While everyone seems to be intent on looking back over the past decade, the near future is looking very exciting, too. Rumours abound that Apple will be unveiling their next big technological product – will it set the world on fire like the iPhone did? Newspapers are carrying headlines such as ‘Google phone could arrive next week’, indicating that the rise of mobile internet has really only just begun. Commentary abounds on the possibilities of marketing within virtual worlds. It’s all stuff we could barely have imagined ten years ago, and it’s on the verge of happening right now.

If your personal New Year’s resolutions are safely decided, now would be a good time to look to your online business. It, too, will benefit from a little foresight and some solid commitments. Here are Notting Hill Internet Services’ suggestions:

1. Take a step into social media. Last year was the year everyone was abuzz with the new marketing possibilities of Twitter; in 2008 it was Facebook and blogging. This year it may well be some new contender we’ve barely heard of yet. One thing is for sure: things move fast in social media. You need to get a grip on it now, before it – and your competitors – leave you behind. It’s not hard, and a little time will yield enormous benefits in customer loyalty, visibility, and potentially, sales – but you need to establish your presence now.

Don’t forget, social media is eminently outsourcable, so give us a call if you’d like some direction there.

2. Give your website a little love. How long is it since you last updated your website? If there’s one thing that the new year hammers home, it’s that time flies, and before you know it, your site could be looking old-fashioned and untended. Take a long hard look at your competitors, and then try to look at your own site as if seeing it for the first time (ask a friend if you don’t find it easy). Does it look dated? Hard to navigate? Remember, too, that you’ll get great benefit from the search engines for updating your site regularly, so if the content has remained the same for ages, do yourself a favour and update it.

We can give your site a whole new look at a very economical price. We can also advise on usability, and provide new copy if required.

3. Make 2010 the year of the new customer. Every online business can benefit from new customers. The great thing is, with structures such as Google AdWords, you can find them, and at minimal outlay. No matter how specialised your product, you can tailor your Adword ads to display on searches that will bring only qualified traffic to your site.

Again, it’s not hard (though it can be fiddly and time-consuming), and again, it’s something that we’ll be more than delighted to help you with.

We hope that all our readers have a happy, and prosperous new year. Here’s to multiplying your online success in 2010.

We were approached by Blanka – who impressed us so much, we employed her! – and asked how she could showcase her photography and art. Our solution was a simple, yet professional website that displayed her images in an attractive and uncomplicated way.  The result was InfinityImages.co.uk.

Case:  Blanka Sadilkova had amassed a large number of images and needed an online presence to showcase her work. 

Solution:  As a local person, struggling to start-up her photography service, we provided a free website.  The website needed to be artistic yet simple enough for the images to be viewed on their own merit.

Results:  InfinityImages.co.uk is now providing Blanka with an online presence allowing her to promote the photography service – which has grown so much we expanded the website to accommodate various galleries.

It’s a small change – but Google’s making a big thing out of it.

You may have noticed, last time you visited Google, that the size of the search box has increased. There again, you may not have noticed: it’s quite a subliminal tweak, and, as search is, by its very nature, a means to an end, you may have had something else on your mind.

There was never any limit to how many words you could fit into that little Google search box, but it’s longer now, so you can see more at once.

So what is the point? Well, Google is trying to sell it as a way of emphasising that Search is their primary and most important product, despite their diversification into so many other areas.

Champions of accessibility and usability might hail it as a welcome step too: larger fields and larger buttons are easier to see, locate, and use.

Ultimately, I suppose, it’s a design tweak, and one we’ll all get used to. Where Google leads, others often follow, so watch this space for larger search fields across the other major search engines – and other websites.

The popularity and simplicity of the iPod Touch and iPhone have done what many have tried and failed to do: turned the UK on to the possibilities of the mobile web. But what might it mean for you, your business, and for the Search industry, as more people turn to hand-held devices and web access on the go?

We’re at the beginning of a mini-revolution. Experts are still saying that the web itself is in its infancy, but it seems positively aged when we start looking at the uncharted horizons of its offshoot, the mobile web.

Totally uncharted? Well, predictions may, of course, be made on the basis of those countries which were much quicker than us to adopt the mobile web, such as Japan, but we must recognise that other factors, such as cultural differences, pricing plans, and accessibility are all going to affect their accuracy.

Here are a few outcomes that we can be sure we’ll see, as more and more people start to access the web while they’re out and about:

• Everyone simply searching a lot more: This is just simple logic. If you have access to the web in your pocket, you have more hours in the day when you might use it. Suddenly, train journeys, boring meetings, or delays as you wait for the bus, all allow for extra browsing time. What does that mean for you? Potentially, lots more visitors, spending much more time on your site.
• People are much more likely to start searching for the information they need in the here and now. Where before they might turn to a stranger to ask where the nearest newsagent is, now they can ask Google. For this reason, you may want to optimise your website for search terms such as ‘nearest to’: “nearest pub to the London Eye”, for example.
• Geo-specific search results come into their own.
  Having said it’s good to optimise, to a certain extent we have seen search engines start to do it for you, with geo-specific search results. Search for ‘restaurant’ on Google, and it will make assumptions about what you want, based on your IP address, delivering highly local results unless you specify otherwise.To take full advantage of this, make sure your business is listed on Google maps (it’s free) and that its purpose or services are clearly defined in terms that a searcher would be likely to use (in other words, think carefully about whether you’re a ‘pub’, ‘public house’, ‘hostelry’, or ‘bar’).
• You can take advantage of the fact that folk are searching ‘on the trot’. What do people need when they’re in a new place, searching for information? Local maps, perhaps, or lists of places of interest. Provide this sort of information, and you may find that the new class of searcher – the last-minute user who relies on their internet connection – comes flocking to your site. They may not buy anything, of course, but you will have achieved the marketers’ holy grail: your business name is now in their consciousness.
• Our devices will come on holiday with us. Who’d leave that iPod or BlackBerry at home when it’s so useful for day-to-day advice? If you can’t speak the local lingo, finding a taxi firm or a restaurant is so much easier when you have the web at hand.This will work the other way, of course: holiday-makers coming to the UK will also be looking for information in their own languages. If your business is situated in a popular tourist spot, or you sell a service that is of use to holiday-makers, you might want to think about optimising in multiple languages.
• Don’t forget the practicalities. Mobile devices mean smaller screens – much smaller screens. Make sure you’ve tried to access your own website via a phone or similar device: you’ll see how hard, or otherwise, it is. Don’t forget that Flash can’t be seen on many phones, and very heavy sites are a no-no where the access is patchy.If mobile web looks like it has the potential to bring you many more customers, there’s really only one answer: you need to do as many of the best sites have done these days, and build a mobile version of your site.

Firefox recently announced that their internet browser has been downloaded a mind-boggling billion times.

Now, we shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking that this means Firefox has a billion users: typically, a single user would have downloaded the browser each time it brought out an update – plus, many people will download out of curiosity, and never use the software.

So, no, Firefox doesn’t have a billion users, but undoubtedly it does have a very strong userbase, and this reminds us of an important point. When was the last time you looked at your website in anything other than the browser you yourself use every day? Be that Firefox or Internet Explorer, or something more esoteric altogether, it pays to take a trip to the other side every now and again.

You may be horrified by what you see: styles that render perfectly in your own rosy world-view may well be spilling out of their neat confines on other browsers or operating systems. Finding out is relatively easy: there’s no need to go and ask your Mac-using, Safari-loving neighbour if you can look over his shoulder. There are a number of services, some free, which will allow you to see your site on a vast array of OS/browser combinations, and, for the sake of your business, I’d strongly advise you to do so, at least when it comes to the most popular combinations.

Employ a reputable company – like us, may I hazard to say – to build your website, and cross-browser testing comes as a standard part of the package. Worried by what you see in that unfamiliar browser? Then give us a call, and we’ll get everything looking hunkydory again, for every one of your hoped-for billion users.

Have you ever watched a mechanic tune up a bicycle? The changes he makes are generally small: some oil, an adjustment to the brakes, perhaps, and a good pump to the tyres – and yet, when you get back on, everything runs so much more smoothly than before.

In a way, we do something similar to websites: small changes that make them work to the best of their capacity.

What we find fascinating about our business is that sometimes, it only take a few alterations to make a world of difference to your visitor numbers, conversions, or sales. Sometimes those changes are based on a knowledge of typical customer behaviour; sometimes they are based on best practice. It’s always fun to weave some design changes in with some solid SEO work, and stand back to watch the website come into its own.

From the customer’s point of view, the best thing about this is that minor alterations, by their very nature, cost very little.

Today, I’m going to describe some of the small changes we suggested to a client: it’s a perfect example of how a few basic modifications can make an enormous difference to a website.

londonrelocationservices.com – A case study

Screenshot of londonrelocationservices.com

London Relocation Services is the business of Anthony Gallo, who specialises in finding rental properties for Americans moving to the capital. Clearly, when you are based on one side of the Atlantic and your entire customer base is on the other, a website is absolutely crucial. Not only will it help you source your customers, but it must also engender trust. Moving house is a fraught experience, and if you are going to solicit help, you need to be sure that you are going to someone both genuine and competent.

Anthony came to us with an existing website which was performing adequately, in the belief that it could be working harder for him. We agreed.

Assessing the website

After a chat with Anthony, we identified several major issues:

• Architecture: Navigation through the site was not intuitive: like many sites which have grown organically, londonrelocationservices.com had started to break the basic laws of usability.
• Ease of contact: As a general rule, we never underestimate the desire of a web user to find everything on a plate. In the old iteration of the site, the user had to click to the ‘contact’ page before they could submit an enquiry.
• Impetus: Similarly, nothing was impelling a customer to make contact. The facts were there, but it was left to the customer to make a decision to use Anthony’s services.
• Knowledge of the customer: While Anthony was getting customers, he had no real insight into where they were coming from, and no way of discerning which sectors of his traffic were converting the most.
• Trust: As we have already seen, trust is vital in this business. We decided to look at ways in which we could increase the site’s credibility.
• Design: Good design will help to address the trust issue, of course (and shoddy design downgrades one’s opinion of a site within seconds). While there was nothing terrible about the site’s look, we knew that we could provide something more suited to this business.

Our solutions

It’s always best to start with a clean slate, rather than try to tinker with existing labyrinthine architecture. By applying fresh eyes to the business, we were able, after asking Anthony what his basic needs and aims were, to suggest a very simple site structure that adheres to the principles that have evolved since the internet’s inception.

We built the site around it, and the result is a site structure which anyone can navigate. Anthony’s customers might well be web-savvy students who have practically grown up online, or they might be elderly travellers who still find the web a daunting place. Good usability benefits both groups: it’s what the first expect, and what the second need.

Our solution was simple but effective: we put a form on every page. This allows the user to browse through the pages, find the information he needs – and when he has, fill in the form. If Anthony wants to get clever, he can monitor which page of the site most of his enquiries come from, and thus gain insight into what specific information impels the user to make contact. He can then use this knowledge in other, offline media, or in his subsequent calls.

At the foot of every piece of text, a link suggests the next page the user should visit, making sure that they are not left to make decisions for themselves – one of which may be to leave the site!

Those who use relocation services can broadly be broken down into professionals, students, and corporate clients. Clearly, marketing for each of these groups will be markedly different. By providing a category on the site for each group, we were able to optimise each page individually.

What’s more, Anthony can examine his site’s log to find out which page is drawing in the most users via search engines and thus find out where there is the most need for relocation services. He can use this knowledge to control his spends on marketing such as Google Adwords, and concentrate on the sector or sectors which display the highest level of demand.

A small headshot of Anthony, and suddenly the site was transformed: no longer could London Relocation Services have been an unanchored firm, possibly run by any fly-by-night. No, this company has a founder who is not afraid to put his face as well as his name to it. Suddenly, you are dealing with a person.

Our second suggestion in this area was that Anthony start a blog. We always think that speaking directly to the customer, sharing stories of the business’ triumphs and set-backs, and offering frequently-refreshed content, adds immeasurably to the human side of a website. Quite apart from the many SEO benefits which a blog will bring, it will bring you regular readers, some of whom you may even build up an online relationship with. As such, it’s one of the most valuable tools in a small business’ armoury.

We design hundreds of websites every year, and we have a lot of experience in matching the right tone to a range of different businesses. After enlarging Anthony’s entire site from 800 pixels wide to 1024, to take advantage of the average user’s wider monitor screen, we applied a subtle range of colours and an elegant backdrop of a London map, immediately matching the site’s theme to its subject-matter.

When customers are anticipating a new life abroad, they want to be able to visualise it, and no site suffers from the addition of attractive photographs. We encouraged Anthony to source photographs of real properties in which he had placed clients.

It’s hard to imagine living abroad before you have even been there, but photographs allow the user to place themselves in a physical environment, and as such are absolutely invaluable.

So: what were the results?

Anthony’s enquiry numbers increased greatly on the very day the new version of the site was launched. The few simple changes we made turned an adequate online business into one that is performing to the best of its capacity.

Would it benefit your business to be receiving many more enquiries than you currently do?

As you can see, there’s nothing revolutionary or even terribly surprising about the changes we made to the site. As ever, we are happy to share our knowledge, and wouldn’t mind at all if you apply the same precepts to your own site. At Notting Hill Internet Services we like to operate in complete transparency: if you do not feel confident making changes like this yourself, you may hire us to do it for you, and we will do so quickly, efficiently, and at a price you may find hard to believe.

Just how much did this all cost?

Like I say, you may find this incredible. All the changes detailed above cost Anthony only £350.00 – possibly the best £350.00 he ever spent.

Notting Hill Internet services and The Pollen Shop last year announced the launch of spiritualcapital-cardiff.org.uk. The website, funded by the Department for Communities and Local Governments Community Development Foundation, explores the issue of how faith groups contribute to the work of Cardiff.

Spiritual Capital Cardiff was the first website produced jointly by The Pollen shop and Notting Hill Internet Services. It was designed to meet the needs of public sector clients that require flexibility and affordability as well as high standards of accessibility.

Fari Peyman, Managing Director, said:

This partnership will build on our core strengths and enable us to offer great value to new and existing clients. Notting Hill Internet Services already has a proven track record in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Producing sites to a high standard of accessibility uses very similar processes. By combining both practices we will now be able to bring a new dimension to our managed Internet services.

If you are interested in discussing an accessible website, at an affordable price, contact us today.

The BBC published a story revealing that many areas of Britain – and not just the rural backwaters – suffer from low levels of internet connectivity. While fewer than 1% of British homes are unable to get any internet connection whatsoever, the story focuses on the estimated three million households with a slow connection of under 2Mbps (megabits per second).

The result of connection speeds this slow is that websites relying on frequent page loads and applications such as the BBC i-Player simply aren’t practical. While the country’s media goes wild for Twitter, Facebook, movies on demand and online shopping, it’s important to remember that some users are being left behind.

For online businesses, it’s often good advice to cater for the lowest common denominator. If your customers are spread throughout the country, bear in mind that installing ‘heavy’ applications on your site may be the cause of immense frustration to some – especially if you require these applications to be used in order to make a sale. If you hope to sell internationally, it makes even more sense to bear in mind that many areas of the world still access the internet on basic dial-up connections, or by mobile phone only.

It’s easy to get carried away and build an all-singing, all dancing website which jumps on all the latest technological bandwagons, but your customers will thank you if you take the time to make a lightweight, basic website that performs as smoothly asyou can make it. The good news is, the government is committing to increasing the country’s access to faster broadband by 2012 – whereupon you can feel free to unveil your all-singing, all-dancing website at last.

Website design: it’s a fine art these days. You can study it at degree level. There are awards for it. The man on the street has opinions about it – and we all pretty much agree what makes a good website design, and what doesn’t.

Don’t we?

Screenshot of the Havenworks homepage

Hmmm. Looking at the Havenworks website,  it seems just possible that there’s one small corner of the world where the niceties of web design have not yet been fully thrashed out. White space, for example: these days, many of the websites we visit most often – Google, Flickr, Facebook – recognise that blank space is just as important as text. It’s restful; it allows the user to concentrate on what really matters (in the case of Google, that means the search box, of course).
 

Then there’s ease of navigation. The very best websites let you navigate through their pages and hardly realise you are doing so. The moment you have to stop and think, or search for the link you need, is the moment the navigation has scored – in the modern online parlance – a big, fat fail.
 

Web designers seem to be coming, en masse, towards the conclusion that Less is More. Havenworks is a great indictment of this, showing quite clearly that the opposite is also true: More is Less. Indeed, More is Utterly Confusing.
 

The question is, with so many talented web designers around, why would you publish out a site that looks like this? I can’t say I know, but I do notice that there is a little wink after the site’s name in the top browser bar. Might it be that the site’s owner knows exactly what he is doing? Think of it this way: I’ve just written a blog post and linked back to the site: one valuable inbound link for him. You’re reading this and maybe you’ll be amused enough to pass the link on to a friend. One more visitor to the site. It’s just possible that this is a complex ploy.
 

On the other hand, I don’t think many visitors would stay long, nor would they return, so from that point of view there’s little to gain. I’ll leave it up to you to decide what you think – but meanwhile, let me just mention that if your own site is looking a little more Havenworks than you’d prefer, we can help. From off-the-peg templates to bespoke designs, we have a number of website design solutions that will get you linked to for all the right reasons.

This question was posed to us in respect of our free website offer to local start-ups and charities/projects. We were proposing a new website for a small business in the W11 area and had been trying to stress that our offer had no strings attached and, that once the website was complete, they were not beholden to us in any way.  

So how do we make our money from this offer?  

Simple answer is – we don’t.

This brought about the next question – “So why do you do it?”

Well….

1. We genuinely want to give back something to the local community – honestly!!

2. We belive that if we provide an excellent service now, then when the local business or charity project expands in the future, we hope that we will be called upon to help with their online needs.

3. We have a valuable link-back to our website on each of the sites we produce.

That’s it. 

Nothing more.