Web Design News

Websites that market a business product to another business are becoming more and more popular but as web designers and developers should we be looking at a B2B site in the same way that we might look at a site that is selling a product to an ordinary consumer?

Just recently I came across a B2B website that had a rather in-your-face background to the text that appeared on the pages. It wasn’t even a particularly relevant background and had little to do with the services the business offered to others.

Should we really be decorating B2B websites in that way or are decorations like that totally irrelevant in a B2B setting?

I’ve certainly got my thoughts on the matter and even the text I write for a B2B site differs from the text I would write for a consumer targeted site but what say you?

There are some web designers and developers who lean towards functionality rather than pretty pictures. Then there are some who think that pretty pictures are far more important than functionality.

Whichever camp you fall into perhaps you should look at this site - http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/ -

and then review the discussion that is going on here.

Personally I’m with the guy who made this comment “Business is not about pretty sites, it’s about making money.”

But of course your mileage may vary
With that said, the site is perfect.

A few days ago I wrote about what was working for our small web design business in a town where there is plenty of competition. You can find that piece here at Beating the Competition.

Since then I came across this interesting thread on on a major Webmaster board that was started by a small designer who was looking for advice on how to pick up more work.

If you run a small web design business it’s definitely worth reading.

Over the years the tourist town where we live and work has had a fairly stable group of web designers and developers. The industry here has been made up of perhaps three ‘big’ design houses and a few low-key home based businesses.

Copy Text has tended to stay out of the local competition because we’ve been fully occupied with overseas clients but in the last year or so we’ve been slowly moving into the local market and so have one or two other web design businesses. Because of our overseas work we’ve been able to make the move into the local market slowly and we’ve been able to depend on the best form of marketing of all … word of mouth.

While the other new and established businesses have been spending money on advertising in various forms of local media we’ve been able to quietly working away at producing a quality product at a reasonable price for our clients and now it’s really beginning to work for us. In the last seven days we’ve taken on three new clients and they have all become interested in dealing with us because of what our satisfied clients have told them.  Two of those jobs landed in our laps in two hours yesterday - and the orders are worth many thousands of dollars.

In some ways that boost has come at a rather interesting time because we’ve noticed that there has been a sudden increase in other small web design businesses starting up around town. While those new guys aren’t doing much media advertising they are driving around town with their marketing message splashed across their vehicles and perhaps that’s what’s working for them.

But what’s working for us is word of mouth marketing done by very satisfied clients and following up on fresh leads that our clients tell us about. We spend time talking to our old clients and we spend time talking to the new prospects too and that’s working for us.

Of course, getting out and selling yourself face to face may not be something that your comfortable with doing. It’s safer to sit in your car or call the local paper and organise an ad in the next edition but if you want to beat the competition you have to move out of your comfort zone and get serious about succeeding in business.

QR code … if you haven’t heard about it yet then you soon will. It’s been big in Japan for some time (think 2003)  and now it’s breaking out into the United Kingdom and it will have an impact on web designers.

QR code is what enables camera phones to read what could best be described by likening it to what we know as a bar code. In Japan businesses display the code on their store fronts, it appears on billboards and just about anywhere else that a someone can point their camera phone at.

When someone does point their phone at one of those pieces of QR code they’re then taken to a website where they can obtain further information about whatever it was they were looking at.

You can read more about QR code here and here

It’s been one of those crazy weeks here at Copy Text Online where the work coming in has just not stopped. If anything it’s actually increased and we’re seriously beginning to think that it’s time to take on more staff.

Not only have we been hit with a bunch of work from some of our overseas clients but we’ve also just been handed a project that is like a dream come true for us. We’ve been asked to do the redesign and text work for two local sites in major tourist centres here in Queensland.

One of the domain names cost the client many tens of thousands of dollars and the other didn’t come much cheaper and now he wants us to rebuild them. Hmmm it’s a challenge we’re looking forward to.

But I didn’t come here to brag about that. What I did hit the blog to talk to you about was banner blindness and that’s something that web designers really should be aware of. As most of you are aware, Jakob Nielsen is the leading usability guru on the Web today and when he speaks we really do need to listen.

Now he’s spoken again and you’ll find what he has to say here. You should read it not only because it talks about what people don’t see on web sites but there’s also a little gem hidden away in there about some of the useless navigation that web designers inflict on their clients.