London Custom Blinds Specialist, Academy Blinds have a new website - they are fully measured, fitted and ready to go. Family Business, Academy Blinds, have been installing made to measure blinds in London for over 15 years. They have always relied upon the Yellow pages for exposure but realised they needed a simple and effective web presence to target more customers across London.

To help Academy Blinds we have set them up on Google Business so they appear on Google maps and on local Google searches (easy to do and is free for any business!).  These are the results you see in the top of search results that site next to the map.

Visit Academy Blinds website.  Oh and if you live in London, give them a call!

Portland House Group specialise in buying properties with sitting tenants and other areas of property investment.

Even adding your company into google local business listings can help with your search results. Although appearing in the search results doesn’t mean people will click your link. Badly written titles for your pages (in between the tags for the geeks!) can have a negative impact. Given that people have only a few seconds to make up their minds - to quote the great Steve Krugg - ‘We don’t make optimal choices we satsfice’ - searchers are looking for something interesting to click on, something that grabs attention!

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!