Website Design is apparently

The graphic design and coding of web pages, full websites and interactive web applications.

It’s a bit like the story of the man in a hot air balloon who descends and hovers above the ground to ask a passer-by where he is. The passer-by thinks for a moment and then tells him he is standing in a basket, strung beneath a hot air balloon, about twenty feet above the centre of a field. All the information is entirely accurate and totally useless.

While the question was open to all sorts of interpretation, the answer was completely obtuse. In web terms a better way of understanding where it all fits in is to couch the questions differently.

What can you do with a website? What can a website do? Why have a website?

All these are better questions.

What can you do with a website?: You can communicate, transact, manage, administer, promote, brand – the list goes on…

What can a website do?: Talk, listen, sell and buy.

Why have a website: Apart from the expectation, you can make everything you do right now more effective through using a good website well.

If e.g. you advertise online or in magazines, then a website can make that more effective. It extends your message beyond the quick hit and into the extended proposition.

If you retail, a website will help you to sell more goods to your existing customers, and allow you to approach them directly with offers rather than waiting for them to come into your shop.

If you have a service there is probably an expectation that you will have a website. Without a product you only have your ‘brand’ to show and people will form opinions about that and you based on it. Certainly it will be the primary source of research for any prospective client. You can organise your key messages in an unambiguous way, present them properly and leave the right impressions and information with the world outside.
Creative Thing is a unique design firm offering a variety of services from basic Website Design to low cost self-managing websites. We can provide complete e-commerce website development through our own sunsidiary company Starteshop from as little as £199. We have created and launched hundreds of successful websites, for many different types of businesses. We have the creative talent of a successful graphics agency, the technical knowldge of advanced web developers, the know how to get your site performing in Search Engines, and the ability to take your business and develop a compelling web proposition to move it forward.

Our website design clients range from small start-up companies to large corporations and everything in between. With our combined experience in graphic design, website development and e-commerce sites, you can be confident that whatever your project demands, our web developers can deliver.

I read a recent definition of Graphic Design:

Graphic design is the process and art of combining text and graphics and communicating an effective message in the design of logos, graphics, brochures, newsletters, posters, signs, and any other type of visual communication. Today’s graphic designers often use desktop publishing software and techniques to achieve their goals.

Examples: “A brochure that makes watching water boil seem exciting or a business card that entices the recipient to call instead of toss owe at least part of their success to good graphic design — it doesn’t matter if they were created with the latest hot software or an old ink pen.”

I can’t help thinking that this is incomplete. We may be based in Upton Upon Severn a small backwater that makes the news annually when the river floods, but graphic design is a universal experience which makes our view as valid as anyone else’s and more valid if you look at the experience we bring to graphic design – even from Upton Upon Severn. div align=”right”>Story…

Web users take just 50 milliseconds to like or hate a website.

From an article originally by Michael Hopkin in Nature News

Researchers in Canada has shown that the snap decisions Internet users make about the quality of a web page have a lasting impact on their opinions.

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Creative Thing are indebted to a contact of ours who told us at a recent meeting that we did not feature in a Google search for web design in Upton upon Severn. Now, achieving a high search engine listing can be complicated and expensive and take a quite some dedication week in – week out. But for a listing against something fairly focused, such as web design in Upton upon Severn, that should be doable without paying someone else to do it.

We actually thought it would be useful if we treated this as a bit of a case study, illustrating how, with some basic techniques, you can get your site performing against a focused search term without paying an SEO agency. By way of a live demo, we thought we would see how long it takes us to get on to a page one list against the search term “web design in Upton Upon Severn”.

Result: It took one hour of work and less than four hours later Creative Thing were placed second on a Google search for ‘web design in Upton upon Severn’.

With search engine optimisation, there is a 80:20 rule. 80% of what makes a difference can be achieved through 20% of all the options and actions open to you. And using these basic techniques alone we wanted to test how high we could rise on Google for web design in Upton Upon Severn.

Key words: Key words are important. In this case the key words ‘web design in Upton upon Severn’ need to appear on the site with a degree of frequency. Of course they will also need to be sewn into the copy in such a way that it reads well and makes sense. It helps if any key words can be used about six times on each relevant page and if they feature on the home page of the site, then so much the better.

Inbound links: Inbound links from other sites are interpreted by Google as a sign that the target site is a valuable reference point. The more important the referring site, the greater Google will reward you. So e.g. if this site was to achieve an inbound link from a national newspaper site, then it would suddenly shoot up the listings under all of its search terms, including web design in Upton Upon Severn. Apparently fifteen to twenty inbound links will make a massive difference to listing levels, the more important the site the better, so keep plugging away at them.

Fresh content: One of the reasons we choose to use a converted blog as a website, is because it offers us the ability to update frequently without having to tweak our designs or revert back to original design files and edit them. We can simply log in and write a new page as if we were writing an email. So we will refresh our content over the coming days with our objective of promoting Creative Thing as the firm for web design in Upton Upon Severn. We could use other systems for this, but the flexibility of a blog and the ability to change the design from time to time without losing the content is a little too attractive to ignore.

Reporting your site to search engines: It never does any harm to go to the sites of Google, Yahoo, Ask and other search engines and fill in the appropriate online forms telling them about your site. You don’t have to do it every day, but certainly once in a while is a good idea. With a blog (such as this site) it benefits from the links it has programmed into it with the blogging engines. These certainly seem to help its listing in the mainstream search engines.

After trying these things for yourself, you might consider, other strategies, such as dropping links on other sites, placing entries onto forums with web links in your auto signature and other such tactics. Beyond those, pay-per-click online advertising has its part. Certainly if you are serious, using a specialist agency such as our SEO partner Vertical Leap will make a significant impact on search engine position and also your ability to maintain that position.

The basic point here is that before you pay for any search engine optimisation work, try these things for yourself and see how well you can do – it is much cheaper and you might be surprised at how 80% of what you need can be achieved through 20% of techniques out there.

Another year and the best time to put new plans into place. Certainly the amount of free money available through government grants seems to be in plentiful supply. Of course, being in the middle of the flood zone, and as one of very few Business Link accredited web and graphics design firms in the county, we have been able to open up these funding streams for local firms to get them going again after the summer deluge.

Creative Thing are an accredited supplier of graphic and web design services through Business Link. While this is an independent endorsement of our skills, value for money and effectiveness, it also allows us to introduce government funding of up to 50% for many client projects. We have secured funding for web projects, marketing and graphic design based activity in the past. Right now any firm affected by the recent flooding can claim an award of £2500 for projects to help regain their  momentum and all other matched funds remain unaffected.

For further information, contact: David Yates on 0845 388 0338

Seasons Greetings, we hope you have a Happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year. While we are at it, we want to share a website with you that helps feed the world’s hungry. A free daily click at www.TheHungerSite.com funds food paid for by site advertisers.

So instead of a Christmas card, we thought we would ask all our clients, friends and contacts to visit The Hunger Site and click on the big orange button entitled Click Here to Give – It’s FREE!

You might think about bookmarking the site and clicking on the link every day over the next year. This would provide the world’s hungry with over 400 cups of rice by this time next year, because each click automatically provides 1.1 cups of food to the hungry in the third world. This will not cost you anything, it is all done through the support of advertisers on The Hunger Site.

Many thanks and Happy Christmas,

Creative Thing

Creative Thing have set up a strategic partnership with Vertical Leap the one of the UK’s leading search engine marketing firms.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a niche speciality within the sphere of web design. It is no longer credible to claim expertise in both web design and SEO. The two things require different skill sets and processes. However, the web designers and the SEO team do need to work very closely to develop sites which score highly in searches.

So we put the term “SEO” into a Google search and the firm that came top of the list was Vertical Leap. This made them top of our list of potential partners. Now Creative Thing’s potency through applying genuine design principles to the world of marketing design has been harnessed to, Vertical Leap’s superiority as Search Engine Optimisation experts.

This gives Creative Thing’s customers the best of both worlds. A dedicated design led approach made to maximise usability and branding effect, supported by dedicated search engine marketing effort from a team of SEO experts. div align=”right”>Story…

The reason we started Creative Thing is because there was a huge gap in the market for properly designed communication tools, constructed properly with research, and a proper design process. The reason this gap exists is because so many people think that graphic design is an artistic exercise. Something to do with making things look ‘cool’.

This is wrong.

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A little vox-pop exercise:

How many websites have you visited? How many can you remember and visualise right now?

Do you get onto a website, get what you want from it and then get out? Or do you hang around a while and explore it’s content?

Do you like useful websites or nice websites (or perhaps something of both)? Is what you think as nice, also what everyone else thinks as nice?

Do you return to websites? If so is it to get more of the same information or more of the same user experience?

Your answers will probably suggest that you visit a quite a few websites over the course of a week or month, but you do not revisit many websites and you cannot really remember what too many of them were like within about ten minutes. You generally are looking for information or to help you form an opinion about a thing or about an organisation. If you do return to a website, it is because you need to regularly top up on the latest information. You think a website is a reflection of the company behind it. You tend to hate too many whistles and bells getting in the way of finding what you are looking for. Most of your friends and colleagues would agree with you about this.

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Online marketing is one of those phrases which seems to crop up a lot. It usually means “Get me to the top page of a Google search”. However ‘Online Marketing’ is not so narrow a concept. In fact is part of a general marketing effort and usually has a branding core to it.

The web is where people are searching, researching, running projects and whole businesses. It is where you probably already are, but what may not be obvious is why you bothered in the first place. The page ranking on Google is not going to do you much good if your visitors don’t get you when they get there. It all has to make sense, not to you, but to the end user. In the same way that anything you do off-line also has to make sense. And these days they probably have to make the same kind of sense in an integrated way.

This comes down to brand. I do not mean logo, I mean brand as defined by “…a shared perception of a given thing”. It’s what people know you as, and how comfortable they are with your business. What the Americans call ‘Corporate DNA’ – a classic Americanism, but you get what they mean. It is what you are, what you cannot help being it is making the most of your good bits, improving the not so good bits and engaging with the sort of people who will be attracted to your ‘brand’.

To stop short of becoming a lecture about marketing, simply put, marketing on the web is not much different from marketing anywhere else. However, the execution can be much cheaper. If you can provide a reason to return, by involving your visitors, you create a following. And your followers will become your brand ambassadors without asking for any money in return.

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