Archive for the ‘NEWS’ Category
Written on July 14, 2010
Euro Food Machinery Ltd are one the major suppliers of food processing machinery and equipment in the UK and they required a website design that reflected their high, professional standards of service. Our design was clean, with colours that relate to the company’s image whilst the site is easy to navigate and showcases the companies suppliers to visitors.
Features within the site include a slideshow, Google Map and Contact Form as well as NECSES Webdesign’s inclusive Word Press Content Management System, full search engine optimisation of the website and W3C compliant XHTML.
Testimonial
“I am absolutely delighted with this new Website designed and created by NECSES Webdesign. The whole process was fast and hassle free, the ideas fresh and modern. I would have no hesitation using NECSES Webdesign again in the future and would recommend them to anybody wanting to dramatically improve their web presence.”
Paul Sandlan, Euro Food Machinery Ltd
Written on June 30, 2010
Capricorn Carpets in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk required a website design that reflected their flooring products. Our design was simple, yet reflects the company’s high quality products, professionalism and helpful and informative service to it’s customers.
Features within the site include an image browser, Google Map and Contact Form as well as NECSES Webdesign’s inclusive Word Press Content Management System, full search engine optimisation of the website and W3C compliant XHTML.
Written on June 30, 2010
ORLA Direct in Suffolk, the UK Distributor of ORLA keyboards and organs required a website design that matched the manufacturers in colour but gave a distinct feel of the quality of their products. The site also needed to enable ORLA’s customers to view their demonstration videos and join their mailing list as well as give ORLA direct full control over the management of their website.
These functions were achieved utilising a Word Press content management system and the Vimeo video sharing website giving ORLA Direct full control of their website.
Full search engine optimisation of the website and W3C compliant XHTML are standard features of NECSES Webdesign’s websites
Written on June 25, 2010
Many site owners make the mistake of building a website without laying out a clear plan for their online business. This is a sure set-up for failure. There are 1000s of abandoned sites on the internet due to lack of careful planning.
Before designing your website you should ask yourself some questions to avoid making mistakes down the road.
1. What Are Your Business Goals?
It’s easy to say, “I want to make money,” however, this is not a great motivator. Think of a deeper motivation that you feel passionate about e.g. “I want to have the financial freedom to spend more time with my kids as they are growing up.”
2. What’s the Purpose of Your Website?
This is the question most visitors will ask when accessing your website. Your home page must clearly explain the purpose and benefits of the products and/or services you are offering.
3. What Type of Products or Services Will You Sell?
Research the marketability of your products or services by doing keyword research. Use the free Google Keyword Tool to find out how many searches your main keywords receive every month. If there are no searches, it means there is not much demand and therefore not worth marketing.
If it is a very competitive market (millions of searches per month), it may be difficult to stand out from your competitors and create a profitable online business.
4. How Many Products Will You Sell From Your Website?
This will determine how many pages your website will have. If you’re only selling one product or service, you may only need 4 web pages e.g. Home, Product (or Services), About, Contact. If you’re selling 100s of items, you will need a database driven site to store and manage all of them.
5. How Many Variables Does Your Product Have?
Variables may include size, color, type, sku#, shipping, tax? Make sure your shopping cart allows you to include these variables.
6. How Will You Accept Online Payments?
To accept credit card payments online, you will need a shopping cart, merchant account, payment gateway and SSL certificate for secure transactions. This means you will have monthly fees and processing fees every time a customer purchases something from your website.
A less expensive option for accepting payments online is the Paypal shopping cart. You don’t need to purchase a separate merchant account, shopping cart, payment gateway and secure certificate. For a small processing fee it takes care of all this in one place.
7. Do You Have a Web Hosting Plan?
Your website needs to be hosted on a server for it to be available online. Select a hosting plan that has sufficient space for all your files and bandwidth to receive 1000s of visitors each month. Make sure you have the flexibility to upgrade your plan should you need more space and bandwidth.
8. Will You Need to Maintain the Website Yourself?
Asking this question before the design will determine what software your designer will use to build your website. If it only consists of a few web pages which don’t need regular updating, then use software such as Dreamweaver to build it. It creates clean code and you will have only a few files.
If your website has 100s of pages, consider a content management system such as WordPress, Joomla or Zen Cart. They all enable 100s of items to be stored in a database. The website can be managed (add, edit, or delete items or pages) by logging into an administration area.
9. Do You Have a Marketing Plan?
To create a profitable online business you must create a plan to promote it. Some methods may include, search engine marketing, pay-per-click, article marketing, press releases, social media, video marketing, etc. Website promotion needs to be done frequently and consistently to be effective.
10. How Will You Monitor Your Website Statistics?
Check if your web hosting plan includes site statistics (e.g. AW Stats). If not, create a Google Analytics account and insert the code on your web pages. It will track how many daily, weekly, monthly, yearly visitors you receive, where they are coming from and what keywords are being used to find your site in the search engines.
If you answer these 10 questions first, you’ll avoid the pitfalls of designing and building a website and increase your potential of creating a profitable online business. If you have any questions, NECSES Webdesign will be able to help you decide what is best for you and your business. They can be contacted by clicking here.
Written on June 10, 2010
Hooves to Paws are a new Dog Walking and Horse Care business based in Chippenham, Suffolk. They wanted a web site that offered control over the content and allowed them to expand the site as their business grows. They also had a very clear idea of how the website should be designed, and NECSES Webdesign’s designers worked with them to produce a clean, exciting and memorable website using a Pluck Content Management System which is an ideal CMS for start up businesses, enabling Hooves to Paws to edit and add/remove pages, text and images as well as manage their own SEO (cutting out the need for additional Optimisation costs).
Written on June 9, 2010
Many small business owners struggle with the seemingly overwhelming task of managing their web site. There always seems to be so much to do, yet no time to do it all (something we know all too well). This brief article should help to highlight the key aspects of web site management that will help them gain the most from their web site with the time that they have available.
The following ten tips are key to maintaining a successful web site. Follow these and your site will do better. Nothing will guarantee that a web site will be successful as there are simple too many different factors that impact web success – but as a general rule these ten tips will always lead to better performance.
- Content
- Freshness
- No Tricks
- Links
- Structure
- Accessibility
- Quality Code
- URLs
- Style
- Images
1. Content
Content is key!
Almost all the search engines scan a sites content now – almost ignoring things like meta tags. The more content you have on your site the more the search engines can scan – but there is more to it then that: people like content too. Many people measure a web site’s success by the number of visitors it gets – so ask yourself – why would people come to your web site? Do you offer them interesting and informative information that relates to your product or service? if not, why would they come?
Relevant content and lots of it is a key for a successful web site. There is always room for more content on a web site, and you can never have too much.
Take this article you are reading for example, while it’s fairly useful information for many of our visitors, it’s also additional content for our web site – and will serve to help our site do better. Writing articles about aspects of your industry is a great way to generate content.
Set asside an hour a day (or at least an hour a week) to devote to adding new content to your web site.
2. Freshness
Keep it current
Having lots of content is great – but if it is all three years old it’s not going to look like your site is much of a priority. The search engines actually track this. They monitor how frequently your site changes as they visit it for indexing. The more often it changes the better your rank in the freshness category.
What constitutes change? Pretty much anything – which is why keeping a BLOG or adding frequent news articles to your web site usually produces such good results. It is also the reason why having something as simple as rotating content and the current date on every page has been shown to make a difference.
3 No Tricks
Don’t try to outsmart the Search Engines – Eventually you’ll loose
Many web design companies promise success through the use of tricks, backdoors, and special tactics designed to sneak a web site into a top position rapidly. Something, of course, that the search engines are constantly battling to defeat. Why play the game? As the search engines find the cheaters they will plug the holes and a rank (that usually costs a pretty penny to achieve) will immediately be lost.
Rather, follow the recommendations of the search engines – most set out rules for web masters that outline what they would like to see in a web site. By following the rules the engines are actually battling all the cheating web sites and working to promote the sites that follow the rules – they are fighting FOR you!
4 Links
Links both in and out must be relevant
There has been a lot of talk about link exchanges – people linking to others merely to gain a higher rank (hmmm this smacks of breaking tip 3) if you are going to link to someone and/or ask them to link to you – ask yourself: is it relevant?
Any old link is not going to help you much – search engines will look at who is linking to you – they also pay very close attention to how many links you have off your web site on a page. This is being done to try and drop sites with pages of links (do you have a links page on your web site?)
It is far better to have relevant links places throughout your web site – on only those pages that specifically the topic that relates to the page being linked to.
Unfortunately you can’t exert too much control over the way that other sites link to yours but it is worth looking at how a site usually links to others before to specifically go requesting a link from them.
5 Structure
Organize your web site and everyone will thank you.
Both the search engines and your web visitors prefer a web site that is well structured. The search engines due to their very nature (being computer programs) must break down all web sites into elements based on the structure of the pages. People, so frequently rushing to find the specific information they are looking for, rarely read through web pages but rather scan headings and bulleted lists to find the detailed sections of interest. In both cases a well structured site will be far better received then one that is a mish-mosh of information haphazardly thrown together.
This is simple to do – but all too often missed. Make headings, use the correct coding tags for them, organize sections of content into groups, and use bold and bulleted lists to present key points.
Keep in mind when writing paragraphs of text that most humans will not read them unless they are specifically titled with a headline that matches what they are looking for.
6 Accessibility
A web site that speaks to all is better then a site that only speaks to some.
Tips no 6 and 7 are closely related: The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) provides a list of guidelines for how to create web sites that are accessible to as many people (and systems) as possible. Think about your web site – can someone with a visual disability (perhaps even something as simple as colour-blindness) still get information about your product or service? If not, how do you feel knowing that you have just excluded a vast segment of the population from accessing your web site?
7 Quality Code
Well coded web sites perform better.
Many small business owners don’t have too much control over the code used to create their web site – but it is still important to know how important it may be. Standard compliant code that has been checked for errors is easier for the search engines to assimilate. It is more widely visible across varied platforms (computer types) and in different browsers.
Ensure your web designer is writing standard compliant code that is validated for errors. You can also check your own web site using free on-line tools from the W3C (The World Wide Web Consortium – the standards body that administers Internet technologies). All NECSES Webdesign websites comply to W3C Standards – giving our customers peace of mind.
8 URLs
Prudent choice of URLs will impact your web site’s performance
Professional web designers should already know this – but if you are using a content management system to build your web site, or portions of it, it is important to understand the significance of the URL used to access pages on your web site.
Search engines look at the address of every page on your web site and try to extract key-words from the content of the url. For example, you may have a page about “Widgets” on your web site called “somewhere.com” creating the page with a filename of widgets.html will give a better keyword rank then page6.html
This is a fairly subtle point but makes a significant difference for most search engines. It can also make it much easier for people that are typing in a URL to access a specific page of your web site. Notice the URL for this web page – it’s called http://www.necseswebdesign.co.uk/top-ten-small-business-web-site-marketing-tips/ for a reason!
9 Style
Looks do matter – but perhaps not the way you think…
In the grand scheme of things the “looks” of a web site in the classic sense are not really that important – honestly! Once people have looked at a web site for a few minutes they will quickly discard their first impression (based on looks) and move immediately to asking – is this site giving me the information I need – and can I find it quickly (going back to tips 1 – content and 5 – structure)
So what are we on about with style? Simple – ensure the style of your site makes it easy to read. Avoid things like black backgrounds with white text (inverse text is harder to read) and ALL CAPS (humans read by identifying word shapes – writing in all caps forces people to read every letter and quickly becomes annoying – plus on the net it is used as a typographic method of indicating you are shouting) font.
10 Images
Selling a product – better make sure it looks good
If you are selling something that has a visual representation – then professional looking photography is key. Even a multi-million dollar resort will not look good if the photographs are amateurish. If you care about what you have to sell, then it’s worth investing in some professional photographs to show people what you have. Remember, on-line people can’t get a hold of your product – so you need to give them some really good photographs so that they can feel confident that it meets their needs.
Written on June 9, 2010
Interesting news surfaced recently regarding Microsoft’s Bing Search to be the leading search engine placed on Apple’s newest iPhone. Previously running through Google’s search, it appears TechCrunch has some news and further sources who have regarded the credibility of Microsoft taking over the search. The news seems very good for Microsoft as trying to compete against Google as a major search engine is not an easy thing to do.
I don’t know how Bing is going to run on the OS, as I’ve always been a huge fan of Google. In fact, I expect to be searching through Google in almost any app.
However with Google starting to fund and truly get behind the Android market, it appears as though a split between Apple and Google was inevitable. Not sure where the market will go from here, especially considering how many apps run through Google (YouTube, Maps, etc).
Here’s further info quoted from an interesting post discussing the relationship between Apple and Google. It reads:
Multiple sources at Google tell us that in informal discussions with Apple over the last few months Apple expressed dismay at the number of core iPhone apps that are powered by Google. Search, maps, YouTube, and other key popular apps are powered by Google. Other than the browser, Apple has little else to call its own other than the core phone, contacts and calendar features.
So at this point I’m a bit torn, only time will truly tell what’s going to happen. It was discussed in TechCrunch’s post that Google is paying Apple $100 million a year for the search rights for the iPhone, along with the rights to serve search ads within the app. Not to say this would be going away any time soon, unless Microsoft happens to offer a better deal.
Written on May 30, 2010
Guy McGregor is a local councillor who wanted a website that allows him to inform people within his ward of work that he is conducting on their behalf as well as a portal for relaying latest news that may affect them.
Using Word Press as a content management system we created a simple design that allows the utilisation of a sidebars for navigation as well as advertising on the site. Features within the site include a News Blog, Gallery and contact forms. Using Word Press widgets allows the full optimisation of the website ensuring that optimisation costs are kept to a minimum whilst giving full exposure to search engines.
Testimonial
“To put it simply, ‘WE LOVE IT’! Your blending of the statue into the picture of Endeavour House really does set the website off. It produces such a fantastic tone – you’ve done an amazing job! Guy is also delighted that he is able to add pages to the website himself.”
Philip Mutton, Assistant to Guy McGregor.
Written on April 29, 2010
NECSES Webdesign’s sister organisation NECSES Events needed a re-designed website that had four main requirements;
- To promote their range of Professional Development Fairs and Business to Business Fairs
- Serve as a source of information for exhibitors and visitors to the fairs
- Generate revenue by advertising exhibitors on the site
- Create a memorable design along with logo creation
Using Word Press as a content management system we created a simple design that allows the utilisation of both sidebars for navigation as well as advertising on the site. Features within the site include a News Blog, Gallery and contact forms. Using Word Press widgets allows the full optimisation of the website ensuring that optimisation costs are kept to a minimum whilst giving full exposure to search engines.
Testimonial
“We wanted a vibrant design for our website, whilst also allowing the opportunity to advertise exhibitors services within the site. NECSES’s website designers gave us just what we needed, and optimised the website so that within 2 weeks of launch we were appearing on the front page of Google for the UK as a whole.”
Beata Stachyra, Events Manager, NECSES Events.
Written on March 26, 2010
Floors2You in Thetford, Norfolk required a website design that was a bright, vibrant reflection of their flooring products. Our design used primary, bold colours and used large menu buttons to draw the users attention to the carpeting company’s helpful and informative service to it’s customers.
Features within the site include an e-commerce bed shop and on-line cost calculator as well as NECSES Webdesign’s inclusive Content Management System, full search engine optimisation of the website and W3C compliant XHTML.
Testimonial
“NECSES Webdesign understood our needs straight away, and came up with a design that completely reflects our vision of Floors2You at a much lower cost than a previous designer was offering us. Also, the fact we can add new products and manage our own SEO means we are saving money, excellent.”
Chris Lambe, Managing Director, Floors2You.
