Affordable, Functional Web Design Port Macquarie

Facebook Marketing: Truth vs Fiction

If your business has developed a Facebook page as part of your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy and you are hoping that Facebook marketing will be the key to boosting your company sales figures as the likes on your Facebook page begin to turn into cash, you are not alone. There has been a steady increase in the number of businesses using Facebook pages and Facebook marketing in an effort to attract customers. However, before you pin all your hopes on making genuine customers of the Facebook faithful, there are a few questions you must ask and answer. Firstly, knowing what we know about the habits of Facebook users, is Facebook marketing a viable strategy for your business?

Facebook marketing is not an easy sell

Facebook marketing is not an easy sell, especially if you are a startup business. According to a recent survey by the IBM Institute for Business Value, people who frequent social networking sites like facebook rarely engage with Facebook marketing. The reason? People who frequent social media sites like Facebook are there for the social connection, not for the sales. In fact, for some, your businesses presence on Facebook can be viewed as an unwelcome intrusion to those who are simply there to connect with friends. If you are like most startups, your first port of call will be to gain “Likes” from your personal pool of Facebook friends who may not necessarily be fans of your business but who are fans of yours. However, even your friends can elect to use the “Hide all” in their News Feed (“unsubscribe” for businesses), keeping them completely insulated from your Facebook marketing updates and keeping you none the wiser.

Does this mean that your business should not have a Facebook marketing strategy? No. But if a business wants to gain genuine likes and stay a part of the dialogue that may eventually yield genuine customers, it should look at developing its marketing in line potential customers expectations. In other words develop a marketing plan with a slant that positions your company as a part of the social Facebook “scene”.  Although 72% of Baby Boomers, 79% of Generation X and 89% of Generation Y use social media, understand that only 23% of all Facebook users say their primary reason for engaging with Facebook is to engage with brands.

According to the findings of the IBM Intsitute for Business Value study “Social CRM… recognizes that instead of managing customers, the role of the business is to facilitate collaborative experiences and dialogue that customers value.” Simply put, a business’ social media page needs to create a positive customers via facebook and other social media and it these trends a dialogue and experiences over time.

Your business needs to be smart about its Facebook marketing and understand that you will need to be in it for the long haul in order to gain customers.

Many people don’t seem realise that they should be optimising Images for the web to get better search results with Google.

Search engines like Google yahoo and Bing can’t recognise images. Now what I mean by that is that search engines may recognise that there is an image on your web page but it has no idea what that image is of. The reason for this is that for a search engine spider or crawler a digital image is nothing more than a series of coloured pixels. So to get the most out your website by optimising images for the web there are a few things you need to know.

1) optimising images, resizing:

Many people just load their images straight on to their website without resizing them not thinking as to why it took so long to load them, then once the images are loaded on to their website they wonder as to why their page now takes so long to load. The fact is that images take up space and bandwidth on your website so the bigger the image the more bandwidth and disc space it is going to use and because of this your website takes longer to load.

2) Optimising Images, Image compression:

Now once you have resized your image you will need to compress it. Some people falsely believe that resizing and compressing is the same thing and that’s just not the case. A resized image may be 115 KB in size and 640px by 480px in dimension but the same image that has a compression rate of only 85% can decrease the size of that same image by half without any visible difference in quality and no difference in the images dimensions.

3) Optimising Images, Name your image:

Most people don’t bother with this and their image is named something like “3453r56.jpeg”. Now like I mentioned earlier search engines don’t know what your image is so if you want to optimise the images you will have to name it so that they will know what it is. So instead of naming your image “3453r56.jpeg” your image should be named “sunset over Bondi beach.jpeg” then give your image an <alt> tag and a description relating to your image is of and make sure you use any related keywords for your website in here as well.

All in One Web Design Packages: Don’t Pay for What You Don’t Own:

This seems very obvious. However, for the uninitiated, paying for a website you don’t own may not be as easy to spot as you might think. So what are we talking about, anyway? Well there are a number of web design options out there at the moment that provide “all in one” web design packages where you design your own website (or a designer will design it for you). These will often include hosting (and sometimes even your own domain name) on their servers. Now while “all in one” may seem convenient, you really need to understand the pitfalls. Many of these “all in one” web design programs are only allowed to be hosted on the providers servers which in short means that, unlike other files and content management systems like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal or standard html files, you cannot move your website to another server or host if you’re not happy with the service, uptime or speed of the hosting they provide.

“So how does that affect me?”

Well, as an example say you paid someone $2,000 to design your website and around $20 per month to host it, only to find out that you don’t really own it. It’s kind of like buying a custom made car that you can’t take out of the car park.  You can only get it serviced by their mechanics and only use their fuel. As an example: many of these web design packages are based in the USA or the UK which means that the speed of your website may be affected by latency. Latency describes what happens when your site is hosted (or stored if you like) in the USA but your website is an Australian website with an Australian client base. Any request to view your website from Australia has to ping from Australia to the USA to retrieve your website and then ping back to Australia to be viewed. Now just like there is a delay when you make an international phone call from Australia to the USA, there may well be a delay in retrieving your Australian website from US based hosting. So let’s say you are an Australian based business and you unwittingly buy one of these all in one web design packages and you pay a designer to design it and you’re paying hosting on top of that but you’re not happy with how long it takes for the website to load and the service is rubbish and you’re losing customers. So someone suggests you move your website to another hosting company that can give you better service, speed and uptime at a more affordable price. You go “great I’m going to move my website to another hosting company” but you contact the designer of your “all in one package” and he inevitably answers “no can do”. Now you’re stuck. You either have to put up with a completely unacceptable website that you will have to keep paying hosting for or you bite the bullet and start again and pay for a completely new website that you do actually own and can move if you need to.

White Labelling Web Design Packages

The other issue you have to be aware of is “white labelling”. That is when an all in one web design package is sold by a third party who sells it under their own label and brand so even if you are buying from what you think is an Australian web design company you may not be. As with most things, it’s best to ask a few pointed questions before you commit to anything.

How does 545 Web Designs Port Macquarie Build Websites?

545 Web Designs Port Macquarie builds our websites on platforms using Content Management Systems, which means that when you build with us, you actually own the website you paid for and can move it, or host it, wherever you like. The vast majority of quality hosting providers in Australia and overseas in most cases will move your website or blog from your previous host for you free of charge. Although 545 Web Designs Port Macquarie does offer website hosting, we are not precious about it. Your website is fully moveable in the unlikely event that your businesses needs outgrow the high capacity and standard of service 545 Web Designs Port Macquarie offers.

There is a lot of conjecture on the Internet about whether or not the location of your server or web host effects your websites search engine rankings with Google. Many websites that you will find online will try to tell you that where you host your website does not matter but from what I’ve experienced many of those websites are advertising U.S. based hosting and trying to sell it to the Australian market. Now U.S. based hosting is not a problem if the majority of your client base is either in the U.S.A. or is internationally based (as in outside of Australia) however if your business and client base is predominantly located in the Australian market the location of your hosting servers will make a difference to your search engine rankings with Google. So why should Australian based websites aiming at selling to the Australian market have their hosting in Australia? There are two reasons, The first reason is that Google looks at the I.P address of the server that your hosting is on and if it is an Australian I.P address with Australian based hosting and has a .com.au suffix for your domain name, it sees that as an indicator that your website is an Australian based website aiming at the Australian market and there for if someone from Australia looks up your business type within Google Australia you should get priority. The second reason is latency; an example of latency is when you are making a phone call from Australia to the U.S.A you will notice a time delay when you are talking. The same latency principal applies when you have an Australian website with hosting based in the U.S.A. If your website is based in the U.S and someone looks it up from Australia the website has to be retrieved from the U.S hosting server and then brought back to Australia and the result of this is a slower loading website and Google has also stated that the speed that you website loads is also a factor in search engine rankings.

In short with all things being equal an Australian based website with a .com.au and Australian based hosting should get preference to a com or .com.au website based in Australia with U.S. hosting. However don’t just take my word for it have a look at these two videos from Matt Cutts, he is the Serach Engine Guru and public face of Google.