This video from Google gets across the point that an “eCommerce system and payment gateway” shouldn’t be too intrusive; and you could be losing sales if it is.

Equally your eCommerce website shouldn’t be messy and cheap looking – you need to build the customer’s trust for them to buy from you. Remember – competitors are only a few clicks away online, not a walk down a different street. Quite amusing video.

Deserve to be Liked by Google Search

We sometimes get asked if we will do “a bit of SEO” for websites that look like they were put together by the owner’s youngest pimply offspring in 1995 and hardly touched since. Typically the website has the seasoned delights of: bad looking and pixellated images riddled with artifacts, unprofessional fonts (see “why you shouldn’t use comic sans“), coloured fonts, hopeless navigation, unbalanced elements, empty pages, broken links, cheesy clichés, boring, nasty, broken, slow, pretentious, confusing, etc, etc.

What I try to get across is that no amount of onsite SEO, offsite backlink building, or social engagement is going to alter the fact that the website is a criminally nasty and cheap design, if it can be called a design – more like a dog’s breakfast.
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I’ve just added an online ticket booking system for a client we manage the website for. Nice and simple for the client to use and administer, and as the events are very popular it allows advance booking even further in advance. Which is clearly good for our client as he has the comfort of knowing which shows to promote more, and can sell more than just “next show” tickets – all future show tickets.

For customers there’s less disappointment now; as shows are always sell outs and late comers end up missing out – now they can book well in advance from their computers, mobiles, iPads, etc.

Online event ticket booking systems can handle sports, gyms, shows, gigs, running events, etc. They all have the ability to build up a database of customers – for emailing campaigns. And some have the option to add in extras to the buying process – E.G. sell other good at point of sale to increase average customer revenue  – t-shirts, posters, whatever customers might be interested in.

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An interesting video for all businesses and marketing departments to watch, it was made to promote the book Socialnomics. The video is basically a slideshow of interesting facts about social media, (this is V2 updated in 2011).

Points to watch out for are – the number of years it took for a new thingamajig to gain 50 million users :

• Radio 38 Years
• TV 13 years
• Internet 4 years
• AND Facebook only took one year to gain 200 million users!

WATCH THIS VIDEO :-
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We installed an eCommerce system on one of the Masai websites. Refining product descriptions and cleaning up multiple photos per product, together with working out shipping costs took quite some time.

If you have more than 20 products you really need to have them detailed on an Excel spreadsheet; – top row – product number, name, full description, price, weight, product options, stock quantity, etc.

The spreadsheet data can then be imported into the eCommerce catalog, you then format the descriptions and set up the individual product options. And triple check everything.

The image on the left shows a sample product page – main product photo, title, description, price, optionals – some of which change the price, enlargeable thumbnails of extra photos. Click the image to see the actual webpage.

Work out your packaging and shipping costs for each product too. For the UK – FedEx have different rates for England, Scotland, Ireland, Northern Island, Channel Islands – there isn’t one UK rate.

I found this interesting Slideshow from JWT all about a powerful emotion called FOMO – the fear of missing out.

Brands can make use of the existence of FOMO to fine-tune messaging, offers, contests and more to tap into fears of missing out. Altho there is no cure for the common FOMO, businesses, marketeers and brands can focus on easing it, escalating it, making light of it or even turning it into a positive.

Do you fear your business is missing out by not getting a better website and marketing online effectively? – If you think so – call me on +44 (0) 1543-415423

See the SLIDESHOW: Read more…

We’ve been busy with a few new sites this last month: three for Masai Omega Automotive and one for KP Events.

Masai / Omega manufacture a range of high quality Land Rover accessories. In addition to web and graphic design Masai wanted an instructional video, an eCommerce system and some copy writing too.

KP Events needed their old website modernised – in fact both clients took advantage of our excellent Wake Up Your Website Service.

The KP Events website now looks radically different and the owners are 100% happy. The brief was basically – make it blue, lively, modern, neat, clearer navigation, and make the back-end easier to use too.

For both sites we did a lot work in Photoshop – cleaning up photos, making graphics, cleaning logos, making sprites and route maps, etc. Also created a few PDFs.

For both website designs we used the highly customisable and flexible WordPress content management system, and we manage all these site on an ongoing basis – regularly adding new content, new events, new products, updates, etc.

We recently made a video for Masai / Omega Automotive, basically an instructional video of how to fit one of their flagship products – The Masai Panoramic Tinted Windows to a Land Rover Defender. That was a very windy day! And its not easy filtering out wind noise.

Like many things, you get what you pay for when hiring a web designer, but the resultant website and its ability to achieve your business objectives is very much dependent upon YOUR input too.

Let’s use the analogy of custom building a desirable house……

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We came up with the idea for our brilliant Wake up Your Website service after being asked to create a better website design and brand image for The Stroke Comedy Club in Lichfield, Staffordshire. www.strokecomedy.com

The website was old fashioned, badly laid out, had slow loading images, didn’t portray the quality of the club and its massive success, and the business owner was not enjoying adding updates or promoting it. So we had a meeting and started planning the improvements.

As you would expect, the revamped site’s function is to quickly give details of forthcoming shows but we also wanted to include everything that people would want to know – how to get tickets, directions, who’s played there before, what the club is like, etc. Read more…