With more and more consumers in Denver turning to the Internet to research local businesses, you can see how failing to invest in the design of your site can affect your lead generation and ultimately your sales revenue. But if you are not experienced with web design or Internet marketing, choosing to build your own site and generate traffic can be too much to handle.

If you are looking for the best web designer in Denver, here are five important factors to consider.

1. Check Out the Designer’s Portfolio

If you hire an independent web designer or a firm, you need to take time to look over their portfolio. All professional designers have portfolio, whether they design websites or home interiors. You should get a feel for the design of each website they were contracted to complete, the functionality, and unique features. If you fail to look at the designer’s portfolio, you are walking into the contract blind.

2. Understands the Importance of Design and Internet Marketing

The design of your website goes hand in hand with Internet marketing. A poor design is not going to appeal to the search engines or the searchers. Your professional website needs to be simple but still professional. It should be keyword optimized, have navigation that the search engine spiders can understand, and still be designed for the user.

3. Experience

Website designers are entering the industry all of the time. Some of these designers have years of experience working for Denver firms and others are self-taught. You want to hire a professional who has experience designing all types of website templates and web pages. Make sure you ask how long the designer has been in business and how they were trained to do what they do.

4. Realizes the Importance of Good Content

You can have a beautiful website but that website is not going to generate traffic if you have poor quality content. The content on your website is just as important as navigation, sitemaps, and everything else. Your web designer must realize the importance of quality content. If they are too focused on the templates, the programming, and the graphics, you might overlook posting quality content.

5. The Call to Action

Consumers are not going to call you if you do not tell them to. You have to have a call to action somewhere on the landing page of your website. If this is missing, all of the prospects that visit you might abandon your page. Make sure the designer will focus on moving a visitor to action or your efforts will be in vain.

Not all Denver web designers are created equally. Some lack the experience they need, some lack knowledge of Internet marketing, and others lack the portfolio. Make sure you take time to choose a professional who will help you build your business expand. If you do this, you will never regret making the investment into your professional business website.

Take a look at the photo below and move around it with your mouse. You will see a 360° view of the kitchen and bath showroom we shot yesterday. We can do the same for you.

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Our Google Business Photos Trusted Photographer will come to your store or business and take photos of your business with a special camera. We will then submit the photos to your Google Places/Google + Local page. The whole process takes 24-48 hours from start to finish.

The virtual tour will be placed on your  Google Places/Google + Local page and then you can easily embed the virtual tour on your website, like I have done above. If you don’t have a Google Places page, we can help you with that, too.

Prices start at $500 and go up from there depending upon how many rooms you want us to shoot. Call us today at 720-922-3124 to talk about this unique approach. Or click here to read more about this service.

The focus of our work shouldn’t be price but value.

I’ll never be the least expensive web design company in town. Nor will I ever be the most expensive one either. But I do want to be the one who gives the most bang for the buck, whether that’s $4,000 or $20,000.

We took over the design of a website two years ago where the previous design company was charging $28,000 for the design and programming of the site. The initial design was horrible and never could figure out why they were charging so much. The only reason I could think of was that they did because they could, and this client fell for it. We ended up doing the site for only $6,000.

It all comes down to what you get for your money, not what you pay. If you don’t have $10,000 to spend on a website then you should find the $1,000 web designer who can get a site up for you. The problem comes when you want a $5,000 website and you only have $500 to spend. It’s feel odd to me when someone wants to pay Craig’s List prices for big agency quality work.

Most of the companies who come to me want to be paid a reasonable amount for the work that they do. They aren’t in the business to rip people off by charging over-inflated prices. So, they should expect to pay a reasonable amount for quality work, too.

Over the last couple months I’ve been contemplating how to get my clients real value for the work they are asking me to do. What I’ve determined for my own business is that I need to take a more holistic approach to websites. I need to concentrate on a comprehensive approach to my web design.

Subsequently, I’ve been bidding projects in the $8,000-10,000 range so we have the time and the talented professionals to ensure my clients will be successful with their website. We begin the process by developing a comprehensive Web Marketing Plan, which happens before we even start thinking about the website design. From the Web Marketing Plan we can make wise choices of what should be included in the design and what we want people do to with the design.

As I’ve tried this approach I have had mixed results. I had one company that probably does $2 million a year in sales choose a company because of friend of his uses them a lot and supposedly will be able to piggyback on their prices. Knowing human nature, I doubt this other company will give them the effort and quality they would give to someone paying full price.

I saw a great quote by Benjamin Franklin recently that might be appropriate to your work: “The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.”

So, take a look at how you’re making decisions about what you’re willing to spend for anything with your business. It’s time for all of us to spend a reasonable amount for the things that will help us succeed, whether it’s hiring a professional web design company, upgrading your computers, or using a better bookkeeper.

And you need to charge a reasonable amount for your work. If you feel like you’re worth it, then you certainly should. You can’t help your clients if you’re out of business.

Someone had obviously written this in response to the way I graded spelling tests. We used to grade each other’s test and I had learned from my previous school that a word was incorrect if you didn’t cross a T or dot an I. So I would marked the word wrong. Someone didn’t like this and made it clear on my pencil holder.

Let’s fast forward 18 years later. I was a copywriter in in-house media team for a large non-profit. One of my roles was to proof documents before they went to the printers.

One day I walked into the designers area for some reason and all the designers had their backs to me. One of the designers, Dwayne, remarked to the other designers, “I don’t know how Dave finds when there are two spaces instead of one.” I was a nitpicker again, but in a good way. We would even double check the documents to make sure the designers made all the changes we had found in the first round of proofing.

It’s easy to not go the second mile when it comes to projects our clients or bosses really may not notice. But we know when someone isn’t done to 100 percent. And that’s when we should embrace our perfectionism.

We recently launched a website and I was bugged by some formatting. I spent an extra half hour of my time fixing the formatting. I was even willing to pay $60 an hour to have this fixed because I knew it mattered to the client, who is even more of a perfectionist than me.

One thing Seth Godin talks about is that you have to ship. If you wait and wait until something is perfect, then you might miss opportunities because of the timing. I agree with this. You have to ship. You have to make something public without everything being 100 percent perfect.

But that is no excuse to get sloppy. You have to get your product or service to a point where is actually valuable. It has to be better and more useful than before.

Steve Jobs was a perfectionist. Some people hated him for this but millions of people love his products because of the perfectionism. Perfect enough can be a good thing when balanced with getting something out the door. Apple wouldn’t be where they are now if they never actually sent something to market.

With a CMS you log into an administration area and then go to the page you want to change. Often you will have an interface that is similar to how you work with a document in Microsoft Word. You can easily make changes to content, create links, insert pictures or graphics, etc.

Having a CMS eliminates your need to contact your webmaster every time you have to change something on your site. You will still need your webmaster if you want to add new functionality to the site or there is something within the template of the site.

We have created dozens of sites in WordPress over the last couple years and our clients really love it. It’s easy to learn and easy to use. Plus it has a blog build into it, which will help with your marketing.

I’ve had clients who was spending a lot of money in Yellow Pages or other places that wasn’t giving them proven results so they moved it over to pay per click so they could track their leads better.

If you are worried about blowing your entire budget all in one day then you need not worry. All of the major pay per click advertising services allow you to designate how much you’re willing to spend on a daily basis. Once you’ve spent that amount for the day, then your advertisements are turned off until 12:01 A.M. the next day.

For example, if you want to spend $900 per month, then you should budget $30 per day. This will control your spending so it doesn’t go out of control.

Setting up your conversions can be simple. If you are using Google Analytics then you can track the number of times people land on your “Thank you” after filling out a contact form.

If you aren’t using Google Analytics, then you just put a small piece of code provided by the pay per click services provide on your “Thank you” page.

I’ve been managing pay per click accounts since 2003. I find it a great way to get traffic to your site quickly and also a way to advertise your company more broadly than with search engine optimization (SEO). It’s definitely a different animal than SEO but it’s a good complement to SEO.

Click here to read more about pay per click advertising.

Once you nailed things down with Adwords, then go to MSN adCenter. You can get visitors through here because your ads will show up in Bing and Yahoo. There system is a little harder to use but can get you visitors that you’d miss in Adwords.

Another avenue is to advertise on Facebook. These are the ads that show up on the right side of the page in Facebook. You can gear your ads to certain locations and demographics.