Who likes drinking champagne? Who likes drinking free champagne? Well we’re pleased to say that the champagne is on us.

Celebrate success
We think success should be celebrated. And success is something we’ve been delivering to our clients for over 7 years.

So now whenever we launch a new website for one of our clients we’re going to be sending them a bottle of champagne so they can toast their future success straight away!

This is not a gimmicky promotion. It’s not a time limited offer neither. We realise no one will hire us to design and build their new website purely on the basis they will get a bottle of champagne. As stated above we do think it’s right to celebrate success and we’re confident that’s what a new website from us will bring you.

So if you want success with your online marketing then get in touch and you’ll be toasting new clients in no time at all.

Get a bottle for recomending us
In addition to the above if you are the one that recommends us to the client then we will also send you a bottle of champagne when the website launches.

So if you know a company that could do with our advice and expertise then just get them to get in touch with us and don’t forget to get them to tell us that you recommended us so you’ll get that bottle of champagne delivered to your door.

We’re even using a local wine specialist The Perfect Wine here in Norfolk to choose and deliver the champagne.

So here’s to your future success!

PS: Please do not tell anyone who doesn’t like free champagne
PPS: Don’t tell anyone who doesn’t like getting new clients

So you’ve got your website and with all the confidence that it will be a great success you’re sat there waiting for the phone to ring red hot, or for the email orders to pile in and…… nothing!

When you open a new shop on the high street you have the benefit of being able to see who browses in the window, see if them come in, what they look at, what they spend time on and what they say even but with a website you can’t get all this vital feedback. You don’t know if they move past the home page or what page it is that brings them to your website in the first place.

Well fortunately you don’t have to be left in the dark. There is a way to get this vital info and to analyse it and get that feedback you need. Of course you can’t see the visitors’ faces nor gauge their body language and what they say but you can see how they get to your website and what they do when they get there.

Google analytics is a fantastic tool that allows you to see important and informative statistical data about the people that come to your website. Features include (but not limited to):

• Track how people found you including keywords and referring websites
• See which pages are attracting visitors (landing pages) and which are turning them away (exit pages)
• See information about the visitors themselves like geographical location, browser info, screen resolution and more
• See visitor loyalty, returning visitors, how long they spend on each page
• Make reports, set date ranges, set up goals

Here’s the great thing about it, it’s 100% free. You just have to add some code to every page of your website and Google Analytics does the rest. Of course this is maybe easier said than done but your website developer should be able to do this for you for a small charge.

So here’s what you need to do to start seeing where problems may lie:

1. Get a Google Analytics account
2. Get the code installed on your website
3. Learn to read the data and understand where problems may lie (a subject on its own)
4. Most importantly – act upon your findings!

More information about Google Analytics can be found here on the Google Analytics website

What are your thoughts on this? We love to interact with our readers so please leave a comment.

If you’ve ever wondered why you’re not getting the level of enquires you wanted, conversions you dreamed of or general business success from your website then here’s 10 hard hitting pointers as to why.

1. It’s ugly and old.
Granted beauty is in the eye of the beholder but has the design of your website fallen out of the ugly tree, hit every branch on the way down and then been beaten with an ugly stick? You have 3 seconds to make a first impression on a visitor and it’s the overall design/colours/style they see first. People are harsh judges and you wont get a second chance.

2. Your site colours cause blindness.
We’ve seen sites where we needed medical attention for temporary blindness caused by the severity of the colours used. For example; bright pink might be your favourite colour but the majority of the word disagrees so use it sparingly. Also light text on dark backgrounds strains the eyes.

3. It’s a mess.
A mess can mean a number of things such as multiple font types and multiple font sizes, things in different places, images all over the place, multiple colours applied to different texts, random patches of bold, italics, underlined all over the place. You might have a wonderful design but if the content is a mess then that’s the weakest link and it will be a ‘Goodbye’ from the visitor.

4. Pointless splash pages.
Do you remember luminous socks? Yeah, they went out of fashion about the same time as splash pages. A splash page is that sort of ‘pre’ page you sometimes get which is sort of a teaser to the main site. It’s often a flash animation that you have to wait to load. Waste of time folks, most people have scampered before it’s even loaded.

5. It’s busy busy busy.
6 Columns of text, 20 choices to make, moving boxes here, flashing boxes there every inch of the landing page is screaming for your visitors attention at the same time…. you get the idea don’t you…it’s a fail!

6. The copy is drivel and way too long.
When entertaining at home would you tell your guests your life story before they’ve even got through the door and gotten comfortable with the surroundings? The same is said for your website. Don’t bore your visitors with paragraphs of information before they can get acquainted. Give them enough to get them interested, and then the option to read more. Some will want to read more and some wont so cater for both types of visitor. Use a copywriter to write text that will engage with your visitors and just the right amount.

7. You’re making your visitors think.
Is the way you channel the visitors to the right information difficult & cumbersome for them? Are the most important things right in front of them (and this is the important things to your potential customers not to you, most don’t care what you think is important)? Can people find their way around easily enough? Do they know where they are at all times? Are you holding their hands or are they fumbling around? Don’t make them have to think.

8. Contact Details.
Your visitors may not know who you are, there’s a lot of scammers out there are people are quick to judge and be cautious. Don’t give them a reason to flee by withholding your contact details, especially your address. Simply having just a contact form or email address is a major fail on a website. There should be a landline number (not just a mobile), your full trading address and if you’re a Ltd company your registered office address as well.

9. Don’t ask – Don’t get.
Are you asking your visitors to buy, to contact you, or do ’something’? This is called a ‘call to action’ if you’re net asking (or telling even) people to do something then they aren’t going to do it and might become ambivalent and go elsewhere.

10. You’re not listening.
You don’t listen to what your customers do and don’t like and you don’t act upon this valuable feedback. Maybe you aren’t listening to the advice given by those around you? We all handle criticism differently but take it all on board, embrace it and do something with it as it could mean the difference between failure or success.

So there you go. Do you think your website is as perfect as it can be? Room for improvement? Does it need a little TLC? Do get in touch with us if you’d like our honest opinion on your website and you’d value what we’d say, be it good or bad.

We love to hear your comments so please do leave them below.

The aim of this article is to talk openly about the restrictions that having a content management system can have on your online marketing and ultimately the success of your business. CMS is sold by web designers as the perfect post launch package but is that really true? Lets take a look at the realities of CMS.

The ability for a site owner to control their own content is nothing new and there are 1000’s of off the shelf content management systems (CMS) out there for developers to use to enable clients to, at various levels control their own content. ‘That’s great’ you might say, ‘who needs to hire a web developer to make changes to a site when I can do it myself?’

More worryingly it also implies that the skill sets of the original designer can be imparted onto the client simply because they now have control

The problem with the ‘who needs to hire a web developer to make changes’ question is that it assumes that a) A CMS system can do everything your original developer can do and will update a website perfectly, it’s fool proof after all …. isn’t it? B) More worryingly It also implies that the skill sets of the original designer can be imparted onto the client simply because they now have control.

I’ve yet to see a CMS system that updates any and every part of a site perfectly and with ease, that’s because it simply doesn’t exist.

When I talk about CMS what I really mean is control and addition of the content pages such as ‘about us’ or ‘home page’ etc. I’m not talking about blogging or e-commerce. It goes without saying that for e-commerce and a blog to be effective the client has to have control but that comes with restrictions. Restrictions put in place by a good developer to make sure the site stays looking how it should.

If you’re reading this and thinking ‘What, CMS doesn’t actually give me total control of my site and let me make updates to anything?’ then you’d be absolutely right, Many people don’t realise this. CMS actually can be quite restrictive because to build in a CMS to a website there are many considerations to be made especially with the design.

Put simply it’s an expert updating the site expertly.

When a designer knows they will have post launch control over a site they can do whatever as they know that they and only they will have to update it. Put simply it’s an expert updating the site expertly. If you know that this isn’t the case then you have to factor things in.

Now with all that in mind there are several ways in which content can be updated on a website:

1. No CMS but you update it yourself as you have some html ‘know how’
2. The people that built the site update it for you
3. The people that build the site include a CMS and you update it yourself via that
4. You are big enough to have an internal dedicated member of staff to look after the site updates (a techy)

Now in the case of point 1 then so be it but either the user is a time served expert online web designer or they aren’t. If they are then why are they hiring a web designer to build the site in the first place, with maybe the exception of time constraints? If they aren’t then should they really be fiddling with it after it’s been perfectly made and is live? You don’t service your car when you don’t know your spark plug from your sink plug so why would you jeopardise your online marketing strategy by playing with your website content?

Point 3; Ok so you have a CMS system, you have control of all or some of your site. Here’s the thing. Here’s the little question or questions that have been bugging me for the past few months:

1. If only simple text updates are needed now and again (and remember I’m not including a blog or e-commerce here) then surely any good web design company would be more than happy to do it?

   ‘Why?’, I hear the website companies scream. Well, it takes less than a minute of your time and it’s an excellent way to keep in touch with your clients and keep them sweet. A happy client will steer happy prospects in your direction. If you still think it’s justified to charge £50 to change a typo then either you probably wont be in business for much longer or your traditional advertising expenditure must be huge due to the lack of referrals from happy clients.

2. So with that in mind and here’s the crux of my article. Why would a client pay a lot of money to a web design company to come up with their online marketing master piece only for them to launch it and then someone with no web design or marketing knowledge take over?
3. Are we as web design companies doing our clients a disservice by offering and in some cases pushing CMS to clients as a ‘good idea’? When you think about it is it really a good idea to give control back to the client which is comparable to handing the steering wheel of a car over to someone who can’t drive?

So is CMS in the wrong hands spelling the kiss of death for businesses as online marketing becomes so important and in many cases the sole revenue stream?

What are your thoughts? We’d love to hear them below. Please leave a comment.

We launched our latest website today for our client FunSongs. Charles Goodger who runs FunSongs hired us to give the site a complete makeover and fun was on the menu!

By using illustrative design techniques we were able to get over the message that learning English is fun, something not always possible with educational based projects. The site selling action songs packages is primarily aimed at international schools teaching English as a second language.

The client is extremely pleased with the outcome and we’ve received much praise surrounding the design. We wish Charles and his team every success with the new site and FunSongs in the future.

www.funsongs.co.uk can be visited here