Web Design News

Everyone has heard the old saying that an image is worth a thousand words … but what are the images and photos on your business website telling your customer?

Are your images and photos really enhancing your website or are they actually detracting from the impact of your site?

Way too many people try to save money by taking their own photographs for a business website. Sure they pay a professional web designer to design the site but they think that their photos are good enough to display on their new site.

Unfortunately all to often the photos are not as good as the business owner might think. Just recently we were given a number of photos to include in a basic website for a client. The lighting and the sharpness were all fine but most of them had problems:

• the subject was too far from the camera
• there was clutter in the foreground that drew your eye away from the subject
• the background was littered with things that shouldn’t have been there or distracted the viewer - an upturned chair - a car park full of cars - doors that were left ajar
• there were thing to the side of the photographer that found their way into the photographs and couldn’t be cropped out
• important items in the background were not centred in the image - a sign with the client’s business name was off-centre so not all of the name appeared in the image.

These are all things that a professional looks for when setting up to take the photos and they’re all things that do nothing to enhance a website.  If you want to take photos for your website then be sure to look before you take the photo and remove the junk that is going to get in the way.

And don’t be afraid to use a professional photographer rather than take some happy snaps yourself and hope for the best.

Here at Total Website Management and Copy Text Online we’re pleased to be able to say that we work with Freddie and Gordon Kitson from Vizionz and they are two of the best commercial photographers in Hervey Bay.

It’s been an absolutely crazy two weeks here at Total Website Management and Copy Text Online. We were on deadlines for clients in the US and in Spain and we also had a crazy deadline to make for stage one of client’s site.

Just to add to all the mayhem we decided that it was time to upgrade a server over in the United States. The old server was still working well but to keep up our standard of service we decided that it was time to make the move to a better server now before the old one began to break down.

Server moves in days gone by have been traumatic and a lot of work but fortunately these days server moves can be almost seamless. However the wait between shifting everything to the new server and waiting to see it come online can be as traumatic as waiting for a baby to be born … anything and everything can go wrong.

Fortunately this baby was born with only a couple of minor glitches and they were fixed within minutes of the new server going live.

So it’s been a crazy time but in the middle of all that craziness we got a letter from the Gayndah and District Historical Society. We did their Gayndah Museum site last month and they wrote to tell us:

“The members who have computers and have had a look all agree that the colour schem you have chosen is spot on and the layout is very easy to follow and appropriate.”

We love it when a plan comes together!

At a recent search engine conference one of the speakers presented the SEO’s 10 Commandments. It was interesting to see that most of them are applicable to web designers too and number 5 is one that we all should live by.

5. Thou shall honor your client’s wishes and goals.

The Online Digital Business Initiative Translation:
Listen to your customers and respect their opinions. Do not pretend you live in an ivory tower, but rather give back to your customers and they will give back to you ten fold.

You can read all 10 of them here

Now there’s an interesting question to ask your web designer. Obviously Google is the leading search engine on the planet but what come in at number two?

If you’re designer tells you that it’s Yahoo! or MSN/Live then he’s either out of touch or he doesn’t care and either way you really don’t want him working on your site. In the last couple of weeks Yahoo! has slipped to the number three spot and something quite different to your normal search engine has taken its place.

Last week was another big week for us here at Total Website Management and Copy Text Online with three very different websites going live.

The first to be released was ABargain.com.au - this is an e-commerce site that we built and now will maintain for a local businessman who imports his stock direct from China, Vietnam and Indonesia. Our client has run a very successful bricks-and-mortar business here on the Fraser Coast but now wants to take his business to people around Australia.

The second site to be released went live last Tuesday and doing the ground work for the Gayndah Museum website was very interesting. Local history is fascinating and the Gayndah Museum has one of the finest collections of very rare steam engines, vehicles and farm equipment in Queensland.

Finally the Fraser Coast Patient Transfer Facility site went live on Friday. As I said over on our small business blog, every small business should be involved in the life of their community in a meaningful way and being one of the sponsors for the committe that is raising funds for this much-needed facility is our way of being involved in the community.

If you’re here in Hervey Bay then please donate to this very worthy project because with out it the time may come when it could be you, flat on your back on a stretcher and getting wet as you’re transferred from an ambulance to the Royal Flying Doctor Service for a life-saving trip to Brisbane.

This coming week looks as though it’s going to be just as busy and we’re certainly looking forward to the challenges.

This week was going to be a rather hectic one for us but so far we are on track to get all our client’s new sites out the door by Friday.  Here’s the first one for a local builder who wanted to get his business online.

It’s a fairly basic site but over time it will be expanded. You can visit the full Daly Classic Homes site - the site of an award winning home builder in Hervey Bay - by clicking on the link.

There’s a big week ahead of us here at Total Website Management and Copy Text Online in Hervey Bay. Our target is to have two “ordinary” websites go live for very different clients along with three e-commerce sites  for other clients.

Add to that we’ve got meetings, site promotion and several site updates to work through too along with some search engine testing to keep up with the latest trends. It’s going to be a fun week

As web designers we’re often asked by clients about how they can go about marketing to their customers via email lists. Here in Australia the law is very clear about constitutes spam and the penalties for spamming are harsh so we web designers need to know what we should tell our clients.

If you’re wondering about the law regarding email spam then here’s something I wrote for our small business blog. Please don’t just take my word for it … do some research yourself because you could already be doing exactly what your country’s spam laws class as illegal.

More and more small businesses are using email as a way of marketing their products and services to past customers and some future customers too. But there’s always a potential risk of being labelled as a spammer when you use email.

Many countries these days have strict anti-spam laws in place that clearly identify what constitutes spam and what penalties those who break the anti-spam laws will face. Because the anti-spam laws in each country are different I would encourage you to read those laws for yourself.

Here in Australia there are three key requirements set down by our anti-spam laws. Those three requirements are:

1. Consent - you must have the consent of the recipient and you must be able to prove that you have received that consent.

2. Your emails to past clients and potential clients must clearly identify you and your business as the authorised sender.

3. Your emails must contain a functioning unsubscribe link
(you can read more about the Australian anti-spam laws here)

Now if your laws are similar then there is an important factor for every small business in that first point. You must have the consent … and prove you have the consent of the recipient … before you can start sending them emails. That means that you just can’t go round harvesting email addresses wherever you might find them and adding them to your email list. There’s simply no consent in doing that.

I know that’s what a lot of small businesses do to build their email lists but if you want to stay on the right side of the law then the only way you can build your email list is with the consent of of the people you want to send those emails out to.

If you’re trying to build up an email list of potential customers then the only way to do it to stay within the law is via an opt-in option … nothing less will do.

There are some exciting and challenging times ahead for businesses who want to stay competitive and accessible to consumers who use the latest technology and those challenges are there for web designers who want to keep abreast of the latest technology too.

Yesterday I was able to attend and important conference in Sydney that looked this latest technology without leaving my desk here in Hervey Bay. Thanks to Twitter I was right there in the conference room and connected to some of the leading experts despite the fact that there was no formal broadcast from the conference and only one of the people I could intereact with actually had a laptop with them.

It was fascinating to “listen” in as these people discussed cutting edge communication technology that can take your business to what has now become known as the “fourth screen”.

Stay tuned for more because this is the stuff of the future and look for an important announcement from the ABC … they’ll soon be launching an initiative that will bring consumer focus to that fourth screen.

If you’re a web designer and you’re setting your clients up on hosting that uses Plesk then you really must read this post over on Webmaster World.