Website Design Case Study
We all know the old saying the proof is in the Pudding. Here is an example of what good, solid Website Design can do for your business here in the Smoky Mountains. The Bed and Breakfast business gets most reservations off the Internet. You will live and die by how effective your site is. Here is a project from March, 2010 where a B & B had a Website which was built by a professional design/hosting company. We were tasked with building a more effective website.
The numbers make the case as to the effectiveness of a site built by deanlewis.biz as compared to another Internet firm. On each graphic, there is a red arrow on the day where the new site went live.
The first chart is Average Time on Site. This is placed first because it's so very important; study after study concludes that the longer the visitor remains on a Website, the more likely he is to make a positive buying decision. In February, the average time on site was 1:24; the first week the new site was up, the average time on site jumped to 3:15. 
The graphic above is called Bounce. In short, the Bounce Rate is a percentage of visitors who come to your site, then bounce away without leaving the page they came in on. Here is a Blog I wrote explaining it in detail. The Bounce rate for this site came down from 72.8% to 20.7% This is HUGE. It cannot be stressed enough how important it is to get people off the landing page and into the site. A Sales Rep. calls this putting them in the picture. 
Lets look at the average pages per visit next. Before the site we built went live, the Bed & Breakfast was averaging 1.54 pages per visit (based on the prior 1000 page views). When taken together with the Bounce Rate above, we know most folks were not looking at any other pages within the site after seeing the Home Page. After our redesign, this jumped to 4.35 pages per visit. That's a 282 percent jump.
The point with all the above (perhaps a little boring), is to make it clear that we don't say we can built a better performing Website, we are showing proof that we can build you a better site.
Feel free to click on the names below and look at the style, even the art of each website.
Briarwood Ranch, Auto Safari
Williamsburg Heritage Dancers
Bee Spas
Newport House Bed & Breakfast
Websites are funny, they seem to collect in odd corners. I currently have about thirty sites that I'm involved with in some form.
Peninsula Promotions
Sevierville Web Design
For almost all web design projects, it is best to hire a professional. Even though it costs more, it is generally only a one-time cost. Small businesses in Sevierville are like small businesses most places, a website is typically only designed once with major revisions only done once every few years; you may make changes here or there in the short run, but a web site usually stays the same for up to a few years or more. So, you might as well go with the most talented yet reasonably priced designer you can find.
You will also discover that having a seasoned designer handle your web site will result in higher Google page rankings. The initial cost of a design project normally includes some SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization, but this is almost never enough to land a new web site on the first page. This is an important point! If you are going to spend hard won cash on a project, don't you want the chance to make that money back?
Because the Smoky Mountain internet market is so competitive, it is going to be an ongoing effort to get high placement in the search engines. This will require a sustained effort on your part. You must be ready to have your Website designer work a couple of hours each month for the next year. There is no substitute for hard work. Building back-links and fine tuning META tags takes time. Hiring someone here in Sevierville will make this process easier because your designer can drop by and have that important face to face discussion.
E.G. Peformance Solutions