Author: David

If you have not got a website at present and are looking to have one created, it can be easy to get carried away with the amount of functions and gadgets you can add in to it. Each time you add something new to your site, it will most likely incur and additional cost. If budget is limited then you may want to create a list of the essential items you need to have on the site and then the additional ones that you would like to have if budget allows.

When taking to your designer and programmer, be honest about the money you have to spend and explain to them what the main purpose of the site is. If it is to sell products online then the checkout process will need to be straight forward and easy to use. If it is to gain enquiries then you need to make sure you have plenty of opportunities to add in call to action banners and buttons.

Always ask the designer to create a visual of a few of the pages so you can see what it is going to look like before they start to build it for you. This will allow you to make any changes at an early stage hopefully without creating too many additional costs.

Your navigation bar on your website is of utmost importance. It is the place most people will go to when looking for something on your site. It is often positioned along the top of the site so people can quickly go from page to page to find what they are looking for. Moving the navigation to a different position can be potentially damaging to your website visits as you may find that people struggle to know where to go on the site and end up leaving.

If you find you have far too many buttons that need to go on the navigation, rather than splitting it on to two lines which can look messy and may not display well on all devices, think about how you can group them. If you have a tab for each of your services, then see if you can split them into one or more group to shrink the space needed on the nav bar. It may be that some of your services are for businesses and other consumers. If this is the case then you may have the main business and consumer buttons with dropdowns for the services within those categories.

Having the navigation move down the page as you scroll can be another relatively simple but effective technique. It allows visitors to navigate quickly without having to keep scrolling back up. This is ideal for sites with longer pages.

With 2019 well underway many businesses are starting out on a new marketing plan or planning for when they get their new marketing budget later on this year. With Brexit looming over our heads, some businesses have a number of marketing strategies up their sleeve, and will not decide which one to use until they know more about the implications Brexit will have.
Every year you should have a number of goals. Some of these need to be things that you want to do short term and others may be long term goals. When setting marketing goals you need to be realistic and also specific. There is no point in juts saying we want to increase sales, you need to establish exactly how you are going to achieve this. It may be that you want to bring a number of new products or services to market. Each product should have an ideal launch date and a strategy in place as to how you are going to inform your target audience of its release, what marketing platforms you are going to use, which geographical locations you are targeting and how much you are going to spend on the marketing.
Your long term goals may change over time but that’s ok, they do not need to be set in stone. You often find that things happen outside of your control which mean plans have to change and the businesses that are most successful are those that are able to adapt to new situations.