Do I REALLY Need a Pro?

 January 09, 2021 | WEB DESIGN

This is a time honored question many business owners have asked. It’s a fair question for any reasonable entrepreneur to consider. Given the limited resources businesses face, it can be wise to try and save when possible. In today’s post, we are going to answer this question with as many options as possible so that you can spend less on your internet presence.

You might NOT need a professionally designed website! Coming from a web design company such as us, you may be surprised to read that. 

At Jayo Designs, we firmly believe in a KISS model. Keep it super simple. When you are starting out, it may be better to just have a simple one page website with an easy way to get in touch with your business. 

This one-page setup will work if you are just starting out and are needing to test the waters.  (you don’t want to stay in this stage thought)

The essentials here are as follows:

• The contact information must be above the fold.  That means when someone lands on the site, they immediately know how to reach you

• What you do or sell must be immediately obvious to people! On our website, www.jayoesigns.com our tagline is upfront and in huge font.  “Websites that work.” That’s what we do. Your website needs to be the same. If you do fishing charters specializing in bottom fishing, yours could say, “Bottom fishing experts.”  If you are an R.V. Park in Florida, on the water, your headline could be, “Amazing views and warm weather.” Keep it simple.

• Bonus points: Throw a good picture in there!  

Two of the most important things to consider in this decision is the following:

• What is the BEST use of your time? 
• What is each customer worth to you?

How much do you make off each customer? To be honest, this should be a post in its own light. The short version is this: By knowing how much each customer is worth to the business, you can better calculate the amount of money you can spend to attract them!

• Example: If you’re a charter captain who charges $1000 for a full day of fishing, you might consider the best use of your time and energy to be taking people fishing.

What matters most of all is visibility and allowing your customers to see the value you offer. If this is a one-page website, GREAT! If this is a full website with a photo gallery, a calendar, and SEO upgrades, COOL!  

Jayo Website Designs can help you with whatever type of website you choose. Even if you just need some guidance setting your own website up. We are happy to answer all questions, free of charge. Please contact us with any web questions you have. Cheers.

Is Your Website Working? (Part 5)

 December 18, 2020 | WEB DESIGN

Who Goes There!?

Hopefully a new visitor to your website!  

One of the biggest parts of running a successful company is getting traffic. You could have the best team, the best product, and the best offers, but if people are not seeing you, you’re not gonna sell much. 

Think of New Visitors and a kind of indicator as to the health of your business for the future.  Traffic is good, really good.  Without the traffic, you know there is a chance your business may be in decline.  

We want to check on this metric especially carefully if we are running promotions.  It will allow us to sanity check our advertising and promos. While there are much better metrics to track specific conversion, in this case we also want to see the obvious number get bigger.  We are not monkeying around here.

This may seem like a lot to ask, you may be thinking, “This sounds like a lot of work.”  To which, we at JaYo Designs say, “A little work today will go a long way for a better tomorrow.  

As always, please contact us with any questions you have about this topic or how to improve your current website! We all love to talk about this business, even if you’re not a customer.  Promise.

Is Your Website Working? (Part 4)

 December 15, 2020 | WEB DEISGN 

Did you know you can automatically track the patterns of returning visitors? This metric provides an outstanding insight into the value your website is providing to your visitors.

To understand this, think of your website as a restaurant. If you’re cooking great food and sending people off with full, satisfied bellies, they’re more likely to come back.

If your food is just ok, you’ll most likely never see those folks again. They’re gonna go to the next place down the street to enjoy the fine culinary art happening down there.

This is what we DO NOT want to have happened.

The big question then becomes, “How the hell do we make our website so useful and attractive that people want to come back to it!?” The answer is not complicated.

2. Whatever your expertise is, start providing free value on the website. A blog is a great example. Not long stuff, just free, relevant information.

3. Continuous improvement. Your website and content need to be updated. Truly, it matters.

This stuff matter. It will make you happy, we promise.

This may seem like a lot to ask, you be thinking, “This sounds like a lot of work.” To which, we at JaYo Designs say, “A little work today will go a long way for a better tomorrow.

As always, please contact us with any questions you have about his topic or how to improve your current website! We all love to talk about this business, even if you’re not a customer. Promise.

Is Your Website Working? (Part 3) 

 December 1, 2020 | WEB DESIGN

So you’ve got some visitors, GREAT! Now what? In the next part of our deep dive into website metrics, we will discuss Pages Per Session.

Pages Per Session is basically telling you how interested your visitors are in your website content. This data answers the question, “What do they do on my site?”

Why do we care!?

We care because this knowledge allows us to tailor our content to the best audience and to be sure the most valuable content is featured correctly. As we examine this data, we are able to see a roadmap of how the visitor travels the site, what they stop on, and even make some educated guesses as to why they did so. It is basically a game of detective to examine this stuff and make good inferences from it.

Key takeaways:

• Pages Per Session is a great metric to review to see how well your content is serving your website visitors
• Providing useful and to-the-point content will increase pages per session
• The more pages a visitor views, the better the chances they will convert

Let us know what questions you have!  We love providing advice and insights about this amazing stuff.

Is Your Website Working? (Part 2) 

 November 24, 2020 | WEB DESIGN 

We discussed Bounce Rate in the previous post.
Today, we are talking about “Time on Page”. Exciting name, right?

Even though it’s a drab name, the metric is pretty darn important. This is an indicator of how interesting visitors find your content, and how relevant it may be to them.

Here is an example:

If you’re a plumber and someone is looking for a plumber in Gainesville Florida who specializes in fixing toilets, and they visit your website trying to find your specialties, but they cannot find a list of your specialties, you can be sure they are gonna leave that page and go find someone else.  This would be an example of low “Time on Page”

Here is another example: 

You’re a charter fishing captain who specializes in targeting yellowtail snapper in the Florida Keys.  And someone (like me for example) is trying to find a captain who is an expert at yellowtail fishing.  If your website had a blog detailing your last trip catching yellowtail, I would read the heck out of that blog, and so would other visitors who were interested in the same thing. 

This would be reflected in your “Time on Page”. This makes us happy.

This is why it can be so important to work with professional website and marketing professionals. They will help you monitor these metrics, offer suggestions, and overall help your business succeed and make more money.

Part three will be coming soon where we will discuss pages per session! Whooo sexy stuff, right? But it IS sexy, because this is the bread and butter of improving your business. Imagine having so many clients you could pick and choose who you work with. Pretty nice huh? What would you do with all that happiness?

Is Your Website Working? 

 November 22, 2020 | WEB DESIGN 

How do you know if the website you currently have is actually making you money? You ARE trying to make money with your business, right?

The good news is having a website that “works” is not especially difficult.

The bad news is that it is not always obvious what is actually working on your website and what is not. This is where a good study of analytics comes in!

Now hang one there, don’t go running away just yet. I wasn’t saying we are gonna do a deep-dive into number crunching!

We are just gonna hit the highlights of some basics you can look for and of course, offer our best suggestions and our services to get some better insight that makes you and your company more successful.

We are going to do away with all the technical mumbo-jumbo for this post and just focus on what is happening at the most simplified level with your business website. This will be part one of a multi-part post. We will be covering Bounce Rate today.

Today, we are able to view the exact path your visitors take on your website and even how long they spend on each page. One of the most essential jobs of your websites is to give your visitor exactly what they came for in as little time as possible (bonus points if they had fun doing it because your site is well designed and fun.)

If a visitor lands on your home page and then immediately leaves without interacting with any other pages, this is called a bounce.

An average bounce rate is around 45-55%. This means half of all visitors to your website leave never having engaged any other pages. Increasing customer engagement and decreasing bounce rate can make you more money and make your customer much happier.

 Here are ways to do this:

• Ensure your homepage loads fast and offers the most essential information which is important to your business.  
• Keep your menu simple and easy to read
• Use a great photo to keep attention
• Lead your customer to the actions you want them to take.