The competition on the grown is now getting tougher especially for SME. And now it is more crucial than ever for SME to have their online presence. While developing website for SME, we’d discover many SME website that seem to have missed a few fundamentals of good website for SME. So before you dive into online branding and join the social web, make sure you’ve covered the basics:

1. ROLL UP YOUR SLEEVES
   If you own a small business and are planning to launch a website,  you want to be able to make minor updates on your own. If you are using a web designer, this is something he or she will need to take into account. The aim is for you to be able to make simple changes: add a new staff member to your “team” page, change prices, or fine-tune a product description. Same thing applies if you already have a website: find someone to show you which software to use, and how to make textual changes. HTML isn’t scary, and anyone can learn the basics in a few hours.
2. KEEP YOUR SITE UP-TO-DATE & SWEAT THE DETAILS
   This follows from the above: if you need to involve (and pay) someone every time you want to make a change to your site, you’ll waste time and money, and might even avoid updates just to save money. Which means your website will soon look out-of-date. If customers can spot that you haven’t updated your site in months or even years, you’re hurting your brand. If it’s 2009 and the copyright line on your website still reads © 2008, that’s as much a sign of neglect as dusty shelves in a grocery store.
3. AVOID THE FLASH TRAP
   Yes, a Flash-based site can look stunning. But if your visitors just want to find out if your salon is open on Sunday, a glitzy intro is an annoying waste of time. If you’re convinced that animated graphics are the best way to show off your product, make it optional: let your visitors decide if and when they want the full tour.
4. TEXT NEEDS TO BE SEARCHABLE
   This is something we still see too often: text in jpegs and gifs. The bulk of text on your website needs to be in text format. If you can highlight the text with your mouse, you’re fine. If not, it’s likely that the text is inside an image, where it’s generally hidden from search engines. And if you’re looking to get traffic to your website, you don’t want to play hide-and-seek with Google.
5. DON’T MAKE THEM GUESS
   Be crystal clear about what you do and what you offer. What are you selling? What does your product do? This is information that needs to be visible on your homepage, and a first-time visitor needs to be able to ‘get it’ as quickly as possible. Use short sentences and illustrative images to get the point across. And make sure that important details are easy for customers and potential customers to find, with as few clicks as possible: how to contact you, where they can find you, when you’re open, etc.

Done? Then it’s time to start marketing your website!.

Internet marketing is a very broad subject. If you understand how broad offline marketing and sales is, it is the same for online or internet marketing. Therefore, in order for your online marketing campaign to be successful, there must be a group of marketers that truly focus on doing it. It is complex and the methods are variety. Fortunately there are few distinguished techniques for you to start. While the others, they can be implemented later accordingly.

1) WEBSITE - Why having a properly designed website is very important to optimize your online marketing?

The purpose of marketing is to create leads.  Once you have leads, then it is up to the sales team to close the deal. Among the leads, there are people whom you can close them right on the spot. For others, there must be some leads nurturing effort before they are convinced to engage on your products or services.

The campaign that you make to get people to visit your website is called marketing. It can be via both ways; online and offline or just one at a time. Once the visitors are at the home page, your website is taking the role of a salesman. Therefore, it is not wrong to say that your products’ website is your online sales men. That factor alone is a very good reason for you to invest for a well designed website.

Now, you’ve understood the function of your website. Let’s get to understand in brief about what are the visitors’ expectations and behaviours about any website:

• People come to web sites to satisfy goals, to do tasks, to get answers to questions.
• They come for information, for the content that they think (or hope) is there
• Answers a question or helps them complete a task
• Information is easy to find and easy to understand
• They expect the content to be accurate, up to date, and credible
• They don’t read much, especially before they get to the page that has the information they want.
• Even on information pages, they skim and scan before they start to read.
• They want to read only enough to meet their needs.

Let’s discuss about the vital points to consider….opps! I’m sorry. I have to catch an appointment now. We’ll continue later, ok?

Let’s get a very short and firm conclusion on the differences between a beautiful website and a sales website.

• Beautiful Website

A beautiful website is a website that triggers the “WOW!”  gesture from your most first time visitors. There’s less needs of bragging out values that you offer or displaying your featured clients. Simple words should be enough.

Even if there are good copies, visitors will tend to be more ‘hypnotized’ by the design. The design tells it all. You’ll have numerous leads asking for your service. All you need to do is to market your website. Most of the time, these kind of websites are suitable for web design firms.

• Sales Website

A sales website is not necessarily beautifully design. It’s more about the content. Yes, it’s CONTENT! CONTENT! CONTENT! I’m not going to say much about this. Showing you practical examples would be the best.

If you go to www.cworks.com.my I am totally convinced that most of you will agree with me that there’s not much of great artistic values on the whole website. But guess what? They are a multimillionaire company that recently expended their business in Middle East! The odd is, their website is their MAIN marketing channel. Their website has all the vital information needed to convert visitors to be their sales leads.

Now, lets get a look of a website that has quite good artistic values plus really great content; www.asterdata.com. This website highlights their entire strong value proposition and they’ve structured it well. They seem to know much about ‘Information Architecture‘.

Next, the most excellent example of a sales website is www.salesforce.com. Have a look of it yourself. I think it is the best sales website I’ve ever see. Their content is top notch!.

Lastly, if you want to learn on how to create great content for your own website, learn from the expert. It’s not going to be easy but you just need to go through the learning curve. You’ll get there eventually. If you have time, go to this link http://www.redish.net/writingfortheweb/ and think again on how have you craft the content of your website.

The internet is full with the geek jargon  such as “social media”, “blogging”, “RSS”, “Web 2.0″ and their like. The Web has created its own set of words, but their popularity change over time.  More and more jargon being created meaning it getting harder for all of us to catch up.  Pingdom had the effort to compile this trend and you can see the full list on their website. Here is some major trend that hits us the past few years.

• “Web 2.0” peaked in 2007 and has been decreasing in 2008.
• The ever-popular “cloud computing” actually dropped sharply late in 2008 after having been increasing rapidly since late 2007.
• While the interest for “blogging” hasn’t changed much over the last couple of years, “microblogging” has seen a rapid rise since early 2007 (presumably due to Twitter).
• “Blogger” has been increasing four years straight.
• “Ecommerce” is decreasing.
• “RSS” is decreasing.
• “Affiliate program” saw a sharp increase during the second half of 2008.

I personally hope that Aidan will continue upgrade itself to keep-up with this everchanging trends.

Web design doesn’t exist. It is a myth. And it’s tired.

What does exist is graphic design, and GUI (graphic user interface) design, which are the latest instances in design history. They both encompass traditional design elements – personality, tone, metaphor – but place a far greater emphasis on information architecture (IA).

Usually (arguably), graphic designers help storytellers and programmers make sense of their writing and messaging for a larger Internet audience. More often than not they fail; occasionally they are on the edge of disaster, and on rare occasions they get it right.

A lot is written about web usability and how it is a mix of technology, sociology, philosophy, communication… and of course web design. There are thousands of blogs about web design, telling you how to do this, and how to do that. Recipes and design “tips and tricks” are all over the Internet. Do you want to be serious, corporate, funny, casual, rare, medium rare, well done? Successful? Of course you want to be successful. Who doesn’t? Promises are made and then graphic wizards work their magic and you are suddenly the proud owner of a beautifully designed website - whatever that means.

What we see every day are streams of indistinguishable graphics, cheap wholesale photography, meaningless marketing messages (“solutions” being my favorite), safe color palettes, derivative designs (I want it to look like The Mac site!), poor execution of interactivity and multimedia (could we have a Flash slide show with sound and really cool transitions) and so on…

Slowly, inevitably, the Internet is being transformed into the biggest garbage dump in the world… and web designers are partly to blame. We have no business without clients, which means we are hostage to the limitations our clients impose. But what this demands of us is greater client education in the art of the possible. It is our job to inspire our clients to see beyond what exists, to break barriers and capture the greater customer engagement opportunities that only the web enables. We have been given an incredible tool but rarely do we stretch it to capacity. Our industry is hesitant to embrace new ways of communication. Marketers rely too much on the old rules of graphic design that belong to traditional print and broadcast media, and which need to be left in traditional media. We are all on a new and different level of communication, which opens new doors, new opportunities, a brave new world if you will, that the few and the courageous have entered and the majority have ignored.

Together, we need to stop talking about static brochures, and start talking about Information Architecture, Storytelling and online community engagement.

So, what can be done?

Design does not, and should not, work on it’s own, creating an empty and meaningless vessel. Design for the web should be a cleverly crafted part of the story telling; it is in fact a critical part of the story. Design for the web is not a box into which we put text and stock photos, links and endless tripe about who we are and why we’re great… as if the world were waiting for us. We further abuse the medium when we appear cheap and obvious; appealing to the lowest common denominator and ignoring the intelligence of good customers, online communities and interested prospects.

The concept and form begin as fine art, and the final product deserves to be no less of a work of art. Incorporating an original concept and high quality content, both textual and visual, with every single project seen as the first one, and the only one. This is a world you envision, create, populate, form out of meaning – it is not a picture – it is a universe unto itself.

This creative process involves planning, research, learning, insight, documentation, ideation, presentation, and production. All of which showcases creativity at its best.

There is no limit to what you can accomplish, just as there is no limit to the companies who shortcut the process, and shortbus their results.

AidanTech website design service, Slvridge, is proud to have served the national armed services. Our clients list recently includes a trio of military organizations, locally and internationally: the Malaysian Armed Forces Veterans Council (MVATM), the Malaysian Royal Ordinance Corps Veterans Organization (VEKOD) and the World Veterans Federation (WVF)

Maybank will launch its new Maybank2U website.

Called M2U 2.0, the major revamp created a new look and feel from the previous Maybank2U website that had its major revamp 7 years ago when it was first launched in year 2000, making it the first internet banking site in Malaysia.

The new themed however was build on the same technical platform. Maybank catalogued all 3,000+ pages on Maybank2u.com, consolidated and reorganised them into groups that were more intuitive based on usability tests conducted with Maybank2u.com customers.

The page templates were designed specifically for the different types of content across the portal, which more effectively highlighted the site content and assisted users in learning about Maybank’s products, finding a product or to conduct internet banking transactions.Maybank2U.com currently has 4.5 million registered user with 1 million active users. It handles over 30 million monthly transaction with a value of RM3.3 billion and has a monthly page view of 157 million making it the leading internet banking portal in Malaysia.The new site will go online tonight replacing the older site and will be launched tomorrow (15 October 2008).

Flash is a multimedia format, a web technology that allows graphic movement and animation. Flash makes the designers more flexible and gives them grounds to create animations and develop interactive movies and images that can be kept in the website that makes the website more attractive and interactive. 

Should you use Flash on YOUR web site?

Advantages

• Flash uses vector graphics, which means that the graphics can be scaled to any size without losing clarity/quality.
• Flash gives the viewer a “high-tech” impression of your organization that is very impressive.
• Flash can be used to create interactive animation for entertaining “Splash” pages, ad banners and even games.
• With Flash you can deliver to your audience engaging applications and web interfaces such as training courses, tutorials and presentations.

Disadvantages

• There are a variety of reasons why Flash content may be inaccessible. First, Flash files require a plug-in called the Flash Player. Many older browsers do not support this plug-in so individuals using those browsers will not be able to view Flash content.
• Flash contents take longer to load due to bigger file size. Many viewers get annoyed when they have to wait for the Flash presentations to load and will end up going elsewhere instead of waiting.
• For full Flash websites, the “Back” button does not work. If you navigate within a Flash object, the standard backtracking method takes you out of the multimedia object and not, as expected, to the previous state.
• Link colors don’t work. Given this, you cannot easily see where you’ve been and which links you’ve yet to visit. This lack of orientation creates navigational confusion.
• The “Make text bigger/smaller” button does not work.
• Flash reduces accessibility for users with disabilities. (Although the latest version “Flash MX” supposedly addresses many of these issues.)
• The “Find in page” feature does not work. In general, Flash integrates poorly with search.
• Internationalization and localization is complicated.  Text that moves is harder to read for users who lack fluency in the language.

Aidan Slvridge can help implement any kind of Flash technology, from flash intros, flash banners and fully flash websites. Visit our portfolio too see several flash samples.

So, to Flash or not to Flash… that is the question. The answer is up to you..

One of our services is website consultation and development. So It’s natural to kick off the blog with some understanding why does your company need a website? Coca-Cola had survived the great depression in the 20’s and 30’s without a website. So why do we need a website now then?

A website is an extremely valuable tool that bolsters your existing marketing, sales, recruitment and communications effort. In fact, if your business is not online or your existing site is unprofessional or ineffective, then you are losing sales opportunities. A good website will help you reach and retain customers!

But how do you go about finding out your companies needs and ultimately, finding out the need for a website? Here are a few questions to ponder, with a few answers to go along with them…

1. Do you currently (or would you like to) use email to communicate within your business and to your customers/vendors? If so, you will need a domain name in order to send and receive corporate email, which is the first step to getting a website. Slvridge’s solutions can develop a website tailored to your specific professional appearance and personal style. We strives to create a functional website designed to be completely user freindly while also giving a very professional look and feel to attract new customers to your business.

2. Do the people in your business’ target market spend time online? If your customers are online part of the time, then they may be looking for your business online. This is an extra medium for you to capture their interest and inform them about your business and your products/services.

3. Do you seek a higher return on your investment than what you’re currently using? Determining your ROI can be very tricky online. A well designed and well managed website will help you to not only achieve these goals, but achieve the repetition of these goals. If you sell to a customer once, that’s great, but if you can sell to that same customer 10 times or 100 times that’s even better. It’s far easier to sell to existing customers than to try to get new ones.
So now it is your call!