When we’re first commissioned to develop a site, our planning process is thorough because that way the finished website will be one that our client, and we, can be proud of.

But as we work we’re constantly thinking about the flexibility and potential we can build in to enable the website to expand and change in this fast-moving world. We often find, when a website goes live, that talk instantly turns to what might happen next.

Case study: How Raystede are planning for the future

We have seen that with one of our most recent and involved projects – a new website for the animal charity Raystede, which is a showcase for the many elements of its work.

The original planning process was very detailed but even now, just weeks after the launch of the site we are talking to chief executive Nigel Mason and his team about what could be done next.

It’s worth taking a look at the website at www.raystede.org and seeing if you can spot all the elements so far included.

Most importantly there is the re-homing section where people who would like to take in an animal from the sanctuary can find out how to go about it – and even choose a pet there.

There’s an online shop, information for visitors, an education area for teachers, events calendar and booking system and crucially sections on volunteering, donating and sponsorship.

Different features from this list are used in varying combinations by our clients but it’s great for us to see them all come together in one place as they do on the Raystede site.

Our work is bespoke and tailored to the different needs of clients and we learn a huge amount about the way their businesses work.

How we can help your business

It’s a privilege to use our expertise to help them find the best way of presenting their organisation online with the aim of bringing in new business.  And we like our clients to know that we don’t just finish a project, say goodbye and forget about them.

Through our Website Review Programme we keep in touch about how to continue to get an even better return on investment.

If this way of working appeals to you, we’d be more than happy to have a chat with you about your requirements. You can call us on 01825 760909 or email enquiries@blueplanetinternet.co.uk.

If you would like to read more about the building of the Raystede website, you can read our previous blog posts:

Blue Planet wins Raystede website contract: http://www.blueplanetinternet.co.uk/blog/blue-planet-wins-raystede-website-contract

The importance of a professional website – a client’s view: http://www.blueplanetinternet.co.uk/blog/the-importance-of-a-professional-website-a-clients-view

Why patience is crucial during a website project: http://www.blueplanetinternet.co.uk/blog/why-patience-is-crucial-during-a-website-project

Blue Planet unveils new website design for Raystede: http://www.blueplanetinternet.co.uk/blog/blue-planet-unveils-new-website-design-for-raystede

Like the man who spent all he had building his dream house, only to discover it had no foundations, all the time and money you have spent on optimising your website for search engines could be completely wasted if you choose the wrong keywords.

Common mistakes

A common mistake is to target well-searched phrases, only to find that you’re facing a constant battle that you shouldn’t be fighting, and the visitors who do come to your site were looking for something else in the first place.

Choosing the wrong keywords is, frankly, pants

Example: “lingerie” might well be a highly searched phrase, but getting people to your site for this phrase is no good unless you actually sell pants.

You need to choose keywords that are:

• Relevant
• Specific
• Good value for the effort

In this post, we’ll attempt to provide an easy-to-follow guide to help you make better decisions when choosing your keywords.

Keyword research – a step-by-step guide

1. Choose 10 phrases to start

Start by writing down 10 keywords or phrases of your choice.  Base this list on what you want to sell most of to your customers.  Look for phrases rather than single word searches that could relate to lots of topics.

Example: You sell wooden photo frames.  “Frames” could relate to all sorts of things; zimmer frames, frames for spectacles, window frames etc.  “Photo frames” is better, but this would cover all types of materials and price ranges. “Wooden photo frames” is targeted and specific – people searching for this are looking for your product.

2. Use Google’s keyword tool for research

Get yourself on over to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.  This is Google’s free keyword research tool.

Google's Keyword Research tool

If you type in the keywords from your initial list from step 1, you’ll be given data on the number of searches carried out for that phrase during the last month (check the “Local Search Volume” column for the number of UK searches).  Even better though, you’ll also be given some alternative suggestions that are similar to your original phrase.  These will often include variations that you wouldn’t necessarily have thought of yourself.

By going through this step, you are making decisions based on actual data, rather than guesses or a hunch.

3.Filter the suggestions

Export the suggestions into a spreadsheet and then go through the list, filtering out any suggestions that are either irrelevant to your business, or duplicates.  Add a column called “Competing pages”.

4. Check the competition

Check how many other pages are competing for your keyword

So now you know which are the most popular search phrases that you might want to target.  But the most popular keywords can sometimes be the most competitive.  Remember, in order to be number one in Google, you just need to be more relevant to your keyword than everyone else.  If no-one else is making much effort to go for a keyword that you’re interested in, you could pick up quite a few visits without too much effort.  Conversely, you could spend all your time and effort trying to get to top spot against some big companies that are spending millions every year on online marketing.

The simplest way to gauge this is to go through your filtered list and do a search on Google.  Make a note of how many pages are returned for the search, and put them into the “Competing pages” column in your spreadsheet.

Perform a simple formula and divide the “Competing Pages” value by the “Number of searches” and put it into a new column called “Score”.  Sort the keywords into order by this column.  Keywords with a low score are well searched but not too competitive – and these could be the ones to target.

5. Select keywords for each page

From your list, choose a maximum of three keywords per page on your site.  Pages that are specific to one or two keywords are more likely to get good search results than pages that try to cover loads of keywords.

Example: A page just about “apples” is more relevant to “apples” than a page about apples, oranges, bananas and grapes.  The relevance to each of these keywords becomes diluted.

Choose specific keywords as much as possible, even if the search volumes are relatively low.  Better to be number 1 for “wooden photo frames” and get 100 visitors per month that are likely to buy one of your frames, than be page 3 for “photo frames” and get 200 people to your site that might be looking for a wooden frame.  Or maybe a metal frame.  Or a plastic frame.  You get the picture (oooh, bad pun).

How we can help

Blue Planet has been helping businesses with their online marketing for more than 10 years. If you are serious about making your website work harder for your business and would like to have a chat about what we can do for you, call us on 01825 760909 or email enquiries@blueplanetinternet.co.uk.

Just what you wanted

Let’s not call this a New Year’s Resolution.  If your resolutions are like mine, they’ll be lucky to last until the end of January before they’re cast aside along with those horrible socks you got for Christmas.

No – this is a plan.  A different approach.  A new, pro-active version of you that is going to actually make a difference to your bottom line.

This post is mainly aimed at those businesses that have a website but don’t get much out of it.  It’s there because you need to have one, but it’s gathering dust in the corner by the fax machine and the Yellow Pages.

The 10 steps in this guide are all pretty easy to implement and don’t require a great deal of website knowledge.  Even if you only do some of them, you’ll see an improvement in your website’s performance and – hey, let’s dare to dream – you might even get some new business through it…

1. Make a plan and a timetable

First up, you need to plan this out.  Don’t be intimidated by the long list; break it down and do a bit at a time.  Book out a couple of hours in your diary each month for each step and spread it out over the year.  Allocate a task or step to each session so you can see what’s coming up.

What sort of impression does this give your potential customers?

2. Review and update

Go through your website and make some notes about what needs updating.  There’s bound to be some stuff that’s got out of date, and there’s nothing worse than having obviously out of date information on your website.  Things to look out for might include:

1. Pricing changes
2. New products to be added, old ones to be removed
3. Changes to descriptions of services
4. Updating case studies, portfolios or galleries
5. Staff changes
6. Opening hours
7. Contact details

3. Install Google Analytics

You want to know whether the time and effort you put in to improving your website is working, don’t you?  Adding Google Analytics to your site is free and it gives you a whole load of stats that will help you get a better picture of how your website is performing for you. For some initial advice on Google Analytics, read our blog post Understanding Google Analytics.

4. SEO Part 1- Research your keywords

Improve your search engine ranking and get more traffic to your website by optimisation.  The first thing to do is research the search terms that people use to find your products and services.  You can do this using free tools like Google Adwords Keyword Research Tool.  Doing this sort of research ensures you find the best keywords and not just the ones you might think are the best.

Choose a couple of keywords for each page on your site, or each product or service you want to promote.

5. SEO Part 2 – Rewrite your page Titles and Headings

Once you’ve chosen keywords for your website, rewrite your page Titles and Headings.  Search engines look for these when they’re deciding what your web page is about, so by including your keywords you’re increasing the chances of being found for the searches you want.  We’ve written a blog post about How to write good page Titles to help you out.  You can follow a similar format for your headings.

6. Plan 6 promotions

Show your promotions and special offers at the front of your website

Have a think about 6 promotions that you could run throughout the year and plan to change your website around them.  It could be as simple as choosing your six most profitable products and featuring these in turn, or you could run some seasonal promotions.  Here’s a few ideas to get you started:

1. New Year Sale
2. Valentines Day
3. Mothers Day
4. Easter
5. Summer Holidays
6. Back to School
7. Halloween
8. Christmas
9. Sports events – the Olympics, Six Nations Rugby, Wimbledon Tennis, Euro 2012 Football…

7. Update your home page

Make the most of your home page by pushing your promotions or your best products and services.  Imagine that your home page is like walking into a shop – push your featured items to the front where everyone can see them.  For more information and guidance on improving your home page, read our blog post Top tips for improving your home page.

Oh, and one last thing – make sure you continue to update your home page with your six promotions…

8. Add a Call to Action to every page

You can increase the number of visitors that become leads or enquiries by having a clear and strong Call to Action on every page of your website.  This usually takes the form of a link or a button that specifically tells them what they can do next to follow up their interest.  Make sure you have a Call to Action on every page.  For more information, read our blog post 3 ways good website design can improve your business.

9. SEO Part 3 – Start a blog

Our blog uses WordPress

The best way to be found on search engines is to have pages that are very specific to your selected keywords.  A blog is an excellent way to achieve this because you can write articles or “posts” about specific topics and each post becomes a new page on your website.  This article that you are reading is number 70 – that’s 70 individual pages about different topics around particular keywords that can all be found under different searches.

We’ve written a number of posts about blogging:

Forward-thinking retailer embraces social media
Blogging – why, when and how you should do it
5 business benefits of blogging – are you missing out?
Top tips for writing a blog

10. Use Twitter

Using Twitter for your business can be a great way of getting your message out to a whole new group of potential customers.  Signing up is quick and easy, and “tweeting” doesn’t need to take up too much time either.  Once you’ve got a group of followers, every tweet you write is viewed by them and if they think it’s interesting, they might in turn share it with the people that follow them.  For more information about using Twitter for your business, read our blog post How to use Twitter, for small local businesses.

How we can help

Blue Planet works with dozens of small local businesses, helping them get more from their website and online marketing.  If you’re serious about making your website work harder for you, call us on 01825 760909 or email mark@blueplanetinternet.co.uk for an initial chat.

What is a Page URL?

URLs are web addresses and appear in the address bar of your web browser

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator and is the character string that references an Internet resource.  Put simply, it’s the specific web address for a web page and is found in the address bar of your web browser.  The URL for this page is www.blueplanetinternet.co.uk/blog/seo-what-to-consider-when-building-your-website.

How to structure your Page URLs

Search engines will look at the URL of a page when considering what it is about.  If your keywords are included in the page URL, this will help your search engine position for that search term.

Assuming that you’ve already completed the vital step of researching the best keywords for your business, let’s look at how best to write your Page URLs for maximum effect.

If your chosen keyword is, let’s say “plumber east sussex”, you should include this in your Page URL – as with your page Title, the more important the keyword is, the nearer the start of your URL it should appear.  A good Page URL in this case might be “www.yourdomainname.co.uk/plumber-east-sussex.html“.

Dashes, underscores and suffixes

There has been debate in the past about whether it is better to use dashes (“-”) or underscores (“_”) in Page URLs.  At one point underscores got the vote, whereas more recently dashes were seen to be more effective.  Similarly, a suffix like .html or .php was considered to be less desirable than no suffix at all – so www.yourdomainname.co.uk/plumber-east-sussex was better than www.yourdomainname.co.uk/plumber-east-sussex.html.  The truth is that the search engines are very clever, and will strip out these characters in any case.  Don’t get hung up about it.

The right length for Page URLs

As with any Search Engine Optimisation, play by the search engines rules but don’t try and break them.  Go over the top and you’ll undo your hard work.  Don’t pack a ridiculously long URL with your keywords, like this:

www.yourdomainname.co.uk/plumber-plumbers-plumbing-east-sussex-west-sussex.html

Site structure

If your business has a handful of key areas or services, it would be worth structuring your website to include the keywords for these areas in your Page URLs like this:

www.yourdomainname.co.uk/plumber/repairs-east-sussex
www.yourdomainname.co.uk/heating-engineer/boiler-repairs-east-sussex

You can do this by creating sub-directories within your website structure that contain your keywords.  In the examples above, your sub-directories would be called “plumber” and “heating-engineer”.

A good Content Management System (CMS) will enable you to edit URLs

But I’ve already had my website built and I don’t want a new one

We realise that you might be approaching this issue after your website has been created, but if so, don’t despair – it can still be fixed.  If you have a good Content Management System (CMS) integrated into your website, you can probably change the Page URLs yourself and call them whatever you like.

If your CMS doesn’t allow you to change URLs, or you don’t have a Content Management System at all, you’ll need to ask your website developer to make the changes for you.  Or you can ask us.

How we can help

Blue Planet helps businesses get more from their websites through online marketing and promotion.  If you’re serious about making the internet a crucial part of your marketing and want to see a great return on your investment, give us a call on 01825 760909 or email mark@blueplanetinternet.co.uk for an initial chat about how we can help you.

It's A Wonderful Life. The best Christmas film ever - bar none.

As regular watchers of Frank Capra’s Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life will know, this time of year often lends itself to a mood of reflection of the twelve months just gone, as we pause for breath before the festivities begin in earnest.

Where does the time go?

2011 seems to have gone past faster than normal, but it hasn’t been short on big changes and significant milestones.

We started the year planning the celebrations for our tenth anniversary, which culminated in a memorable evening with clients and friends at The Hop Barn in Uckfield.

Soon after, we were celebrating again, this time for winning significant projects for Raystede and the National Council for Training of Journalists.  Both sites are due for launch imminently.

We also enjoyed a very busy summer, when historically August can be a quiet month and things slow down significantly.

Louie Charles Vine, aged 4 months

New arrival

In August, our Creative Director Mike Vine became a daddy for the first time, his wife giving birth to Louie Charles, weighing in at 8lb 9oz.  Louie will be four months old next week (!) and is looking forward to his first Christmas.

I can also confirm that Mike has managed to stay awake at his desk since Louie’s arrival (or at least it looks like he has – perhaps he has some cunning disguise?)

Office move

Then in September we moved office to Crowborough, to benefit from bigger premises and better facilities which we share with Judd Associates, and we’re thoroughly enjoying the new environment and the buzz that exists around the place.

2011 has been a good year for Blue Planet, despite tough trading conditions

It’s true that this year has played out in front of a backdrop of tough trading conditions, but we’ve enjoyed further growth in our business, and been privileged to work with clients that are also seeing their businesses move in the right direction.  It’s certainly not all doom and gloom.

So all that remains for me to do is to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous New Year.  Thank you to all our clients and suppliers for your support over the last twelve months.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for me to get back to Jimmy Stewart and the lovely folks at Bedford Falls…

Back in December 2010, I wrote an article called “SEO – The Basics“, which introduced the wide-reaching topic of SEO.  In this post, I am going to explore in more detail one of the points that I wrote about, and it’s one of the most important factors of optimisation that you can apply to your web pages; the Page Title.

The Title tag is displayed on search results

What is a Page Title?

Every web page has a Title.  Although it doesn’t appear on the web page design itself, it appears in the bar at the top of your browser window, as well as on the search results page.  The search engines will look at your Page Title to try and understand what your page is about.  It is vital that your Title is keyword-rich.  The common mistake when people build a website is to have Titles like “Home” or “About us”, which are no use to the search engines at all.

What to include in your Title

Search engines will look for your Title within the <title> tag on your page.  If your Title includes keywords that you want to be found under, your page is considered to be relevant to those keywords – increasing your chances of being found.

Assuming that you’ve already completed the vital step of researching the best keywords for your business, let’s look at how best to write your Page Titles for maximum effect.

If your chosen keyword is, let’s say “handmade furniture sussex”, you should include this right at the start of your Title – the nearer the beginning of the Title, the more important the keyword is.  The Title should still carry relevant information when viewed in the search results pages though, so you should consider including your company name, probably at the end.  A good Title in this case might be “Handmade furniture Sussex – Smith & Son, Lewes”

The right length for Page Titles

An important factor to consider when creating your Titles is the length.  Try not to exceed 70-80 characters, as this is what is displayed on the search engines.  Anything longer than this will be cut-off, which could mean visitors miss your company name, for instance.

Different Titles for different pages

One point that is often forgotten is that each separate page on the website is a potential search result, so you should create a different, targeted Title for each page.  Concentrate on your products or services pages and make them specific to each area.

Using our example above, this could work like this:

Home page – Handmade furniture Sussex – Smith & Son, Lewes
Kitchens page – Bespoke kitchens Sussex – Smith & Son, Lewes
Bedrooms page – Handmade bedroom furniture – Smith & Son, Lewes

How we can help

Blue Planet helps businesses get more from their websites through online marketing and promotion.  If you’re serious about making the internet a crucial part of your marketing and want to see a great return on your investment, give us a call on 01825 760909 or email mark@blueplanetinternet.co.uk for an initial chat about how we can help you.

Regular readers of this blog may have seen my previous articles around the benefits of blogging; back in January there was Top tips for writing a blog, then in Feburary we had 5 business benefits of blogging – are you missing out?, March brought us Blogging – why, when and how you should do it and then most recently, in June I wrote about  How to improve your Google ranking results by blogging.

Our blog uses WordPress

I still regularly get asked about blogging and why anyone should bother doing it.  To many it seems like a lot of effort writing about nothing important for no good reason.  This article aims to demonstrate, with the use of very real examples, that it is well worth it and WILL get more people coming to your website.

Realistic goals

First up, let’s be realistic about what we’re talking about here.  I’m not going to give away some golden secret that is going to get you thousands of new website visitors in one fell swoop.  What we’re talking about is steadily increasing the volume of visits to your site by adding content that can be found by potential visitors.

Each blog article or “post” is added to Google and other search engines in the same way as any other web page.  Google will decide what your page or post is about and when someone does a search for something that they think your page is about, it gets returned as a result against that search.

By writing about very specific areas of your business, you can be matched with lots of targeted niche searches.  Let me show you what I mean…

Four real-life examples of the benefits of blogging

Example 1 – How to improve your Google ranking results by blogging

Back in June, I wrote the aforementioned article called “How to improve your Google ranking results by blogging“. Now, if someone does a search for something like “improve google ranking” the page isn’t going to come up – the search term is too competitive.  But if you search for the more specific “improve your google ranking by blogging“, the page comes up on the first page of results.

“Yes”, I hear you say, “but how many people are going to search for that?” Not loads, I grant you.  But the point is that some do.  That’s a few more visitors a month that are searching for something that we can help them with.

Example 2 – The best times to send your marketing emails

When is the best time of day to send your marketing emails?

Ok, here’s another:

In February I wrote an article called “The best times to send your marketing emails“.  It was a piece based on some market research I had seen around the most effective times to send different types of marketing emails.

Again, searching for something more generic like “email marketing” isn’t going to provide a match, because there are too many other pages that are more relevant to that search term than ours.

But we do get several visits per month from people who have searched for “best times to send marketing emails“, which is still very relevant to what we do – so that’s a few more potential customers.

Lovely.

Example 3 – Search Engine Optimisation ranking factors

A couple of weeks ago, I published a piece called “Search Engine Optimisation ranking factors“.  The post was indexed by Google very quickly (another benefit of adding content to your site via a blog).  Since the post was published we have had 3 visits (that’s in just 14 days, don’t forget) from people searching for the name of the post.

Example 4 – How to stop eating so many biscuits

Biscuits. 'Nuff said.

This last one is a bit bizarre, but I think it makes a point.  Back in the New Year I wrote a piece about New Year’s resolutions (the thrust being that if your resolution was to update your website more, you need to talk to us).  The blog post was called “How to stop eating so many biscuits” as that was one of our resolutions at the time (one which we failed miserably to keep, by the way).

Every month we get between 5 and 10 visits from people that have searched for “How to stop eating biscuits“.  Now I realise that this isn’t much use to us as a business, but it does show the potential benefits to you of writing a good blog.

Maths homework

Our website now has around 65 blog posts from the past 10 months.  If each blog post were to attract *say* just 5 visitors, that’s an extra – what – 325 visits each month from potential customers.  Woo and most definitely hoo…

How this approach can work for you

Bags. Lots and lots of bags

All well and good, says you, but how does this help me?  Right…

Let’s say you sell, oh I don’t know – bags.  All sorts of bags – handbags, laptop bags, “man bags”, the lot.  Let’s also say that you write a number of blog posts about those different sorts of bags.  One about “leather handbags”, one about “designer handbags”, one about “leather laptop bags” etc.  You get the picture.

Each of these posts has the potential to attract customers looking for those things.  Maybe not loads, but some, and by regularly writing a good blog, you can get them coming to your website.

How we can help

If you would like some help setting up a blog for your website, give us a call on 01825 760909 or email mark@blueplanetinternet.co.uk – we’ll be more than happy to have a chat to see how we can help.

The ensuing conversation is often quite lengthy, as you can probably imagine, but I always come away from it feeling that I didn’t do the subject justice.  The fact is that there are several factors that need to be considered, and some are more important than others.

As those of you that regularly follow this blog will know, we recently moved to our new offices in Crowborough.

We share the building with Judd Associates, and one of their web marketing gurus has a fantastic info-graphic pinned to his wall that sums this whole subject up very nicely.

The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors

Designed in the style of the classic periodic table, the info-graphic is designed to clear away some of the mystery and fear for those new to SEO, and provide a “reset” for those who are experienced.

Search Engine Land's Periodic Table of SEO

The full article that accompanies the info-graphic can be found on SearchEngineLand.com.  I hope you find it useful.  What I like about it is that it deliberately doesn’t go into too much detail, but gives you a great overview of the things to be considered.  From this, I’d recommend setting up a checklist to work through as you review your website.

How we can help

Blue Planet helps a wide range of businesses with their search engine optimisation and online marketing.  If you’d like to have an informal chat about the performance of your website, drop me an email (mark@blueplanetinternet.co.uk) or give me a call on 01825 760909.

The-stitchery is a haberdashery; a profession that dates back to the days of Chaucer.  Located upstairs in the historic, listed Riverside building on Cliffe Bridge, it’s a gorgeous, attic emporium crammed to the rafters with sewing and knitting paraphernalia.

the-stitchery is an emporium of sewing and knitting paraphernalia

The previous business that was based there was in desperate need of a re-vamp by the time the-stitchery took over in 2009, under the stewardship of owner Saira Foden.  October 2010 saw the business extend its floor space and product ranges with the arrival of The Linen Basket, focusing on the home; net curtains, curtain and blind-making accessories and beautiful home textile gifts.

Blue Planet started working with the-stitchery soon after it opened for business, providing a very simple one page website that showed contact details for the shop.

But in spring 2011 it was decided that it was time for an altogether different approach; an approach that would fully utilise the web as a powerful marketing tool for the business.

The brief

We talked to Saira at length about what she was trying to achieve; both as a business and more specifically with the new website.  What become obvious to us was that a great deal of the success of the shops is down to the passion and enthusiasm of the staff – and none more so than Saira herself.

Saira Foden, Owner of the-stitchery

When there are no customers, she can be found needle in hand behind the counter, working on her latest creation.  Often customers will ask about what she is making and how to do it, and sharing this knowledge and experience is one of the reasons why they come back to her shop again and again.  We wanted to try and capture this passion via the website.

We decided that we would create a website that enabled Saira to build a library of Makes and How-tos as well as promoting the latest special offers in the shop.  We also wanted to link the site with Twitter and Facebook to get her message out to as wide an audience as possible.

What we did

A blog-based website was identified as the best way to achieve these goals.  We established a site structure that allowed Saira to add content to the site under different categories; News, Sewing, Homewares, How to and Knitting.  As well as these categories she can also promote Special Offers for both the-stitchery and The Linen Basket.

We also configured the site so that whenever Saira publishes a new blog post, she can push it out to the wider world via her Twitter and Facebook accounts.

One of the biggest challenges of this project was the design; Saira has a design background and was very clear about the look she wanted to achieve.  By working closely with her we were able to capture the look that she wanted which, we think you’ll agree, is very distinctive.

The results

The finished website

The finished website can be viewed at www.the-stitchery.co.uk.

Saira has been blogging passionately since the site was launched – even producing content when she was off work with illness – and this has been the key to the success of the site.  It has become a very vibrant and engaging place for both her existing customers and those yet to come, and she has received loads of positive feedback.

But has the new website made a difference to her business?  We’ll let Saira tell you herself:

“It’s still a little bit early to say exactly how big a difference to the bottom line the website has produced but, since the site was launched, we have seen a massive upturn in customer numbers, awareness and contact.

The website and blog have directly led to new customers travelling to the shop from much further afield or emailing us for product information. These were two of our specific goals; once we get customers to the shop we can convert their visit directly into sales -  so far so good!”

So there you go.   Saira’s business has improved as a result of the new website, and that’s important to her.  Our client is delighted, and that’s really important to us.

How we can help

If you’ve been inspired by Saira’s story to do something about your website, get in touch with us by emailing mark@blueplanetinternet.co.uk or by calling us on 01825 760909.

We firmly believe that the best websites are the ones that are updated frequently, reviewed regularly and evolve over a period of time.  For this to work at its best, you need to be talking to your web designer regularly, but there are occasions when it would be far more productive if you didn’t have to, because you were able to make changes yourself.

The C-word

I know, I know...sorry

I’m writing this blog post in mid September.  It’s getting a little bit colder outside, but the sun is still shining and I’m clinging on to the hope that we might get a few more days of warmth before Autumm kicks in.  I do hate to mention the c-word but it is a good example for this post.

So – let’s imagine you want to have a Christmas promotion or special offer.  You really want to get it on your website at the end of October at the latest.  You’ve thought about it (fleetingly) in September and have promised yourself that in the next couple of weeks you’re going to sit down and have a jolly good think about what you’re going to say.  At the beginning of October you come back to it and decide what you want to do; you contact your web designer to talk to them about it and, if they’re any good, they get back to you quickly with a quote.

It’s now mid-October and you’re getting busy.  You’re struggling to find the time to put the content together to email to your web designer and when you do get a minute, you forget what format they wanted the files in and so you put it off.  Before you know it you’re into November and the ideal time has passed…

It doesn’t have to be this way

There are some changes that you will need you web designer to help you with, but by investing in a Content Management System you can manage 80% of the regular updates to your website yourself.  No need to speak to your web designer at all.  Fantastic.

Your Christmas special can be added any time you want.  You don’t need to get a price from your web designers and you can chip away at it until you’re happy with it.  The system is easy to use and you don’t have to worry about “breaking” the site.

5 reasons not to talk to your web designer

It’s not that we don’t want to talk to you – quite the opposite in fact.  But there are some very good reasons not to have to talk to us every single time you want your website changed.  Here’s 5 reasons why you should invest in a Content Management System:

1. You can update your website quickly

A content management system is easy to use and you don’t need any technical knowledge to get started.  Most people learn to do the basics within an hour and after that, you can update your website very quickly.  Simply go online, log in and make your changes.  With the click of a button they’re published.  Job done.

2. You can update your website whenever you want

Not much fun. But if you absolutely HAD to, you could...

With a content management system you’re not waiting on anyone else to get back to you with a price, or a slave to them fitting your work in around their busy schedule.

Because your content management system is online, you can access it from any computer with an internet connection.  Imagine you’re away at a conference and you realise that you’ve got a product wrongly priced on your website.  Find an internet connection for your laptop, log in and simply make the change.  If you wanted to make a quick change from home at 9 o’clock at night, you can do that too.

Imagine how liberating it would be to make changes to your website in your pyjamas…

Ok, maybe not – but you see my point.

3. You can ADD content to your site, making it bigger, better and easier to find

With a good content management system you can add extra pages to your site within a structured hierarchy.  Each of these pages is an opportunity for a potential customer to find you when they search for something you’ve talked about on that page.  Build your site up to several dozen web pages and you spread the net (no pun intended) across more and more possible visitors.

4. You are in control

What we find is that once clients have the tools to manage their websites effectively and they see the tangible benefits it brings (more online ordes, more customers through their shop door), they become much more involved with their website and start using it more and more.  Being in control of your site and turning it into a lean, mean marketing machine because of your own efforts is massively rewarding.

5. You can save money

Everyone likes this one.  Whilst it might sound a bit mad that we’re potentially talking ourselves out of making money, the reality is that if you get a better website by being able to do stuff yourself, you’ll want to develop it beyond what you can do with the content management system.  At this stage we come in and add our expertise and then everyone’s happy.  Hurrah!

How we can help

Blue Planet develops bespoke websites with Content Management Systems for a wide range of clients with different needs.  We’d love to talk to you about how we can help you realise your business goals using the web.  Drop us an email at mark@blueplanetinternet.co.uk or phone us on 01825 760909 for an informal chat.