It's really important to remember that building a great website is not all about fancy graphics and slogans; it distills down to the ability of you and the web designers to engage with your prospects and customers. It takes time and effort to develop great content. The website must be easy to  use and navigate, and just as importantly it needs to effectively convey your brand to the consumer.

Great websites start with a good plan, and that means knowing your target audience, having clear (including financial) objectives for your website, a plan for maintaining the content of the website, and monitoring your websites and the competitions performance.

There's 3 roles involved in the team, Your job in the process is to define the messages, and develop great content, the webdesigners job is to make it look visually appealing and compliant with the standards. The marketeers job is to drive traffic to your website. Sounds easy doesn't it, except that everyone else out there is doing the same, so you need to stand out in the global crowd, and thats where Cube Creative give you the advantage.

so lets explore those facets in a bit more depth.

Planning

• You need to set out with a plan, a good start is having answers to the following questions:-
• What are you selling;
  
• who are you selling to;
  
• who's the competition;
• what are your unique selling points;
• what's your budget;
• how are you going to market the website;
  
• how are you going to manage the website business.

You need then to build the website around these points. The products need to look appealing on the website, you need to know your target market - how big is it, what percentage of the target market visits your website each month, where do they come from, how many visitors are converted into customers. How do I engage with visitors and feed them news about our products and services. What are the competition up to, how can I rapidly analyse their strengths and weaknesses on a regular basis. How do I manage the web business  efficiently.

Cube can teach you how to build a plan in two evenings. Whether you are an established web based business looking to grow, planning a web business, or you would like analyse whether to move from a brochure based website we can help. You will also be armed with information which will enable you to ask the correct questions when selecting a web design and/or a search engine optimisation partner.

Marketing

Having a great looking website is a good platform to build on, but if no-one gets to see it, then whats the point. Like any product you need to market it effectively, and that means a marketing strategy. There's a number of ways to effectively market your product on the web.

1. Search Engine Optimisation

2. Paid advertisements

3. Generating Buzz

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is about making it as easy as possible for search engines to index your content, being conformance to the web standards, and having unique content which is well layed out. So how do Cube Creative approach SEO. We'll analyse your site, and produce a report which gives a number of simple recommendations on how you can improve the ranking of your website. We'll also analyse your site against the competition. We analyse the strategies they use to achieve a high ranking, and aggregate their strategies into a single coherent strategy for your site. We can also produce (if required) a monthly report detailing your sites performance against your goals, and any changes made by the competition.

Paid advertisements

Paid ads are a last resort, they rapidly become very expensive, but they can if managed correctly be effective.

Generating Buzz

One of the most effective campaigns I've ever seen was this Christmas (2009), it was a website which enabled you to personalise a video message from santa to your child for free. In order to do that the website gathered some great information (from their perspective) - your name and email address, optionally your childs, where you live, your childs age, hair colour, eye colour and the type and description of the product  they wanted for Christmas. Stand by for the product coming to you in the new Year big time. What was significant was the viral technique for promoting the original santa website in the first place. It wasn't selling you anything, but the information for marketeers was invaluable, now thats buzz - move over Susan Boyle. 

Brochure based websites

If you want a brochure website, then primarily your marketing strategy is based on traditional marketing. That means, press, media, word of mouth, and there's nothing wrong with that if it works for you. Using that analogue, the business requires a website based on a magazine type presentation. Its primary purpose is to show off your products in order to generate a personal relationship between you and a prospective client. In order for this business relationship to work, the product needs to be high margin. The business is not going to gain great value from search engine optimisation. But it's interesting from the point of view of which pages people visit, and where they exit the website.