Kropmark Design

Premier design for Colorado Springs businesses

Customer Feedback: Trick or Treat?

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Yelp, Yahoo Local, Google Reviews. Is customer feedback a trick or treat?

I just spent some quality Halloween time with my family. We visited friends for dinner and then commenced the usual door knocking in search of a sugar rush.  Halloween is an unusual holiday, isn’t it?  Kids are allowed to beg for candy from complete strangers, with the threat of repercussions if the request is refused. Trick or treat?  Can you imagine the response you would get if you went trick-or-treating two weeks after Halloween day?  You would be laughed at, have a door slammed in your face, or worse.  Halloween is definitely a limited time offer!

Candy is Dandy

Many business owners second guess registering their businesses with customer feedback websites like Yelp because they see them as trick-or-treat type offers.  Sure, you may get some candy in the form of five-star Colorado Springs reviews.  But the threat of receiving that insidious “trick” of a one-star review from an unsatisfied customer is enough to scare many business owners.

A common misconception is that customers are more inclined to give you a bad review rather than a good one.  This is not true.  Although some vindictive types in the world will complain about everything and may write negative reviews, most customers choose to write positive Colorado Springs reviews. They choose to thank business owners who have treated them well, and they find value in recommending businesses that they like to the community.  Just as most folks are happy to give candy to kids on Halloween, most customers prefer the treat to the trick.

This is a Limited Time Offer!

Trick-or-treating is best done on Halloween night from the late afternoon to mid-evening.  Knock on a door too early, and they might not have candy ready for you.  Knock on a door too late, and you might hear some screaming and ghoulishness that you did not expect.  Knock on the door three weeks later, and you might be invited inside for turkey dinner. You need to strike while the iron is hot.

In the same way, now is the right time to register your business with online reputation websites. When we began working with customer feedback a couple of years ago, it was much easier to add your business to these websites than it is now.  Almost all of them were free, and few strings were attached.

Now, you are almost guaranteed to get a sales call or some other marketing materials if you sign up with one of these websites. Some of them make it very difficult to sign up: hiding sign-up links in hard-to-find locations, forcing you to go through multiple hoops and verifications, or allowing only a basic listing unless you sign up with them for a premium service. Some websites previously allowed manual business submissions, but now they won’t give you a listing at all unless you pay them.

You can expect customer feedback websites to become more restrictive and more commercialized as time goes on and as they become more popular.  Now is the time to sign up for these websites while they are still free. Just like Halloween, this is a limited time offer. Do not delay!

What Can Kropmark Design Do For Me?

If you are a do-it-yourself business owner and would like to sign up for free profiles on the major customer feedback websites, we recommend that you download our free step-by-step guide to customer-feedback websites. Our guide has links to most of the major customer feedback websites like Google, Colorado Springs Yelp, Yahoo Local, Superpages and many more.  This is a great option for technically savvy business owners who are able to invest some time into the process.

For those who don’t have the time or the technical know-how, let Kropmark Design help you with this process.  We would be happy to register you with the most important websites for a small monthly fee.  Your listings would include photos, vital business information and even online coupons in some cases.  This service will also include reputation monitoring for your business, to make sure you know about any positive or negative Colorado Springs reviews it receives.  We will advise you in best practices for addressing negative reviews and, if desired, we can send emails to unhappy customers on your behalf.

If you want to get started on the road to a healthy online presence and a top-notch business reputation, give Kropmark Design a call at (719) 465-4599.  Let us “treat” you to a great experience without any “tricks.”

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The nuts and bolts of web design

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The nuts and bolts of web design by Kropmark.

Do you know what you are getting when you purchase a web design? Business owners often pay too much for too little, receive a poorly crafted website from a developer rather than a designer, or are pushed into using a restrictive proprietary website system that is hard to work with. Don’t focus on price at the expense of quality, and make sure to compare several different designers before making a decision. Ask designers to line list what they do and explain why they do it.

At Kropmark Design, we try to make it easy for you to understand what we are going to do when building your website. Although we offer several different web and online marketing services, we have organized our web design services into three main packages. The best package for you will depend on your business goals, which is why we recommend an in-person meeting during which you can ask questions and allows us explain our offerings in greater depth.

Web design packages

For those who need a quick, simple and inexpensive web design we offer a basic website package. The design for this website will be based on a pre-existing template with no customization and we will not perform any search engine optimization. This package is best for businesses on a tight budget and includes the following services:

  • Installation of one content management system website (WordPress, Joomla or Drupal)
  • Setup of website navigation and structure for five total web pages
  • Logo implemented into the header (logo must be supplied by the client)
  • Population of website with text and graphics
  • Assistance with domain name registration and choice of web hosting
  • Setup of one business email account
  • One hour of training in the operation and management of your website

For businesses who want a custom-designed website with on-site search engine optimization included, we offer a standard web design package. Kropmark Design will customize the look of your website to match your company logo and overall brand, we will perform keyword research and competitor research for your business, and we will perform basic search engine optimization for your website. This package includes all of the services in the basic package plus the following services:

  • Design for three preliminary web design concepts
  • One revision to the selected website design concept
  • Competitor research and color theory research
  • Customization of HTML and CSS code
  • Testing in multiple browsers (PC and Mac)
  • Addition of Google Analytics
  • XML sitemap submitted to Google
  • Website registered with major search engines
  • Keyword research for your business genre
  • On-site search engine keyword optimization

For businesses that want to take maximum advantage of the online opportunities available to them, we recommend our enhanced web design package. Kropmark Design will help you set up and design your social media accounts, we will train you in their operation, and we will register you with five different online reputation websites to increase the accessibility of your business to online customers and the visibility of your website to search engines. This package includes all the services from the basic and standard packages, plus the following services:

  • Facebook account activation and design
  • Twitter account activation and design
  • One hour of social media account training
  • Online reputation check of your business
  • Account setup with Google+ Local, Yelp and any three other customer feedback sites

Website requirements not included in any of these packages are priced a la carte, and can include such things as photo galleries (priced by the number of photos), setup of online advertising (banner or sidebar ads), e-commerce applications and shopping cart setup. Kropmark Design also offers many other services such as copywriting of web content, Flash animation and link building-based search engine optimization.

Maintenance agreements are available for the following services:

  • Website updates and backups
  • Online coupon offers and regular online news releases
  • Professional blogging with SEO keywords
  • Regular posts to Facebook or Twitter based on your marketing strategy
  • Management of your Google AdWords or Facebook advertising campaigns
  • Email marketing (e-blast) campaign setup and management
  • Online reputation monitoring
  • Link building through registration with online directories

What makes Kropmark Design different?

Kropmark Design differs from other web design companies in that we use well-supported content management system websites with open source code, rather than proprietary systems. What this means to you is that you will own your website outright, rather than rent it. If at any time you decide you don’t like your web hosting, you can move your website anywhere else that you like. If at any time you don’t want to use Kropmark Design as your webmaster, you can use any number of other designers to help you. Your website will be that universally supported.

Many web designers want to control your website. Their proprietary content management systems force you to go back to them for changes, so that over time you pay more for your website. Kropmark Design leaves the control in your hands and allows you to choose the level of service and on-going support you require.

Our goal is to empower other small businesses to manage their website for themselves, and your new web design by Kropmark will allow this. Never before has website management been so accessible to the average businessperson. Making changes to your website is simple and does not require an intermediary. Because of this, Kropmark Design believes that our websites provide more value and bang for your buck than any other website provider. Try us and see the difference!

If you have any questions about the nuts and bolts of web design, give Kropmark Design a call at (719) 465-4599 or email us at info@kropmark.com. Unlike many of our competitors, our initial consultations are free and we love getting to know more about you and your business.

Image courtesy of Idea go / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The Basics of SEO

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Colorado Springs SEO and website design by Kropmark.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is an important component of any good website design. Yet many times when I speak about SEO to business owners, they still don’t know what it is or why it is necessary.

Every web page has two sides: the side which is seen by human visitors to your website (sometimes called the front-end), and the code behind your website which determines the content, the layout, and how it will be displayed by browsers. Many incredibly beautiful sites on the web have inferior coding or don’t take advantage of the code-based SEO opportunities available to them. Flash-based websites are great examples. They look great to human visitors, but are limited in their search engine optimization capabilities.

Kropmark Design offers online marketing and seo services.
This is how a website looks to humans.

On the other hand, many websites look terrible but get excellent rankings on Google because of their superior SEO. Great SEO is important, but not at the expense of professionalism and the ability to close the sale through your visual presentation. Kropmark Design helps businesses take maximum advantage of their online marketing by creating websites that are attractive to customers and search engines both. After all, what is the advantage of having a beautiful website if no one will ever see it?

Search engines rank your website based on two main criteria: relevant content and inbound links. Relevant content is established by having good copywriting that is rich in the keywords that your customers use in searches. Your site needs enough keywords to be found by Google, but not so many that you get penalized for artificially adding them, also known as “keyword stuffing.” As a result, websites with an abundance of well-written text will outperform websites with minimal content. This is why we recommend that businesses include a native blog component, updated regularly, into their websites.

SEO is making your html code get noticed by Google.
This is how a website looks to search engines.

Maximizing the presence of keywords within your html code is also key. Many business owners ignore file names when uploading photos to their blog or website. Humans who view uploaded photos on your website won’t ever see this filename, but Google will be able to read it in your code. The Colorado Springs SEO value in a file named colorado_springs_web_design.jpg is significantly greater than a file named 92b54h5.jpg. Renaming your files effectively is an easy way to add greater relevance to your website. Kropmark Design can help you with many similar techniques such as utilizing alt tags, writing strategic link and title copy, and using effective meta keywords and descriptions.

Inbound links to your website also raise your prominence in search engine results. Websites which have longevity, a good reputation, and are considered worthy of linking to by the online community are assigned greater value by search engines in website rankings. Most businesses want to get listed on the first page of a Google search the day their business opens, but off-site search engine optimization is a process that is best done over time. Registering your website on customer feedback websites and getting good reviews on these sites is very helpful. Linking to your website from online directories and submitting your blog to aggregator sites are also great techniques that Kropmark Design can implement to get you noticed on search engines like Google.

Opinions about best practices for search engine optimization cover a wide spectrum. Those practices which are condoned by search engines are called white hat SEO services. Techniques that are discouraged by search engines, or that use deception to accomplish better rankings, are called black hat SEO services. Some companies are looking for a quick fix that will get them ranked immediately. They contract SEO companies to trick search engine algorithms by creating artificial links and spam. However, Kropmark Design believes that white hat SEO techniques have greater payoffs in the long run and are also more ethical.

Additional avenues to increase your online presence include video marketing, social media marketing and pay-per-click advertising. Kropmark Design is an all-in-one online marketing company and can help you with any of your web marketing strategies. We can copywrite your social media posts and blog posts, optimize your content and code, and provide you with a beautiful website that will convert your customers into sales. Get found online. Call Kropmark Design today at 719-465-4599.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

A good referral

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Good referrals for Kropmark Design are businesses who need website help.

If you network, you will certainly hear the phrase “a good referral for me is…” more than once. Networking is, after all, a way to help other businesses to succeed and to be helped in the process. I rarely bring referrals up in my own networking, as I prefer to allow leads to grow naturally and organically. However, this topic does give me an excuse to discuss who my clients tend to be and what to look for in businesses that might be helped by Kropmark Design.

Customers of Kropmark Design typically come to us for the following reasons:

You are starting a new Business

Most folks starting a new business today realize the necessity of a website and will make it one of their first priorities. The downside of this is that new businesses rarely have a lot of capital, causing some owners to make the mistake of getting a cheap (and cheaply done) web page design. Which leads me to my next type of client…

You are unhappy with your cheaply-made website

Although a website built through a free website builder will work in a pinch, most business owners realize quickly that there are significant drawbacks to these types of sites. For one, they rarely look as professional as a web page design should be in order to bring in finicky (discriminating?) clients. Second, many of these hosting providers will include only the most basic functionality in your website. Adding a blog, e-commerce or other advanced functions will often increase your monthly rate. These nickel and dime style charges begin to accumulate, and your “inexpensive” website becomes significantly more pricey. This process leads me to my next type of client…

You want to upgrade to a more powerful, flexible and functional website

The restrictions of a non-cms (content management system) website eventually will frustrate most business owners, forcing them to look at better website options. Why would any business pay a monthly charge for blog functionality on a cheap website when they can get a powerful and flexible website with an integrated blog for a one-time fee? Businesses that come to this conclusion will discover that a cms website provides the balance of good looks, adaptability, ease of use and power that other web page designs lack.

You are not getting found by the right customers

Many business owners have great websites, but they are not tapping into online clients as much as they should. These businesses ask for help with their search engine optimization, Google Analytics, or Google Places accounts. Some businesses need help creating quality print advertising or coupon offers.

You ARE getting found by the WRONG customers

Some businesses receive scathing online reviews that they previously did not know existed (Note: you can run your business with top notch customer service and still recieve bad reviews). These businesses realize the damage that negative online reviews can have, or they realize the positive impact that five star reviews of their business can have and ask Kropmark Design to help monitor their online customer feedback.

You want to market your business in other ways, but don’t have the resources

Many businesses want to tap into social media but don’t have the time or knowledge to do so. Some businesses come to Kropmark Design because they want professional print design and layout for their presentations, but they don’t have the proper software or ability to design it themselves.

So then, who are the customers of Kropmark Design?

  • Business startups
  • Growing businesses who need web page design or advertising help
  • Businesses who have at least ten customers a day and need their reputation monitored
  • Business that have a storefront, especially restaurants and retail

Kropmark Design enjoys working with other designers, marketing agencies and programmers who need additional design help but don’t want another full-time employee.  Kropmark Design has also worked with many publishers in need of design, pre-press or production help.

We help other businesses to succeed. It is not just our mission statement, it is what Kropmark Design does and who we are. If you can relate to any of the above descriptions, trust us to provide a quality, high value product that is made with creativity, integrity and precision. We look forward to working with you.

Image by Comstock

Willy Wonka Websites

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The best websites are healthy, not Willy Wonka junk food web sites.

I have been singing Willy Wonka songs lately (and by the way, I came up with this idea WAY before Russell Brand did his horrible rendition at the Olympic Closing Ceremonies). Just like most Americans, I have also been watching the Olympics and cheering for the good ol’ USA to win some medals.  This got me thinking about how these two disparate concepts might relate to designing websites, and believe it or not I came up with a moderately sane analogy!

Clearly, it is not healthy to eat junk food all day long. You may survive, but you end up fat and tired like poor Augustus Gloop whose gluttony caused him to fall into the chocolate river and get squeezed into a vacuum tube. I’m sure we would all rather be like the Usain Bolts of the world, physically fit and feeling great.  However, this requires more time, more discipline, eating a healthy diet and working out regularly.

The analogy is that many businesses have junk food websites. What I mean by this is that business owners, especially when starting their business, cut corners on the health of their website design.  They pay for a cheap 1and1 website or try to make their own site through GoDaddy’s website builder tools, rationalizing that they can upgrade to a better website once they gain more capital. However, most business owners either never upgrade, wait too long to upgrade, or go out of business before they can upgrade.  Those that go out of business sometimes can attribute their lack of success directly to their poorly managed website.

They spend no time optimizing their websites to be found by search engines, and are therefore never found by their online customers. They don’t spend any time linking to their websites from all of the free directories and customer feedback websites that are available. They don’t bother tapping into social media marketing to expand their online presence. They don’t blog, they don’t include any lead generation forms on their website, they don’t do e-blasts… their website and online presence are malnourished and underperforming  This is the junk food website.

On the other hand, business owners who give their website lots of attention, good nutrition and regular exercise will find their online presence becoming more healthy and robust. Feed your website a healthy diet of backlinks, using the online tools available to you. Give your website design yearly checkups with a trained web designer who can evaluate the levels of your on-site search engine optimization. Exercise your website with a weekly regimen of blog entries to keep your content fresh. Jog the memories of your customers by keeping in touch with them through regular emails.  You will see your website winning gold in no time!

Heed my advice and don’t make me start an Oompa Loompa song on you.  Uh oh, here comes one now…

Oompa Loompa, Loompa-Dee-Doo
I have another puzzle for you
Oompa Loompa, Loompa-Dee-Dee
If you are wise, you’ll listen to me

What do you get when your website is junk?
Too much free time, and your business is sunk
Call Kropmark now, get your business in shape
Websites and more with no red tape… just hard work and integrity!

Image from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory / Warner Bros.

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Kropmark Design
based in Colorado Springs, CO
Phone: 719-465-4599

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