BonBon Jewellery’s new ecommerce website is live.  BonBon Jewellery design and create beautiful handmade jewellery in Guildford.  Take a look at the new site in full at www.bonbon-jewellery.co.uk.

The BonBon online jewellery shop is developed using the magento platform and has a clear usable interface making it simple for people to purchase on the shop.  The magento platform gives great features like ‘one page checkouts’ and integration into payment engines.  The powerful admin area allows easy management of orders and stock.

Read more about our ecommerce web design service.

Email delivers the highest return-on-investment of any other marketing vehicle, averaging £57 return for every £1 spent. - Direct Marketing Association.

Redhead Media is celebrating the launch of a managed email marketing service called Email Jam.  Through regular and targeted contact with your existing and potential customers, you can:

• Increase loyalty
• Increase customer spend
• Develop a fruitful relationship
• Increase customer referrals

Targeted email marketing

The Email Jam solution is a results focused, monthly marketing service that starts with an Email Marketing Plan. The email marketing plan is a 6 month strategy aimed at targeting your customers both effectively and legally. Upon delivering your email newsletter from our platform, you get instant feedback with real-time online reports - excellent for measuring the success of your campaign and return on investment.

Why Email Jam

To find out more about the great benefits of our targeted email marketing solution Email Jam, visit www.emailjam.co.uk or read the our email marketing solution key points.

Guildford Photographer Ian Olsson’s new website is now live.  Ian came to Redhead for a redesign of his existing website as it needed a fresh approach.  Ian is local photographer in Guildford although he travels all around the UK and Europe to take stunning photos of weddings, people, corporate stuff and much more!  Check out Ian’s new website at www.ianolsson.com.

Ian’s Site is designed to be as usable as possible with clear navigation and breadcrumbs (the you are here of web design!).  Usability in web design is important not only for the user but for you as a business as well.  Giving people a clear indication of where they are will give them confidence in your site and add to the overall positive experience.  Take Ian’s home page for example, if you landed on this page from a search engine, would you be in any doubt what this website was about?  From a business perspective, clear navigation can help guide people to the areas that are most important to you as a business.  In Ian’s case the portfolio (his work) is where he wants people to go - which is very clear from the home page.  There are other key areas too:  testimonials and a link so you can order photos, which are highlighted on the home page.

Read more about usability and user experience on in our web usability service information page.

Print Strategy, an independent print solutions provider with services such as print audits, document management and managed print services, have a brand new website! We worked closely with Print Strategy to deliver a solution that helps build their internet presence and support their sales and marketing. Solution includes a partner login area, google analytics integration and landing pages for adword campaigns. From a techie non-interesting perspective the site is written in PHP, XHTML and CSS incorporating microformats.

Visit the website live at http://www.printstrategy.co.uk

The site is now live at www.spectacularopticians.co.uk

Before and After Screenshots

Before:

After the re-design

It is not unheard of for one particular friend of mine to come back from holiday with over 2000 images, only to be whittled down to 25 of the very best to be produced proudly in one of those fantastic ‘photo-books’ that you can create online through various providers (we quite like www.photobox.co.uk). It’s amazing how even the most amateur of photographers (by their own admission) can capture some truly awe-inspiring images.

If it’s not appropriate for you to take your own photography, then you may want to consider hiring a photographer (we can recommend excellent, affordable photographers). You should also remember that most web design companies such as Redhead Media will have access to literally millions of stock photographs and illustrations. Work with your web designer to get the very best images that you can.

But I’m not just talking about good photography here. I wanted to quickly talk about using attention-grabbing photography on your website – the sort of photograph that serves a very important purpose – it makes the audience want to read the text that accompanies it.

If you think about it, newspapers do it all the time. How often have you gone to the petrol station to pay for your fuel, and felt drawn to long line of newspapers, all dry and inviting in their little Perspex boxes. I would say that your attention is carefully grabbed by the photographic editor of that paper, who chose an image for the front page that would generate some kind of response ranging from pure shock (tabloid) to curiosity (broadsheet). Of course this is backed up by the other all-important ‘attention-grabbing’ method – the ‘headline’, but for now I wanted to focus on image. After all – ‘a picture tells a thousand words’ and can be processed by our brains much faster than words can. In fact, according to research by 3M, humans process images 60000 times faster than text! This is because we take in all the data from an image simultaneously, while our brains process words in a sequence.

I’m not suggesting that you need to employ shock tactics of the tabloids in order to get the attention of your website users and entice them to read more, but here are a few things to remember when considering the photography/images used on your website:

1. Remember who your audience is – it is their attention that you want to ‘grab’.
2. Use bold colours (it’s a obvious one but worth mentioning). Even the most corporate, white-background design can be enlivened and made incredibly interesting with bold, colourful images.
3. Use people and faces – humans are drawn to other people’s faces, especially if they are attractive or interesting-looking, or have an interesting expression.
4. Use an image that people may not be expecting, but find a way to make it relevant to your text – for example, our web design page uses an image of a sharp, gleaming kitchen knife – it is unexpected but backed up by the headline ‘Cutting Edge Web Design and Development with a Difference’

In summary; remember the important role that images can play in drawing attention to the key sales messages on your website. Think about the use of colour, faces, expressions and ‘the unusual or unexpected’. Always appeal to your audience, and of course back it up with great copy, that encourages them to take action. You have their attention – now make the most of it!

The website has been constructed with search engines in mind as it is coded with web standards and validates to 1.0 strict.  Using semantic markup and code keeps the structure and styling separate so when the Google spiders attempt to index the site, they are presented with the information they need in the format they need.  Google Analytics has been installed as well as taking full advantage of Google Webmaster to ensure that what search engines see, is what we want them to.

Part 2 - Tools for success

Review and Compare (the devil’s in the detail!)
Take a look at your existing website and note down: (if you don’t yet have a website use these points to consider what you will need, and perhaps look at a close competitor’s site with these points in mind).

• how does your content come across (tone/language/purpose)
• how usable and apparent is the navigation (intuitive/straight forward)
• how professional does the site look (first impression/fits the direction of the business/design/branding)
• what sort of impression does the site give (experienced/recommended/trusted)
• what are the positions of key ‘calls to action’ (relevant, clear, obvious – don’t forget that not everyone will visit your homepage first, so they should  appear elsewhere in the website)
• the overall experience of using the site is…? (positive/negative – don’t frustrate your customer!)

These points should be discussed in detail with your team and then with your website design company so that they can translate your requirements into a working solution.  A competent web design company should understand usability and customer conversion. They should be able to guide your decisions and help you craft an approach that will work well regarding the site’s architecture, calls to action and other supporting elements so as to meet business and user needs.

Answering these questions will help you begin to visualise how a user needs to interact with your website in order for it to work efficiently and add serious value to your business.

Supermarket Sweep!
The way a user interacts with your site, is key to its success.  Consider the analogy of how a supermarket interacts with its customers.  They will try and make you walk past all the items they need to sell you.  They will make sure that the more profitable products are within easy reach and at eye level.  They will even make you walk around the shop in a certain direction.  Translate this to your website and look at how you think it is performing!  You cannot expect a customer to buy something they cannot see.

With this in mind, get your crayons out.  Draw out the sections of your website on a large piece of paper like it was the floor plan of gigantic supermarket! Then look at the various routes people can take (this could be from any page given that any page could be a landing page):

• are they seeing what they need?
• are they seeing what you need them to see?
• does your site structure support your sales process or hinder it?
• will your current structure bounce users if they don’t find what they need in 10 seconds?
• is it a positive journey?

Playing supermarket sweep with your website, whilst being immense fun! (I need to get out more), will allow you to turn your visualisations into an actual plan and strategy for your site.  The idea is not to come up with a rigid, inflexible set of rules of what you must do, but to remain open to the idea that you may be able to go back and revisit some of your initial questions and site shortcomings.  If you find areas that are weak or areas that need more supporting information (case studies, background information, Q&As etc) Great! That’s the idea.  You are working your way through and identifying what you need in order to a) meet the needs of the business and b) meet the needs of the user.

What do people do on my site?
Analytics packages are an excellent way of finding out how users interact with your site.  Intelligent use of programs such as Google Analytics (free from Google) can point you to poor performing pages, customer loyalty figures and bounce rates (the rate at which users leave your site as soon as they get there!) amongst many others – you can even find out what screen resolution your website user has!

When users first visit your site they may not come via your home page.  Google will hopefully point them to the most relevant part of your site (landing pages) – that is if your site is optimised well or even indexed by Google (see below).  Analytics can also show you how people are reaching your site whether this is direct (i.e. typing in your address into an internet browser) or from search engines, yell etc.  All this information can help you enhance, develop and mould your site so that when potential customers visit your site, they are taking the path you have given them.

Yes we have a stats package on our site I hear you say.  Being able to tell how many visits your site had last month, is nothing compared to knowing where they went, what they did & for how long, how they found you, why they left, did they return etc.

Can anyone actually see me?
How does your site look from a Search Engine perspective?  Type your web address (i.e. www.yourbusiness.com) into a Google search, preceeded by ‘site:’ For example, the bbc would type site:www.bbc.co.uk . By doing this for your existing website, you can see how many of your pages are indexed in Google’s vast database of websites.  If you know your site has 60 pages and you can only see 15 in Google’s index, you need to know why.  Poor design, Flash sites, and sites designed in frames are a few reasons why but ensuring that your site is designed well for users generally means your site is designed well for search engines.

Appearing in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) is the beginning of your journey into Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and if driving traffic to your website is a key part of your online strategy, this is important.

More Conversions
Once you have asked yourself the questions, played supermarket sweep and changed your design and structure, how will you monitor the progress?

Using analytics packages like Google Analytics (mentioned above) allow you to set up sales funnels and goals so you can ensure that people are taking the route you want them to before encouraging them to do something (download a file, make an enquiry, purchase a product or service).  If they are not simply revisit your plan and ask yourself why.

A website, like a 2 year old, needs constant attention.  If you don’t try different approaches, content and calls to action, how will you ever refine your site so it can be the money making, lead generating, customer converting monster it has the potential of becoming.

If you missed part one in the series, visit: websites that attract and convert customers.