Bag your self a cuppa

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To get your fresh, individually wrapped free tea bag please take 2 minutes to visit www.designconscious.com/tea/ and claim your beverage* (coffee available too).

And when it arrives savour your drink while you imagine how design conscious can help you to transform your website, making it into a virtual sales force that will make your online presence more profitable.

Then before your tea goes cold, bag this offer…

• A full website designed to your budget (yes, to your budget)

AND…

• Get your .co.uk domain name for the first 2 years for just £1.00 This is a website address fully registered in your name with email forwarding included. Use it perhaps as a second domain to your main website or for your own personal use - it’s your choice. (Normal price £35 renewable every 2 years)

• Get your Google website stats emailed to you for FREE PDF of your sites progress emailed to you every month - or week if you prefer.

• Get a feature packed mailing list script installed on your site for just £1.00 (worth £16.95)Never let a prospective client get away ever again! We’ll show you how.

ALSO… have you tried internet telephones yet? No?

• Well, you will also get a Skype headset for just £1.00 (worth £13.95)And we’ll even help you set up a Skype account so you can take advantage of the latest cutting edge technology. Making a free local, national or international call becomes easier than calling someone in the next office.

So when you need a design company that goes way beyond the rest for your business - or if you just want another cup of tea - sign up for our newsletter and bag yourself a cuppa

posted by admin Jan 28, 2008  03:01 PM
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MARKETING: - Take every opportunity to tell people what you sell.ShoesI was recently on holiday and needed some beach shoes, you know those rubber soled scuba jobs that you can walk into the sea with - I was in half a mind to get a wet suit too - well it was a holiday in the UK and the kids wanted to be in the sea.

I took a stroll into town to start searching for shoes and came to a fishing tackle shop (of all places) with crates of shoes outside. I looked at the price label which said £9.99 each - that seemed a little expensive to me so I went to walk away. Out of nowhere up sprang the shop keeper to point out that she had written on the back of an old label (which had turned over in the breeze) and the shoes were actually 2 pairs for £5. I bought a pair (and some for my daughter) and as I was paying, the lady mentioned that they had the cheapest wet suits in town. I had a good walk round and, she was right - they were the cheapest. I went back and bought 4 - one for all of us.Now think about that for a moment - I could have walked away from that shop and would never have grabbed a bargain. But what’s worse the shop keeper might have missed out on two sales. All she did was tell me (the customer) what she sold and because of that I was able to make up my mind and buy what I wanted.

This is a fundamental rule to apply to any business, just tell people what you sell, plain and simple, and shout it louder when you have items on sale. There are many ways of doing it too, send out letters to your past customers, run a mailing list on your website, print flyers and have them inserted in the local free papers or just go house to house and push them through letter boxes.

Remember if people don’t know you sell it - they can’t buy it from you.

Ian Blackford


posted by admin Aug 12, 2007  05:08 AM
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“If you build it… they will come!”

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.

posted by admin Jul 17, 2007  02:07 PM
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There are many aspects to consider about website design, it isn’t just about how the site looks, it also about usability, it’s about how it can be maintained and developed. It’s about marketing and getting results from your expenditure. It’s about knowing where to market your website - don’t try and take on the world, compete locally - Telford for example.

These days the race to the top of a search engine results table is a hard slog. Search engine optimisation is a black art and just as you get the hang of it… it changes. That’s why your website needs to continue growing and adapting beyond the design. It would be foolish to think that you could ever be one step ahead of the search engine and no web designer should ever promise you that, but you do have to keep up, and your site should be designed to allow for this.

You might be happy with your website and have no need for a re-design, you might just need some help with designing your marketing strategy, if so, then contact us for some help.

Design conscious is based in Telford Shropshire and are within easy traveling distance of the West Midlands, Wales and because of the extensive motorway network anywhere in the country.

Just because your site is live, doesn’t mean the development should stop, Design Conscious recognise this and therefore we don’t just ‘design’ a website for you, we tailor the package to you and support you afterwards.

posted by admin Jun 15, 2007  01:06 PM
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