You may think it too soon to be talking about Christmas already, but we all know how quickly it creeps up on us, I mean it’s already nearly September! At PH. Creative we’ve been working on Christmas Lights etc. For 10 years they have been decorating trees and lighting them along with extravagantly lighting our homes…and a few celeb homes too! Rumour has it Christmas Lights etc did The Osbournes house, which featured in OK Magazine, not to mention decorating some of the top Premier League footballers homes too.

There is no time like the present to get prepared for the party season and decking out the house, with an array of unique and beautiful trees, decorations and lights from Christmas Lights etc, you can’t go wrong.

How annoying is it when you unpack all the old decorations, and spend age’s untangling those lights, only to find that when plugged in, are in fact broken! Christmas Lights etc can solve that, they have these indestructible lights that will last for many crimbo’s to come, have a look at some of their very convincing videos and see for yourselves: www.christmaslightsetc.co.uk

We’ve been developing a site for them that is simple, clean and tidy to make your shopping experience as enjoyable as possible, be sure to check out the ‘one click does the trick’ link which is everything in one box to create the perfect tree, garland or wreath, its Christmas in a box!

Liverpool’s first Pride Parade took over the streets on August 7th and 8th, with over 20,000 people joining the party. The whole event was a real success with visitors being treated to stacks of amazing performances including Natasha Hamilton, the ever popular Robin S and one of the UK’s biggest all gay bands-Clubstars.  It was a glittering celebration as the city burst into colour at the Seen Magazine backed festival.

At Ph.Creative, we apply various conversion techniques to our sites with the ultimate goal of capturing as many prospects through a website as possible. There are lots of clever tricks that we apply and over the next few weeks we’ll be giving away some of our pearls of wisdom absolutely free...

To get the ball rolling, our first tip to convert visitors into customers is the most important one, and quite often the one that people struggle with...

The Call to Action

In order to create a compelling call to action your landing page needs to be direct and to the point from the first glance. Don’t over complicate the message or simply assume that users know what they are supposed to do. All landing pages should be designed with an ability to influence - instructing what the user on what to do next every step of the way. This means clear, short calls to action with visual click cues to illustrate what they need to do.

Whilst this is key to engaging your visitors, it's also crucial not to overwhelm the page with too many calls to action. Ideally, a landing page should have one main call to action, supported one or two additional, less important offers. One primary visual cue will help move the visitor towards conversion.

Another good way to ensure users follow the call to action is to support it with a strong testimonial. Tests show that a testimonial specifically placed around the data capture button qualifies the call to action and enhances the potential for a user to use the form.

The scenario: A customer gets all the way through your site, products in basket, then at the last second, decides to do a 180, and leaves your store. Why do you think this is? 

Shopping Cart Abandonment is a problem for retailers across the board, and is a key concern to consider when it comes to marketing your eCommerce site. 

Naturally, you want your website to perform an element of data capture, which is crucial to forging meaningful long-term relationship with your customer.Unfortunately most new customers want to avoid a registration process and checkout as quickly as possible.  So how can retailers encourage more registrations without deterring customers?

Follow Up 

Follow a transaction by sending your new customer an order number and thank them for making their purchase. Ask the proactive, time-saving question “Would you like to save your details for next time?”  No mention of registering, just a focus on saving the customer valuable time in future.Give clear benefits of creating an 

account (faster and easier shopping, order tracking, ratings and reviews). Go at step further and pre-populatel the first name, surname and email address field with the customers details they provided a few minutes earlier. Simply ask the customer to choose a password and enter it twice for validation. At this point, keep the customer focused on the benefits of providing a password, by being selective in your choice of words - 'Save my details’ rather than ‘Create an account’ or ‘Proceed to registration’.  

Simple Checkout

Customers want to make their purchase, and move on.  Don't make them jump through hoops to spend their money with you. Provide only two options at the start of checkout – login and checkout. Don’t mention registration and account creation until the order confirmation page - even then you don't need to use the word 'register'.Ensure your checkout forms follow form best practice, therefore reducing potential usability issues for customers.Clearly promote the benefits of registering.

Avoid Distractions 

Make the process as simple as possible – remember the one key piece of additional information they need to provide is a password. Save asking visitors to choose a range of marketing preferences until they have registered, and then make it easy and intuitive for them to choose how they would like to receive marketing communication from you.

If you remove as many potential distractions as possible and don't force new customers to make a decision before they have completed their purchase, you are on the right track to a seamless transaction process, and building those crucial relationships in order to encourage repeat custom.

Many small businesses in the UK are failing to make the most of their online presence, with 47% of SME websites having either very basic or no SEO work at all.

A recent study - the State of UK Business Websites 2010,  looked at 1,001 SME websites and compared them against a range of SEO criteria.  A correlation between the size of a business and the levels of search engine optimisation was the first point found. It seems larger companies tend to have better optimised sites, while over 70% of companies with less than 50 employees have either very basic levels of optimisation, or none at all.

Amazingly, 12% of all business websites are not indexed in any search engine, which almost defeats the purpose of having a website in the first place. Many of the problems are down to businesses not implementing SEO basics. For instance, 35% of websites did not have unique page titles, and 56% lacked unique page descriptions. These are relatively quick SEO wins for small businesses.

Clearly, there are plenty of small businesses that are yet to see the value of effective SEO, or perhaps lack the knowledge to carry out the basics of site optimisation. These businesses should be looking to correct this as, implemented well, SEO has the potential to be a very important and cost-effective sales tool.

Whilst not every company will have the resources or know-how to run an effective campaign, simply getting the basics right, such as ensuring that a site can be indexed and contains relevant content, can make a noticeable difference to search results.

1. What’s your goal?

Make sure that when you redesign your website you keep what is important – not the colour or font but the increase in visitors, leads and customers. Focus on the RESULTS you want. So stop worrying about a colour scheme and start thinking up ideas to improve your online marketing.

2. Protect your assets

A website redesign can actually have a negative impact on your marketing results. There will be things about your existing website that your customers will actually like or automatically associate with you.  You need to find out what those assets are: great content, keywords you rank for, inbound links to individual pages, conversion tools? You need to protect these during the redesign, remember that you still have a say and "web design experts" are often just that; experts in design, not marketing.

3. Content that attracts and converts

To quote Seth Godin: "I'm going to go out on a limb and beg you not to create an original design. There are more than a billion pages on the web. Surely there's one that you can start with? ...Your car isn't unique, and your house might not be either."

If you have a tight budget, you’d be better investing in great copy rather than a fancy design. This is what people care about the most; this is how they find out about you and what you do. That doesn’t mean having a blank website; the design should still be good but not necessarily unique and expensive.

4.  Content Building

By putting an ongoing content building strategy in place you will be able to build and build your website and keep it full of fresh content.  A 100-page website is likely to attract more visitors than a 10 page website and therefore growing the business quicker. Obviously don’t throw in 100 pointless pages - make sure these pages are slowly fitted in and the content is interesting and relevant. If you don’t fancy writing thousands of words of content then blogs and news feeds are quick and easy ways to create more content.

5. Don’t forget the basics

Any website built today should always include the basics: a blog, RSS, landing pages, SEO.  They’re inexpensive, and they’re effective.  A blog is a great way to create content on an ongoing basis, RSS allows some content from your website to be automatically pushed out to other websites, landing pages actually get value out of your traffic and SEO gets your new website the attention it deserves.

The only time I had previously come across the word, ‘bespoke,’ was when I was flicking through pages of designer dresses in an issue of Vogue. Before now, bespoke always meant an absolutely beautiful, one-off, custom-made dress… absolute glamour.

So when I heard bespoke and web development being used all together, I’ll admit I wondered what my dream dress had to do with web development. In my quest for answers, very journalistic of me, I found a few bits of usual information I though you might like to know…

- Bespoke web development is a consideration of striking, intuitive designs and commercial elements so that your website can be developed for the right reasons

- There are plenty of existing websites that are developing for the wrong reasons – they may be pretty but they’re definitely not clever

- Bespoke web development is effective in taking you ahead of the market place competition

So, instead of that custom-made dress I was imagining, think of it like a custom-made website with functions that often stretch far beyond the imagination. 

Here at Ph. we have our very own in-house content management system, Ph.Use, which means we can make anything possible - from online redeemable vouchers to innovative scraping technology.

The main thing about bespoke web development is to make sure you always have your client’s commercial goals in mind, navigated with Search Engine importance.

If you can offer something completely new, well that’s just showing off really…

It gives me great pride to announce that last night, Bryan Adams, Managing Director was awarded Young Entrepreneur of The Year at the DLIB Livercool Awards.   

As I’m sure you’ll agree, this award was greatly deserved by Bryan - a true business leader that has made great waves in the creative industry and grown his vision into the huge success that today, is Ph.Creative. 

Ph.Creative would like to express sincere thanks to everyone who voted, and supported us, and say that we are proud to have established long-term relationships with all of our clients and associates. 

I’d like to express my congratulations to both the Ph.Creative team, and to Bryan – a creative genius, an inspirational leader, and a great friend. 

May our dream continue…

What everyone asks first is, how many visitors did we get to our website? 

No matter how long you’ve had your website, your analytics tool, who you are or what you do! This is always the first question, your natural instinct.  So let’s look at a couple of variations: 

Visits 

Also be known as ‘total visitors’.  Simply put how many people visited your website in a given timeframe.   But, in this metric the same person could visit you website 5 times in a day and it would be counted five times.  This leads me onto... 

Unique Visits 

This is basically home many ‘unique’ people have visited your website in a given timeframe.  So, it doesn’t take into account repeat visit, well it does but it won’t include users who visit your website, say 5 times in a day. 

For example: I visit the BBC website 5 times in a day (to keep on top of the sport of course!). This would show as: 

• Visits:     5
• Unique Visits:    1 

I do this for a week: 

• Visits:    35
• Unique Visits:    1 

Why should you care and what you need to care about? 

They provide the foundation of the activity coming to your website.  I personally consider ‘unique visitors’ as more important of the two, as this in ‘new’ people coming to you shop, business.  How do they react, what actions do they take, how quickly do they leave, and a host other insights can be gained. However loyalty and ‘recency’ are also really important in building relationships and selling more – but we’ll be talking about this in the next week or two. 

So, pretty straightforward but you’d be amazed how people can get confused, so let’s all get on the ‘same page’ and I’ll define some more basics over the next week or so and then we can get down to some real conversion busting tips. 

Google Dave 

PS...Remember post your comments; let me know what you’d like to know.   

This week in the Ph.Creative design studio we've come across the weird & wonderful of web design. In this weeks’ design blog, we've picked out the good, the bad and the down right ugly of websites.

We've come across loads of great looking sites this week but the one that stands out for us is the events.carsonified.com. As if Carsonified weren't cool enough as an agency, the events site continues to push the creativity and userbility. It not only looks great but is packed with tonnes of videos of seminars from all areas of the industry. The bold colourful typography and the use of different illustration styles in the mast and the footer is really refreshing and a nice change from the standard free vector graphics that are flooding the sites nowadays!  For us it’s the attention to detail that makes the sites stand out, the old 'less is more' theory. This is a great site. Nice & simple yet very informative! 5 out of 5!  
 

The site we've chosen for this wins hands down. If there was a room 101, this site would be first in the queue! www.genicap.com. The designers of this site, for us, broke every rule in web design. From the homepage, the user has no idea of what they do and its just doesn't engage the user at any stage. In fact, it’s so boring that the web designers couldn't even be bothered laying out some of the text so just dropped in dodgy jpgs of the copy! Poor work guys. We've come across lots of bad sites but this one is right up there.

This is almost tongue in cheek. We actually wanted to email these guys and ask if its a joke? At least on this site we know what they do, they're a driving school but how bad is it!
http://www.drivingskills.on.ca/ has more clipart on a site than we’ve ever seen. The nasty background, lack of understanding of colour and typography has to make this the ugliest site on the web.

So that’s it for this we, our small collection of really bad sites. If you’ve seen any howlers out there that deserve to be in our blog, please feel free to send them in to us.