Spa Website Design

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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Over the last month, we've done a series on the top goals for the home page of your website. This focus on your home page is really about conversion: taking visitors to your website and turning them into clients. Focus on conversion has long lasting benefits beyond any particular marketing effort — it's always there, maximizing the benefit of the visitors that you attract to your website.

You have unique challenges as a spa in making your website effective. Our home page goals tackle that by answering your visitors' questions:

• #1 Where am I?
• #2 What do you want me to do?
• #3 What’s new?
• #4 Where are you?

And then, with the final, and arguably most important goal, making it easy for them:

• #5 Start me off on the right foot

Do these five things on your home page, and your sales will increase. Of course, if it was that easy, everyone would be doing it! But that's why it's an opportunity, and another way you can be better than your competition.

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Visitors quickly give up on slow websites.

If your website takes 15 seconds to load, you're losing half of your visitors. Even with fast broadband connections, there are plenty of spa websites that take even longer than that to load. The third of Internet users on dialup should just give up now.

Fancy Flash animations and huge graphics will lose you clients. Don't do it! You need a beautiful, elegant website — but make sure that it's also effective. For more research on website load time and techniques for your webmaster to make your site faster, check out Marketing Experiments.

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Home page goal #5

Your home page is where I'm going to learn how your site works. It has to be easy to figure out. It should build on the experience I have from visiting hundreds of other websites. If your website is confusing, I'm just going to move on.

Don't make me re-learn your website. Your home page should teach me how your site operates, and I shouldn't have to re-learn it once I go to an "internal" page. If your web designer shows you a design with the layout of the home page different than internal pages, send them back to the drawing board. Or get a new web designer.

I could have easily made this the first goal of your home page. After all, if you fail the usability test, nothing else will matter. But, it's really a way of summing up the first four home page goals: make it easy for your visitors.

Jakob Neilsen sums it up in Usability 101:

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Home Page Goal #4

Spas are local businesses, and one of the first things a new visitor to your website wants to know is, where are you?

They may be searching for themselves, in which case they want to see if your location is relatively convenient for them. Or, they may be purchasing an Instant Gift Certificate for someone some place else, and may not be very familiar with the city.

Make it easy to figure out where you are! I've been to dozens of spa websites where it was challenging to just find their address—nevermind directions to the spa and a handy link to Google Maps or Mapquest. With that link to Google Maps, it would be very easy to enter my Mom's address and see if the spa is reasonably close.

Include your address and/or for multiple locations, the area that you serve. Make sure you have a consistent "Contact Us" link that provides more detailed information, with a link to one of the mapping services and directions to your location, particularly if you're not on a major street.

When talking about the area that you serve, make sure and use the terms that people will search for when looking for a particular area. For example, your address might be in a suburb, but it's generally referred to as the surrounding city. Include reference to convenient neighboring areas.

These techniques are also search engine optimization (SEO), making it easier for someone to find you on Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.

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Home page goal #3

I've been to your website before and I know who you are; now I want to know what's new. What new services are you offering to entice me to return for another visit? What specials are you promoting (not necessarily discounts) for the upcoming gift-giving occasion? What are the upcoming events at your spa?

I see spa websites all the time where the home page is always the same. They might address goal #1 and goal #2 effectively, but now they're losing a great marketing opportunity. Don't make your repeat visitors search around to find out what's new at your spa — give them an obvious reason to call you again or buy another Instant Gift Certificate by always promoting relevant, current events on your home page.

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Home page goal #2

They've found your website. They immediately know what you do and why you're unique (thanks to goal #1). Now, what do you want them to do?

Become your client, of course! You want them to:

• Schedule an appointment
• Buy an Instant Gift Certificate
• Buy product

So, don't be shy. Make it obvious:

• Include your phone number and email (or link to your contact page) in your main content, along with links for Instant Gift Certificate and Request Appointment. This is the first area that new visitors are going to scan — and what you want them to do should be right there.
• Use subheadings to call out these options so that when someone scans your website, they can immediately find what they're looking for. Need an appointment? Need a gift certificate? Here it is!
• Include your phone number and address in a separate section on your home page, and then carry this over consistently to every page on your site.
• Do the same with your primary navigation. Make sure you have links for Instant Gift Certificate, Request Appointment and Contact Us, starting on the home page and then in the same place on every other page on your site.

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This is the first in a series on the goals for your website's home page. It's the most important page of your site, and it has a lot to do. So, if we figure out what's really important, it will make it a whole lot easier to design. Thanks to A List Apart, a great online magazine for web designers, for the inspiration for this series.

Home page goal #1: Where am I, and do I really want to be here?

That's the question your home page needs to immediately answer, in the first paragraph of the main content. Don't be afraid to just say who you are and what you do.

But, this is more difficult than it sounds. Building on our last two posts, Website heat maps and What do you do?, you need to highlight what makes your spa unique, and do it consicely, because your web site visitors are only going to give you a split second to answer their question.

Make every word count. Make sure that first paragraph communicates the core essence of your spa. You want to encourage your first time visitors to realize they've found the right spa, and that they need to spend a little more time with you (which will take us to the next goals for your home page, coming soon!).

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If you actually watch people use websites you can learn some interesting things. In this case, Jakob Nielsen used eye-tracking to visualize with hot spots the portions of a web page that users actually looked at (go to Nielsen's site to see the cool pictures).

It turns out that people's eye movements create a big, blurry "F" superimposed on top your web page. So, what are the implications?

• The first heading and paragraph on your website are crucial. This is the most read element of your site, and must concisely explain who you are and what makes you different (this is the top of the "F"; the second paragraph get less attention, and forms the the second bar of the "F").
• Subheadings as you read down the page are critical — the first two or three words need to point out what the reader is looking for to bring them into the text (the makes up the stem of the "F", as visitors scan down the left side of the main content of the page).
• Visitors to your site aren't reading your text thoroughly. They're scanning to find exactly what they're looking for.
• Graphics don't get very much attention.
• Make sure what you really care about is in your main text, and easily highlighted with a subheading.

This is why we recommend promoting your Instant Gift Certificate capability in the main text of your home page, with it's own heading, so that it's easy for people to find. You're doing a service for your clients while selling more!

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"Flash in the pan" is an allusion to what happens when a 17th-century flintlock musket doesn't shoot. Misusing Flash on your website can produce the same result: a marketing misfire.

Here's the problems:

• Search engines can't index Flash, so anything that appears via Flash is invisible to Google. If you're whole site is in flash, well, then your whole site is invisible and people can't find you unless they happen to know your exact web address.
• Prospective clients with slow internet connections will just give up and move on to the next spa's website.
• People without a Flash player installed, or the wrong version installed, will just see a big empty spot where the Flash is supposed to be. They probably won't take the time to install the latest Flash player.
• Flash is often used to create intros that you have to wait through to get to the actual website — fluff that doesn't tell the visitor what they're looking for and doesn't even remember that you've already been to the website five times and already seen the intro five times. Very frustrating.

Web designers at advertising agencies love to use Flash. It lets them apply all of their traditional marketing techniques to the web. But what you end up with is a very expensive website that isn't well tuned to what works effectively online. But it is (or at least can be) beautiful.

The allure, the atmosphere, the experience of your spa is crucial, and bringing that online is important to your spa's image. But it can be accomplished without Flash, or very judicious use of Flash. Some tips if you're going to use Flash:

• Don't make it a core part of your site. Make sure your website is still effective if the Flash doesn't show up.
• Don't put any content in Flash, or have that content reappear in another way on your site so that people can find it when using search engines.
• Don't use intros. Go immediately to the home page of your site. Use a relatively small section of your site to show off what would have been the Flash intro.

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When was the last time you looked at or clicked on a banner ad? We trained ourselves a long time ago to ignore them. It's just someone trying to sell you something, and it's rarely what you want. Now, on your own website, is there something that is so important that you've used snazzy graphics to highlight it? It's probably having exactly the opposite effect — your visitors don't even see it.

Usability testing watches actual people use websites to understand what works and what doesn't. Here's an example from Jakob Neilson:

Neilson is like the fashion designer that always wears black: his own website is as plain as can be (but usable).

Neilson's findings are a great example of why we recommend promoting your great new capability of Instant Gift Certificates with text in the main content of your home page and in your navigation links. Fancy graphics just don't get noticed.

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Well, based on the relevancy of the search results that they produce, Google and Yahoo are tied. But Google still maintains a real advantage over Yahoo in a critical area: usability.

Compare what you see when you go to the two sites:

At Yahoo, you're overrun with options. Maybe what you want is in there, maybe it's not. With Google, you know exactly what to do — type something in to search for it. Yahoo, with a huge head start in the market and all those options, now has a valuation less than half that of Google.

Now, think about your website. When someone goes there, is what you want them to do obvious?

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Spa Finder has a habit of putting out what they see as the upcoming trends for the year. SpaTrade has done a nice article and webinar with their spin on it, particularly as it applies to day spas. They make a couple of great points about your online presence, to which I'll add my own spin:

• "Make sure the look of your website reflects your spa’s brand"  — Your website should be an extension of the experience at your spa. When someone goes to your spa after seeing your website, they should immediately sense they are at the right place. It's amazing how many spa websites I've seen with a logo that doesn't match the signage at the spa.
• "Update transaction functionality of your website" — In other words, your clients and prospective clients need to be able to actually do something at your website, say buy gift certificates or schedule appointments.
• "Link to as many aggregators as possible (SpaTrade, SpaWish, SpaFinder, Spa Addicts, etc.)" — Always good advice; this will bring traffic to your website and increase it's ranking in search results.
• "Spend your marketing dollars online" — We're working to quantify this more, but the feedback from our clients says that an increasing portion of your advertising budget should go online, particularly if you've done the second point above and are selling online.

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You've opened your brand-new spa and commissioned a beautifully designed website to go with it (hopefully a SpaBoom Dynamic Website). An obvious way for somebody to find out about your new business is to search on Google, maybe for "Albuquerque spa". There's only one problem: chances are very good that your brand-new website won't show up on the search pages, or will be buried so deep that no one will ever see it.

You're stuck in what many search engine experts are calling the Google sandbox. Your time in this Internet penalty box can last several months.

There's a simple explanation for this purgatory-on-earth: Google's goal is to return the most relevant results for searches. And they've decided that brand-new websites tend not to be the most relevant. It's part of the search engine's fight against "spam" websites. You've probably clicked on them after running a search: a website filled with junk surrounded by ads. Well, your brand-new website is caught right in the middle of this battle between Google and spam websites.

Note that we're not talking about a redesign of an existing website. Don't worry about updating the look of your existing site — you won't have this problem. This is only an issue for a brand-new website, or more accurately, a brand-new domain, e.g. "yourspa.com".

You only have one solution: wait it out. In the meantime, focus on the core marketing that will turn your website into a great asset for your spa:

• Include your website on every piece of printed material that you put out: your service menu, business cards, advertisements, etc.
• Direct clients to your website on your voice mail. Tell them they can buy Instant Gift Certificates and schedule appointments online. Consider custom hold "music" that includes your website.
• Ask relevant organizations and businesses to link to your site: the local Chamber of Commerce, the tourism department, the bed and breakfast down the street.
• Get listed in Discover Spas.
• Collect e-mail addresses on your new client forms and when you sell anything at retail. Then, put them in SpaBoom under Clients (we don't have e-mail marketing yet — but will soon!).
• Consider using Google AdWords to buy text ads for search terms that prospective clients are likely to use when looking for a spa. Yes, there is some serious irony here in paying Google for text ads to help compensate for Google penalizing you.

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

Less than two weeks to V-Day, now is the time to do a checkup on your website:

• Clutter is the bane of an effective website — has any junk collected on your home page that detracts from your image? Old, outdated information or text that seemed like a good idea but doesn't really help guide a prospective client in to buying a gift certificate or scheduling a couple's massage for Valentine's Day?
• Look at your site with fresh eyes. What do you see?
• Verify all of your links. Are you prominently promoting Instant Gift Certificates?
• Are your Valentine's Day specials in Events so they appear in Instant Gift Certificates and Appointment Requests?

Valentine's Day is the third largest gift certificate selling season for spas, right behind Mother's Day (#2) and the Holidays (#1). Take advantage of it!

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

That's how long it takes a propective client to judge your spa's website and decide whether they're going to spend more time with you, or move on to the next listing on Google, according to new research published in the journal Behaviour and Information Technology.

Design counts — a beautiful, elegant website conveys the kind of experience a prospective client is seeking when looking for a spa. It's this halo effect that makes that first impression of your website critical.

Seth Godin, a real pioneer in online marketing (he was with Yahoo! back when it was the Google of the day) points us to this update of his three second rule from the Big Red Fez. Godin wrote it in 2001, and it should still be required reading for anyone that designs websites. Things move faster these days: we're down from three seconds to 50 milliseconds.

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