Spa Website Design

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.

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Diann Archambault at Face to Face Skin Care Salon & Spa left such a great comment that I had to turn it into a posting:

Thanks, Diann, for the feedback and great idea!

A quick note on an important search engine optimization (SEO) consideration: if you employ this technique, then like Diann, make sure you do the right stuff technically so you don't get hit by Google's duplicate content penalty. Google doesn't like having multiple domains that point to the same web pages. For example, "www.yourspa.com" and "www.alsoyourspa.com" showing the same website can penalize your search rankings if not done right.

An easier approach, but not quite as effective in capturing stats, is to use landing pages: a new page on your website that you promote in your ads. For example, instead of "www.yourspa.com", you refer to "www.yourspa.com/radio". This works a lot better if you're promoting a special that you can only get to from that page.

Landing pages are easy to implement on your Dynamic Spa Website:

1. Go into Setup, Website. Copy an appropriate page (home is often a good starting point), and give a short, easy to remember ID like "radio".
2. Edit the content of your new page to reflect the special associated with your radio or display advertising.
3. Direct consumers to the new page in your advertising: www.yourspa.com/radio.
4. Use the Landing Pages report, looking at your new page to guage the effectiveness of your ads. You can see how many visitors came to your site by starting on your landing page, and the resulting GCs and appointments.

Posted in Spa Marketing, Spa Website Design • Comment »

Via simplicity comes this quote from Leonardo da Vinci:

There weren't many websites back in Leonardo's day, but what a beautiful quote when it comes to spa website design.

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If you think of the visitors to your spa's website as information foragers, then you need to leave them a trail of scents so they can find what they're after, and not lead them off the trail with confusing scents. Relying on Jakob Nielsen again:

What does that mean for your spa's website?

• Particularly for navigation, don't use made up words or slogans; use plain language that make sense to your clients. As your website visitor is quickly scanning your site, frantically looking for the right morsel, you can't expect them to translate unfamiliar terms. For example, label the link "Instant Gift Certificates", not "MySpaCards".
• Deliver information in tasty little morsels. Don't force your website visitors to wade through a sea of text. Use headlines (plain language again) to break up your content.
• The more obstacles between your website visitor and their goal, they less likely they are to get there. Avoid additional pages between your "Instant Gift Certificates" link and your Instant Gift Certificates page.
• Your visitors expect the most important information to be front and center. If you want them to find it, put it in the main content of your home page. Don't hide anything important the foliage of fancy graphics.

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Your website visitors are just like wild animals searching for food — they're just after information instead. "Information foraging" is the perfect way to think of what your website visitors are doing; here's how Jakob Nielsen puts it:

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Next time you're a little bored, grab somebody, anybody you know and sit them down in front of a computer. Ask them to go to your spa and buy a gift certificate for their significant other. Don't tell them your website address (you can remind them of the name of your spa, if you've abducted someone off the street). Don't give them any help. Just watch and learn:

• How do they find your website? Can they just type the name of your spa the way they think of it in Google and find you?
• Once they get to your website, how long does it take for them to find your Instant Gift Certificates link?
• Are there any obstacles in the way along the way before they can starting purchasing an Instant GC?
• Do they understand your services menu, and easily make a choice for a great gift? (Try this on a guy for some real fun!)

In the corporate world, we called it hallway testing, because you would just grab some unsuspecting person walking by from another department, and have them try out your latest software or website design. Do this a few times, and you'll immediately see the obstacles on your website preventing sales.

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Everyone focuses on traffic — getting more visitors to your website. And that's important. But it's a lot easier to improve your conversion: turning that traffic into clients. And the results are immediate!

Your website design determines your conversion rate. We tackle all the important issues in our Spa Website Design Guide. It's the perfect companion to the Online Spa Marketing Guide.

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There are so many good reasons to not use a splash intro page on your spa's website (those infamous "click to enter" or "skip intro" pages, almost always made in Flash, that you see when you're trying to get to a website). But before I sum those up, let's start with a beautiful quote, from an usability engineer at the company that makes Flash:

Now, if that wasn't enough, here's the reasons:

• Splash pages are bad for search engines. Search engines bring you clients.
• Splash pages are bad for clients. They hate 'em. 25% of website visitors immediately hit the back button whenever they see a "loading" message for a splash page.

Ok, it's not an extensive list (here's some more). But what else do you need?

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Newspapers always put their best stories above the fold to catch your attention and draw you in. The same thing applies to your website, where above the fold is the portion you can see without scrolling. You want to try it at a screen resolution of 1024 x 768, matching 60% of your website visitors. You can check your resolution or change it under Windows in Control Panel, Display, Settings. On the Mac, it's under System Preferences, Displays.

What makes your spa unique is what goes above the fold — draw your new website visitors in and give them a reason to scroll down and learn more about your spa.

According to Jakob Neilsen's new book Prioritizing Web Usability, the average website visitor spends just 31 seconds on the home page, and only 23% scroll down. Why so little? The headline and story isn't compelling enough to draw them in.

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I know, it's hard to believe, but a ton of web designers don't know how to create websites that work. Although there are plenty of ways to screw up a website technically so it doesn't work, that's not what I'm talking about. A website that works is one that brings your spa new business. That requires the magical combination of an elegant design that is also usable.

It's the usable part that is hard, particularly for designers that are attached to flashy graphics and design elements that break the expectations of your potential clients. Usability is what drives conversion, taking visitors and turning them into clients.

This is where the Christmas present comes in. Buy them Jakob Neilsen's new book Prioritizing Web Usability. It will really be a present to your spa, because you'll get more sales.

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Want to sell more Instant Gift Certificates? Just increase your conversion: get more of the visitors who come to your website to buy. Here's the secret: it's easy to do!

Here's how:

• Make it easy to find links to Instant GCs. Include it in your main navigation and also in the main content of your home page.
• Put your main navigation in the same place on every page.
• Don't hide your Instant GCs link in fancy graphics that people are trained to ignore.
• Link directly to your Instant GCs page. Don't force your visitors through another step, like a "shopping" page.
• Don't open your Instant GCs page in a new window. It's an automatic reaction from webmasters for pages they didn't design (I know, I have to resist it, too).
• Tell your visitors that your gift certificates aren't like what they've seen at other websites. You have Instant Gift Certificates, which you can immediately print or email.
• After your home page, your services menu is the most important content on your website. Describe your services in depth, so that seasoned spa goers know why you're different and spa novices understand what they are.
• Speaking of services, create packages that solve specific gift-giving problems. Right now is a great time to be promoting birthday and anniversary packages with Events.

Posted in Spa Website Design, Spa Gift Certificates • 1 Comment »

Here's a quick and easy way to tell if your webmaster has a clue about search engine optimization (SEO): just ask them about the importance of "meta tag keywords".

If their answer is that they are crucial to your ranking on search engines, it's time for a new webmaster (or at least to send them back to training).

SEO is a constantly changing field, because search engines are always updating their algorithms to return what they consider to be the best search results. But this particular misconception has lingered on forever — meta tag keywords lost their power years ago.

Death Of A Meta Tag sums it up nicely from one of the real SEO experts, Danny Sullivan. This was written almost four years ago.

Bottom line? Meta tag keywords have almost no effect on your search page rankings. If you don' t have them on your website, don't worry about. If you are designing a new website, don't spend more than five minutes putting in meta tag keywords.

Posted in Spa Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Spa Website Design • 1 Comment »

It's good to be well-rounded, and now your website can be, too, with our new Rounded website theme. Here's an example:

Rounded Theme

Just to be well-rounded ourselves, we've also created a square version:

Squared Theme

To create our spa websites, we start with one of our core themes, and then apply colors, photos and content that create the unique online identity for your spa.

Posted in SpaBoom New Features, Spa Website Design • 1 Comment »

I'm thinking in terms of pixels: what is the best screen resolution for which to optimize your website? The answer is simple, because the most common size (roughly 60% of your website visitors) is 1024×768 pixels.

But, you can't forget the 17% of your visitors still running 800×600, so your site still needs to work well at this smaller resolution. And the future is bigger and bigger screens. The remaining balance of your visitors are already there with resolutions of 1280×1024 or larger. So, you also want a site design that looks good at large resolutions, too.

Jakob Nielsen gives us the three criteria for evaluating page layout at these various sizes:

So, it's not so simple anymore. Your site needs to work well at 800×600, 1024×768 and 1280×1024, and don't forget checking at least the two most common browsers at all those resolutions, IE and Firefox. This is exactly the approach we take with our spa websites.

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My postings have been a little sparse because I've been traveling. Right now, I'm looking out over Lake Geneva (the one somewhat closer to home, in Wisconsin — not Switzerland), using my cell phone as a modem to get online.

Like many techies, it's been a long time since I've used dialup to access the Internet. It gives you a whole different perspective. A very slow one. And I'm not alone — about a third of the visitors to your spa's website are using dialup. What's their experience like? Are you still attracting them as a client? Next time you get the chance, go to your website via dialup. See what it's like.

Even though I don't spend much time on dialup, we put a lot of effort into the speed of the websites and linked pages that we create. For example, in Dynamic Websites, we always include in the HTML markup for images the size of the picture. Web pages designed this way come up faster, because the browser doesn't have to wait for the image to load to know how large it is.

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Just don't do it. What I'm talking about is the link on a spa's website — like "Tour our spa" — that does no such thing, but instead just brings up "Page under construction". It's annoying to website visitors who are after real information about your spa. If you don't have the page done yet, don't add the link. It's not worth trying to puff up your website to make it look complete, when it's really not there.

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I don't know how much quality time you've spent looking at the web stats for your website. Probably not very much, and I don't blame you.

There is often a lot of amazing stuff in there, much of it arcane and useless. So, we've decided to boil down the stats for your website to what really matters — the stuff that shows you the effectiveness of your website. The stuff upon which you can make business decisions.

 
So, what is that? How many visitors to your website, where they came from and how many of them purchase an Instant Gift Certificate or request an appointment. With that in mind, we've created two reports:

• Referrers: shows where visitors to your website are coming from. Either "(none)", because they typed your website address in directly, or the website they came from, say Google.
• Keywords: For visitors from search engines, what keywords did they use to find you?

You won't find any mention of hits on your website reports. What is a hit anyway? Instead, you'll see the number of visitors, how many pages of your website they looked at on average, and how many GCs they bought. And then, the really important number: conversion percentage, which is the percentage of your visitors that purchased.

This gets right to the heart of measuring the two ways you can increase your online sales: increase your number of visitors, and increase your conversion percentage. This is exactly what we're here to help you with.

If you have a Dynamic Website, these reports show you the full picture of your website. For linked sites, the stats represent your SpaBoom linked pages. So, not your home page, but visitors that make it to your Instant GCs page.

Now the not-as-great-news: because we're using a new technique to collect this information, it's only available starting from when we implemented it, July 2nd.

Posted in Spa Search Engine Optimization (SEO), SpaBoom New Features, Spa Website Design • 1 Comment »

Since we've taken our dynamic websites national, we've seen and heard very good things. Please always feel free to share your feelings — good and bad — about any service that we provide for you. We want to know what you like, what you need and what's working for you. After all, our job is about making sure you have the very best tools at your disposal to capture online revenues!

Amanda Harper, with Living Well, recently shared her perspective on her new website:

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Think of your website as a guide taking visitors on a road trip. They start at your home page, and as their guide, it's your responsibility to help them find the right destination. What's that? Becoming a client, of course! You want them to end their trip by scheduling a service or buying an Instant Gift Certificate.

There will be some stops along the way, of course. Start off with a quick tour of what makes your spa unique. Make a little detour to check that your location is reasonably convenient. Peruse your menu of services, full of rich descriptions of the pleasure they'll experience. Cheerfully answer all of those new client questions at every step of the journey.

Make it easy to always see the destination. Whenever your visitor is ready, your phone number and Instant Gift Certificate and Appointment links are always easy to find. They already know where they are, because they've seen them at every stop along the way.

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Tranquil is the watchword for Cascade Gardens Spa. They've created an inviting, aromatically calming, aesthetically pleasing environment where clients can fully enjoy their services. Their SpaBoom Dynamic Spa Website extends that sense of tranquility, and presents to the world the image that truly reflects what Cascade Gardens Spa is all about.

Lori Costa, Spa Manager, shared her thoughts with us:

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