VectorDefector Blog
Have you had trouble getting your business online? It can sound pretty simple at first with a lot of website builder software services out that that allow you to do it yourself, but the fact of the matter is it can take a lot of time and effort to properly stand up your web presence. You’ve taken your own efforts as far as you can go or you’re ready invest some market dollars – it’s time to hire a professional!
So How Do You Find the Right Website Provider?
First off, we always advise our clients to make sure to find a website designer/developer who is familiar with your industry. Ask them if they know anything about your business!
There are tons of great website providers out there, but advertising is still in that unique phase where the wrong moves can result in huge setbacks – make sure your provider knows the do’s and don’ts of marketing within your category.
Get Proof
Next, the proof is in the pudding. Spend time researching different website development design teams. Compare local providers with national ones and be wary of big agencies – more often than not you get better service at better prices from boutique designers.
Make sure you like their website and branding; if they can’t get their own image right, how can they help you? Finally, make sure they list examples of their past work and that it is up to the standard of your brand. You may even want to contact those companies and ask how their experience was.
Know Your Budget
Align your expectations with your budget. Understand that 90% of what you’re paying for when hiring a professional is their time. Big agencies ask for big budgets because they often have a large team where each member works on a portion of your project.
Boutique agencies have lower overhead and tend to have small teams of multi-disciplined experts and can often give the same quality at a lower price. Try to stay within the threshold of good price for good quality and remember that with reduced cost comes reduced risk – bargain prices can mean slow turn-around, poor results, and poor communication.
Get to Know Your Team
Finally, take an interview and make sure you like them! Most design agencies will give you an initial consultation. When you’re ready to make the decision, take them up on it and make sure your interests and your goals jive. Communication is key – make sure they “speak your language” and are easy to address problems with. Be sure they provide you with written goals and an agreement to give progress updates.
This creative process can lead to a long road to success, and it’s important to align yourself with like minded business partners. As a marketing design and website development boutique agency, we like to form relationships that last beyond the project and synergy between all of our partners. A rising tide raises all boats!
Ready to get your website rocking? Get a quality marketing and design partner in VectorDefector. Contact us today!
Starting a new business is hard, and as any entrepreneur knows, it can be very easy to get overwhelmed with decisions and to-dos. It’s time to delegate an essential part of your business: your website and marketing!
Why Hire a Website Designer? I Can Do That Myself.
True! You can create a website entirely by yourself, and there are many starter platforms to do it on – we highly recommend creating your own site as a starting point. However, as your business grows in size, your website will need to scale too.
Often taking your site to the next level requires a bigger platform, obtaining new IT tech, and creating massive amounts of thoughtful, targeted content. This can be a big task, especially if you’re not well versed in marketing and SEO concepts.
Hiring website design experts, especially those who have years of experience working within the industry, ultimately can save you time, money and headache by handling those tasks for you in a more effective way.
I Don’t Have the Budget to Hire a Web Designer
Not always true! Different companies have different pricing, overhead, and techniques, so pricing of websites can vary greatly. In truth, most websites cost very little to purchase, but the real value comes in having the expertise of someone who has created hundreds of websites.
While we do recommend your business be in the position that it has an established marketing budget, you’d be surprised how much return you can get by hiring a small team of experts to accomplish your business website’s design, creation, and goals.
Your Brand and Your Style Are Important!
Every industry is highly competitive. Brand recognition and placement can be the difference between a sale or being pushed to the bottom of the shelf, and your website and marketing design play a huge factor in perceived value.
You want your marketing and website to make your brand shine above the competitors and highlight your mission or intent with every step. The perception of a “nicer” product often leads to more sales, more recognition, and a wider reach.
Unless you’re well versed in design and marketing theory, hiring a professional website creator enables you to not only to take that workload off of your already busy schedule, but the results of investing in a higher-quality website and design product will show immediately in how much larger your brand seems when its professionally styled, managed and strategized.
So, what are you waiting for? Get your website in high gear and contact VectorDefector for a FREE marketing consultation today!
Using a website as your marketing tool has been a go-to for businesses for more than 20 years, but now more than ever, having a good website vs. one that just exists is practically a necessity for any start-up. It’s easy to build and put up a mediocre website, but what does that effort really get you?
Without working with an expert website creator or having some knowledge about competitive fine-tuning, the website you have may be underperforming and costing you business. These are the five most common issues we find from clients that come to us, many of which who already have a website.
#1 You Don’t Have Any Content
When it comes to getting recognized on major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, the truth is: content is key! The more you have to say, and the more spot-on that written content, social media posting, or video entry is to your businesses’ message is how people find you when they type their search phrase into the input box. Have multiple tiers of pages, posts, and videos explaining your products, your company’s goals, and how you relate to your customers.
Simply having a website does get your foot in the door, but that may be all it gets you. You need to frequently and consistently write, create, video, or design new content for your site on a weekly basis in order to stay ahead of the competition. Hire a content creator or social media influencer to help you build if you don’t have the time!
#2 You’re on an old, slow platform or have no mobile support
Yes, it’s possible to be falling behind even with a well-thought-out and well-executed content campaign! Technology moves fast, and so does people’s expectations. If your website is slow, buggy, broken on mobile, or just functioning improperly, your visitors will move on quickly. Start-up businesses often buy into low monthly payments or starter web packages, but these low-value products are often made for wide audiences and come with a lot of bloat and unnecessary bells and whistles.
Working with a professional website creator can not only take that job out of your busy entrepreneur hands, but it can also help you optimize your site to flow better for your visitors and render better results on search engines and for mobile devices which are a huge part of the marketplace.
#3 You’ve let your blog or your menus get outdated
In any industry your competition moves as fast, so content and product menus are easy to lose track of. However, if you’re not keeping your content up to date, it’s common for visitors to assume you’re no longer in business or simply don’t carry what they’re looking for.
In the information age, searching is ideally the easiest way for your visitors to locate what they’re shopping for, but if your website is not showing them what you have, you’re likely getting visits from people who won’t be coming back.
#4 Your website design sucks
Let’s be honest; in 2019 visitors can tell the difference between a “good” website and a “bad” website. While we’re not saying you need to spend a fortune on your marketing, we do believe that having a stylish design that speaks to your company’s brand and values speaks bounds to your audience. This is often hard to accomplish without the help of an expert.
If visitors arrive at your site and it appears dated, low quality, or hard to navigate, customers may straight up assume you’re not making any money and move on to a bigger and sharper looking competitor. A large part of website marketing is making sure your brand represents exactly who you are and who you want your audience to think you aspire to be.
#5 You need search engine optimization
It’s true: a lot of websites are accomplishing all of the above just fine. They look good, function well, and have plenty of content, but they’re still falling behind competitors. Once your website hits this point, it’s often time for some fine-tuning for search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO is a practice used specifically to net your website more traffic – either in general or to funnel the right audience to the right places. SEO practices can include things like:
- speed optimizing your website for performance
- making sure your page and link structure make sense from a user angle
- re-working your content to make sure it has the right verbiage for your audience
- creating a set of focus terms and phrases (keywords) that help match you with your visitors on Google and other search platforms better
Overall, having a website is essential to any new modern business – but simply owning one isn’t always the key to success. Make sure you hire the right team to bring the right strategy, SEO and content to your audience with every step.
Want to get the most out of your website? Contact the website design, SEO, and marketing experts at VectorDefector for a FREE consultation!
Comedian – Josh Blue
Looking to display his multitude of creative pursuits, Josh Blue – comedian and winner of NBC’s Last Comic Standing 2006 contracted with VectorDefector for a fully custom website design & development. Between killing it on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, the release of his latest DVD – DELETE, his ongoing stand-up tour, advocacy work & more, Josh Blue needed a clean, easy to work website that allows his team to keep his fans up to date with his busy schedule.
Focused on brand and easy-to-find experience, this mobile responsive website features: full customizable home page with animated slides, E-Commerce merch store, unique Media and Tour schedule sections, and a personal projects blog.
E-commerce and ship-to-order may be the fastest growing industries in America in 2019, but with great opportunity comes big competition. The product space is getting crowded and the line to get onto a retail store’s prime shelf space is constantly growing. It can take a big effort involving a good sales team that understands your products, a bullet-proof marketing strategy, and plenty of old fashioned effort, but what’s one go-to move you can make to help all of these efforts? Make sure your branding and packaging is on point!
How Does Having a Quality Brand & Packaging Design Help Sell?
Shelf space, especially in an emerging marketplace, is a game that is all about image. Most retail stores try to carry a wide variety of products, and on average, your customers likely spend less than 10 seconds scanning each shelf to find a product that speaks to them. Unless they’re coming in specifically because they’ve heard of your product, how will they single you out among the masses? Get ahead of that curve with sharp, eye catching brand and packaging design.
The days of the dotcom e-commerce boom are dead and gone and simply having your product ready to go to shelf is not enough to survive in today’s online retail marketplaces. Your brand, style and packaging has to “talk the talk” for you. If your product style is unique, represents your company’s mission, and has an appealing style, sales, marketing and adverting efforts become much easier.
So What is “Good” Branding and How Do We Get There?
We’ve all seen them on shelves and at events: products that specifically stand out because of their poor or lack of design choices. If given the choice, you have limited time to decide, and the price is competitive, are you more likely to pick the concentrate with the vibrant colors and prominent logo that screams “fire!” or do you pick the white label with black lettering that just makes you think “Cheap Price”? The choice is obvious – sight and perception are a major factor in our purchasing decisions. Don’t let your product be perceived the wrong way resulting in the ideal buyers and partners passing you up.
How Do You Get Your Packaging to the Next Level?
Hiring a professional graphic designer is the best move you can make to ensure your branding, packaging and marketing are on point. Our team has not only emerged themselves in graphic design marketing for the last 15+ years, we’ve familiarized ourselves with the ins and outs of compliance in a variety of markets.
We know how to work hand-in-hand with our partners to roll out branding, style and packaging that looks great, is sized and formatted correctly for any packaging manufacturer, meets compliance, and gets that eye-catching recognition that makes a connection with your potential customers. You don’t have to spend a fortune, you just have to find the right team!
Ready to take your company’s brand, style or packaging to the next level? Contact VectorDefector and get a FREE design or website quote today!
Rob Baird Music
Gearing up for the release of his fourth full length record, singer/songwriter Rob Baird (www.robbairdmusic.com) wanted a clean and simple website made to focus on his unique genre-defying musical style. Coming out in January 2019, Rob’s new record After All represents an emotional roller-coaster resulting in a new “grown-up” rebirth, and the website aims to focus on this fresh new direction.
Focused on clean simplicity to emphasize the music itself, this mobile responsive website features: full customizable home page for individual album advertising, tour details, and streaming social media feed.
Search Engine Optimization has been around since the late 90s when brands like Google, Yahoo! and AOL were first building their tools for skimming the rapidly growing internet. Now synonymous with “look it up,” the biggest search engine, Google, has developed some pretty sophisticated ways to determine how to serve up the best website match to the keywords you type into the little box at the top of your screen.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of fine-tuning your website’s content in order to float higher up on the results returned by Google, Bing, Yahoo! and others. There’s a number of different things that factor in, like:
- How well your website’s address matches the search phrase
- How old your website is / how many years it’s been online consistently
- How much written content you have (ex. pages or blog articles), and what percentage of that content matches the keyword or phrase (important!)
- How many people or other websites subscribe to or link to your website
- How much social media traffic you have
- Pay-for-click ads that give you a boost when people find you using certain keywords
For new businesses, SEO practices are a bit more challenging. One of the biggest issues for start-ups is that most major search engines favor traffic, which is hard to obtain when you’re brand new. Saturation becomes another problem. Google is still working on ways to reduce “search engine overload,” or the problem you get when you can’t find what you’re searching for even though you know what keywords to type.
For that reason, practices like “organic” SEO have become far more successful for start-ups. Organic SEO is the concept of writing genuine content for your site consistently while simultaneously being conscious of your audience, your message and your keywords for search results. Organic SEO can be a bit trickier since it requires a bit of writing skill, patience, and a knack for tracking stats. Start-up businesses benefit from organic SEO the most for a variety of reasons. New business’s customers in particular value a brand’s integrity and its commitment to the community – this is a perfect opportunity to generate content that shows off your industry expertise and your interactions with your customers.
Also, while social media is a prominent way to gain traction, they are just a small piece of the puzzle when it comes to creating a quality online sales funnel. A properly tuned, search engine optimized website being fed by active social media channels can be the monster lead generator you never know you could have; and it can all be automated for simplicity!
Overall, new businesses should pay attention to their web presence. The vast majority of customers will Google a business before making any decisions about it, and it’s a race to the top of the results. The right team, smart goals, and consistent effort could mean the difference between your sale and a competitor’s.
Looking to learn how to boost your SEO and/or improve your start-up business website?
Connect with VectorDefector today for expert marketing and search engine optimization consultation!
Energique Pro
Experts in a wide variety of natural products, GRATO Holdings, contacted me to design and develop their third website – this one aimed at a higher end look and feel for doctors & medical practitioners. With 700+ products, a gated area for wholesale purchases, a practitioner locator, and improved features for search, this site is positioned to be their top-earner.
This custom made e-commerce website features a hand-made web design, a fully custom content-driven responsive website, and an SEO-friendly, coupon-ready e-commerce integration with separate pricing, details and content for wholesale and retail customers.
Langhorne Slim
Hailing from Nashville, Tennessee, musician & songwriter and Langhorne Slim’s website was designed for simplicity – and to focus on the unique, fresh folk vibe he’s become widely known for. This retro-folk site launches in tandem with the release of Langhorne Slim’s newest album: Lost at Last: Vol 1, and his recent appearance on the Conan O’Brien Show. Great performance!
Focused on social media managed directly by the artist & his manager, this mobile responsive website features: full customizable home page for individual album advertising, tour details, and streaming social media feed.
Expert in pain-free strength training, weight loss and fitness: Lee Cherry contracted with VectorDefector to upgrade the look and feel of his new business – In Home Personal Trainer. Focusing on Lee’s no-BS, no “meat head” attitude mixed with a sharp new finish, this new web experience is built to emphasize Lee’s personality and target his specific local customer base.
Featuring a unique look and feel, this totally custom mobile responsive website is complete with hand-designed class/product pages, back-end membership access to a collection of growing custom-made videos by Lee, and an e-commerce store to sell a series of merch designed by VectorDefector to promote Lee’s style and to work as effective fitness gear.
Lee has already begun posting news of his client’s success to his new site and social media – we can’t wait to see what’s next!
Good marketing has always been important to any business, but when you’re a start-up, your marketing and your brand can be the difference between success and failure.
To define it: your marketing is the process, means and materials you’re using to connect with your customers and the world to let them know you exist. Your brand is the visual representation of your company; it’s how people recognize that the product / location / advertisement they’re looking at is you and not a competitor. People tend to be more loyal to brands that represent their own values.
Start-up companies often make the mistake of assuming they don’t need to think about branding and marketing and that success is waiting to spill forward as soon as the doors are open and a “we’re open” sign is hung in the window. That’s not always the case.
Today’s online market is way more competitive because quality and loyalty to products and brands already on the market grow every day, and new start-ups are popping up in every conceivable market every minute.
In order to set yourself apart, you need to stand out. You also need to be able to quickly relate your message to your audience. Having a well designed logo, choice of colors, website that works on multiple devices, and written messaging that clearly states your style and mission goes a long way to letting customers know that you desire the same things in a product or service as they do and that you’re the company for them.
This can seem like a truly impossible task if you’ve never had experience with marketing!
Companies that have a strong recognizable brand, and that can continue to draw a crowd online and offline will be the ones who rise, and those who rely on simply being around or cling to an “old school” small audience appeal will quickly fade away.
Want to get your brand started today? Get online with VectorDefector today!
Greater Park Hill Community
Serving the Park Hill Community in Denver, Colorado, the Greater Park Hill Community is a volunteer-based neighborhood organization that aims to help promote diversity and community participation. This community features Denver locales such as the Museum of Nature & Science, the Denver Zoo, City Park, Park Hill Country Club and many historic features.
VectorDefector partnered with the GPHC to provide a brand new website with focuses on: higher quality neighborhood imagery, easy to use navigation, mobile responsive design and custom hand-made features.
We’re happy to be a part of this great neighborhood and hope to continue to help contribute to it’s success!
