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

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.

Whenever you ask a group of senior managers what the cost of each external salesman is you’ll normally get an answer in the region of £60,000 to £90,000 a year including car, expenses, phone etc.

What do you get for your money? If your lucky you get an experienced salesperson who helps grow business with effective territory management and face to face sales but more typically you’ll get someone who isnt quite as effective as you hoped. Most external sales jobs can go at least six months doing a milk round before the turnover of their territory drops off.

External sales people are hard to manage, impossible to track easily and impractical to scale up when you need them.

So what the smart companies are turning to is investing that money in online advertising using the pay per click or pay per call/action models. The best reasons for doing this are in my experience: -

Every advert is closely targeted to the product or offering that your company is best placed to convert
You can track every metric possible to ensure that convert in a predictable manor
The sales effort goes on in a reliable manor day in day out
You can simply and quickly calculate the cost of converting orders
When you understand what the customers want scaling up for greater success is only limited by the search inventory available

Imagine therefore if you knew for a fact when each salesperson was selling, what they were offering and most importantly you only paid for their wages when they closed a sale.

PPC - the perfect salesperson….

As a man who sold face to face in a competitive business environment for 12 years I know which channel I would now choose.

Contact Crea8 to get started finding out how PPC could help you sell more.

Making your Wordpress Blog search engine friendly doesn’t require some magical SEO knowledge, just an hour of your time and some reading.

Here goes my simple guide to making wordpress search engine friendly: -

Visit print, read and follow these articles

Then also get these plugins and use them

Add link Attribute
Permalinks migration for Wordpress
Wordpress head meta tags
Wordpress Title Tags

Once you have them all you can implement all that you see in the articles earlier.

Good luck - post some comments and I will try to help there..

I have a great deal of experience in designing Wordpress themes from scratch so that you can make sure that you give that professional image whilst still making use of the fantastic communication opportunities a blog gives.

Heres a few examples of custom designs I have done for people: -

FishSEO
A custom design for Scott Fish that integrates seamlessly with his existing site to provide a blog to his consultancy site

Affearners
The blog here provides a news front end to this popular affiliate forum and the blog design is integrated into the SMF forum template to make this a flexible portal for all things affiliate marketing related.

G-Man SEO Blog
This design took G-Man from his existing free wordpress theme to the custom one that his standing in the industry really deserved.

My own SEOidiot Blog
This theme changes quite often (every time I get bored with the old one) but each one is bespoke from the ground up.

The general deal with getting a theme designed is to contact me and we will discuss what’s involved, prices vary wildly depending on the nature of the project but I have been told many times that my pricing is far less than other people that they have asked.

So contact me today and get a proposal, it costs nothing to ask!