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Top 5 Online Marketing Tips for Small Businesses – Part 5 – Website
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If you haven’t read my previous posts, you might want to check them out. There’s one on Email Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Search Marketing and Social Media Marketing
1. Website
It is estimated that 70% of SMEs don’t have a business website, despite the fact that over 60% of high street purchases are first researched online. As a small business owner, a website is probably the singular most important thing you can own for your business. It’s not just about being in with the crowd, but owning a business website could save you £££’s whilst earning you some new ones as well.
Why do you need a business website?
Make some noise online by giving your sites a well-considered refresh. Craig Grannell finds out how to clear away the cobwebs
As the global economy continues to stutter its way through 2009, companies are increasingly fighting to be heard. In recent months, investment has shifted abruptly from traditional media and ‘real world’ environments to the internet, which provides the means to reach the largest possible audience in a relatively cost-effective manner.
In theory, this is great news, but in practice the picture isn’t entirely rosy. As Clearleft’s managing director Andy Budd explains: “Many people view a website as a one-off project, rather than an ongoing concern. Organisations often go through a big redesign and then let a website fall into disrepair.” Instead, he recommends training yourself and your clients to think of a website as a staged process, which should be updated every three to six months: “That way, it’ll always be up to date and will last longer, rather than spending the majority of its life underperforming.”
Instead of tearing a site down and rebuilding it from scratch, figure out ways to make the existing site work harder. “Breathing new life into a site through a design refresh is one such option,” suggests Budd. “Smart companies also explore usability improvements to help conversion rates – small tweaks to registration and checkout processes can see conversions skyrocket and pay for themselves in no time.” The trick is in knowing the difference between an expense and an investment. While some sites are too outdated to make do with subtle tweaks and need a radical revamp, you can often do a lot with a little, thereby finding yourself in tune with companies cutting back on large capital expenditures.
Everyone knows it, so it must be true, right? Wrong! Craig Grannell talks to industry figures to uncover some major misconceptions in web design and development.
The moment you start working as a web designer or web developer, you’re told ‘do this’ and ‘don’t do that’. Official and unofficial rules abound. You soon internalise them and start passing them on to others, either consciously or subconsciously.
But here’s the bad news: not all of this advice is correct. Some of these firmly held ‘truths’ are based on outdated assumptions, and some were just wrong to start with.
It’s time to take a step back and reassess some of the myths and misconceptions circulating in the world of web design. With our sword of truth and shield of keen analysis, we’ll begin to break the cycle of bad advice and free our minds from outmoded dogma.
We’ll start at the very beginning of the design process, when you’re investigating potential audiences. And our first myth is, in the words of standards guru Eric Meyer, “the idea that global browser statistics matter in the slightest”. In fact, he points out, “What matters are the browsers visiting your site.”
By way of illumination, Meyer notes that a recent client had 14 per cent IE 5.01 usage – so Microsoft’s ancient browser suddenly became significantly more important than global statistics would otherwise suggest.
Most designers would jump at the chance to revisit their work but what is the right motivation for a site redesign and how should the process actually work? .net puts you in the know
Even if you get it right first time, there are plenty of reasons to take a fresh look at an older site. For a start, the web is changing. Again. Consider the web circa 1994 – design didn’t even come into it for those of us struggling to view grey, graphics-free pages using Mosaic. Today’s Web 2.0 revolution promises an epochal shift in user-expectation as significant as that caused by the introduction of streaming media, WYSIWIG web design applications or Flash.
There are other factors, too: accessibility, for one, and, of course, the time-honoured tradition of corporate re-branding, which is as good a reason for redesigning a website as any other.
When it comes to redesigning, there is a clear divide about how websites should be handled: is it better to patch-up any problems and give a quick coat of paint to the original aesthetic or burn the whole thing down and start again from scratch?
Just because it’s at the bottom of the screen doesn’t mean it isn’t vital for creating an informative and stylish homepage. Elliot Jay Stocks shows us how.
In the last tutorial we created a great-looking header for our fictional small business website. It followed an autumnal colour palette, using some elegant typography and some basic photo manipulation to set the theme for the site. We’re going to follow that up this issue by creating the footer to complement it.
If headers are the bold, striking elements that lead a user into a site’s content and give the first impressions, then footers might well be seen as the ‘parting thoughts’ of a website; a graphical bookend to all of the other elements on the page. They might not be very noticeable, but they’re there to do an important job.