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.

Are you running special promotions, seasonal offerings, sale items or introductory pricing? Are there changes in your company, new people who have joined the team? What are the latest trends or issues in your business, how do these changes affect your customers, and what are you doing to do to respond to new developments? Your customers want to know, and keeping them informed via your website, email newsletters or blog shows them you care about their issues and you have solutions to offer. You may also consider introducing alternative forms of media into your site. Video clips demonstrating new products or customer testimonials can be very effective in reaching out to customers.

This may also be a good time to review how your website is organised. Is the home page clear and easy to navigate? Does the content and usability (ease of use) direct your visitors to the pages you want them to see? Are there appropriate calls to action, e.g. click for more info, click to join our email list, click to add to your shopping basket, etc? Review your site regularly. Better yet, have someone else take a look. Ask your customers for their feedback. Minor changes and regular content updates will keep the all important search engines happy and your customers coming back. Leaving it until the site needs a major overhaul is more likely to result in lost business, lost opportunity and an expensive redesign from scratch.

Click and download our easy to use website review checklist to make sure you are getting the best return, in any economy.

Call the Redhead Media team now for a free consultation - 01428 788170.

The Conservatory came to us and asked for a unique design that represented their approach to both their business and their clients, taking into account their current branding, history and culture.  They also wanted the ability to sell bouquets, arrangements and flowers online.  Their e-commerce platform gives them the ability to fully manage the order process, view graphs, reports and statistics on sales and their customers.

Having full control over their products means they can cross and up-sell products where relevant and of course the shop is designed with search engines in mind. Customers can create accounts so they can manage their orders, subscribe to newsletters, re-order products and track their items.  All this making the user journey more comfortable and positive.

Tracking Customers and Website Users

When building the site, and like we do for all our customers, we added tracking applications and software so we can track the customers that go through the website.  We can even tell what operating system they were using!  This important information, as any true marketeer will tell you, is gold dust!  Being able to see how many people visited your site, where they went, for how long amongst many other statistics helps you identify strong and weak areas of your website.  As return on investment is key, you can produce a better picture of how your website is performing.  You can even track offers and offer alternate pages to your users, always refining and developing your site so it becomes a customer converting machine!

Search Engine Consideration

Online shops, e-commerce platforms and content management systems that are designed around a database, can be problematic for search engines in finding information they need.  If your platform generates urls that look like this www.myshop.com?page=23333?id=34?category=2 chances are both your users and a search engine (lets say google!) can get confused.  More importantly, this confusion means that google may not index your page (meaning you have less chance of your pages appearing in Google’s search results - that’s bad!).  Consider a url design that looks like this:  www.myshop.com/a-nice-category/a-great-product-name/ Search Engines much prefer this and so would your users  as it’s descriptive and user-friendly.

URL design is just one of the many considerations and challenges that you face when working with dynamically generated content from a database and deserves it’s own post (which i’ll do later!)

Part One - Overcoming problems with Intelligent design

The problem: Who is the website for?
A website can have many goals, but at a very simplistic level it should either make or save money for your business.  As more and more people search the internet to find out about companies and their products and services, how does the design of your website stand up to your competitors?  What does it do for your customers?  More importantly, what can it do for your customers?

Many problems stem from not putting yourself in the position of your customers - this is why we are really here right?  Starting with first impressions, your typical website visitor gives you around 10 seconds (maximum) before clicking the back button to return to Google (that is if your website is even in the Google index!).  Can your customer easily identify; The main navigation? Your contact details? Important content and messages?  Relevant call to actions?  Choosing the right web design company is important as you don’t just want a glorified business card - we need to go beyond the predictable web pages we currently have (the royal we!) and consider a more intelligent approach.

What is intelligent design?
Identifying the simple and basic elements of a website (listed above) causes constant problems for users.  How many times have you been on a website and you cannot find what you are looking for?  How does this make you feel?  Let’s just say that negative experiences don’t lead to increased enquiries and customer conversion.  The real question we should be asking ourselves is ‘how can we create a positive experience’, so that when a visitor sees your website:

• they have a great first impression
• they get a professional feel from your business
• they make an enquiry or buy a product/service?

Some usability models start from the bottom up and ask the first two fundamental questions:  What do we want from our website and what do our customers want from our website?  These fundamental questions give us the building blocks of the site and guide our decisions about how we can meet both these sets of needs, making both the business and the customer happy!

Once you know what your customers are looking for, your content, navigation, design and entire site strategy is more targeted and is set up for achieving results.  Match these with the needs of your business and you’re onto a winner!   If you can answer the question ‘does this element of the website meet a need?’ (whether for the business or a customer), you can make an intelligent decision on what to include and what not to include.

From another perspective
Successful retailers will walk into their shops as if they were a customer, absorbing the experience so they can enhance and improve the customer’s journey.   Trying to guess how your customers will use your website can seem rather a daunting task, but such information could help shape your design and even give you some ideas to better meet their needs.

Why not ask your customers?  They won’t bite!  Whether you work in a marketing department, run your own business or are working with a design agency, carrying out at least a small amount of user research could unearth some gems of information.  When speaking to your customers, pay attention to the tone and language used when they refer to your services and products.  How would they find you if they were looking for your service through a search engine? What do they want to know about your business? What is important to them?  The field of user research is large but even the smallest amount can pay dividends.

Part two of this series will talk about practical tools and approaches you can take, giving your website the edge over your competitors whilst giving your customers a positive experience. Part 2 - Tools for designing successful websites.

1. Make a shortlist of web design companies with potential
2. Spend some time looking at their portfolios
3. Meet them and see if you like them
4. Make sure they understand business (not just how to build a website)
5. Do they understand how to target customers?
6. Make your final assessment of their proposal and costs

1. Make a shortlist of web design companies with potential.
We suggest you first ask around for recommendations, (fire off a quick email to all your contacts!) and Yell.com for web design companies within your area. Think about how far are you prepared to travel if you want to go to their office for a meeting. (NB. A couple of our clients take a 3 hour round trip - but they say it’s worth it to be working with us!) When searching on Google, you might try searching for “web design company Surrey” or try to narrow your search with adjectives that are important to you, i.e. “beautiful web design Surrey” or “florist web design Guildford“. In any case, you will have many to choose from, so you may have to simply go through the results one-by-one, until you have two or three that look like they could be the right web design company for you. How do you do this?

2. Spend some time looking at their portfolios.
Any web design company worth dealing with should have on their own website, a well-presented portfolio of their clients’ websites. Spend some time browsing through these. Ask yourself if you find those websites appealing, easy to navigate and that they guide you to important information easily. Is there good use of colour, fonts, images etc? Do you think they have done a good job for their previous/existing clients, and have they worked for any clients in a similar market to you?

Once you have a shortlist based on the best portfolios, choosing the right web design company for your business can be approached swiftly and intelligently using these key points to guide you:

3. Meet them and see if you like them!
We have more than one client who came to us after bad experiences with their previous web design company, bringing me swiftly on to a very important point: Don’t work with someone you have never met. Some web designers work by communicating only by email. It just doesn’t work. Establishing a good face-to-face rapport, which can be continued by telephone (and email as well of course!), is essential to building a productive and enjoyable business relationship. You need to have good, open, honest communication with your web design company so that you get exactly what you want, and maybe even have some fun along the way.

4. Make sure they understand business (not just how to build a website)
Modern, successful web design, (be it by one person or a big agency), will encompass the following three disciplines: 1.Business, 2.Creative and 3.Technical expertise. These are the Magic 3 - look out for them! You need to be able to talk business with your web design company, and for them to understand and make suggestions based on their experience. Their graphic design and technical ability should be clearly visible on their portfolio - you need to make sure all three boxes are ticked.

5. Do they understand how to target customers?
Although some web design companies specialise in designing for certain types of business, you will probably benefit from working with a company whose client-base is varied. Their experience working with such differing briefs and target audiences can bring a lot to the table (I’m talking clever ideas here - not a plate of biscuits).

6. Make your final assessment of their proposal and costs
Having met with the web design companies you should already have a good idea who is going to deliver what you need and be good to work with, but there is a last stage in this process. Following your meeting, you will receive the written proposal (a final chance to be sure that this company understands your needs and is able to meet them), along with a quote. The quote should be detailed (for example, so you can clearly see how much time is allocated to the design, and coding the site). How to make the final decision? If you can afford it, simply go with the web design company that best meets your needs (based on all of the suggestions in this blog post). In these uncertain times, where the internet is becoming more important than ever for purchasing decisions, your business needs to be represented by an attractive, usable, informative website that appeals to your target audience. So why not get started today? Or you could put it off ‘til later - you have nothing to lose but customers…!

camberley natural therapy

The Camberley Natural Therapy Center have been working with Redhead Media over the last month to re-design and re-launch their website.  The new site provides all the necessary information about their therapies, staff qualifications and how their services can help both individuals and businesses.

The website also includes a Blog where all the staff can contribute writing articles and news on each of their specialist subject areas from Acupuncture (of which Sue Kalicinska is a founding member of the British Acupuncture Council) to Mental Colour Therapy and more!

The site uses the database driven and content managed side of the platform to enable a fresh look and feel to the home page, where the latest main article is dynamically inserted.  This is good for both users and search engines.  Returning users to a website like to see that the site is changing constantly and offering new content, this will encourage their return, and if the content is well written and informative, will ensure that users will keep coming back.

Search engines like a site to be fresh and updated regularly.  Take Google for instance.  Google likes to provide its customers (internet searchers!) with relevant, up-to-date and informative content.  So when you constantly update your site with new information that achieves this, Google likes you and will give you more brownie points than a static site that never changes (nobody wants old news!). Staying on the good side of search engines is important - especially when you need your website to generate leads!

In order to further extend the reach of the information on the Natural Therapy website - we have incorporated an RSS feed.  This feed (xml coded versions of your articles and information) can be distributed at will across the internet giving your content the chance to get picked up by other sites and other users.   Whilst they may not be in your postcode or business area, they may well link back to relevant content.  This helps in increasing your natural rankings in search engines - another bonus!

Aimtec Ltd - Sun Ray Notebook Solutions

Aimtec are a Sun Ray notebook solutions and Addonics data storage specialist.  Aimtec work closely with Sun Microsystems to deliver thin client technology using machines (Gobi 7 & Gobi8) that carry no data making them extremely secure.  Aimtec Ltd required a fresh clean look that represented their brand and marketing messages and approached Redhead Media as we had been recommended by another technology company we had worked with.
We are currently developing an e-commerce platform to bolt onto the main site so that Aimtec can sell Addonics data storage products online.