pretty it is.

I quickly discovered that there is nothing more disappointing than a website that gets absolutely no visits other than the owner and his wife.

Doing Dental SEO While Building the Website

So I changed my ways. I make good looking websites, but when I build I am investing a lot in the base SEO of the site. When I started to do this I had a few surprises. A dentist’s website for which I was paid not one dime for dental SEO as a specific service – turned up ranking well in Google search within TWO weeks of going live. This is, to my knowledge, unheard of.

However another dentists website that had been built without dental SEO and which got poor starting rankings required a LOT of work to get it moving. It seemed to me that the “out of the gate” performance was a strong influence.

I noticed that this happened more often than not and so it was again with one of my more recent websites- www.allstarkidsdental.com.

Searching “DAYTON TX DENTIST” in Google search shows that my All Star Kids Dental Website ranks #3 in google maps and #3 in search- showing twice on the first page of google results. Interesting because the dentist concerned simply puchased a website and never paid a penny for SEO.

In my mind this is more evidence that starting SEO gets extra points from google.

When I started doing dental SEO I found that generally brand new websites were very poor performers and needed time and SEO to get well ranked. What I am finding now is that if you build a site that is well optimized right from the word go, you can hit the home page in a low-competition market or at least page two in a higher competition market.

Moral of the story- optimize out of the box.

What Makes a Great Veterinary Website?

Your veterinary website is an important part of your veterinary marketing strategy. Most major cities get 200 searches a day for “find a veterinarian”.

Right now, a lot of people are looking for your services.

Top Four Factors for Your Veterinary Website

You Must Have Your Phone Number Very Visible: The impulse to call your vet clinic as a result of seeing your website is very fleeting. A person thinks “maybe I should call this vet” and a moment later the thought is gone and they are moving on to another website. Having your phone number very visible on your website is extremely important.
You Must Display Your Address in a Prominent Position: It is a fact that your clients mostly exist in a 5 mile radius of your vet practice. This is normal for all urban vet practices. Having your address very visibly displayed allows a person to mentally calculate distance and make the decision to travel to your location. Visitors to websites do not like to hunt around for information. The visitor is using the internet because they want fast and they want easy. Your website must accommodate this.
Your Site Must Have Your Photo: People use vets that they can connect to. Having your photograph on your website is very important and helps potential clients connect to you.
Put Testimonials On Your Website: A huge factor for vet’s (and other health providers) is trust. From glancing at your website the potential client, who has never met you, must decide if he or she is going to hike all the way to your vet practice and trust you with his or her pet. Testimonials help people to make this decision. Before and After photos of pets can also be very effective.

Having built scores of websites for health professionals and seen the anayltics for many hundreds of thousands of visits, it is very clear that trust is an important issue for people who come to a veterinary website for the first time. They are going to place their pet in your hands and want to have confidence that you will do a good job.

This trust is established through

Your personal page, which should have a good photograph of you and some personal information as well as your bio and qualifications.
A page that has testimonials and reviews.
A page that has before and after stories

And interestingly enough, when it comes to veterinary website traffic, these pages are very heavily visited by people who are coming for their first visit. Your existing clients know you and you have had an opportunity to build trust. New clients have not met you and must judge your through your on line reviews in Google and Yelp and other such review sources and also right there on your own website where they get to find out about you for the first time.

To find out more about creating a great veterinary website, contact us for a free consultation!

Website Design -Do I Need a Separate Mobile Version?

To Mobilize or Not to Mobilize, that is the question. Well the answer is categorically YES, you do need a mobile version of your website.

Here at the home of San Antonio Website Design we run some very large, very busy websites. Lets take a look at some specific numbers.

The largest and busiest vet website in San Antonio is the Becker Animal Hospital website. And guess what? They get 21% of all their visits through mobile devices.

Another busy website (over 20,000 visits a month) is a health website we manage specializing in Candida overgrowths and how to address them. This is a website where you would expect people to be doing more serious research from laptops or desktops, but in fact this website gets 15% of it’s traffic on mobile devices and this percentage is steadily climbing.

A large dental office here in San Antonio is getting 17% of all its traffic on mobile devices.

These are not vague general statistics, these are real business people with real websites and they are seeing 15% to 20% of their website traffic coming in on mobile devices.

Recently I wrote about the importance of eye trail in website design in my post Website Design Basics. Well this becomes much more important when considering the 4 inch screen on a mobile device. What happens?

The website takes forever to load. Even with 3G and now 4G, trying to load a full size website across a mobile line is noticeably slower than a regular line. Will your prospective customer sit and wait?
Trying to view a normal website is that the user is scrolling all over the place trying to read information and the phone number and contact information is almost impossible to see. One again, will your user sit scroll through your now confusing website layout? Or will they move on?

Internet use is all about speed. You want to know what movies are out? A second or two later you are looking at them. You want to find a good restaurant? A second or two later you are reading the reviews. Internet users are on the internet because they want to move fast and get information quickly. If they wanted to go slow, they would shuffle through the yellow pages. So rather than ask the question “Do I need a mobile version of my website”, instead ask yourself “Can I afford to blow off 15% to 20% of my new business?” My company does a lot of San Antonio website design projects and one for one we create mobile versions of our websites.

Please contact me if you would like a website design consultation.

Five Worst Mistakes You Can Make When You Design Your Website

San Antonio Website Designer Wayne Baumgarten reveals the worst flops and blunders that you can make when working out the design for your website.

1. Never Use Flash Animations (ipad and iphone can’t read them). Moving images and graphics on a website can be very attractive. However the main tool used to create this kind of design element has been a program from Adobe called “Flash”. This program is specifically designed to create animations for web, and was for a long time very popular. Even entire websites can be created using Flash. The problem is all about power. Flash animations drag lots of power, and so Steve Jobs made the decision that iphone and ipad would not read website content that was built using flash. If you have a website that is either entirely built in flash ipad and iphone users will not see a website, but rather a grey blob on the screen. Same for a website design that incorporates elements built from Flash- those elements show only as grey blobs. That is not to say you have to have a static website design with nothing in motion. There are several other ways to create attractive animations on your website. Ask your website designer if your website will be using flash graphics.

2. No Call To Action (so visitors like the site but never do anything). Take a look at your website design. Is there a button to click to sign up for something? Is it visible and prominent? What about your phone number? Is that very clearly presented? Or is it in the fine print at the bottom of the page? You can find more information on this important subject in our article on Website Design Basics.

3. Generic Content Written by a Copywriter. (Sounds fakey and false). If you are paying good money for a new website then take an hour of two and sit down and write about yourself and what you do. Nothing can replace the words of the real person writing about what they really do.

4. Small with Limited Content. To create a web page with a lot of written content costs about the same as a page with very little content. Provide your website designer with a lot of content- long pages, with full descriptions of what you do and how it works. Throw in a few extra pages with tips and ideas that come from your experience and training in your field. Small websites with little information have little impact.

5. Not Listed with Google and Bing. It is quite easy to register a website with google, bing and yahoo- which covers over 90% of all search traffic. Make sure your website designer does so! Otherwise your website may never show up in any search and lose a lot of its potential value. Also signing up for google maps (now called google places) is a very simple process. You can do that yourself and it will help your business and your website.

If you are interested an updated website design, contact us for a free, no-obligation analysis and quote. Also check out a small sampling of our many happy customers in our San Antonio website design gallery.

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