Design Conscious will add this important marketing facility to any site we design for you and you then have two choices:

You can have the username and password so you can run your own mail outs.*

Or

We can run it for you, we will design the emails using your information, we will import any contacts you already have into the system and we will schedule the mailings so they go out at regular times.

Pricing

Set up with website: £500 – one off charge to set up the messagelist account

• Please note: Spamming will not be tolerated. Anyone suspected or reported for spamming will have their account terminated immediately with no refund.

But what are the bits you need to have in place?

Why do you really need a website?

Why, now that you have a website, does it not bring in the work you expected?

Worst of all – how do you find the answers to these and a million other questions?

At Design Conscious we recognise that you sometimes don’t need the full web service that our company can offer. You quite like your existing website, but it’s just not working for you. Sometimes you want to do some marketing or advertsing but the words scare you – ‘MARKETING’ normally associated with people in suits telling you what to do and then charging you a fortune.

Sometimes you just want to do it yourself… if you could just find out what to do.

The simplest thing to do is: Ask someone.

Even simpler than that, book an hours consultancy with us and… ask away.

……………………………………

Here’s the deal

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1 hour consultancy = £40 – Just £40 to get all your questions answered

(Payment before consultation begins via PayPal or credit card)

The consultancy is to be conducted over Skype* in multiples of 1 hour (If an hour isn’t enough you can just book more time). Telephone can be considered but Skype is preferred because the call can be recorded and sent to you for later referral and because of Skype’s instant messaging it makes it really easy to show you examples of websites or methods of working etc. Of course the biggest bonus about using Skype is: the call is free.

So to recap:

• 1 hour £40
• Call recorded and sent to you
• Free call via Skype
• Done at a time to suit you

Your consultation will be conducted by Ian Blackford: Owner/Manager of Design Conscious .com

Get the answers you need to move your business forward

*Skype is a free internet telephone system that allows you to use your computer to make free calls via your broadband. Software from Skype is required (free) and a headset – or your computer might already have a microphone / speakers built in.

Hmmmmm, good film: Kevin Costner, big field, ghost baseball players one of Hollywoods better turn outs. But the internet is not Hollywood. If you build a website, there is no guarantee that anyone will come to it – even if it’s indexed by the search engines.

Why?

Well, your site for definite is competing with millions of others all around the world for search engine results. You may also be in a market sector that is swamped with spam results. You might have only just made your site live and so you haven’t been indexed by the search engines yet – and even if you have been indexed you won’t show up straight away (months even) while Google (and the others) sandbox your site for an unknown period of time.

Gloomy isn’t it?

Then along comes a company GUARANTEEING you search engine placement. Their SEO package of improvements will catapult you up the results pages. Very possibly they will make things worse, at best nothing will happen at worst you will be de-listed by the search engine because of their spamming methods. Our advice is don’t touch these companies.

Actually… it’s not just our advice – while looking around for info to back up our beliefs above (because we could be pulling the wool over your eyes – just like the SEO companies), we came across this, read it from the horses mouth: Googles’ Take on SEO

So what can you do to promote your website?

Well, the old saying of “do it right first time” still applies. Get the right mix of keywords for your market place, write your website copy carefully, focus on your core business and…. most importantly…. compete locally.

Compete Locally? What does that mean?

Can you honestly say that you want to have enquiries from abroad, or from other parts of the UK? Do you really want to be number 1 for “your market sector widgets” in America? Or France? Or even the other end of the UK? can you fulfill those orders? If the answer is no, then you don’t need your website to compete globally. This is something that many people overlook completely.

Tell people you sell stuff

This might sound a little obvious – but how many times have you been in a shop and found something that you wanted and that you had no idea they sold? Worst of it is you had been looking everywhere for it and bought it at a higher price only a week or so before? Ok, so we can go on adding in the cliché’s but you get the drift.

Tell people you sell stuff – then tell them again, and again. Regular customer contact is easy to achieve and very powerful for results. This is why you get the leaflets in your free paper, this is why websites run mailing lists etc.

There a hundred and one things that you can do to promote your site, some of them will cost you money, others won’t cost you a penny, but promotion is the key to a successful website.

Talk to us and let us help you do it right first time.

Wrong, just because you like it doesn’t mean to say somebody else will, and it certainly doesn’t mean that it will turn your market on. The best way to find out is to create something then show it to someone and gauge their reaction. If they don’t like it you change it and present it again. This is what you should do with your website, get a few pages up there, gets some feed back and then improve and expand.

Anybody can design a website, the tools to do it are readily available and relatively cheap. If you want to try it, go right ahead, be aware however that finding that right balance of images and layout may take you a long long time, ‘Design is never ending…’ remember. The secret isn’t knowing when to stop it’s knowing where to begin. It’s knowing how to research the design trends of a market and pick out the best bits, it’s knowing how to melt those elements into the clients existing style. It’s knowing how to collect the feedback to improve the whole.

Design isn’t just visual, it’s far more than that, this is why design professionals are used. While it might seem expensive in the short term, in the long run you can’t afford not to if you are serious about your website.

Hosting is another vital part of your website, if you liken your domain name to your telephone number, your hosting can be thought of as your office. When someone rings your number (types your web address) they get through to your office. Hosting is where your website files reside, they sit on the hard disk of a hosting computer that is permanently connected to the internet.

When your web address (URL) is typed into a browser the hosting computer gets a request to serve the page. It could be asked to do this at any moment and has to be ready to respond, therefore it can’t be switched off, it has to be secure and the hosting provider has to have a back up plan for when it crashes. A good provider will have daily back ups, fast connections to the internet back bone and a good website statistics package.

As with most things there are different prices for the different levels of service required, a simple site doesn’t need database interactivity and therefore is cheaper than an ecommerce package.

Online sales is big business now, reports suggest that US online retail sales will top $130 Billion with the UK and Europe trading at similar amounts. But it’s not an easy ride, gone are the days of setting up a website and making a million over night. It takes the right product with the right web strategy many years to hit the million pound turnover.

Don’t be put off though, if you can sell it on the high street then there isn’t any reason that you can’t sell it online. A lot of companies use their online presence as an backup to their bricks and mortar business, perhaps to sell through end of line stock or for promotions etc. They do this because to survive online you have to be competitively priced but you can get into price differentials between your shop and your website so selling stock that isn’t in store is sometimes a better option.

To be effective online the website management has to be slick, you need to changes prices easily and you need to add or remove product at the click of button. The best way to do this is via a database, ideally with content supplied from your own stock management software. What? You don’t have stock management software? Well all you need to do is create spreadsheets and the website can be driven from that.

Ecommerce is a powerful thing and can be adapted in many different ways… we know because we done it… and we can do it for you.

You can go to many many website’s and register a domain name and some of them are very cheap, even free, but just because it’s registered doesn’t mean it’s website ready or that you are going to start receiving email.

To receive email the DNS (domain name server) has to hold MX (mail exchange) records about the mailservers you are using. Some registrars do this automatically when you register the name, others give it to you as a control panel option, some others will even charge you for it.

To serve your website the DNS needs to know where you are hosting the website. Some registrars only allow you to host it with them, others will only allow web forwarding while the best registrars will allow you to change to different name servers so the DNS can be controlled somewhere else.

Get it done by a professional, do it once, do it right and then leave it alone. It’s one less thing to worry about. Design Conscious can do it for you.

Yes, but it’s for small companies too, and any size in between. All it means is ‘Corporate’ or company, ‘ID’ or identity. Put simply it’s how your business is portrayed through printed and online material. It’s about setting standards and adhering to them. If your logo is red, always print it in red, always use original artwork when it is reproduced, always supply original artwork to sign writers, printers and magazines etc. Specify the typefaces to use and their sizes, always see proofs before anything is printed and ensure it matches your standards.

The easiest way to gain consistency is to appoint a member of staff who is responsible for your print and web requirements. Make sure that person gets some training in the basics. This person then becomes the point of contact for all media and they should set about finding professional designers and printers who they can get to know and work with.

If all that sounds too big and corporate for your company then think about finding a designer who can deal with all this for you. It needn’t be complicated it’s just about consistency.

Advantages:

• It’s by far cheaper to host your site on a providers server than it is to arrange for a permanent internet connection to be installed in your office. By permanent connection we mean a ‘leased line’ or similar robust always on internet connection and not ‘Broadband’. Broadband is meant as a surfing connection and is limited in its ability to upload or serve data. Some ISP’s actually prevent you from running a mail or webserver on a broadband connection.
• The data you export from your own system contains only the data you want to display on your site, therefore no personal data is exposed as your own computer is not ‘hackable’ via your website.

Disadvantages:

• Unless you are familiar with the import process, ideally this should be done by your website designer.

That means, the paper thickness and quality, how it folds, quality of printing and first impressions i.e. what is the first thing to be seen when it’s removed from the envelope.

If you have little money to spend on your stationery then spend it on your print, a flashy logo is going to be really let down if it’s printed out of register on poor quality paper. Whereas a simple logo or even a typeface logo will always look good when printed in one colour on good quality paper.

These days many printers will also do your artwork, but design isn’t necessarily the printers strong point. So if it’s a strong design and ID you are after you are better offommissioning a designer. There is nothing stopping you however having your design and artwork done by a designer and once you have the artwork on disk, buying the print yourself. You don’t have to have it done by all one company.

Corporate ID is often overlooked. A companies letterhead often gets produced and looks nothing like the brochure. Or the vans are sign written but the company name is in a different typestyle to everything else. A designer can help you keep your image intact by creating a manual that other can follow so they can produce consistent printed material and help to build your brand. And no, your business is not too small to have a design manual written.

At design conscious our background is in print, we have experience in producing everything from business cards to books and magazines. So who better to trust with your consistent image?