Web Wise Business – websites scotland (and beyond)
website development and websites Scotland from web wise businessArchive for web development
Web development in Scotland – flash
Flash can produce some great looking sites but it can be expensive to put together and it is not very SEO friendly at the moment. By all means use flash but use in sparingly and don’t blow the budget. As web developers we can come up with decent features without resorting to flash.
Web development in Scotland – fashion
One of the things we notice in web development world is fashion. Images can look dated fast, styles of presentation can look old within months and glitzy animation can suddenly look old hat. We’d recommend holding back on too many expensive whiz bang things and encourage good solid functionality.
Web development in Scotland – selling
Whatever you are writing for your website the chances are that you want to generate sales. So make sure that all your copy has the benefits of what you offer made obvious. As web developers we often recommend to put call to actions in numerous and multiple locations to help with the chance of converting a visitor to a customer.
Web development in Scotland – interest
Keeping the interest fresh on your site can be pretty tricky, so regular news and new features are important. Systems like that need good timed content and steady management.
Web development in Scotland – registration
Many CMS systems will provide the ability for visitors to create user accounts. This helps create loyalty if you have resources or information hidden behind the scenes. If you are building customer loyalty via registration type benefits then you will probably need web development help to take care of the tricky areas.
Web development in Scotland – choosing a CMS
You can shell out good cash and buy a CMS – not a bad idea but often Open Source CMS packages are a better deal. Maintained by legions of dedicated coders they can offer better support in some cases than commercially available packages.
Some CMS packages are tailored toward specific target markets – photographers for example. However it better to choose a more open and generic CMS as it is almost bound to have a richer feature set and will therefore be better when it comes to web development.
Credit Crunch Winners – Managed IT Services
It wasn’t so long ago that most of the evenings TV entertainment involved buying a house, botching a renovation and selling quickly at vast profit due to rampant housing inflation.
Now, however, Halloween TV included “Credit Crunch Winners” where former dragon Richard Farleigh ran around looking at those entrepreneurs who are seeing something to be cheerful about. Iceland and Aldi were featured heavily and sales are up as we seek cheaper alternatives.
Also featured was a company that supply a cost effective remote PA service. These services have been around a while but are now in vogue as business avoids recruiting when they can outsource. We see the same opportunities in web development and managed it services as more and more businesses seek to secure external help rather than build expensive in house capability.
As the recession kicks in we will see new business models spring up – so if anyone is needing something outsourced and want to be inventive let us know.
Ecommerce for event organisers using What’s On Central
It’s taken a wee while for us to get to this but we are in the process of adding an ecommerce option to our event publicity site What’s On Central. It’s always been on the list of things to do – but our list kept getting longer.
We run What’s On Central for free – though the booking and email system costs a monthly fee. The bit that has been missing since day 1 has been taking payment at the point of booking – so we’re getting that sorted.
For folks who develop ecommerce websites we really should have done this a long time ago – but customers come first. And to be fair to ourselves we also wanted to make sure that What’s On Central was something that the business and academic community in Scotland would actually use. It’s been fun watching the site fill up and the user level rise – it now consistently has more than 100 business and academic Scottish events listed. Nice one – so time we stuck on epayment options.
Acquire, convert and retain – web development
The phrase we keep using in the office is acquire, convert, retain. It’s become a bit of a mantra. It’s one of those Web 2 phrases. Web 2? There is a phrase you don’t hear as often as you did a year ago.
We reckon that’s because folks are doing web 2 development without even thinking about it. Our web development activities are now regularly focussed on interactivity with users – and how you use that interactivity to acquire, convert and retain online visitors.
Will the recession accelerate Managed IT Services uptake and other pay as you go approaches?
Now that the Bank of England have come clean and pointed out that there is an elephant in the room (they’ve used the recession word) I guess we need to think through how that elephant impacts the wee world we inhabit.
For us that world is web development as well as the pay as you go services that we provide such as hosting and web support. I’m sure we’ll see some push back on pricing – that’s only to be expected – but I guess we’ll just have to stand our ground and point out that the services we supply are to aid the sales effort of the companies we support.
My gut feeling is that pay as you go services such as managed IT services and the web support type services we offer should increase in popularity. When times are tight businesses become more focussed on outsourcing rather than building things in house or investing in large capital projects – so cost effective solutions like managed IT services should see an upswing.
We’ll see how things shake out – but recessions have a habit of throwing up innovations and new ways of working. So pretty soon I suspect that the elephant in the room may well prove to be available on a monthly subscription basis – who knows?
