The Kona Impact Blog

We at Kona Impact has always admired the work of local artisans. While we work with pixels and digital design, we certainly appreciate those who work with wood and hand tools. Kona, Hawaii is home to many highly skilled woodworkers and artisans, and when we get the chance to work with them, we always have a great experience.

One awesome woodworker in Kona is Andy at Boardworks Woodworking. His use of clean lines and exceptional materials make his custom cabinetry, custom made furniture and doors true works of art. When we were working on his new website, we often found ourselves sayings among ourselves that we would all love to have Andy's furniture in our homes. Even if you're not in the market for new cabinets or furniture, take a look at Andy's portfolio of work on his website.

When making Boardworks Woodworking's new site, we wanted to make sure that the focus of the website is Andy's work. In other words, his awesome portfolio of completed projects are his selling point, and the website should showcase what he has accomplished and what he can offer those seeking custom woodworking in the Hawaiian Islands. Fortunately, he has been taking high resolution pictures of his work for many years.

We look forward to seeing Boardworks Woodworking beautify more homes in Hawaii.

Hawaii Island has, I believe, the highest electricity rates in the United States. Most of our energy comes from imported oil, which is burned, in our on-island power generators. With a relatively large area, small population and great distance from our fuel sources, we are mostly stuck with very high electricity rates.

Hawaiian Solar is a great local company that offers home and building owners the chance to (at least partially) break free from our high electricity costs. They have hot water, pool and photovoltaic systems and are the most experienced solar equipment dealers and installers on the island.

Like with most of our clients, we got to work closely with Ken, the owner, over a period of weeks to learn about his business and how we could convey what he does online. We certainly enjoyed learning about solar systems and why Hawaiian Solar is the local leader. We even got to design a face plate for Ken's new Segway--our first design for a Segway.

One of the nice things about doing business locally is that we often come across businesses that we end up using ourselves. One such business is Precision Auto Kona. Within ten minutes of speaking with the owners, Raymond and Shelly Ciriako, we knew that we would be taking our cars to them instead of the mechanics we had been previously using. Raymond, we could tell, knew how to treat customers and, more importantly, has a passion for top-quality work at reasonable prices.

We have finished their logo, business card, banner and website work, and while not looking forward to car and truck repairs, Precision Auto Kona is at the top of our list for places to take our vehicles when we do.

When you're ready to start growing your business, give us a call at 329-6077. Our consultations are free, and who knows, we may end up becoming your customer, too!

Whenever you use Google to search for a term, you’ll see two different types of results. The pay-per-click listing are the top three listing in the beige box at the top of the page and the eight listings on the right side of the page. You may not see all these ads if you are searching for something that has no pay-per-click advertisers. Advertisers pay a fee to Google every time someone clicks on their ad in these positions. The results that begin below the beige box (if there is one) are organic search results. These are not advertisements and the website owners do not pay when someone clicks them.

Which is better, organic or pay-per-click? The answer is simple: both! And, it depends!

Let’s look at three marketing scenarios:

New Website, Invisible Online

If you have just launched your website, you’ll notice that you’re not found easily on the first page of Google search engine results. Unfortunately, many web designers don’t have a clue about how to design pages to be found and indexed properly. Even a skilled web design team like Kona Impact will tell clients that it can take weeks, if not a month or two to be found.

Initiating a pay-per-click advertising campaign can insure some immediate results. That is, your ads can begin running almost immediately. The downside, of course, is the cost in terms of money and time it takes to set up, run and sustain a pay-per-click campaign. That said, it’s really the best way to guarantee some immediate visitors to your website.

Established Website; Good Organic Visibility

If your webmaster has done his job and your website in the top five of Google results for the keywords you targeted, you are in pretty good shape. After all, it’s best to have people arrive at your website with no pay-per-click cost to you. If you have good coverage of most the keywords you want to target, it may be a good idea to leave well enough alone and put your marketing dollars elsewhere.

Imagine, however, that you have thirty of forty keywords you want to target (based on solid research, I hope), it will be difficult to do well on all of them. This is where you might want to supplement your organic search efforts with pay-per-click ads. You can buy yourself visibility, which is something you can do with organic search efforts.

Established Website; Want Control

If you are great at organic search and you want to have the greatest possibility of people searching for your business or products to find you, include pay-per-click advertising in your marketing plan. With eleven pay-per-click ad spaces available on Google for all keywords, web searchers can become overwhelmed with the choices and just click to top, pay-per-click results. Even if you are #1 for all your targeting keywords, you will still miss potential visitors who will click the pay-per-click ads. Likewise, if all you have going for you is a lot of pay-per-click advertising and no organic search results visibility, you are missing a lot of visitors.

So, in the best of all possible worlds, you are in a category that allows you to dominate the organic results and the pay-per-click advertising. In the worst of all possible worlds, your webmaster did a crummy job of designing your website and helping you with the content and you are invisible on the organic search search and you don’t have the time or budget for pay-per-click.

Unfortunately, Kona Impact sees websites every day that look nice but, for a number of reasons, do terrible on the organic search results. In effect, the only way the business owner can get visitors to her site is pay-per-click. This is a worst case scenario, as pay-per-click ads are best seen as a supplement to your organic search result marketing efforts and not a substitute for them.

The Kona Impact team has been making websites and running pay-per-click ads for over ten years. Put our experience to work for you. Call today at 808-329-6077.

It's always nice at Kona Impact when we can do a website for a company we patronize often. So, when we were asked by the great folks at Buns in the Sun to develop a website for their bakery, we felt that we already knew a lot about the business.

For those unfamiliar with Kailua-Kona, Buns in the Sun is, with a doubt, the best place for fresh baked goods and sandwiches. They also have some awesome coffee. Located in the Lanihau Center, B.I.T.S. is open for breakfast and lunch seven days a week. We know they are hard-working people and dedicated to making great food, as many of the email we received regarding the project came at 5 or 6 in the morning.

We started the website with the logo, which we used for the color scheme, and some nice high-quality pictures. From those items we built the site to include slide shows of their products and included partial menus on the site. We also included downloadable menus for those who want to see the full selection of items. Another design choice was to include a large image of their bread and a breakfast omlette "outside the box", in the area that will re-size depending on the screen and browser width.

We certainly enjoyed working on this project and look forward to seeing the website becoming another way for Buns in the Sun to be found. We certainly love their food and recommend their baked goods without reservations.

Kona Impact is proud to launch another website: Soderstrom Construction.

John Soderstrom Construction is a builder of custom homes in Hawaii. These luxurious homes are some of the premiere homes in the high-end developments in the Kona area of Hawaii Island. Custom designed and made, they are works of art and adhere to a very high standard of design and quality. Take a look at the spectacular pictures on the website to see the level of design and craftsmanship.

John and Jessica were a great clients to work with. They were specific in their needs and prompt with supplying the content and feedback. Their professionalism, attention to detail and responsiveness, we suspect, are qualities that they live and apply to the work they do on their construction projects. If you're looking for a custom home building in Hawaii, we'd highly recommend giving Soderstrom Construction a call.

Kona Impact is proud to launch another web design project: jd-trading.com

JD Trading is a wonderful company located on Olowalu Street in Kailua-Kona. Nate and Deng, the owners, not only have a keen sense of design, but also have a great network of suppliers that can make some of the world's finest woodwork and stone products.

JD Trading designs and imports custom-made building materials, including custom-made wood, doors, stone, fine art and silk plants. Their work has been featured in several high-end homes on the Kona and Kohala Coasts. When you look at the pictures on their website, you will see the true extent of their attention to design and material excellence.

If you are looking for some amazing materials for your home design or re-model project, take a look at JD Trading's website. Then, of course, stop by their store and have a chat with Nate and Deng.

Nothing provides more satisfaction for the Kona Impact crew than seeing our clients succeed. We love it when online sales far exceed their expectations and when our clients tell us of how they are experiencing a growth in customers due to their website. In these tough times, there is nothing more satisfying than seeing our clients realize a good return on their investment.

One of our favorite things to do is to work with a company with little or no solid online presence and help them become more visible than their competitors in a short time. For example, imagine a new business that can be found more easily online than a business that has been around tens of years.

In the old days a business would have to spend thousands of dollars on yellow pages ads—ads that had to be set up at least six months in advance to get noticed. If you start your business in late fall or winter, you could have to wait over 12 months to run a yellow pages ad. Once printed, the yellow pages ads, of course, are stagnant and cannot be changed for at a year.

The other alternatives for local marketing includes newspaper ads, the radio or television. The problem with these is that they are are not reference mediums; that is, you would not go to a newspaper or turn on the radio to find a local plumber, for example. Only the yellow pages and the internet are mediums that allow people to search for services.

So, how does a new business or an established business leapfrog the competition? The plan is simple: become more visible online.

The first step is to do some searching for the goods and services related to the business. Use “city name+service” (i.e., “kona roof repair”) and see if the business comes up as one of the top five results in Google. If you’re not there, your invisible and losing customers.
The next step is to take a look at what companies are in the top five. If they are just directory services, there is a lot of opportunity to take those spots with a well-executed search engine marketing plan. If, for example, the keywords are of high value and there is significant competition, “waikiki hotel”, for example, there is little opportunity to breach the top five without substantial (and costly) resources are devoted to the challenge.

The fact is that for most small and medium-size businesses in most small and medium-size cities, the top five places are fairly attainable with a good plan. This is where you can decide to do-it-yourself or hire a professional. A search engine marketing professional will have the experience and tools to design and implement a plan with the best chances of success. The do-it-yourself plan can be very costly in terms of time and software investment and is less likely to succeed. Unless you plan on entering the online marketing business, it’s probably best to hire a pro.

The benefit of a solid online marketing plan is that you can, over time, become more visible than your competitors. At Kona Impact we have found this true time and time again, as many of the local businesses do not have a solid online presence. Without exception, we have been able to help every business that comes in our door be seen more and realize sales because of our efforts.

When your business is ready to leapfrog its competition, give us a call at 329-6077.

We are proud to have launched a website for RhizaPerfomance.com.

Rhiza, which is Greek for "root", is the name of the company that offers a unique approach to fitness and pain reduction. Nicole, the owner, has spent years understanding the connections between the skeletal and muscular systems and their relation to movement, fitness and pain. I doubt if there is anyone in Kona, Hawaii with a more comprehensive approach to fitness and health as they relate human anatomy.

For her website, we worked on a design that would highlight her three core areas: performance, movement and rehabilitation. The waves outside the main content box and the Flash splash screen are two interesting design features.

We highly recommend Rhiza to those who are looking for a personalized and comprehensive approach to health and wellness. Nicole is, without a doubt, highly qualified. It also helps that she has a delightful personality and has exceptional communication skills.

One of the things we love about our work at Kona Impact is how we can help a lot of small business get off to a good start. While it's exciting to do work for a big hotel or famous brand-name business, it is often more satisfying to work with the people who are starting a new business.

These small businessmen and women are almost without exception highly-motivated and have done a lot of thinking about the products or services they will offer. Many have not, however, figured out how they are going to effectively market their business. This is where the experience and expertise of the Kona Impact team can really help a lot of these businesses.

We have completed over 500 projects, ranging from logos to full e-commerce websites with integrated marketing plans. These projects and the on-going contact we have with our clients have helped us identify many highly-effective ways for businesses to succeed. We know they are successful because a large part of business is repeat business and referrals.

When new clients come in we spend a lot of time (at no cost to the client) helping them understand their options and discover solutions that the the best for them.

Just last week, for example, we worked with the following types of businesses:

Automotive
Landscaping
Legal
Import
Personal Services
Food and Beverage
Fitness
Online Retail
Vacation Services

While all of them have their unique challenges and opportunities, they all come to us with the same need: How can they market and advertise their businesses in the most cost-effective and efficient ways? None of our clients have an unlimited budget, so what we do is help them make wise choices that are right for their business.

For example, we did a little research for a new client and discovered that none of their competitors had a credible web presence, but they all had big yellow pages ads. Hmmm, we thought. We know that more people use online searches these days than more than the yellow pages, so we saw a huge opportunity for this new company. A website with the right keywords in the right places could fairly easily put this business in the top three places on Google searches. As a result, this new business will be noticed by at least half of the people looking for its services at less cost than their competitors who spend a lot more to have display ads in the crowded yellow pages. Not only are we going to save them a lot of money, we are going to deliver a highly-effective marketing tool that will leap frog the competition!

That is why we love what we do!