This is an all too prevalent issue and it’s understandable, particularly in today’s economic climate that ‘the bargain’ is searched for when looking to employ any service. However, there are so many pitfalls with website design and development that by and large this can really be false economy. The range of skills required to design, develop, host and maintain a website can be wide and varied and it’s almost impossible to find someone with no industry experience who has learnt to make a web page using Microsoft Front Page during an ICT course at school but would have nowhere near the depth of understanding and technical ability to produce a website that will serve the purpose for which it was built.

First impressions are vital to any online business whether new or old, a badly designed business website can quite easily be misinterpreted by customers as a badly organised, stuck in time company, …..which lets be honest, isn’t good for winning new customers is it?.

Nowadays it’s not a matter of just ‘having’ a website online because everyone else has one but a matter of having a website that provides potential customers their first critical impression about your business, translates the right message about your company, be modern, functional, eye-catching, contains logical/transparent navigation, is written with well optimised/keyword-rich textual content, has all the correct coding practices in place, conforms to website coding convention guidelines, conforms to accessibility guidelines etc, etc, etc.  In fact, there are dozens of principles that need to be applied to produce a good website that again someone who doesn’t work as a professional in the business wouldn’t know.

Furthermore, there is a vast difference between graphic design and web development for example an amateur ‘Jack of all trades’ is not going to be proficient in all areas sufficiently leading you to a website that is deficient in key areas.

Obviously, nearperfect are a website design, graphic design, website development and search engine optimisation (SEO) company and so would be pro the professional approach but from experience with our client base, some of whom had previously gone down the ‘friend’s neighbour  ’ approach, we can say hand on heart that it’s tantamount to throwing good money away in most instances!

1.Know more about you!
2.Capture a coherent set of requirements and relate them to the project’s delivery.
3.Build a structured expression of these issues which is prioritised and agreed.

It’s a balance. We want to know about you as the client. We also need to capture the requirements of the project in a structured way. Complexity is commonplace and our team are well used to dealing with this but there are limits. Russell and the team are able to work their way through quite complex marketing, technical and usability issues. If there are structural issues or seemingly irresolvable issues between a client’s own teams, then frankly, the meetings aren’t going to be the best use of a project’s budget. Resolve them first. Decide on your priorities. Then hold a meeting with the nearperfect media team.

I use the term structure a great deal. Really, I mean clarity. The studio is a flexible and fast paced environment. I want our consultants to be able to clearly express the requirements we discover. You’ll know exactly where you stand, we’ll know exactly what you mean and together we can move forward with clarity and purpose.

The Increasing value of Social Media

With search engines indexing more and more social data almost on a minute-by-minute basis, the increased value of social media from an SEO perspective should certainly not be discounted. Just last month, Bing and Twitter hinted at the continuation of their deal which allows Bing to display Tweets within search listings. Even with the loss of real time search in Google, the development and investment in Google+ shows commitment to a signal source which will become an increasingly significant factor in influencing Google’s search results over time.

Search engines must react to the most relevant signals they can in order to ensure the quality of search results returned to end users. In this case, using social signals are the next logical development for them when considering how they should identify and rank content. The content that users share, discuss and endorse socially is an ideal indicator of relevance. As a direct result, SEO strategies have already begun to include social activity in a targeted attempt to increase rankings.

Social isn’t just about gaining links

It is important to understand that social media isn’t purely about gaining links but is about providing valuable content, interaction and engagement with your customer, client or prospect base. As a result, any social media strategy needs to seriously consider the SEO opportunity, but should not be guided by it.

Defining the success of Social Media however cannot be based on the weighting that search engines give to social media activities alone and how these affect keyword positions. If social media is about providing valuable content, then it is the potential for fans and followers to share and link to this content which makes it such a valuable asset to SEO; building links to your social profile pages and your website in turn. This valuable social content also drives traffic and builds your company profile, brand and image in the wider context, demonstrating benefits over and above making gains within the rankings.

So in response to the proposition, yes, social media can be (and will become even more) effective for SEO, but being short-sighted about its benefits and not integrating as part of a wider strategy is ultimately, a mistake. If you can develop an integrated social media strategy, it is possible to gain significant advantages from your social media space, not purely for SEO but for your branding, lead generation and client nurturing efforts.

2. Simplicity is elegance
The graphical elements of web design and the spatial relationships on your web pages play an important role. Visual appeal means more than just attractive graphics and vibrant illustrations; the form and overall theme of the site are crucial, and must be both attractive and uncluttered. There should be a natural flow to the navigation of the site, and any good designer knows this.
The simpler and more elegant the design of a website, the less time it will take to load. Consumers (and search engines) quickly move on from sluggish sites, and those vital seconds could mean a potential customer hits that back button in their browser and moves on to a competitor. The best form and design can also help cater to consumers increasingly using their smartphones for browsing.

3. Your website is worthless if no one can find it
Unless a business is an already established brand, with years of marketing budget spend behind it, the chances are most traffic will get to their site through a search engine. Search engine optimisation (SEO) should be considered in all elements of the design process. Working with a web designer who understands what your site needs to climb search engine rankings and generate traffic could earn your business back those design fees, thanks to the extra income an optimised site might generate

nearperfect media specialise in more than just design and development, we can create bespoke designs that are SEO friendly. Learn more by giving us a call.

• Meets the needs of sales and marketing
• Is compelling
• Can be created quickly
• Can be created cost-effectively
• Supports the sales cycle

We covered a lot of ground in our discussion. But I’ve put together some of the main tips and takeaways here as a summary.

Understand your audience:
Whether you create content to raise awareness of your products and services, establish thought leadership, increase your search rankings, feed your social media engine, or nurture your leads, remember that your ultimate goal is to generate sales leads. It’s a point many marketers lose sight of.

TO DO:
Start by analysing your sales funnel:

• What sales objections and questions do you typically encounter for each stage of the sales funnel?
• Who are you speaking to if you had to categorise them by persona?
• Do you have content that addresses their objections or their questions for every stage?

A big portion of the content will be used by the sales reps and not just for your marketing efforts. So the key steps here are:

• Determine your personas.
• Understand your buying cycles.
• Map your content to your funnel.Fill any gaps you find with new and relevant content.
• Create alignment with sales

Marketing and sales may not qualify leads the same way. You need to have a handle on the differences so you can create content that addresses the needs of both marketing and sales.

TO DO:
Sit down with your senior sales leadership and perhaps a top individual performer to discuss what signs they look for in a lead at every stage of the sales cycle. Obvious signs may be job title or company size, but there may also be smaller signs — like specific customer pain points — that would equally qualify them.

Assign weighted values to each qualifier. You’ll soon learn what is important to the sales cycle, and you can then create content as well as calls to action that will help you determine if a prospect qualifies as a lead.

These factors should influence your content development and promotion efforts and will quickly get sales to buy in to your efforts.Be prepared to repurpose your content
You need to balance the demands of your tight budget and the buyers’ needs to consume content in their own preferred channels and format.  Make your life easier and minimise the impact on your budge  by repurposing some of the content that you create to fit other platforms.

TO DO:
Plan to repurpose key content. For instance, if you host a webinar and record it you can:Reproduce it as a podcast.Transcribe that podcast into a pseudo-white paper.Take some of the key points in the white paper and turn them into a blog post.

Leverage some of your sound-bite worthy quotes from any of these assets for social media traffic generation.

Now you have at least four pieces of content from the one piece you spent time and money on to create. With all of the content you’ve just created, your website looks more impressive and credible, and your prospects have more options for consuming your content through their preferred channels.Cross-promote whenever possible
In any business field, there is only so much that is new and content creation-worthy at a given time. Even the best writers can get writer’s block and find it hard to create new materials. You can overcome these issues by using content created by others to inspire your own content development efforts.

TO DO:
Share content you find with others by using your own words and points of view to create more robust and interactive conversations with your audience.

Some ideas:
If you see a great video or read a great white paper, create a blog post that highlights what you learned from those materials or record a podcast that reviews key lessons from your own perspective. Always be sure to attribute the content to the original author or provide a link, if possible.

Check out the associated discussion forums (including those on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) and comment on relevant articles and share your perspective, making sure to refer back to any supporting content you’ve created that can add value to the discussion.Use technology to create efficiencies

There are many ways you can use technology to make your job easier and scale your time more efficiently. This is especially true when creating and promoting your content.

TO DO:
If you have a Mac computer, you can use some of its free programs like iMovie, or GarageBand to create videos or podcasts  or to turn a video into a podcast and vice-versa.

If you’re a PC user, free, open-source programs like Audacity work very well for creating podcasts.

Don’t be afraid to use your webcam to generate YouTube quality content videos (just be sure to use good lighting and incorporate your points concisely).

Rather than being a slave to your social media networks, tools like HootSuite can help you distribute your content-based promotions across multiple social platforms at all times of the day using its scheduling capabilities.

While these points summarise what we discussed, I want to add one more key point for consideration: Create a content calendar. For such a complex and important discipline as content marketing, it can be overwhelming to tackle the whole job in one piece. So after you have completed an analysis of your content needs, schedule each action you need to complete to reach your goal. You’ll find the process to be far less daunting and more affordable once you understand it doesn’t need to be done overnight.

It is a constant advert for the sophistication of its owner. An indication of the kind of person or company it represents. For many it will be the first contact that they have with your organisation.
You want them to think ‘nice jacket’.  Not ‘that looks warm!’, or ‘did your mum buy you that’ and certainly not ‘that’s rubbish’.

Cheap websites are bad
For an average business person a website is:

• An essential part of their sales and marketing processes
• A catalogue of company information
• A statement of what the business has achieved
• AND a portal for it’s customers.

For someone willing to create a cheap website it is a collection of HTML pages, put together with little regard for the needs of the client and a chance to make a quick buck from someone trying to start a business. With the exception of a few sites they are tricky to manage, hard for customers to use and unreliable. They are also a quick fix which cause their owners problems when they go wrong.
Buying a site like this is the equivalent of going up a mountain in an old cardigan
It will offer little support. It’s deficiencies will harm your chances of reaching the top. And you’ll wish you had started with something more suitable.As a customer commissioning any sort of website is a leap of faith; so why will spending make it more likely that you will be successful?

Planning?
Cheap website providers cut back here when this is the most important stage. Business people tend to know their business well but building a website is different to any other company purchase. Unless you already work in web you will need:
• Expert advice on how to communicate your business to an online audience
• Help with structuring your site journey so that your traffic actually leads to some sort of outcome
• Someone to explain how to use your website going forward to make it work for you
• Advice on how new developments in web technology could help you.

WARNING: Failure to deliver a well functioning website will reflect badly on you even if

(i) your initial budgets were insufficient (ii) you were charged with bringing in a project with no training or guidance (iii) the person you chose to plan your project didn’t contribute a solitary idea.

Avoid Dodgy Execution
“By keeping costs to a minimum we help your business get off the ground fast..

”The second half of this sentence is often omitted:
“…and in the process completely disregard any requirements you might have for a CMS or web platform”

Making sure that your website is built on the right software is important. A website needs to be an extension of your existing brand and business; so if your customers are used to a level of service which is not replicated on your website you’re in trouble. Spending that little bit extra can mean that you get a well made CMS which ranks well in search engines. It will be easier to manage and add content too, which will make the job of managing your website easier and faster.

Support
|It is unlikely that someone who is willing to build a website for £500 will have a well drilled customer services team. This seems obvious but it is often forgotten!!.

Users’ demands from websites can change on a weekly, daily or even hourly basis and when this happens you need to be able to act fast. By choosing an agency with a permanent staff of account handlers you will be able to explain your change of requirements quickly and get qualified advice on how to gain an advantage or avert a catastrophe. If you don’t have that constant network of support you could be waiting days to move on a huge opportunity or be twiddling your thumbs for a week while your reputation goes down the toilet.

Conclusions
Buying a website is very much like buying a jacket:

• It needs to be reliable
• It needs to do a job
• It needs to look good
- It should ideally be guaranteed
• It should be comfortable
- It should be customisable
• Other people should look at it
• You should feel proud to own it
• If you have a bad one people will remember it for a long long time

Either way is fine, it’s just beneficial to set expectations early on so that you can make sure you have the right agency on board. All too often, companies leave hugely important branding and messaging decisions in the hands of their web team – and if you’ve engaged a traditional web design agency, this may or may not be their bag.

Web Design agencies come in all different shapes and sizes. Some are creatively focused, meaning their portfolio is a impressive showcase of beautiful web design; other agencies may have a strong technical edge, allowing them to knock out CMSs in their sleep and always be able to execute high quality technical solutions to help your business. Others may have a strong SEO advantage, and claim to get you the right traffic visiting the site. But out of all these strengths, these can easily be fairly redundant unless you can define a strong brand position, clear messaging strategies and clarity around what you, or what your services are. A full service agency, such as nearperfect, is proud be be able to offer all of the above.

However, not all prospects realise when they set out on their web design journey just how important it is to either a) have a very clear and defined brand positioning strategy or b) know if their chosen agency has the experience, and while web agencies worth their salt have had to adapt and add branding, positioning and marketing expertise to their team in order to pitch with any confidence as a full service agency, many haven’t.

Don’t confuse the two briefs

It’s a tall ask to expect an traditional web agency to be able to come up with the correct messaging, tone of voice, or service proposition alongside a standard web design project, it takes time to do correctly and needs to be valued as an important step. This is where most SME websites fail to make any real impact – when they were designed, the wrong people were asked to do the wrong jobs. If a website is poor, it’s more than likely that the brief didn’t explore in any real depth the brand and positioning strategy, or the web agency didn’t have the experience or budget to fill the gap and meet the expectation.

Taking the appropriate time to understand the different elements of brand strategy is key to ensure the success of a web project.

Take a look at the list below, if you have a very clear idea for each, then you’re about to give a dream brief to your agency! If it’s clear that perhaps some more thought needs to be considered, then bear that in mind when looking for, or briefing your web team. It’s important a clear vision is either defined using the help of a full service agency, or thought about prior to thinking about a web project. The biggest mistake is to confuse a humble web design exercise with something of greater importance. Web Brand Strategy Elements

The Company

• What is the current situation with the business?
• What’s the long term vision?
• What’s the nearer-term mission?
• Cultural values?
• Business goals?

The Customer

• Who are the audience groups?
• What are their desires / goals / beliefs and habits?
• What are their needs?

The Market

• What is the marketplace in which you are competing?
• Are there any market trends to consider?
• Who are the traditional and non-traditional competitors?
• What are the industry, category and segments in which you compete?

Category and Position

• What’s your company differentiation?
• What is the single differentiating idea you intend to own in the minds of your customers?

Messaging

• What’s the brand promise?
• What are your key messages and support points?

Experience

• What is the company providing and what are the benefits that customers can expect to enjoy from them?

If you would like to kick off a web project, or positioning exercise, please get in touch and we’ll help you to get your marketing defined and your website generating quality leads.

• It can deliver the message clearly. Not too many business owners are aware that good branding is actually a good method of communication. If the design of the brand is right, it can deliver the message to the customers even without the aid of expensive advertising. That is why it is necessary to do extensive research with respect to the needs of the customers to create a brand that is not only suited to their needs, but can also deliver a message to them. When the connection is developed, the customers are no longer mere customers but clients.

• It can create business credibility. For many business owners, credibility is not developed overnight. It is a product or service of continuous innovation, aggressive marketing campaigns and delivering the promised excellence in service or products. As the credibility of the company grows to a deeper level, the clients can easily associate the brand with the company. When the brand is registered in the minds of the people, the credibility of the company began to be established.

• It can create a connection between the product and the client. In almost all cases, people can easily find a connection with their favourite brands. This is simply because in all areas of human life, good products and services have become the silent witnesses of their success and failures in life. This is how important a brand is to a company. In fact, a well-thought of brand can surely develop a strong tie between the company and the countless clients who are continuing to patronise the company’s products and services.

• It helps motivate the buyer. As previously said, branding helps develop connection between the product and the clients. When the connection is strong, the brand can be a good motivator for the clients to continuously purchase the products or services. This is one of the amazing results of the relationship between the company and the clients. This is only possible, however, if the company has a unique and appealing brand that people can easily associate themselves with.

Surely, there are other ways to become successful in any business endeavour, but there is nothing more certain than having a recognisable, appealing and unique brand that customers/buyers and clients can easily associate themselves with. The importance of having a brand is the key to having a successful business.

The growth of social media:

Years to Reach 50 millions Users:
Radio: 38 Years
TV: 13 Years
Internet: 4 Years
iPod: 3 Years
Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months
iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months
(Source: Socialnomics, Erik Qualman)

Sceptical about social media? Don’t be. Take a look at this video to see some interesting facts about the global growth of social media, who’s using it and its proliferation, especially Facebook and Twitter. It’s just over 4 minutes long and worth a watch. Sound not essential.

So how can social networking marketing work for your business?

If you’re reading this, you can see the potential that social media could make to your business, but finding the right way to use it for your brand or business is critical. With social media, it’s all about interaction and it’s immediate. Your fans and followers are your biggest advocates, promoting your services and products at the touch of a button.

Get it right, and you’ve got a great channel for promotion, driving sales and increasing brand awareness, customer interaction and customer engagement in your brand or business. It’s a marketers dream and should be part of every digital marketer’s marketing plan.

Social Media Strategy

Our social networking marketing services can help you develop a social media strategy that’s right for your business and that dovetails into your existing marketing strategy and business objectives. Whether you’re looking to create a loyal fan base to help disseminate your messages or you want to increase sales through time sensitive promotions, we can help.

Getting started with social media

If you’re a complete social media novice, don’t worry. We offer a ‘getting started’ package where we get you set up on Facebook and Twitter and generate a fanbase/followers for your business. We’ll also train you on how to use Facebook and Twitter, so you’re confident on how to run your own successful campaigns.

Why not call us today on 01420 556108 to find out more about how we can help you get started with social networking for your business.

•    MobileMe is being revamped with cloud storage features.
•    The iPad 2 is a ho-hum update. It’s more of a speed bump than a redesign.
•    The iPad 3 is the one to get excited about, and it’s on track for release later this year.
The Apple staffer, who asked to remain anonymous for obvious reasons, said the new MobileMe service will store music, TV shows, and films that were purchased from the iTunes store. The staffer also said that there was talk inside Apple of being able to upload all your music and videos to the cloud whether it was purchased from iTunes or not. However, they couldn’t confirm whether this will be rolled out or not. Before Apple bought it, the LaLa music service allowed users to upload music to an online locker for streaming to any device. There has been a lot of speculation that Apple would roll LaLa’s service into iTunes to create a streaming music service.

The Apple staffer declined to give details about the iPad 2 or 3, but said:
“For the iPad 2 don’t get your hopes up too high. That’s all I’m going to say. They’ve had a number of problems along the way, and the third-generation iPad is the one to make a song and a dance about.”
The iPad 2 is expected to thinner and lighter than the first iPad. It will have both front- and rear-facing cameras for FaceTime videoconferencing and for photos and video.

It will have a larger, beefier speaker but the screen is expected to be the same resolution as the first iPad — no super high-res screen for this update.

It will have a faster chip and more RAM, and it will likely have a Qualcomm dual-mode wireless chip for connecting to both GSM and CDMA data networks.