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)

Here are some tips for making your company blog a success.

Make the tone conversational
Dont let the marketing guys have free rein on the content or theyll write stuff like “With product X you experience the best feeling you have ever had, buy now while stocks last” - Yuck I dont want the sale thrust down my throat. Use language like “When I was chatting to one of our customers they came up with a great new way to use product X and I just had to share it with you”

Avoid corporate announcements and press releases
Less formal please people, professional sure but make the writing interesting not dull or nobody will read it!

Make sure you use the language of your customers
Spend some time talking to customers and listen to what they call your products or services. I have a packaging customer who calls brown sticky tape, polyprop hotmelt packaging tape yet guess what their customers call it? Yup brown sticky tape!

Write content your customers have asked for
Talk to them, they know what they want. If they are always asking when you deliver to their area write a post telling them where you go each day and then tell them you wrote it! Make them feel its written for them not written for you.

Ask yourself before you post ‘Who does this content benefit?’
If you can look yourself in the eye and say ‘I wrote this for customer(s) x & y then you are on the right track.

Add content that creates buzz
Ever thought about making a quick video of how to use a new product then sending it to the people you target, trust me it beats the hell out of a glossy flyer any day!

Keep listening to your customers and youll keep growing your business!

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.

We currently catch domains that have ‘dropped’ when someone decides not to renew them. Slushies.co.uk is an example of such a domain and would make a very sensible purchase for anyone who sells slushies or related products.

Contact us via the form below or by phone on 07740 376358 to discuss owning this domain.

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!

Once in a while I like to go and look at the current adverts running for a marketplace I know well and get a feel for what people are doing well and what they could need help on.

Today I have chosen Packaging as a market area and I will be looking at the commodity product in that market place using the keyword “Packaging Tape”.

If you go to Google and do this search you’ll get a list of all the people currently advertising for the phrase “Packaging tape” and from this list we will pull out a few examples of good and bad practice for PPC.

First of all lets have a look at the adverts themselves, here’s the screen shots of the first three pages: -

Now looking at these first two pages there are a few things that jump out at me. In no particular order: -

Customtape.co.uk have been aggressive and included their telephone number so people may call without even costing them a click. They also have a nice obvious call to action - Call now!

Tapes-Direct.co.uk seem to have some experience - they are in position 3 (A good place to be in my opinion) and they have clearly stated the term again in their advert (Which is shown in bold by google indicating it matched what you searched for)

Satco.co.uk on the other hand are sitting at number 1 however their message of ‘Try us now’ lacks the conviction of the two below it and they chose to use the advertising space to tell people they had to buy 36 rolls. That might be the minimum but why put a barrier up before the user has even been given the reason to buy from you. In my opinion this isnt pre qualifying the lead its just putting people off. Their ad also smacks of a advert created by someone internally and some money has been thrown at it to make it rank, I would suggest that this isn’t going to give them a positive ROI.

discountofficeproducts - not a good advert - where’s my reason to click?
Rajapack - lazy looking advert in my opinion
Packaging2u.co.uk - Again no call to action at all here!
www.ezpack.co.uk - not a bad advert provided your looking for only Tesa brand
www.TrekRemovals.com - They didn’t even try to be relevant - sure people moving house use packaging tape but are they really going to choose your advert based on a search for ‘Packaging Tape’ ?

Well that’s all the ads that made it to or bought their way on page 1

Page 2 doesn’t fair any better…. for a start you’re on page 2 and getting beaten by a removals firm!

www.bsdonline.co.uk - is the only one that looks new on there for me, I think they could get a better result with some tweaks to their bids.

So what are all these people sending us to? Lets have a look at the highly important landing pages

Satco.co.uk - You are sending paid for traffic to this page? !!

No product - no way to buy - wasting your money!!

Customtape.co.uk - Better than Satco but still not making it too easy for me to part with my money or even to give you an enquiry. Its obvious that your looking to upsell me onto a custom printed tape instead so I would have expected that the landing page would try to explain to me why that is a good idea. Tell me its for security, for branding, for vanity - something!

Tapes-direct.co.uk - Getting better, if i was in the market for packaging tape this is a nice page to be sent to. I can see what i need to make a decision and I can buy! - Well done.

Packaging2u.co.uk - not too bad but I feel the bounce rate on the page they are sending us too will be pretty high

After all that what have we learnt from this?

Well I would take the following lessons: -
Make sure you make your ads very tight and relevant - they should include the search term and tell the user what to do.
They should link through to a landing page that is targeted to the search term, is relevant and makes it obvious and easy for the user to convert that interest into actions.

I would also suggest that in Pay Per Click you should make the call to someone who can help manage the whole process for maximum results.

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.

So here you are lots of desks lots of people, you have grown your business well. You just wish that IT hadn’t become such a hassle. Every time one of the PC’s goes wrong you either have to call out the local IT firm and pay through the nose or you have to get through the hassle of trying to fix it yourself.

That’s not helping grow your business is it?

Many people now use Thin Clients instead and you can too. Thin Client means having a small bare bones network computer on each desk, they often look a bit like this (2 monitors may be a bit excessive here!)

Contact me to talk through whats possible or add a comment or question below.

What these devices are designed to do is to connect each desktop to a central server. All the programs and all the software then live on the central server and each user simply connects to and shares this server.

Should one of these devices go wrong - unplug it and plug in in a spare and you are good to go.. no it involvement at all really.
Want to work at someone elses desk or even at a different depot? No problem again - as your desktop and programs live on the server now you can connect to them from any Thin client device anywhere on the network.

Upgrade time or patch time for your software? Its all done on the central server so its easy!

If you like you can host the server yourself or you could do what many people do and buy managed server space in a data centre somewhere and connect your thin client devices to it via the internet. You pay them to keep it up and running and fix it if it breaks.

If you have an expanding business this is really ideal as to get a new depot or branch live all you need is a few pre configured thin client devices and a broadband connection - they plug them in and they are live!

From 50 pc’s to just 1
50 times less hassle (In fact as users cant mess with the programs now you’ll get even less hassle than that!)
Suddenly IT is helping you grow your business not stopping you

Contact me to talk through whats possible for your business or leave a comment or question below

Newsletters are a great way to reach out to your customers, keep them informed and maintain a good relationship with your contacts. There are now quite a number of companies offering the service of sending out email newsletters and they all make similar claims: -

Etc etc… yawn

My advice would be to ignore these firms and do it the Crea8 way!
What they dont tell you is: -

So what would I do that’s any better?

If you feel you MUST send out email newsletters use a service like Aweber or Getresponse - Both companies are professionals at sending out mail and have very strict anti spam policies so as a consequence there mail servers are trusted and the mail they send gets delivered far batter. Another plus is they WILL be cheaper than whoever is offering you the email newsletter service.

Now what I would do in an ideal world is get yourself a Getresponse account and make a form for customers to signup. Then instead of sending out massive image filled email newsletters I suggest sending out simple plain emails that just say the headlines and link back to your own website. Here you write pages that have all the images links and interactivity that you want.

Picture the scenario - you send out 1000 emails to your customer base and 200 of them click on an article link in the email sending them to your site. They read the article and some comment, some also stay around to browse the site some more, hey it may even remind them to order!

Great advantage of this method is that you are able to track the email newsletter through your normal analytics program and using something like Getclicky you can even track people coming in from the email right through every action they take. You wont get that from a html flashy email newsletter!

You are also creating content, people will find your site as a result in the coming months and years - no original content is a bad idea.

Email me if you would like to learn more - or post your questions below