Web Design Archives - Bourn Creative

Selling A Million Dollars In Design Side Projects

May 18, 2017 Jennifer Bourn

Development is clear cut. It works or it doesn’t. The code is well-written or it’s a mess. Design on the other hand, is subjective, with the success of a project often based on the client’s ideas, perceptions, opinions, and personal experiences of what good design is.

Jennifer Bourn (that’s me) is founding partner and lead designer of Bourn Creative. While she spends her days designing high-end, complex, custom WordPress sites and brand suites, she has also sold well over a million dollars in just side projects and add-ons ranging from in price from $75-$3,000 — and the journey has been good, bad, and at times, down right ugly.

Jennifer recently teamed up with iThemes Training to deliver a free webinar called Selling a Million Dollars In Design about selling design services that skips the hype and sugar-coating, and gets right to the mistakes made, lessons learned, and business practices implemented over the 12 years Bourn Creative has been in business.

Crafting High-Converting Client Contracts For Web Work

June 11, 2015 Jennifer Bourn

In my last article for the GoDaddy Garage, I shared the benefits of using a Crafting High-Converting Client Contracts For Web Work — should give you a solid foundation to see where your contract can be improved.

If you’re on the client-side of things, you may be looking at a contract from a potential service provider, wondering if it is any good, or if they really are the best choice. This post should help you evaluate a contract for a potential service provider, and ensure you are asking the right questions.

Remember, the ultimate goal is to make your contract easy to understand and to eliminate any roadblocks to decision-making, and to make your potential client feel comfortable and safe.

How To Design A Website Header (And What Should Go In It)

April 9, 2014 Jennifer Bourn

A website header is the area is one of the most valuable areas of your website. It runs across the top of the page and appears on every page of your website, except on sales or landing pages templates that have it removed.

The purpose of your website header is to promote your brand and make your site instantly recognizable to those who are already familiar with you. For many businesses, the header is the perfect place to efficiently and effectively convey exactly what your site is about and what your business does.

How to Create A Highly Effective Website Home Page

April 5, 2014 Jennifer Bourn

While many visitors may enter your website for the first time through a blog post, your Home page is the virtual front door of your website and the main door into your site for the rest of the world. When someone visits your site directly through your main URL, your Home page is the first page of your website they will see.

The Home page represents the very first opportunity you have to make an impression. So visitors need to be able to quickly figure out — in just a few seconds — if they are in the right place, and if your site is what they have been looking for.

Defining the purpose of your website, and in turn the purpose of your Home page is the first step in creating a strategy that will attract your ideal clients and customers to your website.

What Your “WordPress Consultant” Isn’t Telling You (About WordPress)

November 12, 2012 Jennifer Bourn

So I’ve got a pet peeve! I get irritated when people who need help turn to consultants — supposed experts — for help and are misled or fed incorrect or outdated information simply because the consultant doesn’t know the answer and they don’t want to admit it.

This drives me especially CRAZY in the WordPress world. Lies, myths, untruths, and false information about WordPress is being fed to business owners left and right — and it’s perpetuating false beliefs.

Let me explain. I LOVE WordPress — all of our sites are built for WordPress and I love the fact that it allows our clients to have total control over their websites. But this ability comes at a price. Now anyone can open a hosting account, install a theme, and plop in a custom header can call themselves a WordPress web designer or WordPress consultant. There are even some calling themselves WordPress developers that can’t even read PHP!

Why? Because WordPress is a “Hot Topic” for entrepreneurs who want to start online businesses. And for some, these so-called “Hot Topics” mean easy and fast cash.

When Your Website Home Page Isn’t The Entry Point

May 11, 2011 Jennifer Bourn

Your home page is one of the most critical pieces of your website, and if you use a squeeze page, splash page, or some other form of home page with little-to-no content, you’re shooting yourself in the foot!

Search engines value high quality, relevant content and links. That means that content and links into your website are the top things they are looking for when they are scanning websites and indexing pages to include in the search results.

To search engines, your home page is considered the main page and entry point of your website, so it needs to include valuable, relevant, high-quality content.

If you really want to benefit from high organic search engine rankings, you MUST put effort into your home page. Now I’m not talking about putting a lot of effort into writing your home page content once and not touching it again for months at a time. I’m talking about tweaking and testing different headlines, keyword combinations, bold text, and even the design of your home page.

Planning a Successful Small Business Website

March 18, 2011 Jennifer Bourn

Often when we start working with a new client, they are anxious to get their site up quickly and want to jump into the website design process and get started right away. But design isn’t the first step in the process of creating a successful small business website. Before we get started on the design of any client site, we first need to work with our clients to plan the site.

Planning a small business website can be a daunting task, but it will make a huge difference in your conversion rates, sales, and results you see from the site.

Here is a list of things you need to take into consideration and plan for before you get started on the design of your website:

A Website Footer Is For More Than Your Copyright Notice

February 21, 2011 Jennifer Bourn

I guarantee that if you browse the internet for any length of time, you’ll notice that while some websites put a lot of information in their website footer, most simply use it as a space to put their copyright notice and maybe, just maybe if you’re lucky their contact information.

Like your website sidebar, the footer of your website is a very powerful part of your site that can make a big difference in your search engine rankings and how your website visitors move through your website, yet it is one of the most under-utilized tools.

Before I share with you some ideas on how you can leverage your website footer to improve your website and search engine rankings, I want to cover some of the biggest mistakes website owners make when it comes to their website footer: