How to set up an E-Commerce Website!

So, how do you set up an E-Commerce Website?71% of Social Media users say they are more likely to buy off a company they follow

Well, although there are numerous other ways to set up an E-Commerce site, we specialise in WordPress, so we’re going to use that. I’ll not run over setting up WordPress, as we’ve covered that elsewhere and I’ll assume you’ve set up a site already. How to build your own Website!

So, assuming you’ve got that set up, what you need to do is extend the functionality of WordPress with a plug in. So in the main menu of WordPress you need to head on over to the Plugins option, and use the search function there to search for WooCommerce, and select and install it. It’ll take a few moments to download it and Install it, but once that is done, you need to activate it.

 

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is an amazing addition to WordPress, and it walks you through the steps to setting up your E-Commerce site, taking you through the country and currency that you’re operating in. The shipping measurements, and the payment gateway you’ll be using to accept payment. Then finally it will ask you to install a theme compatible with WooCommerce.

The suggested theme is Storefront, and is a plain but useable Theme for WordPress, and it is a good one to start off with, however if you don’t like it, you can search the Theme’s in the Appearance section of WordPress and look for WooCommerce, and you’ll find dozens of compatible themes.

However, it is possible to operate a WooCommerce store without installing a compatible theme, however it will make the users journey less than optimal (something which can be resolved by adding their cart to your main menu, and certain other tweaks), but it is not recommended.

WooCommerce has it’s own range of plugins, which add functionality to it, including different payment gateways, product displays, and shipping calculators, these can be very handy indeed, but you’ll find that the most useful of these require a purchase, so it’s up to you to calculate whether the value of these is worth the asking price, as it’s very easy to want all the functions these provide you and your customers, without them adding any real value to the site.

Payment Gateways

A payment gateway is how your E-Commerce store accepts customer payments, and can be the hardest part to set up. There are many options, and if you’re a company with a company bank account you’ll find yourself with a few hoops to jump through to set this up, but these are not insurmountable, just a little of a pain. Setting these up I recommend having your book-keeper or accountant to hand to help answer the required questions.

The simplest option to get around all this is to use Paypal, setting up your Paypal account for business is easy enough, and it’ll give you the keys to enter into your website and start accepting payments. The disadvantage of Paypal is the percentage cut they take of each sales, but you’re going to have to pay a payment gateway in one way or another, and the convenience of Paypal is worth the few extra pennies it costs. It’s only once you start doing serious business through your store that it’ll really cost you, and if you reach that point you can upgrade.

Products

Now the time consuming bit, setting up your products, you’re obviously going to need their price, a description and title, and realistically you’ll need a picture of the product. If you’ve only one or two things, then this is easy enough, but if you’ve 700, then this is going to take some serious time.

When setting up products, if you’ve only one or two, then you don’t really need to bother with categories, but if you’ve more than 10 products, you’ll really need to start separating them out into different categories, so that customers can more easily find them (imagine going on Amazon, and absolutely everything was just bundled in together, trying to find a James Bond DVD, when all the DVD’s, books, video-games and aftershave were all showing up in one massive list, it’d be horrible).

Depending on the number of products, you might wish to separate everything out even further with sub-categories, so that t-shirts can be found amongst clothing, breakfast serials amongst food, etc. 

Shipping

One last thing worth mentioning is shipping, there is very little chance of every single order requiring the same shipping costs, what if someone is buying a single t-shirt and someone else is buying 500, or someone is buying a badge, and someone else buying a crate of wine. The different size and weight of orders is going to mean different costs for shipping, especially considering do you ship to the Scottish Islands, or Internationally, the costs will be very different for different areas, so look into this first, and make sure you cover your costs.

Don’t rely on an average shipping cost, and don’t make a loss on shipping on any single order, as if that type of order becomes the most popular, then your site will lose you money.

Finally

The above will get you a functioning E-Commerce site, and while there’s plenty you may wish to consider, for example you might consider using social media plugins to help build your site into a Marketing Funnel, you’ve now got the basics to build on, and build your sales from here.

If you’ve any questions, or want to discuss anything in this article, please get in touch through our email, social media, or the many other ways, listed in our contacts page. Thanks for reading.

 

What is a Marketing Funnel?

Introduction

Building a Marketing Funnel is the new big thing in Web Design at the moment, and while they are a new way of framing what we do, they’re nothing new in themselves, and in fact reach back into more traditional marketing for reframing web design.

Sections of a Marketing Funnel

Basically a Marketing Funnel breaks the stream of getting sales online down into five main sections as seen in the illustration here. Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, Loyalty and Advocacy. And then break down the tasks which commonly take place within an online business to fit within these sections, making it easier to track customers through the process to the point where they’re actively promoting you and your services.

This allows you to organise the process to a successful online venture more easily, and also allows website builders to sell you a full service to reach your goals, rather than just selling you part of the process, leaving you to deal with the rest yourself, or fail.

Many people think that getting a shiny new website which ticks all the boxes (Responsive, Mobile Compliant, etc) is enough to get you sales. But if you’re not channelling people towards your site, marketing it to gain visitors, then you’re never going to get sales. And if you’re not making the best of visitors and their awareness of your site, then you’re losing out on aftersales.

The Sections of a Marketing Funnel

Awareness

This section is everything to bring someone to your website, so while it includes things on your website such as SEO, Blog Entries, etc, which make your site easier to find on the search engines. It also includes paid efforts such as Online Advertising (Google Adwords, Facebook Adverts, etc), and free efforts such as your Social Media Presence (although obviously paid social media managers are available), Videos and email outreach.

These bring people to the website, without visitors all your other efforts are pointless.

So you need to put efforts to bring in visitors, Online Advertising is obviously the best way to get instant visitors. Whether they are potential customers, often depends on the quality of your advertising, and the cost of acquiring these customers can often be high especially in popular key words. For example, a brewery using the keyword “Beer”, will find this keyword highly contested and will have to pay a very high value for each visitor that clicks through to their website. For large brands who are building brand awareness, this will likely pay out eventually, as even if someone doesn’t buy immediately, they are more aware of the brand and therefore more likely to buy when they next see the brand at the bar or supermarket. But for a small company, who isn’t likely to be seen on a bar or in a supermarket far from their premises, then specifying “Beer” along with their town or county, to only capture people interested in local products. This also goes if they have any specialities or Unique Selling Points such as ingredients or recipes, targeting people only interested in those will be far less contested, and more likely to land sales.

Social Media, should never be ignored, it can bring in great success, as word of mouth can spread more easily, and people can get a more accurate idea of what your company and products are like than from advertising. We’ve written about Social Media  many times, so rather than delving more into it here, we’ll just point you towards How to Grow your Twitter!Some Eye Opening fact about Social Media5 Tips If You’re A Start-up Starting Out In Social MediaShedding the shell: confidence is essential when starting out in social media and Social-ism!

Other outreach, is writing guest articles on other peoples websites, this drives awareness, and builds you a reputation as a seasoned practitioner in your field, and promoting your own blog articles on sites such as Reddit, Digg, Google Bookmarks, Delicious and StumbleUpon. Email, while difficult to start off with, unless you buy in a list (not recommended), you should use all the business cards you’ve gathered and all your old contacts to form the basis of your email outreach, and build to it from your website.

Finally, anything you can create can be used for reaching more customers, videos, eBooks, White Papers, etc. Creating these, and providing them for free, or for an email subscription, is an easy way to build a reputation for someone who provides quality content free of charge, and builds an audience.

Consideration

The next part of a Marketing Funnel is Consideration, in which the customer needs to be provided with the information on the subject. So providing comprehensive information on your products, allowing them to compare them against competitors, customer testimonials, reviews, case studies, etc. Giving the customer the information they need to make a decision, this isn’t about heavy sales work here, you’re making them aware of the advantages of the product, and making them sure it is what they need.

Putting some of this content only available when the customer provides their email address is one way of building your email list, but also to follow up and begin conversion of their wants to a sale.

Good photography and images are important here as well, if you product looks terrible because it’s poorly lighted and out of focus, that sells to the customer that it’s not important and that the rest of your service will be equally shoddy.

Conversion

This part of a Marketing Funnel is all about the sale, pushing the customer into making a decision, some of this can be done on the site, offering discounts and after sales support to help convince them into making the decision now. But utilising pop up aftermarketing (as they leave the site) to convince them to complete the sale, promising fast delivery, etc if they buy now. Also offering a free trial, or contacting them about the items in their shopping basket may lead to completing the sale. Webinars for more information are also useful to invite customers to, as is offering them information on the direct benefits they can expect from your product.

Loyalty

After an initial sale is made, it’s easier to upsell, or make repeat sales to customers who are already convinced to buy from you. So creating loyalty, and providing them a useful service and informing them of this using their captured email details, can build loyalty and sales. So if you sell flowers, reminding them of final order dates for mothers day provides them with a useful reminder, and an easy way to fulfil their needs to buy something for their mum at that time of year. Offering discounts and money off sales can bring customers back for repeat sales.

Even if you don’t want to give money away in discounts, you can provide a feeling of community by providing a newsletter informing people of what’s going on in your company, trade shows you’ve attended and awards you’ve won, even the coming and going of staff can build the feeling that they know you, and makes them more likely to trust you once again. Even something as simple as a survey, can build a feeling that you care about your customers and listen to their needs and wants.

Advocacy

The next step of the Marketing Funnel says that you should want to convert your loyal customers into walking, talking adverts for how great you are. You first stop should probably be your social media, make it easy for your customers to like and share your products and services to their friends and family, promoting you to potential customers who you’re not even aware of. You may want to identify particular customers that love you and send them an email asking them to refer you to their friends, providing a discount code they can offer to their friends. Affiliate or loyalty programs where customers get incentives for referring you could be set up, so your customers actually become active in selling your products.

The most basic level of this however is whichever methods you choose, you need to be impressing your customers as it’s easy for these to backfire. Social Media can be used to advertise how bad your service is, and once something is on the Internet it doesn’t easily go away. Furthermore, you need to make sure any discount codes are secure, or that you can afford for the code to go viral, as spreading the code on social media could lead to a rush of sales, but if they’re at a razor thin margin, or acting as a loss leader it can cause more harm than it was worth in extra sales.

Summary

While a Marketing Funnel is as I said upfront, just a way of highlighting the stages that you should really be targeting to build sales online, they are very useful in making it a step by step process of building sales. While I’ve spent more time in this article prioritising the acquisition of new customers in the Awareness stage of the Marketing Funnel, all the stages are of equal importance but some may be more obvious than others. So while it’s likely that you will find some stages come naturally and are therefore easy, others may be more tricky.

If you want to discuss anything in this article, please feel free to get in touch.

 

 

 

How to build your own Website!

Okay, I’ve said in the past not to build your own website, and for 99% of businesses I still absolutely completely recommend this, the danger of making a severe mess of it and destroying your credibility is massive. However, for businesses operating on an absolute shoestring, or people who like to tinker with technology I can say that building websites is a load of fun.

So what I’m going to do is run through the basics of purchasing and setting up a website of your very own.

You’re going to need three things, a Domain Name (the address you type in to get to your website), a host (a server on the Internet to hold your website) and a Content Management System (the user friendly way of building a website), which in this article will be WordPress it’s common and easy to use(other CMS’s exist, your mileage may vary).

Choosing a Domain Name

The obvious first step, choosing the address people will use to find you on the web. While this will usually be your company name, unfortunately no matter how imaginative that you think you are (for example we’re lucky we’re Scot’s, as ScruffyDog was already long gone, but using the colloquial “Dug” allowed us to get our name), someone in all likelihood has already thought of your domain name and you’ll have to make a compromise.

The areas of compromise comes in three areas,

  • Adding to your name. So for example, if our name ScruffyDug had been taken, then perhaps we could have used ScruffyDugDS, or ScruffyDugDesignSolutions. The obvious problem with these is that the name can get long and difficult to remember as well as looking unwieldy on business cards and flyers.
  • Adding padding to the name. So for example, Scruffy_Dug or Scruffy-Dug might still be available, and in some ways look far more readable than cramming all the words of your domain name together (just ask expertsexchange, are they Experts Exchange, or Expert Sexchange?, and don’t get me started on therapist ). The problem with these, is that if ScruffyDug was gone, then people mistyping the address and missing the underscores or dashes, would end up at the alternative site.
  • Changing the TLD. The TLD is the .com, the .org, .net .co.uk, the .xyz or whatever on the end of the domain name. While many TLD’s are available, .com’s are still the most popular. Now, many of these are very good, for a UK based business then .co.uk may actually be better, especially if you’re seeking a name already taken in the .com. However if you start to move into the more obscure, you move into the territory mentioned above, that someone mistyping, forgetting the TLD and assuming it’s a .com, will end up on the wrong site.

Whichever name you choose, you’ll need to check it’s availability, while whoever you choose as a host will perform availability checks for you, it’s probably best not to type your chosen domain name into a registrar until you’re absolutely ready to register the domain.

The reason for this is I’m afraid some registrars play dirty, knowing people will use their domain availability checker, before moving onto a cheaper rival, they’ll take advantage of the data you’ve just typed in, and their position as a registrar (who can return a domain name within a month for a full refund) to register your domain, forcing you to go to them and pay a premium since they now own your domain.

Now, this isn’t all registrars, it isn’t even a majority, but I’m aware of at least one of the biggest website sellers using this tactic, and instead of paying £10 or so to register your domain, they treat it at a premium (since they know you want it) and can charge £100 and up.

So if you want to see if someone really has your domain name, then you should check it out with an independent tool , such as this one.

Choosing a Host

Right, you’ve chosen your domain name, now to choose somewhere to put that website.  What you’re looking for in a hosting company, as well as the obvious things such as a good price, good customer support and good reviews, is less obvious things such as plenty of storage space (5gb and up will be plenty) and plenty of data transfer (1tb should be plenty). But most importantly for this article is support for cPanel.

cPanel is a control panel (funnily enough) for the server, it allows you to set up and control everything from your email accounts, right through to what system you install onto the server for your website.

Once you register with a Host, they’ll email you through your log-in details, allowing you to log into cPanel.

Installing WordPress

Using the details you’ve been sent through by your host, log into cPanel (they’ll send you through the URL for this too). You’ll be confronted by what appears to be a startling number of details and options, but what you’re looking for is softaculous or installatron (same thing really). Clicking within this section will take you to another large list of options, and what you’re looking for is WordPress (depending on the version of cPanel and it’s configuration, this may actually be available from the main menu within the softaculous/installatron section).

A brief explanation of WordPress will follow, with an install button, which is what you’re looking for. Clicking it will take you to the configuration options, most of which are perfectly okay already, the ones you’re looking to change at this point are your blog name and description, and your admin username and password (do not use the same password as you’ve been given for cPanel, as if someone hacks your website, they’ll get full control, where if they only hack WordPress, you’ve still got cPanel to get control back).

Once you’ve set these (and maybe in later versions of Installatron you’ve selected a theme for your blog), click the install button at the bottom and softaculous/installatron will now install the databases and scripts for wordpress automatically. They’ll even let you click straight into the admin side of the site bypassing your password once it’s done.

Setting up WordPress

Once cPanel has finished it’s magic and WordPress is installed, log into the Admin side of the site, either using the automatic link that cPanel shows you, or by going to your domain with /wp-admin on the end, which will let you enter your username/password to log in.

There are several parts you now want to get to, and since this isn’t a total guide to WordPress (I may do that in the future), I’ll only briefly cover them.

  • Appearance. This section decides what your website is going to look like, select a general design to the site from the many thousands of themes available through the Theme’s submenu, and then using the Customise menu option you can select to use your logo, and many themes allow you to select colours, etc.
  • Pages. This is where you actually set up the pages within your website properly, adding images through the Media Section, and writing the text that will appear on the pages, use the Add New menu option for adding new pages (pretty obvious), or selecting already created ones for editing within the All Pages menu option. Remember if you want people to see the pages, you’re probably going to have to add them to the Menu’s within the Theme’s Menus option. 
  • Plugins. This is where you add extra functionality to WordPress, some of these such as WooCommerce allow you to add a whole eCommerce store within WordPress, others add smaller but no less useful functionality. So if you want to add your Twitter Feed to your website, then you’ll find a plugin to do that here among the tens of thousands of Plugins available, mainly for free. Once you’ve added the plugin, make sure you activate it, and you’ll be able to add it within your website in the Theme’s Widgets menu option, or in some cases it’s functionality will have it’s own menu option or it will add to an already existing section.

Your website is ready to go!

With your website looking how you want it, and will the content you want on it, the sites ready to go. Register it with Google to help them find it (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url), and let your social feeds know about it.

Setting up a website is easy these days with cPanel and WordPress, but the devil is in the details as they say, and you’ll find many hours getting swallowed up as you tweak and fiddle with the settings to get it how you want it.

Hope this has been of a little use to someone out there, have fun, and if you want to talk about anything from Web Design to Social Media, please get in touch, we’d love to hear from you.

A mobile user is 67% more likely to purchase online on a mobile compatible website.
A mobile user is 67% more likely to purchase online on a mobile compatible website.

How to grow your Twitter!

It’s a bit of a blunt title, but that’s exactly what I’m going to tell you, or at least what I’ve been doing to grow my Twitter account. I’ll point you towards the websites and systems I’m using, and tell you exactly what I’m doing. I’ve been doing this for three months now, and have grown my audience from 87 (on the day I started) to 7145 (at the moment of writing), almost exactly 3 months to the day since I began.

I’m not going to teach you how to use the tools, as this article will be long enough without that, but they’re relatively easy to learn, and can be pretty much mastered in a few hours.

Schedule your Twitter posts

Before you try anything else, what you’ve got to do is give people some content to look at on your twitter. My long repeated phrase of “Content is King” holds on Twitter too. Now while you could do this yourself whenever you can, it’s far better to schedule your posts.

While there are many tools for doing this, and I’ve heard good things about Hootsuite, personally I use Zoho Social, even though I’ve used it for 3 months, I’m still on the free trial (they give you 30 days, + 10 for tweeting about them, then 30 each for writing reviews on each of 3 different review sites), so you get something crazy like 130 days free, and even then they’re very reasonable (I’m definitely going to subscribe when my trial finally expires).

These type of tools allow you to set for posts to be made on your behalf at set times. So you can put aside an hour or so, and write a weeks worth of posts all at once, and set them to go up each day at set times. The tools post to various social networks, but I’ve been concentrating on Twitter, as they all require different ways of boosting them (I may cover other Social Networks in future posts).

Various studies say the more posts per day that you do the better, with around 6 a day being the best. Being slightly lazy, I settled for 4 at set times, boosted whenever I can with normal posts. Setting my schedule, I set a photograph to go up at 9am each day (I live in picturesque Ayrshire, so just snapping away with my phone camera when I’m out and about works great for this). I set a blog post to go up at 12 noon (just something from our past blog postings), a link to some news item or blog posting by someone else at 3pm, and finally an inspirational or amusing quote at 6pm.

I also found an app on my phone called Crowdfire, which suggests articles for tweeting, which I’ve found useful to add to my daily number of tweets (and found some amazing articles on there for myself too). I also love that it reminds you to do this everyday, and gives you a count of new followers each day, which has really helped to keep pushing me on.

Find Twitter Followers

Now, while using hashtags is useful to growing your audience, it’s also very slow. The faster way of growing your audience is to seek them out and follow them, fingers crossed they’ll have a look at what you’re posting and follow you back.

So look for leaders in your field, for us it’s other web design companies and social media managers. You’re looking for ones with thousands of followers at least on their twitter feed (lower numbers of followers tend to be friends and family, so won’t be that interested in you), these followers are people with an interest in your field/sector (or at least they’ve followed someone posting about this, so presumably do), and you want to follow them. Now the basic way is to go to their twitter, look at the Followers page, and select each one, one at a time and follow them (this is very slow and time consuming).

When I first started, I personally began using a tool called Tweepi, which allows much faster processing of follows. However, I’ve now moved to a Chrome plug in called Mass Follow for Twitter, which allows you to follow lots of potential followers very quickly.

Something to bear in mind, is that Twitter frowns on “aggressive following”, and there are certain limits you’ve got to bear in mind. Firstly, you’re not allowed to follow more than 1000 people a day, and secondly, you’re not allowed to follow more than 5000 people, or the number of people that follow you + 10%, whichever is higher. So be careful and stay well within Twitters limits, or you risk being locked out of your account, or it being shut down completely.

You’ll also notice that if you’re following 1000 people extra each day, and your limit is 5000, you’re going to quickly fill that 5000 following limit. So you’re going to need to unfollow some people. To keep this under control, I at first used a tool called Manage Flitter, which keeps track of who’s not following you back, and allows you to unfollow them.

But Mass Follow for Twitter actually does it better, allowing you to set that it works its way through your followers list and doesn’t unfollow people following you, and gives people a few days to follow you back after you follow them.

I used to think this method of gaining followers was a bit like walking up to people at a party and asking them to be your friend without any introduction, but as long as you’re following people with an interest in your field/sector I now think it’s more like walking up to someone at a convention and saying I thought you might be interested in this. Some people will find it annoying, but they are definitely in the minority.

Set a Schedule for Maintaining this

Now you’ve started you need to keep this up, you need to follow people daily, unfollow people daily, and weekly add new content for the week.

My personal schedule is that I add new content each weekend, copying pictures from my phone and having bookmarked interesting content during the week. Then each morning, first thing I do after sitting down at my desk is start Mass Follow and get it doing it’s magic. Time wise, it takes between an hour and two each weekend, and between 5 and 30 minutes each day, which for the results I feel is very reasonable.

Summary

While there are lots of guides out there, many of which are probably better than this one. This is what I’ve been doing, and the lessons I’ve learnt along the way, it’s grown my twitter by over 8200%, hopefully it will be of use to you too.

If you’ve got any questions, or want any advice or help growing your Twitter following then feel free to get in touch at info@scruffydug.com.

45% more is spent by fans of a company's social media profile than those who are not fans

Most Common Business Mistake

Think for a moment, one day you are at an event and run into Microsoft CEO, Bill Gates. You shake his hand, talk about some business, and he hands you his business card. Imagine you look down, and you see his email address “billgates295@hotmail.com“.

What would you think? Would that seem savvy to you? Would you consider that to be really professional? What about branding? Wouldn’t you wonder why it wasn’t “bill@microsoft.com”?
 

That scenario above simply would never happen. Bill Gates didn’t become the worlds richest man without understanding the importance of image, branding and professionalism.

Nearly every day…

But nearly every day in my business, I encounter business people, that hand me a business card or brochure with a Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, or AOL email address. It’s perplexing to me, because most of these people have a domain name, and a company website listed too.

It also makes things a little more difficult to remember, when I want to email Bill at Microsoft, it’s easier to remember “bill@microsoft.com“, than “billgates293@hotmail.com” (and to prove that, the email address above was “billgates295” not “billgates293“, so we’d already forgotten.

The majority of these email addresses are also the persons personal email account, which is a certain no no, because do you really want to stand mixing up a client called Clive and your cousin Clive and sending the wrong email to the wrong person. Far better to keep business and personal emails separate, and not accidentally send your invoices to family members, and your rant about Uncle Ernie getting drunk at Christmas dinner . . .  again . . . to your clients.

Are you one of these people?

Do you use an email address provided by your internet service provider (ISP), even though you have a company web site? Sure, it’s free, but is it smart?

Small Problem, you don’t own or control it.

Today, youremail@yourisp.com may work just fine. But one day you may decide to move to an area where your ISP doesn’t serve, or they are too expensive, or they get taken over, or any number of possible scenarios, you need to get an internet connection from someone else.

Now what? Yes, you are locked into an email address that you don’t own or control. Now you must notify every business contact and friend about the address change if you want to continue receiving email from them. And your business cards, brochures, letterhead, stamps, printed materials and website all just become obsolete. Time to spend lots of money updating them all!

And guess what, you’ll now be locked in again to another companies email address, so you’ll get to enjoy repeating that cycle again in the future.

Big Problem, you look small and unprofessional.

Besides having no control over your email address, if you actually have your own domain, it’s terrible from a marketing and branding perspective to use a free or ISP-provided email account. Instead of your email address reinforcing your company name, it’s providing free advertising for Yahoo, Google, AOL or Hotmail. You are weakening your brand, and strengthening theirs!

It’s the equivalent of having your postal address be courtesy of another larger company, “Send my mail to the local Walmart, and I’ll pick it up there.”

Can I just forward all my domain email to my Yahoo account?

Well, it’s an improvement, but this also is a bad idea, because when you reply to these business contacts, they will have sent email to “youremail@yourdomain.com” yet you will respond from “transformersfriend789@yahoo.com” and it’s confusing, and further damaging to your image.

Rule #1.

Splurge the cash to own your own domain name, it’s not a lot each year. You will own it forever, you will control it, it will never change. You will build your own name, your own brand, and you will look far more professional. You can have the same email address for as long as you keep your domain registered, and you can have as many email addresses as you want.

If you already have a domain name and aren’t using it for email, start using it immediately. If you are in business, it is well worth the cost to have a permanent email address that is fully in your control and reinforces your company name and brand.

Need help registering a domain, and setting up your hosting and email accounts then get in touch?

 

4 seconds is the average time a user will wait for a page to load.
4 seconds is the average time a user will wait for a page to load.

Beer Trumps

Introduction

Beer Trumps? Being ex-brewery staff, we like our beer. And being essentially lazy we love reusing code and techniques. So this morning, before breakfast I whipped up the below.

So what is it?

It’s a “Top Trumps” like game, where you guess which of it’s ratings is higher than the opposing cards ratings. We’ve taken the ratings from SIBA’s (Society for Independent Brewers (formerly the Small Independent Brewers Association for those trying to work out how you get the Acronym SIBA from Society for Independent Brewers)) Cyclops ratings for beer. We’ve just taken the Bitter, Sweetness and ABV ratings, and thrown them into this little game. We’re not judging any of the beers, apart from we’ve heard of all the breweries, and the beer was the first on their list of beers on Cyclops.

So!

    Enjoy.



New Web Site: Bird Stewart

www.birdstewart.co.uk

We’re always hugely happy to announce another web site launch, but this one we’re especially proud of, we’ve been working away with Bird Stewart since late last year, with many clear instructions on what they wanted from a website, and what we’ve been able to deliver. 

The site looks great due to a long process of choosing the exact photography and style for the site, and although as always there are a few updates to be done (no website should ever be considered complete), Bird Stewart asked us to launch, and it brings a smile to our faces to be able to show this one off.

So head on over to www.birdstewart.co.uk for independent financial advice, and check it out.

Best use of Colour, Part 2

I recently did a blog post on the use of colour in design, how different palettes from sources as diverse as movies, adverts and photographs of pretty sunsets.

A rainbow of colours

I thought I’d revisit this subject, because one of the major parts of design is choosing the colours, so I thought I’d share some of the colour palettes I’ve selected in the past and used in designs. It’s useful to see colours on the screen in front of you, because just sitting with the mixer palette in Photoshop and moving those sliders up and down doesn’t really help you visualise what the colour will look like when used with other colours, or what it’s going to look like when filling a large area. I’m not saying these are the definitive selections of colours, just ones I’ve chosen and used, and hopefully they’ll be of use to someone else.

Spring Colour

Spring Colour

A spray of lighter shades, a bright selection but lighters and more subtle than the stronger tones of Summer.

Summer Colours

Summer Colours

These are richer colours, stronger and more defined.

Winter Colous

Winter Colours

A darker colour collection, moving towards the dusky deeper colours, without being black or brown.

Autumn Colours

Autumn Colours

While Autumn turns brown, it’s also a time of year filled with shades and colours, so here’s an array hinting towards early sunsets and golden leaves.

Vibrant Colours

Vibrant Colours

Bright vibrant colours are really popular in web design at the moment, used for highlighting large blocks of screen space.

Neon Colours

Neon Colours

Not used too much at the moment, but with the slightly more muted tones of Vibrant still showing popularity, surely the brighter, stronger, more eye burning tones of neon can’t be far behind.

 

Summing Up 

Well hopefully some of these will spark something in you, even if it’s just disgust. If you’d like to talk about any of the issues raised in this article, or just get in touch for any reason that you can conceive of  then please do, http://www.scruffydug.com/contact-us/

Trends in Web Design

I know I’ve been posting a lot of videos lately, but this one on Trends in Web Design, I found really interesting, and I’m enjoying sharing what I find that inspires me to do great new work.

Web Design

While the web is a graphical medium, and a lot of the design elements from Graphic Design carry over, Web Design is subtly different, with the graphic design making only a part of the overall design. Since you have to integrate into your design the fact that different information and images will be displayed over different pages, and you have to take into account elements such as navigation into the whole design.

Let’s Go

Well the below video has definitely inspired me, but I’m torn between elements such as including Vibrant colours, Gif’s, and others, I wonder if I can merge them all together into something stunning. Makes me wonder if maybe this site needs a redesign.

I hope you enjoy the video, and if it inspires you to do anything interesting then get in touch and we can discuss it.

So, if you’d like to talk about the video, or anything else, get in touch and we can talk, http://www.scruffydug.com/contact-us/

88.8% of all Internet traffic comes from Search Engines.
88.8% of all Internet traffic comes from Search Engines.