We think you’ll agree it’s radically different to the old site (a copy kept here for posterity), and indeed to many of the websites you see around.  Here’s what we had in mind when we designed and built it:

• Make it less about our brand:
  
  OK that might seem a bit odd – after all, we are our brand, and we need to market ourselves, don’t we?  Well yes, but we think far too many websites focus way too much on the company that owns them, rather than the company’s customers.  The classic website owner of old wants to drone on about their company history on the home page, and make their logo as big as possible.  Yes you need branding to be present, but the website should heavily feature the things that (a) a customer wants to find out, and (b) the things that make the company a good choice.  So for us, that’s our services and our people – we’ve pushed our logo down to the bottom of the page to an ever-present footer bar, which also has the main menu, and majored at the top of the page about the quality and experience of our people, and the services we offer.  The ever-present Contact and Support buttons provide customers with a quick route to those areas, which is often what the majority of a website’s visitors are after.
• Make it different:
  
  We’re a web design agency.  The old site got lots of good feedback, but it was pretty minimal and cold.  Dull, some people would say.  With our new site, we’ve tried to go for a radical new design that showcases what we can do, both in terms of design, and technical capability.  So the site is mobile-device responsive (the large header image disappears, the service “blocks” rearrange themselves, the menu turns into a single button, and the content rearranges itself, on a mobile device), and there are lots of bells and whistles.  We’ve always got our website visitor uppermost in our mind though, so this is not design for design’s sake, but a genuine attempt to get our customers and prospective customers to the information they want, faster, and in a more visually appealing way.  The inner pages have a pleasant “infographic” style of presentation which breaks up the page to make it more digestible.
• Make it regional:
  
  We are growing fast nationally (and soon to be internationally) through our Partner Programme, where the right individuals can open a web design business locally under our brand through a franchise agreement.  With 6 regional offices, and a further 4 run by our central team, we wanted a way to allow individual offices to maintain their own web presence, promoting local news and services as appropriate, whilst under the watchful eye of the central operations team who provide content, marketing and support for our regional operations.  So each region has it’s own sub-site (e.g. http://newcastle.metanym.com/) with its own local flavour, run not purely as an SEO technique, but by an experienced local person in that area.  The local content of each site will grow over the weeks and months, and we expect some interesting variants to emerge.

We would love to hear your views below.

Images play a huge part of a successful website especially an E-Commerce site. Pictures really do speak a thousand words so what can you do to make sure viewers become your customers?

Well it’s true that not every style, colour or angle will appeal to everyone. Some people love something bold, different, bright maybe even abstract and if you’re selling to the younger generation or advertising a trendy restaurant or night club then that approach might be perfect.

Equally, traditional, muted and more serious might be the way to go if you’re selling to a market looking for secure and dependable products. All quite logical and understandable but there are some key points that can be applied to all markets, all age groups and all sites:

Image Quality

One of the biggest turn-offs when it comes to images must be a poorly taken or poorly focused image of your wares. Make sure your images are clear, crisp and sharp and where possible employ a good professional photographer to take them, especially if they are of your team, your premises or most importantly your products. No one wants to squint at a tiny or poorly focused picture and will make an immediate decision about how they feel about you and what you are trying to do.

If you use images of people, then poses where the person faces forward are found to be more approachable and inviting.

Image Load Speeds

If you want to add images that give the ‘wow’ factor, you must make sure you offset this against the risk that the time it takes for the image to load is just too long for someone to stay around to experience it. We’ve spoken before about how quickly someone might be prepared to wait to view a site so test this out before you lose out.

Placement

There is some science to the way a user views a site. It’s commonly thought that users look firstly to the top left of a page (excellent place to store your logo) and then read across the top of the page, down through the middle and stop bottom right.

They also try to take in most of the info before having to scroll down to the lower section of the page so if possible try and get your important images and info into that top section to make sure this is absorbed quickly.  Studies have also shown that users spend 69% of the time viewing the left side of the page so again get those important images towards the left if you can.

Of course there has to be balance and while these guidelines might help you decide where to place a sidebar for instance, you need to make sure that overall the page looks well laid out and even.

Finally, after Logo, Navigation Menu and Social Media icons, it is thought that your main image is the next area where users will spend most time looking once a page opens. That’s just slightly more than the main text content so clear, relevant, well placed images really are vital both in making people stay on your site but also to give them an immediate feel for you and your company.

Get it right and you are on your way to a great site that will encourage users to stick around, enjoy and most importantly shop!

For sites to meet all of your requirements, why not contact us for more information. We can paint that perfect picture for you.

But can we really track that success? Can we monitor our popularity and examine our reputation and appeal? For as many social media platforms available to us, there are many more tools which can evaluate, track and check just how well our social media campaign is progressing.

Here are just a few you might want to try out:

www.tweetreach.com

• Quickly analyse recent tweets; search by keyword, twitter username, phrase or website and see how far your tweets have travelled.
• Discover top tweets and contributors.
• Generate reports

www.howsociable.com

• Measure your brand magnitude by filtering all the relevant data on the web
• Use metrics to give you an objective view of your brand positioning.
• Allows you to control your online reputation.
• Provides a score of 0-10 that indicates the level of activity around your brand in a given week from across the social web, using the 36 most popular social media sites.
• Breaks down scores for different social media platforms so that you can see where your brand is most active.

www.amplicate.com

• Find out what people love and hate on social media.
• Search for a term and get an immediate breakdown of ‘love’ and ‘hate’ opinions on a topic

www.socialmention.com

• Real-time social media search and analysis.
• Search for a topic and get a breakdown of the number of mentions, negative and positive views and social media platforms used.

www.tweetarchivist.com

• Save and analyse tweets.
• Tweet Archivist updates your archive hourly, so you are guaranteed not to miss a tweet.
• Generate and download professional, presentation-ready charts and reports.
• Export the archives to Excel for further analysis.
• Share the archive and analytics to the world with a unique URL. Embed active charts in webpages. Or, keep everything entirely private.

www.netvibes

• Provides you with a dashboard to Monitor all your apps, feeds, sentiments and Tweets—all in real-time
• Access from your iPad, iPhone or mobile, manage multiple dashboards and even read articles offline

www.thinkup.com

• Free, open source web application that captures all your activity on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Foursquare and stores it in your own database
• Search, sort, analyse, publish and display

http://www.trackur.com

• Quickly monitor your online reputation
• Measure social media trends
• Analyse social media mentions for your company, brands, or clients.

www.sendible.com

• Monitor & respond to mentions of your brand on the social web.
• Publish & schedule content, generate leads & grow your following.
• Prove the effectiveness of your social media efforts with in-depth analytics.

So with all this analysis and insight there’s really no excuse for not making the most of social media for your business. But if you’d prefer, we’d be happy to help here at Metanym. Call us on 0845 1800 198 or visit us at www.metanym.com and we’ll manage a successful social media campaign for you.

Source: www.dailytekk.com

Check that your bio is appealing to new followers. Many people read this first, as well as checking your last few tweets to see if you are relevant to them. Your avatar should be a photo of you, which you can customise with your company logo – random images or leaving the Twitter egg as your avatar makes you look like a spammer. Spammers tend to have few followers but are following thousands so are best avoided.

Make sure your Twitter name is on everything you do and make it easy for people to follow you – put it on your business cards, in presentations and email signatures, as well as in your profile on all your other social media accounts and this will increase your visibility.

It’s really important to tweet regularly, at least once or twice a day. Link your Facebook account to Twitter so that anything you post on Facebook will be tweeted, but don’t do it the other way round – one sure way to annoy your Facebook fans is with a stream of tweets! You can post images, interesting links, useful advice and tips in your field and topical conversation – keep it interesting, engaging and relevant to your targeted followers.

Do a Twitter search on keywords that are relevant to your business and you will find people who are tweeting about that topic. Follow the relevant ones and tweet to them too, especially the big players. Look at the list of followers for those key people and follow some of them. Follow your competitors followers too.

Search on your local area too, as many regions or towns have their own hashtag and a time when they tweet. For example every Monday 8-9pm is #LincsHour promoting the local area, businesses, events, and tourism.

Many business networks such as Bizitalk, UKStartUp, and Purpledog promote UK businesses. Add their hashtag to a tweet and they will usually retweet it to their many thousands of followers.

There are other ways to add followers that involve paying for them or using automation, but it is the followers that you engage with that will bring business to you. That involves building up a relationship with them and that takes time and can’t be easily bought. Concentrate on generating quality content and followers will come on their own. The truth is that quality is better than quantity.

If you would like to talk to use more about our social media services please just click here to contact us.  

If you have a well written and properly functioning website, do you really need to worry about making it ‘mobile’ friendly? The best way to answer that question is to look at current stats:

• By the end of last year there were 1.5 billion mobile broadband subscriptions worldwide. (Source: mobithinking.com)

•  45% of the world’s population is now covered by a 3G mobile network.
  (Source: mobithinking.com)

• Mobile internet usage is projected to overtake desktop internet usage by 2014.(Source: tag.microsoft.com)

So if we know its big business and that it’s here to stay, what do we know about how people use their mobile web access?

• 50% of all local searches are performed on a mobile device
  (Sourcetag.microsoft.com)

• 74% of consumers will wait 5 seconds for a web page to load on their mobile device before abandoning the site. (Source: www.gomez.com)

• 46% of consumers are unlikely to return to a mobile site if it didn’t work properly during their last visit. (Source: www.gomez.com)

So doesn’t it make sense to make sure your site works well in a mobile setting?

Whether you are starting up and want your first website or are a growing business looking to reinvest in something new, just what should you look for in a mobile friendly site…

• Think about what you want to show your customers, what is the most important factor, the thing that will make them want to stay?

If you use your site to sell products then concentrate on images that show off your wares to their best advantage. Mobile user’s aren’t necessarily going to be interested in fancy design features or lots of text and so in these cases a new mobile template can be used to transform your site into the most mobile-friendly format.

If your site is not used for selling but provides information, then a responsive design might be the best way to go. This recognises when a user is viewing your site on a mobile device and transforms the layout into easy to follow columns and simple navigation.

•  Think about what users are searching for – if they are out and about perhaps what they are looking for is your opening hours, your contact details, a map to help them find you? Make sure this information is prominent.

• Think about the device they may be using. Most use touch screens so it’s important that your site supports this and also shows users that the features are working by perhaps changing colours when an area is pressed.

• Social interaction – 25% of the time spent on a mobile device will relate to social media sites so make sure you provide social media access on your site.

• Try not to clog up the site with files that are too large or unnecessary images if they are likely to slow down access. Users will wait only a matter of seconds for a site to load before they decide to move on!

• Make your navigation simple and easy to use. Menus should be collapsible where possible to make best use of the space on a page.

• SEO – Don’t overlook this element – no point working hard on a mobile site that no one can find.

• If you’re still not convinced by the stats, why not check your own analytics to prove exactly how many users visit your site using a mobile device. If you don’t use Google Analytics already, then sign up now at www.google.com/analytics.

So back to that question…Do you need a mobile site? Well what are you waiting for? Call us on 0845 1800 198 or contact us here and we’ll do the work for you!

Please take a look how one of our customers increased their enquiries by 100% with our help. Read the full story here.

Some may be forgiven for thinking that an initial investment in a good quality website which can then be improved by further investment into good SEO is just about as much as is required to get the best results.

Problem is that technology moves fast and what was once sufficient becomes only the baseline for what you need to think about to make sure that initial investment proves profitable.

We already know that a mobile version of your site (or a mobile template) is a must to make sure that those who use it on a mobile device (and its A LOT) get the best experience and not only stay but go on to buy your services, products or other. So does the same rule therefore apply to a desktop site when it comes to making sure it works hard for you? Or do you need a bit more help?

When it comes to looking at mobile SEO, a lot of the same principles apply. You just need to implement them while thinking specifically about your site being used on a mobile device.

So…when you start any good SEO campaign, it’s important to firstly nail down the most appropriate keywords. It’s the same when it comes to Mobile SEO. If you have Google Analytics (and if not, why not?!), then you can check to see what users search for when they access your site on a mobile device. You can then make sure you optimise the site well for these terms. In some cases it will be similar to desktop search but is likely to be location focused, so contact details and maps for instance, or time-focused like opening times or start times.

Thinking about how your user is using the mobile device leads us to the next point. If you are out and about and you want to find something, you are likely to try and locate a site using as few keywords as possible. In fact According to Google’s research, the average query on Mobile Search is 15 characters long, but takes roughly 30 key presses and approximately 40 seconds to enter. To get round this, Google uses predictive search terms as so tries to guess what you are looking for by adding a dropdown box with suggested terms or phrases. What you need to do is make sure your site is linked to one of those suggestions by looking carefully at the common phrases that might describe your services, product and location and making sure you use those to optimise your site. Google keyword tool is a good place to start.

You also need to think about where these users are or what they are doing – are they on a bus, walking along a street, in a pub or restaurant. In a lot of cases they’ll be in a position where they need to get to the info quickly and easily so page-load speed and ease of navigation are important. They are also much more likely to use brand names rather than generic descriptions of what they want for speed so make sure you use these in your site if that’s what you sell.

You also need to think carefully about your location. With mobile searching, Google will consider you just as important to its users as a well-known brand or shop if you are closer to the person searching. So get your site well optimised for your location and all the areas you may serve.

Another area to think about is presentation. Something that will be covered in your original conversion to a mobile site but especially important when it comes to SEO. Due to the lack of well-designed mobile sites and uniformity across different mobile platforms, Google is beginning to introduce something called ‘Transcoding’. Basically if your site doesn’t measure up when it’s viewed on mobile device, Google will change it. In doing this however, it could mean that what you intended to display and what Google thinks you should display could be very different. The only way to avoid this is to get a good quality mobile version of your site in place so that Google doesn’t need to interfere.

Of course on top of all this, you still need to think about all your regular SEO good practices which may just need to be tweaked slightly for the mobile audience:

• Try to avoid platforms that don’t work well in a mobile setting – Flash, Ajax or Frames etc.
• Don’t bury important info too deep within your site but keep it easy to find with as few menu layers as possible.
• Use compliant mobile language so that as many types of mobile devices can display your content as possible.
• Check your site displays well in all browsers
• Think about Social Media – mobile devices are used for social interaction so make sure your site lets your users participate.
• Make sure your site has a good sitemap and that this is submitted to Google and other search engines.
• Make sure you make use of Google Webmaster tools
• Try and link to other good quality mobile sites to make your user experience the best it can be.

Lots to think about! But it doesn’t have to be a chore. Metanym offer mobile web site conversion, new mobile sites, mobile & desktop SEO and Social Media so please give us a call on 0845 1800 198 or contact us here.