Well I have resisted for as long as I felt I could but today I have been forced to add a captcha to my contact form. Captchas are those irritating little mashed up bits of text that you have to enter to prove you are a human rather than a software bot.

I dislike them as they trend to impede usability and conversion but if you find, like me, that you are getting tens if not hundreds of ‘offers’ submitted then the only option to help stop the automated bots is add a captcha.

So sorry but that is what I have had to do, if anyone else has similar problems and would like some advice or help in getting scrapers, bots and automated programs off your site please contact me and I would be happy to help (Filling in my captcha as you do sorry)

If you add a blog to your site suddenly you have a way in which a conversation with your customers can start. So many dry ecommerce catalogues online are simply there as a way of projecting the range and the pricing model.

What does that say to your customers?
For me that says we are here to take your order, you Mr customer are simply turnover for us, sure you might have great aftersales service and the best delivery performance in your industry but for me you arent listening to the customer.

I would also make the argument that you are in fact falling into a common trap for ecommerce sites, the internet is a fantastic way for consumers to compare pricing and with just pricing and products on your site you are just reinforcing the movement towards your products being treated as a commodity.

So how do you think you can change that?
Add a blog to your site, it doesnt have to be called a blog but the addition of the functionality of a blog means you suddenly have a host of new opportunities to differentiate your company.

You can put the task of publishing content in the hands of the people who have the information
Salesmen can create guides and tips / tricks to help customers choose the right product
Customer service can write information about delivery schedules or the process giving customers more belief in the quality of your offering (This also helps to answer some objections customers may feel and close sales)

Blogs by their very nature are a conversational tool
Customers can comment on articles (Dont worry you can moderate before they appear on the site). Comments provide a way of getting feedback from customers and a way of customers asking questions after articles which will help you adjust the content to get the best results.

Blogs offer a way of pushing service selling points not just product
You can add value by writing about how the products can be used, imagine if you are a supplier of golf products and can provide an online guide on how a product can improve your swing, increasing your trust with the buyers and selling more of the product. Without this function most ecommerce sites are a list of products that can only sell themselves through price, are you in the stack em high sell em cheap game or the adding value game?

Content will be visible quicker and easier
Because the blog platform provides an in built way to ping (or inform automatically) search services your content will appear quicker on the search engines and often in better positions than through other methods.

So what are some of the concerns I hear before customers realise that this is a good thing for them?

“I dont think having a ‘Blog’ sounds very good for us”
It doesnt have to be called a blog and it can be integrated fully into your existing site, a blog is simply a content management system (CMS) that suits the task we have for it. Have a look at this Packaging materials supplier to see a blog acting as their full web site.

“We already have a design that we like and dont want to spend a fortune re designing our site”
We can just integrate it into your current design, see our work in action at Casino.com to see a blog added to their existing site in a seamless manor.

“I dont think we can host it on our current server”
We can easily host the blog on a subdomain allowing it to be hosted on a seperate server away from any other part of the site.

“I cant afford to get another site designed”
The cost of adding a blog can be quite small, usually far less than your existing site and can be spread across the year on a managed service basis with Crea8.

Contact us to learn more about what we can do.

Crea8 New Media are a specialist design agency and internet consultancy based near Manchester. We look after customers both large and small and focus on understanding the business needs of our clients to deliver sites that deliver.

Web design Manchester
As Manchester web designers and consultants Crea8 understand what is important to make sites that work, sites that fulfil a need, a business need. The internet provides the greatest opportunity for connecting with your customers available today and Crea8 can make that a reality and a success.

Manchester web designers often provide services that lack the connection with you as a business and wont deliver results for your company, we are different making us the best web designers in Manchester.

Specialists in the following services contact us today to discuss how we can help you and your company: -

SEO
Search engine optimisation - making sites that can perform in the search engines or helping solve hidden problems within your existing site.

PPC
Pay Per Click advertising - using Google Adwords or a similar engine we can create, manage and track all aspects of your online advertising spend.

Internet and Web Consultancy
Understanding your business to understand how the web can provide cost savings for you makes web design affordable in Manchester.

Fill in the form below and we will contact you today!

So what’s the method we use for evaluating a site before we even make a proposal?

Well to start with we like to get an idea of what the appetite for change in the site is, are we expecting a possible redesign or will we be working with what you already have?

Then we start with a two stage data gathering process. Its my firmly held belief that you cant make confident proposals for a customer on how we can contribute to your business without knowing about who you are and what you have now.

So to start with we work with you to place a set of analytics tools onto your site. This is usually in addition to any stats tools you already have in place as we like to get a clean and familiar data set. Typically we will run these for anywhere between 2 weeks and 2 months so we can get some statistically reliable data on the sites metrics, which include amongst others the following:-

Visitor numbers
Uniques / Pageviews
Bounce rate / Sticky ratio
Geo profile (Where they come from)

Marketing and content
How people find your site
Where they arrive from
What they were looking for when they found you
Current search performance
Pages indexed
Link profile etc.

We will also profile your visitors
Typical visitor examples including path taken, activities etc.
Heat map / Click tracking (Where people click on the site)

Whilst our tools are gathering this data it gives us time to get to know more about you and your business.

Business Process Mapping

We normally like to spend some time with you and your key staff to try to understand you and your business, we understand that you are busy people and we try not to take up much of your time but to really get to the key benefit the web can offer you we need to know where the needs are for you and your customers.

For example on a typical business review I recently did in conversations with the sales manager it became obvious that the companies internal sales team found that their time was being taken up explaining the same things to numerous customers on how to use a key product they sold. As part of Crea8’s proposal we suggested that creating simple guides for these common requests and posting them online would help vastly reduce this drain on the internal resources and at the same time open up a new marketing channel helping drive in new business.

In normal circumstances we conduct the initial site data gathering and business review for free (Unless it involves significant time when we would agree a fixed price for the consultancy)

This way you get a clear understanding of what’s possible and how we can together build a business case for any future development of your online activities.

Contact Crea8 today and let us guide you through the process.

So you’ve gone through your detailed plans and now your ready to choose someone to help make those plans a reality, but just how do you go about finding a web designer you can rely on?

Let us start by defining what we are looking for. Do we want to look for a web developer or simply a designer? In my view you need to look for someone who has a track record of designing quality and performing websites. The key there is performing, dont ever be seduced by a flashy looking portfolio a disappointing number of web designers simply create sites that look nice and then disappear. Those sites never perform.

So how do you find a designer in the first place?
Don’t ask your print company, I know that they say that they can design sites for you but they cant. I have never ever seen a traditional print company that knows anything useful about web development. Do take soundings from people you know and trust about who they have used, word of mouth is still a very important tool in your decision making process here. I would also suggest that if you have taken the decision to get advice from a web consultant or SEO firm then the people that they suggest should also be high on your list of people to look at.

How to trim down the list to a short-list of possibles.
Have a look at their sites, the sites of web design companies can tell you a great deal about the company. Not only will the site tell you about sites they have done (Usually) but also the site will often give you a good feel for what their way of working will be. Here’s an example of a good web design firm in my opinion.

Don’t always assume that the web designers will have former client sites listed on their site, for example here you wont see many client sites as its a well known tactic of other web development firms to come and market in a negative way to your clients, in an industry where its easy to spread untruths many people keep these things close to their chest.

If you do get to look at a list of sites its always worth taking a quick look at how the sites are performing, I know that’s really why your here and not something you know how to do that well so here’s a quick tip.

Disclaimer: I don’t subscribe to any view that pagerank is worth following but its still a quick and dirty method of a sites status.
Copy the sites URL and paste it into the tool here. This tool will show you the Google Pagerank of the sites they have made. Whilst there are many reasons why the page rank of a site can be misleading (Its a simple scale of 1-10, 10 being best) you can assume that if all the sites they show you are PR0 or PR1 those sites wont be performing.

Ask the opinion of a web consultant or SEO firm if you need help here too.

So once you have trimmed down the list you had to a manageable number (3-5 is good) get in contact and ask about what the process is for getting proposals from them. If they don’t do proposals then that should be a big warning sign for how the whole project would go.

Choosing a web designer or developer is very much like choosing any other supplier but with the added complication of not knowing the products you are buying as well. I think if you can a web consultant is ideally placed to help you navigate through the process.

Good luck! I am here to help if you still find the process confusing, remember that good advice at this point will protect any investment you make from here onwards.

I have looked at and helped develop countless websites over the years and yes I have had a good cross section of experience on what works and what doesn’t. From over 10 years of building sites it is clear there are some key factors that will dictate whether your new website will sink or swim.

Ready? Lets get them out and clear!

How integrated is the site in the aims of the business?
If the site is created as an online brochure packed with what you think the customer wants it will fail very quickly.
The site should be central and key to everything you do and everything you want to achieve, without this focus it will never shine.

Who looks after the site?
Anyone who thinks the website is an IT issue or even worse an office juniors job may as well have just burnt the money. The website is another employee or a team of employees working round the clock for your business, they need help and they need resources.

What happens to the orders and enquiries the site gets?
They should go into the person best placed to convert business or directly into the accounting system as soon as possible. If the costs of pulling orders directly into the accounting system is too expensive remember that even having orders that get entered by hand in will be far far more efficient than telephone or fax orders. With telephone and fax etc your sales people have to interpret the requirements whereas the orders from the web are entered as part number, qty very quickly.

The web is an opportunity for efficiency

Make sure the site is fresh and reaches out to your customers
The worst thing possible is to have a site designed that is static and cant be changed without spending more money with your web developer. You need to make sure that you have a content management system included that is simple to use and easy for every member of staff to learn and help contribute. The best companies have sites that allow their most experienced staff members to add content easily and some even take it as far as having suppliers write content for them or even have people like the warehouse add content about how deliveries are made etc.

Listen to your customers, in person and in stat form
Analytics can tell you a huge huge amount about your customers and will be the main factor in helping you decide what content or changes to make. Simply adding something like Google Analytics (Its free!) will open up a wealth of information on who visits the site, from where and why. It should be a weekly meeting in the diary for key staff members to go through the stats and look at what can be done to improve the sites performance (More on that later too!)

Other services that can help in this area and some of my personal favourites: -
Get Clicky Great web 2.0 analytics service offering some great features. For example I can watch a visitor come into the site live and follow where they go and what they do. It includes a handy ip based google map showing you where the visitor comes from. In demonstration once we watched as a competitor came into the site live and read through the new offers they had!
CrazyEgg.com Another cool analytics site, key feature i love here is heatmaps.. these are graphical overlays of your site showing where the visitors clicked or moved their mouse, fantastic for seeing where your site isnt doing what you hoped.

Add the human touch to the site
Make sure that you try to project the personality of your business on to those customers who want to know more. Many websites are cold and business like, some really special ones have info about staff members, profiles and news. All of them help foster a feeling of warmth between you and your customer

Call in the professionals where you need them
Nobody knows your content and market like you do and if you listen to your customers you are half way there but when it comes to the specialist services its always best to get advice. These areas are where I would call in help: -
SEO - Search engines are complicated things and getting the site in a state that allows you to be ranked is very important. They will also be able to help you build up the links that youll need to gain that all important authority and beat the competition
PPC - Pay per click advertising is an easy way to lose your money fast. I cant stress how much better you’ll find the experience of online advertising if you get your campaigns managed by someone who does it every day.
SEM - Your SEO people will no doubt be able to help you with some overall marketing online.
Conversion consultancy - its far far easier to double your conversions than double your traffic, whilst this can seem like an extravagance for new sites it should be more than self funding.