How we created the Novatoo website

by Don Kreski

Designing an effective website for a small company is harder than it looks.

Every company, whether large or small, has to compete with the biggest players in their particular corner of the market. The site designer has to make sure that they appear as capable, professional and appealing as the big firms, every bit as able to get the job done.

Being capable isn't enough, however. Potential customers have to have a reason to switch to a new supplier. For that reason, it’s important to figure out what the company is best at and convey it in the site. In Good to Great, Jim Collins suggests that a great company will be best in the world in what they do, but in fact any well run firm will be better than any competitor in some important aspect. If they weren't, there would be no reason to buy from them.

So when we began work last winter on a new website for Novatoo Audio Visual, a small dealership in west suburban Chicago, the key questions were: What do Novatoo’s customers find so appealing that they prefer them to larger firms? How could we portray these advantages in a way that new prospects would find appealing and memorable? And how could we do it and stay within a small company’s limited budget?

Finding the unique

To begin answering these questions, I interviewed Novatoo owners Tim Novak and John Toomey about what they felt they had that was unique. It was soon evident that they were concentrating on service, with customer convenience a critical factor.

Novak and Toomey offer pricing that is very competitive, but so do a lot of companies. They offer a wide range of products and services –rental, staging, sales and installations– but again, there’s nothing unique about that.

What’s different about Novatoo AV is that the partners try to make things easier and more convenient for their customers than anyone else around. Thus they offer free delivery and pickup on most rentals, even when it’s not profitable in the short term. They maintain a 24-hour hotline and are willing to get up in the middle of the night to help customers. We decided to emphasize the 24/7 service on every page of the site and call out the free delivery service on the rental pages.

Beyond that, if you know Tim and John you know they are exceptionally honest. Honesty is not an easy thing to convey in a marketing piece, however. Cynical readers understand that people who lie by habit generally lie about their integrity.

We addressed the issue in two ways. First, we gathered quotes from Novatoo customers and put one on every inside page, believing that what their customers said would be much more believable than anything we could say. Second, we offered a story to Rental and Staging Magazine with an interview of the pair; when they published it we added a link from the new home page.

Finally, worried that even established customers might not be aware of the range of services that Novatoo offers, we added the tag line, “your one stop shop for AV.” There’s nothing unique about a full-service dealership, but we felt that pointing it out would help Novatoo capture new business from customers they already had.

An organic design

Once we decided these three strategies, designing the website was relatively straightforward.

I laid out a plan for the site and wrote copy for each of the pages. One of my goals, quite frankly, was to create as many pages as I could for the money we had to work with.

Content is the number one factor search engines use to rank websites. A site with more pages will simply do better than a smaller site. I broke the Novatoo story, wherever possible, into many single-topic pages rather than a few comprehensive pages. For example, their rental price list appears as ten separate pages: seven pages of product plus a menu page and a two-page combined price list in pdf form. An added plus is that this type of breakdown makes each page cleaner and easier to understand. The problem is that it can add a lot of programming cost.

One of my web programmers, Gary Kamen, suggested we create the site for a Linux server using dynamic php-format pages. The advantage here was that he could create two or three templates which would contain all of the shared elements of the site: logo, navigation, tag lines, address and phone. Individual pages would be stripped down to their unique content and programming greatly simplified. This kind of format would also help in future years by allowing us to add new pages very easily. The technology was a great help in making this site affordable.

I took our plans to Novak and Toomey and, once they approved them, I brought in an experienced graphic designer, Sharon Ferdinand, to establish the look of each page.

“Most websites are built on a table structure, a pattern of squares and rectangles,” Ferdinand says. “Maybe because so many of the designers who work on the web have only done websites, they tend to follow this grid structure. You end up with a lot of sites that are boxy and kind of look the same.

“When I was working on Novatoo,” she continues, “I was trying to create something a little softer and more organic. Of course they have that circle in their logo, and that’s how I got started. I decided to repeat that, so that people would remember their logo, and that, on a first glance, it would obviously be the Novatoo site.”

I was very pleased when I saw Ferdinand’s design. It was eye catching, memorable, and that it made the products and services Novatoo offers obvious at a glance. “I just looked at other websites that I liked and thought, ‘what do I like about them?’” she says. “You need to have navigation, you need to have certain things and fit a certain format, but the best sites don’t let that take over. I was able to design the site the way I thought it should be and trust that Gary would make it work.”

Novak and Toomey are very pleased with the new website and the business it has brought in so far. “We were really surprised at the kind of site Don was able to create for our budget,” Novak explains. “It goes way beyond anything we expected.”