Services

Web Design & Development

Web Design is one of the most important aspects to many businesses these days as it is often the primary place to make an impression on your prospective clients and customers. Think of it as your shop window and think how you want your image to be portrayed.

It is really important to provide the correct image and this is a vital part of your marketing mix. There is a principle in design known as the Attractiveness Bias that relates to how important it is to look good and this along with the principle of simplicity that underlies my User Experience design technique form the basis of my design approach. This approach relates to web site design, online application design, Email Marketing and Print Design to give a coherent and consistent look to your marketing.

The development of your site or application can depend on what you are trying to achieve and what technology will be best suited to achieving that result, whether it be an ecommerce website or a content managed site through to an application users subscribe to. I can advise on approaches that might be taken and either develop the site or application myself or assemble and project manage the team necessary to produce your desired result.

Online Marketing

The Online Marketing title covers most areas of my work as it is foremost in everything I do. It is only through designing and developing with an eye on the marketing of the site, product or service that the marketing will be a success. This is often overlooked and it can not be overstated that web design is only a part of the overall online marketing process. With this in mind I offer many other areas of online marketing including:

Search Engine Optimisation

The core of a well developed site is that the front end code should be compliant to the W3C‘s Web Standards, which helps to create code that is easily readable by not only standards compliant browsers and assistive technologies but also the search engines. However, being standards compliant is not the whole story behind optimising the code on a website for the search engines, the correct marking up of a document and semantic use of HTML along with a knowledge of how search engines view pages and value the markup can help the site acheive better rankings on the SERPs. Without your site being optimised for the dearch engines you could be losing positions in the SERPs and even be marked down or blacklisted by the Search Engines.

Link Building

It is often said that on the web content is king, and to a certain extent this is true, but how is that content judged by the search engines? The search engines prize highly relevant content and one of the ways for them to judge the relevance of any content is on the number of links it has coming into it from around the web. This is why a good and consistent link building campaign is often necessary for a business to achieve higher rankings on the SERPs.

Email Marketing

Direct Marketing has always been a good way of marketing to people you know will be interested in your product, especially if they have signed up to hear about your product or services. Email Marketing has made this even cheaper and I can offer email marketing design and delivery that will draw on my decade of experience creating marketing emails for companies such as GlaxoSmithKline and Ministry of Sound. My experience can help make sure your email renders well in the maximum number of email clients so you can maximise the audience of your mail along with helping you to establish the correct approach in the language, tone and imagery used.

Pay Per Click

PPC advertising is an area of marketing that can help out those who are in a competitive market and also those who are just starting out and wish to maximise visitors to their site whilst building the, slower to establish, natural search audience. The Pay Per Click campaign needs to be managed carefully and demands a mix of managing the spend, targetting the correct keywords and making sure the landing page is relevant and enticing to the consumer to maximise the ROI. This area of marketing needs careful planning to establish if it is correct for your business or service and to make the best of a PPC campaign given that it is very easy to spend a lot of money whilst not converting those who click into paying customers.

Community Marketing

One of my favourite areas of marketing is building communities in niche markets. Some products or services lend themselves extremely well to building a community around them. This can be beneficial to the consumer as well as the site offering the product or service as support from a community can be of particular importance. Also the site owner can market directly to those interested in the product or service and thereby maximising their potential ROI.

Social Marketing

Social Marketing is all over the web and is closely related to the Community Marketing, however, the important thing with Social Marketing is that it is relaxed and promotes a two way conversation between the provider of a product or service and the consumers. This can help you to ascertain who your audience are and their perception of you, your products or services and how you may be able to change or enhance that perception. Listening to your customers is very important these days as social media has also brought about a power to the consumer on the web to share their experiences with others and this could be bad for your business. Start a relationship with your customers today with an integrated approach to your conversation.

Web Analysis and Strategy

To fully understand the worth of your website and whether it is attaining its potential you will need a way to measure it performance. I will use analytics software to generate reports on your website that will reveal all the statistics of your sites performance. This will highlight areas that work well and those that do not and help to provide the raw data that can then be the basis for formulating your web strategy. This will help me to plan where best to spend time and effort in the marketing of your site.

Hosting

I have a number of hosting companies that I have strong contacts with that allow me to offer hosting on various scales. This can be from the small scale where I will directly manage the server on your behalf all the way to setting up a speciality server for services such as streaming Flash video.

Allied Services

Copywriting

I can help with providing the copywriting for your site through my trusted contacts who are professional PR copywriters with journalism backgrounds. They can deliver the correct copy for your needs.

Domain Name Registration

I can offer guidance in registering your domain name and managing that domain or I can do all of this for you. I mainly use 123-Reg for domain name management.