iPixel Creative - Singapore web design & web development company: Business

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Wednesday, June 24, 2015

A Powerful Online Image will Revolutionize your Business

You have a business. But you know your business is unlike any other business. You know that your business is special. This is a common thought among the many business owners and brand marketers in the world. They have a business, and they want to define the business as offering something special or unique, but they don’t know how because the image they have is not the image that they portray to their audience.

Unfortunately, there are many who get it wrong. Building a powerful image for your business, especially online can revolutionize your business for the better. Building a strong business image can improve the quality of your leads, improve the conversion to sales and to inspire the advocacy for your brand by consumers.

The online aspect of your business’s online marketing is now integrated as a part of the consumer buying process. This is due to the accessibility of information through the internet on people’s smart devices. Businesses need to manage their online presence well. Should they succeed, the financial rewards and accolades will come on autopilot. But should the business fail to manage their online presence, it could send the business’s brand into a crisis.

Below we discuss steps businesses can take to implement a positive presence online to enhance their brand image profile and to reinforce positive consumer sentiment.

Forge the trust aspect of your brand by engaging with your customers online.

1-brand

With the anonymity available on the internet, people aren’t afraid to speak their minds or to seek out information that is related to your business, both good and bad. It is great to receive positive interaction. However, there will always be those people that will draw on the negative aspects of the business. The catch is that people will believe what they see. That’s why the voice of the brand that must be heard is the one directly from the business and not one of an anonymous internet user.

Potentially, other credible web citations may be influencing your brand presence and reputation. There is an internet joke that says ‘once it is on the internet, it is there forever’. And in a sense, this is true. Once it is there, you need to manage what you can to prevent what is being said about your business to dictate your business outcome. If you had no influence with instrumenting the dialogue towards your web marketing campaign efforts, you need to take action to ensure that whatever message is being communicated to your customers is one that is within your control.

To build this trust, you must be able to demonstrate value to your customers. And you can achieve this by communicating it through your business’s desired message.

Keep and manage your brand identity online

2-identity

A business’s brand image is their identity. It is the business’s most trusted asset and must be guarded at all costs. The brand perception will either enhance the perceived value or reduce it. The loss of positive sentiment to your online brand presence can cost your business thousands or even millions in lost business opportunities. This means the business needs to manage the business presence across the mix of digital marketing channels available. Maximising the positive sentiment across these channels is crucial to the success of the brands online marketing efforts.

The only way to do this is by driving positive digital PR initiatives. Demonstrating your business value by publishing is the key to developing a strong online presence. By publishing brand content, the business will be able to gain a stronger ‘share of voice’ online. Below we have covered three important areas that businesses should manage with their online presence.

Web reviews

This is an area in the online arena that you must have in complete control. Upset customers and frustrated customers are able to publish content that could negatively impact your business, costing you opportunities in lost sales, lead prospects and referrals. Good reviews will further boost your web credibility and can potentially spur positive virality for your business. This leads to more cost efficient promotions and a stronger advocacy for your business.

It is crucial that businesses maintain strong web reviews across platforms that will make or break purchase decisions in the customer’s decision-making process. For example, people choosing to stay in hotel accommodation will check for reviews on Google search results, as well as on vertical search platforms such as TripAdvisor and other hotel comparison websites such as Booking.com and Agoda.com. The customers feedback will make a much stronger impact on the purchase decision than any marketing that your company will do. Work to get reviews in your favour to grow your business on autopilot.

Organic search presence

Businesses need to be aware of where they are in the organic search space. Which keywords are they showing up for and what type of traffic it is bringing to their business website. Furthermore, can those people take or initiate an action that will positively fuel the positivity of the business’s web presence. For example, if a business appears on the search results for a blog post, this allows the person to discover their content. This opens a window of opportunity for the business to pitch their credibility or their sales offer. Businesses realistically need to achieve one of the two. If not, the customer will leave and never come back. The business not only needs to know how to get the people to appear there, but how to keep them there to take action that will influence their actions.

Become an authority in your niche

You can become a perceived authority in your industry by publishing news and revealing new information. By becoming an authority source, you become the perceived expert, and the ‘go to’ business in your industry. Your business becomes synonymous with credibility and trust. You can easily achieve this status by publishing regular blog posts, publishing news feeds and providing regular bulletins via podcasting, YouTube shows and regular newsletters.

Should your business be seeking web profile enhancement services, it is recommended that they seek advice from a digital agency in Melbourne that can best advise them on any digital PR activities that can help the business achieve the desired online profile that they are aiming for.

A Powerful Online Image will Revolutionize your Business

Friday, June 19, 2015

7 Ways to Improve a Small Business Website

As your small business evolves, you need to make sure that your presence on the web follows suit. Don’t worry – it doesn’t mean that you need to completely revamp your website every now and then, just that adding small improvements will over time help you build a great space for creating a strong brand and massaging that resonates with your target audience.

Here are 7 smart and easy ways to instantly improve your website.

1. Provide easier navigation

As a brand, you need to provide a smooth and enjoyable experience on your website. If users are looking for specific information and cannot find it in any of your pages, you’re in for trouble. Good navigation is paramount to your success, so add at least 5 top-level categories like Blog, Contact or About Us and make sure that they all reflect the content included on each sub-page.

2. Tone it down a little

Yes, your website should stand out and be characteristic, but taking this value to an extreme can simply hurt your brand online. Websites with lots of decorative elements, animated gifs, flashy buttons or other colorful and eye-catching details are just bad taste.

In order to stay productive, you should allow your visitors to focus on your products, content and brand. The color scheme of your website should match your logo and be simple. Leaving white spaces will only improve the readability of your content. If you’d like to have a look at the worst website ever published on the web, here it is.

3. Add a call to action

This is the part where you inspire your visitor to take action – join your newsletter, schedule a free demo, download information or purchase a product. What you need to do is take a close look at your website and identify the sections that could benefit from a call-to-action.

A call-to-action can be a targeted message, a visually eye-catching button or something else. The important thing is that you align the purpose of your call-to-action element with your general sales and marketing goals.

4. Write headlines that sell

Reading on the web is usually based on a short attention span. The minute users lay their eyes on the headings in various sections of your website is crucial. If you don’t hold their attention now, they’ll probably soon abandon your website.

Use smart headlines to improve the readability of your content as nobody wants to break through large chunks of text – just make it easy to scan. By including important keywords in your headings, you’ll also make them more searchable, which is always a plus for a small business operation that cannot spend thousands on SEO services.

5. Update meta descriptions

Meta descriptions are important – they’re the first thing users see when searching your website through search engines. Make sure each page has a unique meta description that is full of keywords your target audience considers attractive and clickable.

6. Include consumer testimonials

This is a simple step small businesses take to improve the credibility of their brand, which in turn encourages visitors to make a purchase. You can place consumer testimonials in one page or on various pages of your website – for instance, a bar that appears on the title page and product page.

7. Choose the right visuals

We process visuals way faster than text, so it’s important that you incorporate the right images on your website. Go for professionally-looking, crisp and high-quality pictures. Avoid stock photos that just scream ‘stock photos’. Always think about your target audience and their expectations about visuals.

Improving your small business website doesn’t have to involve considerable costs or time. These small adjustments will have a great impact on user experience on your website and the impressions visitors will have of your brand and products.

7 Ways to Improve a Small Business Website

Monday, June 15, 2015

Why Your Web Design Platform Really Needs To Be a Business Tool

Web design has never just been an easy to crack process, and has traditionally involved quite a few different pieces of software. For a typical website, I may use the following software:

Adobe Photoshop – to design the visual look and feel of the site

Adobe Dreamweaver or NotePad++ – to code the initial templates for the pages

CMS (usually either WordPress or ExpressionEngine) – to build the website upon and give clients the ability to manage the site themselves

FileZille FTP – to upload website files and images to the web server

This is just for the design and development parts of the process. Before we can even get started with these tools, we first have to set up website hosting and register a domain name, which requires connecting with other websites and software.

Once a site is completed and launched, even more software comes into play, including analytics that will report on the traffic and performance of the site and whatever software your business will use to actually bill for all the work you have done.

As you can see, it is pretty easy to become overwhelmed with the variety of software tools needed to design, deploy, and manage even the simplest website. This is why, if you are looking for an alternative to this process, you should be looking for a complete business tool and not just a web design platform.

Doing More With Less (Software)

The problem with the typical web design process outlined above is that so many disparate pieces of software are required because each one of those tools does only one specific thing. Photoshop is great for design, but it will not allow you to write code or develop your web pages. Dreamweaver has powerful web development features, but it lacks the visual design components found in Photoshop. For all of these software options, you will find the same scenario – they do one or two things really well, but require other software to be used to complete the full process.

While this scenario is common, it can also be very complicated at times because of the quantity of tools at play. A platform that includes many or all of these features, allowing you to effectively eliminate other software from your process, allows you to actually do more while using less software. This is where a solution like the cloud-based web design platform, Webydo, can really be much more than web design software – it can be a tool upon which you can run your design business.

All Under One Roof

Created “by designers, for designers”, Webydo starts as a powerful visual design platform with features that you would find in programs like Adobe Photoshop or InDesign. This platform is so much more than a replacement for those programs, however, because its functionality does not stop there. The websites that are designed in Webydo can then be published as working webpages without the need to hand-code anything. Powerful web features like responsive design, parallax scrolling animation, and even Ecommerce functionality can all be added using this same platform – all without the need to write any code. So the design and development aspects of the project are covered, but the platform does not stop there!

CMS – Webydo includes CMS-editing features that will allow your clients to manage their own sites. There is even a White Label option that you can use to get your brand in front of your clients and further reinforce that relationship. Ultimately, this CMS feature replaces the need to have a separate content management system like WordPress used in your process, because the same platform used to design and develop the site can also be used as the CMS.

Domain Names, Web Hosting, and FTP – you can register domain names and set up hosting all from within the Webydo interface and you can upload your files right through the system too!

Analytics – once a website is live, Webydo will report on real-time statistics about traffic to the website and much more.

Backups – the “Revision History” feature of Webydo allows you to review older versions of your webpages and restore those versions if you have made a mistake on the current one, eliminating the need to call a hosting provider to try to restore files from some kind of backup file that they may maintain.

Client Billing – yes, you can even establish client billing directly from Webydo, making it easier to get paid for your hard work (after all, that is one of the main reasons we do this, right?)

The Freedom of One Platform

Not only does the ability to use one platform to replace all those aforementioned software solutions greatly simplify the process of web design, but it gives you so much flexibility and freedom. Because Webydo is accessible from a web browser, you can login and do work from anywhere that you have an Internet connection.

You no longer need to wait until you are in front of a computer that has your specific design software installed or has your billing software configured – you can login from anywhere and do what needs to be done.

Give It a Try

There will always be a need for different software tools. For instance, if you need to do photo retouching, Adobe Photoshop is still an excellent choice for that work, even if you have replaced it for your web design needs. By combining certain tasks under one roof, however, you can improve your overall process and replace complexity with a more unified and enjoyable web design experience.

You can sign up for a free trial of Webydo to experiment with the platform for yourself and see how it could become the exact tool you need to take your web design business to the next level.

Why Your Web Design Platform Really Needs To Be a Business Tool

Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Get the Ball Rolling: Preparing Your Freelance Web Design Business

Nowadays, the internet has created a plethora of opportunities for individuals to make a living based on their passions, skills, and abilities. What was once a trying concept of developing a business, marketing locally, and making a living can now all be done from the comfort of your own home. If you just so happen to love the art and technology of website design and/or development, then it might be lucrative to become a freelance web designer. Working solely for yourself, you have the opportunity to create trending websites that millions of users visit on the daily basis.

However, you can’t just put up an open for business sign and hope the clients start rolling in; it’ll take a bit of planning. Below are a few tidbits of advice on how to get started:

Develop a Iron Clad Contract

Before you ever get your first customer, it is extremely important that you have a contract in place that protects you and your work to the fullest extent. There are plenty of tools that you can invest in that will allow you to create your own business forms with ease. While you hope that every customer you come across will be an honest and reliable one, this is not always the case. As such, you want to protect yourself against potential lawsuits.

Create a contract that clearly defines what your assignment is, how long it may take, and how much you should be compensated for the work you’ve completed. Also, ensure that before completing any work that your client has completely read, understood and signed the agreement.

Don’t Be Afraid to Invest

As a freelancer, you won’t have the financial cushion of a boss to invest in the company needs. This responsibility now falls solely in your lap. While you might be anxious to begin making a profit from your services, it is important to always remember to invest in the betterment of your business. After all, the world of website design is constantly evolving, and if you can’t keep up with the latest trends, you run the risk of losing customers left and right. Ask yourself a few questions to make sure that you’re ready to get up and running:

Do I have the right equipment?

Do I have the appropriate business contact information (i.e. fax, phone, email address)?

Do I have reliable internet services to effectively market and communicate with clients? (This step also requires that you have the right internet service provider. To gain the attention and respect of potential clients you must first showcase your skills and abilities. Having adequate internet service to effectively communicate with your clients is essential. Click here for more info on internet service providers and the various options you have for your home based business.)

Am I up to speed on the latest trends so that I can give my customers the best services possible?

Create a Comfortable Working Space

As a freelancer, finding the appropriate space to work will be completely up to you. While it can be fun having the means to work wherever you want, you do need a place in which you can work without distractions from the outside world. Find a space in your room that you can designate as your home office space and begin creating an environment that is fun to work in on the regular basis, but also free from the many distractions in your home (television, young children, or even the fridge).

Network Every Chance You Get

The key to getting the word out about your business is effectively networking. You will need to make your presence known both online and in person. You can start by creating an effective website which will act as your business card. You will also need to develop professional social media pages on sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+. Marketing and networking online is an ongoing process that will require several different strategies. Lastly, you will need to get out and greet people. Find out about local business conferences and attend, and just stay relevant within your community. Word of mouth is still the biggest form of marketing and you want to make sure that what’s being said about you is positive.

The life of a freelancer is certainly one that is filled with peaks and valleys. However, if you’re really passionate about web design and/or development and want to earn a sizable living, working on your own is certainly a choice worth considering. By creating a contract, investing in your business’s startup needs, designating a space to work in, and networking on the regular basis, you will soon start to see your hard work pay off.

Get the Ball Rolling: Preparing Your Freelance Web Design Business

Saturday, May 9, 2015

Showcase of Cool Hipster Business Card Designs

A business card serves a simple purpose: it bears your name, the name of your company or product, and contact details should the client want to get in touch with you. These days business cards are unique and outstanding, reflecting their owners’ personalities, quirks and talents ever since creatives got involved and completely changed the game.

Instead of being the regular flimsy and rectangular definition of business cards, the business cards of today’s hipster generation may be designed in only 1 or 2 colors, have odd cut-outs, look like pizza slices, drink coasters or fish among other things. In this post we have over 70 of these strange and beautiful business cards to showcase.

The Essentials to Designing a Business Card

Before we dive into the massive collection of creative business cards, here are some things you should know about business card designs.

Designing a business card which makes an impression is way harder than it looks. From margins to bleed areas, to how to pick the right color and card size, check out some of the essential aspects in business card designs you cannot afford to overlook.

Read full article here.

70+ Creative Business Card Designs

Here we go: in this massive collection, we’ve handpicked creative business cards of the hipster generation that fully showcase the talents of their makers.

IMAGE: H OUT H