So, we are back at our desks and raring to go…. OK, we are back at our desks at least. I always get a mixture of feelings on my first day back, excitement – what’s in store? who’s going to ring? and trepidation – what’s in store? who’s going to ring?

At least I know there have been no big website drama’s this holiday, because for the first time I have been able to offer proper emergency support over this holiday break. I now have an iPad which monitors my email so I was able to respond to a couple of clients who needed website updates and email support without turning on my computer. While a ‘shut down’ period should be just that, I didn’t and don’t mind having the odd call from clients who need help, after all if they are working and need support then I’d rather they call and get sorted than feel they can’t and get frustrated.

Adding value

Thinking about the new year lead me to thoughts of what I want to achieve in 2012, because by all accounts this could be a critical year for many businesses. I identified a couple of areas to focus on, get more clients, stay in profit but most importantly look after my existing customers. Looking after people is something I hope I have always done, but I feel there is always scope for more effort. This year I hope to give you all: added value. I already try and be as fair as I can with my pricing, so my thoughts were to try and improve the service I give to my clients.

I’ve joined a Google program called Google Engage – it should help me get a better understanding of Adwords and some of the other offerings from Google. You may not be interested in advertising with Google so I have something up my sleeve that is twitter based. Also, I realise that I haven’t really explained the control panel that you get with your hosting account, there are features in there that you might find useful, so I will point out a few things to you in subsequent emails.

I want to hear from you

I was reminded while my mind was rambling over how to add value, of something that a marketing guy once said to me, the best way to decide how to improve your service is to ask the market place, so, I’d like to invite you to email me with your requests and ideas of what you need help with or what you want to get done with your website. Don’t worry if it’s a small thing, or something that might seem obvious, any feedback you give will help me formulate an action plan.

Contact me

Please email ian@designconscious.com with your needs or ideas however big or small, I’m not looking for an in-depth explanation just a few lines mentioning your thoughts.

Also…

While I’m on the subject of contacting me, I need to let you all know that as of the 1st February my 0845 number will cease working, please make sure you have updated your speed dials and contact details and have replaced the 0845 number with:

01952 414 003

2012

So, here’s to a good year for us all (I’m lifting my coffee cup in a toast) and I look forward to receiving your ideas.

Speak to you soon

Welcome to the Design Conscious July update

News In A Nutshell

Holiday done – office now re-open

I’m back off holiday so it’s back to my desk and business as usual.

Email Outage

While I was away it seems the Design Conscious hosting account had a blip which affected my email from Wednesday 1st July onwards till Sunday 5th July so if you emailed me anything between those days I won’t have received it. If you are at all unsure please resend your email.  I’d hate to miss anything important so I don’t mind getting the same email twice. It looks like the blip did not affect anyone else and all sites operated normally with nobody needing to email ermergency@…

Feedback Required Please

Discounts

I had a couple of ideas last week which I would love for you to comment on. In an effort to improve cash flow I’ve had the idea to offer a 14 day discount on all my invoices. That would work like this: when I quote a job I will quote it at normal full price. When the job is invoiced and if it is paid within 14 days I will apply a % based discount as a thank you for settling the account quickly. If the invoice is paid on 30 days then the discount is not applied and the full quoted price becomes payable.

I don’t really know if that’s acceptable practice or even a good idea. I also don’t know if there is a mechanism for this in Sage, I don’t want to be issuing credit notes all the time for the discount so it might need some more thought. If you have any ideas or opinions then please let me know.

Bank Transfer Payments

I’m contemplating only accepting bank transfer payments and of course paying my bills by bank transfer too. Banks seem to be charging less for this method of payment so should help to keep costs down for everyone. If you have any thoughts or opinions then please let me know.

Quick Edits

Very often I get asked to do a quick edit to someone’s site which literally takes 5 minutes to do. I don’t normally charge for this as raising an invoice for 5 minutes worth of work is pointless, however over the year these edits mount up into a block of time that actually is worth charging for. Please don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to rock the boat and refuse to do this work unless I get paid as that would be a major backward step, but I was wandering if a single yearly ‘maintenance’ charge would be acceptable if it was a sensible low amount? Perhaps even a tiered charge, a low charge for anyone who knows their site only needs minor modifications, a slightly higher charge for those people who need more work done, and so on.

This idea came from two thought processes, the first was to try and cover my time ‘costs’ doing the 5 minute jobs and secondly (and more importantly) I realised that some of my clients don’t update their site from one year to the next. I have a client who’s leaving me because (I suspect) their site isn’t performing very well and (I guess) that’s being blamed on me. The reality is if you don’t update your site and add new content your site will never perform very well. This particular site has not been updated for a while which illustrates my point. I swapped to WordPress as a way of generating websites because it has a fantastic admin system that allows my clients to get in and update the site themselves, yes it’s a learning curve but it’s definitely worth worth it in the end. However, those that can’t get to grips with it, or don’t have the time can always ask me to do it for them, but if they are afraid of the costs running away with them then that’s not going to happen, and this is the second reason why I came up with the idea of the tiered maintenance charge. If you know that your amendments are covered and you have already paid in advance at the beginning of the year, there is no reason why you shouldn’t update your site a little.

Again it’s just an idea right now, I’d like to gather your opinions. I would need to work out some ground rules because some amendments I’m asked to do can’t be covered under this idea as they are just too big, so I would need to work some structure into it all. If the general consensus is positive then I will apply some proper thought to it and ask for opinions on what I come up with.

Save The Children Charity

Do you ever have things happen to you that seem totally independent instances but you get a sudden realisation that they can be linked? I do, and I did the other day. My bookkeeper, Diane, asked me about a payment I make every month to Currys electrical store for £4.99. I told her it’s a ‘what ever happens’ plan which protects my TV, basically they will fix it or replace it if it breaks down. A few days later a pack came through the post from Save The Children thanking me for the donation I made when the Tsunami hit Japan and could I help again. It didn’t strike me at first but after a while I realised that I was blindly paying £4.99 a month to insure a TV when millions of children in the world don’t even have basic clothes, food, water or access to medical help.

I felt bad and decided to do something about it… then forgot and didn’t.

Last week my son fell over and split his knee which required 8 stitches. We were in Spain but he got treatment in just a few hours, we were lucky for it to happen in a developed country, just image if we had been elsewhere in the world.

So today I am cancelling the Currys payment and setting up a new direct debit to Save The Children, it’s not going to cost me anything but it might just help somebody else.

End Note

Thanks for reading this update, don’t forget to resend any email to me that you think might have gone astray and please let me know your thoughts on the ideas above, your input is of vital importance.

I’m looking forward to sending you another update soon.

Best Regards

ICB

—————

. Ian Blackford
Owner Manager – Design conscious .com

Welcome to the Design Conscious spring news round up. It’s been an eventful time here in the DC studio these last few months. I’ve learned a few lessons and been thankful of a few of my work practices.

News In A Nutshell

Away on holiday – office closed

I’m away on holiday for one week from 28th May – 4th June so the office will be closed that week.

Website emergency whilst office is closed

I’ve attempted in the past to try and read my email while I’m away but to be honest it’s never been successful. If you experience a major emergency with your website that can’t wait till I return, I have set up this email address:

emergency@designconscious.com

This mailbox is being monitored by someone local who has the ability to try and resolve your problem. Please only use this as a last resort, if the issue can wait till I get back please send me a normal email and I will attend to it for you after the 4th June. The person monitoring the emergency email address is remote to my office and so may not have full access to all the files and so may not be able to fully remedy any problems.

Telephone and mobile numbers

Since moving to Madeley my mobile has been worse than useless, the signal here is appalling and the battery life on the Nokia Slide 6700 is rubbish. Because of this my mobile should not be relied upon as a serious means of communicating with me. Please where possible use the landline. For a while now I have used the 0845 number and ported that to my landline, but it was pointed out to me a couple of times that people who have inclusive call packages have to pay for calls to 0845 numbers, so I am now not publicising that number any more. The 0845 number will still work for anyone who wants to call it, but it would be better if you change your address book and use this instead:

01952 414 003

Logo change

I was hoping to have had my new logo changed over at the beginning of the year, new house, new phone number, new look website, new logo. Well my strategy didn’t pan out. I was going to do a big unveil and… anyway that’s gone out the window, as you will notice from the header of this email (and from the website) my logo has changed, it’s still a lighthouse, but it’s now more graphic and stylised than before. I’m getting round to changing my stationery so you might still see the old logo for a little longer.

Other News

Recently two clients have let me down rather badly, one decided to go into voluntary liquidation and the other has over spent on his pet project and now can’t (won’t) pay me. The client who went into liquidation did so because he can’t pay his VAT bill, I had £300ish outstanding with him and a £5,500 job on the go. I was told not to worry because he was starting up again and the new company would honour my invoice and we could continue with the big job. As far as he was concerned it was business as usual but without the burden of a large VAT bill hanging over him.

I get very uneasy at these kind of practices, I’m pretty sure that someone who is capable of doing a runner from their debts is someone who won’t think twice about doing it again, and next time it might be when my £5,500 invoice is due. So as hard as it was to walk away from time and effort invested in the big job (and the outstanding invoice), I rang him and told him I didn’t want to do work for him any more. This didn’t go down well and has caused me a lot of hassle and wasted a lot of my time.

That was the first eventful happening. The next week whilst chasing up another client for payment on his outstanding invoice, I ended up having strong words with him after he accused me of invoicing him to much for the work done, not telling him the costs up front and generally trying to rip him off. I spent a number of hours that week trawling back through my email archive, finding out the emails that I had sent to him and he to me regarding payment and what to do about it. I shan’t go into the details now but I am 100% confident that I did everything by the book and I have the emails to prove it. You see all email in or out of my office is archived. Every message I send gets saved and every message I receive gets filed and archived, so I know what, when and at what time things are said by whom and to whom. I can state with absolute fact that this guy was told how much I was charging and that he had agreed to the cost up front before the invoices were raised. Basically this client has over spent on something that he couldn’t make a return from and is now refusing to acknowledge that he has any financial commitments to it. I notice that he hasn’t filled his company accounts at Companies House either, he set the project up as a Limited company so it will be interesting to watch what he does now. I’m still contemplating taking him to court over it but in the mean time I have suspended his website and stopped him accessing his email. I have put a holding page up stating that the site is offline because of outstanding debts, he appears not to have woken up to the fact that everybody can plainly see that he has defaulted on my invoices.

His job and some future work to come from a lead that he gave me means that I’m out of pocket by about £1,300, which when you add that to the other work I won’t get paid for it’s been a very expensive spring time here at design conscious!

End Note

I’m happy that I’ve walked away when I did from the one client and that I didn’t spend too much time on the lead for the other guy but what I’m most please about is my practice of archiving all my email. If you don’t do it then I strongly advise that you do.

A few people I deal with always call me on the phone to discuss changes to their websites and I realise that sometimes that’s easier to do than to write it out. However when you call someone there is no written prove that you called or that the resulting changes / work reflects what you actually asked for. An email is dated, time stamped, has a sender, a recipient and leaves a trail in the log files on the mail servers so should you ever need to prove what you said then you can with surprising accuracy. I send my emails out with a receipt request embedded in them so for 90% of my email I get notified when the recipient has read my mail, this is another useful feature and adds weight to your argument should you need it.

I’ve realised these last few months that being a sole trader is getting harder, I have a list of things to do on my desk right now that need my attention, however I need to finish this email, answer the phone, attend to the post and sort some job bags and… and there is always something else to add to the list. Logistically running an office on your own is difficult but it’s more than that, when you set up a business you create a monster that needs feeding. It requires a steady stream of incoming work to feed it or the monster will die. Looking for the work takes a lot of time and effort and as we have all felt it’s gotten a lot worse over the last couple of years. I need to improve my situation because it ultimately impacts on my clients so I’m still going to try and improve my turn around times, I’m fully aware that sometimes I’m not as speedy as perhaps I should be, I was hoping to get some of my admin work or marketing outsourced but with the cash flow hit I’ve just had that’s unlikely any time soon. If I can’t speed up I’m going to improve my communication, there is nothing worse than hearing nothing back and having to chase up the person again to find out what’s going on.

So I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you all for your continued support, to apologise if you have had to wait for your projects to get done and to ask you to look out for the next DC.com Newsletter which I’m hoping will discuss happier events!

Best Regards

ICB

—————

. Ian Blackford

Owner Manager – Design conscious .com

So, I’m back on track with what I do best: website development for my own clients and advice to those who ask and and pay for it. I think I shall have a lot more success that way, I shall be happier and ultimately better off for it.

Twitter updates will be more business like from now on, more focussed on what’s going on at Design Conscious and website development. I shall be posting news on designconscious.com website and that will notify twitter accordingly, I shan’t be having a twitter app open to monitor my stream much either, sorry if that means I lose some followers.

I think this is the best way forward for me and Design Conscious, many thanks to you all.

Design Conscious .com eMarketing Newsletter

Issue: 5.2 – January 2009

8 WAYS TO DRIVE TRAFFIC TO YOUR SITE – PART 2

————————————————————————

This weeks newsletter is in two parts, and it covers ways to drive
traffic to your site. The first part gave you tips 1-4 now it’s time
for tips 5-8.

Part one is available here:

I hope you find the tips useful, please contact me on 0845 370 3459
should you need any further help or advice, and don’t forget the
Design Conscious Voucher Codes email is still waiting for all those of
you who haven’t opted to receive it yet.

Vouchers for: Tesco, Thomson, Currys, Dell, Weight Watchers etc.

8 WAYS TO DRIVE TRAFFIC TO YOUR SITE – PART 2 (tips 5-8)

(continued fram part 1)

5. Build a sitemap

How?
Google has a facility for you to add your websites sitemap to a
Google account. There are scripts you can install on your site to
automatically create a Google valid sitemap – so it’s easy to tell
Google and the other search engine spiders exactly where your pages are.

—————————

6. Make words in your links meaningful

How?
If you make ‘Blue Widgets’ and the link to the widgets page says
‘Click here for our products’ then the search engine has no keywords in
the link to match up with the product page. Change the words in your
links to something like ‘The Blue Widget range’ – then the link and the
product page have keywords in common (Blue and Widget) thus increasing
your keyword relevancy.

—————————

7. Look at your webstats and track your links

How?
Ask your web developer to show you the stats for your site and see where
your traffic is coming from. If your traffic is mainly referals from other
sites think about increasing your visability on those pages. Look at the
top 10 keywords that are being used to find your site and improve their
denisty and relevancy in your website (Don’t over do it – Google will
delist you for keyword stuffing if you repeat your words unnecessarily).
If you advertise in a newspaper or magazine add a tracking code to the
URL in the advert and then see how much traffic is generated. Doing this
will help you identify which advertising is really working for you -
allowing you to drop any area of advertising that isnt performing and to
increase the advertising that is.

—————————

8. Google Adwords

How?
Google adwords is a briliant way of driving highly targeted traffic
to your site. It’s targeted because you bid on a keyword relating to
your business – say ‘Blue Widgets’ and your link is only shown when
someone searches and matches your keyword. When they click you get
charged and they are sent to your site. It’s a good way of getting
traffic but it can be a costly excercise if you don’t manage your
account, before you do this make sure your site is good enough to
convert any possible new leads to sales.

You now have eight of the best tips around for improving your online
presence. If you wish to implement any of these cost effective tips
call me for a quick quote or health check report on 0845 370 3459.

Make 2009 eventful not regretful!

Looking forward to speaking to you soon.

Ian Blackford
Owner / Manager
Design Conscious .com
Tel: 0845 370 3459

Saturday, January 31, 2009

————————————————————————

This email is being sent to you as a follow up from a paper letter we
have sent to you in the post previously.

Please make sure you add this email address to your address book or
white list this email address to prevent you from missing other issues
of the newsletter. Should you wish to un-subscribe from future mailings
please click here:

Please call or email ian@designconscious.com if you have any questions
about this email.

Design Conscious .com
Head Office, 40 Glendale Gardens, Lawley Village
Telford, Shropshire. TF4 2RG Tel: 0845 370 3459

—————————

Design Conscious Voucher Codes email is still waiting for all those
of you who haven’t opted to receive it yet.

Vouchers for: Tesco, Thomson, Currys, Dell, Weight Watchers etc.

Design Conscious .com eMarketing Newsletter

Issue: 5.1 – January 2009

8 WAYS TO DRIVE TRAFFIC TO YOUR SITE – PART 1

————————————————————————

This weeks newsletter is in two parts, and it covers ways to drive
traffic to your site. The first part gives you tips 1-4 the second
part will be tips 5-8.

I hope you find the tips useful, please contact me on 0845 370 3459
should you need any further help or advice, and don’t forget the
Design Conscious Voucher Codes email is still waiting for all those of
you who haven’t opted to receive it yet.

Vouchers for: Tesco, Thomson, Currys, Dell, Weight Watchers etc.

8 WAYS TO DRIVE TRAFFIC TO YOUR SITE – PART 1 (tips 1-4)

1. Make it easy for your website visitors to recommend you to others

How?
Add a Share button to your pages so your visitors can instantly
submit you to social network sites like Digg and StumbleUpon.

—————————

2. Write more pages

How?
Look at your industry and work out what is the latest hot news (or
what’s going to be hot) then write a page of info about it on your site.
Do this at least once a month. The more content you have the more chance
the search engines will find you.

—————————

3. Update your website structure

How?
Have a health check report done on your site. Any site that is a
couple of years old will have legacy code that the search engines now
ignores or worse can’t use. Search engine technology has moved on a lot
- your site needs to move on with.

—————————

4. Tell people about yourself

How?
Get marketing. As I have said in previous mailshots the best way to
drive traffic and therefore sales is to tell people about your
services or products. One of the most effective ways of doing this is
with email mailshots (an example of which you are currently reading).

(continued in part 2)

Look out for part two later this week, you will then have eight of the
best tips around for improving your online presence. Call me for any
help or advice on 0845 370 3459.

Make 2009 eventful not regretful!

Looking forward to speaking to you soon.

Ian Blackford
Owner / Manager Design Conscious .com
Tel: 0845 370 3459

————————————————————————

This email is being sent to you as a follow up from a paper letter we
have sent to you in the post previously.

Please make sure you add this email address to your address book or
white list this email address to prevent you from missing other issues
of the newsletter. Should you wish to un-subscribe from future mailings
please click here:

Please call or email ian@designconscious.com if you have any questions
about this email.

Design Conscious .com
Head Office, 40 Glendale Gardens, Lawley Village
Telford, Shropshire. TF4 2RG Tel: 0845 370 3459

—————————

Design Conscious Voucher Codes email is still waiting for all those
of you who haven’t opted to receive it yet.

Vouchers for: Tesco, Thomson, Currys, Dell, Weight Watchers etc.

Design Conscious .com eMarketing Newsletter

Issue: 4 – January 2990

BUYING POWER VOUCHER CODES:
Tesco, Wieght Watchers, Thomson, Dell, Currys, Design Conscious .com

Voucher Codes Newsletter

————————————————————————

Being cautious and saving money is key at the moment, we all need to
keep an eye on what we are spending so we don’t come financially
unstuck. There are two problems with this however, the first is: life
goes on and there are things that we need in order to continue our
businesses and home life. The second issue is: the less we spend, the
less the companies we buy from sell, the more likely they are to go
bust. Putting this second point the other way round, the less people
spend, the less we sell, the more likely it is that WE can go bust.

Balancing spending is a very fine art and in these times it’s about the
only thing that you can really control. You can’t control the amount of
sales you make because the decision is out of your hands. You can’t
control the current business climate because it’s too big to influence,
but you can control how much money leaves the bank because you choose
to spend or not.

Ultimately buying power is in your hands, it’s in everybodies hands. At
the moment businesses are cutting spending to try and protect
themselves – this is always a sensible move – but what happens when
we need or want to buy something? When purchasing there is only one
thing to do and that is to buy wisely, buy where you can get discount
or the best value deal. At Design Conscious we understand this and so
we have pleasure in offering you some money saving deals.

We have obtained voucher codes from big names such as:

+ Tesco
+ Currys
+ Weight Watchers
+ Thomson Holidays
+ Dell Computers

With these offers you can benefit from up to £200 off a holiday (many
with free child places), £10 of your shopping at Tesco when you shop
online, 15% off a new Dell computer for your office, not to mention we
are also offering £150 off your first website or marketing campaign of
£400 or over with us at Design Conscious .com

Spending wisely helps everyone because: you get a great money saving deal,
the company you buy from gets a sale and slowly the economy gets up off
its knees. We all have a responsibility to get through this in one piece
and help each other do the same. Times are hard but we needn’t be hard
on ourselves. There is plenty of scope to get what we want and at the
price we want.

To get started all you have to do is follow this link and request the
Design Conscious Voucher Codes Newsletter:

Voucher Codes Newsletter

Once you have requested the newsletter you will get your voucher codes
in your welcome email this will be the second email you get, the first
requires you to click a confirmation link – make sure you confirm or
you won’t get your voucher email!

Make 2009 eventful not regretful!

Looking forward to speaking to you soon.

Ian Blackford
Owner / Manager Design Conscious .com
Tel: 0845 370 3459

————————————————————————

This email is being sent to you as a follow up from a paper letter we
have sent to you in the post previously.

Please make sure you add this email address to your address book or
white list this email address to prevent you from missing other issues
of the newsletter. Should you wish to un-subscribe from future mailings
please click here:

Please call or email ian@designconscious.com if you have any questions
about this email.

Design Conscious .com
Head Office, 40 Glendale Gardens, Lawley Village
Telford, Shropshire. TF4 2RG Tel: 0845 370 3459

Design Conscious .com eMarketing Newsletter Update

Issue: 3- January 2009

————————————————————————

Following on from the email I sent out last week which included
information about my photography service, I’d like to give you a little
update. In the last email there was a link to my website where you
could view a selection of my photographic work. I had added a tracking
code to that link and I have been monitoring it over the weekend. It
seems that 33% of you clicked the link and viewed my web page. It’s
almost certain that some of those clicks were for curiosity, but it’s
very possible that someone wanted to know more because they will have a
need for the service. (My rates are extremely good by the way!) It only
takes one of you who clicked to hire me to make it all worthwhile.

I hope now you can see that email mailshots are a very effective way of
getting people to see what you have to offer and with tracking you can
easily build a picture of what does and doesn’t work. You will
definitely be surprised at how little it can cost.

If you already have a list of your clients emails (on disk) and you are
able to write a short email (like this one) explaining what you have to
offer – then a one off mailing can cost as little as £80. A series of
6 emails can reduce the price of each mailing to £60 each (when booked
as a block of 6 to be mailed within 2 months of booking). HTML emails
can be produced but will require an individual quote.

A word of advice: I must strongly reccommend that you have a second
domain registered with which to run your mailing list from. You might
have noticed that my newsletters are being sent through:

delivery@designconsciousmarketing.com

Design Conscious Marketing .com

I registered designconsciousmarketing.com to protect myself should
anyone misinterpret my email newsleters and report me for sending
unsolicited email. If that becomes the case in theory my main email
address of designconscious.com won’t be affected. Non of us will want
to be accused of this but should it happen at least you are able to
retrived email on your main account. The registration of a second
domain name is the usual cost of £35 .co.uk or £50 .com – I will throw
in – F.O.C – a basic hosting account and MySQL database to enable the
mailing list to work and of course the tracking script will be installed
as well.

Take 5 minutes now to think about what you may be missing out on by not
keeping your clients in ‘check’ and then decide on how you can utilise
the email mailshot format to your best advantage, then give me a call
to discuss it in more detail.

Make 2009 eventful not regretful!

Looking forward to speaking to you soon.

Ian Blackford
Owner / Manager
Design Conscious .com
Tel: 0845 370 345

————————————————————————

This email is being sent to you because you are a client of
Ian Blackford at Design conscious .com.

Please make sure you add this email address to your address book or
white list this email address to prevent you from missing other issues
of the newsletter.

Please call or email ian@designconscious.com if you have any questions
about this email.

Design Conscious .com
Head Office, 40 Glendale Gardens, Lawley Village
Telford, Shropshire. TF4 2RG Tel: 0845 370 3459

Design Conscious .com eMarketing Newsletter

Issue: 2 – January 2009

Your clients need to be told what you sell

————————————————————————

Increasing your sales is difficult at the best of times, but it can be
made easier if you apply one golden rule:

“Tell everyone what you sell”

This is called ‘staying in check’. Nobody can buy from you if they
don’t know what you sell. How many times have you stumbled across a
product in a shop only to be surprised that they sold it at all? How
many times have you wanted something but just didn’t know where to buy
it from?

It’s frustrating for the purchaser – but it’s a loss of income for you
the product or service provider.

This year is the year to do something about it. 2009 is a ‘doom and
gloom’ year so now more than ever is the time to market your company at
any chance. Sending mailshots coupled with your website is by far the
most effective means of doing this.

This email is part of our 2009 proactive marketing – you are reading
it because we sent it to you. Look out for more of them soon as they
should start you thinking about your marketing too. Why not give me a
call and find out how well this email mailshot was received? Perhaps we
can talk about setting up and running a mailing list for you, so you
too can keep your clients in check? I bet you have a list of clients,
and I bet you have their email addresses. Why not send them an email
telling them about everything you do? I can help you – it’s actually
very easy and painless and more cost effective than you might imagine.

Did you know that not only do I offer website development and marketing
advice, I also provide a photography service? I can take shots onsite
and even take close up product shots in a mobile studio situation too.
I also create web ready 360 degree panorama shots. Here are some
examples of my photography:

Click here

There… you wouldn’t have known that if we hadn’t sent you this email
now would you? :-)

Make 2009 eventful not regretful!

Looking forward to speaking to you soon.

Ian Blackford
Owner / Manager Design Conscious .com
Tel: 0845 370 3459

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