The website has become the number one global marketing tool and that is why it’s essential that you have the right web development team behind you.

Whats the difference between web design and web development?

Perhaps you need both, but it’s important to be able to differenciate between the two.  The web designer designs the look of your website.  It’s a creative discipline. Web development on the other hand, refers to the technical creation of your site and the coding behind the site. It involves a more technical skillset.

Here are some tips to make sure you have the right team behind you. (more…)

If we look at any sort of media or entertainment, be it music, films, television, books or whatever, fresh content and fresh stories will be the driver to success.  Everybody likes original or new content.  And your website’s performance for search engine rankings is no different.  When it comes to your website and how the search engines rank it, it should have fresh content in order to maximize the search engine optimization of the site. (more…)

The internet is now established itself as one of the most powerful marketing tools that can be taken advantage of by virtually all businesses.  It provides a platform for a business of any size to advertise and market their products or services in order to reach a larger audience and boost growth and development.

And it is also one of the least expensive tools a business can use.

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The colour usage of a web design is vitally important in determining how successful a website will be.  How the website looks and feels to the browser is important in order to increase click through rates and also enticing them to delve deeper and for longer periods in the website.  In simple terms, the usage of colours in your site can either retain or turn away browsers so spend time choosing the right ones.

When choosing the colours in your web design, they say it’s best to stick to colours that reflect the colours in your logo.  This isn’t strictly speaking always true.  You should always avoid colours that will be irritating to the eyes. This could include overly bright colours, neon, or anything else that might be considered a visual deterrent.

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What is a microsite?

A microsite is a specific area of web design and is generally a landing page with a specific purpose. It will have a separate domain name with separate hosting to the main site – a separate website in fact.

It is often considered as a special kind of ‘landing page’. And like all landing pages the objective is to maximise the conversion of visitors, whether that is a sale or a lead generation activity in the form of a contact or sign-up form.

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1.     Make your headline emotive: Use your web design to pull on the heart strings. Give your title a message that matches your customer’s desires, hopes or aspirations.

2. Design your web site to allow for a real time 2 way conversation: Place live chat widgets on lots of pages – critically, right beside the Call To Action.  Be able to answer queries from someone unsure about a decision to purchase. (more…)

Cut through the  SEO confusion with our simple process to find those elusive key words that work for your business. Sometimes it’s easy to overlook the obvious!

1. Make sure you Register Your Own Brand Names

Always be sure you rank for your brand name. This is the first goal of search engine optimization. Search for it and establish where exactly you rank on the web.  In the event that you don’t feature for your own brand then make it a priority. It’s usually an easy step and you may even be there already. Force out any competitors ranking on page one with your brand, you want to own this position. Search engine algorithms won’t allow brand ownership of the full first page of results, they generally will only show 2 – 4 results from the same domain on a page.

2. Get Keyword Suggestions

Add your web address, any relevant keywords plus competitor URLs into a keyword search tool and download a list of ideas for recommended keywords. Google’s Keyword Tool is free and is commonly used. When you use a suggestion tool to add keywords that are relevant to your brand, ensure that you include a selection of header terms, middle ranking terms and long-tail keywords.

• Head terms get 1,000+ monthly searches – generic
• Mid-terms get  between 100 to 1,000 monthly searches – more tailored
• Long-tail keywords usually get 100 monthly searches – quite specific and target related

3. Beat Your Competitors at Search Engine Optimization

Find out which keywords your competitors have selected by inserting their main URL address to the keyword suggestion tool you are employing. Check your own keyword list to see how it works in comparison to those of your competitors. Maybe you have overlooked some key words that you need to include now?

4. Break down Your SEO Keyword List

How does your keyword list now fit in terms of competition, status, search volume, relevance and brand positioning. You want to target ultimately 10 keywords for each SEO campaign – including your brand name and at most four other keywords.

5. Build a Search Engine Optimization Plan

Once you have identified the top 10 keywords to target, simply build your SEO marketing plan with them. Track the trends of the rankings for your keywords and see how much traffic you’re generating from them. The highest performing keywords are those that lead to business conversions.

Tip 1.   Make Sure Your Web Design Has CLEAR Navigation.

The best designed retail websites make shopping online easy.  It is tempting to amaze visitors with a complex and busy look and feel…but resist.  Easy, clear, simple instructions work best. Trying too hard with bells and whistles can result in frustrated shoppers. And they won’t return.

Test to make sure your web design has navigation that is simple to use and understand.  Label instructions clearly explaining exactly what to expect when a person clicks. Selling shoes? Try labels such as Men’s Shoes or Women’s Shoes.

Usability testing can reveal things about how users navigate your site that you might not anticipate.

Tip 2.  Design to Make Sure your Web Navigation is Easy to Access

As we know some of your customers are likely to have health limits that require surfing the web by means of screen readers, Braille displays that are refreshable, screens with magnifiers or additional devices. Try to situate text navigation and skip links at the page heading.

Tip 3: Let the Web Design Tell a Browser Where They Are

To choose where to go on your site, people need to know exactly where they are. As many shoppers are using search engines to find stores online, they can easily find your site on any page – there is no guarantee that they hit your site on the home page – use visual and text clues to show the customer where he or she is on your site. This is known as breadcrumbs.

Tip 4. Design Web Layers to break up Large Sites

Sites with many product categories, many brands or that offer many products, need to include layers of navigation to break it down into easy shopping steps.

Shoppers need to be able to browse by product, price, brand, age, size/colour, gender or just about any other product feature. The navigation design for your web should allow that facility intuitively.

Tip 5: Integrate Search Facilities into the Web Design

Ecommerce websites should allow shoppers to just search for products. Make sure that a Search Box is added to every page on your site and test to make sure it delivers the appropriate results.

Choosing Joomla for your web development has superior strengths to competitor products known as WISIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) platforms like FrontPage or Dreamweaver.

1. Joomla incorporates a Content Management System.

This feature ensures that all your website pages are developed, maintained and updated easily, including adding or removing new pages.  A CMS ability is the key advantage over constructing and coding a website in the straightforward HTML standard language.

2. Joomla is an Open Source web development product

Using Joomla means that there are no licensing fees, costs which you do have to pay for a Microsoft product or an alternative commercial product.  There is also an enormous community of skilled users available online 24 / 7 to provide support.

3. Some other good reasons to develop your website use Joomla!

A very attractive feature of Joomla! is its functionality. It’s great for tasks  such as simple brochure site web development to entire shopping cart sites, or indeed fully interactive online membership websites. Avail of the 3,500 plugins and add-ons to extend its functionality including exciting and easy to use shopping carts, videos, galleries, blogs, forums, project tools – in fact everything you could possibly need to develop your web site.

4. Re-design is easier

Template systems also make it easy to change the look and feel of your site without having to redo the whole site from scratch. You can literally change the whole graphic design/look of the site in a matter of seconds while retaining the content. Find more than 2000 templates, many of them free, allow a web developer to change the look and feel of your site quite easily.

5. Joomla V WordPress

Although WordPress allows web developers to access many plugins too, and can extend to many new functions, it simply doesn’t have the sheer power underlying it’s infrastructure for web developers to easily plug in a comprehensive shopping cart for ecommerce websites for example.

Check out our web development portfolio to see examples of Joomla in action.

Making your online marketing work involves targeting relevant audiences often through several online channels.  These typically can include:

• Pay Per Click (PPC)
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Email Marketing

How do I establish a PPC online marketing campaign?

Managing a good PPC campaign involves spending time on basic keyword research, focusing on your customers. Not all advertisers understand the route chosen to search for a product or service, nor the ideal search phrases to measure.

Our online marketing professionals understand how to research the ideal keyword or phrases to bid on.  They look at competitor bid levels, frequency of search terms, and ‘broad matching’ a bid, having your ad highlighted in results that are relevant or similar.

Recent Online Marketing (Irish) Research Data

[from the Interactive Media Retail Group]

• 51% of The population in the UK purchase online and 15% buy with their cell phone
• Sales worth £45.6 billion were made online from January to October 2010, an increase of 17%, the total figure for 2009 was £49.8 billion – quite an increase!

Retailers who use multiple channels – online, mobile, retail – to reach customers are increasing market share in relation to the dedicated online sites. PPC works on the web and mobile channels.  You need to constantly test, improve and respond to results by measuring responses, links and customer activity.

• Females shoppers spend 20% more time on shopping sites than men Source: comScore
• In a channel value analysis by JC Penney, the typical value of sales for retailers of multiple channels was $900 per year, online only achieved $160 in sales while retail only channel operators achieved on average $200
• Social commerce is now a growing business, 28% of US all online businesses have  reported sales achieved through social media sites are growing significantly Shop.org

Wake up to eCommerce business. Remember opportunities exist as well as risks. Investment at the outset of any online marketing campaign in both strategy and planning will return dividends.

Act now to get your business online.