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Archive for the ‘Advice on Websites’ Category

The Case for Case Studies

Monday, November 7th, 2011

This is me! This is what I do! Hear me roar… umm… or please see my Case Studies page.

Are you wanting to shout your services and great work to the world? Want to advertise without actually advertising? But what you do is SO fantastic how will prospective clients ever believe that you can achieve what you are shouting about?

We need proof they say…

Proof? you want proof? I’ll show you proof!

Please navigate to my case studies page…

Before you can have the perfect case studies page you need a few perfect case studies. Here are some tips on how to create a perfect case study.

5 things your case studies should include:

  1. Break it down – be sure to include a brief breakdown of the case study as an intro. It makes it easy for visitors to find the case study they are looking for quickly and without getting frustrated
  2. Images – images always make things more interesting, if you haven’t helped a client with anything tangible that you can include photos or screenshots of, then you can use stock images, just make sure they are well chosen, match the look and feel of the rest of your site and they aren’t cheesy! Fish Financial used some great quirky images for their case studies.
  3. Headings – breaking your case study into sections is a great idea – but make sure you include headings. Your visitor should be able to easily see who the ‘Client’ is, what the ‘Project’ is, where the ‘Challenges’ lay, an ‘Overview’ of how you planned to help the client, the ‘Work Required’ to achieve satisfaction, the ‘Solution’ and the ‘Result’ where you can say how everything was achieved and also how it has helped the company or client. Try using headings that actually help tell the story – such as “Helping a pet food company increase their earnings by 72%” or “Probate advice for a family of 8”
  4. Testimonials – these are the life of case studies. Testimonials give a name and occasionally a face to the case study – this helps people feel a connection to the client in question and can build trust. If you can convince the testimonial giver to let you use a picture of them, then that’s even better – CWB is a great example of this.
  5. Give me more! – if you have chosen to take our advice and have an intro to begin with be sure your site visitors can find the entire case study easily by either including a link to the full case study or a link to a downloadable PDF of the case study (something that visitors can download and read at their leisure). A Business Innovation makes use of downloadable PDFs for their case studies.

7 reasons to have case studies:

  1. It’s a great way to advertise without actually advertising
  2. It can help evoke emotion by discussing situations that other people may also be in (for instance financial case studies are very important as there will always be website visitors who are retiring, have been retrenched, or just want to save for a better future)
  3. People get a much better idea of what you do by reading real life stories
  4. It’s a lot less “salesly” to tell a story about the services you provide and to let the results and testimonials speak for themselves. You can list statistics to show how a company has grown, become more productive, or made more money. Numbers are always a great way to show how well things are actually working
  5. Everyone likes a good success story
  6. If your clients are also businesses they will get free exposure and SEO benefits
  7. By showcasing a variety of different types of clients, you have a greater chance of the reader identifying with ONE of them and understanding how you can help THEM.

Below are some examples of case study pages that we have done:

A Business Innovation

A Business Innovation - case studies page

A Business Innovation is a company we regularly partner up with on projects. Together we have worked on some great websites AND case studies pages!

This page features all case studies on one page – company name, brief overview, and an image of the websites home pages. If you hover over the images of the home pages the image border changes to red and the website home page image is replaced with the company’s logo. See the cool feature here.

A Business Innovation also makes use of pages dedicated to each case study with a downloadable PDF.

Fish Financial

Fish Financial - case studies page

For the Fish Financial website case studies page we chose a fresh, clean layout to match the rest of the site. All 6 case studies are easy to navigate between with them listed on the left. When on a specific case study the left navigation boxes change colour to show you where you are.

The case studies themselves all have their own individual quirky image to go with them. They include a brief overview of the case study with a quote from the featured client and a PDF download to the full case study.

The Bespoke Wedding Company

The Bespoke Wedding Company - case studies page

The Bespoke Wedding Company has a great reason to have a case studies page. Being a wedding planning company there will always be lovely stories to share, but more importantly loads of amazing photos to show off.

The main case studies page shows all case studies with one large feature image, intro text and a link to the specific case studies. The specific case study pages include a full write-up on the event and the services they supplied. It also has a testimonial from the bride and groom and a lovely gallery to showcase the event and services rendered.

The Bespoke Wedding Company - case studies inner page

Prescience

Prescience - case studies page

Prescience is an integrated media company who focus on film production, financing and sales. They have helped fund movies such as ‘The Kings Speech’, ‘Chalet Girl’ and ‘Horrid Henry’.

Their case studies page needed to show all the projects they have helped fund, the projects that are soon to be released and even ones still in development. Their main case studies page just features the movies name and a recognisable image of the actors in the films, if you click on any of the movie names or the magnifying glasses a cool lightbox pops-up to give you an overview of the movie, from there you can navigate through them all.

Prescience - case studies inner page

 

Karen Haller Colour & Design Consultancy

Being a colour and design consultancy means that there will always be lovely pictures to feature on the case studies page. The main case studies page features 4 case studies – large images, intro, and a link to the full case study.

Each case study has its own page which features a full breakdown of the projects (using those fabulous headings), a testimonial from the client, clever links leading into other parts of the website and a lovely gallery to showcase the colour and design consultancy that was supplied.

OWL Regulatory Consulting

OWL - case studies page

OWL  is a Regulatory Consultancy who have helped many clients. They chose only 3 case studies to feature on their website. It’s a very simple layout and the full case studies all appear on one page.

Based on the fact that the case studies are quite small we used a great drop-down feature. So arriving at the page you see the 3 case studies, headings and images, and if you click on the ‘More’ link then it drops down to show the whole case study.

Clarkson Wayman Ball

Clarkson Wayman Ball - case studies page

Clarkson Wayman Ball are a finance company and have many success stories to share. As we mentioned earlier – adding a testimonial from the client is a great way to get your visitor to connect with the story. CWB managed to get their clients to tell their personal stories and was even able to convince their clients to pose for pictures for the case studies. This really gives a whole other level to them.

They have an individual page per case study which includes the full story, a photo of the client, a downloadable PDF of the case study, a testimonial and a brief introduction to the team members that worked on the project – this is a fantastic way to allow your visitors to ‘meet the team’ and also gives the visitor an idea of who could be working on their specific case. Brilliant!

Clarkson Wayman Ball - case studies inner page

3 things you should know about “Pimp My Website”

Tuesday, October 4th, 2011

Pimp My Website - 6th October 2011 - 11am - 2pm

It’s so exciting that our next event “Pimp My Website” is just around the corner. For those of you who missed the news – it’s Thursday the 6th October, 11am to 2pm, at the amazing venue we have been using lately for our seminars.

Seminars at 38
38 Devonshire Street
London W1g 6qb

We have prepared an array of amazing and useful tips which can be implemented on any website to improve the chances of people reacting in the way YOU want them to do.

Think of your call to action
Many people don’t even think about this when creating their websites. It’s so important to plan this out – what do you want your website visitors to DO? Do you want them to call you, email you, ask for a quote, buy something, share a link to your blog, come to an event? It’s an important concept and needs to be carefully considered.

Ok so what are the three things?

1. I will get right to it! First thing you should know about this event is that it’s all about the Secrets of High Conversion websites. We have stats and everything! And the idea is that every tip, in itself, is easy to implement on any EXISTING website. So, that means it doesn’t take a long time and is therefore not costly. In some cases the changes can be made for free! We also are offering a guarantee on the event.

2. The second thing is that like our other full day events, and even though this is ONLY £50 – we will be serving lunch, refreshments, and our famous Top Left Design cupcakes, made for us by our very own Tamlyn – so talented! Some people come only for the cupcakes, which are delicious – but of course we teach great stuff too!

Top Left Design Cupcakes

3. The final thing everyone should know is by coming along you get two free bonuses. One is a workbook which will be a comprehensive reminder of all the tips and tricks we are sharing – extremely useful. And the other bonus is that we will add our attendees to our internal bulletin where we share cool useful tools (don’t worry we are VERY selective!) that allow us to make our clients websites so great – usually this is ONLY for Top Left Design people but we will be sharing this with all who have come to “Pimp My Website”

Below is the link to book – see you there!!

Should we have professional photography in our website?

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

Yes!

Having good quality images on your site can set you apart from your competitors in a big way. Have you ever been to a website and thought “those pictures are awful”? How did that affect your impressions of the company? I’d be willing to bet that your perception of the company went down some – the quality of your content is directly linked to how your visitors perceive the overall quality of your company.

There’s nothing worse than having a great website designed, only to populate the pages with low quality clipart style stock imagery, or dodgy team pictures.

  • If you are a venue – people will want to see the venue in all it’s glory
  • If you have a physical product – then show off the product with high quality pictures
  • If you have people in your business – (yes we know this means everyone!) – adding team pictures creates trust and transparency

Professional photography really does add a sophisticated and unique feel to your company and products. Below is just a small collection of  professional photography used throughout websites TLD has designed – now you’ll be able to see why professional photography is a must!

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6 Horrendous Web Design No-No’s

Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

Llama

Disapproving llama does not like your use of 90's web design

When it comes to making websites look good, there are a plethora of ways to set a design apart from the rest, without needing to delve into the pit of cliché doom.

A strong design does not need gimmicks, just as it does not need uninspired generic content. The tricky part is finding the balance!

Here are some common culprits, steer clear of these or you might end giving people a migrane – or worse – they might steer clear of your site completely…

Full Text Justification

A website is not a newspaper. Even websites owned by newspapers don’t justify their text. Print layout is very different to web layout, and besides the accessibility issues, it just looks messy:

The River

The 'River' in all it's glory. Yellow = bad.

When you justify text on a website, you can end up with large gaps inbetween text, called “rivers”. You see, when a newspaper with justified text is edited, the designer can determine exactly how the text will look as the material will be printed. This means they can remove any “rivers” and compensate for any ugly spacing. However, there is simply no control over this on the internet. People use different browsers, different screen sizes, and can change the font size for accessibility – so fixing a gap for one machine might mean that it looks terrible on another screen. Don’t justify text on the internet.

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More learning = more teaching!

Sunday, May 22nd, 2011

Social Media - it's not hard - it just take's practice!

We are very lucky to have met the lovely people who work at 38 Devonshire Street. It’s a Dental Practice and Seminar Venue. The venue provides a lovely large room and AV equipment and delicious catered lunch. It is there where this coming Friday I will be joined by Tamsin Fox-Davies for one of our famous joint seminars!

“‎Keren Lerner and Tamsin Fox-Davies make a great team!” (actual quote from Karen Haller who attended our last talk)

Both Tamsin and I constantly learn and keep up to date with latest in the world of social media, SME marketing, online marketing, blogging and design.
Those who have been to see us work together have been impressed by our on-stage chemistry! We hope you can join us and learn about the do’s and don’ts of social media impressions and behaviours, how to become effective influencers, and discover more about the overall magic of social media. it’s going to be information packed and interactive and we have both worked hard to put together valuable and useful information which can be applied to all businesses.

To book visit this link and for the especially observant of you, we are offering a 2 for one deal for those coming in pairs – just email me to ask how to get this!

A blog is not a website – or is it?

Monday, May 2nd, 2011

A blog or a website - which is best?

There are many people who are using blogs as a replacement for a website.

A blog can make up your entire web presence, and has many benefits. Blogs are easy to update regularly, which means you can keep your content fresh. The most recent “post” comes up at the top. You can use it for text, images, video and audio and it takes very little time to put content online.  Blogs are also brilliant for search engines as varied and frequent content means search engines will visit your site more often and this will mean higher rankings. Blogs are also less expensive than a full website. And by having a blog you can build on your credibility because you can continue to showcase your skills, knowledge, expertise and work. And blog posts are more easily shared amongst people on social media, which means your post will have many more views than without a blog.

So, we really love blogs!

For those with a limited budget – having a blog instead of a full website is something we regularly recommend.
In many ways this is better than the other way around – having an out of date website without any social presence or blogging can nowadays look static and old fashioned.

But for optimum usability and to really showcase your business, there are some things that are more easily navigable on a website.

What makes more sense as part of a website

  • A section called”Case Studies” where you can tell some stories about work you have done in the past
  • Specific pages for each of your Services which can explain to people what they can expect
  • A “Meet the Team” section with pictures of the staff and brief bios (we recommend links to their LinkedIn pages)
  • Contact Us page with possibly a form, a map to where you are, and all your main contact details
  • A really clear proposition of what you are actually selling – so people can see what your business is!

Note: Testimonials are good to have everywhere – within each page, on your homepage, and on pages with related content.

What makes more sense as part of a blog

  • Recently launched projects
  • Events and workshops you are running, attending, have run
  • Video blogs reviewing events
  • Video testimonials from clients
  • New partnerships, new deals, new hires within your business
  • Interviews with people in your industry
  • Guest blogs from people who would be of interest to your audience
  • Tips, Step by Steps, and How tos for your clients and contacts
  • Collections and Roundups of things within your industry
  • Reviews of software or tools which are relevant to your audience.

In addition, a standalone blog can have an “about this blog” type area and a blog can often be designed to even look like a website, with the categories placed horizontally accross the top.

So the best option is to?

The ideal scenario is that you would have a website with a blog. This is something we specialise in here at Top Left Design. It allows you to have the best of both worlds – showcase your expertise and be as clear as possible about who you are, what you do, how you add value to your clients/customers.

Below are some examples:

Fish Financial IFAs

Fish Financial IFAs

Bluecoat Wealth Management

Bluecoat Wealth Management

Kubera Wealth

Kubera Wealth

 

Kamaka Executive Coaching for Women

 

 

Kamaka Executive Coaching for Women

The Bespoke Wedding Company

The Bespoke Wedding Company

Owl Regulatory Consulting

Owl Regulatory Consulting

5 hot tips on linking to other peoples websites – guest blog post by Joanna Tall

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

Off to see my lawyer - website

Joanna Tall from Off to see my lawyer has been kind enough to allow us to feature her fantastic 5 hot tips on linking as a post on our blog. The content below is full of useful advice and hot tips when it comes to linking to other people’s websites and creating your own website Terms of Use.

I hope you find the article below useful to you and your business.

5 hot tips on linking

Linking to others’ websites is a good idea PROVIDED you carry out a few little checks. Otherwise you could find yourself in deep trouble (and possibly in need of a lawyer!)

First, check that the terms of the site you want to link to allow you to link to it. You should find the answer in its website Terms of Use which are usually reached via a link from the homepage. If linking is permitted, then:

  • Warn your customers that they are leaving your site, especially if the other site is embedded in your site i.e. looks as if it is part of your site.
  • Make sure your website Terms of Use say that you are not liable for any linked site’s content.
  • Don’t include the linked site’s logos, trademarks or content on your site without their permission or they could bring a claim against you for damages (e.g. forbreach of copyright or ‘passing off’).
  • Make sure you identify the other site’s trademark and/or copyright notices.
  • Ideally have a formal Linking Agreement which not only lessens the risk of the other site being annoyed with you, but can establish a positive partnership and create revenue.

Hot tip: if you don’t have Terms of Use, visit Joanne’s online document shop where they can be bought and downloaded immediately – they are “oven-ready”! Simply go to: www.offtoseemylawyer.com and click on ‘Document Shop’.


A big thank you to Joanna for allowing us to use her top tips!

 

You can find out more information about Joanna and Off to see my lawyer on her website www.offtoseemylawyer.com.

Also follow her tweets here: twitter.com/off2seemylawyer and check out her Facebook fan page too.

How to tell someone their website is ‘pants’

Tuesday, February 15th, 2011

How to tell someone their website is pants!

Recently, one of our new friends from Twitter and Athena emailed to ask the advice on how to tell people in her network that they have a website which is “….(insert own expletive!)…pants!”

This prompted me to put together some tips on tactful ways to help them – we do believe it helps with referrals – if someone has a bad website, we are hesitant in sending their website address out to people we want to refer them to, as their websites don’t represent their businesses as they should and therefore it’s hard for others to believe us that those people are worth speaking to.

If someone you knew had spinach in their teeth, you would tell them, no?
A bad website is like spinach in the teeth of a business – it can put potential clients off!

Here are some tips to help you communicate this to people who you know deserve a better website, because they are nice people!

There is big difference between Traffic vs Conversion

It makes perfect sense that if you get lots of traffic to a website, and people spend only seconds on it before going elsewhere, that search engine traffic is not the be all and end all. Even with all the new amazing ways of driving traffic to your website via social media, you still need to keep them interested with good design and good content!

It really bugs me when people’s first question is “How do I get to the top of the search engines?”

When it should be

“How do I make a website that keeps people interested when they get there”!

So here are some tips on helping people out! (more…)

Linkedin member offer – only 4 available

Friday, January 7th, 2011

One hour consultancy offer for 4 people only – from Linkedin

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Using the online space to market your business

Sunday, November 28th, 2010

The internet is your playground

There are a multitude of options and ways to market small businesses on the internet. Nowadays it’s important to think about the whole internet as your “playground” – rather than just your website!
Most people are familiar with the concept of having a website to market their businesses but it’s important to consider social media and blogging as well. Read on for some tips on how to use each effectively. And please comment at the end! We like comments!

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