Tag: web development
What is a “Hero Banner” On Your Website?
What is a “hero banner?”
Of course, you can ask ChatGPT or Gemini and get an answer, but since you’re here reading this post, I’ll tell you what it is.
A “hero banner” is the first section below your website header, which uses three specific components to drive interest to action.
It should start below the website header, which holds your navigation menu, and end at the bottom of the screen
It’s all the person viewing your home page should see, unless they scroll below.m it. That content is filler content.
A hero banner consists of:
- A background graphic, photo, or video that captures the person’s attention and conveys what the organization is about.
I use a background video no more than a few seconds long that is looped, so the motion is constant. A background video can really create a story about the organization, sometimes more than an image ever could. The motion creates energy, and the viewer will stop to watch the video, which increases time spent on the site and can reduce your bounce rate.
- A concise sentence (and maybe subtext) that tells the viewer exactly what your business offers.
For my Digital Strategy Works digital marketing agency, I use this:
Primary – “dynamic digital strategies for content and commerce”
Sub-text – @Planning integrated web, mobile, and social strategies to foster organic engagement and regenerative growth!”
- A call-to-action button that, when clicked, takes the viewer directly to your offer. I use “Get Started” for my button text.
A call-to-action is the prompt that directs the viewer to where you want them to go. It stands alone as the primary way to drive your potential customers into your sales channel.
Are you following these steps to close your deal, sell your product, or generate new leads? If you need help with this, let’s schedule 30 minutes to chat about getting you unstuck.
We can go over this, as well as address more of your website design or redesign needs.
Is the website you were sold by a web developer that good?
Did the web development agency who cold called you really do a great job on the new website you commissioned?
Maybe. Maybe not. Or, maybe somewhere in between. How do you know if you’re not working with an website experience professional?
You don’t know.
A new client just had a website built for them by an agency who exclusively works with contractors. He showed me the website they’d built for him.
He thought it was great. On the surface, it was pretty good. I’d give it a 6 or 7 for design and they were using some professional grade plugins like Elementor, RankMath, and even Gravity Forms, my go to for form building.
But after the initial scan, I tore it apart.
- No FAQs. Everyone in web development today building websites for contractors should build a FAQ page, as that’s a great way to have your answer to a common question surfaced as an answer in search.
Fix: Add a popular FAQ plugin to manage your FAQs. You can use all on the FAQ page or pull one with a short code or block into a specific page or post.
- Portfio page video carousel has no text describing each portfolio project and all the insights and strategy going into each project. Your customer comes to the page and sees the project video but no other details to sell them on the project. What, why, when, where, and how. Provide that level of detail and not just for search but to close the sale. Be the expert in the room. And include a testimonial from the customer which can close a sale.
Also on the portfolio page, a carousel of random projects where the images were not titled properly, there are no captions, and like the videos above, no explanation of what you’re seeing. How can you sell people on your expertise and authority in this domain by just showing them one photo and not explaining what it is or why it’s important enough for you to showcase it.
Fix: Add a portfolio plugin to generate a page for each portfolio project. Add the video and the images you have and then build a page with content describing the project, its location (for local SEO), and how you solved the problem. Add a sidebar listing all portfolio page links so the viewer can navigate your portfolio and get a better look at what you have to offer.
- After a Google Page Soeed review, the desktop score was 97, but the mobile score was 67. We know that Google prioritized mobile search.
Fix: Review all issues uncovered by Google with your image sizes and serve images in next gen formats like webp. There are plugins that help compress images and swap out jpg for webp. Resolve critical CSS and render blocking JavaScript issues to improve load times. Use lazy load for images and video. You have to look under the hood to fix the car.
These are just a few of the issues I uncovered that need to be resolved. If your curious whether your web developer did all they could do on your new WordPress website, I offer an inspection and report for just $299* (per website). Contact me to discuss.
neighborbee.com is live!
Over lunch at Cafe Amrita on the Upper West Side, neighborbee founder, Anthony Lobosco and I met to discuss the vision for supercharging what was a simple blog with content about New York City neighborhoods into a hyper-local social community. A place where neighbors could freely post what they love about their communities and well, what they don’t love so much. Lobosco, a Fordham alum and telecom industry sales executive has had his share of stress as a New York City co-op owner. He believed that if people could just have a place to publish information down to the building level in major cities, it could be a transformative in many ways. And, oddly enough, we share the same first names. We’re both of Italian-American descent. My wife’s business has a bee in the name: Melibee Global. And, our wives first names are Melissa!
I had recently launched Digital Strategy Works, my digital strategy and WordPress consulting company out of my Bronxville apartment after spending one year at a web development agency in Farmingdale, NY. My wife and I had discussed my driving from Bronxville to Farmingdale everyday. While I spent some nights at one of the founders houses on Long Island, the 3-hour round-trip drives were taking their toll on my health and our relationship, so we decided that I would leave my job and take a risk on my own business.
Since 2003, I’d been publishing my music blog, Netmix.com on WordPress. Over the next 6-years, I engaged with the WordPress community, helping others with their issues in the WordPress.org forums while building my knowledge of the platform. As WordPress grew, opportunities to build WordPress sites for others started to come in. In the summer of 2009, about 9-months after I’d left my job, I signed an agreement with Anthony to build Neighborbee.com. I would project manage the site and hire developers in Boston for the build.
Anthony and I began to spend many nights drawing up the information architecture and business requirements documentation for the site. We used an office at Fordam University’s alumni association in Columbus Circle. I can’t recall how many nights we spent working out the documentation for the project, but it’s safe to say it was a lengthy process. We found that we got along quite well. Anthony was a solid client who understood the task at hand. I don’t think either of us knew what we would be in for, but with his vision spelled out and my ability to partner and drive development, we set forth on a path for success. That path was a 3-year journey, which finally came to an end, or should I say, new beginning, over the last few weeks. After 3-years of development, we finally launched neighborbee.com. In those 3-years, Anthony moved to Stamford and I moved to Chapel Hill, Carrboro, back to Chapel Hill and then to Winston-Salem. Anthony and his wife also had not one, but two babies! Imagine working full-time, building your start-up and having two children at the same time. Makes me exhausted just thinking about it.
Of course, Anthony and I could not do it alone. WordPress developers Jeffrey Marx, formerly of the Journal News in Westchester and CBS Local and now at Gilt Groupe and Michael McNeil, a student at UNC Chapel Hill who both have contributed a great deal to the growth and success of Digital Strategy Works, spent countless hours perfecting, cajoling and moving neighborbee in the right direction. While we’d started off with the web shop in Boston who shall remain nameless, given the negative experience we had with them, Jeff and Michael brought the right mix of experience, passion and creativity to the project.
We’d also gone through a couple of designers, but couldn’t seem to get the visual experience down to a web 2.0 look and feel, but Anthony brought on Chris Antonelle, a web graphic designer in NYC, who added the right mix of colors and style and brought it all together. We would have been finished last year, but we all agreed to let Chris do his magic and we’d implement the solutions. What you see today is the result of that effort.
Lastly, we needed someone to deal with content. While the neighborbee Dev team are gifted in their own ways, it was important to find someone who could shape the editorial voice of neighborbee as well as enhance our social media profiles on Facebook and Twitter. Anthony turned to Elance and found Julia Crenshaw-Smith, a freelance marketing and editorial consultant who we brought on to give neighborbee it’s, well, honey – if you will. Julia turned the site’s prior content into usable material to seed the network. Now, it’s up to the users of neighborbee, who can join with their zip code or address in NYC-only, to explore their neighborhoods and seed their hives with honey.
Yes, all this was done while working nights and weekends over the past two-years. I’d taken a job at UNC Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication in July of 2010 to build out the digital presence of a $4M gift-funded newsroom to teach students digital journalism, social media and audience engagement. Through November 2011, I pitched in to manage the continued build out and revised graphical user interface. After a scandal at UNC, which saw my boss get canned for carrying on a relationship with a student resulting in a downsizing the program, I found a new opportunity at Market America in Greensboro, NC, where I am leading product development of an online music platform for artists, Getconquer.com. While the work that I am doing by day is very important, neighborbee has become – for me, a labor of love and dedication. The project is so important for many reasons, as it can really open up communication in neighborhoods and go into buildings, which local news organizations simply cannot cover.
Yes, it’s going to take a village. A village of bees, that is, to get neighborbee off to the start it so deserves. We’re looking forward to that user adoption and providing ways for users to really engage the site. The next step is obviously mobile and we have plans for that as well. And, we’re starting to build out funding strategy, putting together our pitch deck and submitting our application to pitch at New York Tech Meetup sometime soon!
So, without further adieu, I present the home page of neighborbee.com below. Let me know what you think by posting a comment here on my blog.
The number one issue is: CULTURE!
Web developers in India, Ukraine, Brazil, and parts of Eastern Europe have vastly different approaches to how they design and build the website you want and need. They’ve all learned different ways of doing things and will apply what they know, which might work for them, but not for anyone else coming on board that doesn’t have a handle on how they did what they’ve done.
I’ve worked with India-based developers for many years. What I’ve come to learn is that they go to school to learn web development, but they don’t go to school to learn how to solve problems. And, they say “yes” an awful lot but yes means they can try, not yes, they can do. Maybe with experience, they will, but like any junior developer anywhere, they will just build what they think you want in the only way they know how without thinking through the impact down the road.
For example, a few years ago, I needed my India team to build a website with a header and footer in a page builder called Divi. The page builder has a process for this. But what did my developers do? They custom-coded the header and the footer. This was before I learned how to do it in Divi myself.
Years later, once I had to go in and fix something, I couldn’t.
Why?
Because the way they built it with custom code was complicated, and they left me with no documentation on how they did it.
Back then, I didn’t know what I know now. I paid far more for what I needed because I didn’t know how to instruct them otherwise. And, when I finally found out years later, I’d stopped working with them because of these mishaps, so I had no recourse but to rebuild it all myself.
That’s right – a non-developer with product development experience and a deep understanding of WordPress fixed it all in under an hour. I can’t remember how much time it took them all those years ago, but it certainly wasn’t an hour.
Are you struggling with a WordPress project that you can’t seem to wrap your head around? Are you finding it hard to work with the offshore team that pitched you on being able to do anything you ask for without explaining how or why they’re going to do it that way?
If you need a coach to walk you through aspects of your web development project, I’m happy to be there for you. Schedule time with me to discuss your project. Let’s have a conversation about where you are and where you need to go, then start to right the wrongs that you may be experiencing.
As a WordPress coach, consultant, and trainer, I’ve worked with designers, developers, project managers, email marketers, social media managers, and many other roles on hundreds of projects. Let’s connect so I can assist you with working through your challenging website development roadblocks.