Designing wedding stationery

Wedding stationery can cost the earth and more and more people are choosing to design their own rather than pick something off the shelf. When it comes to designing your wedding stationery such as invitations, table plans and place cards you will probably want to theme them around your wedding theme and colours.

Finding a designer who has experience in doing this and also can offer the service you need at the price you want can be tricky. Always make sure that you see examples of work that has been created by them previously and discuss your requirements before committing to a project. You will need to be sure that they are able to design the stationary in the time frame needed and find out if they are also able to print them for you or if you will need to organise this yourself.

When considering prices, it may sound cheap to only be charged a pound per invite but if you are inviting a hundred people then this money soon adds up and when you add place name cards and table planner etc, you can very quickly be fast approaching £200-£300. This may be a big chunk of your budget so you need to ensure that it is exactly what you want.

 

How best to spend your online marketing budget

As a business owner, you are probably already aware of how important online marketing is. Many people use the internet and social media sites to find products and services that they need and in order to gain their business, you need to have a good online presence. Deciding on how much to spend on your online marketing can be a little confusing. The amount can vary drastically from a few hundred pounds a month to over a million pounds a month for some of the huge retailers.

Factors that will impact how large or smaller a budget you will need to have will include the level of competition for your phrases, geographical locations and how competitive you want to be.

Some companies decide to start off with a low budget and then gradually increase it over time as they see results but this is often not a good idea as if you spend too little to start with you will often see hardly any return and therefore think it is pointless. By spending a little more you are much more likely to get some enquiries or sales. You will need to find out how you are going to split up your budget e.g. social media marketing, pay per click or organic search optimisation.

 

Tracking where your visitors go and what they do

When you have a website, it is important to be able to analyse the traffic to your site and see how they behave once on your website. This will allow you to see if your marketing is working as it should and if your website is offering your customers what they are looking for.

The first thing to analyse is where the traffic is coming from. There are a number of stats packages out there, many of which are attached to the server your website is hosted on. These can be quite accurate but are often not very user-friendly and may pick up a lot of traffic from bots. Google has their own stats package which is free to use called Google Analytics. This software is great at allowing you to really drill down to see the interaction between your site and your viewers. You can see how they have found your site i.e. through Google or through social media and see what pages they clicked on whilst on your site. You can even see how long they spent on a page and what page they left on. This information is like gold dust and can really help you make massive improvements to your web site.

 

Finding the right marketing avenues for your business

There are literally hundreds of ways in which to market your business. Some companies chose to do it solely offline, some solely online and other companies chose to do a mixture of the two. There is not a set right way in which to market a business, it all depends upon what you are marketing in terms of competition, the types of people or businesses you are marketing, the budget you have and the time you have, these factors alone can help you decide how to invest your marketing budget.

If you are after quick results then you may consider doing telesales or leaflet drops or a Pay per Click campaigns such as with Google Adwords or Facebook marketing. If however, you are looking for a more long term build-up of business you may wish to invest in a website with strong SEO marketing and more constant contact with customers through a dedicated customer service team.

It is vital that you are able to monitor the success of your marketing campaigns, ensuring that you are getting a good return on your investment. There is no point in throwing a lot of money at a particular marketing avenue that clearly isn’t working for your business.

Considerations when building a new website

If you are in the process of building a new website there are many points you need to consider prior to the go live date. If you are going to be hosting the new website on the same domain name then you will need to build the site offline and then switch it over to the new site when it is ready. This will allow you to keep the one site live whilst the other one is in progress. You can of course take the old site offline but if there are delays with the new site you may find your company with no site at all for a while and this is not advisable.

If you are going to be having the new site on a new domain name then it is often easier as you can work on the new domain and get it ready to go live with a password on. On the day of switch over all you need to do is remove the password and turn off the old site. You may need to redirect old URL’s on to new ones if you do not want to lose any of the traffic from rankings you have already got.

 

Responsive web design mistakes you want to avoid

We should all know by now that a website, regardless of the size, should be responsive. All websites whether they are small information sites or larger ecommerce websites, need to be responsive in order for them to work correctly on multiple screen sizes.

When programmers make an existing site responsive or build a new one from scratch, there are certain mistakes that are often quite common that need to be avoided. With new tablets and phones hitting the market every month, it would be virtually impossible to tailor your design around each and every one of them, instead you need to focus on screen size. Not all phones for example have the same screen size so making sites just suitable for phones in general will not always work well for your audience.

Although mobile device viewing has now overtaking desktop users, there is still a massive 42% of searches carried out on desktops and therefore it would be silly to only design your site to work and look good on mobile / small screen devices. Take full advantage of the added space you get on desktops rather than just enlarging everything to fill the page.

 

What your office says about your web design company

Web design companies are often knowing for being ahead of the times and often a little bit quirky. If you have a web design or web marketing company then you need to consider the first impression clients have when coming to meet you and the team in your office. It may be that you are dealing with large clients with a big budget and need to show that you are professional.

When looking at your office space, try and have a designated area that can be used for meetings that is free from clutter and has some visual items around for your guests to look at. Having screens showing your latest work or designs on the wall or logos you have created etc, can be a great way to show off some of your work whilst your visitors are waiting for a cup of tea.

If your company wants to show that you are bold and bright then your office should reflect this, so chose a colour scheme that is tasteful but also reflects your ethos.

Visual aids are great at engaging customers, so why not invest in a large screen that shows a video of your team or a discussion about topics that may be relevant to your client.

 

 

 

Your website mobile version explored

If you have a website then you need to consider how it is being viewed and used on mobile device. Historically people only ever used a Pc or laptop to view websites but with many of us having smart phones that can access the internet, the need to a mobile friendly website have never been greater. Not only do you need to be able to offer your customers the best experience on your site whilst browsing through a mobile device but search engines such as Google now take this in to account when deciding on where to rank sites in their search engine result pages.

You need to view your site on multiple devices to check how it all fits on the screen, ease of navigating round the site and allowing customers to click links and zoom in and out when needed. If you have video on your site then you should consider if they will enlarge when played or whether they are clicked to link through to Youtube for example.

Analysing your web traffic can allow you to see how many people are viewing your site on a mobile device and what pages they view and also what pages they leave on, this can give you an indication as to any issues with mobile browsing.