Finding the Right Golf Website Designer

Hey When designing a new golf website, or redesigning an older website, there is a delicate balance between the creative-the look and feel of the website-and the technical-which is what makes the website work.

Thinking Over-emphasis of one, or the other, will result in a golf website that either looks great, but doesn't function that well, or will create a website that functions great but doesn't look good at all.

I think many golf website designers are either very technical or very creative. Seldom do you find a website designer who is great at both dealing with the technical issues of building a website and who is also a great graphic designer.

Ideally, you will want to find an individual or company which can provide you a high level of expertise in the look and feel of the website, and provide outstanding technical solutions. While graphic designers can generally create beautiful website designs, their ability to create complex technical solutions may be very limited.

And conversely, a programmer or web developer who is very technically savvy may not be able to give your website design that extra sparkle it needs to truly shine. Programmers create applications or software and typically have no training or expertise in how a website should look or function.

Most programmers, while technically competent, know computer languages inside and out and can code your website, but programmers typically have no graphic design training. Most programmers come from a university's computer science curriculum, and few, if any, will take a graphic design class an elective. While you want your designer to be able to solve technical issues or at least oversee them, website visitors are visually interacting with your website, so the look and feel of your website, navigation and organization of information is extremely important.

Truly great golf website designers will have the ability to look beyond the challenge of creating your website, and will also want to know where your website fits into your overall marketing strategy, and what the primary goals are for the website. Too many websites are created without paying close attention to what the website will actually accomplish.

Establishing primary and secondary goals for a website is very important. However, building the ultimate website that misses the mark or fails to achieve basic website goals is just a waste of everyone's time and money. You can usually tell if your website design resource is looking beyond the immediate project by the questions they ask-or don't ask.

A great golf web designer such as back9clicks.com or mousecodestudio.com will be knowledgeable, but will not resort to using excessive techno-babble to confuse or overly impress a client. Great web designers know what they are talking about, but should not talk down to you, the client.

Educated clients are the best clients. You don't have to know everything your developer knows, but you need to know that they are truly competent and they can communicate effectively with you. Think of your website designer as being a sort of partner in your company's marketing efforts; a part of your overall team.

Most good Hong Kong web designers are organized and can manage their time effectively. Often, technology projects take far longer then they need too because too little attention is being paid to project progress and resolving issues that are stalling a project.

Your web developer should be a self-starter, and should not rely on you reminding them that the project is behind schedule. If you are using a company to create your website, make sure there is a project manager involved, who can provide weekly status meetings and who is pro-active in resolving issues that will affect the time-line of the project and the website launch date.

Professionalism

While many people and companies provide website design services with a high degree of expertise, the level of professionalism varies from individual to individual and company to company.

When first contacting a potential website designer, look for signs of professionalism-or lack of professionalism. When you call them, do you receive a call back in a timely fashion? Does the developer or company keep regular office hours? When you send an email, is it answered promptly and are the responses professional?

It is always best to try and avoid working with a less than professional company, but evaluating someone before you have a chance to start working with them can be difficult. From the first contact you make with your vendor, be on the lookout for signs that someone may be less than professional.

Working with an individual or a company that is not professional will only lead to frustration on your part as the project moves along or grinds to a halt. But working with someone who understands the business world and values your time, returns your calls and emails promptly and professionally, will help make the project experience much more pleasant. See www.back9clicks.com for your golf website design

Choosing a Hong Kong Web Design Company

Every forward thinking business needs a web design in Hong Kong, or needs to re-design their existing website at some point, and so choosing a website design company is a decision that every business needs to make at one time or another. The consequences of this decision should not be underestimated. Why is that? Well, put simply, a good website will bring in more leads and sales, and a bad one will not.

So, how can a business be sure that they are making the right decision when choosing a Hong Kong web design company?


Firstly, it is important to establish what exactly is required from the website. Rather than just guessing about this issue, a business should undertake some research about their target audience. To do this a business should contact some of their existing customers and ask them a straight question - what information and features do you expect to see on our website?

Once it is known what is required, the next step is to make a shortlist of website design companies. Such a list can be made by simply searching on Google for terms such as "website design companies" or "website designer". Lots of results will be brought up, so a little time will need to be spent looking through the websites of these companies and seeing what they have to offer.

Having made a shortlist of around 5-10 website design companies, each should then be contacted and the following should be considered...

- Do they have an extensive and impressive portfolio?
- Is there a certain feel to all of the sites they have created, or are they flexible in their designs?
- Are they willing to let any of their past clients be contacted?
- How structured is their planning process?
- How soon can they start work on the project?
- How much of the work do they do themselves and how much of it do they outsource to others?
- Do they offer assistance in getting websites listed in the major search engines?
- Do they offer the setting up of a blog as part of their design packages?
- Who owns the intellectual property rights for the finished website?
- Will they maintain the website after the initial design?
- Do they charge an hourly rate or a fixed fee?
- How much payment needs to be made upfront?
- What guarantees are offered that the project will be completed on time?

The answers to these questions should be used to narrow down the shortlist to 3 or so companies, who should then be asked to give a final quote. Prices may vary significantly, but a general ball park figure for a well designed 10 page website is around $2000. Businesses should be cautious about proceeding with a company that offers to design a website for much less than that figure because the quality of the final website may be questionable. Visit MouseCode Studio for more information about Hong Kong Web Design

Golf Website Design Tips

The key to a successful online business is building customer trust. Establishing trust in the virtual world can be a difficult task because there are so many websites competing for visitors. One important method of building trust is to create a professional golf web design.

Golf business websites allow you to be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, so that you are able to interact with millions of potential customers from around the world. A professional website design tells a visitor that a business is secure, credible, and provides quality goods and services. A key component of internet marketing is to create a trust building your golf website. A professional golf website design should be business appropriate, well thought-out and implemented, and focused on the visitor.

To build visitor trust, a web design should utilize the following tools:

Content: A professional website should contain educational and informative articles that are relevant to the businesses vision. The articles should also be professionally written that do not contain errors.

Search Engine Rankings: Your website design should be search engine friendly so that it will achieve a high ranking. Make sure you have the appropriate key words, minimal pictures, links, appropriate domain name, a Blog, chat room, the business address, logo, and a contact email and address.

Privacy: Include a privacy policy that is clearly located on the website. Never disclose email addresses to 3rd party companies.

Email marketing: Provide your targeted audience with an "opt out" tool for your email marketing campaigns.

Encourage Visitor Interaction: Provide tools to allow your visitors to interact with the site. This can include webinars, discussion forums, surveys, comment section, polls, and contests.

Showcase Your Company: Include your company's history, mission, vision, and other important background information. Make sure you have a list of client testimonials. Display pictures of your business that includes both the interior and exterior. You can even include pictures of your employees working such as in a meeting or at their desk.

Create a Blog: Add a Blog to your site which will allow you to keep your visitors up-to-date about new products, services, upcoming events, special announcements, and positive news about the company.

Hire a Professional Golf Website Design Company: Website design companies know the "ins" and "outs" of creating a professional website. They will help determine your needs and your visitors' needs, and then design a website that is professional and user-friendly.

Visit www.back9clicks.com for more info on how to build and grow your website.

Five Tips for SEO

Launching an innovative golf product is undoubtedly one of the largely stressful and complex times for any golf website entrepreneur. Whether it's your first product, your fiftieth, or your hundredth, knowing just how the marketplace will react is something that you can never do through intuition alone. Although the most popular and successful golf marketing entrepreneurs are said to have the 'personal touch' that can predict a product's success, they're more than often wired up to the hard data when making any major decisions. While focus groups and beta testers are often without of the financial means of many internet entrepreneurs and marketers, it's easily possible to use the massive search traffic of Google as an useful replacement for traditional marketing test groups.

By running AdWords campaigns that are specifically targeted to your own market, you can gain some massive and valuable insights into your market's performance, consumer preferences, and general price for any product. Simply put up a series of advertisements that test for several variables of your product, either price, name, and product description, and let the results speak for themselves. Whether you're looking to sell 10 copies or 100, the information that an AdWords campaign can bring to you is priceless.

Need some guidelines? Here's a simple example, using an eBook as a demo product:

You're trying to market an eBook that you've written yourself. With five potential product names, 10 potential product descriptions, and no idea of the price, you need to gather as much information as quickly and cheaply as possible.

First, run five different Google AdWords campaigns, using the book's potential titles in the ad text or headline. Everything else on the ads needs to stay the same, and there needs to be no mention of pricing or approximate costs. See which one performs the best, and then lose the others.

Then, run your ads with ten different product descriptions. The titles and headlines should be consistent and identical, with only the advertising copy changing. Find out which product description works the best for your audience, and lose the others.

Then, run the same tests over and over again, but this time to determine price point. Set ten different prices, and see which one continually leads to most people to both click on your advertisement and read through your product description and sales copy. At the end of the page, put a "name and email" form and collect details for potential customers.

By using this simple strategy, you've created a marketing database, an easy email list, and given yourself the opportunity to market to people directly once your product launches. Not only that, you've determined the best name, description, and price for your online product. Not bad for a little AdWords spending, and certainly more cost effective than the traditional methods of gathering market information.

Original article here.

For more info about how to market your golf website visit www.back9clicks.com

Golf in Hong Kong

View our latest site www.golfinhongkong.com featuring information on golf courses, driving ranges, golf lessons and all about golf in Hong Kong.

Golf Marketing Tips: Social Networking Do's and Dont's

Golf associations and trade organizations are great places to meet individuals. Usually organizations have a common theme, and it is an understood implication that all members participate to improve themselves and their golf businesses and online golf marketing initiatives.

Whether it is a chamber of commerce or a trade association, members have common problems, issues and concerns. By sharing issues and resolutions, members can benefit by the experience of others. Many business owners participate in organizations, not only to network, but also to hopefully circumvent some of the pitfalls encountered by other small businesses--learning from others.

Golf Marketing Networking Tips.
Many trade organizations provide forums for networking. In some cases, these might be private online newsgroups, casual meetings, or even professional events with speakers. In order to take full advantage of these networking opportunities consider these tips.

Who You Know.
It is often not who you know, but who they know. I can't tell you the number of times I've seen someone put-off someone who is clearly a beginner only to learn that the "beginner" is the brother or friend of a contact they've been trying to meet for weeks.


Honesty.
Be honest. Pretending to be something that you are not, or implying you can deliver a product or service that is outside of your abilities, will foster an environment of distrust and potentially harm your reputation. Keep in mind that networking is viral? Vital? And if promises are not kept, word will spread. Establishing yourself and firm as an honest, reputable company and golf website.

Professional.
Keep conversations to strictly business subjects. In a business environment, it is important to focus on safe non-emotional topics. The last thing you want to do is alienate or offend a potential client because of an outspoken view on a controversial topic. There is a time and a place for everything and discussing political views or cultural issues is not a generally accepted business topic. Bearing that in mind, it is also important to be aware and sensitive to cultural differences. The Internet has opened doors to a global market and respecting cultural differences is critical to establishing strong business relationships in the global marketplace.

Socialize.
Now is not the time to be a wallflower. Whether you participate in social business events, or monitor trade forums, it is critical that you participate. Participation will help you distinguish yourself in your industry. Attempt to remember individual personal details and foster introductions among others in the industry.

Positive.
Stay positive. It sounds simple, but it will really impact how others view you. If you are constantly negative and pointing out the flaws in others, it will reflect on how others view you. Presenting the best and positive business experiences will enhance your image and golf website

Help.
Provide genuine assistance to others. Whether or not they are able to reciprocate, networking is viral? Vital. Helping others will establish you as a useful member of your business community and will endear you to others. If you are unable to help an individual, attempt to refer them to someone who can.


Research
A little research goes a long way. Be sure to research people and companies in your golf business community. Knowing their common goals and interests will build topics for discussions.

Acknowledging the need to connect with other golf marketers to grow and expand a business may seem like common sense. Cultivating business relationships and interact with other small businesses is often mutually beneficial and should not be underestimated.

Golf website Networking is about building relationships and mutual interaction benefiting both parties. Being proactive and following up, you can have a network of contacts that you will be able to access quickly when you need them. Whether by more traditional means, such as in person or over the Internet, personal networks are essential for furthering your business. Relationship networking is give and take, be sure to help others in your quest for help.

SEO Quick Tips for Your Golf Website

Here's a few tips to help your golf website rank higher on Google and help your golf marketing. Whether you're a newbie or an experienced webmaster, your golf business sales will rise significantly with highly targeted golf website traffic.

Organic search and paid traffic can be generated or increased by including your golf web site in the top golf directories, search engines, golf article directories, golf blogs and press releases. In order for the search engines to properly index your golf web site, the backend or code of your website needs to be built correctly by someone who knows what they are doing.

Make sure your golf website has meta-tags. Golf Websites that have too many missing links or data that has not been recently updated could give the google bot and other search engine robots a red flag indicating that your pages are old or not relevant anymore. If you have a self designed website, make sure you keep the directory structure simple and not too deep. The fewer directories you have to crawl will make the job much easier for the search engines bots.


Try to find out which pages visitors usually enter your golf web site through so you can include more initial information on your site's products and services. Analyze other useful information from reports about website visitors including their countries, browsers, languages, operating systems, IP addresses as well as number of repeated visitors. It is essential that you know where your website visitors are coming from. Use google analytics to analyze your website visitors. Google Analytics is a brilliant and free web traffic analyzation tool. It can give you detailed, business-oriented data about your site's visitors through a powerful web-based user interface. The more you know about your business website visitors the easier it will be to do SEO for that particular page or pages. Google Analytics is free to anyone who desires to know more about their website traffic or visitors.

Google Analytics is also a powerful internet resource that allows golf website owners to track things like their page views, unique visitors, and entrance keywords. Google Analytics is a "cookie-based" (as opposed to a web analytics tool that analyzes log files). It will also help you become aware of the online golf marketing projects which are more cost effective.
For many companies Google Analytics is their primary resource guide. It is free and can quickly turn your online golf business into a profitable venture.

For more information about how to optimise your golf website and get in noticed on the web please contact Back9clicks.com - The Golf Marketing Professionals.