Showing all posts in Business & Blogging

In Business & Blogging

Setting Up Your Business Website

Author Nicki CawoodPosted on
Setting Up Your Business Website

Nearly all businesses need a website in order to advertise your business as effectively as possible. A good website will be a landing spot for anyone wanting to know more, a marketing tool which you can refer to at all times to anyone who needs it, and a way of selling or advertising the products and services that you offer to customers. It is wise to ensure that the site is as professionally designed and polished as possible, but what are some of the things that you will need to think about to make sure of that? In this post, I’ll mention a few things that might prove to be important if you hope to make your business website work out well. I need to revamp mine so hopefully tell you about setting up your business website will kick me into touch!

A Good Domain Name

First up, you are going to have to make sure that you have the kind of domain name which really works for your business. Of course, ideally, that will be the business’ trading name and a recognisable suffix such as .com or .co.uk or whatever it might be. You might have to compromise somewhere – or you might find that you are expected to pay quite a lot for a domain name that you don’t necessarily need to have. All in all, you will probably find that you need to shop around a lot before you can hope to end up with a domain name that you will feel is perfect. This work is worth doing though. The right domain name can really make all the difference in the world so choose wisely when setting up your business website.

Top Tip:

When choosing a name make sure that you check out similar ones already live. You don’t necessarily want something that is one letter away from a website you wouldn’t want to be accidentally linked to.

Great Design

Most businesses will look to the professionals when it comes to actually designing their site, for the obvious reason that it means that you can hope for it to be as perfect and polished as you would like. If you are keen to make sure that your website will be as good as possible, spend some time seeking out those who can make that a reality. That might be a quality WordPress design agency, or it could be that you need to ask someone you know who happens to be good at web design. As long as you are sure that it looks professional, then you should be happy for it to be the online public face of your business.

My websites are…. ok. I did them myself, they are functional and they more or less do the job. I know that I either really need to sit down and redo them from scratch or employ someone with more skill (not hard!) to do it for me. 

Setting Up Your Business Website: Be Useful & Informative

When it comes to setting up your business website make sure that you think about the customer first. When you look at your website, ask yourself whether it is the kind of website that your customers are actually going to find useful. They should be able to turn to it to discover information about your business that they need to know, whether that is in the form of a FAQs page or by providing contact information or further information on your products and services. As long as you feel you are providing enough information, you should find that it is doing its job. 

In Conclusion

When it comes to setting up your business website, whether this is a new business or like me you are looking to completely redesign, choose wisely. Choose your domain name wisely, your platform wisely (I’m a WordPress gal through and through) and make sure that it looks great and performs well not only on your laptop but on phones and tablets too.

In Business & Blogging

Branding: Increasing its Power

Author Nicki CawoodPosted on
Branding: Increasing its Power

One thing that you are going to want to work out fairly quickly in the early days of your business is branding. The way in which you brand your business is hugely important if you want to make sure that you are attracting enough attention and the right type of attraction. You might need to think about what you can do in order to increase the power and potency of your brand so that it can do as much for your business as possible. Branding is not my strongest skill, to say the least so thank goodness for my Graphic Designer friend who is keeping me right! I’m in desperate need of a rebrand so hopefully, this information will be as useful to you as it is to me.

Make It Bolder

If you are hoping to make a brand more powerful and potent, the first thing to do is to make sure that it is as bold as possible. The bolder a brand is, the more likely it is going to be effective, so you need to always be prepared to go back to the drawing board and make it bolder if necessary. If you are to do this, you will need to think about what it is that actually makes a brand bold, and that is something that you might struggle with for a long time. Bright colours, clear displays, an obvious and loud message – all of this will help, but the boldness of a brand really comes from the force with which you sell it to people. Do that, and you will find that the brand has a much stronger impact in its boldness in no time. Remember though, going big is fabulous but keep it classy and consistent.

Boost Visibility With Branding

You’ll also need to make sure that your brand is absolutely everywhere, or as far as you can get it. After all, it’s not worth much if nobody can see it, so the more visible you make it, the better. There are many ways to improve and increase visibility in this way. You might want to think about the age-old method of merchandising, wherein the simple use of pens, pencils and branded reusable coffee cups can be enough for your brand to reach far and wide. Merchandise is a great means of boosting visibility, but so is merely talking about it with people, so make sure that you do that at every opportunity you can too.

I find that branding online, and again consistency of branding across social media accounts, the website, email signatures and so on all help your business build recognition and reputation. 

Reinvent Where Necessary

There will be times when you find that you need to reinvent your brand, and you need to know how to identify that need, and then you need to know how you are actually going to make it a reality. Reinventing your brand where necessary will ensure that you can always keep it fresh, and yet you will need to make sure that you are keeping it in line with your previous branding enough for it to be recognisable. Keep that balance in mind, and you should be able to master such reinventions, with a view to increasing the power of your brands much more easily.

Do you have any top branding tips to share? Keep an eye out in the coming months for my rebrand! if you’ve recently rebranded I’d love to hear more about it/see it so feel free to tell me about it below.

All original content on these pages is fingerprinted and certified by Digiprove