Banner advertising design - get your business seen by the world
What can a website say about your brand?
You only have one opportunity to make a first impression, and for most businesses, your website is the first point of contact that many customers have with your brand, so it's vitally important that your website reflects well on your business.
With the average time an internet user spends on any one webpage being around just eleven seconds, you don't have long to convince them that you are not only reputable (and internet users are particularly cynical in this day and age - and who can blame them with so many unscrupulous people lurking in the more dimly lit corners of the web!), but you are trustworthy, conscientious, that they won't receive any nasty surprises, that your service or product will be of good quality and if there's a problem you will deal with it courteously. If they have even the slightest inkling that you may not tick all of those boxes, then they will quickly jump ship and try your next competitor, and you'll never hear from them again!
On the other hand, should you get your website/branding combo right, then you can give your brand any character and tone of voice you wish, irrespective of the location and size of your business.
Maddison Creative web design Newcastle are specialists in the use of shapes, photography, colour and typography in order to encourage internet users to feel the way your want them to feel about your business and website, whether it's an entertainment brand that you want people to associate with energy, passion and excitement, or a health spa where you want people to feel at ease, relaxed and empowered. Emotion plays a large part in online user behaviour/experience and so it's vitally important you capitalize on that in order to get the most from your website.
What are the advantages of making use of a website to promote and market my business online?
One advantage of promoting and marketing your business by means of a website is that you can promptly and easily make updates to your online promotional material. Unlike print marketing and advertising you can come up with a new marketing initiative in a meeting at 9am, by lunchtime it can be live and you will know whether or not it's likely to be a success by the time you go home at half five, changing or updating your offering the next morning should you wish. You can also react to market forces or opportunities in the market, being among the first movers when an opportunity presents itself. Print advertising simply wouldn't allow you to do this, the lead times being significantly greater.
It also reduces the amount of time and money you spend on outdated campaigns. Once your offer changes or is no longer available, with a print campaign all of your posters and flyers that you've painstakingly had produced at great expense need to go in the bin, with great cost to you and a significant cost to the environment. With a website, you simply get in touch with your webmaser/web designer/website manager and they will quickly and cleanly make the change for you online, and you are ready to go with absolutely no waste. And should you have chosen to have a content managed website (CMS) it's even easier - you simply log in to your site and make the changes yourself.
How do we go about building a website, and what web design is involved?
The process that ends up with a successful, beautifully designed, fully functional, well marketed and promoted usually begins with a great idea. Whether this idea is a product or service, or something to plug a gap in the market, a way of making money or something that entertains people - this idea is the key to making your project a success. You need to have a realistic expectation of what success looks like and a plan of how you're going to get there. You could have the best website in the world, and if your idea is a duffer, it's going to flop.
Once you have this idea and plan, an idea of how you're going to measure success, backed up with a good bit of market research you can think about how you're going to push your idea online. (The internet has become that significant that to not have a website in this day and age is not an option!). That's when Maddison Creative web design Newcastle comes in. We can help you with expert industry knowledge of what works and what doesn't. What can be achieved, and how we can achieve it. What you're going to need, how long it will take and how much it's all going to cost. We will generally then come up with a site structure, with a number of levels, and a flat design/visual/creative. Once these two key elements have been agreed then we set to work putting the two together and voila! You have a website. The hard work doesn't stop there though. Many people think that you build a website, and you can then sit back and watch it work its magic year after year. Unfortunately it's not like that - a website (and its search engine performance) are a living, breathing animal. You have to tend to it, update it, improve it, add to it and love it, otherwise it won't perform to it's maximum and you won't get most from it.
From a practical point of view, you need a domain (an address for your website so people can find it), you need a hosting company to provide you with space on one of their servers (a computer that you can access via the internet) and you need the files you create, nicely arranged into folders. Once you have all these, you attach your domain name to your server, and software that allows you to FTP (File transfer protocol) or upload your files onto your server. Once they're up there then the world can see your site and you're off!
Maddison Creative web design Newcastle can arrange all of this for you - we have great relationships with a number of hosting companies, and we use the latest FTP software, so it's not something you need to worry you - it's included in all new website packages. If you have an existing website and you like to keep the domain name and/or hosting provider, that's not a problem either, we can simply use your existing setup to upload the new site to.
What are the benefits of advertising my business dynamically online via a website?
One of the great features of promoting your business via the web is that you can add to your site almost instantaneously. You could think of an idea for a promotion one lunchtime and but close of business it can be live, with little or no lead time and no costly printing to contend with.
Unlike printed media and traditional advertising methods, if you publish your website and you decide that your offer is no longer available, your prices need to change or you want to change your messaging, you can do it quickly, easily, and more importantly very cost effectively 'on-the-fly', allowing you to be as reactive and as responsive to market forces as you wish.
Similarly, if you have something time-sensitive you wish to communicate to your customer base, you can add it to your site where it can be made live immediately, and once it's no longer needed it can be taken down just as quickly.
You no longer need to scrap boxes and boxes of flyers, or have expensive TV or radio commercials remade. You simply contact your web manager/designer, let them know what the update is, and they will update hassle free. Should you have opted for a CMS (Content management system) website where you have the ability to update the content yourself, then it's even easier! You simply log in to the admin area, navigate to the page in question, edit your text, hit save and you're done!
I'm looking for web design - why should I invest in eCommerce?
In the United Kingdom, the eCommmerce sector is huge and growing relentlessly with growth of around 15% year-on-year. Online purchases have an average value of £78 in the UK, and over 76% of people who went online last year made some sort of purchase.
One of the most significant growth areas is eCommerce on a handheld, touchscreen devices such as a mobile phone or a tablet. Around a third of all purchases made in the UK last year were made on a mobile device, which means that if you are selling online, there is a 1 in 3 chance that if someone buys one of your products they are sitting in the park, or on the bus or waiting for their partner to get back to the car from an actual real-life shopping trip.
The advancement in technology of mobile devices and internet coverage is largely responsible for this, a significant factor being the number of eCommerce sites that are optimised for mobile and the size of mobile phone screens.
Internet advertising is also a massive growth area, with around half of the annual advertising spend in the UK spent online, a figure that is expected to again rise by another 10% by the year 2020. Given the growing number of potential customers who are turning to the web to shop, it is understandable that an ever increasing number of online businesses are devoting an ever increasing proportion of their budget to advertising online.
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