When it comes to websites people get really confused. The market is full with webdesigning companies, freelancers, virtual assistants, students and marketing agencies offering website design services. There are different platforms used and everybody has a slightly different style and a different skill set.

Some webdesigners produce the most stunning looking work when it comes to design, but the traffic ranking is bad. Others produce horrific looking, weirdly coloured websites and lots of traffic and sales. If you are lucky your website looks attractive and attracts sales.

So, how on earth do you know what kind of website to get, who to ask to do it, how much you should spend, which keywords to use, etc. etc.

The best thing to start with is to find out what kind of site you require for your specific situation and goal. If you know that you have a much better understanding of who and what to look for. You then are also able to search for the right solution on Google.com or ask your prospective webdesign the right questions.

There are different kind of websites available for you and need to match your business strategy. Things have changed a lot in the recent years with the rise of Social Media and you can actually make very different decisions about your web presence than in the years before. I will start off with telling you about the different types of websites that are out there and for what purpose they are (because they all have their purpose).

Types of websites

Brochure website

This is the traditional website that we all know from the past – and of course, the presence. It is the website that many webdesign companies still recommend, but this choice may be limiting you in your marketing efforts. Many brochure websites are done in HTML, which means they are static websites and don’t index in the search engines that easily. It is often recommended by Internet Marketers to have all your websites on a Blog/Wordpress platform for better search engine optimization.

The brochure website is great to show off your logo and branding, it can be the “home” of your business, but it is not interactive, you can’t communicate with your visitors and often you can’t keep them on your website for longer than a few minutes or seconds.

This is an example of a brochure website:

The brochure website can be a great company website portal, meaning that it simply shows off who you are, what you are about and what services you can offer. This may be a starting point for your business if you are a wedding event manager, photographer, etc.

What is missing is a way to attract your visitors to

• communicate with you
• share your articles or content
• add new content regularly, even daily
• show off specials
• offer a free taste or service for your website visitor

You can create your brochure website as a portal. The portal is like a front entrance that leads you into the hall of the homepage and you have different doors people can enter. One door might read: Consulting. The other door might be Products, the next Books and so on. It can be accummulation of all your business offers. It may also be a portal if you have different sub businesses, say your business domain name is <your name.com>, eg. Lizzy Lissington, and on this website you simply tell people what you are offering. This may be Lizzy Lissington’s sub businesses, such as Lizzy’s Photography, Lizzy’s Dog Equipment, Lizzy’s Dog Breeding Kennels, etc. People can click on the part of Lizzy’s business that they are looking for. They may want to buy a puppy, so they go to Lizzy’s dog information. When they click on Lizzy’s dog breeding, they may be led to another website called: Lissingtonkennels.com. Please note the names are purely ficticous.

When the visitor clicks on Lizzy’s Photography, they may be taken to a Facebook page with a customized Facebook page where they can check out all her work and click on “like” to be added to Lizzy’s community on Facebook, ask her questions, read her posts and interact with other people who like Lizzy’s Photography.

When the visitor clicks on Lizzy’s dog beds and dog equipment, they may be led to a shop website called “Lizzysdoggear.com” and are able to see all dog equipment Lizzy has on offer, from leashes, dog food to dog beds. They simply browse the store front and click on the items they like and order them by using the shoppingcart system and paying by credit card.

So in the end, you can see it as a hub that shows you all about Lizzy. Lizzy could even add information about her dog training ebook on there. When you click on “dog training”, you will find yourself on a so-called squeeze page, which means that all you can do on that particular website or page is ordering a free, sample ebook on dog training. It could be a 30 page free document on “How to buy a puppy” or “how to stop your dog from barking at the neighbours”. Lizzy short report is meant to give you a taste of what her training is about, how easy it is to implement her suggestions and to show you how knowledgable she is when it comes to dog training. It is also meant to buy her database, her “list”. The database or list is a list of prospects who may want to buy her dog training videos or ebooks that are not free of charge, but as you already liked her free report, you may be more inclined to buy her information products because you start to “know, like and trust her”.

Squeeze or Listbuilding page

A listbuilding page is also called a squeeze page and has only one purpose: to get the website visitors contact details, including the email address, to keep in touch with them. The marketer knows that many visitors don’t buy at first or second touch, they need to feel the “I know, like and trust you” factor before they want to buy from you. Different to the sales page, the squeeze page has no buy button anywhere. It is also much shorter, usually only one screen size long and often has a video or photo attached and an opt-in form, asking the visitor for name and email address. Sometimes other details are asked for, but the more the more information is asked the less people usually sign up, so business owners need to be careful to not push their visitors off the page by asking too many contact details. Often only two fields, name and email address, are compulsory, even if there are fields for phone number, address, website, questions, etc..

When a website visitors signs in, the contact information goes into a listbuilding shoppingcart or email marketing system. From there the business owner can contact the visitor whenever they like with a newsletter or a special offer. It is not recommended to contact the list (the people who opted in) too often, otherwise people will perceive it as spam and unsubscribe. There has to be an unsubscribe function in your system, otherwise you go against the spam laws.

When the website visitor has entered into Lizzy’s squeeze or listbuilding page, he or she may at some stage be led to a sales page. This is the time when Lizzy hopes that someone will buy her complete video dog training course. Underneath you see what a salespage could look like.

Sales page

On the left you see an example of a very long sales page for dog training. Please note I’m not affiliated to the service nor have done the webdesign. It’s simply a good example of a sales page for you to check out. Click on the image to enlarge it to see its elements: video use, persuasive text, website only leads to one thing: the sale. The salespage also has large buy buttons, testimonials, photos, etc.

Say you want to sell a product, such as an ebook or an information report or a CD Multi-Media coaching set, you do best by organizing yourself a sales page.

A sales page is often very long. It states problems the website visitors may have and talk about the solution, gives examples, features, benefits and also testimonials. At the end (and in-between) there are calls for action, to buy the product.

Sales pages are highly effective when done correctly and don’t really look like webdesigners “pretty” works, they have only one aim and that is SELL. Many sales pages have no link going anywhere other than the shoppingcart to buy the product. The philosophy behind this is that a confused person doesn’t buy. If your whole page/website deals only with the sale of this one product or event or service, then all you can do here is buying or not buying.

The longer you stay with the text the more likely it is you buy. The sales page is a conversation and written in a conversational style. There is no place for British English and high level academic language on it.

Online reports and video series can often be represented by graphic design products. The actual product is an information product (mp3 audio, Youtube video, ebook in pdf. format, etc.) and the graphic designer creates a graphic showing off how the online products could potentially look like. Very often you will never receive a real product when you buy an online product. Sometimes you will receive a real folder with CDs and you can choose to have an online version.

The graphics for an information product could look like this:

You may wonder why the trainer or information marketer uses these graphics that makes you think you purchased a real book or real CDs. This is just to help you make a decision to buy. If they talk about a report or video only, you may not be able to imagine how much information you will get for your money. If they show you a graphic with ten CDs you will think that you receive the content that fits on 10 CDs, so it must worth the money you spend.

If you sell an information product you may consider using graphics for them as well. Look at the graphic on the left: doesn’t it look like you are purchasing a ton of information instead of just some online videos or reports?

 

The Store website

If you sell real products, such as dogs leases, dog beds, dog food, etc. you will consider have your own store. This store has a shoppingcart that helps the visitor purchase the goods and pay for them immediately online. They often take Paypal or creditcards or both.

Underneath you see an example of an online dog store.

Facebook page

As mentioned, Lizzy could have a store or a page on Facebook as well. Some people who haven’t got a business website yet, actually choose to build a customized Facebook page instead. The page is different to your profile. Lizzy would have her profile set up for Lizzy Lissington and then a Facebook page for her dog business. This is free of charge and she can talk to her clients online and attract a lot of traffic as Facebook is one of the world’s leading websites. It’s of similar importance as Google.

To make her Facebook page memorable and to sell her products and make her business known, she might want to hire a web designer who design her custom Facebook page as it’s not that easy to do it yourself, but it is usually cheaper than a full website.

Check out the example of a Facebook dog business page:

To engage people, Barkbusters have a Facebook page with a competition. If you “like” their page, you go into the draw to win something. Check it out underneath:

Example Facebook page

Hub

Cesar Millan, the famous dogtrainer, has a big hub for his dog training business, offering everything from online video training, book sales, apparel, forum, etc. His website is done as a static website. Being Cesar and famous, his website ranks extremely high in the search engines, but when you are a newbie to the online world, chances are that your static website would rank worse than a WordPress website with constantly fresh content via the blog page. The blog page is your newspage that will get indexed very quickly in Google when you update the blog frequently and with the right keywords.

A hub website (could also be called portal website) that also integrates the blog (news items) and Social Media, such as Youtube, Facebook, etc. is the website from the internet marketer Fabienne Frederickson. It’s a great example of a web site that shows off everything that someone offers, such as online courses, coaching, mastermind groups, events, etc. Check it out http://www.clientattraction.com.The reason I show you Fabienne’s's website is that she combines the elements mentioned in the text above: she uses the sign up box for her listbuilding, she lists her products and services like a portal and she intergrates Social Media (video, Facebook, etc.)

Social Media integration is nowadays a must to grow your business. Fabienne is using a WordPress platform. Two-way-communication is more and more important for the consumers of today and integrating a blog and Social Media platforms make that possible.

See the example: Fabienne makes use of the sign up box for her listbuilding, she uses her blog to show the website visitor she knows what she is talking about, helps the search engine optimization with it, she displays a Facebook bad on the side bar, she shows off the icons of the Social Networks you can connect with her (Twitter, etc.) and she posts videos and photos. When you go to her product page, you will find links to salespages, so she integrates all marketing methods in one.

Conclusion

You see that there are several options to market your services and products successfully online. Each solution mentioned her has its reasons. The sales and squeeze pages want the website visitor to only to ONE thing (either sign up with your contact details or to buy something) and don’t want any distraction, therefore you can only do one thing on these pages.

The store has the aim to offer the visitor a great shopping experience with a handy way to buy products, pay online and get them delivered to your door. Great for time-poor people.

The portal and hub helps you to see what services and products are on offer. Often businesses have a variety of these websites with different domain names to get maximum results.

Looking at Fabienne’s clientattraction website, you see it all integrated in one, but then leading off from different pages and links you see squeeze pages, sales pages, blog pages and her Facebook page in action. Why did she do this? Because Fabienne is a very well known marketer and wanted to show her readers and clients what services and products she offers and what she can do for you. She has many programmes, products and training events available that it makes sense to have a big hub or portal to show them all off at one glance. In the past, she used to have a squeeze page as her homepage and had a WordPress website hidden behind the squeeze page. I will show it to you underneath: