Not Just Pretty | Building An Effective Small Business Brand

Website Design: Design Elements and Decisions

Now that I’ve covered the basics of how to design a website, when to design it and who should do the work, now it’s time to think about what needs to go into your site design.

Things to consider while you go through the design process:

• The website must match and extend your brand. Your logo and Visual Vocabulary for your website needs to match your printed pieces so that it’s clear that they all come from the same company.
  
• It must look different than your competitors’ sites while still being of comparable or better complexity and quality.
  
• You can use more colors online. Many small businesses limit their color palette in print to one or two colors, because of printing costs. But, online, colors are free – so why not expand your palette?
  
• Vertical or horizontal navigation? While a horizontal navigation bar looks more sophisticated and takes up less room, it also gives you less room to grow, and makes secondary navigation more difficult.
  
• Do you need secondary navigation? If so, how should it look?
  
• Consistency in navigation
  
• Should your design fill the whole web browser or be constrained?
  
• Do you have to worry about “web safe colors”?
  
• The advantages to using straight lines and edges.
  
• Flash vs. HTML: The pros and cons of both.
  
• Easier ways to get animation on your site: Animated GIFs
  
• Preparing graphics for online use
  
• Photos: Stock or custom
  

Specifics of text design:

• HTML vs. text as an image: The debate over having cool fonts or Search Engine friendly text
  
• Style sheets and why they make sense for text design
  
• Underlining and how to use it on the web
  
• How to use signatures on your web page
  
• Callout boxes
  
• Side bars
  
• Custom fonts in-line with other text
  

Redesign:

• Re-planning the navigation: What pages do you no longer need, what pages do you need to add?
  
• Re-skinning
  
• Complete re-coding
  
• Much the same as designing
  

I’ll be addressing each of these points in detail over the next few weeks.

Who Should Design Your Website: Hiring Someone

You can make many choices of what type of professional to hire to design and code your website. There are certainly some pros and cons to each approach.

• A graphic designer: There are actually 2 major categories of graphic design: print design and web design.

  While some of the underlying design principles are the same, there are others that differ depending on the use and the media that the design is being developed for. For example, color works differently online than it does in print. Another difference is that you have to take the coding of a website into consideration during the design phase, so that you make sure that the site will be easy to code and will read well across all browsers and computers.

  Many design programs focus on print design in their graphic design majors. So, if you’re talking to a graphic designer about creating your website, ask about their level of technical involvement with the coding of the websites in their portfolio.

  Many graphic designers do know how to design for the web, and even how to use a program such as Dreamweaver to put a site together. But, that may be where their knowledge ends. Coding a website should not be the end of the process – there should also be some work on the site’s function, like making sure that it ranks well in the Search Engines. Make sure that you can get that from your designer, along with a beautiful design. And, even Dreamweaver doesn’t create code that’s as clean and seamless as hand-coding.

  Another thing to watch out for with graphic designers is the tendency for them to want to create Flash-based websites. It’s true that Flash does offer more flexibility in the design choices for the website – you can use more fonts, having hard edges isn’t as important, and you can create motion and animation effects easily, all of which definitely look cool. But, Flash has some major “cons” as well, like the fact that it doesn’t make a lot of your content available for Search Engines to read, and it can be difficult and time-consuming to make even small changes to the site. I’ll be writing more about Flash vs. HTML websites in a later post in this section, but suffice it to say for now that I highly recommend HTML websites.

• A web programmer: This is the second “school” of website professionals. Website programmers are typically more technically-oriented than graphic designers, which can be in your favor when it comes to coding the site.

  The thing to watch out for when you hire a web programmer is the overall look and feel of the site. Since many web programmers don’t have a lot of design training, the design of your site can suffer. They may just have training in how to use the various design programs, so they might make their sites all look largely the same, and just stick your logo in the site that they tend to make and go from there. This results in a site that’s little more than a template.

  Even if they do customize the design, they may not be experienced enough in design to create a site that’s timeless and will be able to last many years – they may just design something that reflects current trends. Or, even worse, they may design something that reflects past trends, so your site will look behind the times from the moment it’s launched.

  You also want to make sure that they are well informed about your brand and Visual Vocabulary, and that they take your brand strategy into account when designing your site.

  Programmers are typically quite good at coding websites, but you do have to make sure that they don’t code your site in a way that will make it hard for you to maintain. Unless your site’s going to have some really advanced functionality, you want your website to be coded in nice, simple HTML with some CSS controlling the font sizes and styles. This will enable pretty much anyone to maintain it – including enabling you to maintain it yourself. If your web programmer codes the site in PHP or uses Active X or even XHTML instead of regular old HTML, or creates CSS that controls the design and layout as well as the fonts, it can make it more difficult to go in and update the code and change your text in the site.

• Hiring a graphic designer to design the site and a programmer to code it: This may seem like a great option, especially after reading the last two sections. After all, then you’d get the best of both worlds, with none of the weaknesses – right?

  Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. If a designer creates the site sketches and then passes them on to a programmer, there’s a chance that something will be “lost in translation” – maybe the designer sketches at a particular scale, or intends for certain aspects of the design to be prepared as images, and others to be coded in HTML. Or, the web programmer could have a particular way of coding things which could actually require that the design take those into account.

  But, whatever the case, it takes either a lot of communication between both parties, which can add hours to the project, or an already-existing understanding of these requirements. Or, your site could wind up needing to be redesigned, or it could be mis-coded and then need to be re-coded – all of which are very time consuming and expensive.

  The one situation where this can work well is when the designer and programmer already work together often. If they’ve teamed together on projects in the past, then they should have all their communications and procedures worked out before beginning to work with you.

  And, this may be necessary if you need to create a site that’s both very well-designed and highly technical. For instance, I’ve teamed up with a web programmer in a couple of instances where the clients needed to develop custom shopping carts for their online stores.

  But, what I don’t recommend is requiring a designer and a programmer who have never worked together in the past to work on your project – the results probably won’t be very good, and this could add a lot of frustration to your project.

• A web AND graphic designer: It used to be that finding a combination web and graphic designer used to be difficult. It was hard to find someone who was trained in design principles, branding and design layout programs, and who also knows how to code clean HTML by hand and set up the other pieces of functionality behind a website.

  But, this is becoming an easier combination to find. More design programs are teaching both print and web, and designers who have been in the field for a while, have seen the trend towards web design and picked up coding HTML to better serve their clients.

  I recommend that, if you’re planning to hire someone to design your website, you should look for a graphic designer with branding and strategy experience who can also hand-code your website. And, yes, I’m one of these! ☺
  

With all the information in these past few posts, I hope that you have enough information to make this big decision about who will design your website. Next, I'll be talking about all the design decisions and elements that go into designing your website.

Who Should Design Your Website: The Do's and Don'ts of Using A Template

Many designers will tell you not to ever use templates. But, I think that there are different kinds of templates out there, and that they each have their place in a small business’s web strategy.

• Pre-made, out-of-the-box templates: This is the most common type of website template available today. If you sign up for website hosting, and they offer you templates to use with your account, those are pre-made templates. You can also buy pre-made templates on many websites.

  I don’t recommend using pre-made templates for your permanent website – they’re too generic to extend your brand well, and you also have no control over the photos, colors and effects used in the template. Because you can’t change those options, then you can’t customize your template to make it your own, and to make it stand out from your competition.

  If you purchase your pre-made template from your hosting company, it will often be controlled by an application in a web browser, so you won’t be able to work on it locally on your computer. These applications can be tricky to use and can limit your formatting options. You also may not have a lot of control over the Search Engine Optimization options for your site.
  
  Sometimes, it also won’t allow you to make local backups of the pages you create either – so if your host has problems, which is unlikely, but can happen, you’ll lose all the work you did on the website. If you do use a premade template, I recommend that you archive your text as Word documents or at least as screen shots.

  But, these templates actually do have a place! Writing your website content using a template is a great way to start. Many entrepreneurs struggle with writing their first set of web copy in Word, because they can’t “see” how it will look on their website. They write it, pass it along to a web designer, and then find that it doesn’t look right to them online, so they wind up going through many rounds of copy revisions with their designer. But, this can add up and get expensive. But, if you use a pre-made template to develop your website copy, you’ll be able to quickly make your own revisions and test out how everything looks online with ease.

  Also, pre-made templates are useful for businesses who are just starting out and who haven’t had enough experience to pin down their Brand Definition and to develop a Brand Identity for their businesses. If your business is so new that you’re just not ready to commit to a brand, but you’re anxious to get online, a template can get you up and running online without making a big branding push.

  This is also the least expensive way to get a website up – so if your business is strapped for cash, this can get you online with a very low budget.

• Customizable templates. Some templates allow you to customize the color palette, navigation items, and even the stock photos used in the template. This can allow you to create a website with a unique look and feel, which will help you to stand out amid all of the “noise” online.

  This sort of template will take a bit more work, and they can be more difficult to find. But, they’re well worth searching a bit more for, because you will be able to distinguish yourself a bit more.

  This is still not the best way to go because you won’t be able to fully brand your website. But, you’ll at least be able to get closer to your brand by customizing color palettes.

  You’ll also run into the problems with how you’re allowed to access your site to work on it and to make backups, and you may also have less control over the Search Engine Optimization customization.

• Designer-customized templates. Some designers and web designers do offer templates that they’ll customize to fit your brand by changing the colors and photos, or even the entire top header on the website. I offer these types of templates, and with the template, I sell a service package where I code the text that you provide into the template. So, you don’t have to fumble around with your host’s online web editor, or learn another coding program to put the text into your site. I also customize the color palette, certain aspects of the design, like having straight or brush-stroke edges, and the site’s header for you.

  This gives you a clean, unique, well-coded site with some professional service included – but since you’re not presented with a lot of design customization options, the package is much less expensive than a custom website design.

  The down side of that is that you don’t have a fully custom web design, and these templates are usually limited in the number and titles of the pages that are included. For example, I provide 4 and 5 page templates. But, if you don’t need a huge website, then it can still work well for you.
  

Who Should Design Your Website?

Once you’ve got the timing down, the next thing to think about is who should design your website. In fact, the two questions have a lot to do with each other – because, if you decide to hire someone, their schedule and timeline for a site will partially determine the timing.

There are a few different approaches to who should design your site:

• Design it yourself
  
• Templates: what they’re good and not good for
  
• Hire someone
  
  • A graphic designer
    
  • A web designer
    
  • A web + graphic designer
    
  • About hiring different people: splitting the project between multiple vendors
    

  So, today, I’ll discuss the first option.

  Design It Yourself: This first option is certainly the least expensive in terms of an up-front investment. But it will take more time and learning to do so. You’ll also lose the perspective of having another person involved in the process by doing this yourself.

  There are also quite a few things that you’ll need to learn in order to design your own website. Without knowing all of these pieces, you can't design a website that will look professional, work well, and represent your company effectively.

  • Some design basics. You’ll want to design your site to look professional and to reflect your company’s brand. So, having some knowledge of some design basics for websites can be very helpful. I’ll be discussing many of those here over the next few posts. There’s also a few helpful books on the topic:
    Non-Designer’s Guide to Design
    Non Designer’s Guide to Web Design

    You can also often find web design courses at local community colleges – those might be helpful to you as well.

  • A design program. You’ll need to create the design and layout for your website with a computer graphics program. While you can design web sites using Word, Publisher or even Front Page, these tools produce sloppy designs, poorly rendered graphics and don’t allow you to use a wide variety of tools and effects that are available in many design programs.

    I recommend designing your site using a professional-grade design program such as Illustrator or Photoshop. While these programs are a bit of an investment, they’ll allow you to not only design your own website, but you’ll be able to design other marketing materials as well. I especially recommend Illustrator if you plan to design your own marketing materials – working with type and text in Illustrator is a lot easier than in Photoshop.

    You can learn to use these programs in a few different ways. First, there are many books available on how to use these programs. I like the style and simplicity of the Visual Quickstart Guides.

    Visual Quickstart Guide: Photoshop CS
    Visual Quickstart Guide: Illustrator CS

    Alternatively, if book learning isn’t for you, you can get training in these programs in a few ways. Community colleges often offer beginning and intermediate level training in these programs. You can also take professional training courses from software training companies, such as Learn It. If you’d prefer to learn online, Lynda.com offers a lot of training options in many design programs.

    
    

  • A website creation program. After your site is designed, you need to code the design into HTML. I, again, don’t recommend coding your site using Microsoft Word or Front Page. The HTML generated by these programs is typically not very clean, because they tend to put in extra code which makes your site slower to load, more difficult to edit, and the messiness is a big “turn off” to the Search Engines as well.

    I do recommend professional-grade website coding tools such as Dreamweaver or GoLive. Both of these programs write pretty clean code, and they both offer some advanced coding options such as the option to add CSS to your website (I’ll talk more about CSS in the coming weeks). They are, again, slightly expensive – but you’ll be able to both design and maintain your site using this program, so it’s an investment that will certainly pay off. You’ll also have to spend some time learning the program.

    As with the design programs, there are many books available on how to use these programs - the Visual Quickstart series, again, is a good resource for Dreamweaver, and the Adobe Classroom In A Book is great for GoLive.

    Macromedia Dreamweaver MX for Windows & Macintosh (Visual QuickStart Guide)
    GoLive Classroom In A Book

    Many community colleges and learning outlets such as Learn It also offer inexpensive courses on how to use these programs. Lynda.com is an online training center where you can take courses on how to use these programs, too.

    And, while I do recommend Adobe Contribute for making small text changes to your website, I don’t recommend it to code your website from the start – it’s just not a powerful enough program to do that.

  • Your business’s brand and Visual Vocabulary. You need to create a website that coordinates with your other designed materials. And, your brand is usually made up of much more than your logo – but, you might not have information on your business’s Brand Rules or Visual Vocabulary elements.

    If you haven’t designed your brand yet, but you intend to design your own website or other materials down the road, then you should ask your designer to make up your Brand Rules and Visual Vocabulary along with the logo. It will usually make for a more complicated and expensive project, but it’s well worth it to have those tools available to you as you design your own pieces.

    You’ll also have to have your logo in a format and size that works well for your website. You can read more about logo file formats here.
    
    

  • Sources for stock photography to use in your site. Using photography is an effective way to engage viewers and to make your website more interesting. Stock photography is a pretty complex can be a post all in itself, though, so I’ll discuss that more in a later post in this section.
    

Timing When Designing Your Website: How Long the Design Takes and When To Start

• How long the design and coding actually takes: The design of a website, no matter the length of the site, typically takes about 2 weeks when the business owner’s feedback is given to me quickly. This process can be rushed, but there’s an additional fee involved for that.

  The coding for a site can vary depending on the number of pages being created and the functionality required. For a simple, HTML-only site of 5 pages, the coding can be accomplished in 1 week. For a site with many pages, with forms and newsletter sign-up capabilities, a longer timeline will be required.

  And, if there’s a delay in providing the site map, site text, photos or feedback, the timeline will be extended accordingly.

• When to start: This depends on your schedule. You want to start the project when you’ve done a bit of your homework – that is, getting started on your copy and nailing down your site map. Again, many designers do offer website planning to help with this step.

  You also want to make sure that you design your site at a time when you have some time to devote to feedback, completing your copy, and giving your designer the attention they need from you to complete your project. This shouldn’t take a lot of time, but your designer won’t be able to move forward if you’re on vacation, too busy to return calls or emails, or otherwise unavailable.

  Be sure to allow plenty of time for your designer’s schedule as well. If you have an important event coming up, plan to begin your website design at least a month before that to allow ample time and to avoid rush fees. If you also need to design a logo, keep in mind that you should do that before designing a website, and that will add about 3 weeks on to the process.

  And, be aware of the “busy times” for designers. The end and beginning of the year, along with the end of each fiscal quarter, tends to be pretty hectic for most of the designers that I know. You may not be able to just call up your designer of choice and get on their schedule right away, especially at those times.

Timing when designing your website

There are three major timing considerations in the design of a website:

When the designer will need your input: There are 4 major areas that tend to require the most work on the part of the business owner: The site map, the text for the site, photographs such as product shots or head shots, and feedback on the designs.

• Site map: Website design pricing is often partly based on the number of pages to be included in the site. So, having a page count is often required to quote a new site design project.

  Having a full site map completed before requesting a quote can help ensure that all of the technical and functionality requirements are considered in your quote as well – which is important for accuracy of the quote. But, it can be difficult for entrepreneurs who are building their own website to create the site map on their own. Many designers offer site planning consultations that can help you with this important step.

  No matter how it is created, the designer will need your site map before work can begin on the site. Determining the site map is important because the site map determines the navigation items for the site. The navigation is one of the major design and functionality elements on a website, so this information needs to be locked down at the beginning of the process to ensure that the design process goes smoothly.

• Text: It’s helpful to have the full text for one page of the site at the beginning of the design process. I recommend that this text be for the home page if possible, because the home page will typically have more text customization such as headlines, sub-heads, and call-out boxes. Also, the design of the home page is very important since it will be the primary landing page for your website.

  This first page of text doesn’t have to be proofread or perfect at the beginning of the design process. The first phase of the Design of the website will be done as sketches, in a design application such as Photoshop or Illustrator. The text will have to be coded separately into the final website, so you’ll have an opportunity to make changes.

  The rest of the site text will be needed when the sketching phase of the design is completed, and coding begins.

• Photographs: When photos are needed will depend on the intended use of the photos. For primary photos, such as photos of your products that you’d like to include as a main feature photo in the page design or on the home page, it’s helpful to have those as early as possible in the process. The style, colors, orientation (vertical or horizontal), and content of those photos plays a major role in the overall design of the site, and providing them to the designer early in the process will enable the designer to create a design that integrates well with the photos.

  Secondary photos, such as head shots of your staff, or photos of products to use in the shopping cart, are typically required during the coding phase of the site. The very nature of these photos require that a more generic approach to using them be created because you want to be able to add more staff biographies and more items to your cart over time. So, they are not typically integrated into the design, but rather dropped in after the design is created.

  If you’re planning to use stock photos, the designer will typically budget some time for searching for and specifying photos into your project fee. Ask them how much time is included under your contract.

• Feedback: I can’t count the number of sites that I’ve worked on that have missed their target launch date because of delays in feedback. My timelines, for example, assume that the business owner will get back to me within 24 hours of designs being submitted. Some entrepreneurs have taken over two weeks to get back to me with initial thoughts on the first round of the designs, and then they’ve been shocked to find that I won’t be able to make the target launch date of three weeks from the beginning of the project!
  

Since web design is a many-stepped process, and many of those steps allow the business owner multiple opportunities for review, fast feedback is critical to keeping your project on-schedule. Delays in feedback will contribute to delays in the overall timeline.

And, remember, that keeping your project on my desk does you no good!

The process of designing a website

Many small business owners think that the process of creating a website is too expensive, time-intensive and difficult to make it worthwhile. But, it is possible—and easier than you think!

We have created the following process for developing a website:

• Phase 1—Planning: You can create an outline for the site yourself, or we can plan the site organization with you—for example, the type of pages you'd like to have on the site, and the type of sections you'd like to have on the pages. This typically addresses the “Content” portion of the website.

• Phase 2—Design: Creation of initial design concepts that show the "frame" for the pages—the basic navigation and design scheme that will remain the same across all of the pages of the site. We'll go through revisions in this stage until the "frame" design is just as you'd like it.

• Phase 3—Coding: We'll code one page of the site to be used as a template. The Cascading Style Sheet template and Javascript for the navigation are also written during this phase. This page will be tested during this stage as well, since it will serve as a base for the rest of the pages in your site. We offer two rounds of revisions for client-requested changes during this phase.

• Phase 4—Implementation: The text and local images for the site are placed into the page template and formatted. We offer two rounds of revisions for client-requested changes during this phase, so you can make text edits and corrections after you see the text in the pages.

• Phase 5—Testing: Though basic testing of the site takes place in phases 3 and 4, we'll thoroughly test the site after it has been completely assembled and revised. We test in the two most recent versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer and in the Safari browser. Additional browser testing is available.

• Phase 6—Launch: We launch the site! After the site is live, we also submit it to the major search engines. We can add additional text and pages in the future (and as your budget allows).
  

So it's really not that complicated! We can launch first-version sites with very simplified text, so your online presence is soon established. Refining the text and adding more pages later is easy!

Designing an Effective Web Site

The design of your website is the second primary area that you have to be concerned about. Once you’ve started writing your content, when you have a couple of pages put together, it’s time to start thinking about the design of the site.

When I talk about the design of the site, I actually fold the coding of the site up into this same topic. The two are dependent on one another, and I feel that you can’t talk about one without addressing the other.

In this section, I’ll be talking about:

The website design process: This will cover a general overview of the steps involved in a website design.

Timing: Things to consider in the timing of designing a website

Who can design your website:

• Design it yourself
  
• Standard Templates: what they’re good and not good for
  
• Highly-Customizable Templates

• Hire someone
  
  • A graphic designer
    
  • A web designer
    
  • A web + graphic designer
    
  • About hiring different people
    
  
  

Things to consider while you go through the design process:

• The website must match and extend your brand. Your logo and Visual Vocabulary for your website needs to match your printed pieces so that it’s clear that they all come from the same company.
  
• You can use more colors online. Many small businesses limit their color palette in print to one or two colors, because of printing costs. But, online, colors are free – so why not expand your palette?
  
• Vertical or horizontal navigation? While a horizontal navigation bar looks more sophisticated and takes up less room, it also gives you less room to grow, and makes secondary navigation more difficult.
  
• Do you need secondary navigation? If so, how should it look?
  
• Consistency in navigation
  
• Should your design fill the whole web browser or be constrained?
  
• Do you have to worry about “web safe colors”?
  
• The advantages to using straight lines and edges.
  
• Flash vs. HTML: The pros and cons of both.
  
• Easier ways to get animation on your site: Animated GIFs
  
• Preparing graphics for online use
  
• Photos
  

Specifics of text design:

• HTML vs. text as an image: The debate over having cool fonts or Search Engine friendly text
  
• Style sheets and why they make sense for text design
  
• Underlining and how to use it on the web
  
• How to use signatures on your web page
  
• Callout boxes
  
• Side bars
  
• Custom fonts in-line with other text
  

Redesign:

• Re-planning the navigation: What pages do you no longer need, what pages do you need to add?
  
• Re-skinning
  
• Complete re-coding
  
• Much the same as designing
  

Whew!

I had a lot more to say about the Content of a web site than I thought!

I wanted to remind everyone that you’re welcome to contact me with questions or comments – just click on the “Comments” button at the bottom of any post! I know you’re out there, and I’d love to start up a two-way conversation!

Thanks, and now back to our regularly scheduled topics…

How To Use Testimonials On Your Website

Testimonials are a great way to build credibility for your company with your marketing materials. I’ve included them in the “writing” section of the website components because there are a few approaches to using them most effectively.

First of all, you’ll need to get some testimonials. There are many strategies for the how-to of getting great testimonials, and I can recommend the following resources:

• Ask Sean D’Souza of psychotactics.com about Reverse Testimonials
  
• Bill Metcalf is an expert in getting “Raving Fans” testimonials from your clients
  

Then, the next question is, who to get them from? Get testimonials from:

• Your clients: This is the most common type of testimonial to use on a site. Ask each of your clients, as you work with them, to provide a testimonial. It can be a scary practice to start, but having a bank of testimonials to work from is important.
  
• Your power partners: Even if you don’t work directly for them, you do work with them. Their testimonials can be a testament to your professionalism and working style.
  
• Your vendors: Especially if you’re in a field where you’re turning technical stuff, like files, over to your vendors, you can get some great testimonials on your expertise from them. For example, my printers are always telling me that I do an exceptional job of preparing my print design files from a technical perspective. Having a testimonial from one of them could help my clients to see that I have good attention to detail.
  
• Other professionals in your field: I have several testimonials from other designers on my website. This may seem like a strange strategy at first glance, but one of my biggest marketing methods is to write informative articles about the design field. Many other designers use my articles and newsletters to better explain things to their clients. And, I think that their testimonials about that show that I really know what I’m talking about!
  

Once you’ve got them, what do you do with them?
I recommend using testimonials throughout your marketing materials, but your website is one of the easiest and most prominent places to put them – especially if they’re long. Since you can make a web page as long as you want (it just gets “scrollier”), having a long testimonial doesn’t cost you extra or take up valuable page space.

What page to put them on?
A common mistake is to create a separate “Testimonials” web page on your site, and to not add any compelling reason for a visitor to go there. Why would someone want to click on yet another page just to see all the sugary-sweet stuff that people have to say about you? It’s a much more effective tactic to include them throughout the site, with one on every page or on every few pages.

How to make them more prominent:

• Put them in a sidebar, or in a text box with a colored background or border. This draws more attention, and pulls the eye in to your testimonial.
  
• Highlight them with your clients’ logo, or photo. Again, this will pull the eye towards the testimonial and make it more visually interesting.
  
• Place them near samples of work that you’ve done for the client . Seeing the testimonial in context adds more value to it.
  
• Put them into your website text, or inside of a case study. Format your text like a newspaper article, with the quote in-line with the copy. This makes it more natural to read.
  

These strategies will make your use of testimonials more effective, which will help you to really build your credibility with them.