Month: June 2009

  • 6 ways a small business can beat the recession

    Glenn Reffin

    We are in the middle of a recession, so why is it a good time for small businesses to sort out their web presence at such a bad time? Surely, it would be better to wait for the recession to be over and then to start investing again. In this post, I have outlined 6 reasons why you should be thinking about a redesign of your web site now; or if your business is not online, why you should get your business on the internet now.

    Your customers are looking for bargains

    Your customers have already searched online for the best deals and best products. The internet has helped consumers to drive down prices and be better informed about the goods they are purchasing. The web has enabled consumers to not only compare products, prices and resellers, but also to find out what others think of a product, service or company. All of this is done online. If you have an out of date or non-existant web site, you will miss out on this traffic. By 2007, Verdict Research estimated that £10.9bn was spent online by UK consumers. That was a year-on-year increase of 33.4%. Since then, despite the recession, internet retail sales have continued to increase.

    Your competitors have a site already

    Your competitors — both locally and globally — more than likely already have a website and are benefiting from the additional traffic that it generates. By not having a website, or not having it updated, you are missing out on the custom that your competitors are enjoying. Would you shut your shop one day a week and put a sign on your door giving directions to your nearest competitor? This is exactly what you are doing if you don’t have a modern web site.

    Professional image

    Most consumers today expect a professional business to have a website and to be listed online. You can gain a lot of business by making the right first impression for consumers who may not have known you existed. By being able to answer questions online and show your products or services, you start to build a relationship with potential customers. Those who do product research online may email you a quick question, your answer may build a relationship that subsequently leads to a sale. Brand trust is a key factor in the decisions consumers make.

    Marketing tools

    Why not generate new marketing opportunities with your website? You can market directly to people who have visited your site and subscribed to your updates. You can send them advice on your latest offers, new lines, deals and company information. And it won’t cost you a penny to do!

    A website also offers you the ability to be open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with no additional staff requirements. It is an advertising dream offering you the ability to advertise your goods and services in a cost effective way. Owning a website is much cheaper than taking out a year’s worth of advertising.

    Give contact details to millions of passers by

    The internet enables you to offer browsers and passers-by the opportunity to get in touch with you. Whether that is leaving a comment on your blog, emailing you directly, sending you a message through your online form, using a chat room, giving your telephone number and address, adding your listing to directory services and Google…. These days, people don’t look in Yellow Pages™ for business information. They look online. It is up to you to make sure you are there when they come looking.

    The recession won’t last forever

    You won’t find many market experts telling you when the bottom of the recession will be reached. In fact, you won’t hear them claiming the recession is over until after the economy has scrambled out of the hole and is making a dash for it. You shouldn’t wait for the experts to tell you that everything is going to be fine; you need to make provisions for the survival of your own business and the best way to do that is to spend a little time sprucing up your online shop windows. This will push you ahead of the game when the economy does start to react and you will be leading the field.

  • The Design Process

    Glenn Reffin

    Rowers by Y

    Before starting on the design process, you should have a well defined brief and understand the scope of the job. Without these, your project may end up with higher costs and delay because your expectations differ to those of your client. Now you are ready to evolve your ideas into some concepts to present to your client. For now, you are not actually building the site; you are designing concepts to a pre-construction stage that can be presented to and agreed by your client.

    The brief may have given you a number of ideas for how to design the site and this stage is intended to consider these ideas, present the best to your client and identify the preferred option. But before you can do that you need to get answers to a few more questions and test your ideas against them.

    Some things a web designer should consider:

    Users

    You need to test your ideas against what users will expect to see. The users of the site are of absolute importance – if you put your navigation system at the bottom of the page, for example, is this what users will expect? Where will they expect to see the logo? There are a number of conventions that users will expect and you should consider these carefully before you decide to go against them.

    You also need to consider user-specified items that should appear on the site, such as login widgets, video, interactive elements, forms, etc. How and where will these appear? How important are they for functionality, usability and ‘stickiness’ — the ability to keep users on the site. Create a hierarchy of these objects.

    Functionality

    Really this is a subsection of Users because it describes how users interact with the site and whether it provides the functionality they expect in the places where they expect to find it. Do users have to search through 20 pages of description to get to the ‘buy me’ button? If they do, it ain’t functionin’! This is about making it easy for people to do what they want to do on the site. Functionality, to some extent, also covers speed: how quickly does the page load, how many server calls are made to load the page, does the JavaScript slow the page down?, and also how quickly can a user skim the content to find the piece that they want to read (is the typography helpful or a hindrance, is the structure of the page suitable to the content…)?

    Accessibility

    This is another important feature of any site and one that you should start designing into the site from the first drawing. In this sense, accessibility is about the colours you use — do they provide sufficient contrast? — The fonts you use, — are they easily legible? Is the content going to be overshadowed by that great picture you want to use? Are the link methods you are planning to use accessible? Have you structured content correctly, — is data stored in a table and is the table accessible?

    The fundamentals of these questions will be put into practice when you start building the site. Creating the foundation of that best practice now, will make life a lot easier further down the line.

    Plan the site

    You should also have a clear idea of the content that will appear on the site, how pages will fit together — which page will link to which? This will help you to develop your site structure and the overall site map. This is essential for a large site but is also really useful for a small site and will help you to start structuring your Search Engine Optimisation as a core part of the page design.

    Do you want to see my sketches?

    Before you start anything electronically, you should use pen and paper to sketch your ideas. This gives you the opportunity to see how they look, modify them and hone them without spending hours getting Fireworks, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. displaying what you intended and finding it doesn’t work. It also gives you some rough concepts to present to your client and seek feedback. You should only start committing them to electronic form when you have some clear ideas on paper.

    Sketching a design allows you to play with where elements of a page should go to maximise visitors’ attention and optimise use of the hotspots on the page. It also allows you to ensure that visual elements work together.

    What do you get out of following a design process?

    There are very clear benefits to working through a design process (no matter how basic). It gives you a structure to work to and elements on which to focus; so, rather than jumping in and getting it wrong, you are able to concentrate on making the design achieve the results it expects before dedicating time and your client’s money to a concept that simply won’t work. Furthermore, it will help you to explain your design process to your client.

    At the end of this stage you should be presenting your final mock-ups to your client for approval and to decide on which design to follow. This is much easier if you are able to describe the process you have followed and explain the reason you have made the decisions you have made.

    The next stage in the five step project management cycle is construction. If you have developed your design well, you should have:

    • A site structure and site map
    • An understanding of the back-end data structure
    • An agreed design to carry forward
    • An understanding of what content will be required

  • 7 reasons to use WordPress for a small business website

    Glenn Reffin

    WordPress logo
    WordPress can help small businesses

    Which Content Management System (CMS) to use for small businesses that wants to update their website content? There are many options available for a small business and these may seem bewildering. In this post, I will give 7 reasons why WordPress is one of the best tools to support your small business website.

    Self-hosting

    With WordPress installed on your hosting server, you remain in control of the site, its software and its content. You are not at the mercy of a third party being responsible for maintenance and upgrades; you have complete control. You can choose to manage the whole thing yourself, or you can pay someone to do the maintenance and upgrading for you, as necessary. You will need to make sure that your chosen web host is capable of supporting WordPress on their servers (most are).

    Plugins

    If the standard setup does not do what you want it to do, there are masses of extensions to the functionality of the platform available as plugins. All that is needed is for them to be downloaded and activated and they are ready to use immediately. Plugins offer a huge amount of flexibility to your WordPress installation, making the functionality fairly bespoke depending on the plugins that you install.

    Community support

    If you have problems with your installation, there is a vast community of professionals who are able to assist, unlike other more specialist platforms, WordPress is built on PHP and MySQL, which are languages that are readily understood by many developers and other professionals. As WordPress, PHP and MySQL are open source platforms, there is a huge amount of information and support available as well as a very active and supportive WordPress community. If you have any problems or questions, you will find it fairly easy to get an answer (and no question is too trivial, believe me!).

    Flexibility

    As WordPress is open source and has a great community following, it offers flexibility and ease of use. Indeed, one of the biggest advantages of WordPress over other platforms is its user-friendliness: you don’t need to understand programming languages, PHP, HTML or MySQL to use it. You can just log in, click and type. Often, it is considered to be ‘only’ a blogging tool but its flexibility is astonishing at accomplishing many different tasks.

    Open source and free

    WordPress is built on an open source platform and is itself open source. It is free to use for any purpose (personal or commercial). This has to be a huge benefit for any small business or not-for-profit organisation with a limited budget. Also, it is simple to learn and it is quick to keep your site up to date and fresh, so resource use can be minimised and you won’t need to go on any expensive or time consuming courses.

    SEO and Standards compliant

    WordPress takes much of the pain out of ensuring your site is Search Engine friendly and automatically completes many of the tasks that have to be completed every time new content is added to a web site. It also ensures that new content is compliant with the latest web standards and that your site is accessible and visitor friendly (depending on the theme that is used to display your content). It does all of these essential things out of the box, allowing you to get on with running your business.

    No coding necessary

    Unlike some other platforms, you may never need to touch a line of code. All the HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL takes place in the background, where it should be. You don’t need to be an expert in web technologies to use it, which leaves you time to ensure your content is great. With many websites and some other CMS platforms, you would need to have a knowledge of some coding to update, change or add to your existing content. With WordPress, this is not necessary, saving you time and money.

    And finally, one more for luck…

    Branding

    You can easily make your web site look and feel the way you want it to with bespoke themes. A theme is a set of ‘templates’ that wrap around your content so that it looks the way you want it to look. Whether you have a brand identity, or an existing web site that you want to pull your blog into, you can theme your installation how you want. There are many existing themes available (some for free) if you want to use something off the shelf. But if you want something bespoke, you can easily get it designed and developed for you by a WordPress expert.

  • How to write a creative brief

    Glenn Reffin

    BT Tower, London

    This post covers how to write a brief for a web design project.

    Why is this important?

    Web design projects are only ever successful if two things can be achieved at the same time:

    • You provide your client with a site that fulfills the brief and they are satisfied with it; and
    • You have correctly estimated the time it will take to complete the project and you have been adequately paid for the work you have done.

    To achieve both of these, it is essential for you to have a clear understanding of what your client wants to achieve. One of the ways we do this at Redcentaur is to set out in a creative brief exactly what the client wants to get from their web site and the reasons for it. This helps us to identify the objectives of the site and to scope the work necessary.

    Obviously, the completion of a creative brief is not the be-all-and-end-all of understanding your client and the goals of the web site. It is the starting point, from which there needs to be conversation and discussion to drill down into the responses to the brief.

    The brief

    There are two parts to a creative brief that are designed to give the web developer a clear understanding of the client, their needs, desires, strengths and weaknesses. Paying heed and due attention to the brief can pay dividends for both client and designer in reducing the risk of missing the mark at a later stage.

    The creative brief

    The key part of the brief is to understand the creative requirements of the client. This can be broken down into four sections. Remember, your client might not have a clear grasp of these expectations themselves. This section of the brief should help them to start pinning down some of these concepts if they haven’t already.

    Summary

    This section should give a general overview of the client and the project as they envisage it. It should state the purpose of the project from their perspective and identify any specific goals they have in mind.

    Audience profile

    Your client probably has a general idea of who the target audience is for their web site and this section provides you with an opportunity to identify the target market from the outset. By asking your client what they think the target audience is, what they care about and why they would visit the site, you are able to develop an in-depth understanding of your client’s aspirations and the factors that will measure the success of your web design.

    Communication

    In our experience, this is one of the most difficult factors to obtain from a client. Often clients do not have a clear idea of their message or how that message should be conveyed. This section is about what it is your client wants to say to their target audience and why it is important for that audience to see this message. This section may help the client to start defining this message.

    Competitive position

    In an age when the internet has brought huge amounts of information to every audience, competitive edge is king. You need to be clear on the things that set your client apart from the rest and what factors make your client a success where others in their field are not. This will help you to identify the key strengths of your client that will need to be the focus of the design.

    The technical brief

    The client may have an idea of the technical aspects of the site that need to be delivered. These can be as fundamental as site logos and photography, copy, contact forms, etc. or more technical issues, such as database integration. The technical brief should be tailored to the services that you are able to provide. This is a secondary part to the brief as much of the technical specification will be a result of the design as it develops, but it is important here to understand if the client has decided the site will form the backbone of its customer relationship management, for example.

    Roles and responsibilities

    Once you have some answers to these questions, you can start to flesh out what are the roles and responsibilities within the project — who will provide the site images, who will provide the copy…?

    It is important to have an understanding of this so that you can accurately estimate the time required to complete the design — if you suddenly find that the client does not have suitable photography, you will have to spend time either getting the photographs or sourcing them; a cost that you may not have factored into your quote.

    Next steps

    Once you are clear on the scope of the web site and have a clear brief, you can move on to design.

    Discussion

    Please leave a comment below to let us know how useful this is to you. Are there other aspects that you feel have not been tackled in our brief? Is this something you don’t find useful? How do you understand your client’s expectations?