I found this list on Dan Zarella’s media blog – the top 20 words and phrases that appear in retweeted messages on Twitter.

You
Twitter
Please
Retweet
Post
Blog
Social
Free
Media
Help
Please retweet
Great
Social media
10
Follow
How to
Top
Blog post
Check out
New blog post

Any thoughts on the best combination of the above – in under 140 characters? Here’s my two:

Check out our free new blog post: top 20 retweeted words http://bit.ly/95e6Y5 Please retweet

Great free social media blog post for you: top 20 retweeted words http://bit.ly/95e6Y5 Please retweet

DAG Building Services are builders in Ramsgate. They have been established for around ten years but did not have a website until now.

However, with an expanding business and some high profile clients, DAG decided they wanted a site that:

• Reflected the quality and range of their work
• Gave them a web presence
• Provided their contact details for anyone searching for them
• Presented an overview of their work
• Could be easily expanded and updated in the future

With all this in mind, we decided on a one page site initially that could then be expanded to a much larger site.

Key features

We wanted to create a strong first impression with the site, to present DAG in the most favourable light.

We designed a simple layout dominated by an animated image gallery showcasing photos from some of DAG’s projects. We placed a statement in large type describing DAG’s key offering next to the images. In this way, a visitor to the site immediately understands what DAG do and can see evidence of the quality of their work.

The main content establishes DAG’s credentials and experience in the industry as well as outlining their services in more detail. When the site is expanded, several of the areas in this section will have their own pages.

Finally, as one of the main purposes of the site is to provide visitors with DAG’s contact details, we placed a contact button prominently at the top right of the screen. We used an animated scroll on clicking the contact button to add some interest to the page.

Cosy Toes is a plumbing and heating company based in Margate. Although they have been in business for nearly 20 years, they didn’t have a website so felt it was about time they got one.

Their primary aims in having a website were to generate some additional business via search engines and to allow people to find their contact details online. Budget was a big consideration so they opted for a single page design which incorporated contact details, details about the company, and a list of their main services.

We created a page that is well laid out, allowing visitors to find information quickly and easily. Contact details are prominent in the header and footer. As Cosy Toes didn’t have any artwork or graphical identity, we created a simple design using warm colours to reflect the Cosy Toes name.

We rounded the page off with some graphical interest in the shape of a Google map to show the area covered by Cosy Toes.

This was all achieved for a very reasonable price and, as we’ve installed Google Analytics, we’ll monitor the site’s performance over the next couple of months in case any fine-tuning is required.

Take a look at the site here: Margate plumbers.

In the first post we looked at the need to understand your client’s business before you can design their identity. In this post we’ll look at the design process itself for Field and Stone.

Field and Stone are Ramsgate property investors and developers. Although the people behind the company have been working in this field for many years, the company is a relatively new one. They needed to come across as established and credible, with an identity that was restrained and refined.

In the client questionnaire, Field and Stone highlighted certain adjectives as important to their brand, including ‘established’, ‘professional’ and ‘reliable’. As a result, we decided to create an identity using a typographical logo, with no imagery. This meant that colour and typeface were crucial and the ampersand would become the graphical interest.

Which ampersand is best?

As the logo would appear on a number of different items, including the website, letterheads and business cards, we worked up a number of visuals to get a feel for how the logo would look and to make sure we wouldn’t encounter any nasty surprises down the line.

I’ve attached some of these visuals below to give you a feel for how much work can go into a design and often how laborious this can be. I mentioned in the last post that people make the mistake of thinking that design is something that just happens. Hopefully over these two posts, I’ve demonstrated the level of effort that goes into producing that appearance of effortlessness.

No stone left unturned

At the moment we have seven websites in development and we are waiting for content from the clients on all of them. I was going to name and shame them here but I figured that might be counter-productive.

Instead, I thought it might be useful to talk about why clients find it so difficult to write content and what we can do to help.

Reasons not to write content

Writing content is the last thing on the client’s list of priorities. Other stuff will get in the way like their own clients, their own suppliers, and the fact that they have to find time to go to sleep at night. All these reasons are completely understandable.

Writing content is one of those jobs that feels okay to put off. It naturally comes after essential tasks like making another cup of tea, catching up on personal email, and rearranging the pencils on your desk.

People generally don’t like sitting down to write something. There’s something very intimidating about the blank page when you start. Yet we know it’s got to get written. So how can we make that process easier?

Good reasons to write content

Remember the reason you decided to have a website in the first place. It’s to promote your business to clients. You shouldn’t think of your website as a necessary evil; it’s an opportunity to make more money. If that’s not an incentive to get the content written, then you’ll never manage it.

Writing notes on your business is a good exercise in itself. It helps you focus on what you’re doing. I’ve often asked clients even basic questions about their business which they’ve been unable to answer. Writing content is a good way of taking stock of your business.

So getting your content written will help you think about your business and help to promote it to others. Those are two good reasons to do it.

Techniques to help write content

Even the most prolific writers have techniques to help them get their words down. Try to remember these points when you’re starting to write your content:

• Brainstorm some ideas by writing down whatever comes into your head. Don’t filter anything and don’t cross anything out once it’s written. This will help get over the sight of a blank page and it’ll generate some good ideas.
• When you’ve got some ideas written down, sit back and pick one that you feel most comfortable with. Follow a similar brainstorming process as before but concentrate on this one subject area. Write down everything connected with the subject – don’t filter and don’t cross out.
• By now, you should have a stack of notes. Think about the subject and decide what the key point is about this subject.
• Now is the time to start crossing out. Cross out everything in your notes that does not support the key point.
• Structure what’s left so that your most important supporting points are first.
• Remember that you don’t need to write too much. People don’t want to read essays, just the essential stuff.

Content writing service

If you’re still struggling or you’d just like to discuss your content, we can help. We can sit down with you and map out the content for your site within a couple of hours.

If necessary, we can write a first draft for your review. You may find that once you have a document in front of you it’s much easier to organise your thoughts.

And we might get to actually finish developing the site.

This is the second part of a series of posts on how to audit your own site to evaluate its effectiveness and usability. In the first article we looked at how your site should present information to users. In this article we look at some basics on optimising your website for search engines. Use this article as a checklist for your own site. This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Page titles

You should ensure that your page title contains specific keywords that describe the content on the page. The page title is used by search engines to describe your site. It’s what the user sees in search results and is probably the main factor determining whether the user clicks the link to your site or not.

So, for instance, check your own site’s home page title and compare it to the title of this site’s homepage:

You can see that the page title is what appears in the search results. It’s key information for users and for search engines.

Page titles that use generic terms like ‘Home’ are wasted in terms of search engine optimisation and contain little information for the user.

Headings

In the first part of this post we looked at how to present information to the user. Just using headings to break up the text on the page helps the user to find the information they need.

Headings also help search engine know what’s important on the page. They assign more value to words in headings than in standard body text so ensure that your page headings contain keywords.

Optimised URLs

The phrase ‘optimised URL’ might sound like gibberish but it actually refers to something very simple. A URL is your site’s address, e.g. freshfishdesign.co.uk. Search engines use information in URLs to assess the importance of pages. Your website should contain important keywords in its URLs just as it should in page titles and heading tags.

For example, the URL of this page is ‘freshfishdesign.co.uk/is-your-website-optimised-for-search-engines’. People searching for terms like ‘optimise website for search engines’ are far more likely to find this page than if its URL was ‘freshfishdesign.co.uk/page213.html’. (And if you use Google Analytics you’ll be able to measure what people have searched on when they find your site).

The URLs on your website should be meaningful both to search engines and to your users.

Keywords

Keywords are the words or phrases that users might search for to get to your site. For instance, if you are a garage in Thanet then you should say that on your site. That’s pretty obvious.

What you also need to remember are the less common and more specific terms that people might search for. People don’t always search for ‘garage Thanet’. They might specifically look for ‘MOT Thanet’ or ‘new tyres Thanet’. It’s important that your site contains information on all the services you offer so that people can find specific information.

Ideally, your site will have a page of content devoted to each of your services or products to ensure that people can find exactly what they need. Approximately 70% of traffic to your website will come from this kind of specific search.

Search engine submission

In Thanet, and in other parts of the world too, there are a number of local web design companies who offer to submit your site to search engines. At best, they’re so far behind the times that they don’t realise this hasn’t been necessary for nearly 10 years; at worst, they’re kidding you that they’re offering you a valuable service.

If you see a web design company offering to submit your site to Google, then you need to ask some serious questions about their competency and reliability.

What’s good for your user is good for search engines

Hopefully this article will have pointed up how closely aligned usability and searchability are. Keeping your content clear, relevant and well laid out is helpful for your user and for search engines. If you think that your site is lacking in any of the areas above, go back to your developers and ask why.

We’ll look at the quality of information provided by web design companies in a later post.

The one page website is our new service designed to help you get a web presence at an affordable price. A one page website costs £200, including domain name registration and free hosting for the first year.

What is a one page website?

A one page site is a place on the web where customers and search engines can find you. It allows you to market yourself online by creating a profile for yourself or your business. You can choose to add a number of different elements like banner images, animated image galleries, contact details, and even a news section on the page that you can maintain yourself, allowing you to keep your content up-to-date.

What are the benefits of a one page website?

With a one page site, you can:

• Get online for an affordable price
• Gain a competitive advantage
• Attract new customers and communicate with existing customers

Who is a one page website suitable for?

One page sites probably aren’t the ideal solution if you’re a large multinational corporation. However, just about anyone else would find them a perfect first website, particularly:

• Sole traders
• One-man bands
• Small businesses

Why choose us?

• Before we do anything else, we’ll sit down with you to understand your business, what your key message is, and what you want to achieve with a website. We will create a site that works for you.
• We never build the same site twice, so your one page site will help you stand out from the crowd. We don’t use templates, we design everything from scratch – which means that every one of our sites is unique.
• We design websites that will get you noticed. Our designs are high quality and many of our website designs are featured in online web design galleries. A high quality web design is a sign of a high quality business.
• If required, we can include a section within your one page site that you can edit and update yourself. As far as we know, we’re the only company to offer this kind of feature at such an affordable price.
• Our one page sites are extendable, so if you decide a few months down the line that you’d like to scale up your website, we can build additional pages and features without having to rebuild the entire site.

How long will it take?

Once we’ve agreed the content and design with you, we can get you online within a week.

One page websites are an ideal way to create a web presence. Get in touch with us if you’d like any more information.

A strong and recognisable identity is one of the most important factors in promoting your business. It conveys quality, credibility and trust. The process to create a successful identity is something that is often misunderstood and I’d like to use this short series of articles to provide some insight into the thinking and the work that goes into designing an identity and how it’s applied to websites and other media.

But surely I can just create a logo myself?

There’s a common misconception among many people that design is something that just happens. Whether it’s a logo, a letterhead or a website, it’s often thought that all the designer does is grab a piece of clip art and colour it in.

This is the same thinking that encourages people to design their own logo and website. We see many examples of logos and websites that people have attempted to design themselves or that have been built by companies with no design skills. In choosing the cheap option, businesses risk presenting themselves as amateurish and inexperienced and ultimately they will pay heavily for it.

In fact, good design is an investment. According to one report:

For every £100 a business spends on design, turnover increases by £225.

Source: The Value of Design Factfinder report 2007, http://www.designfactfinder.co.uk

At Pomegranate, we have over 20 years’ experience in creating identities that successfully promote businesses. We don’t just put pretty images and text together, we create a persona that sells a business to potential customers. We inform the public as to what kind of company and product they will be dealing with.

Understanding the client’s business

However, this is not something that we just pull together in a couple of hours. We need to build up a picture of the client’s business and position in the marketplace before we can start to think about how to present the client back to the market.

One of our most useful tools in this respect is a questionnaire that we go through with all our clients. Among other things, the questionnaire helps us to understand certain key information, like:

• The client’s unique selling point

• The client’s target market demographic, e.g. age, sex, income and so on

• Adjectives that describe how the client wants to be perceived

After completing the questionnaire, we analyse the responses. Typically, this stage of the process will take hours, if not days. Only after we have gained a complete understanding of the client’s business and of their requirements can we begin to formulate our approach and think about design. It’s this holistic and detailed process that has ensured the success of our clients.

Creating an identity

In the next article I’ll look at the next stage of the process, using the Field and Stone identity and website as a case study. Field and Stone are property investors in Ramsgate. We designed their identity, logo and the layout for their website, which was then developed by FreshFishDesign.

You can take a look at some of our other designs by following the links below.

SAMS: Kent health and safety management

Gadds: Ramsgate brewers

Field and Stone: Ramsgate property investors

This week we launched IsleOne – a website aimed at helping people find all the best places to go and things to do on the Isle of Thanet. This article explains some of the thinking behind the site and gives a rough timeline for its development.

Months ago

We’ve had the idea for this site for a while – a more grown-up version of ThanetKids. There are a lot of high quality places to go in Thanet but it didn’t seem like there was a website that reflected this. So we’ve been researching ideas for the site and compiling lists of places since the beginning of this year.

Weeks ago

Once we’d put together most of the content, we could look at how the site would be structured and start to think of a design. We settled on four main categories for content – places to eat and drink, shops, things to do, and places to stay in Thanet – plus room for a news section and a contact page. We’ve also designed the site to be extendable in case we want to add further sections in the future.

With a structure for the content in place, we could start to design the actual look and feel of the site. We wanted something that was dynamic, cool, and that would present its listed businesses in the best possible light. So the site is very visual with bold images accompanying each listing; the front page is divided up into animated sections; and there are a couple of information feeds from other parts of the site and from external sources.

The overall effect is intended to be dynamic without being distracting. The main point of the site is to highlight all the quality places to go in Thanet – the design should support that, not overwhelm it.

Days ago

Last week was mostly spent taking the design out of Photoshop and building the web pages for real. The site is built on Wordpress which means it was relatively simple to configure. When everything was working correctly, we took the site out of the test environment and placed it on the live server.

We then started to add more content. There are currently around 20 businesses listed on the site and that will probably grow to around 40. So if you know a quality place to eat or somewhere to go in Thanet, please let us know.

Seconds ago

Part of the thinking behind the site is that it should be live and dynamic. Anyone visiting IsleOne should be able to see the most up-to-the-minute information. To that end, we included a section called ‘the latest’ which pulls in the most recent tweets from a number of Twitter feeds. It updates itself every couple of minutes to ensure it’s displaying the very latest news and gossip from relevant organisations and individuals around Thanet.

There’s also a news section that allows for more in depth articles. The news section is intended to promote events in the area. Eventually, it may be that businesses listed on the site are able to contribute and update articles themselves.

The future

Although the site went live over the weekend we were still updating content so we didn’t publicise it. Even so, people still found the site via Twitter and the feedback we’ve had has been really good. It’s always great when that happens. We hope the site will continue to be so well received.

Originally I was going to write this post as ‘questions you should ask your web designer.’ Then I realised it was probably far more useful to write about what your designer should be asking you. If you’re out there now looking for a new website, these are the key questions that any designer should be asking. A web designer’s job isn’t simply to transfer your content online – they need to know the ins and outs of your business in order to build you an effective site.

What is the site for?

You might have any number of answers for this but typically people need websites to promote their business, find new clients, market their products and services, raise awareness, and so on.

Who is the site for?

Your designer should be thinking about the kinds of sites your typical visitors might be familiar with and what their expectations are when they come to your site.

Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen points out that “users spend most of their time on other websites”. There are certain conventions that people expect from sites and your designer should be aware of what your visitors are familiar with. If you need a corporate site then your designer shouldn’t be building something that looks like a dating site.

Who are your competitors?

Your designer should be looking to find out as much as possible about your business. This includes finding out who your competitors are and what their websites look like. Because you need a better one.

How will people find the site?

Are you expecting new visitors to find your site via search engines or will you direct existing contacts to your site? Often it’s a mixture of both and your web designer should be thinking about this.

For example, if you’re starting a new business and you’re expecting most of your business to come from online searches, your designer should be establishing key phrases that people will be searching on and understanding how competitive they are.

What’s your site’s key message?

Your site needs to communicate what it’s about to visitors within the first few seconds. Users tend to make up their minds very quickly about websites so your message needs to come through loud and clear straightaway. Effective ways of doing this include using a slogan on the home page with a mission statement, making the correct choices about colour and font, and avoiding opening phrases like ‘Welcome to our website’.

The GrossPay site has a clear mission statement

What would be the ideal outcome of a visit to your site?

This might seem really obvious but once people have found your site what do you want them to do next?

As an example, if your site is an online shop then the outcome should be that visitors will buy products. It’s not always so obvious what the outcome should be if your site isn’t a shop. Often it’s simply that you would like people to contact you, in which case your contact form needs to be clear and simple to use. Other possible outcomes to sites might include user contribution – e.g. on forums or in comments; you might want people to forward the site link to other people – viral marketing works this way; or you might want people to contribute money – for a charity, for instance.

What will make visitors want to return?

Getting visitors to your site is hard; getting them to return is even harder. Social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and so on allow you to connect with your visitors in ways that you couldn’t previously. Your designer should be able to suggest the best ways for you to hook your visitors in and keep them coming back.

Of course, one of the best ways to encourage visitors to return is to keep giving them interesting and relevant content. We build sites that allow you to add and update content easily – because keeping your site up to date is one of the greatest competitive advantages you can have. Get in touch with us if you’d like to find out more.