When it comes to advertising in any form of the word, both online and offline, companies have to make sure they are making the most of every single last penny they are spending. Large or small you have to make sure your getting maximum return on investment.

Quite often we get asked to do a review for our clients to demonstrate how we can help to cut their costs. This involves looking through everything they do in order to attract new clients, or to increase brand exposure. Nine times out of Ten, we quickly find ineffective and insufficient avenues being taken. Take for example the online version of the big YELLow book we all have delivered each year. A lot of our clients used to spend hundreds if not thousands of pounds each year with next to nothing to show for their money. The reason so many people fall into this trap is the fact that they have so much trust and faith in “the book”, as that can be a very effective way to advertise, and works for a lot of people. They automatically assume, because the book has worked for them, the online equivalent will garnish similar results, and of course they are encouraged to make that assumption by their Regional Sales Manager.

This does not work! And has never worked. It is hugely expensive, and gives minimal results. It is practically impossible to see a decent return on investment for 99% of businesses. Admittedly if you have a highly profitable product, you may be one of the few disagreeing with this article. With the current financial climate very few people have a “highly profitable product”.

I will use one of our clients as an example, but for the sake of privacy I will call them “Company A”:

When we originally approached “Company A”, our “pitch” was that we could save them money, whilst increasing their client base. Intrigued, as anybody would be, they agreed for us to carry out a review. After investigating we found the following…

Spend on the YELLow website: £1400 p/a
Spend in the YELLOW book with PAGES: £2500 p/a
Newspaper advertising: £3000 p/a (£60 per week)

The great advantage we had going in, was “Company A” had done a very good job of keeping track of where their leads came from. Every single booking made reference to the source of the lead. Therefore we knew going in the effectiveness of their spend.

With some digging into the grossly over reporting statistics tool the YELLow website provides, and then having a look at the actual figures(server logs – these keep track on the actual amount of visitors that hit your website), we came to the conclusion that for the £1400 they had spent that year, they had had 67 unique visitors from the YELLow website. Thats £20.90 per unique visitor. We then went through their sales reports and found only 2 clients that had reported the YELLow website as being where they had found “Company A”. That’s a £700.00 cost per client.

Our proposal to the client was as follows:

New Search Engine Optimised website: £1200.00 (One off build charge)
Hosting cost: £60 p/a (to host 2 websites)
Money saved by eliminating the YELLow website spend: £1400 p/a

Saving £140.00 in the first year, £1340 per year after that, as building a website is a one off. Obviously people upgrade their website, but the beauty of this is you do not lose the product you already have if you decide not to, and you know you will only upgrade if it has worked!

The above does not take into consideration the overall results they are now getting through their website. They now get at least 30 leads per month (up to 60 in a good month), of which they are closing at least 75%. This is certainly far superior to 2 clients in the space of 12 months. Their website is also beating the YELLow book with PAGES hands down.

The bottom line is, having a website is the most effective form of advertising out there today. It also offers the best return on investment. Not only that but your company image is suffering if you do not have a site, or you have one that is of poor quality, which is something I will cover with another blog post sometime in the near future.

Until then…

A good example of this is when a client wants to use Flash within their website, as content on a flash website has to be scripted in the right way to be indexable by the search engines, and is normally best avoided if targetting a national audience in your SEO campaign.

Moving on we will be covering the following:

• Using cascading style sheets (CSS) to achieve the web design you want
• Best use of Flash in your website, and when you shouldn’t use it
• Image driven navigation vs. text links
• Accessiblity and compliance within your website
• Setting your websites goals and priorities
• Knowing what to expect from an experienced web developer
• Best practises in search engine optimisation

Others will be added as time goes on, but the above is an outline of what we would like to achieve with these articles.

Using cascading style sheets (CSS) to achieve the web design you want

Any web developer stuck in the dark ages of tables and image only design/layout should be hung! Using tables generates a whole lot of messy code, they completely defy all rules of content storage and retrieval by mixing design with content,  and above all, tables were not created to do this job! Why use tables for something when you have CSS, which can achieve a much tidier and better looking result.

For those who don’t understand what CSS is, here is a simple explanation:  CSS is a web techology/language created to layout and style web documents created in markup(the standard web code format). It is generally used to seperate document design from document content, which gives many benefits. The main benefit for most though is the fact that these style sheets can then be linked to with one line of code from your main document, meaning the likes of google/yahoo/bing only index your content, and not unneccessarily indexing design. This means they only have the information you want them to have.

For those with a technology phobia, please turn away now! I am going to show you the difference between the code you would use in your document to generate a 2 column layout in CSS, and then by using tables.

The CSS is not only more logical and clean, it is much shorter, making it infinite times better for search engine indexing.

The parts where it says “id=[name]” are calling design and layout elements from the CSS code where there will be matching entries to tell your web browser how to display that information.

The other huge advantage is when it comes to styling header tags. If you want the title of your content to be in a slightly bigger and bolder font, and maybe to have a different colour, you can tell the style sheet to display them however you want. The advantage being that you then wrap the text you want to display in “<h1>” tags. This not only tells your browser how to display that text, but it also tells google that that text is more important than any other text on that particular page, therefore the rest of the content should follow the same theme.

We will carry on looking into Design and Content in our upcoming series of articles.

Moving forwards we are now aiming at more targetted, easier to obtain phrases that will really help people just like you like North Wales Web Design“, find the best on the web(Brainstorm Media if you couldn’t tell!).

We have several successes for our web design and search engine optimisation clients this week, as we see Italian World in Conwy, and Folkestone Printing’s traffic on the rise. With Hallmark Limos in Llangefni, Anglesey, continuing to recieve the lions share of the traffic for “[Local Term] Limo”, we are continuing to prove who you should be spending your money with online.

Check back for ongoing news in the web design world!

When investing your hard earned cash into your new website, you should feel 100% secure that you have chosen the right web developement company.

These are a selection of what you should know before you spend your dough!

1. How long will it take? – Too often we hear nightmare stories of deposits being made, and then 2 months down the line they still have no website! If you like wasting money on banter, don’t ask this question.
2. What input will you have? – Will the designer throw a paddy fit when you say you don’t like what they have done? Are you able to have a creative input?
3. How will the website be updated? – Is the site on a Content Management System so you can update it yourself? If not how much does the developer charge per update?
4. Will the site be Search Engine friendly? - This is incredibly important, as your website is just a brochure without the search engines knowing about it. The site can be built with search engines in mind, but this does not necessarily mean you will have an ongoing Search Engine Optimisation contract. This leads us to the next question…
5. Does the site include ongoing Search Engine Optimisation? – Ongoing SEO can get expensive, and is rarely part of the deal. This is an essential part of a successful online marketing campaign so make sure you know everything going forward. Nobody can guarantee rankings, not even Google themselves, as there search engine is not controllable by the living breathing types! Be wary of ANY company that offers a money back guarantee, as you DON’T get a full refund of your money. It’s normally a small percentage based on which page in the search rankings they get you to!
6. Will your site be built to W3C standards? - There is an ongoing disagreement between various web developers of the world about whether a website should comply to the W3C standards. They need very good reasoning to not follow the standards, and “W3C standards are too restrictive for our technology” is not a valid excuse. ALL web technology can comply to W3C standards if done in the right way.
7. Is your site accessible? – This ties in closely with the last question. But this is essential for users with disabilities, for example if your menu jumps to different positions on each page, somebody using a screen reader(a device that allows them to zoom into to different areas of the screen) will have difficulty locating it on the next page load. It is now a legal requirement to make sure your site is accessible, and depending on your contract, it is not your web developer who will be responsible.
8. Any further costs? – Too often we hear of people being told they were only quoted for the basic website, when they thought they had the full job! Also make sure you know if your paying per hour, or a set project fee. Set project fees are always better for a lot of reasons, for example designers might not feel as creative that day, so the job will take them longer, costing you more money.
9. What after sales support is on offer? – What support is included free? Are errors resolved free of charge? Do they offer an extended support service? If so is there a minimum contract period? We normally recommend taking out upto 6 months extended support, so you know you are covered for everything while you get to grips with your new website.
10. What tuition is included? – Some development companies will include tuition free of charge as part of the deal, others will charge per hour. Make sure you know where you are with this as per hour charging can quickly mount up.

First I’d like to give you a quick run down on who we are and what we do.

We are a company based in the Gwynedd area, serving North Wales and the UK. My name is Katrina and I will be doing a blog once or twice a week to keep you informed of what we are up to and what’s going on in the world of the internet. We specialise in web design, graphic design, web development, and branding and search engine optimisation.

We have several projects being developed at the moment. Kevin our web design and graphic master has been working on developing a social networking script, so we can offer targetted community driven websites to our clients, the first on the list will be RockerFile! A social networking site for the headbangers of the world, to share music, guitar tab, and videos, and check out the latest news on their favourite bands! It’s certainly starting to look the part as well, and includes some great features like integration with Facebook, and photo tagging! He is developing a site for The Owl Box, and Casa Las Brisas, both of which are run on custom designed content management systems(CMS).

Dave our search engine optimisation (SEO) specialist is working on Italian World and Folkestone Printing, ensuring that they stay in the higher ranks of google. He also created a bespoke module for Folkestone Printing allowing their customers to upload their artwork for each product before purchase on their ecommerce website.

Next blog will be a list of do’s and dont’s when approaching a web design company for a quote, with things to look out for!