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If you have a business that appears to be performing well within the local areas, you may wish to start to broaden your horizons and start to market your business further afield. There are many ways in which you can do this and ideally you should consider all the options and ways before deciding which route to take as you may find that one will work better for you than another.

Firstly you should look at your website and find out currently which areas you perform well in. It may be that you only have one location mentioned on your site. To target additional areas you will need to create additional content (possibly even pages) talking about the products or services that you want to start to promote in these areas. You may want to create these new pages with one county or area in mind but there is often no reason why you cannot include a few phases for smaller locations near that area to allow you to show up in the search results for those areas. Be careful not to try and target too many locations on one page as you may end up not getting ranked for any of your search phrases.

Google Adwords is a great way to target locations as it allows you to create specific ads and show them only to a selected geographical location. This will allow you to manage each location with its own budget according to competition.

Pretty much every website will at some point make use of images to advertise a product or service or to set an ambiance for the viewer. The use of these images can be very effective in the right places however there are a few points to consider when selecting appropriate images.

Firstly the image must either be your own image or must be an image that you have permission to use as if not you could be breaking copyright law and could find yourself in a lot of trouble.

The image must also be high enough quality that it will not appear distorted or pixilated on screen as this would look unprofessional and could make the whole website have a negative impact on your business.

The images used should also be high definition enough that any products are shown from all relevant angles and have a zoom feature allowing a potential customer to look at the product in closer detail. If images aren’t clear or detailed enough then a buyer won’t have the confidence to purchase an item that they cannot see in the flesh and this could result in many product returns and unsatisfied customers.

Always use the best quality images that you can to allow your website to really show off your business to its full potential.

When choosing a marketing company it is important to remember that you will need to work with them in order to get the most success out of the marketing they do on your behalf. Marketing companies are experts in the industry but may not be an expert in your industry, so the best marketing is done when companies work together.

Finding the right companies can be tricky as you may be inundated with companies trying to sell you their services. Do not always go with the cheapest option as those that are good at what they do will be happy to justify why they are charging a higher price than others.

Always try and read reviews or use a company that has been recommended to you by others. If you are using a new companies that you do not know much about then try and establish a trial period and do not tie yourself in to any lengthy contracts until you are sure you are satisfied with the work and results they are getting you.

Designing a company website can be a challenge. You will constantly have to balance between what the customer wants and what you know will work as sometimes opinions differ.

Below are a few tips that should help you improve your skills as a website designer.

• Design in grey scale – When producing visuals you should first design them in grey and then add in photography in colour. Then you can go through and colour each element. This will avoid over designing and allow you to make the most important parts stand out.
• Don’t make the social media stand out too much – So many websites spend time and money making sure that they are offering their customers a great experience and yet promote their social media pages prominently basically encouraging people to leave. If people like your site they will want to stay on and have a look round not see what information you have put on social media sites.

Marketing of a website is as important as the look and feel of it. There is no point in having a website that looks great and inks through well but cannot be found by anyone. Many customers are unaware of web marketing and therefore go with a company or a programmer with little or no experience in marketing only to be stung later on down the line.

All too often companies have to end up having a new website designed as their previous one has not been built with marketing in mind so cannot be changed in the way it is needed to be to allow it to start getting good rankings. There are a number of marketing techniques that are used to help improve the rankings of a website and a lot of this is built in to the site behind the scenes. If you are in doubt as to whether your website is search engine optimised, then get in touch with a local web agency to give it a once over. Many will offer a free SEO evaluation.

As a web developer, there is nothing more frustrating than a bug. It may be that something on the website has stopped working, for apparently no reason or it may be that a bit of code you have used on another site won’t work on a new one that you are building. Hours can be spent trying to find out the problem and sometimes to no avail.

When you are trying to fix a bug, you should take advantage of programs such as Firebox (part of Firefox browser) which allow you to pick apart code on the website to see why it is not displaying / working as it should. It also allows you to make live changes (local only) to the code to see if you can fix it. Once you have found what the issue is you can then apply the fix to the code. Forums are also a great way to get help with an error that you are unfamiliar with although it may take a while to get a response.

When a consumer makes a decision to use a company to buy products or services from, trust is a big part of it. Everyone wants to feel that they can trust the retailer to give them a product or service that does what it should and that they have the support when they need it should they have any issues.

It may be that you can build up this trust over time with continued business but for new customers you need to market your ethos. Promoting other clients that have used your company will give people confidence. Also showing case studies and recent projects can allow your customers to find out more about the type of service you offer. If possible, giving guarantees and / or warranties is another way to build up trust with your clients giving them peace of mind, should anything go wrong it can be quickly and easily rectified.

Many companies spend a lot of time planning out how their website will look and function but then forget the importance of the content. As a web designer, I all too often get asked to fill in the content section of a site for a client without them really wanting any input in to it.

When writing content for a website you should consider what message you want to get across and make sure that each page is specifically related to that service or product that you are wanting to promote. Content writing is a balance between writing purely for the customer and writing for search engine optimisation purposes. Good content should do both equally.

Remember to consider keywords, keyword density, call to actions, internal links and also ease of reading i.e. fonts, size of font etc.

If you know what you want to say on your website but have little or no experience and knowledge of SEO then I would suggest working together with someone that does to make sure that you get the right balance of both.

If you are looking at having a website designed then you have a choice of who to use. You can opt to use a self employed / individual to design the website or you may wish to go to a design agency.

There are pros and cons for both, but using a design agency does seem to have many more advantages.

With an agency you have the peace of mind that they will probably have more than one designer, meaning if for example, your designer goes off ill or on holiday, there is someone else to cover the work. Also as the saying goes, two heads are better than one, or in the case of an agency often tens to hundreds of heads. Allowing people of all experiences within the design industry to get their heads together to come up with a design that not only looks good but works and allows for growth is vital and an agency will have the relevant people to do this.

Having a website is a great way to promote your business and showcase your products and services. Many small businesses are now realising the importance of having a website and taking the plunge, but did you know your website also needs to be mobile compatible.

With a huge amount of searches taking place on mobile devices such as phones or tablets, you need to ensure that your website displays correctly on such devices. There are a few ways of doing this, you can chose to have a website designed that is responsive meaning the layout will change in order to match the screen size it is being viewed on or you can opt for a mobile version.

If you use a content management system such as WordPress then you can quite easily add a mobile version of the site via a plugin. If you are unsure if your site is mobile friendly then you can go on one of the many websites that will test it for you.