You can just forget about it and it’ll be completely self sufficient until you decide to add some new pictures? Well, kind of..We always say that your website should be an ongoing process, meaning that the job doesn’t end when the site is launched. What is the sound of a falling tree if nobody is around to hear it? Who knows. What’s the point of a website if nobody ever sees it. Following the launch of a new site it makes sense to have the following things in place:<ul style="list-style-type:disc;"><li>Launch strategy – tell people about your new site</li><li>Have a clear marketing plan – how will you attract visitors?</li><li>Support the site with social media</li><li>Build traffic to your site with SEO</li></ul>These are the obvious things, which you’ve hopefully got in order. But what about the ongoing maintenance of the site? There are two obvious options here:<ul style="list-style-type:disc;"><li>Maintain it yourself, or have a go</li><li>Let an agency do it for you</li></ul>Although there are obvious cost benefits to doing it yourself, should you?Ongoing maintenance includes things like:<ul style="list-style-type:disc;"><li>Checking site uptime, is the site always available?</li><li>Monitoring response times, does the site continue to load quickly?</li><li>Software updates</li><li>Pre-update software testing</li><li>Technical changes</li><li>Security scans</li></ul>If you’re happy doing these, then it’s one less thing you need to pay for each month. If not, it’s worth considering letting an agency take care of it for you. A neglected site could go offline and be turning away potential customers. If the site software is outdated it also opens you up to security breaches, you could risk losing your data, having customer data stolen, or even your e-commerce store hijacked. A poorly maintained site is a potentially dangerous site.Worth some thought if you don’t already have a provision in place to look after your interests online, especially if this is part of your core business model.&nbsp;

So you’ve got your new website built. It looks great, it’s live and you might even be starting to get your first visitors. Job complete right? 

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Self maintained vs letting a digital agency do it for you?

The New Year is a great time to take a look at your current website offering, in particular making sure it’s all relevant and up to date. Most companies go into some form of hibernation over the festive break but January brings a whole new business year to make use of.&nbsp;We’ve already seen lots of neglected websites that are still living in 2021 in various ways. The most common being having last year’s date plastered all over the site, Christmas messages, store closure information for the holidays, December delivery information. If your site is still in “have a nice Christmas / New Year” mode then it sends a clear message to customers that you’re not yet open for business. Plus an outdated site looks like you just don’t care about your web presence. Get on top of it and make sure it looks like you’re actually open for business!While you’re at it, it’s a good opportunity to make sure that your site is healthy and working. Take a look for any broken links, outdated / broken images, make sure your contact form works and that email addresses and telephone numbers are up to date. Maybe now is the time to remove the staff profile from the sales manager that left in 2019?The country is now back and open for business, there’s always a surge of interest in products and services after the holidays so make sure you’re putting your best foot forward for 2022.Of course, if you take a look at your site and decide it’s past it’s sell-by date, maybe this year is the year to bring it bang up to date? Get in touch and we’ll be more than happy to go through your current offering and redesign / relaunch it for you. Take a look at our <a href="/websites">website services</a>. &nbsp;

The country is back open for business, but is your website ready..?

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2022 Website Housekeeping

It’s a fact, people don’t like writing content for their websites. It’s often seen as a laborious task that is best avoided, but the problem is that a site without content is just a logo and some pretty pictures.The sort of content needed for a site depends on type of site you’ve got. If it’s purely an informational website then you’ll likely need descriptive text about your company, values, product and USP’s. There’s no getting away from writing this sort of content. The options are either to write it yourself, or outsource to an agency that is willing to write it for you (we can do this by the way..).There’s more to content than just words on the page, it has to be punchy enough to capture the attention of your readers and informative enough to get across your message. On top of this it also needs to feature wording and phrasing that’s attractive to search engines so they’ll deem your site to be worthwhile. It’s a tall order and harder to get right than you might first think.Now onto the topic of the blog, the upcoming use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for site content. We’re starting to see this used for things like product descriptions on websites, or describing an item. This might be of interest if you run an e-commerce website and are suddenly faced with writing interesting descriptions for 500 items where you can’t (or aren’t allowed) to use the manufacturer text.AI copywriting uses machine learning to gain an understanding of what you’re trying to write, and what the topic is. It’ll then use natural language to string together some text which describes the item. Often you’ll have to enter some keywords or phrases to point it in the right direction. The AI will use phrasing and descriptions it finds on other websites and attempt to use this knowledge to build you a one-off description, rather than just copy / pasting other content.All of a sudden you could have a full e-commerce catalogue populated by actual descriptions, not just a title, size and price!&nbsp;If any of this rings a bell, you’d perhaps benefit from a conversation about AI copywriting. If you just need some interesting and emotive text to describe your company and entice your customers we’d be happy to hand write you some. But if you need text descriptions for products, why not consider letting AI do some of the work for you? &nbsp;

Writing descriptions and content for websites isn't much fun, is it? Maybe there is another way...

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Artificial Intelligence for website content

Unless you’ve been under a rock you’ll have heard of Google Analytics, the de-facto standard in website traffic analysis. It’s not only a great tool you can use to see how your site is performing, but amazingly useful for visitor insights.If you’ve not got this set up on your website yet, we’d strongly recommend you have a look and start using it. It cannot be assumed that a website will be performing optimally without watching how your visitors click through the site. Here are some examples:<ul><li>Not getting enquiries, but have plenty of visitors? Maybe your navigation isn’t slick enough or you don’t encourage the visitor to go any further than the homepage. With analytics you could see where homepage visitors are going, and how many people are clicking on your contact form.</li><li>Set up goals. A goal can be a sale on an e-commerce website or the confirmation page of an enquiry form. With a bit of minor nerding you can set up goals and work out conversion rates.</li><li>See where your traffic is coming from. One of the most basic uses is to simply see where your customers are coming from. A report will show what keywords are bring visitors to the site and even what people are searching for on your own search forms.</li></ul>The possibilities are limitless. Even if you don’t want the learning curve of getting your head around Analytics, get in touch – we can set up easy to use custom reports and lend a helping hand.Trying to make a success of your site without Analytics is like setting off before defrosting your windscreen!

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Google analytics for dummies

Or...an adult who is shopping online? using a self serve machine? Queuing or having to wait for more than a minute for something to happen, wether it be online or in a retail environment.As we move further in to a "self-serve" and App driven world, are we becoming so impatient we can't wait for other brands and services to catch up? And by that I mean businesses or brands and even services that don't allow us to do something straight away.We are fast approaching a point of no return, some businesses could (will) potentially lose out on sales for not having FAQ's, Pricing, the power to purchase within seconds at consumers finger tips.Let's use McDonald's for example, so they have the screens in restaurants where you can customise your order...fantastic I arrive choose a screen pay for my order and skip one queue. Leaps and bounds ahead of many fast food outlets.BUT wait McDonalds don't stop there! You can now place your order on the McDonald's App from wherever you wish then once you arrive in store, notify them you have arrived resulting in us even skipping the potential queues for the self serve screens!!!This is just one example of how the world is evolving and it's something many companies should be planning for. Could your company deliver results in this fashion? Could bots help? Perhaps <a href="http://darkcherrycreative.co.uk/marketing">email automation</a>?After all we wouldn't expect potential customers to have to spend a little while of their own personal time searching for what they want to know, especially in a phase growth for marketing automation and the power of apps, bots and voice controlled devices.To see how we can help your business deliver a customer focused experience, please don't hesitate to <a href="http://darkcherrycreative.co.uk/contact">contact us</a>... NOW NOW NOW

Something you hear children say in a sweet shop or perhaps a toy shop?

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Now now we want it now

Part one of this series discussed how to use structured data on your pages so that Google can pick up essential details about your business, and best work out what it’s actually about. Google is pretty smart about categorising pages these days, but the same old rule holds true that the more cues and clues you can give it, the better.Google My Business is a commonly overlooked feature that allows you to control how your business information appears on result pages. This is separate from actual search results, it’s the section on the right hand side of the main listings that show you visitors your company information. This is most commonly displayed when somebody searches for your business using a “branded” keyword, or basically searches for your company by its name.These days very few people think to type out a website address, browsers and search engines are great at autocompleting phrases and company names. When is the last time you started typing “www.” and got all the way to “.co.uk” without your phone, browsers or tablet guessing what you’re looking for first? People will often type your company name directly into the address or search bar, and this is when they’ll be greeted by the Google My Business listing. Assuming that is that you’ve gone to the trouble to create itGoogle My Business can be a powerful tool, you can edit your listing to include a brief intro to your business, perhaps show the sector it operates in, link to your website, a whole bunch of things! You can go further though, you can allow customers to publically post reviews of your business here which (assuming they’re positive!) will help inspire confidence is your business.Depending on what sort of business you operate, you can use this listing to show pictures of your premises, inside and out. If you operate a showroom or something of a visual nature this can be a powerful tool.The most obvious things you want here however are all the ways customers can get in touch, a website address is an obvious one, but you ideally also want your telephone number, address (with map) and your business hours.We can create all this for you when we launch your site as one of our promotional packages, or we can put it together as a standalone service if you need it. Regardless of whether you do it yourself or drop us an email, make sure you don’t neglect it! You can set up your listing by going to <a href="https://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/business/">https://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/business/</a>

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Get your small business found locally: My Business (formally Places)

<figure class="image"><img src="http://darkcherrycreative.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/e-commerce-1-300x170.jpg" alt=""></figure>This is a common question for many small businesses, there’s a real stigma regarding making the move online and accepting orders – unnecessarily so in our opinion.Sure there are some companies with the skills and know-how in-house to open an online store, maybe with a bit of effort they can muddle through and set up a website – that’s great. However, the pitfalls of selling online are far greater than those associated with a regular website. There are lots of additional considerations.Security…The elephant in the room, so many websites are launched prematurely or without proper consideration for the security required when handling cash transactions. There are other requirements too such as PCI compliance; this is a set of standards endorsed by most merchant banks that sellers need to adhere to.So it’s too difficult?Not at all! It just means that a more measured approach is required if you want to launch a successful and safe e-commerce store. Predictably, this is where we come in. We can handle all the technical red-tape and let you focus on the actual goal of the store, selling things. We can provide a secure and intuitive environment for your customers, taking the guesswork and risk out of e-commerce.How do I get started?Very simply – just get in touch and let us know what your goals are. No matter what you want to sell, we can help. To get you started, take a look at our <a href="/websites/ecommerce">e-commerce services</a> pages – this should give you some background information on what we offer.

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How do I start selling online?

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Creative digital agency, web design, web development, branding and marketing. We're an enthusiastic creative design agency based in Wakefield West Yorkshire

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