Spa Website Design

We've all been technological hostages at one time or another, and we've all reacted differently to that most ridiculous experience. We at SpaBoom decided that being dependent upon IT gurus more than is absolutely necessary, is just silly.

Examples like the ones that follow are part of the reason we not only provide the powerful revenue generating Instant Gift Certificates, but also offer up Dynamic Websites that you the spa owner can edit at will. Without calling us. Unless you just want to say, "Hi!", which is always fine.

Enjoy!

A spa owner knows they hired the wrong web designer when…

• They realize that cheap actually meant crappy.
• They try to make a change to the site and it crashes.
• It takes until Valentine's to update last year's holiday spa menu-Ho Ho Ho!
• You would have called him an idiot at the first meeting but his mom had driven him there.
• He withholds site changes unless you refer to him as "the master."
• The web designer vents endlessly about her last "super picky, totally over the top with changes" client.
• Web site design budget exceeds last year's gross revenue.
• You read your web designer's blog and you suddenly feel dirty.
• You have to change your security settings to see his personal blog.
• His eyes light up when you tell him you are a massage therapist.

Posted in General, Spa Website Design • Comment »

Reviews, reviews.  We've talked a lot about them, first when we introduced them in October, and then again last month when announcing that we had collected over 30 thousand of them on your behalf!

Currently, the number stands at almost 42,000 - a fantastic opportunity for you to showcase your favorite clients and their feedback.

I will cover how to add Reviews to your Linked in website in Part 2, but first up:

If you have a hosted dynamic website with us, adding reviews to your Events sidebar and your navigation menu (see my handy illustration to the right) is easy, and we go over it in our new help document, called "Reviews for Dynamic Websites".  Yeah, we try not to be too tricky when naming help files - all the better for you to find them, of course.  If you've considered a dynamic website from us, this is yet one more reason to hop on the wagon - up-front showcasing of those great testimonials!

You can continue to see all of your reviews from the Reports tab, whether or not you display them on your site.  Use that report to keep track of any great comments, or even identify places where you can improve in the future.  After all, your clients will tell you exactly what they want, if you just let them, and that's what we are making available to both of you.

Let us know if you have great success stories or comments on the whole Reviews feature - we'd love to hear it!

Posted in SpaBoom New Features, Spa Website Design • 6 Comments »

Episode 2: Will it attract the right attention?

Being just a pretty face simply doesn't cut it on the Web. Nothing proves that more readily than a gorgeous website that just can't seem to garner online attention or convert visitors to clients.

Why does this happen? Well, maybe there's too much Flash and not enough substance. If you've read our prior postings on how invisible Flash is to search engines, then you know we're not making this up just to be difficult. If you haven't, check out Seth's article to catch up.

Other factors in the so beautiful but terribly ineffective conundrum include heavy use of graphical text. If, for example, the name of your spa is only displayed as a graphic, rather than appearing in true text form as well, it won't be seen by search engines. It's invisible. Imagine that. Something you spent so much time and energy developing, the very essence of your business image, invisible.

While sophisticated in some ways, search engines are truly blind to the content within graphics. So don't stop using photos, by any means. Just make sure the describing text is outside of the graphic itself.

Speaking of photos… did you know that you can create your own library of photos within your SpaBoom Dynamic Website and rotate them as often as you like?

Posted in Spa Marketing, General, Spa Website Design • 2 Comments »

After Larry's post, I wanted to add a link to a complementary article on SEOmoz about an analysis of social networking and how it is in many ways more trusted than email marketing for contacting potential partners or clients. In that analysis, one sentence in particular jumped out at me:

Wow.  With that in mind, consider how your pride and joy (and blood sweat & tears) — your business — appears to the internet at large.  By all means, first work on your basic website functionality, referring to our great starter guide for tips:

But after that, consider secondary online presences like a MySpace or Facebook page.  At the very least, do you personally have a LinkedIn profile? Consider adding these to your constantly growing toolkit for developing your business and branding.

The work of promotion and growing your unique brand never stops - not in a good economy, not in a down market, not ever.

Posted in Spa Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Spa Marketing, Spa Website Design • Comment »

SEO (Search Engine Optimization):

No one can buy from your site if they can't find it. If you want to understand how people do or don't find your website, watch a friend or customer use Google to try to find a spa in our neighborhood. Try this test:

Have your friend search for your spa/salon, then have them search for several spa or services that you offer like a facial, massage or Reiki therapy. If you do not show up on the first page of results, a little SEO effort is in order. SEO is the dark art of making your website visible to the folks who should be looking for it. If you have never heard this term, and want that $4,000 month of online sales, this is a must do. It's a really big subject and the industry is full of scam artists, cheats and liars, so it's best to learn a little about it yourself.

I recommend starting with your "content." Good content is really the key to a successful SEO effort. Content is the stuff you say about your business on your website. It should have lots of the terms you think people are using to look for a spa or your business. Generally, make sure you describe who, what and where you are. You must include your city and geographic prominently in your home page (ideally in the the title tag). There are millions of sites about spas and massage, but only a few in your area. It also matters how your content is put up on your site. Use lots of text in your content. That website with swimming Koi, falling Lotus flowers or whining music are invisible to search engines. No one looks for a spa website for entertainment (except for us if its really really bad).

You should also check out your site's Page Rank. Google ranks website on a scale of 1 to 10. If you are at the bottom of that scale, your site (no matter how pretty) is unlikely to show up on that first page of results unless your content matches the search better then sites that are better ranked.

As I cautioned above, this is a massive area but you can do some good just by paying attention and editing your site. If your website is hard (or expensive) to edit this may be a key problem we can help you solve with a Dynamic Website.

If you would like to chat about these tips, join me by phone tomorrow.

Posted in Spa Search Engine Optimization (SEO), General, Spa Website Design • 2 Comments »

A TeleSeminar is worth 1000 blog posts.

If you are enjoying our top ten e-commerce tips series, Chris Brazey of SpaBoard is hosting a free TeleSeminar on Thursday, March 6th at 10:00am PT, 1:00pm ET. I will be his "guest" and will be covering 10 Tips to Improve Your Online Marketing. I will discuss all the tips we are presenting in the blog series as well as taking general questions on the subject.

Chris can accommodate the first 100 people who sign up for the seminar.

There is one catch to be aware of; when you sign up, you are also signing up for Chris's weekly profit tip newsletter. Chris assured me that he has an easy unsubscribe program if you later decide that you do not want his tips.

Sign up at DaySpaOwner.com before it fills up.

Posted in Spa Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Spa Marketing, Spa Business Management, General, Spa Website Design • Comment »

Tip #2a

"One of These Things is Not Like the Others…"

Remember that sing-song game that had you as a little kid searching for items in a group that were different from the rest?

Your eye is drawn to differences — it's how our brains are wired.

Like the human eye, which eagerly jumps to things that are new and shiny, so, too, do the search engines. If you change the content of your website on a regular basis, those search engines see the difference on their next go-around and re-index your site. The key to your increased visibility, however, is that once the search engine sees new content, it will re-index your site more frequently.

Say you're on a one-month "schedule" with Google. Change your site every other week and you might now get indexed every 14 days. Or every 7. Obviously I can't speak to their exact strategies, but it has been confirmed that the more you change, the more they will notice.

Read about this in more detail in this great article on the interesting website design blog, AHFX.

Use that knowledge to add some new content to your existing site, change a description of what you do, or jump right into your SpaBoom Dynamic Website and add some new feature information that really talks to your clients. Our Dynamic Websites are already search engine friendly, but regularly changing your own content is just another way to get a leg up on the local and national searches that your potential customers are doing right this very moment. As a bonus, Dynamic Websites automatically tell Google every time you change your site, including things like new specials in Events, encouraging Google to index your site more often.

Posted in Spa Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Spa Website Design, Spa Gift Certificates • Comment »

A lot of our Dynamic Spa Website themes have some sort of boundary — we thought it was time to break free with the new Floating theme. Open and airy, Floating is unrestricted by the lines and boxes that define many website designs.

See an example of the Floating theme. Like all SpaBoom Dynamic Websites, it's easy to choose your own color palette and photos, add new pages and customize to your heart's content.

If you're thinking about switching themes for your Dynamic, check out the great new feature we have in Website, Settings to "Create Website Backup". It's a great idea to make a backup any time you're going to make big changes to your site.

Posted in SpaBoom New Features, Spa Website Design • 2 Comments »

Tip #3

Sell packages or services online: Most of our top sellers sell packages or gifts for services. The top quarter of our sellers have an average a higher average sale amount, which makes perfect sense. If a (possibly male) spa gift buyer does not know what to buy they generally buy a $100 gift certificate (our average sale data supports this assertion). However, if you have a nice $129 Valentine's Day package, many buyers will jump on it-and you just raised your revenue 30% on the transaction.

Posted in SpaFinder, General, Spa Website Design, Starting a Spa • 5 Comments »

Tip #2

Have a great website: No, I'm not repeating, or trying to make just 9 points so I can go home early (I am sort of home for those who care).

A website is not something you build and forget about. Just like your store, you have to keep it current or visitors get bored and have no reason to return. Add interesting content regularly; update your menu and specials and packages.

The SpaBoom Dynamic Website application will do this for you, and most of our top sellers use those tools. If you would like to make better use of them, call us! If you don't have a website you can easily edit, you should consider an alternative from us or a good web designer, like our partner Televox.

Posted in Spa Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Spa Marketing, General, Spa Website Design • Comment »

Tip #1

Build a great website: OK this sounds obvious, but it is harder than it sounds. A great website does not have to be fancy, flashy (excuse my pun) or expensive. The problem starts with the design or direction to the web designers. Lots of bad websites result from a designer building what the client asks for. The trick is to ask for the right thing(s).

A website should load quickly, be easy to navigate and have an intuitive lay out. In geek speak we call that usability.

Think about what someone might want to look for on your website. Information like hours, phone number, treatments, location(s) and transaction links (like gift certificates, shopping carts or reservations) are what most web users are looking for on a business website. They should be able to get to any one of those from your home page with a single click.

Avoid "click to enter" landing pages, music and anything that causes a progress bar (often with the text "loading") to appear. These things look impressive when the designer shows them to you but no one wants to sit through them-twice. You want your clients to return often.

Posted in Spa Search Engine Optimization (SEO), General, Spa Website Design • 3 Comments »

What do you get when you combine TeleVox Software's communication solutions with SpaBoom's Instant Gift Certificates technology? A partnership that delivers revenue-maximizing services to salon and spa owners!

SpaBoom is now the TeleVox preferred provider of online gift certificates for spas and salons, and will be included as an option in TeleVox's custom-designed WebPlus websites. The addition of premium gift certificates is a perfect fit with the TeleVox websites, which are built by the company's in-house design team and include industry-leading hosting services.

"We are excited to work with SpaBoom to provide spas and salons with an easy-to-use tool for increasing online revenue," said Chad Greer, Vice President of TeleVox. "With today’s prevalence of e-commerce, our customers are now better able to provide comprehensive client service that includes the crucial online component."

We are delighted to be working the TeleVox, and look forward to partnering on many beautiful and highly effective websites for our spas and salons!

To learn more about TeleVox, please visit www.televox.com.

Posted in TeleVox, Spa Website Design • 4 Comments »

Squeaky wheels get the grease, especially around here. Some of you (ok lots of you) had been telling us that you GOT how cool our Dynamic Websites are, and why your spas, salons and massage therapy practices would benefit from having one, but that you just didn't want to take the project on yourselves.

We promised to hold your hands through the process, to ensure that we'd encourage and support and direct you through the process, and that we wouldn't let you get in over your heads.

You know what we heard? "We just don't have the time to take on a project like this, no matter what you say, SpaBoom."

So, in spite of the fact that we did NOT originally intend to go into the website construction business, but were content just refreshing and guiding website work, we went into the business.

We decided to charge a little, just to pay for the time required to choose a color palette, to choose a design template, to enter your service menus and content, and $299 for the soup-to-nuts creation process is what we came up with. The monthly fee of $39.95 begins 30 days after signup.

We really want you all to have Dynamic Websites. We really want you all to be able to update your content and graphics at will, no techies required. Of course Instant Gift Certificates and Appointment Requests are automatically part of each new Dynamic.

And since we really want you all to have a great website, which will help you be more visible and beautiful (from a web perspective!) we're going to do full constructions for just $99 until September 14th.

So, get on the stick if you're one of the ones who got us headed this direction (and you KNOW who you are!) and let's build your website already!

Posted in Spa Website Design • 3 Comments »

Some website designers love to use a technique that may start out looking beautiful, but can make it almost impossible to read your spa's website: use small text with too little contrast.

Here is a website example which mixes bright text along with a background image that further muddies the view:

This hardly means you need to work in black and white! Color is still useful and important to set the mood for your clients. Four examples of the same general color scheme are shown below that feature both good contrast and poor contrast - see the difference it makes in readability (image thanks to Destroy All Monsters).

When choosing your colors, do not be afraid to use vibrant hues and exciting juxtapositions, but make sure that the text leaps off the screen without giving you a headache, and you've probably struck a good balance.

Posted in General, Spa Website Design • Comment »

A lot of website design work these days (ok, most) is redesigning existing websites. Not exactly a bad way to spend your time, since the traditional way of building websites is a manual process. Even if the website was at one time search engine optimized, is unlikely to be any longer. But there is a critical step in a website redesign for which you'll pay a big price if you miss it.

Older websites, even when not search engine friendly, bring with them something very valuable: link equity. That's all the incoming links from other websites and all the links from search engines that have crawled your old website. That includes a lot of deep links — links which point from one page to another within your website.

It's very common — if not almost every time — to rename internal pages in a website redesign. Previously, Google or another website may have known your services page as services.html, but in your new website it's called menu, and Google "loses" that data. The value of all those links has just disappeared.

To sidestep the issue completely, do not change the filenames of your internal pages if you can avoid it. But if it can't be helped, here's the critical step: make sure your webmaster does a redirect from the old page to the new. You keep all that link equity, and it's valuable stuff! (Technical note: the redirect should be a 301, not a 302).

It's something we do automatically for Dynamic Websites (and one great reason to upgrade your SpaBoom Linked-in account to a Dynamic). Because of the Google Sandbox, you've got a big advantage with an exisiting website — make sure you keep it!

Posted in Spa Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Spa Website Design • 6 Comments »

A new page to talk about your therapists, another one for more spa photos, and then another page, and another — this is good! The more content the better. But then every new page is important, and so they all get added to your spa website's main navigation. That's where the problem comes in.

This is by far not the worst example I could come up with:

But it's easy to organize that menu a little bit, and make it more clear to our website visitors what is really important. We'll take "Therapists" and link to it as part of the "Spa Tour", link to "Policies" from "What to Expect" and move "Recommend Links" to "Articles". Those minor adjustments make an easier to navigate menu:

Just about everything on a spa's website can fit into this structure, and avoid menu overload. Our goal is simple — make it clear what we want our website visitors to do, and guide them there.

We make it terribly easy to add new items to your navigation in Dynamic Spa Websites, but that doesn't mean you should.

Posted in Spa Website Design • 2 Comments »

Website Oversights are easy things to overlook on spa websites, but than can have a big impact on how successful you are online. When your spa's website is hard to understand and use, your conversion drops and you lose money. Fortunately, these oversights are easy to fix!

Let's start with underlines: in the real world, we're accustomed to using underlines to highlight important headlines or phrases. But, if you do that on your website, it creates a real problem:

Which are the links? The "Our Services" headline, or "Services Menu" in the text? Your website visitors have long been taught that underline means link, and they'll be confused with headlines that are underlined but aren't a link.

Just remove the underlines from anything that's not a link:

Deceptive underlining is such an easy thing to do — and so annoying to website visitors — that I've even thought of taking away the underline button when editing Dynamic Spa Websites. But besides being a little draconian, it would also make it really challenging to remove existing underlines. So, there is an underline button — just don't use it!

Posted in Spa Website Design • 1 Comment »

Last week, we talked about domain name renewal scams. Now it's time for another ugly little domain name problem.

Imagine if the lease for your spa's location didn't have your name on it. You could be held hostage by whoever's name was on the lease, subject to unreasonable demands or kicked out of your space.

The same principle applies to your domain name, as in "yourspa.com". There are some shady (usually small) website design/hosting companies that will catch you in this trap: you hire them to build your website, and they register a domain name for you — with themselves as the registrant. They're the only ones that can make changes to your domain name. Like where it's hosted.

To check your domain, go to what's called a Whois lookup and enter your domain name without the "www." part, i.e. "yourspa.com". Look for the "Whois Record" information, and make sure your name is under "Registrant" and your name and email address is under "Administrative Contact".

If it's not your name and email address, demand that the hosting company fixes it and that you are listed as the registrant. We've helped several SpaBoomers that switched to Dynamic Website solve exactly this problem.

Don't take this to mean you shouldn't hire a small web design company. For custom websites, a great option is a small design shop for which you've gotten personal recommendations.

But, just like you wouldn't establish a brick and mortar location without the lease being in your name, do the same for your website address.

Posted in General, Spa Website Design, Starting a Spa • 4 Comments »

If you have a website, then you have a domain name, like "yourspa.com". To own a domain, you have to renew it annually (some choose to renew for several years at a time). But, there are a lot of scams out there you need to be careful of when it comes to the renewal of your domain.

Things to watch out for:

• Anything sent via the old fashioned post office. Scammers often send letters in the mail. A legit company communicates it's renewal notifications via email. Make sure your domain company has a good email address on file for you.
• The letter asks for a check or money order — real domain companies prefer to work with credit cards.
• The letter will be friendly but use rather scary language. They might imply that if you don't pay up now, your site will go down and you might loose the domain name for good.
• Someone calls you out of the blue, claiming that you're about to lose your domain name. Real domain companies don't make renewal phone calls.

These companies, like Liberty Domains of America and Domain Registry of America, prey upon ignorance and fear. If you ever have doubts or questions about the legitimacy of a letter, call or email regarding your domain, you can look up for yourself where your domain is registered and when it expires with a Whois lookup. Don't include the "www." part, just "yourspa.com".

In there, you will find the registrar, which is your domain company and the only one to whom you should pay for renewals, unless you're specifically choosing to change registrars. You'll also find your expiration date, so you can verify that it really is coming up.

Posted in General, Spa Website Design • 2 Comments »

SpaBoom Dynamic Websites come with a great selection of stock photos. But what if nothing quite works for you, or you're looking for something especially unique?

If you haven't looked at stock photos recently, you may be surprised at how cost effective it is these days to find great photos for your website, or for ads, brochures, etc. Selection has improved dramatically, and prices have plummeted. Two of my favorite sites for finding great spa photos:

• Dreamstime has almost 10,000 spa-related photos, for $1 each for web use and $2 each for print use. Any photographer can include their photos, so there are some of questionable quality. But there are plenty of great photos, and it's hard to complain about the price.
• iStockPhoto is bit more of a traditional stock photo site with 9,000 spa-related photos. It's a little more expensive, costing the equivalent of $1.20 for an "xsmall" resolution (which is a little on the small side, but will work for a lot of website photos) and $2.40 for "small", which is about the same as Dreamtime's web size.

Both sites use a system where you buy credits up front, and then use them whenever you find a photo you like. For Dreamstime, the minimum purchase is $20, and with iStockPhoto it's $12.

Start with a search for "spa", and then narrow it down with "spa massage", "spa facial" and so on. It's fun to play around and see what images you can find — that undiscovered stock photo is a cost-effective way to add unique imagery to your spa's website.

Posted in Spa Website Design • Comment »