If you have an ecommerce website in Lancashire you need to look at these three trends which will affect it’s performance in 2016 and beyond.
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Increasing conversion rates is a high priority for any company that relies on online sales to increase profits. Every time a user visits a website and fails to make a purchase it represents a lost opportunity. There are many ways companies can reduce lost conversions in Lancashire and beyond.
A/B testing is a popular technique for honing in on the marketing strategy that leads to the highest conversion rate. One example of A/B testing is creating two ads, each with a unique headline. Include an identical call to action on both ads and calculate the number of users that took the action for each version. This gives you a clear picture of which headline was more effective.
It is important to test one element at a time when A/B testing. Elements to test include page layout, calls to action wording, order button size, and the offer. You can also test the effectiveness of different media by creating one landing page with text only and one landing page with a video that utilizes that text as a script.
Another way to increase conversions is to create a compelling value proposition. Your potential customers want to know why they should purchase your product or service. You need to tell them in precise terms what sets your company apart from the competition.
When you are creating a value proposition, focus on at least one unique aspect of your company and its product or service. Identify your unique qualities and find a way to describe them in as few words as possible. Try to get your point across in a single sentence. You can use A/B testing to gauge its effect on your ideal prospect.
Eliminate the jargon, whether you are writing content for your website, blogging, or creating an ad. Fancy business language is not going to impress anybody. People visiting your site want reliable information in language they can clearly understand. Cut back on the marketing speak and stick to the facts. Imagine you are explaining your service or product to a friend or someone who has no previous knowledge about your industry.
Building trust with potential customers is among the best ways to encourage them to spend their money with you. Your website should look professional and be simple to navigate. Hire a professional designer to create an attractive layout and make sure your content is free of typos and grammatical errors. If you are careless in your presentation, potential customers will assume you are just as careless with providing your service or manufacturing your product. Make it easy for visitors to contact you by providing an email address, a physical address, and a phone number. Visitors need to be able to verity that a real organization run by real people is behind the site.
Finding effective ways to increase your conversion rate is an ongoing process that takes time. Do not expect your sales to increase overnight just because you changed the headline on your website’s front page. Take a methodical approach to improving the ways you communicate with your target audience and watch your profits grow.
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Acceler8 Media are Website Design Professionals in Lancashire who can Make Your Online Presence Known:
Having an online presence has never been as important as it is right now. Company websites are an essential part of marketing, and can increase sales and customers. But if you don’t know where to start when it comes to building a website, we can help you find the best website design in Lancashire, who will give you exactly the type of website you want.
Why is a Website Important
What is the number one way people find products or services they want to spend their money on? While it used to be word of mouth, it is now online. Millions and millions of searches for any service or product you can imagine are made on Google everyday. The one and only way to capitalize off of that is to have a website. But as the web becomes bigger and more complex, it takes the right sort of site to catch someone’s attention online.
Looks Matter
When company websites were first around, pretty much anyone could sign up for a simple, pre-made template site and do pretty well. Now in order to keep someone on your site, it has to have a great deal of detail put into it. You’ll need:
- An organized layout that makes finding things easy
- A simple design that isn’t too crowded, but gives customers all the details they need in one place
- An attractive design that will fit your company, service, message and brand
- A site that’s html coded from scratch – one that will be possible to update in the future when you need to
That’s a long list of requirements when you don’t know the first thing about web design! You want web design professionals in Lancashire that will listen to what you want, know what your company needs, and know the latest web design techniques.
Professional Difference
Putting together a website is no small task. Not only do you need to gather, organize and categorize all the information you’ll need online, it has to be readable to your customer, the website, and the search engines. A crowded website with crowded information and code will never look good online, so this is when hiring a professional makes a true difference. Here’s just a small preview of what a professional web designers in Lancashire can give you:
- A meeting or outline to discuss exactly the message you want your website to send in its design and structure.
- Options. A great professional will know what works and be able to give you options and choices in layout, design and style.
- Style. You can tell when a website has been designed professionally. It’s menus and information work together harmoniously, to give your clients the best experience possible.
- Originality. Stand out from all the cookie cutter competition with a design that no one else will have.
When you hire a professional web designer in Lancashire, you’re getting quality service. Trust Acceler8 Media to help you find the best, and help your company be at its best.
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However much you try and educate people and inform them of the importance of having a mobile friendly website there are still plenty who fail to move with the times. Acceler8 Media only ever build mobile optimised websites and our customers throughout Lancashire have been reaping the rewards in their Google rankings.
Have a look at some of the stats in this wonderful infographic and see how important mobile device usage has become for internet users. Don’t miss the boat. Make sure your website is benefiting from the burgeoning amounts of mobile traffic.
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Minimalism is accomplished by decreasing a configuration to just the most crucial components. Articulations of minimalism vary, and can be found in other works of art, for example, music and writing. For web design, however, minimalism can be scary and hard to get right.
In any reality, even in Preston anybody can ace minimalism. Basically, minimalism speaks the truth separating things to the barest components vital for an outline to work. It’s about taking things away until nothing else can be uprooted without removing the reason for the outline. The following are various standards of minimal design relating to web development.
Less is Always More
“Less is More” is presumably the most surely understood catchphrase of minimal development. It was advanced by designer Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in portraying the minimal style.
In Web design, toning it down is accomplished by utilizing just components that are important to a given configuration. Utilizing less to accomplish an impact that is more than the total of the outline’s parts is the objective.
Overlook Needless Things
In their book The Elements of Style, Strunk and White authored the saying “omit needless words.” It has been adjusted to minimal rationality as, “omit needless things.” i.e. exclude superfluous components in your website designs.
Think about what’s important to the substance and functionality of your site. At that point concentrate on just those things, and preclude anything that doesn’t straightforwardly add to either the substance or functionality. Keep in mind, however, that certain outline and graphical components will always influence the decipherability or ease of use of your site.
Subtract Until It Breaks
At the point when making you are finalising your new minimal website design, have a go at subtracting components until the new site fails to work in a normal manner. At the point when the site is very nearly breaking, you know you’ve accomplished the most minimal outline conceivable.
Keep in mind that “breaks” is relative in website design. Ability of the user to gain the required information is the one and only approach to gauge whether something is broken. Verify your site is still easy to use and conveys the experience you need guests to have.
Each Detail Counts
In a minimal design, each point of interest is critical. What you decide to leave in is key. A fringe around a picture, the shading palette, the white space, each part gets to be critical to the general look and feel of the site when the components are reduced to a few.
Think about the feeling you need your site to give guests, and subsequently settle on the points of interest that would give that feel. While numerous designers and developers view minimalism as one size fits all, there is still space for distinctive feelings in view of individual outline components. A minimal site can without much of a stretch be hip and present day, crisp and clean, rich and refined, or anything in the middle.
Shading Minimally
Shading can make or break a new minimal website design. Picking the right palette or accent hues is essential. Numerous developers pick a basic dark, white and/or dim palette, yet minimalism allows for any shading in the rainbow.
As with subtle elements, shading increases in influence with less components. Pay consideration on the implications of the hues you pick and how they connect with each other.
White Space Is Vital
White (or negative) space is the foundation of any minimal outline. What you ignore for a design is generally as critical as what you put in. White space is important to the relationship of certain components over others. White space “makes” an outline minimal to a substantial degree. Without it, you’d wind up with a matrix outline or some other style that is not genuinely minimal.
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Here at Acceler8 Media we like to become acquainted with our customers. Not on the grounds that we’re nosey or stalkers. We simply feel it gives us the knowledge we need to start an outline that suits our customers taste and additionally their businesses needs. As good website is about individual taste an it’s always easier to provide somethng for a customer once you know all the relevant information about them and their business. Try not to stress, that doesn’t mean we’ll be going over your business with a fine tooth comb! A chat on the phone or in person is typically enough to help us understand your requirements. We like to think of this is as the ‘discovery phase’. During this journey we can start to instill a vision of what you are looking to achieve and also manage the expectations of both parties, based on the requirements.
When we know about you and your Croston or other Lancashire based business and have assembled all the content and imagery we can proceed to initiate building the new website. The initial part of the Website Design in Croston is when we work out the structure/layout of the site, the type of functionality that is required and what the best design will be to make it as usable as could reasonably be expected by the client and their customers. In the event that the site needs to be future scalable, we will ensure that we use the correct platform to reach the clients end goal. We will likewise take a gander at the content that has been accumulated and recognize keywords for search engine optimisation from the outset.
Now the fun begins and we enter the ‘planning phase’. We take all that we’ve learnt and combine it to create the look and feel of the site. This will be shown to you at certain points and will change and advance under your guidance until you are content with design. Once everyone is happy we will end the planning phase to move into the ‘development phase’. This is the part when you website starts to become reality and you see your vision taking shape. This incorporates making the coded html pages that will be utilized within the content management system, to make layouts that will add pages to your site. When these are added to the CMS you will start to see the functionality develop to incorporate such things as moving images, contact forms, parallax designs, social media feeds and the sky is the limit from there.
Once we have built your website and every one of the pages are published with relevant content we enter the ‘testing phase’ to verify it works and is fully functional on any mobile device. Every one of our sites are approved to meet W3C guidelines to guarantee the best execution and that they perform well in relation to Google and other search engines. When we are satisfied that our work is complete we will arrange to sit down with you in Croston (or wherever else you maybe in Lancashire), and iron out any glitches or tweaks before setting your new website live. Job Done!
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The crux of keeping any business afloat is generating new leads and ultimately customers. Now matter how well established your business may be, there always tends to be a natural turnover of the customer base for a variety of factors. Even if you endeavour to keep everyone of your customers as your number one priority there are always factors outside your influence which mean that you lose customers.
At Acceler8 Media we tend to think of our customer base as a leaky bucket. As we deal with a large number of SME businesses there tends to be a natural loss due to external factors e.g. retirement, closing the business, cashflow problems etc…. All of these things are outside of our control and no matter how good the work is that we have done for these customers they will always end up leaving. As such, in order to at least maintain the customer base and ideally grow it we are always looking to engage new clients.
Social Media is one of the services we offer to businesses, but it is also a massively important source of new work for ourselves. It wouldn’t be fair for us to preach the benefits of Social Media to our clients if we didn’t use it as a key resource in our own development. We have a number of followers on Twitter and they are made up of genuine businesses and networking opportunities. We focus on organically attracting business followers in and around Lancashire. Because of this it is fair to say that we probably generate at least one direct message a week enquiring about our services purely from our Twitter activity. This is in addition to our Facebook referrals which seem to be generated as a matter of course through referral from our customers individual accounts.
However, I think it is fair to say that we have never really capitalised on the power of Linkedin and the massive potential it offers for networking and referrals. We have decided that is definitely something we need to improve over the coming months and have found an excellent infographic with some great tips on how to use Linkedin. We think a lot of the information is invaluable and hope that some of our avid blog readers will benefit as well.
Watch this space and we will share any good news we get via our new Linkedin campaign!
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What is responsive website design?
Responsive web designs are a system used to guarantee that a site shows up precisely on a mixture of distinct gadgets. As such, your site knows when it is being shown on a mobile phone or device (e.g. an iPhone, iPad or Android device) and consequently reverts automatically to touch friendly functionality.
Why We Use Responsive Web Design in Glorious Burnley, Lancashire?
There are two main reasons:
The people who use your site are visiting at different times from different devices, in different locations. For example if someone visits your site whilst they are sat at a bus stop in Burnley, chances are they will need web design which is mobile friendly. It makes sense that you can guarantee that your site looks its best and works perfectly, whilst being shown on all types of device, be it a PC, tablet or the latest smart phone. Google recently produced a report on the basic pattern of “multi-screen purchasing” and the significance of your site being viewed effectively on all screen sizes.
The main outcome was that Google will rank you higher! Google realises that near to 50% of the people who use their site are on mobile devices and mainly smart phones. It makes sense that these users would be hoping to see websites that are mobile friendly when trying to navigate the website. Thus it is to Google’s greatest advantage to downgrade ineffective an non-responsive websites and promote those which are easy to use.
Is my WordPress site responsive? How do I tell?
Straightforward, load it up on any smart phone or tablet device. Does it look simply like it does on a computer, but all squashed down and difficult to navigate? If this is the case then your site is not responsive, nor is it mobile friendly. However, if your site is showing up differently than the desktop form and is anything but difficult to explore on any type of touch screen, you have yourself a fully responsive site!
Another test is to use Chrome or Firefox and dragging the window to see if the website changes. When you resize the screen down to the width of a smart phone or tablet you ought to see your responsive site change over into the new responsive layout immediatley. Give it a go on this site and see for yourself.
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The straightforwardness with which guests can explore your site dictates whether you get the customer or a lost lead.
Positive client encounters have direct impact for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as well. Google eventually needs to rank local websites that individuals find enlightening, as well as simple to explore, and their algorithm is equipped to a limited extent towards that.
So how does the experience of the user apply towards single and numerous page web design layouts? There is no right reply on this front. Well composed single page websites can have an instinctive transition, making the procedure of getting key data simple. In any case, we always have to look for a balance. When you have larger quantities of data for the user to explore, a multi-page configuration is liable to make a superior experience for your users.
A good guideline that we use to advise our clients in Ramsbottom and throughout Lancashire – if looking through your single page site starts to feel confusing or difficult, its in all likelihood time to change to a multi-page website design.
SEO is the key to the promotion of your website. It’s additionally frequently overcomplicated to the point of ludicrousness.
In actuality, an extensive amount of SEO is from the nuts and bolts of the initial web design. Keeping in mind there’s not space to dig into the points of interest in this article, I would like to concentrate on how your decision of configuration can influence Google’s “feeling” of your site.
It is simpler to target individual specialist words on a for each page premise with a changeable page outline, possibly prompting various rankings for particular ‘long tail’ catchphrases. For instance, you could have a page focusing “on the best material for your lawn” while another targets “how to build a new shed”. These are particular expressions, both of which are connected however will contain diverse data. Google adores this.
In the mean time, focusing on unmistakable keywords on a one page outline can rapidly get untidy. While a one page layout can rank well for numerous firmly related essential words, Google is far more averse to distribute various related catchphrases to your site’s single page.
Besides, the absence of accessible space in a one page layout could imply that the magic words you endeavor to rank for are contained inside paragraphs and that aren’t sufficiently long to be of much genuine quality (in Google’s algorithmic eyes).
In principle, a multi-page WordPress layout gives your site various shots of being positioned for different words. There are numerous components to consider, and it can rapidly get to be overpowering, so my recommendation is to concentrate on what you believe is best for the target user.
At last, Google is attempting to implement algorithms that present the most instinctive, instructive and applicable websites and their pages on their results pages. So instead of concentrating vigorously on SEO, concentrate on furnishing your guests with the most intuitive layout and design. Some people in Ramsbottom like a one page option whereas others go for multiple pages as these are right for their business.
Matt Cutts, leader of the webspam group at Google, has remarked and delivered a feature on this exact topic. To put it plainly, you ought to be constructing your site for your clients instead of Google and other search engines.
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For every customer we speak to who is happy with the provider of their website, there is always another who is keen to recount their tales of woe. It never ceases to amaze me how many times we come across shockingly bad websites, produced by the same local businesses, still churning them out, week after week. Since day one at Acceler8 Media Web Design we have always maintained the quality of the work we produce and vowed never to resort to the levels of churn which litters the internet.
We understand that small businesses and tradesmen have budget constraints and we are more than capable of offering competitive solutions in this marketplace. However, just because your budget is limited doesn’t mean you have to have a poor website. Probably the main offenders for producing over priced and inferior quality work are directory companies. They have a large customer base which has been built up on the back of their now dying main product. In an attempt to try and revert the terminal decline of their businesses they are reliant on their salesforce to push these products onto their customers as an alternative to print. Unfortunately, all of their sites tend to b e developed in Asia, using templated designs and badly written, generic content.
In 2015 and beyond the first port of call for the majority of new or potential customers is your website. This is your shop window and the opportunity to showcase your skills and level of workmanship. If the user doesn’t like what they see, they will go straight back onto Google and look for one of your competitors. The one bonus of having a website with a directory company is that there is very little possibility of it being found via Google and portraying your business in a poor light.
OK. So you’ve bought into the fact that your website needs to look the part as well as perform on Google, but you are still not convinced that Acceler8 Media can offer you a cost effective solution compared to the local website, churn factory? To keep things simple I have sourced two websites for similar businesses in Lancashire as a direct comparison. Have a look and see which one you would choose:
I’m hoping that you preferred Lancashire Landscaping, which has far more functionality and is aesthetically far superior? If so, you would probably be very surprised to know that it was actually £120 cheaper to build than the competitor site, with a management fee of half the price.
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