I recently took a leave of absence from Blizzard to visit my sister in Wellington, New Zealand.  During our visit together to the South Island, we made a stop in Christchurch, where we stayed at the Hotel So.  Opening in 2007, the designer hotel is a recent addition to the city’s myriad of accommodation choices.  They market themselves toward a younger, style (yet budget) conscious crowd, mainly composed of 20 and 30-something adventurers, as well as some business travelers.  The overall feel of the hotel is modern and chic, with minimal yet appealing interior design.  The bar serves designer martinis; the café menu is eclectic and trendy. 

The thing that grabbed my attention the most about this hot spot was their branding strategy.  Every detail of the hotel was considered in the planning of the business; all elements communicated with each other visually.  From the logo to the wallpaper, right down to the tea bags and chocolates, everything matched perfectly.  Simply said, it’s a designer’s paradise, and I fell in love immediately.  If their marketing team hasn’t won an award for this place yet, it’s about time they did!

When I returned to the states in March, I hadn’t checked out the Hotel So website yet, so when I finally did I was pleased to see that their website carried the same stunning brand identity that the hotel did.  Not only did the professional photography sweep me right back across the Pacific Ocean, but the graphic elements of the site reminded me of how carefully their designers made the place a cohesive whole.  The same unusual color combinations of brownish taupe and various pastel colors (which are all very fashionable combinations right now) that I found throughout the hotel itself, were now echoed on my computer screen. 

So what’s so important about creating a brand identity for your property?  Well, there are lots of reasons.  For starters, if you create a lasting impression on your customers, they will become repeat customers.  There is no doubt that if I were to find myself in Christchurch again, I would make a point of staying at the Hotel So.  Since my sister and I stayed in a variety of hotels and hostels all over New Zealand, many of them blur together in my memory.  However, this place was an experience in itself, and I won’t soon forget it. 

The AVS Group, a web services company in Wisconsin, explains another reason that branding is so important. “Brand identity commands a price-premium. Why is someone willing to pay thousands of dollars more for a Lexus than for a Toyota? They are virtually the same product with the exception of some additional options and accessories…the value proposition is wrapped around the brand. The Lexus…[is] worth more in the minds of consumers regardless of whether the product actually functions better.” According to an article by Lara Appelhans at INeedHits.com, “building your brand will create credibility, implies trustworthiness, and should make your business name synonymous with the product or service that you sell.”

When it’s time to start establishing your brand, make sure your design is consistent online and offline.  You and your designer(s) should work together to establish a standard of typefaces, layouts and color palettes.  If your outdoor signage is designed in the font Soho Gothic, carry that font over to your website and use it on some of your buttons (remember though that for many areas of a website, such as the copy, you will need to stick to web-safe fonts).  If the color of the walls in most of your rooms is hunter green, try using a similar color in your website design. 

One of the design elements that we see on the Hotel So website is the repeated abstract line pattern at the bottom of the screen:

Although not identical, it is very similar the line pattern found on the wood panels and comforters found in every room:

To the non-designer, details such as repeating lines may seem trivial.  However, when several of these small details tie together, it can create a visual theme that wows the consumer.  Next time you order new comforters for your beds, or new packaging for in-room amenities - think about the “style” you’re conveying with your property and with your website.  Sometimes making a few simple purchase decisions can go a long way towards giving your guests the experience today’s traveler is craving. 

Organizing a website design is one of the most effective ways to make it user friendly and more productive. A few important elements of website design are; content, images, navigation, and placement. Each of these elements can be viewed as blocks of information that must be presented in a way which is pleasing to the viewer.



Homepage
The home page is the first thing that the viewer sees. A good first impression is a lasting impression. The home page is where the viewer is welcomed to your hotel or resort. Invite the viewer to come and stay with you. Tell them how comfortable and relaxed they will feel. You can do this with images and text. Display your logo prominently. Let them know how they can reach you by phone, address, email with a call to action. With a click of a button they can reserve a room. These elements should be placed above the fold; the area the viewer sees when first arriving at your site.

Text
Text on a page describes the purpose and goal of that page. For example; the accommodations page will have a brief description of rooms available. This information is quickly, easily read and understood by the viewer. The words you use to describe the room are being fed to search engines to direct more traffic to your site. A minimum of 150 words per page is a good start. Headings and bulleted lists count too.

Images
The images you choose to display your hotel or resort should be clean and crisp. Images should be sized appropriately to load quickly and be visually pleasing. The images that you choose set the mood for your site. A soothing beach photo, for example, will relax the viewer. The colors of your design also set the mood this way. If you choose to include a slide show, use a few quality images.

Clear Paths and Navigation
Who likes to get lost? Nobody does. Establish your main navigation position and keep that position throughout your site. The main navigation should have no more than 7 links including a home link. The names of each link should be clearly understood. These 7 links should organize the main areas of your site. The sub-navigation will break down into more specific areas. For example; a main navigation link to the accommodations page will describe the hotel rooms available. The sub-navigation will describe in detail the amenities of the suite. A preliminary layout of your site will help you to map your site for easy linking from page to page.

Lead the viewer through the site visually. Placement of images, text, navigation and use of white space is a path for the eye to follow. You may grab the viewer’s attention with a beautiful photo of the area surrounding your hotel or resort. Bring them to your logo as an identifier. Navigation will briefly explain what you have to offer a potential guest. A quick scan of the layout can take only seconds. A clean and simple layout is best and easier to update, maintain and expand.

Layout, design and organization of a site are an important part of its productivity. You want your viewers to arrive at your site, reserve a room and stay a while.

The following questions we want to ask ourselves as we maintain the current trends of Email Marketing and receive the best results.

Does presenting the content in your email newsletter impact the results you receive?

What should an email newsletter look like?

How do you arrange it so that the newsletter draws customers to your site?

Does the layout depend on the topic and target market you are trying to sell your product to?

Email Newsletter vs. Website
The first concept to grasp is that email newsletters are not websites! When you send a newsletter, customers are not expecting your website. Obviously, you want your newsletter to continue branding your website, remaining strong with the overall image, but a newsletter should have a very different layout from your website. Think about the word Newsletter, what other forms of news do we look at and how do they draw us in? Newsletters should have a similar feel as a newspaper or a magazine. Newspapers always give you the main topic of the article first. Your reader should be able to figure out the main idea of your email newsletter from the first glance at the top of the email. Think about how a magazine or a newspaper pulls you in with headlines and teasing featured articles. You want to do the same as you setup your newsletter. One idea to consider is to bullet point the main topics of the newsletter at the top of the page. The bullet points can also work as a table of contents linking to different parts of the newsletter. Remember to draw your readers in with key points, maintaining a layout of news and not a website.

Email Blasts vs. Full Articles
Deciding what your content is about is influential to formatting the newsletter layout. You want to have a clear goal whether your newsletter will drive traffic to your site or build your reputation and relationship with the reader. If you want to drive traffic to your site, don’t give the complete information in the newsletter. Build links to your website that will tease readers to click on them. Skillful ‘teasers’will drive traffic to your site. If you decide your newsletter is more about relationships and reputation, then your newsletter should provide the complete information, giving the full content to the reader.

Prioritizing Content
To organize content, you want to target the reading styles, putting more emphasis on certain areas of your newsletter. Some readers skim subject lines and may never look at the email, others will skim the main headers and key bullet points of the newsletter. The following are the areas that are important to emphasize in your newsletter:

• Dynamic Subject Lines

Some readers look at the subject lines of their emails, if it doesn’t appeal to them, they will delete the email without opening it. Making your subject line dynamic is a crucial aspect to bringing results.

• Call to Action

You always want to make it easy for your reader to take the actions you are wanting; in your newsletters have a primary place for the reader to click your call to action.

• Sectioning your Newsletter

Placing your content in sections, help readers gain the main points, and makes it simple for readers to quickly find the area of the newsletter they are most interested in.

• Headlines

It is easier for readers to get the main point of your newsletter, if they have headlines to outline the key points. Headlines go along with sectioning your newsletter, helping to organize the content for readers.

• Image Blocking

You want to make sure your newsletter can be read even if the pictures are not displaying. Make sure your layout allows for this aspect, readers can still read your newsletter even without the pictures.

Conclusive Testing
Remember the above key points as you think about the layout of your next email newsletter. You may want to test different layouts to see what works best for your. This will help you see the impact layouts have on your results. With tracking programs, you can try different types of newsletters and track the actions of your readers.

There are many different ways to layout a newsletter; however here is example template highlighting placement and key attributes discussed in the article:

CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, have reinvented the way website designers not only create the look and feel of a website, but also how they keep that look consistent throughout the entire website.

Whether it’s a one page or 100 page website, CSS makes updating each page much simpler. With Cascading Style Sheets, a designer has one area or file he/she uses to add pictures, change the font or color of the text, change the background color or image and update the entire look of a website.

CSS is a syntax used in the markup languages HTML and XHTML and has limited use in XML documents. HTML and XHTML are the programming languages most widely used and they are supported by most search engines. CSS is used in almost every aspect of today’s website designs.

CSS hasn’t always been the web designer’s outlet for a ‘simple fix’ method to revamp or give a website a ‘face lift’. After years of trial and error testing, CSS is still a work on progress. With ever changing browser support and new browsers being continually created, finding the correct syntax for CSS is a constant and everlasting project.

Since the beginning of style sheet usage in the 1970’s, it has evolved through wide-spread study and testing. It wasn’t until the mid 1990’s that CSS was introduced to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). At that time, W3C members became involved in its development, as well. In the late 1990’s, CSS was ready to go LIVE and in December 1996, the syntax became official.

Even with the tremendous support from the W3C, Internet Explorer 3 was released in 1996 with very little support for the highly useful style sheet syntax.

Three years later, Internet Explorer 5 was released and had a nearly 100% compatibility and support for CSS. As with any new internet language, however, bugs and inconsistencies were major obstacles.

Introducing different variations of CSS, such as CSS1, CSS2 and CSS3, aided in weeding out the properties that browsers simply wouldn’t support. Creating a standard for CSS and browser compatibility was mandatory for a successful syntax and style tool. By using variations from all forms of CSS, CSS2.1 was created in late July 2007. By 2008, the latest and greatest version of Internet Explorer, IE8, allowed for full support of the CSS2.1 syntax in its highest quality ‘web standards’ mode.

Today there are still several quirks and tweaks in CSS and some website designers use CSS filters and hacks to “workaround” inconsistencies. Keeping a consistent appearance in ALL internet browsers is the main goal and reason for constant research and testing as newer versions of CSS are established.

CSS3 is currently in the works. This newest version of the elder syntax will involve several of the same elements included in prior versions. W3C keeps an ongoing record of its work and studies on CSS3. You may access them at www.w3.org

Bugs and Limitations:

The most well known Internet Explorer browser bug associated with CSS is the ‘Internet Explorer box model bug’. This bug affects many CSS attributes in Windows-based browsers up to and including IE6. The bug mainly affects the size and interpretation of certain ‘blocks’ included with most website designs. Below is an example of the box model bug as explained in wikipedia.org.

As specified by most CSS syntaxes, the width and height of block-level elements should be included for all information and content within the box, not including the surrounding padding, margins, borders, etc…this is to be added afterwards. However, some web browsers, IE5 and earlier, were programmed to include the padding and margins within the block elements, therefore expanding the size of the block seen by the browsers and misconstruing the layout of web pages using the CSS syntax.

Several ‘workarounds’ have been invented to force IE5 and earlier versions to display the layout of web pages as the CSS programmer intended. Along with the famous box model bug, arose a workaround called the ‘box model hack’. It was developed by Tantek Celik, a computer scientist in San Francisco who was also the Chief Technologist for Technorati, a social media marketing forum. Though the ‘box model hack’ was developed to improve compatibility of CSS in web browsers, most designers currently find the ‘hacks’ to be unreliable and have opted to use CSS filters to insure proper viewing of web pages in earlier versions of IE.

With a history of limitations and disadvantages in using standard CSS to style websites, the current and future advantages of style sheets to create a consistent and flowing feel to one’s website are well worth the minor hindrances of certain elements contained in CSS attributes.

With the W3C involved in the continuous testing and revamping of CSS syntax, it will play a major part in creating a ‘style’ and continuing flow in websites well into the future. Stay tuned, next month I’m going to take look at CSS from a WHOLE NEW ANGLE and explain how it works to my mom - a decidedly non-techie person.

As an internet junkie, I see lots of web sites each day. I’ve seen some web sites that are successful and others that have the potential, but are missing a few key elements. Think about these as “technical” and “non-technical” factors that can help your website succeed and attract online customers.

1. Call to Action - As a web site visitor, I want to get straight to the point. If I don’t know what you want me to do on your web site, then you have failed. Make sure your book now buttons and you phone numbers are “above the fold”. If your visitors have to scroll to find it, you have failed yet again. Think of a folded newspaper, the most vital information is above the fold.
2. The K.I.S.S. Approach to Navigation – Do not make your navigation hard to use. Visitors have a hard time making a decision if you give them too many choices. Make your navigation prominent and easy to find on each page. Vincent Flanders calls this Mystery Meat Navigation.
3. Readable Text – Make sure that the text on your page is readable to all of your visitors. By using a web safe font and a decent font size, you surely can’t fail.
4. Quality Control – Broken links and images can lower the trust of your visitors. When people don’t trust you, they won’t buy from you. Be sure to search your web site with a fine toothed comb.
5. Marketing – It never ceases to amaze me how many web site owners don’t market their web site. Many just assume that by having a web presence, they are guaranteed online success. You may have the best web site out there, but how can it be successful if no one knows about it?
6. New Content – Search engines thrive on new content and so do your visitors. If something isn’t new, why should they come back?
7. Cross Browser Compatibility – Does your web site work in major web browsers and operating systems? If not, you are probably losing business. To test your web site in different browsers and systems I recommend using Browsershots.org .
8. Return Incentive – Do your visitors have a reason to come back? You can update your specials regularly and even provide a contest to entice them.
9. Not Enough Information - It’s good to have a few paragraphs that provide information your visitors are looking for.
10. Too Much Information – Web users are scanners. They won’t read eight paragraphs of content; they will in fact scan to find the points that interest them.
11. Visual Appeal – Do you use clipart or little animations of dogs, cats or hamsters on your web pages? If so you should ditch them and use some high quality photography. Users want a glimpse of what their paying for, not a piece of clipart from back in 1997.
12. No Scrolling Text – Sadly, I still see these every now and then. Text should not scroll slowly (or quickly) across your screen and visitors shouldn’t have to wait to see the entire message scroll by.
13. Ads for Competitors – Some web hosting companies, who offer free web site hosting, will put ads on your pages to cover the costs. Most of the time, these advertise your competitor’s web site. If you are cheap about your web hosting, you visitors probably won’t trust you.
14. Load Time – The rule of thumb for a web site’s load time was nine seconds. Those nine seconds were to captivate the user into buying. Nowadays the time needed to amaze, keeps getting quicker as internet connection speeds get faster. Be sure that your images and code are properly optimized for best web performance.
15. Under Construction – I see these too; it’s insane to think that I could have been a potential customer. “Coming soon” pages are an eyesore as well. If you don’t have the content, the page shouldn’t exist. One of the sorriest things that I have witnessed is large company web sites that “go down for maintenance”. A web site should never go down. If it must go down, it should be down for no longer than five minutes. This can turn off potential customers and most likely affect your search engine ranking.
16. Splash Pages – Ever go to a web site that makes you click a link to enter it? By adding an extra step just to get to your web site is just wrong. I usually leave.
17. Visible Hit Counters – Never let your visitors see how much traffic your site has received. Your site should reflect a professional appeal. Hit counters were a neat feature back in the late ‘90s, but you should not be using them today especially when you are selling something.
18. Background Music – Nothing kills me more than to enter a web page and have some crazy music begin playing. If you must have background music, please have a way to shut it off. It’s annoying.
19. 404 Pages – Let’s say that a bad link got past you from tip #4. Is the visitor going to see an ugly “404 – File Not Found” page or are they going to find a friendly page that looks like your site explaining what had happened.
20. Redesign – The web is continuously changing and so are web technologies. Consider redesigning your web site every two years. Not only will your site be up-to-date, but your visitors will appreciate the change as well.
21. Bonus – Commenting on blogs (such as this one) is a great way to let people know you are out there…

In conclusion, be sure to consult with your web designer if something doesn’t quite seem right. Remember technology is changing at a rapid pace. Make sure that your web site isn’t being left behind. Success comes in many different ways, by using the tips above, you shouldn’t fail.

At Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc. we recommend that anyone who’s serious about their online business redesigns or overhauls their website once every 2 to 3 years. Recently, Navarre Properties, who specializes in Navarre Beach vacation rentals on the Gulf Coast of Florida, did exactly that.

Their new design is clean and uncluttered, with the stylish and sophisticated new look  reflecting the world wide web of 2008. In addition, the new site is much more SEO-friendly than the old, with text navigation for the spiders to feed on and follow, instead of old-school image or javascript navigation.

There is one particular change that we expect will really impact their rankings for the better - the site now features a well-optimized page about each and every property that they represent. This will allow them to rank for a multitude of long-tail keyword phrases - something that many vacation rental websites cannot do because their property pages live on a booking engine’s website instead of on their own site.

If you need a little inspiration to get moving on a redesign for your own website, take a look at Navarre’s today!

Design maintenance is necessary to keep your site fresh.

Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc. introduced our Annual Design Maintenance Agreement (ADMA) just over a year ago. Some clients still have questions on what the ADMA provides and why they should purchase it. Today, I want to answer some of the many questions I hear frequently.

Q: Why do I need to purchase an ADMA?
A: In order for Blizzard’s design staff to maintain your website an ADMA is required. By purchasing an ADMA you are declaring you have chosen Blizzard to be your webmaster. Thus when you have changes to be made on your site, such as a rate change, text change, photo change, or even adding a new page, the information should be sent to Blizzard for those changes to be made.

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