Client Gallery: Landscape Illumination

Our latest client website has gone live. For the last month I’ve been working with Darrin Selking from Lanscape Illumination- a landscape lighting firm based in Valparaiso, Indiana - to develop a new Wordpress based dynamic website for them.

The site has turned out great and I think it looks great. Darrin and his team do beautiful work in landscape lighting all over the country and early on we decided that their work needed to be the center of the site – so on every page on the site you’ll see images and videos of their awesome work.

Our work for them included:

• Wordpress Theme Customization
• Site Installation and setup
• Moved Content from Old Site
• Created Custom Image Gallery system to show off their work
• Custom Contact Form Creation (Two lead forms – one with 50 fields!)
• Content Consultation
• Page formatting and setup
• Google Analytics Installation and setup
• Basic Site Search Engine Optimization and Google Search Submission

Check out the site here: Landscape Illumination, LLC

Thanks Darrin! I hope your new website brings you much success!

E-Mail Marketing Still Works On a Small Scale

With the pervasiveness of e-mail SPAM, many people have written off e-mail marketing as useless endeavor. What many don’t realize is that the proliferation of SPAM has actually made e-mail marketing more effective. How?

Two Words:

Permission Marketing

SPAM Blockers generally do a pretty good job of filtering out e-mail that people don’t want. So, they just don’t see the typical e-mails soliciting interest in Viagra or helping out a Nigerian prince anymore. No, instead, their e-mail box is full of e-mail that they WANT.

If someone signs up for your newsletter, they want to hear from you. They are asking to hear from your company again – to hear your latest deals, news and announcements.

You need to leverage that willingness. Many small business owners don’t think of using direct e-mail marketing – they don’t think it can have a good ROI on a small scale.

Of course it can!

Even if your e-mail list has 100 people on it – those are 100 people who want to hear your message! It only take one read for it turn into new business.

E-mail marketing is cheap these days. You can use a service like Mailchimp that will handle your e-mail list, provide e-mail templates and give you awesome analytics – all for free! You only have to pay if you run really large e-mail campaigns – which most people won’t need to.

So, what are you waiting for? Start gathering your customer e-mail addresses, ask for them, add a subscribe form to your website. You have nothing to use.

If you’re interested in developing an effective e-mail marketing campaign in Northwest Indiana, Valparaiso, Chesterton, Portage or Lake County – then contact us and see if we can help you.

It Should Not Cost a Small Business $3,000 for a Simple Website

I was meeting with a client the other day to show her how to edit and change the new website that I had built for her and she revealed something interesting to me – the last website quote she had gotten was for over $3000.

I was quite taken aback by this. I was charging her substantially less than $3000 but I was charging what I thought the work was worth. The client was a small insurance company near our base in Valparaiso and I could not see how anyone could justify charging so much money for something as small as a website for a small business.

Many small business owners are intimidated by the prospect of creating a website and will settle for someone that says that they’ll just take care of it all for them. My advice to small business owners looking for web development is – don’t fall for that.

Think of your website as an extension of your normal marketing efforts. It acts as a way for people to find you. Your website needs to explain who you are, show off your work, where you’re located and how they can get in touch with you. The amount of work involved in creating a website of that size, in my mind, is not worth $3,000.

As a corollary to this topic – don’t also fall for services that promise a cheap website, quickly and set up in a hour. Services from people like Inuit come to mind where they promise ‘to build a website tonight’ for little to no money.

The problem with services like this is that you are getting what you paid for. Your website is being built with a template that is being used by thousands of other websites. Chances are the interface is not as simple to use as it says and you also lose a lot of control of your site. Many of these services are so cumbersome to use that many small business owners build the site and forget about it – leaving it unchanged for years.

To stay competitive on the web in your market – your website needs to be updated often and kept fresh.

That’s why we build websites with Wordpress. Wordpress gives you complete control after we’ve handed the site over to you. Wordpress has a simple interface that allows you to edit and update your site that’s as simple as editing a Word document. Rubber Duck and Company uses a set of premium Wordpress templates that we’ve had to pay for a license to use. The templates work for a variety of applications and what sets us apart from the ‘website tonight’ folks is that we’ll customize the template so it doesn’t look like every other small business website out there.

So, if you’re looking to redevelop your existing website or build it for the first time – it shouldn’t cost you a fortune.

Don’t believe me? Then contact us first.

Client Gallery: PatrickDj.Com – Wordpress Website

One of our recent projects was a small website for a local DJ based in the Chicagoland area. Patrick wanted a simple website that he would be able to update himself. He was on a budget and didn’t want expensive ongoing website management fees.

So, we built him a small website using the Wordpress content management platoform using a Studuiopress template we had a license for.

He was very pleased with the result.

The website features:

Homepage that featured pictures
Video Page
Blog About His Business
Social Media Integration
Review/Guestbook system where customers could leave a review
Details about his Equipment and Music
Contact Form
Google Analytics Tracking
Basic Search Engine Optimization

The whole project was quick – we had the site done for him in a week – and it was a pleasure to build. Patrick is a great guy to work with and we highly recommend using him as a DJ!

Check out the site here.

Why It’s Still So Important For Your Business to Have a Website

I run into this all the time when talking with small business owners – the thought of a having a website wasn’t something they thought they needed. Their business model wasn’t online, so why would they need a website?

You need a website because while your operations may not be online, your customers ARE online.

Google has changed the way people search for local business – the yellow pages are an irrelevant door stopper these days. It’s no longer worth it to invest in a yellow pages ad when your customers aren’t looking at it. Your customers are looking online and it’s time you got there.

Now, most business owners are intimidated by the thought of being online. You don’t need to be – running a website has never been easier and more low maintenance. We specialize in developing websites with Wordpress and Drupal – two systems that make running feature rich and impressive websites a breeze.

Think of your website as an online brochure.

It needs to do 4 simple things:

Tell What You Do
Tell Who You Are
Tell Where You Are
Tell How to Contact

Your site can certainly do more than that with a website – but those basic principles are enough for a successful website. Those are the principles we use when we develop our client website – keep things simple and provide the information that consumers are looking for.

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