Blog

IF your company is quite large or looking to expand, then you may consider having an internal marketing department. With many web designers / developers / marketing experts charging upwards of thirty pounds an hour, it can start to become quite expensive if you are having to outsource all your online marketing and website projects.

It could be that you do not need a full time team and that just one or two people or even a part time team. Some companies chose to work alongside a marketing agency, so will have skeleton marketing staff employed but then outsource bigger projects to an agency. This allows them to keep day to day running costs of the business down but having the right amount of back up and support when its needed.

An agency can often bring a wealth of knowledge and understanding to the world of online marketing, so even if you are going to be running the marketing in house, it is worth possibly paying an agency to create a marketing strategy for your business, even if it is implemented in house. This allows you to draw on their expertise whilst keep costs low.

If you are the owner of a small business then you will already be aware of how important your customers are. Not only might you rely on their repeat business but also their word of mouth to gain you more customers. Relying on word of mouth marketing is not ideal and although you may find that this brings in enough business initially, it probably won’t last for ever. For this reason you need to explore other marketing avenues. Costs can often be tight in a small business and many have not got thousands of pounds to spend on marketing each month. There are a few ways in which you can market your small business for little or even no money, but you will need to invest some of your time.

Social media is a great marketing platform for business of all sizes. It allows you to connect with people in your local area if your business is aimed locally or nationally. Setting up a profile or account on the social media sites is pretty straight forward but managing them can be a little difficult. Many business owners say they struggle with knowing what to put on the social media sites and also how often. If you are happy to manage your social media accounts yourself then it is always worth investing in a training course aimed at businesses to show you how to get the most out of your social media marketing.

Costing a website can be tricky as unless you have spent a lot of time with the client or they have a written specification that you can work through, it is very had to be able to accurately cost the project.

It may be that you can create template packages to offer to customers where you have a list of what is included. For example, many website companies will offer a fixed price for a 4 /5 page brochure website with a contact form. You may even have a website that you are able to show them, that will show what they will be getting for their money. Often people like to see a working product before they part with money and with a website this can be hard unless you have previous works that you can show them.

Be sure to button down exactly what is and what isn’t included in the price and use this to upsell your other products and services. Do not be afraid to find out what their budget is as if they only have a very small budget and it is a lot less than you could complete the project for then you may as well tell them upfront to save everyone time.

In the web design industry, there have been a number of changes over the past few decades that have changed the way we design and program our sites. At one stage, Flash was a great way to play a video type message on your site that was relatively easy to embed. There were a number of problems with this especially when Apply produced the Iphone which did not support Flash, meaning it simply wouldn’t play on these devices. Also Google could not read the content within the Flash file so trying to optimise a site was hard work. Also from a user’s point of view, often it would make the site loading time longer and also sometimes mean they have to upgrade their flash player before they could continue with the site.

Now, designers and programmers are tending to use quirky techniques that allow users to interact with the screen often in a number of ways whist not limiting the people who can access it or how long it takes to access it, often this information is written in such a way that it can be read by the search engines too.

When having a logo or a website designed it is important to understand who owns the copyright to it. If the designer is using a third party website template, then the design rights will belong to the third part and not you or your designer. If they have designed it themselves then they usually own the copyright until it has been paid for or which they may lease to you.  Copyright protects your design so that others cannot copy it and use it as their own. You do not have to pay or register to copyright a logo or design, this is granted automatically. You may be contacted by a number of companies about purchasing the copyright for your design but this is not necessary and is pretty much meaningless. You can however purchase intellectual property rights or patents.

You automatically acquire the copyright to an image, illustration, piece of music, artwork, web content, logos etc. when you have created it from scratch so you cannot simply amend someone else’s logo and then claim it to be your own work.

Always clarify with your designer who has the rights to what in the design work they are under taking for you.

As part of your online marketing strategy, you may well wish to send out electronic news letters also known as e-news letters. Some companies choose to send these out themselves and others use a third party to create and send them.

If you are sending them out yourself through your own servers, you do need to be careful of the volume that you send out and the frequency. Sending out too many emails at once or too frequently can cause your server to be blacklisted and may mean to no email sent from your company will be delivered or if they do, may be marked as spam or junk.

When you are preparing a newsletter, you need to know a little bit about coding unless you are using a drag and drop system. You need to be aware that different email clients such as Yahoo and Gmail for example, may render the newsletter differently therefore you need to ensure that the newsletter is compatible with all of them.

Before hitting the send button, double and even triple check that all the links within the email work correctly as they should. It doesn’t look good if they don’t and you may find that people unsubscribe after this has happened.

When it comes to choosing a web designer, you need to establish what is important to your business. If you are very much driven by price and have a strict budget then you will need to find a web developer that can build you your site for the money that you have allowed. It may be that money is not really the main issue as long as you get all the functionality you need and the site is finished to a high standard and within a time limit.

Firstly you need to decide exactly what you want your website to do, you can always play around with the way it looks, but knowing what functionality you need is essential. Once you have this you can start to obtain quotes for the site.  You may find that some developers will only programmer the site and will not design it, and vice versa. Ideally you want to use a company or individual that can offer both otherwise you may have issues with communication between the two.

If you are driven by price, be careful of going for a quote that seems far too cheap as you may end up being disappointed with the results.

Rebranding a website can be tricky as there are often many aspects you need to consider and some of the changes must be done all in one go rather than gradually.

If you have changed your company name and logo for example, you will need to decide upon a date from which you are going to start using the new ones and change it across all platforms simultaneously to avoid confusion.

If you have social media accounts you will need to apply the changes to the name and logo also (some social media accounts will require you to set up a new one rather than change an existing name.

Don’t forget to update the branding on any downloadable forms etc from the website such as Terms and Conditions or application forms, these often get forgotten about until weeks or months down the line.

You may want to notify your customers before you make these changes to ensure that they are aware of what is going to be happening, a sudden name change or brand change can lead customers to panic and sometimes even lose trust in your company as they are not sure if you are still who they used to use.

When having a website created it is important to try and finalise as much of it as possible before going ahead with the build. Although website can be changed and changes can be quite instant once programmed, you may end up incurring additional costs by making changes later on or if your website goes live and it does not work how you need it to, you may end up losing customers.

Have a good look round at your competitors websites and bullet point ideas that you like and that you don’t like. Many sure you have a list of must have’s to include in the web design and then perhaps a list of nice to have’s too. When going through your list find out off the programmer the cost of adding in the additional items and then weigh up whether it is going to be worth while building them it. You can also ask if it is something that could be added easily at a later date if you want to wait until you have recouped some of your costs before proceeding with extra programming.  Creating a site map will be able to let you visualise the content and pages on your site before going to the build stag.

Each and every firm requires different application specifications for them to reach their targets. For instance, web based applications must be tailor-made to fit with their requirements when it comes to things such as receiving input from their customers, encrypting the data while it is in transit and making sure that it is in the correct format so as to avoid incompatibility issues. Additionally, the company could also be seeking to provide a better class of service to their customers hence ensuring that they are fully satisfied, and all their expectations are met.
Bespoke programming and development start off from the ground up with an approach that is aimed at giving the customer the best leverage regarding the features to be included in the applications and how these features will assist them to become better at the provision of services. Beginning from scratch ensures that the application is customised to the individual needs of the software and not directly over-the-counter applications that target a broad audience but fail to provide specific services. (more…)