Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

You asked and you shall receive!

Following on from our enormously successful Affiliate Scheme and feedback from our affiliates we have now added an extra 10 banners and graphics which provides a total of 12 different images to use. And as requested we have added a dedicated banner page which means you no longer have to sign up before seeing what images are available.

All of banners and graphics can now be found HERE. Don’t forget, you do not need to be a Hampshire Web Design client to sign up to our Affiliate Scheme and you are welcome to use your own image design – As long as it links back to your dedicated affiliate code then that’s all you need.

If you would like to design your own banner and make it available to our other affiliates to use then we would be very grateful! Just contact us and we would be honoured to add it to the current collection.

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Sunday, May 24th, 2009

The idea is that, no matter what business you are into or how small your business is, you must have a website. You have just started off, and you won’t want to miss on any chance you can get to make yourself recognized in no time. Here are some tips you can follow to make your website more productive and having to suffer little expenses.

Don’t Make Usability An After-Thought:
Of course when you are new, you would want instant results of fame. This would drive you towards building an SEO-friendly website to be the top priority in search engines. This is a great thing, but don’t ever let go of your website’s usability. You are new and what you mostly need is the user’s attention and trust. In whatever manner you design your website, be sure to make it user-centered. The gains of planning usability into your website increases end-user satisfaction and reduce long-term development costs (costs of fixing and maintaining poorly designed websites later on)

Create To Sell:
Your website’s main purpose is to sell what you offer—whether products or services. If your site fails to do that, there’s no point of having it at the first place! Make your visitors comfortable and compel them to buy. What you can do is give them full details about yourself, probably on your “about us” page. Address to them in a communicative language and give them an option to contact you back for any suggestions or any other reason. Be concise, you don’t want to bore them with petty details.

Make Your Site Speak For Your Business:
The home page of your website should be neatly organized with having a good design and solid meaningful content. Tell your visitors what your business, products, and services are all about. Enlighten the features and plus points your business in detail. Remember, your website is your sales person and business spokesman, don’t let this opportunity go to waste. Emphasize Your Competitive Advantage: There is always something that makes you unique from your competitive market. The key is to acknowledge that “something” and bring it forward to the visitors. There is an ideal chance that your small business may give the visitors exactly what they want and didn’t find it anywhere else. Tell them how they can make the best choice by choosing you.

Brand Identity Is Important:
Don’t forget to place your logo and colors on your site. Colors and logos are important in determining your brand identity and they connect your site to your other marketing materials. Use a consistent and simple design for each of your website pages. Position your logo and navigation elements at the same place on every page; this will divert your visitor’s attention towards the content entirely, saving you from designing complexities.

Your Site Should Provide Solutions:
Remember, your visitors have many questions to which they want effective and reliable answers. Don’t confuse them but explain how you can solve their issues by providing successful solutions. Be as much supportive as you can, this will enhance your credibility and make your visitors deal with you without hesitation. It is also good to include any experience you have had in solving problems of your earlier clients. Include client testimonials for verifications if you can; nothing is more effective than showing what actually the reality is. If you choose a professional web designing firm to build your website, make sure they are aware of these tips while creating your website. As you are new, they should understand your business requirements and how it can be given maximum exposure through your website. You need a Web designer that is capable of producing a site that will work well for you.

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Friday, May 22nd, 2009

SEO is an essential part of any website and without using it correctly you’ll never get anywhere in the maze that is Search Engine Rankings.

This amazing guide, published by Google covers just about everything you can think of, including:

• Create unique, accurate page titles
• Make use of the “description” meta tag
• Improving the structure of your URLs
• Making your site easier to navigate
• Offering quality content and services
• Writing better anchor text

and much more with easy to follow examples and images.

If you are serious about gaining good rankings then you must read this!

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Friday, May 8th, 2009

In order to assist web developers in search engine optimization (SEO), Google launched a tool named Analytics. A simple Java Script code is used by the tool which shows details such as how a user found a website, how they reached to the website, and also how a web designer can improve the user experience of a website. All this information helps in the Search Engine Optimization process to drive more traffic to websites and increase the return on investment (ROI) through higher number of conversions.

Importance of Conversions
The rate of conversions decides the success parameters of online marketing campaigns. Conversions are also known as ‘Goals’ which represents the behaviour of the user to match the motive behind the campaigning. One important way to find out the effectiveness of the campaign is thus, to keep a track of the rate of conversions. Maintaining conversion rates also helps in determining whether keywords, ad creative or other elements require modification. Therefore, it is very important to set up goals to understand the reaction of the search engines to your website, especially when you are using Google Analytics.

Setting up a goal in Google Analytics & Specifying the URL or Goal Page
The goal page is the page where the user reaches after performing the required action for conversion. This page can be accessed only after the conversion has taken place in the form of purchase, register, download etc.

Providing a name to the goal
A name is necessary since it should be easily recognized by Google Analytics to generate reports.

Defining funnels
A funnel refers to a set of pages that lead the user to the goal page. Funnels help you determine the behaviour of a user as he moves towards the goal. In many cases, the users leave the website in between before navigating to the goal, you should know when (which stage) the user left the website. This information will help you in modifying the site design, layout, or ad creative.

Assigning values
Based on the achieved goals, Google Analytics provides metrics such as average score, ROI, and others.

The result of the campaign depends on the assigned values of the goal quantifiers. It is difficult to calculate a value if a direct sales or purchase is not involved. In that case you can calculate the conversion rates and the dollar or pound amount of the conversion to measure the value of a goal.

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Friday, May 1st, 2009

We would like to congratulate Nikki of CC3Skins for earning an incredible £55 through our Affiliate scheme last month.

If you haven’t already joined our Affiliate Scheme then more details can be found at http://www.hants-web.co.uk/affiliates.html and it just goes to show that a simple banner or text link can earn you a considerable amount of money if your website is receiving traffic.

Well done Nikki! It’s up to you now to try and beat your record for this month

Posted in Announcements | 2 Comments »