Apparently Angela also has a talent for building websites, as the site she built with vSites shows. We at vFlyer are simply blown away by her site; it has great branding, is well organized, balances text and images well, and makes good use of lots of different module types. It also just looks fantastic.

I caught up with Angela this week and she kindly answered my questions about her business, her website, her experience with vSites, and her advice for other business owners thinking about building a website.

Can you tell me a little about your business?

I joke that I have self-confidence in a bottle. In today’s world, appearances matter. It’s not fair, but it’s fact. As a makeup artist, I have a pretty deep bag of tricks that I use to make women look and feel their best.

I’m based in suburban Chicago and for now, I’m a one-woman show. I work with brides, but I also do commercial work for photo shoots.

How did you get into makeup?

I have always loved makeup. No matter how fat you get, lipstick always fits! I did my first makeover at 16. Back then it never occurred to me that I could make a living putting makeup on people. So I went to college and then worked in a series of soul-crushing corporate jobs. When the recession struck and being downsized seemed unavoidable, I decided to pursue my passion full-time.

How did you learn about vSites?

It was by accident. I was looking for a service that had web templates but offered a LOT of customization options. I didn’t want to hand code the whole thing, but I didn’t want to be trapped either. As I looked at people’s websites, I noticed that realtors had clean websites with lots of pictures, so Googling around, I tripped over vSites. Once I tried it and saw the vMarketing complement, I signed right up.

How did you decide how to design and structure your website?

I have a marketing background, so I knew basically that I wanted the website to be graphic but still feminine. I also wanted it to reflect my personality. I tried to design it with my different market segments in mind.

Why is it important for your business that you have a quality website?

Brides and personal clients are now doing all of their legwork online. A professional website gives people the confidence that you will handle their needs competently.

What’s your favorite vSites feature?

MODULES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Why no one else has thought of this I’ll never understand. You just figure out what you want and where you want it and click. Easy.

Do you have any advice for someone thinking about building a website for his or her business?

Do it yourself. It’s not about saving money, it’s about retaining control. As a business owner, you need to understand everything about how your business runs. A service like vSites makes it easy to produce professional-quality sites.

My other advice… don’t reinvent the wheel. Look at the websites of successful companies in industries with similar clients. For example, I looked at interior design and real estate because they are high-ticket, emotional services in female-dominated industries.

*Note: I was unfamiliar with “makeup heads” and intrigued by the Marie Osmond thing, so I did a series of Google image searches to try to find a picture of a Marie Osmond makeup head (which I now know was part of a celebrity makeup head line that Mattel launched in the late 70s and that also included Farrah Fawcett and the Bionic Woman). Apparently — and disappointingly — no such picture exists.

What I love most about Dennis’s website is his use of images, from the different header images he uses on his homepage and other pages, to the splash image he displays for his seminar, “Career Transition in a Challenging Job Market.” In general, images enhance a website, and vSites makes it easy to display images anywhere on the site.

Dennis also adds a nice touch to his site by using a gradient background in his text boxes. I haven’t seen this effect used on any other sites, and I really like it.

Finally, Dennis leverages the power of video on his homepage and shows how you can customize the size and display of a video in vSites. He managed to fit his video into a relatively tight space, but the page doesn’t appear cluttered at all.

Great job with your website, Dennis!

We’ll be back next week with another site of the week. If you’ve built a website with vSites and think it should be featured, let us know! We would love to hear from you. And if you haven’t tried out vSites yet, I hope you’ll check it out and build a website with it today.

What I really like about Seattle Consultant’s website is the use of lots of different module types. Jaime pulls in photo slideshows, service and article lists, vMarketing listings, floor plans, and more to populate his site with different kinds of content. While no website is ever complete (as any good webmaster knows), the Seattle Consultant site feels sufficiently full of information, as though I could go there and find everything that I came for.

Jaime also structured his site well. Take the homepage for instance: it includes an “About Us” section with a slideshow, another slideshow that displays properties the firm has successfully marketed, a map of their location, and testimonials from their clients. It’s a lot of content, but the page is so thoughtfully laid out that it doesn’t feel cluttered or overwhelming in the least.

Excellent work, Jaime and the Seattle Consultant team!

Real estate agents and brokers looking for a new website solution can give their web presence a boost by switching to vSites. vFlyer’s new website service is easy to use and, more importantly, makes it easy to update a website on an ongoing basis. Contact us at sales [at] vflyer dot com or (800) 594-5930 ext. 2 if you want to learn more about how vSites could help your business.

What I like most about Rental Home KC’s website:

1. It’s well organized. They pack a lot of content into the site but keep it easily navigable through the use of drop-down menus in the navigation bar. I also like how they put links to the most important pages on the site (“Find a Rental Home,” “Submit Application,” and “Lease your home”) on the homepage, “above the fold” where people can easily find them.

2. They make good use of their vMarketing content, including a listings page that pulls in their vMarketing listings, and a widget that they display on the homepage. The widget scrolls through the photos of their listings, giving site visitors a taste of the kinds of properties they can find on the site.

3. They’ve made the site functional. That is, instead of simply providing information, they give site visitors the ability to download a rental application and pay the application fee via PayPal. With vSites’ new file upload and JavaScript support, making a site functional in this way can be done easily.

Great job Betty, Larry, and all the folks at Rental Home KC on building a fantastic website!

If you’re interested in building a website for your business, take a look at vSites and all the things you can do with it. If you have questions, contact our Customer Success Team at support [at] vflyer.com or call us at (800) 594-5930.

Beyond Residential did a great job customizing each page, and took the time to personalize the website so that viewers can get a feel for their company culture.  My favorite things about this site are:

1) They customized the Facebook Like module, spreading it across the bottom of their homepage, which gives it a unique and fun look.

2)Beyond Residential’s branding really shows through on the website, and is consistent with their Facebook and Twitter profiles as well.  They use the same custom header, logo, and slogan on all three accounts, which is great.

3) They added a Contact module on each of their pages (besides the homepage) making it super easy for people to reach them.  This shows that they encourage people to get in touch with them.

4)Each page appears to have been given a lot of thought.  They customized the splash images to better reflect the content on the page, and it is really easy to figure out who the company is, and what they do.  They even customized the footer to be more aesthetically pleasing and match the rest of their site.

5)The “Contact Us” page is fun.  It has an attractive splash image with a human element, and utilizes the Map module beautifully.  In addition to providing the Contact module, they also created a new module with the heading “Reach Out to us:” again, driving home the point that they want to interact with their visitors.

Great job, Beyond Residential, and best of luck with your new business!

If you are interested in creating a professional-looking site of your own, visit us, or sign up for a free vSites for Beginners webinar!

]]> http://www.vflyerblog.com/2011/09/23/site-of-the-week-by-beyond-residential/feed/ 0 http://www.vflyerblog.com/2011/09/16/site-of-the-week-by-zs-outdoors/ http://www.vflyerblog.com/2011/09/16/site-of-the-week-by-zs-outdoors/#comments Fri, 16 Sep 2011 19:07:47 +0000 Dan Lenehan http://www.vflyerblog.com/?p=1265 Our site of the week, created using vSites, comes to us from Z’s Outdoors in Buffalo, Minnesota, just northwest of the Twin Cities. Z’s Outdoors is an outdoor equipment retailer, focusing on fishing and hunting gear, and they reflect those themes right in their logo. They did a nice job showcasing the logo on the site and coming up with a color palette to go along with it.

Z’s Outdoors also makes good use of various module types on their site, especially the map module, which they use on each page, and the Facebook Like module, displayed on the homepage. Now visitors to their website can immediately see how many people “Like” Z’s Outdoors on Facebook and “Like” them themselves.

Finally, one thing I really like about this website is that they prominently display their phone number at the top. I always find it annoying when I have to search around on a website just to find the phone number. It may not seem like an important detail, but shouldn’t your website be a source for phone inquiries? If people can’t find your phone number on your site, it’s unlikely you’ll be hearing from them. So take a note from Z’s Outdoors’ playbook and show your phone number, large and in charge!

Learn more about creating a website for your business or sign up for an upcoming vSites for Beginners training!

Treetop Sales is a manufactured homes dealer hailing from Kissimmee, Florida. Naturally, the website focuses on the homes available for sale today. Whereas last week’s featured site employed an inline frame to reference a listing inventory hosted elsewhere, Anthony, who already has all of his homes on vMarketing, made good use of the Listings Module in his website. The Listings Module automatically draws flyers from your vMarketing account and seamlessly displays them on your website. Click the thumbnail image for a property that appeals to you, and a detail page appears—complete with Flash slide show, contact form, and all the listing details.

One of the reasons we love this site is that Anthony has put lots of effort into each of his vMarketing listings—especially when it comes to the listing photos. The result is a website with a ton of rich, high-quality content, much of it imported from the corresponding vMarketing account.

Rounding out the site are a concise About Us page, a Services page highlighting the buyer and seller services Treetop offers, and a Contact page with an embedded Google Map. In the left-hand column, and displaying on all site pages, are a nice pair of client testimonials and Treetop’s hours of operation. The header and footer, also appearing on each page, hold key facts like company name, slogan, address, and phone number. In case you were wondering, this site uses the “Winsett – Beachfront” theme.

All in all, it’s a squeaky-clean, elegant site that shows off the power and simplicity of the vSites platform as well as the listings and services of a fantastic small business.

There a few features of vSites that Steve has put to good use in his website.  First of all, he’s chosen the “Broadmore – Lounge” vTheme, a real-estate theme with smooth menu styling and a bold splash image.  Steve then used the vSites Theme Editor to change the color scheme to a sharp light blue, and set the header font color to white.

On the homepage, the “column divider” module is used to create four columns side-by-side.  In each of these columns, picture modules have been inserted advertising the four main sections of Steve’s site – listings, seller info, mortgage calculator, and contact info.  These picture modules are all linked to the appropriate pages of the site.

On the “Listings” page, Steve has used iframes to embed his property inventory.  Since his inventory is already entered and managed elsewhere, the iframe is a quick and easy way to incorporate these existing webpages into the vSite.  It’s like a page within a page.

Finally, Steve makes good use of drop-down menus.  The “Listings” menu item, for example, has five different categories that pop up below.  Sub menus like this are easy to create—just customize your menu module and indent one menu item beneath another to create a sub menu.

All in all, it’s a snappy website that has a lot of content but doesn’t lose its clean, professional look.  Well done, Steve!

This particular flyer advertises their specialized mechanical expertise, but Leading Edge is involved in all things flight in Central Oregon—flight training, aircraft sales, and more. A quick look at their blog will show you the smiling faces of dozens of successful new pilots.

We can’t say with certainty that this is the world’s first avionics services vFlyer, but we definitely hope it’s not the last. Thanks to Leading Edge for a great custom theme, and happy flying!

Kudos, Nick, and thanks for making your vFlyer content look great!

Enjoy the weekend and we’ll be back with another featured custom theme next week. If you’ve created a custom theme you’re especially proud of, let us know!