Category Archives: Web Design

3 Questions To Ask Answer Before Designing Your Medical Website

Facebook Marketing, medical website design, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Web Design

medical-website-designBefore you spend lots of money designing a flashy new website you are going to want to make sure that it’s not just bells and whistles with no real content to sell your business. Make sure you have a site that helps you capitalize on your potential clientele and effectively market your services. Before you even get started ask yourself these following questions.

Do I make the most of my staff page?

If you want people to know right off the bat what kind of person you are, show them the faces behind the company. Truly take advantage of the opportunity to share information about yourself and your staff. Include photos and brief bios about each of your staff members. You’d be surprised how comforting this can be for people who may be skeptical about your company, perhaps because they are considering leaving a practice they’d come to know and love. They would really benefit from seeing the type of people they’ll meet in your office. It’s always good to put a face to a name and that is especially true when putting a face to your business.

Also don’t be afraid to step outside of the box with your staff bios. Perhaps instead of just listing their name, occupation and credentials, include interesting facts about them. For example customers may find it endearing to know their favorite quotes or most cherished accomplishment.

Does my web design have ‘social proof’?

Social Proof is a “psychology phenomenon where people assume the action of others reflect the correct behavior for a given situation…driven by the assumption that the surrounding people have more information than they do.” It is a classic case of monkey see monkey do. You can use social media to make sure your business is being talked about, shared and maintaining a degree of popularity, therefore building your reputation through social proof.

You probably know by now that you need to have your business represented on Facebook, so you have created a Facebook page. You want your page to be active and engaging. Don’t host a page simply for the sake of putting it on your website. Use it as a way to interact with your clients, stay engaged with the online community and show that you are personable and truly involved in your field. Use it to post articles about your field, links to your specials, and to start discussions about the new and inventive procedures your office offers. That is all content and content is important if you want to get noticed.

Facebook has been offering the “Sponsored Story” feature for some time now. It allows advertisers to attain more likes, posts and other activity. By getting their “story” featured, it is seen on the right hand side of your friends Facebook screen and functions as an advertisement of sorts.

In addition to Facebook make sure your social presence is big! If someone tweets something like, “I just got treated for sun damage at “XYZ Dermatology” and my skin has never looked better,” be sure to re-tweet it. Get listed on Yelp, be searchable on Google Business, allow people to check-in on Foursquare, get subscribers to your blog, and post testimonials to your page. Most importantly, make sure it all links back to your website.

Is my site at all persuasive?

Remember that at the end of the day you are selling a service. You can have the prettiest website on the internet and never get a single client if you aren’t persuasive. Incorporate some simple selling strategies to make sure that you are actively marketing and selling your services.

Product Badges—Help your customers during the decision making process by “badging” certain products with qualities such as “best-selling service,” “customer favorite,” “limited time only.”

Customer Reviews—the badges will catch their eye and the reviews will reel them in. You’ve labeled a product as best-selling, so include a review from a particularly happy customer to let people know that you aren’t baselessly boasting about your services.

Suggested sells—Strategies like buy-one get half off is a great way to persuade customers to try new products. Also sharing information about what other clients are buying can be quite persuasive. For example you could have a note under products that complement each other reading something like, “Customers who received the advanced acne treatment also purchased the dark spot removal services.” It suggests that getting both is a logical decision many others have also made and therefore is likely a good investment.

Our Guest Author: Dr. Steven Zimmet is an Austin dermatologist at Zimmet Vein and Dermatology who is dedicated to venous and dermatological advancements. Dr. Zimmet was nominated by his peers for inclusion in the Best Doctors in America Database 2011-2012 and has proudly served the Austin area for several years.

How to Find Quality Images for Your Content

Blogging, Copywriting, Social Media Marketing, Web Design, , , ,

Quality Images for contentPhotos give customers a rich impression of your business, and articles with photos in them are 47 percent more likely to be clicked on, reports content creation agency Curata. Not only do compelling photos encourage engagement, they aid in SEO efforts, since photos may be tagged with keywords and show up in search results. Photos are essential for a company’s SEO strategy, writes SEO agency AudienceBloom CEO Jayson DeMars. Besides supporting written or filmed content, photos tell stories. Great photographers combine technical proficiency, style and vision to creatively illustrate ideas, according to a digital photography school. Whatever your budget, there are things you can do to ensure you only use quality images for your content.

Rule of Thirds

While outsourcing to professionals is ideal, if you shoot photos in house, there are things you can do to make the pictures look professional. Spanish business photographer Alexandro Lacadena Gomez suggests you are conscious of the rule of thirds; imagine an image is divided into nine parts with two horizontal and vertical lines spaced equally, and put your subject where the lines intersect, since that is where people’s eyes naturally gravitate.

Show Perspective

If you’re photographing a product, shoot it from all angles to show off all features. For other subjects, shoot from multiple angles to show unique perspectives. Use black or white for your background to make your product pop, and light the product from all sides. Be mindful of your white balance setting to ensure white backgrounds don’t appear yellowish or brownish, according to blog.cx.com. Consider diversity when using models.

Composition

Once you’re familiar with composition, you’ll be surprised how universal most of the tips are. You’ll find the way to make a photo look professional, according to photographymad.com, instead of a snapshot:

  • Place your main subject off center
  • Think about the way you place your leading lines: straight, diagonal, radial, zigzag, curvy, etc.
  • Work with symmetry and patterns
  • Consider photographing from above, ground level, close up, far away, from the side, etc. for a unique perspective
  • Keep the background simple
  • Give depth through a background, middle ground and foreground

Cropping and Editing

After shots are taken, crop photos to optimize them if needed. Photos may be edited later for color, for elimination of red eye, and for exposure — most basic computer editing programs, such as Apple iPhoto, have these features built in.

Learn.columbia.edu has a photo resolution and size guide, which recommends photos for the web be at least 600 pixels wide with a 72 DPI resolution and a file size of 20-200K. To embed photos into your website, use a free popular uploader such as Picasa or Flickr, according to Practical Ecommerce, since your Web platform may have photo limitations.

Portrait Lighting

Photographer Bill Hurter’s book, “The Best of Photographic Lighting,” states there are five basic portrait lighting setups:

  • Paramount, butterfly or glamour lighting: produces symmetrical shadows beneath the subjects nose
  • Loop lighting: great for people with oval-shaped faces
  • Rembrandt lighting: the shadowed cheek of the subject has a small, triangular highlight
  • Split lighting: occurs when the key light illuminates half of the face
  • Profile lighting: used when the subject’s head is turned 90 degrees from the camera lens

Inexpensive Photography Resources

Using royalty-free photography can give you many quality photos for free through sites such as SXC.hu or Flickr. Examine the photographer’s terms to ensure you’re using the photos legally, suggests Search Engine Journal.

During the photography process, relax and breathe, Phoenix-based photographer Maria Vassett told Phoenix People. She encouraged photographers to follow their creative sides and inspirations when shooting.

By Peter Marino, owner of reelWebDesign.com, a complete content marketing company in NYC.

Using People In Your Web Design – Make It Look Professional Rather Than Awkward

HTML5, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Web Design,

SEO Expert Peter MarinoFor a business there are many requirements that a website has to fulfill  but one of the most important is that it should look professional. You want your website to reflect your organization in only the best light and make it look like you are capable, resourceful and skilled in everything that you involve yourself with. If you have a website that looks sub-par, or that doesn’t have a professional edge to it, then people will instead think that you either lacked the skills and resources, or that you aren’t bothered about doing jobs to the best of your ability. If your website looks like a child made it, then who is going to want to entrust you to handle their finances, or sell them computer parts? What’s to say they won’t be just as shoddy?

 

With this in mind, using images of real people in your web design is a risky move and one that can go either way. While having people on your site can inspire confidence if it looks professionally done (the assumption would be that you hired professional models and photographers), it can also end up being unintentionally funny if they end up looking awkward or it’s obvious you took the pictures yourself. So how can you ensure that you get the human element right and make your site look corporate and impressive rather than like a fun day out with your friends?

 

Use the Right Services

The first thing to do is to outsource. You may be tempted to try and do this yourself, but unless you are professionally trained in taking and editing great photos and you have a model friend it won’t look right. Your web design company should be able to handle it for you, but if they can’t make sure you find someone who can.

 

The Models

You also need to make sure that you find the right models to demo your products or services for you. This means finding people who are attractive because this will make your company look more desirable and successful, and it means dressing them in a ‘power dressing’ kind of way. Look for diversity in your models too and you will make your business appeal to a wider audience.

 

Additionally you also need to ensure that your models are good actors – if they are even a little bit self conscious it will come across, so ensure they have experience behind a camera before pointing one at them.

 

Setting

The setting of your photos is equally important. If you have a professional looking work environment that says what you want to say about your business then it’s fine to use that as long as you have the right lighting. Otherwise, see if you can rent somewhere else or speak with your designers.

 

Editing

The way you edit your pictures can also have a big impact on how effective they are. This is again something best left to the pros, who will be able to enhance the lighting and contrast to give the images that glossy magazine-style feel, and who can use airbrushing to remove any blemishes or mistakes.

 

Author: Vadim Kirichenko is the brains behind today’s guest post. He likes sharing his views on online marketing and SEO. He says a good advertisement is the one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself. He also says that a good web design is nothing more than creative way of attracting people to your website.

The Easy and Search Friendly Way to
Setup 301 Redirects

HTML5, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Technology, Web Design

301 Redirect Using HTAccess fileAs many of you know I recently updated my entire website and in the process I had to setup 301 redirects for the new page names. Why should you do this when updating a site? It’s simple, when someone does a search on Google, Bing or Yahoo! it would yield a blank or 404 error page if there is no 301 redirect implemented.  A 301 redirect basically takes the old URL/page name and redirects it to the new page or URL.  Thus the information a prospective client is searching for will still come up seamlessly   This can mean the difference between a new client and a passerby.  But wait, couldn’t I have created the new pages with the old file names, Yes, I could have but I believe the newer page names I made are contextually more appropriate to the current content and making them more SEO friendly.  Also, I didn’t want to lose all of that old “Google juice” I had built up over the last 5 years, hence, I needed a 301 redirect.  There are many ways to setup 301 redirects but the following way is the easiest and most search engine friendly approach.  However, it should be noted that this  HTAccess approach is for Apache servers only.

Open a simple text file and name it .htaccess (you can not use Word or WordPad it must be a simple text editor with no formatting).

Depending on what you’re trying to do, redirect an entire site to a new domain or just redirect a page it would be as shown below.

Redirecting  a single page

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.yoursite.com/newpage.html
Redirect 301 /oldpage2.html http://www.yoursite.com/folder/

Redirect an entire site

This way does it with links intact. That is, www.oldsite.com/some/link.html will become www.newsite.com/some/link.html. This is extremely helpful when you are just “moving” a site to a new domain.
Place this on the OLD sites HTAccess file:
Redirect 301 / http://newsite.com/

Here is an example of my .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine on

ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

%{HTTP_HOST} ^www.reelwebdesign.com$
^/?$ "http\:\/\/reelWebDesign\.com" [R=301,L]

Redirect /web_SMM_packages_NYC.html http://reelwebdesign.com/social-media-marketing-plans.php
Redirect /web_SEO_packages_NYC.html http://reelwebdesign.com/SEO-packages-NYC.php
Redirect /web_design_ny.html http://reelwebdesign.com/contact.html
Redirect /online_public_relations.html http://reelwebdesign.com/press-release-writing.html
Redirect /pay-per-click-management.html http://reelwebdesign.com/PPC-management.html
Redirect /local_SEO_packages.html http://reelwebdesign.com/local-SEO-packages.php
Redirect /web-design-services.php http://reelwebdesign.com/web-design-services.html

Notice the 404 Error Document is telling the browser to go to my 404.html file. This is another handy feature to implement in your .htaccess file.

Happy redirecting!