Design Conscious web design

Archive for the ‘Domains Design and Hosting’ Category

E-commerce, ecommerce, e-tailing it doesn’t matter how you spell or say it, it boils down to the same thing – selling online.

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.

Your domain name is the beginning of your website, it’s the name you print on all your stationery, it’s the name you tell everybody and more importantly it’s the biggest part of your email address.

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.

Sounds grand doesn’t it? Corporate ID, surely that’s for big companies?

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 computer that serves your website is not a computer in your office, therefore it is ‘divorced’ from your own stock management systems. In the ideal world this would not be the case, ideally you would want to serve your own website so when you change your own data so it’s correct in your office and correct on your website. This can be done however, all you do is change your data then export it in a format that can be imported into your website.

Well presented stationery carries weight, it’s impressive when it’s received. It needn’t be expensive but the whole package has to be well thought out.

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.