May 30th, 2011 by The Online Marketeer
Getting Irish business online
The initiative named “Getting Irish Business Online” (GIBO) is underway. Essentially what is on offer is a FREE website if you are a registered Irish Business.
What you get for Free
- A free domain name (http://www.webshed.ie for example). This includes .ie, .com and .eu
- Free hosting. You have to have your website on a server and Blacknight are providing this!
- An easy to use website builder
- A choice of 17 different themes
- Upgrades like a free picture gallery or adding Twitter/ blog feeds (FREE too!)
- €100 of Google adwords advertising
The 17 templates available to build your website. Click for larger view
Why are Webshed advertising this? Don’t you sell websites?
Absolutely. Websites are at the core of what Webshed does. What Webshed offers is significantly different though. In a previous post on website pricing I had a little rant about people offering much the same thing as the Getting Irish Business Online initiative but charging handsomely for it.
For that reason I absolutely welcome this initiative. It gets Irish business’s online that may not have otherwise invested in any web presence at all. Some if not all of the county enterprise boards will be offering training and there will be support emails sent (if you opt in).
What you don’t get with this package.
It is hard for me to write about what you don’t get with the Getting Irish Business Online package without sounding picky. This is not my intention. I think it is a great idea for the people it is aimed at.
- E-commerce possibilities (This is not shop software)
- Website Design unique to your business and taking into consideration your company colour branding (unless by happy coincidence)
- An online marketing strategy
- Advice on how to optimise your site for both visitors and search engines (heuristics and SEO)
Who should take up the offer of a free website?
The short answer is “everybody”. There are of course limitations to the software, but considering that it is costing nothing and you will have a functioning website, it is great. Will the website look really professional? That is up to you and your abilities within the framework. Will the website get you more business? That depends on how you promote it. It is a starting point and it is free. If you have been scared of setting up a website in the past because of cost or lack of IT knowledge, now is the time to jump on board. The following is my advice for companies setting up a free website…..
Advice on Setting up a free website
- Choosing your domain name: Your domain name has to match your company name or your site will be removed. This means that unless keywords that you want to be found for exist in your company name, you will have a harder time ranking for those keywords. If this is the case for your business you can set up a free external blog (follow the instructions on the main page). As an example, if your company name was Maggen Ltd and your business was furniture sales, then you could try getting the domain name as www.maggenfurniture.ie. If that got deleted you could just have www.maggen.ie and set up furniture.columnists.ie using the free blog link above. You could then use the blog to link to your main site using relevant keywords. It is not ideal, but it keeps everything free.
- Writing your content: You MUST have relevant keywords in your text. It is incredible how many sites there are that do not have words they would like to show up in Google for contained in their website text. The content must also read well to human visitors. After all, they are your customers.
- Pictures: Use sites like istockphoto or shutterstock to get good quality pictures. Neither of these services are free, but they are less expensive than hiring a photographer by a long shot! Pictures are really important for keeping visitors engaged with your website.
- Google Adwords: Your €100 of free adwords advertising is not going to last long. You will need a long term plan of action for keeping up visitor traffic. Ideally you do not want to be completely reliant on adwords or other online advertising for your traffic stream. By coming up high in Organic search results (the normal google search results) you will be getting more natural traffic. When you are ranked highly for your keywords your traffic is free, however, getting to rank highly will cost in terms of learning how to do it. This process is known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). It is a long term strategy and will reduce costs in the long run.
- Use current resources: Add your website to your email signatures, your business cards and other stationery. Put it on Linkedin if you have an account and any other professional online presence you may already have. If you have listed your website in directories in the past update them with your new website.
- Most importantly: Have a plan. Set goals for your website. You would not be in business if you had not set yourself goals. The same applies to your website. What do you want your website to do for you? How is it useful to your business and to your customers?
Tags: Advice on Setting up a free website, Blacknight hosting free websites, Free Domain Names, Free Hosting, Free Websites!, Getting Irish Business Online, Getting Irish Business Online website templates, GIBO, Webshed supports Gettting Irish Business Online Initiative, Website Design, Website Templates
Posted in Google, Marketing, Web Design, Websites | Comments Off
May 9th, 2011 by The Online Marketeer
The new Pebbles Cafe Website
We have just launched the new website for Pebbles Cafe in Greystones. The website is just part of the overall online marketing campaign that Pebbles have embarked on.
Pebbles is situated in the Blacklion Retail park (where Lidl is). They have been open since September 2010 and while I don’t drink coffee, they do a lovely hot chocolate and their food is superb!
Based on a the latest wordpress platform, work on the site has included:
- Theme design (web design)
- Copy writing
- Photography
- Social Media Integration
- Search Engine optimisation has begun too.
We are excited to have the site up and running on the same week that Pebbles Cafe becomes a Restaurant by night. Pebbles have built up a solid customer base with their breakfast and lunch menus. The new Bistro style restaurant menu is a natural progression for a cafe that has a reputation for good food and convivial surroundings.
Social Media
The meshing of online and offline social experiences blurs the line between the web and a social experience like a cafe.
Pebbles Cafe have very much embraced the digital age. Free Wifi is available, and this makes joining in fun social media experiences like foursquare that much easier.
In the coming weeks there will be exclusive offers for foursquare users. Every page on the site has both twitter and facebook buttons, making sharing your experience of Pebbles extremely easy. People can also comment on the blog which is syndicated to Twitter and Facebook.
Why use Wordpress for a site like Pebbles?
Wordpress is a very stable, well supported content management system (CMS). It makes it easy for clients to update their own website with very little training. This cuts down on ongoing costs of having to get somebody to update your website for you.
It also reduces costs greatly by comparison to a bespoke CMS. It is tried and tested with regular updates.
Most importantly, Wordpress sites tend to do well in the search engines.
As a social media platform Wordpress is second to none. No matter what functionality you want there is a probably a plugin available.
Your Business
Would a wordpress based site like Pebbles suit your business? Why not give me a call and discuss it. Here at Webshed there is a realisation that a website is much more than just a website. It needs to work for each individual client. I can talk about the web until the cows come home and am more than happy to give my advice and suggestions for a plan of action for your business.
Ian Wortley – 086 3817149
Tags: Blacklion Retail Park, Copy Writing Service, Free Wifi in Greystones, Greystones, Greystones Cafe, I don't drink coffee, Pebbles Cafe, Restaurant, Restaurants Greystones, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, Social Media, Social Media Integration, Theme Design, Web Design, Website Photography, Wordpress Sites
Posted in Blogging, Copywriting, Online Marketing, Web Design, Website Launch | Comments Off
May 4th, 2011 by The Online Marketeer
How do you set a price point in a recession?
It is very easy to make a knee jerk reaction and decide that reducing your price point is the thing that will make you competitive. This may well be the case, but bear in mind that price is almost never the sole factor in determining sales.
I may tighten my belt by having fewer decent coffees, but I am unlikely to start drinking instant coffee. This is a very small example, but I expect to pay more for my mocha than my Nescafe, and am not willing to compromise on the quality.
Likewise, if I find a mocha for €1.50 then I am going to assume that it is of inferior quality and will probably not buy it.
Price point equates to quality in our minds. Why? Because marketeers and life have taught us to expect less for less. Bear this in mind when setting your price point.
One last thing. Overpricing is a very different matter. If I see that mocha for €6 then I’m even less likely to buy it.
Tags: expect less for less, Nescafe, Price point, Price vs Quality, Setting a price point in a recession, The price of a good mocha
Posted in Marketing | Comments Off
May 3rd, 2011 by The Online Marketeer
Banking crisis, Depression, Recession, The death of the Celtic Tiger, No more fun – ever. How do I know that you are all feeling like this today? Google told me!
Google’s autocomplete feature relies on search volume and content volume (and probably a few more things) to suggest search terms as you type. The result is this…..
Woah, that's a lot of negativity. Cheers Google.
Google Autocomplete bad for brand management
It is all very amusing when you get results like that, but I would not be happy if I was Starbucks right now. The Autocomplete results for “Starbucks coffee is” are as follows…..
Is Starbucks coffee really that bad?
Google Autocomplete Manipulation
It is possible to manipulate the results for Autocomplete. However, Autocomplete manipulation falls squarely into the Black Hat list of SEO options. I would have to think that it would be worth the risk for Starbucks though.
Google Autocomplete Fail
Want to see more Google Fails? Try looking up “google is” or “i really hope you get “
Tags: Brand Management - Google Autocomplete, Google Autocomplete, Google Autocomplete Fails, Google Autocomplete Manipulation, Google Fail, Ireland is a bankrupt, Starbucks, Starbucks Coffee is
Posted in Google, Public Relations | Comments Off
May 3rd, 2011 by The Online Marketeer
For a lot of Irish companies, their website is a irregularly updated reference source for customers who already know the company exists and what it does. A website that can only be found in a search engine by typing in the company name is not attracting any new business whatsoever.
If your company name is J.Smith Ltd and you make picket fences, then you need your website (jsmith.ie for example) to show up in searches for “picket fences”, not “J.Smith Ltd”.
Make your website work harder for you
If you had an employee who was sitting around answering maybe 40 or 50 questions from existing customers a month and doing nothing else it would be a huge drain on resources for little return. You would make him or her work harder for you. Particularly since the question that person most often answers is “what is your telephone number again?”.
Why then, are so many Irish companies happy to let their website away with doing little to nothing for them?
5 Reasons why Companies let their website underperform
- Technophobia - Computers are still a relatively new phenomenon. Hard to believe for a current school leaver, but absolutely the case for those of us who are a bit older and remember when offices relied solely on paper.
- Suspicion – This links in with technophobia. Many people heard the message that they needed a website and got one. Most of those people saw little to no return for it. The reason for this is simple. They were sold a product that did not suit their purpose. Having a website is not enough on its own. It needs to be marketed. Once bitten twice shy. “Those techies sold me something that didn’t do much for me the first time, now they want me to buy something else…..”
- Resistance - This holds true for most things in life. “If it’s not broken don’t fix it” is applied to things that are actually broken (or at least not performing) far too often.
- Lack of expertise – Online marketing is not the same as marketing. The tools are different, the methods are different. Only the base principles stay the same. Nor is online marketing something that is taught to IT graduates. To be really effective you need to be a programmer, a designer and a marketer to succeed online. Very few people have all that is necessary and hiring more than one person for the function is expensive. Very often companies are left with a situation where they struggle to update their website themselves let alone use it as an effective marketing tool.
- Lack of understanding – The online world moves at such a quick pace that is can be hard to understand how it relates to your own business. Websites -> Social Media -> Cloud Computing. The hype surrounding each of those was justified, but there are still a high number of businesses that do not understand why creating a facebook page does not mean you will get visitors to it. More than that, they do not understand what they are supposed to do with any visitors they do get. “What is the point?” is a question I have heard many many times. The truth is that without defining your purpose at the outset there is very little point.
5 Steps to Make your Website Work Harder
- Assign a role to your website – This could be to attract new customers for example
- Modify your website to suit the role you assigned – Make your website user friendly. Make the process of getting a new visitor to where you want them to be simple.
- Make your design inviting – Big corporations spend millions on branding. If your budget allows you can research colour psychology and online behavioural patterns. If your budget is smaller just ensure that your finished website has a “feel” that represents your company well. It must look professional. (not boring – professional).
- Optimise your website for search engines – If you can’t be found, then you will have no visitors to work with.
- Get feedback – Relations are no good for this. You need to know what the experience was like for a customer. Did you get the results you wanted / expected? Have you increased revenue as a result? If the answer is no then use your feedback and your web statistics to formulate a better plan of action.
More information on Website Planning
In my last post I wrote more about the website planning process.
Tags: 5 reasons why companies let their website underperform, 5 steps to make your website work harder, Assign a role to your website, Lack of Expertise, Lack of Understanding, Make your web design inviting, Modify your website, Resistance, Suspicion, Technophobia
Posted in Marketing, Online Marketing, Web Design | 5 Comments »
April 26th, 2011 by The Online Marketeer
Benjamin Franklin once wrote
“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”
Planning a website is no different to anything else in business.
Planning a website is important
I sometimes find it helpful to think of a website as a completely different business doing exactly the same thing as your primary business. The reason for this is that thinking of your website as different business means putting more time and energy into it.
If you think of a website as a tack-on afterthought to your main business then you are not likely to get a return from your online investment. Certainly you are not likely to get a return that is fulfilling the potential of an online investment.
13 Steps to Planning Your Website
- Identify your goals. What do you want your website to achieve?
- Identify your target market. Are you trying to reach the same demographics as your offline business or are you using the internet to reach new markets either by location or by other factors such as age or sex?
- Consult with an expert on how to reach your target market and achieve your online goals. This is a step that is often missed. Think about your offline marketing. Do you advertise in print media like the Irish Times because you think your target market read it or because you know they do? Do you want a facebook presence because other people have one or because it will actually help your business?
- Decide on the type of website you want. Is it to be an e-commerce site where you sell products, a brochure site that literally gives a few pages of information about what your company does, or do you want it to be a tool for communicating with your customers 24/7?
- Decide who is to be responsible for your online activities. This will probably happen at an earlier stage but it is important that one person takes command of and responsibility for your website and associated projects. This person must have a very clear knowledge of the companys’ marketing direction and target demographics. It would be helpful if they have an interest and/or ability surrounding internet technologies. As a rule of thumb, it is better that this person comes from a marketing background than a computer networking background. There is often an incorrect assumption that somebody who knows a lot about connecting computers to a central server will know about all that other “IT stuff” too. Online marketing shares more with traditional marketing than server technology. If your IT department / person happens to know a bit about web technologies too then that is a bonus, but your marketing department should be in the driving seat here. With your website you have the potential to reach many multiples of the people you reach at your actual place of business. Image is everything.
- Decide on what features you want your website to have. This will be based on your goals and target market. If the purpose of the website is simply to inform, then you will not need many features, but you will need good copy. If your purpose is to engage as many potential customers as possible then you will have to build in some form of interaction. Why would one of your customers or potential customers look up your site? What would they be looking for when they got there and what would make them come back again? Do you want to collect information like email addresses for mailing lists from them? Do they want you to collect information like that from them?
- Design your website. Depending on the sort of website you need you can decide to do it yourself (you can even do it for free using tools like Joomla or Wordpress) or you can get your site professionally designed. Obviously I have a biased opinion here, but never the less, your own web surfing experience will tell you that professionally designed websites are less likely to look like your 9 year old created them. If you have the ability to create a website in line with your company image then do it yourself. If you don’t then it is time to get a professional web designer.
- Optimise your website for search engines internally (on-site Search Engine Optimisation). There are many factors that come into play for SEO. These are some of the more important ones for on-page optimisation:
- Site Copy. Well written and original copy using keywords that have been qualified as important for your website to rank for.
- Relevant Meta tags and page names. The Meta Title is particularly important. Your page names should ideally look like http://www.yoursite.com/what-i-want-to-rank-for.html when displayed in as a URL.
- Good heading tags. In particular no page should be without a h1 tag and the content must be relevant to the copy.
- No spamming. Do not stuff as many keywords into your text as you can. It may cause your site to suffer.
- Usability. It’s not only search engines you have to worry about. People are the primary cause of your site existing in the first place. Your site needs to be easy to navigate and self explanitory.
- Publish Your Website. Launch your website. Don’t forget to make a song and dance about it. A lot of effort will have gone into it at this stage.
- Start your off-page Search Engine Optimisation campaign. Really what I am talking about here is gaining links from other websites. This is hugely important. What is more important is the “quality” of those links. They should come from relevant websites and never ever come from a link farm. Google have only recently depreciated links from content farms too (article submission sites etc). Play by the rules and you will not get a nasty surprise down the road. You will need help and direction here. It is not easy.
- Consider a Pay Per Click campaign. Google Adwords or Facebook ads can drive visitors to your website. You only pay for people who actually reach your site. The bigger your budget the more people you can get through your virtual doors. Although PPC accounts for somewhere in the region of 80% of all online spend, only 15-25% of clicks come from this “non-organic” source. If you can have your site occurring at the top of the non-paid search results you will have a much better ROI. Plan to use PPC while you work on getting your site up the ranks. It can be a slow process sometimes.
- Manage your other online activities. Are you blogging, using flickr or youtube? Are your staff posting in industry forums or using Linkedin? Be clear to anybody promoting the business online on what the aims of their efforts are. Even a well intended post can turn into a PR nightmare.
- Measure your online success. Use Google Analytics or some other analytics software to measure your visitor numbers and track their usage of your website. The more information you have the easier it is to make alterations to your site that result in better user experiences.
Budgeting For a Website
It is impossible to plan a website properly without the word budget cropping up (usually often). I left it out of the 13 steps because there are several different approaches to budgeting for a website.
In my experience, a lot of smaller business’s will start with a budget figure in mind. The trouble with this is that it is like saying “I’m going to go out and buy 350 ducks. My budget for it is 1,000.” I have no idea how much ducks cost or what the associated costs for housing, feed and anything else might be.
At least with ducks I should be able to find out the market price. Websites range from a few hundred euros to thousands of euros depending on many factors. Like with buying a used car, a lot depends on what is going on “under the hood”. Since these differences may not be easy to see on the outside of a website, it is very hard to tell why you are getting quotes which could vary from between 500 and 5,000 for a website.
What I am getting at here is that pricing should not be the determining factor for your website. There has to be a cap on the budget. It would be foolish not to have one. What I would suggest is going through the planning stages above and then, once the needs have been established, getting quotes. If your current budget does not stretch to what you need to have done consult with experts in the field and ask what they think could be cut back with the least negative impact.
Lots of people can make a website and therefore legitimately call themselves web designers. What I have conveyed with my 13 point plan though is that the actual website design should only be a small part of the online process.
There are also the techniques used to consider. If I want a website that looks amazing I would probably use flash animation for it. If I did that though, I would have a very hard time getting the site to show up in Google because Google can’t read content that is in flash. Incidentally, flash design tends to be expensive because it is highly skilled work.
Is the person doing the website a web developer, hand coding your site, or somebody using a web design package like frontpage? In other words, what is their level of expertise. Going back to the car analogy, are they an experienced mechanic, or have they picked up a Haynes manual and decided to give it a go?
Ultimately when it comes to budgeting for your website it comes down to trying to find somebody who can deliver your goals at a price that is within your budget. The purpose of this post is to help give you a clearer picture of what those goals are. It is not enough in todays market to simply say “I want a website”. You will get one, but it is wasted money if it does not perform for you.
If you have any questions feel free to give me a call. My mobile number is 086 3817149.
Regards,
Ian.
Tags: 13 steps to planning a website, Budgeting for a Website, Copy Writing, Decide who is responsible for online activities, Design your website, failing to prepare, Identify your goals, Identify your target market, Measure Your Online Success, Optimise your website, Pay Per Click (PPC), Planning a website, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, Setting a Website Budget, Web design planning, Website features
Posted in Copywriting, Google, Marketing, Online Marketing, PPC, Search Engine Optimisation | 3 Comments »
April 4th, 2011 by The Online Marketeer
I know I said that my next post was going to be about planning your website, but this has come up in the meantime. I’m a little late writing about it since it happened at the start of the year, but It only affected me today. I’m in the wrong business to be the sort of person that gets annoyed by changes, but this one has got my back up a bit.
Google used to let you verify your Google Places listing by phone. You submitted your listing and they rang your number straight away with a pin code to let you validate your new listing before it went live.
The days of phone validation could be over. While it does not apply to all listings (although the criteria is far from clear) it seems that most businesses are being forced to wait up to three weeks for a letter from Google in order to validate their Google Places listing.
For a website designer like me this is really annoying. Most of my clients do not know how to make a Google Places listing and would rather I do it for them. It is not hard, but it is easier for me to do it since I have done it before many times, and it means they are not distracted from their normal workload. Today I was making a listing for a florists in Bray and came across this problem when I submitted the listing.
Waiting a few weeks is not a major problem in the case of a small business like a florists, where all staff members can be aware of the impending arrival of the missive from Google. I bet though that there will be businesses where the letter gets dumped as junk mail, causing another few weeks delay because the letter “never arrived” and a new one has to be requested.
Frankly I don’t really understand the move on Google’s part. Mail is less reliable and more expensive. Has there really been that much spam and abuse of the system using phone validation? Maybe there has, but I have not noticed it here in Ireland to any extent that it would bother me unduly. Besides, bad listings can be reported and you can be sure that postal validation will be abused too. I can think of at least one way in which it could be done.
Why am I moaning about a wait of just a few weeks? Well, it means there is another thing that I have make sure I follow up on instead of just doing it and it being done. It means that there is the risk of other factors interrupting the process (lost in post, binned as junk, sitting in a pile of unopened mail, failure to notify me by whoever opens it).
If I was a business owner doing my own listing the chances are that my experience goes a bit like this: -
- Hear about Google Places / notice it and decide to make my own listing
- Fail to notice that it is called Google Places and do some searches to find it.
- Find competitor listings in my own vertical and click on them. Have to click back because I probably went through to their website instead of the places listing.
- Discover that there is no clear instruction on how to make a listing from somebody elses listing.
- Click on the help tab on that page and miss the places help which is the very last listing on the page.
- Maybe try “edit this place” (which will probably be on a competitors listing) and finally that will bring up the following message:
- At last I have a link to Google Places. If I missed that, then I’ll be another while typing in terms like “Maps for Business” or “Business Maps on Google” which will also get me there, but what I will remember of the process is that it was not easy.
Now add in that I have to go back there several weeks later and log in with the same details to be able to put in my pin to validate the listing……
I know a lot of people that would not even make it to that stage. Not because they are not able to, but because it seems too much like hard work and it is on a computer. If these people can say “do it for me” to a developer like me, then they will. Hell, I would if I was them!
For those that need it, the link for Google Places is https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=lbc&passive=1209600&continue=http://www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter?gl%3DIE%26hl%3Den-IE%26service%3Dlbc%26hl%3Den-IE%26gl%3DIE%26utm_campaign%3Den%26utm_source%3Den-ha-nace-ie-google%26utm_medium%3Dha%26utm_term%3Dgoogle%2Bplaces&followup=http://www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter?gl%3DIE%26hl%3Den-IE%26service%3Dlbc%26hl%3Den-IE%26gl%3DIE%26utm_campaign%3Den%26utm_source%3Den-ha-nace-ie-google%26utm_medium%3Dha%26utm_term%3Dgoogle%2Bplaces&hl=en-IE
Nice and simple isn’t it? Wait until you discover you need a Google account to use it if you don’t have one already. I can hear the curses from here.
Tags: Business Maps on Google, Google Business Maps, Google Pin, Google Places, Google Places mail verification, Google Posting Pin, It's in the post.... google places, Verify Google Places by Phone
Posted in Google, Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation | Comments Off
March 24th, 2011 by The Online Marketeer
There are a lot of web designers out there that use a price per page model. There will be a separate price for a website with two pages, or with four or twenty pages plus. This is one of my pet peeves!
The reason behind this sort of pricing structure is simple although not necessarily logical.
- To create a full bells and whistles website costs.
- Businesses wish to pay as little as possible.
- An entry level offering (“Websites from just €450!!!“) attracts customers.
An example of one of the many cheap services offered for websites. Would you buy a car for €99 and expect it to run though?
In truth, a two page website is never going to be worth any sum of money. You may as well give your money to your competitors instead. This is why it is not logical to have a website like this in a pricing structure: it offers no ROI (return on investment).
Conversely, by attracting people with a low price you can then upsell them to what they actually need, which will be considerably more expensive in most cases.
The real reason that this sort of price structure gets my back up is that companies are perfectly happy to charge nearly twice the price for a 4 page website as a two page website. This is money for nothing. The hard work in web design is the overall look of a website. The rest is just putting in content. Why should somebody pay nearly the same price for two pages of content as they do for an overall website design? It doesn’t make sense.
You may be told that a two page website will not get you results, and that the difference a 4 page brochure site would make is worth the difference in price. Frankly, two or four pages are not much different when it comes to getting found online.
This is where the marketing comes in.
You may have a wonderful design on your small brochure website, but what good is that to you if nobody can find your site other than by typing in your actual web address? You have to ask yourself the question “What do I want from my website?”
If the answer is that you want it to gain you business, then I cannot think of a single instance where it is enough to have a small brochure site that is not integrated with social media and is not updated regularly. Content is king, not only because it makes better reading and because original content gets ranked on Google. Content is also king because good content attracts links from other sites. Those inbound links are crucial. If your content is not good enough to get them naturally (people linking to your site by themselves), then you are going to have to create them yourself which is much harder work. Frankly you will probably have to do this anyway at the start at least.
Pricing model ethics
Offering a price per page web design model says to me, “I’ll take your money and I don’t really care what you get for it”. That may sound harsh and I welcome discussion from those that use that model, but I cannot see how offering anybody something that is not “fit for purpose” in most cases is even slightly ethical.
Understanding web design
Web design is complex. In fact, the actual design work is only a small part of what it takes to create a website and market it well. In my next post, Planning your Website, I will go into the whole process. For now, I will leave you with this thought…..
Imagine that your business has a shop window (maybe it has). If you could move that window to any location, where would you put it? In Dundrum Shopping Centre, or on Shrewsbury Road?
I used Shrewsbury road example for a reason. It may sound flash, and be well presented, but it just doesn’t have the footfall that Dundrum Shopping Centre has.
Tags: brochure websites, Content Is King!, Dundrum Shopping Centre or Shrewsbury?, Price Per Page, Two page "websites", Understanding Web Design, web designers, Web Pricing Ethics, Website Pricing, Websites from just €450 - not really
Posted in Marketing, Web Design | 1 Comment »
December 10th, 2010 by The Online Marketeer
Our dog Dougal has gone missing since last night. Last seen in the Greystones harbour area. Please share this post with anybody you know in the area.
Dougal is about the size of a large jack russel, has a completely black and white body (with exception of his face) and is very hairy (very fluffy tail).
He was last seen wearing a collar with a red bandana. His collar has a tag on it which reads “Dougal” on one side and “086 3817149″ on the other.
If you spot him please give me a ring. His 5 year old owner is very upset. (Dougal is 4 so she has had him as long as she can remember).
Thank you.
Ian.
Tags: Dougal, Greystones, Greystones Harbour, Hairy dog lost, Lost Dog
Posted in Completely off topic | 1 Comment »
