Posts Tagged ‘web design’

There’s only a couple of days left to qualify for the early bird discount on the next course that we’re running.

The course is all about how to improve your website so as it brings you more enquiries, more sales, and more profits.

Delivered by David Miles from Divadani and Anuschka Fritz from Moustique Design, this one day course will teach you:

• How to decide what approach to take with the website
• How to attract your target audience
• The seven things you must consider when designing a website
• How to write killer copy that will increase enquiries from your website
• How to put together an effective brief for a web designer
• What to consider when selecting a web designer and how to avoid getting ripped off
• What functionality you will need to enhance your business website
• Ten ways to market the website once it is complete.

This is an interactive course, and if you already have a website you’ll get the chance to have it assessed and critiqued. You’ll leave with a clear action plan of simple steps you can take to ensure your new or existing website gets results.

The course is taking place on 21 June in Central London and costs only £79.99 + VAT – and that includes lunch and other refreshments throughout the day.

Find out more about the course and book online today for your early bird discount.

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• Best Practices To Always Remember With Website Design (ronmedlin.com)

I was introduced to a great website last week. It’s called Which Test Won and it really makes clear the importance of split testing.

What is split testing? Well, for every piece of marketing you do – whether it’s writing an advert or a direct sales letter, designing a website, running an AdWords campaign, or anything else – there will always be more than one way of wording or presenting your message. And without testing, you won’t know for sure which way is best.

With split testing you come up with two versions of your website landing page, sales letter, advert or whatever it is you are using, and then you put version A in front of one group of potential customers and version B in front of the other group and you see which generates the best response in terms of sales, enquiries, etc.

The beauty of online marketing is that it is actually pretty simple to carry out split testing and to measure what results you get. So even if you have a website which you think is working well, or an AdWords campaign that is generating you a healthy return on investment, it is still worth experimenting to see if some subtle changes could bring you even better results. Sometimes, for example, just changing the colour of a Buy Now button can have a dramatic impact on your number of online sales.

If you don’t believe me, you should definitely check out Which Test Won. It has loads of real life examples of split tests that have been carried out. You can play along by trying to guess which of the two different versions of each item of marketing material was most successful and then find out what way other people voted and which version was actually the winner in real life testing.

How much split testing are you doing in your business? Has carrying out this kind of regular experimenting and testing made a difference to how much business you get from the web? We’d love to hear your stories – just use the comments box below to tell us.

Do you reckon that no-one gets business from social networking? Do you think it doesn’t matter if your website isn’t iPhone friendly? Do you believe that the look of a website is more important than its usability?

Then read on…..

I’ve just got back from a week away in Somerset, where we stayed in a converted barn in the middle of nowhere. Thanks to the thick walls of the former barn, we had no mobile signal at all inside the building, which was great for getting a bit of peace and quiet.

Outside, we just about managed to get a signal if we stood in the right place. As for data – well, if the wind was blowing the right way we could sometimes get a 3G signal but most of the time the only option was a painfully slow 2G connection.

But modern habits die hard, so when @MrsJaneMiles and I decided we wanted to find a nice pub for dinner one night, I did the obvious thing and put a message out on Twitter asking for a recommendation. One of my Bristol based followers picked up on this and got the word out to a number of his Twitter contacts in the Glastonbury area and within a few hours I had received recommendations for three local pubs.

Excellent! One lucky landlord was going to get a bit of extra business thanks to the power of social media.

Because @MrsJaneMiles is allergic to dairy products, I wanted to check the pubs’ food menus to see where she had the best chance of being able to eat something.

I went to the website of the first pub – The King’s Head in Wells – and was confronted with a screen that simply said “Loading: 0%”. After a not inconsiderable wait (I’m on a mobile phone with a 2G connection here, don’t forget) it crept up to 5%. Then another long wait and it was up to 10%. After about five minutes it had struggled up to about 20% – at which point I gave up.

I’ve since seen the site on a laptop with a 3G connection and it’s a very nice looking site and the pub looks great. But they didn’t get our business because they didn’t make any allowance for the fact that some potential customers might not have been able to handle the highly graphical nature of the website.

Lesson 1: As I discovered when doing the research for ‘Fusion’, the use of mobile phones for accessing web sites is growing at a phenomenal rate. So if you are going to have a very visual, graphic heavy website (especially if it uses Flash), then you really should ensure you’ve also got a mobile-friendly version of the site which loads automatically if it detects that someone is accessing it from an iPhone or other mobile device.

The next pub I looked at was The Apple Tree Inn. Their website is much more basic, but I was able to navigate around it easily on my phone (even with a slow connection) and check out the restaurant menu. We would have gone there but, despite trying them at various times of the day over a 24 hour period, I couldn’t get through on the phone. It just rang and rang with no answer.

Lesson 2: Just because someone finds you via the web, it doesn’t mean they won’t want to talk to you. Buy an answering machine or, better still, use a call answering service so as your calls get answered by a real person even when you’re not around.

And so it was that we ended up going to The Who’d A Thought It in Glastonbury – an excellent pub with a range of beers, quality food, helpful and friendly staff, and a website that works!

What do you think? Should businesses be making more effort to ensure that their websites can be accessed quickly and easily by people on the move? Do pubs/restaurants really need to bother about this kind of thing, or would most people have checked them out from home on a wi-fi connection before going on holiday? Feel free to comment below!