Partner Blog

Weebly Partner Team has officially launched our Weebly Real Estate Partner webpage. We had heard from many of you in the real estate community that it is still difficult to create property, broker, and branch sites at scale! Check out our new site explains how we are making that easier. 

If you organize your design process effectively, you  can go from developing half a dozen sites per month to 30 or more sites per month. The keys to success for website building at scale requires you to plan ahead, be organized and utilize the right tools. Use the following tips create and fine tune your design process.

• Understand Your Client’s Goals: Create a process for capturing everything you need from clients and stick to it religiously to make the design stage quick and efficient. Have questionnaire forms for each client to fill out and website design templates for clients to choose from. Have clients choose a template and fill out the questionnaire before beginning the work.
• Make the Process Clear and Easy: One of the most important steps you can take for the website building process is to explain the design process to clients, including expected time frames. This makes the whole process go smooth and eliminates client confusion. Your clients know what to expect and when.
• Create a Clear Call-to-Action: Make sure your staff understands your client’s needs and goals, the timeline, and the design process so everything goes smoothly and is completed on schedule. 
• Content: Every small business site needs content, which includes written content, photos, and multimedia, and chances are your clients don’t have this content. As part of your design package, provide these content services. Either have your in-house team produce content or team up with another company so you can provide an all-in-one service to your clients. After the content is developed, send it to the client for quick approval and move on to the next stage of the design process.
• SEO/Keywords: SEO/keyword optimization shouldn’t be an afterthought. Going over content after the site is created takes too much time. Speed up the process by making this optimization a standard part of your design process. Use in-house SEO experts or team up with an outside company to analyze and optimize each client’s content from the beginning of the design process.
• Provide an End-to-End Solution: Your clients aren’t going to want to work with several companies to achieve their online presence. By offering site design, eCommerce, blog creation, and mobile site services, you can create an end-to-end solution that will keep your clients satisfied and coming back for more. 
• Have a Scalable Back-End: Think ahead regarding your clients’ future needs. After all, your clients’ needs will change over time. Some of them may start out with a small site and grow to need a quite large site. By having a scalable back-end, you can easily take any site from small to large with very little work. 
• Automate Easy Tasks: Save time and automate easy tasks. When you are creating a lot of sites, you don’t have a lot of time to spare. There is no need to create all your code from scratch, when some of it is readily available. For example, Weebly offers drag and drop layouts, forms, and more, which allows you to spend more time on other more complex tasks. 

Comment below and let us know if you have any additional tips that help helped you scale your design process! 

Interested in learning more? Contact Us!

Designing for SMBs presents special challenges, as these businesses don’t have a whole marketing and design team behind them. Where a larger client may use these teams to help them identify and develop marketing plans and content needs, for SMBs these tasks are often left up to your web design firm. The following are the top 10 tips that will help your design firm identify the unique needs of your SMB clients so you can successfully design sites for them.

1. Helping SMBs Identify Their Needs
SMBs think they know what they need, but they usually don’t. They don’t have a good grasp of online marketing and often have unrealistic ideas of what it takes to succeed on the web. Spend a little extra time identifying what your firm’s clients truly need and it will surely pay off.

2. Identify Goals of the Website
Ask your firm’s clients about their business and their ultimate goals. Then, develop a plan based off what they have given you. Be prepared to show examples of marketing solutions that have been effective for other business that are similar to theirs. You may have to do some selling to educate and convince your firm’s clients, but the end result will be worth it.

3. Identify Industry Needs
Do some research into your client’s particular industry to help them identify any special services or features they should have on their website. When you’ve learned more about their industry, it’ll be easier for your web design firm to create a design they’ll love.

4. Steer Clear of Flashy and Focus on Function
Many clients are drawn to flashy websites, but they don’t realize that a flashy website can deter from functionality. It can slow the site down for end users and make the site hard to navigate. Explain to your firm’s clients that end users want quick-loading sites that are simple to use and informative. A good SMB site should make it easy for consumers to find out who the business is, what it does, how it is different from its competitors, how to take action, and provide easy to find contact information (phone number and email), and have a contact form. To help explain this to your firm’s clients, show them examples of functional sites that are successful and efficient.

5. Quick Quality Content
Usually, by the time clients come to you, they are ready to go live immediately, but they probably don’t have any or very little content for their site. What content they do have, is probably not optimized for the web. Your firm’s clients are looking to your team to develop quality content. 

Web design and content development is a skill. Each client has their own skill sets, which usually does not include the online marketing skills to figure out what their site needs or the experience creating online content such as taking good pictures of products or writing good product descriptions. Fulfill your design firm’s clients needs by offering in-house content and media creation services or if you don’t have staff that can write quality content and create graphics and media, team up with another service provider.

6. Offer an All-in-One Solution
Your design firm’s clients don’t want to go to several different companies to achieve their online goals; they want a one-stop solution. In line with content creation, try to give your firm’s clients even more of what they need by offering web design, blog creation, social media solutions, content creation, SEO and keyword services and eCommerce solutions.

7. When Cost is an Issue
SMBs are always looking for ways to save money and may not seem willing to pay enough for the services your firm is suggesting. Consequently, it’s up to you to explain their ROI (return on investment) from your design firm’s services.

The saying “it takes money to make money” is especially relevant here. SMBs need to make the initial investment in online marketing, but that investment will give them a valuable return. If a client isn’t grasping their ROI potential, show them examples of other businesses (preferably those who are similar to theirs) who have increased sales substantially through online marketing.

8. Going Social
Many SMBs don’t realize the importance of going social, and when they do, they don’t really understand how it works. Consequently, always be ready to properly explain social marketing to your firm’s clients and its importance. Help them go social, but be sure not to go overboard. While going social can definitely benefit a business, inundating consumers with social media posts can have the opposite effect and turn them away.

9. Identify Complementary Services for Your Clients
Help your design firm’s clients achieve success by identifying complementary services that will benefit their business. These may be services your firm provides or may be outside services such as social media sites.

10. Show Your Clients How to Track and Monitor Their Sites
Teach your web design firm’s clients how to track and monitor sales, visitors on their site and website feedback, so they can identify what is working and what isn’t, and so they can ask for needed changes as they become necessary.

Check out our latest presentation on how real estate companies and professionals are being successful online. 

Here at Weebly, we’re always looking for new and innovative ways to work with companies that have a big reach in the SMB market, especially when it comes to website development. In our effort to make building websites for SMBs even easier, Weebly is proud to announce that we’re growing our partner channels, and one of the first steps is providing this all new partner blog. From this point forward, we’ll be delivering a ton of new resources to help our partners get the most out of Weebly.

Just to give a little more background on Weebly, we’ve been working since 2006 to help small businesses and designers deliver great websites, even if they have little or no technical expertise. We’re backed by some of the most well-known and knowledgeable investors in Silicon Valley, such as Sequoia Capital and Y Combinator, so you know we’re extremely driven when it comes to providing the best possible features and usability to our user base. Now over 15 million people use Weebly to create personal and business websites, and that number is only continuing to grow!

We want this partner blog to serve as the go-to place for our partners to learn more about what Weebly does and how working with us can deliver even greater value to your new and existing customers. That includes subjects like easily building websites, implementing e-commerce features, how to find professional-looking themes, scalable website development, and much more. Just check back here frequently for the most current information on Weebly features, tips, and tricks on taking advantage of our tools.

By leveraging our affiliate partner programs, enterprise platform, and strategic partnerships we are rededicating ourselves to helping companies get their clients on the web quickly and easily.  A great-looking website is the key to any business’s success, and with the help of partners like you, building websites for will be easier than ever before. We’re incredibly excited to for this opportunity to reach out to the small business community, as well as to offer greater value to our prospective and current partners, and we hope that you’ll join us on this journey!
You can find more information about our partner and affiliate programs here, or email us at [email protected].