Design and Technology Blog

Time wasters and how your business can avoid them

TimeWe all know running a business requires a certain amount of speculation. Dealing with enquiries that might not come to anything, quoting for jobs you might not get, and offering the benefit of your advice to prospects in the hope that they’ll become customers. It’s all part of the game. But you only need to run a business for a short while to realise that there are a lot of people out there who will quite happily waste your time. Since I became a business owner, I’ve worked out that there are two basic types of time waster.

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You’re a businessman!

The wheels of businessA business consultant gave me a very good piece of advice when I was about to start my own business. He asked me what my job title was and I replied “Web Designer and Graphic Designer”. His reply was simple: “No you’re not, stop thinking like that!”. He had been appointed by my previous employer to offer help and advice to those of us who had been told we were about to become victims of the latest wave of redundancies.

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Do your visitors trust your website?

Business HandshakeWeb site owners spend a lot of time optimising their content for search engines and promoting their site through Facebook and Twitter. But some are then disappointed when they find they aren”t converting as many visitors to customers as they”d like. Read more »

You can’t fool a search engine

SEOSearch engines are a lot like humans. When somebody searches for something, a search engine reads the text on a page and decides how relevant the content is to what that person is searching for. It then decides how important that page is in relation to all the other pages that may also contain relevant content.

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Is your web site working for you? 10 tips to make sure it is!

Business PerformanceSo you’ve had your web site a while but you’re still waiting for all the business to start flooding in? It’s a familiar story. As a web designer I’m constantly amazed at some of the very basic mistakes I see on company web sites.Here are 10 tips that will help you get the most from your web site and perform better in search rankings. Some of these are primarily from a point of view of helping you perform better in search engine rankings, others are general improvements that may improve usability and convert viewers to customers.

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10 Things You Should Never Say to a Web Designer

Web DesignI love my job, and the vast majority of my clients  are intelligent people who know their businesses better than I do, and are able to strike a balance between taking sensible advice and asserting their wishes. But over the years I”ve had a few requests that have left me wondering why I bother. Some of these crop up time and time again. So here”s a fun look at some of the things they say.

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How to create the perfect company logo

LogoYour logo is in many cases one of the first things people notice about your business. It speaks volumes about who you are, what your business does and what kind of an outfit you run. It is essential that you get it right.

But as a small business owner, you probably aren’t in a position to hire a team of marketing and design consultants to create a logo for you. The good news is, you don’t have to. Follow a few basic principles and you can have a logo that’s perfectly suitable for your business.
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Top 10 Tips for start-ups and self employed

Start Up BusinessMany people find themselves leaving the world of nine to five drudgery as a paid employee for the exciting life as a business owner or self employed person. It may be through choice, or it may be due to redundancy, but whatever the reason, it can be a massive culture shock for anyone who has been cushioned by the safe world of paid employment for a long time.

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