I’ve recently been asked to carry out some e-mail marketing by a client, but it seems that the e-mail marketing market is a circle of contradictions!

My client is a small business & cannot afford the exorbitant charges that Google Adwords now runs up in order to attract business to their website. They are in a particular sector of the market & only want to target the construction sector. After some research into data lists I chose to purchase 3000 B2B e-mail addresses for construction sector companies in just three local counties. The company I purchased from claims to be a member of the Direct Marketing Association as well as several other bodies & assured me that all the addresses were opt in.

Because most web hosts restrict the amount of recipients you can send an e-mail to, to between 30 & 50, it’s necessary to use an e-mail marketing company in order to send the e-mails. However, most of them will not let you use purchased data or 3rd party lists! Their answer is:

“We will design a form for your website, which people can then go to in order to sign up for your emails”. But hang on; isn’t this absolutely useless if people are not aware of your company?! If they’ve been to your website to sign up for a newsletter, then they already know about your company & what service you provide! Yes, I can certainly tell them about the latest offers if they sign up for a newsletter, but it’s useless when the main purpose of this marketing is to make other businesses aware that this company exists & what it does!

I’m bombarded by spam all day, every day, but whilst I’m constantly filtering out Viagra ads & web design offers from India, it appears that legitimate UK businesses are prevented from e-mailing relevant, targeted companies. Surely e-mailing companies to make them aware of your service is surely no different to sending out a postal mailshot, or cold calling by phone. It simply makes another company aware of what you do & that you exist, when you can’t afford to pay thousands for Google Adwords!

Whilst I hate SPAM as much as the next person, if the marketing is targeted & relevant, I don’t mind the 10 seconds it takes me to decide if it’s something I require. I’ve found out about a number of things that I’ve then purchased, or services I’ve used, because I received the e-mail equivalent of a cold call. These are products/services I would never have been aware of if they hadn’t told me about them & I certainly wouldn’t have gone looking for them, because I didn’t know they existed!!!! In fact, I’m much more likely to take up an offer sent via e-mail than if someone phones me, because I like  the opportunity for further research & the chance to decide in my own time, rather than being pressured on the phone!

However, it appears that we’ve become so obsessed about SPAM in the UK, that you are prevented from e-mail marketing companies unless they have already visited your site & signed up to receive marketing from you………..surely this defeats the main point of e-mail marketing…………getting NEW customers.

These restrictions for UK businesses don’t  stop the REAL SPAM – the endless “enlarge your penis” & “buy from this Chinese wholesaler” botnet type junk mail that is the real bane of my life………oh yes, because they don’t follow the UK rules!

Aaaaagh!

Well, it’s happened again! After having put in hours of work on a site, the client has changed their mind & sneakily built themselves a “do it yourself” site, using elements of my design in their “creation”.

This happened to me a while ago when I was building a HIPS site & has now happened with the escort agency I was building a site for. Despite putting in hours of work & even having the client visit me to discuss how to progress with the site, all of a sudden they had gone very quiet! Upon checking the domain that I was supposed to be working on, I found a very cheap and tacky looking site, developed using doyourownsite.co.uk, which costs £5.88 per month to use & the resulting site certainly looks worth no more than that!

The client did explain that she wasn’t educated & this would explain the spelling mistakes that proliferate the site. However, I suppose the sort of people who will be using the service won’t care too much about that, but the client was saying that she wanted the site to look professional, along the lines of www.vogueescorts.co.uk. However, the one she’s come up with looks total rubbish – I won’t put their domain here as I don’t want to give them any publicity!

I think I’ll have to start assuming that everyone will try to rip me off by default & charge people a deposit up front from now on, as I can’t afford this to keep happening…..I’ve spent the last month working on 4 sites & have not yet been paid by any of the clients – I know I will get paid by one of them, it looks like I won’t get paid anything by 1 and the other 2 are an unknown quantity. The only solution seems to be taking part payment up front to prevent this happening again. Interestingly enough, the two people that have done this have both been self-employed business women! Contentious I know, but is this because women tend to change their moinds more often?!!!

The escort agency client did mention to me that she pays no tax on her business, yet makes a shed load of money (the girls get £110 per hour, before any “extras” are negotiated), so I contacted the HMRC Tax Evasion hotline, with as many details as I could supply, as she’s made it quite clear I won’t be getting any money out of her for the work already done!

First rule of business these days seems to be “don’t trust anyone”!

I recently completed another affordable website design for a client, which you can see at www.tideservices.co.uk.

This was quite a straightforward job; although the original company role was the installation of roller shutters to shops & bakeries, they have branched out into many more fields over the last few years, but wanted all of this covered by a 5 page site!!

This was the only issue as far as designing the site was concerned…..the company performs about a dozen different functions – how to get that into a 5 page site. Luckily, I was able to separate the navigation into 2 sections on the homepage – Industrial doors & building maintenance down the side as the 2 main functions of the company & some sub headings horizontally across the page too, highlighting particular products!

Once all the information was collated from the client, the site made good headway & the client is very pleased….I can say this because he wants me to work on another site for him & has referred me to a relative who runs a wedding planning business!!

Always nice to be appreciated )

It’s been sometime since I blogged about web design work that I’ve been doing – is there any time inbetween affiliate marketing for other things?!!! O  Well, I suppose I have to earn some money to pay for the advertising, which sometimes seems like a bottomless pit! In fact, I don’t know why we don’t all give up affiliate marketing & just become advertising agencies instead – that seems to be where the real money is!!

A few months ago, I was asked to build a website for Change Social Care – a London based recruitment agency, with over 20 years experience specialising in the recruitment of quality Social Care Professionals & Administration and Secretarial Staff for Public and Private Sectors.

The budget for the job was around £300, even though the site took some time to complete, due to the regular re-writing of the content /  But, the site was finally completed to the satisfaction of the client & has been up & running now for some months.

I was contacted recently by an advertising agency, to build a 3 page website within a couple of days! They supplied all the copy & the site was built & uploaded on schedule, at a cost of just £100! The site www.mediatalent.co.uk is pretty basic, but looks fine & what do you expect for £100?!!!!

The major project I’ve been working on for some time has been for Roberts Roofing, a London roofing contractor working on projects worth £4 million last year! So, the pressure was on with this site!! They already had a website, built by the company itself, but wanted it brought up to date & modernised.

The new site was designed with a great deal of CSS and was constructed to emphasise the projects they have worked on, showing decent quality images of them. They wanted clean, simple lines & all relevant infomation to be available within a few clicks of each other, whilst removing a lot of the personalisation that had existed on the original site.

The site has finally been finished & the client is VERY pleased with it – so am I )

New website built for Roberts Roofing

If you’re selling products and services that are related to a special area, it is crucial that your website gets found by people that are looking for it. One of the easiest ways to get found by people that live in your area is to optimise your web page titles for your product & location.

What is the web page title?

The title of a web page is the text that is written between the tags in the HTML head code of a web page, is displayed in the web browser window when someone visits your website and it is usually used as the linked text when your website appears in the search results.

Why should you use optimised web page titles?

The web page title is one of the main factors that Google, Yahoo and other search engines use to rank web pages. A good, relevant, informative web page title greatly improves the chances of getting high search engine rankings for your product/service.

The web page title is used by the search engines as the bold linked text on search result pages. That means that it should be clear, relevant, concise and appealing, so that web surfers will be drawn to click on it.

How to write your web page title so that it gets better local rankings

If you optimise your web page titles correctly, they will both increase your search engine rankings and attract people from the local area & those looking for your products/services, to your website.

You’ll benefit from targeted traffic and targeted traffic leads to more conversions i.e. sales. Here are some things that you can do to improve your web page titles:

Include the name of your business, important keywords and your city in the title of your homepage:

FreshWebz – Affordable web design in London and Essex

Depending on your business size, change the order of these items. Well known businesses should list their company name first. If your business is new then it’s usually better to list the keyword first:

Affordable web design for small businesses: Freshwebz in London

People are probably looking for a solution to their problem (web design) instead of your actual company name. Instead of your town, you can also use the name of the greater area if your service is available in that area.

Use a different title tag for every page. This is important! The title should reflect the content that can be found on the page, so it’s less effective just copying the homepage title to every page. For branding purposes, the titles should contain your company name and a popular keyword for which you want to be found on search engines:

FreshWebz: Search engine optimisation & SEO services in London and Essex
FreshWebz: Web design Portfolio – websites designed for recent clients
FreshWebz: Contact us for an affordable quote for your new website design

Use short web page titles. Short titles are much easier to read for web surfers. Do not try to stuff your title with keywords in the same way that you wouldn’t stuff your page content with keywords. It is much better if your web page title is highly relevant to one keyword, than somewhat relevant to many keywords. If you want to optimise your website for different keywords, optimise different pages for different keywords.

Do not use special characters in your titles. Avoid symbols and other special characters wherever possible. They might not be displayed properly on all computers and your website listing might look strange in the search results.

If you change your web page titles as described, your website will get better rankings on search engines and it will be found by people looking for your products/services & who live in the right area. By getting more visitors for one topic, you will improve the overall ranking of your site & so improve your position for other search terms.

Unfortunately, the web page title is not the only element that influences the position of your website in the search results of Google and other search engines. If you want to make sure that your site appears in the top 10 results, you should optimise all factors that are needed to get top rankings. FreshWebz can offer your website guaranteed Top 10 Google rankings for your desired keywords in the natural listings.

It appears that simple inbound links are no longer good enough to improve your search engine ranking by themselves. As web masters buy up thousands of paid directory links, the value of those links diminish, simply because the links are on websites that are largely irrelevant to the content of your site.

More emphasis is now being placed on articles which should contain information about your websites topic. The content contains links to your site & the idea behind this is that the links show the search engines that your site is relevant to the links pointing to it.

I have already written an article myself for ezinearticles.com, but it can be a time consuming effort (when you’re blogging as well!!), so I decided to look at some Article Writing Services.

I found a UK company that claims to have been researching and writing content for various websites in the US and United Kingdom for more than three years, writing web content for travel and tourism web sites, research websites dealing with history, place information, hotels, hospitals and other articles too.

The effective team of the company consists of 35 well trained Writers, 4 Supervisors and 6 highly qualified editors, and 3 System Administrators & they claim to carry out the following steps when writing articles:

» Conducting research on the key words
» Keyword optimised fresh 400 words per article.
» Writing optimised meta title
» Writing optimised meta descriptions
» Writing meta Keywords
» Unlimited changes on each article

The cost for their service is £5 per article & so I’ve signed up to have 10 articles written for My Travel Extras & Cashback Shopper. Once I get the articles, I will be able to give more information as to their quality & the company details.

I was just doing some work on the homepage of My Travel Extras, adding a top 10 London hotels widget & got it fitted in nicely with the other hotel & short break content on the page.

I use Firefox for web browsing & the page looked great viewed through it. Of course, every good web designer knows that you must test your site in different browsers, so I fired up IE7 and lo & behold, the page looks a complete mess!!! >:o/

Internet Explorer drives me mad – the page looks perfect in Firefox & Opera, but the web browser 75% of surfers use is the one that isn’t web standards compliant & has to have it’s problems worked around to build a site!

Microsoft promises that Internet Explorer 8 will be web standards compliant – I certainly hope so! In the meantime it’s back to the drawing board to try & get the page to work in ALL browsers – grrrrr!

Finally got it licked – two and a half hours later!!!! But at least it now works in Safari too, for all those MAC users )

Durrrr! Like me, have you been looking over your website and wondering what you need to do to increase your sales, leads or sign-ups?

In a new competition Google are offering you the “chance of a lifetime”. Imagine having the Google team give your website the once over, and undertake all the testing and tweaks to improve your site’s conversion!!!

For some lucky people it’s no longer a dream. The team at Google are running the “Website Workout” competition which will see a handful of business/website owners win the opportunity to have their websites optimised for more leads, sign-ups and/or sales.

According to the Google Website Workout page:

“Our consultants will work with you to discover ways in which we can increase site performance. Using Website Optimizer, our free website testing and optimization tool, a team of experts will work with you to determine the page layout, headlines, images, and text that will drive the most business from your site.”

To give your website the chance of winning an conversion overhaul by the team at Google, enter the Website Workout competition before June 17th 2008. You can submit your entry here.

I was recently asked to build a website for a mirror framing company based in the East End (London), Britannia Mirrors Ltd.

The initial brief asked for a site that would show a gallery of their products, but as they sell to the trade only, they wanted people to register & provide contact details so that they would be able to follow up who was visiting/using the site. They also wanted customers to register with them before being able to download copies of their catalogue and price list which would be available from the site.

Unfortunately, the client did used to have a website at www.britanniamirrors.com, but let the domain expire & now it is owned by a domain name company who haven’t responded to my enquiries about buying the name back (why buy up names & then never reply to people who want to buy them when that is supposedly your business?!). We therefore had to go for www.britanniamirrorsltd.com /

My initial thought was to build a site using a shopping cart package like osCommerce, which although primarily for building an e-commerce store, does have the ability to have the cart turned off, leaving a simple gallery & registration system. However, the client felt this was too complex & preferred a simpler design.

I then decided to run with a mainly CSS based site with a registration & login system, allowing access to an image gallery & the download page. The site design itself was pretty straightforward, the time consuming task was working with the large number of images that had to be pulled from the PDF based catalogue, resized & in some cases cropped/rotated!

Once the images were sorted, the next step was to create the gallery & I tried a number of options before settling on an Image Thumbnail Viewer Script from Dynamic Drive. This launched a nice, centred, bordered image when selected & even allows for some text to be added to the enlarged image.

The final element was to create the registration & login system, which is using a mySQL database & asks users to register before allowing access to the gallery categories and the catalogue download pages. There have been a few teething problems with the registration due to not much time for testing; the client was already telling people the site was live! But all seems fine now & no further issues have arisen.

I’m pretty pleased with the site and just waiting for some home page copy & additional photos, from the client, to fill/brighten it up a little before signing off on it.

UK Online Charities – I did give quite a bit of thought to whether this was an acceptable site to build, but then I considered why charities have affiliate programmes, the purpose being to attract donations from people who may not have donated previously, or who used to donate & then stopped. If promoting the charities online, without offering any incentive to the user (charities used to appear on cashback websites and there were cases of people setting up a direct debit for £3, getting their £10-15 cashback & then cancelling the direct debit), earns the charity a new donater, then it is morally acceptable to build an affiliate site around it.

I even signed up to the Lottoaid programme myself & still make my regular donation every month ) (Lottoaid is the weekly fundraising lottery of international development charity, ActionAid.)

The initial list of charities added to the site were: Action Against Hunger, ActionAid – Sponsor a Child, ActionAid – Gifts in Action, ActionAid – LottoAid, Age Concern, British Red Cross, Cancer Research UK, Cancer Research UK – Virtual Gifts, Childline, Children in Crisis, CLIC Sargent, Compassion in World Farming, Farm Africa – Presents, Farm Africa – Farm Friends, Great Ormond Street Hospital, Greenpeace, NDCS, NDCS Challenges, NSPCC, Oxfam Unwrapped, PDSA, Plan UK, Practical Presents, Present Aid, RSPB, Shelter, Shelter Build A City campaign, Sight Savers International, The Aspinall Foundation, The Blue Cross, The Childrens Society, The Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, Torture Care, Unicef, World Land Trust, World Vision Child Sponsorship, World Vision Alternative Gift Catalogue, WSPA, WWF Adoption & WWF Membership. I also added in a few charity credit cards & also included on the front page, a few click through programmes which generate donations from simply clicking on the links (no commission is paid for these).

I also decided to create this site solely in CSS using a Dreamweaver extension called Eric Meyer’s CSS SCULPTOR™ from Web Assist. Eric Meyer is a renowned CSS master & the extension is very easy to use (apart from the occasional freeze up!). I am actually learning more from using this & playing around with the site afterwards, than I have done by reading books, but if you are interested in learning about CSS, my store has plenty of books/software on all aspects of web design!!

The site is up and running now & has made a few sales….I think it needs more text links as it uses banners at the moment & as people are much more likely to click on a text link than a banner, it may need a little updating soon.

On May 30th Plan UK launches a month long ‘Sponsor a Girl’ online recruitment campaign. The campaign is timed to coincide with the 2008 launch of Plan’s ‘Because I am a Girl’ report.