Your business needs a website. A Facebook page doesn’t count, nor does a Twitter or LinkedIn profile. Most buyers check businesses on the internet before contacting/visiting/phoning them. In today’s dynamic and competitive market, you need your own space that provides a complete picture of what you’re offering. It’s a critical component of your brand. Your own website allows you to layout your business in an organised up-to-date manner. It’s not as difficult to setup as you might imagine, read more
Web Design
Importance of Answering Emails
As I’ve mentioned before, I often wonder why some businesses have websites. They pay thousands of dollars to create and maintain a website, then when a potential customer contacts them via the website they don’t respond. This week I have contacted five businesses (via their contact page), I’m ready to buy, yet three have not replied to my request for prices. Two others have quoted me but haven’t replied to requests for more information. As I started out – Why have a website if you are going to ignore the responses it generates?
Many won’t do business with anyone that uses @yahoo or @gmail
Here’s a recent post from the Flying Solo Forum:
“I cringe when I see people using a webmail email address for their business.”
Strong words from Jasmine on the topic of whether it’s worth having a professional email address (ie yourname@yourdomain.com) for your business or not!
Adam agreed: “Personally I won’t do business with anyone that uses @yahoo or @gmail as their primary address. Just reeks of dodgy to me.”
And really, there is no need to use free email services because, as Reenie pointed out: “These days it is not a huge expense to register a domain name and have your own business email address.”
I couldn’t agree more. Ad Image can arrange the whole thing for you.
Colours vary
Be aware that every media you use will reproduce your colours differently. Pantone PMS
colour specifications are great for spot colours in the printing world, but can’t always be
matched in CMYK the main gamut of commercial offset printing. Also digital printing may
also produce another variation, some digital printers use RGB rather than CMYK. Screen
printing inks while made up to PMS specifications are often more intense in colour than
offset printing. If your signwriter wants to use signwriting vinyl or paint there will be
another mismatch. Plus on Television and the internet your colours will be different on
every screen. Colours and images will look brighter, more vivid on Television and the internet/computer simply because they are back-lit.
UX – User Experience
User experience design (UX), is a yet another buzzword/jargon for an existing best practice design and is without a universally recognized definition. Good designers have always incorporated considerations beyond just the look and feel of a design. As a separate practice, ‘User Experience design’ therefore brings no additional value over existing good design. User experience can’t be fully measured, which means you can’t measure the return on investment and casts doubt on the whole practice as a separate entity. Another layer of expense business can do without, just a trendy acronym – UX.
Keeping your website up to date
Update your website often. It’s important to keep your website up to date, but you shouldn’t treat your website like a FaceBook page. Just up loading things that interest you is not appropriate to a business website. Everything needs to be relevant to your business and presented in a logical sequence. Get yourself a business FaceBook page and upload interesting or funny items, as a way of engaging with your clients. Don’t forget to add social media links to your website.
Responsive Websites – Mobile devices
Since Google announced back in March 2015 they were changing the ranking of sites they considered not mobile-friendly, there has been a rush to make websites mobile friendly. Globally there are more mobile devices now than desktop or laptop devices, but are they all your consumers? For example, Laos SE Asia a developing country with a population of nearly 7 million has 5 million mobile phone users, but how many of those are likely to be your target market. I believe in the rush to mobile layouts it has been overlooked that while there is a strong trend to searching on mobile devices (phones & tablets) that this is not so true for non-consumer websites. Many business to business websites are better off staying with a layout that suits desktop screens as that is the more likely way their potential clients will view them. Of course your website still needs to be responsive to mobile devices, but should be designed primarily for desktops. Websites designed for small screens only, usually look bland and sparse on large screens.
Why have a website?
I often wonder why some businesses have websites. They pay thousands of dollars to create and maintain a website, then when a potential customer contacts them via the website they don’t respond. Last week I contacted three businesses (via their contact page), I’m ready to buy, yet a week later none have replied to my request for prices. As I started out – Why have a website?
Having a website is so important today, most consumers will check the web before making a purchase or choosing a professional. But just creating the website then forgetting about it is a total waste of money. Not only do you need to continually update the content but responding to any emails or comments very promptly is vital. Modern consumers are not patient, if you don’t respond quickly they move on.
SEO Expert
A new client had until recently been paying an SEO Expert (Search Engine Optimisation) a handsome monthly fee and the client’s average number of website visitors was just 10 per month. Six weeks after we revamped their website for a fixed fee they are now averaging over 250 visitors per month. No monthly SEO fees.
250 visitors per month may not be a huge number, but compared their past record it’s a huge improvement that should steadily improve.