The reverse is also true; designers and marketing experts are not IT people. The two are worlds apart. But in my experience, thanks to some questionable claims made by IT people, the average business owner has trouble distinguishing between them, often to the detriment of their business. A lot of businesses end up with cheap and nasty looking websites.
I’m a graphic designer and web designer. My expertise is in design, visual identities and marketing communications. I’m not a Microsoft Systems Administrator or an IT support guy. In fact I don’t even use a Windows PC. And yet I’ve lost count of the number of times people have said to me “You work in computers don’t you? Can you fix my PC/set up my email/show me how to use Excel…”.
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When buying a computer for their business, most people don’t look beyond a Windows based PC. Microsoft’s operating system is pre-installed on every PC from low-end to top of the range, and therein lies the problem. Whatever machine you choose, the user experience is the same. You can buy the best PC in the shop but you’ll still get all the crashes, virus attacks, spyware, unintuitive interface and annoying security warnings.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Thanks to the popularity of the iPhone among business users, more and more people are waking up to the fact that in addition to making the device that rewrote the rule book on mobile phones, Apple also makes computers that feature the same reliability, ease of use and polish. And best of all, they don’t run Microsoft Windows.
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More and more of my clients are being contacted by so-called ‘SEO Experts’. It is my view that businesses who claim to be Search Engine Optimisation companies are nothing but fraudsters and fakes, whose sharp business practices are giving the web marketing industry a bad name.
I’ve seen countless examples of their ambiguous claims and misleading marketing tactics. Most of the time they’re trying to sell you a service you could easily do yourself.
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Don’t you just hate those absurd phrases and buzzwords that people in suits come out with in meetings? Boil the ocean. Think outside the box. Take it offline. You know the ones I mean; some people like to make themselves sound important by using an over complicated jargonistic term in place of what could often have been a single unpretentious word. I have many eye rolling memories of these from back in the days when I was a paid employee of a multi national business.
Half the time I didn’t even understand what they were talking about. Now there’s a solution. Unsuck It is a business jargon search engine/translator that allows you to simply type the offending phrase in and watch the translated plain English, or “Unsucked” version appear on your screen. Genius.
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Many small businesses suffer from a slow patch during the summer. Clients are in the habit of going on holiday or spending time with the kids instead of giving you work and paying your invoices. This can be a nerve racking time, especially if you’re a one person operation relying on just a few clients to keep the wolf from the door.
Working at home can be lonely at the best of times, but its even worse if nobody is phoning or emailing you. But the good news is, there are some simple steps you can take to minimise the impact on your business and help your business through this difficult time.
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.CO is the new domain extension being touted as the next big thing in web addresses, offering businesses a new option in establishing their web presence. Actually it isn’t new at all, it was originally the country level domain for Columbia, and was available only to business or residents of that country. But with effect from 20th July 2010, any person or entity in the world can register .CO domain names.
Widely accepted as the short term for ‘company’ or ‘corporation’, and associated with words like ‘commerce’, ‘content’, ‘community’ and ‘connection’, the new .CO domain is likely to appeal to a wide range of businesses.
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We all know running a business requires a certain amount of speculation. Dealing with enquiries that might not come to anything, quoting for jobs you might not get, and offering the benefit of your advice to prospects in the hope that they’ll become customers. It’s all part of the game.
But you only need to run a business for a short while to realise that there are a lot of people out there who will quite happily waste your time. Since I became a business owner, I’ve worked out that there are two basic types of time waster.
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Business owners spend a lot of time optimising their website content for search engines and promoting their site through Facebook and Twitter. But even if they get decent traffic, some are then disappointed when they find they aren’t converting as many visitors to customers as they’d like.
In order to become your customers, people have to be 100% happy that you’re someone they feel comfortable doing business with. If you follow a few basic rules, your visitors will feel they can trust you and your conversion rates will improve. These tips apply equally to ecommerce sites and ‘brochure’ style sites; in short any site that intends to elicit a response from potential customers of your business.
