November 2009

Your Website Is Your Best PR

by Bruce Rigney
( Reprinted in part from www.beautyprpro.com)

Part one last month took a look at the home page of your website and what kind of first impression it made on your salon clientele. Part two picks up with “Where to From Here” … how to guide your visitor from the home page to where you can satisfy their needs and your website’s objectives.

Part II — Beyond Your Home Page

Which way did they go? After viewing your website’s homepage, your visitor has to decide where to go next. Given you’ve captured their interest, they now want to know more about you, your product, or your service. Your website design must guide them to:

• Contact you.
• Make an appointment.
• Buy your product(s).
• Give you their contact information.

If your homepage navigation is well designed, your visitor should easily find their next area of interest and click on it. That interest is definitely influenced by your website’s design and structure. The use of ‘clickable’ features to bring them directly to special offers or benefit helps your visitor swiftly find their way to your contact or purchase pages.

What They Read … Is What They Get

When your visitor arrives at a page of your website and is confronted with a large gray mass of text, you have lost them. Break up text blocks. Help your visitors immediately locate their area of interest on the page. Use:

• Subheads: These are usually in a different color from the text and help to define the text below them. The visitor can use the subhead as a guide to locate that part of the text that is of interest.
• Bullets: A paragraph which contains a list (of benefits, uses, services offered, credentials, clients, etc.) should be broken apart into bulleted listings which enable the visitor to immediately locate relevant items. No longer a blur of text, information ‘pops’ off the page.
• Secondary Navigation: When you have a list of services or types of products, you can employ a secondary navigation element to the page, often on the side of the page. This allows the visitor to narrow his or her search quickly and get right to what they are looking for. For example, on a services page for a salon, rather than display a long page with a continuous listing of services, the page could have a general statement about the services of the salon. Then, on the side of the page, a boxed area or sidebar can list each of the individual services where the visitor can click on a listed item to link directly to data about the specific service.
• Eliminate the Negative – Reverse Type: If you want to hide or obscure your message, reverse the text. White on black or on any other color, is almost impossible to read in quantity on a website.
• Visitor Drop-Off –Long Lines of Text: Two-thirds of the way across the line of type readers ‘drop off’ and lose track of what they are reading. Reader drop-off rate is relative to the length of the line of text and the size of the type. If you must run text the full width of the page, increase the type size to balance the length of the line.

Drop-off is a significant design factor for the new wider website standard for the larger monitors now in general use. Designers must artfully balance artwork, sidebars, navigation columns and the use of shorter columns to avoid a layout that requires the reader to scan a full length wider web page.

• Use Calls to Action. Places where you ask your visitor to contact you, or purchase a product. These can be on the homepage, or on any pages where it is probable that the visitor might be receptive to being guided toward that action. These calls to action are usually presented as prominently displayed links which direct the visitor to “Buy Now” or “Call Today” or “Contact Us.”

Remember, your site was not only built to be beautiful and inspire confidence in your products or services, but as a lead (or income) generating tool to grow your business.

Who is Your Visitor? Capture Contact Info

Many salon/spa sites are not set up for online sales. The main goal is to generate enough interest to get a visitor to make an appointment or respond to an offer. If they’ve gotten to your website, they are already a warm lead and you want to capture their contact information to re-contact them if you miss them this time around.

Ideally, what you want is your visitor’s name, address, phone number and email address, but most of us are reluctant to divulge all that on first contact. Since the goal is to continue to communicate to them, obtaining an email address alone is a victory.

Once contact info has been captured in any form, you are able to continue to stimulate their interest via email. Such items as:

• News stories about your business
• Customer successes or endorsements
• New product and/or service offerings

All of these encourage a potential client to try your product or service and eventually become part of your ever-expanding clientele.

This article is edited from the three part series on www.beautyprpro.com, a PR blog written regularly by Sharon Esche and Alexander Irving of Esche & Alexander Public Relations for salon and spa professionals. The website series was originally guest posted by Bruce Rigney, owner of Rigney Graphics, a marketing communications and web design firm headquartered in Pasadena, CA. Their website is www.rigneygraphics.com.