Last Monday I started my review of Karin’s pet sitting website. In that review I talked about how to make your website customer friendly – that is make sure you give your prospective clients / website visitors all the information that they are looking for and start to build their trust.
Today I want to look at the next key to a great pet sitting website – your website must be attractive and easy to read. Another way of saying this is – Is your website pleasing to the visitors eye?
One of the big trends in the past few years was to use fancy flash animated graphics (for example dancing dogs or cats) and really colorful patterned backgrounds. Today you should not use flash animations or busy backgrounds. Both will really date your website – and they are only distracting the customer from your main message. If your website has these features – remove them! The aim of your site is to give a customer information, prove your credibility, and get them to contact you to book services – not to entertain them or make them say how cute!
Your website needs to give your customer the perception that you run a professional pet sitting business and that you are serious about providing reliable pet care. Make sure that you have a website that conveys your professionalism by having a consistent background and layout for all your pages.
Get a professionally designed logo and make sure that the image quality of your logo on your site is sharp and clear (this should also be true for any photos you display on your website). The colors that you use for background and text on your site should co-ordinate with the colors of your logo to portray a consistent brand image. If you need help designing your logo or your site you can find graphic designers for a reasonable price at http://99designs.com/ or http://www.elance.com.
Photos on your site should show you with a welcoming and warm smile – and are even more effective if they show you with your own or customers pets. If you don’t have photos of you and your pets, you can include pictures of your pets too – or go out and have some new photos taken with them. Photos with your family are also effective if you promote your business as family owned and operated – I’ve had several customers tell me that they selected my pet sitting services because of the photos that I displayed on my About page on my website.
The last important key to making your site easy to read is to include plenty of white space between your text and pictures. Don’t make your site too busy or cluttered – but space out text and use lists and bullets to highlight services and service areas.
On Karin’s site http://s2.webstarts.com/AnimalsGreatandSmallPetsitting/index.html I would recommend:
1) An updated logo – and I would also advise using exactly the same logo format on each website page.
2) Breaking up the text on the home page by using lists and centering some of the text to create more interest and more white space.
3) Using a smaller picture on the home page – the poop scooping dog is cute but it dominates the page too much and distracts from the information about her service. A picture of Karin with a dog or her pets would be a better choice.
4) Using a larger, clearer, color picture of Karin on the contact page that shows her happy and enjoying the pets.
If you have any other suggestions for Karin please leave a comment on the post.
Great post Danielle! Absolutely right on.
When I first started doing research about getting into the pet sitting businesses I looked at a lot of pet sitter’s websites. I found that many of them were outdated, confusing and hard to read.
Immediately, I knew that the one thing I could capitalize on this and create a great website that would draw people in vs. turning them off. I thought I did a pretty good job and have heard from a lot of my clients that they chose me because of my website.
But, my friend Mike has done an awesome job on his website. It’s the best I have seen so far. I recommend people check it out.
http://hurleypetservices.com/hpsa/
Thanks Mel – I really like the template that Mike is using for his site. However, the home pages seems kind of blank – if I was looking for a pet sitter I would like to see the services he offers, his service area, and his affiliations / qualifications shown on the front page – possibly even some customer testimonials too. The front home page may be the only page a customer looks at when they are scanning though pet sitting sites. You want to get them interested and give them the info they are looking for to make a decision right there on the first page.
I love that Mike is using photos with his testimonials.
Before we ever opened for business, the two things we did were get a logo made and get our own domain and have the email set up to our own domain as well. This, I felt, would set us apart from other companies in the area. We got our first client within 2 weeks of launching the website so I think these were definitely helpful. The next thing we did was add our business to Google and Yahoo local searches. The hits to our website quadrupled once we did this (from about 60/mo to about 250/mo) and our business has jumped accordingly.
I appreciate all the tips you have given, I am definitely going to add an about me and testimonial page to my website. The testimonial page was always planned, but we’ve only been up and running about 6 months, so we still need a few more people to give good testimonials.
Any feedback you could give me on our site would be greatly appreciated too…it is http://www.sleepy-paws.com
By the way, we are using the article on pet toys from Circle of Pet Sitting Success as part of our email Xmas card to our clients as well. Thanks very much, the service is great!
Hi Dave – glad you could put the articles to use!
Are you currently sending a follow up email to clients requesting a testimonial or online review? I have just added links to my Google local and Yelp in my follow up email and had a client fill out a review that is listing on the front page of Google for a search on my city. This is definitely worthwhile!
Yeah, I started doing that about 2 months ago. The email I send links to the survey and then once they complete the survey, it pulls up a page with links to Google Local, Yahoo Local and others. I got a real nice testimonial from one of my customers and all positive answers to the questionnaire from 2 others (but no testimonial), but none of them took the extra step to do the reviews. I recently polished up the email using Mail Chimp’s templates and put Google, Yahoo and Angie’s List links right in the email w/a coupon if they do a review. Still nothing yet, but I’m sure we will get some reviews eventually.
Here is the link to the survey, anything I should add or take out?
http://sleepy-paws.com/survey.aspx
Dave – I really like the survey – especially that you ask if you can use photos and testimonials on the web.
When you send out the email to invite people to the survey – is this also the email that you have the links to leave a review on Google and Yahoo? Once they have filled out the survey do you have a thank you page that reminds them about leaving reviews and gives them the links again. I’m wondering if you just have the initial email whether people are coming to the survey and then finishing and forgeting about the other request for reviews online?
When they complete the survey, the thank you page has the links as well as asking them to fill out the survey and there are also links in the email.
I sent you a copy of the email so you could check it out.
TBH, the very first thing you should’ve pointed out before even LOOKING at Karen’s website is the fact that Karen needs an easy to remember domain name!! The above web address (url) is too long to easily put on any business card plus makes it even harder for people to just “type” in to their web browser.
This also makes her business look more professional (even if it is just “covering up” the longer web address).