LW design BLOG

Promoting your business

Producing a business card, a leaflet, brochure, advert or website.

Good design sells. As does interesting copy and attention grabbing images.

Poor design can damage your business and your brand. If you design a flyer yourself, in a desk top package like publisher or word, people can tell you have done the job on a budget, which may give off the wrong impression!

Spend more on the design and buy a lower quantity of a higher quality product. Or combine the two by taking advantage of our monthly offers, our skills and knowledge, to produce products you’re proud to be associated with and comfortable handing out to clients.

PRODUCTION

One of the biggest obstacles with design for print or the web is getting the content together. Here is a checklist to help you gather information for a designer to weave their magic and create print or web ready files

PLANNING

1) What are you looking to produce?
A business card for networking?
A flyer explaining your products and services or courses
A website or blog. Do you need to regularly update the content?

2) Why do you need this product?
Is it to enlighten?
To remove confusion about what it is you actually do.
Or just to sell more stock

3) Who is it for?
Existing Customers or New customers or both?

4) When do you need it by?
Remember to factor in additional time for the designer and printer to be able to produce it in time! And include additional time for errors or reprints!

SETTING GOALS

Sometimes it helps to start at the end and work backwards. This can help with timescales, to see if you have time to meet a deadline.

1) What are you trying to achieve?
Is it just to understand your business better or to gain more loyal customers

2) How will you measure this?
Ask how the customer found you? i.e from your Website, your flyer, or a recommendation?
Does your website have stats or Google Analytics installed?

3) Do you need help?
for example a copywriter, a designer, a distributor

4) How realistic are your Goals?
Will you struggle to gather the content?
Do you have the budget for the product you require?
Is it fit for purpose?

CONSIDER YOUR MESSAGE

1) Who is your audience?
Anyone?
A specific age group or sex?
Is it a fun or serious product?

2) What do you want your visitors to do?
Buy from you?
Recommend you?
Complain to you?
Learn from you?
This is where you need to provide a call to action, either emailing a sales or service contact, or calling or completing an online form or transaction.

3) Why are your products or services better than another businesses?
are they value for money?
Are you a local, reliable service?
Will your products be effective and provide the solution the customer is looking for?

PRODUCING THE ARTWORK

1) Supplying Content
If you can supply the following, LW design can produce your artwork and send you a pdf proof.
A print ready logo
Content: written text, supplied as a word file or in the body of a email.
Images, graphics or photos.
Or you can supply print ready pdfs.

Don’t worry, if you are missing some of the above, we can produce them for you or locate stock photography.

Quite a lot of information to consider but if work through the above list, you will either achieve your goal or realise you need help. Or maybe you’ll find it’s just better to wait for the right time to market your products and services, and do it properly…

Why you need a Website

Your Business Never Sleeps - Presumably your business is “customer focused” and is there for them even when you are not. With a website your business never sleeps 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, your customers can get all the information they need when you are not around or place an order when you are out to lunch.

It is instant and dynamic. Your business’s offering are shown on a computer monitor instantly and  updates, changes and any new information can appear in a moment on your website. Enabling your customers to be kept right up to date as far as what your business is offering.

Your competitor has a website – but that’s OK just make sure that yours is better, more attractive, more informative and easier to use and it will be them that will be left catching up to you.

There are two types of businesses – Those that have a website and those who need a website. With the speed that the technological market place moves these days a business without a website is at a severe disadvantage.

Why Use a Graphic Designer?

First impressions really do count and none more so with all forms of marketing material which represent a company or organisation. If well designed and of good quality such material will present your business in a favourable and professional way and, if required, help you to build your brand image.

Graphic design is essentially a visual problem solving exercise. With the use of different typefaces and graphical illustrations the designer’s challenge is to create something that is not just pleasing to the eye but also functional and memorable.

By functional we mean it must clearly convey the message or information required by the client and do so within the image and tone desired by the client. An attractively designed instruction manual for a product may look great but if it is confusing or difficult to understand you will soon forget its attractiveness!

Graphic Designers have an understanding of all these issues which affect presentation through extensive design training and experience of what “Looks Right”. Without this training and understanding it is very easy, with all the means available nowadays, both to “design” and get things very wrong (ie wrong use of colour, typeface, layout and size of text etc) creating a product which is both unattractive, of little use and a waste of money!

Everyone can afford good design – An Example
What is more important to you? How many leaflets you hand out or how many orders you get? You could mail 5,000 badly designed leaflets and get no orders. Or, you could send a thousand with a clear and interesting design and win say a dozen orders. The difference is design. So unless your budget is zero, you can definitely afford good design – see it as an investment, not an extra cost…

Healthy profits come from healthy optimised web pages!

That’s right, we’re offering you the chance to improve your web site’s Google rankings with a FREE Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) health check on your web site’s home page.

The FREE health check covers your sites’ all important home page only, checking the fundamental elements are in place to gain further exposure in the search engine natural listings.

The FREE Health Check

The SEO health check will review:

• Meta/Page Title
• Meta Keywords
• Meta Description
• Relevant header tags
• Content relevance
• Alt Tags

Book your FREE Search Engine Health check online now!

Complete the form below with upto four key words and we’ll get back to you

Name:

Email Address:

Web site address:

Enter 4 key words here:

Enter web form code

 

How we’ll do it:

Before we start the FREE Health Check, we’ll ask what you estimate your customers are typing into Google to find you….and we’ll take it from there by returning a summary report on how things stand based on the information you supply. The report will make suggestions and recommend actions which will improve search engine ranking.

This SEO health check is FREE for your sites home page…so its a win win situation. Our recommendations will improve your site’s rankings if implemented.

The report will also quote a price to carry out the recommendations. Remember, we only recommend where are sure we can improve your overall Google ranking within an agreed time-scale and sensible price.

For further SEO information call LW Design: 01306 876203

RSS Feeds - what are they?

RSS feeds allow you to see when websites or blogs have added new content. You can get the latest headlines and video in one place, as soon as its published, without having to visit the websites you have taken the feed from.

Feeds are also known as RSS. There is some discussion as to what RSS stands for, but most people plump for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. In essence, the feeds themselves are just web pages, designed to be read by computers rather than people.

Brand Identity

Brand identity design is concerned with the visual aspects of a company or organization’s “Look or Feel”. A brand identity design is the visual element that represents how a company wants to be seen; it is the company’s visual identity, and is how a company illustrates its ‘image.’

A company’s brand identity can be represented in terms of design through a unique logo, or signage, and is then often integrated throughout all the elements of a company’s materials such as business cards, stationery, packaging, media advertising, promotions, and on the internet. Brand identity may include logo design. Brand identity development is usually a collaborative effort between graphic designers and the client.

The benefit of Brand Identity can be fully understood within large organisations where the brand is so strong (Coca Cola, Nike, Shell etc) that one only has to see a small part of their logo to recognise the company. Their Brand constantly reinforces their image, name and what they represent

Brand Identity is just as essential for small businesses operating in a competitive environment, it will give an advantage over the competition by constantly reinforcing the identity of the company through all of its communicated material (marketing, stationery, website, advertising, recruitment etc)

Can a new Brand Identity assist your company in these difficult times for businesses?

Would a new Brand Identity help with your customer recognition and lift you above the competition?

Business Card Design

In this digital age of laptops, PDA’s and mobile phones etc it seems that the humble business card has proliferated. It has become more than just a source of contact information and become an enticing glimpse into the business culture
“the more memorable the card, the more memorable the contact”

Our eyes are constantly bombarded with attention grabbing information and in this context the business card has become more eye catching and elaborate. Limitations of “look and Feel” exist only within the designers mind. Some of the most memorable can be developed within the tightest of budgets.

These little, unique “company salesmen” often travel from individual to individual and can become many times removed from the originator. The can make their way into the hands of distant but potential contacts. All this because of good memorable design to reflect the personality of a company.

What difference does good graphic design make to business card acceptability and where is the best place to purchase business card printing ?

Why use printing.com

Obviously, as a printing.com franchise, we will want to promote the business opportunity provided by printing.com.

It hasn’t been an easy transition from sole trader to a limited company, as we were stuck in our ways and used to a traditional method of purchasing print. Integrating printing.com into our business was a painful experience, the thought of losing our hard fought identity to printing.com was difficult to swallow.

However, time has proven, the decision to take on the challenge of a bolt on franchise was worth the headache. The system works, the quality of print is first class, customers are always happy with the end result and, on most occasions, they receive exceptional value for money.

Each month we promote our “Offer of the Month“, a range of half price print products to help you promote your business successfully.

If you have used dorking@printing.com, and would like to leave some feedback below on your experience of using the printing.com, we would be glad to hear from you.

Top Ten web page optimisation tips

Below is a Top-Ten list of checks we carry out to ensure our web pages will be indexed by a search engine:

1. Make sure your domain name is relevant to your service or product. Try to buy a domain name with keywords in it, not your name or company name.
2. Save the webpage with a search engine friendly filename, i.e. website-design.html.
3. Match the filename to the page title.
4. Include the page title in the meta tag “description“.
5. Include the page title and keywords in the meta tag “keywords“.
6. Ensure the page title is in the Heading One tag.
7. Include, within a well written article, the page title keywords.
8. Make sure you have quality content that will encourage the reader to read on or link to another part of your website.
9. Link to appropriate pages within your website.
10. Ensure links contain keywords and a title.

If you have any useful suggestions or tips we can add to this list, please do leave a comment

LW design Blog

No doubt you’ve heard about Blogs and Blogging…but what’s it all about? And what can they do for me?

Well, for the uninitiated, Blogs can do lots for your web site. Put simply, Blogs are a great way to communicate with others online.

They offer several advantages over traditional web sites. The main advantages Blogs have over a traditional web site is that Blogs are easy to update and people can contribute to them.

As mentioned above, Blogs are a two way interactive dialogue. This is good news because, as others add information to your Blog, search engines are finding that content and picking it all up – thus helping your overall rankings.

As we said, other can contribute information to your Blog. This is performed by others making a comment to a post. You, the owner of the Blog, make posts and people respond to them via comments. You, the administrator, have overall control over incoming comments. Therefore comments you deem as inappropriate, don’t need to published – you’ve got total control over content.

What LW Design can do for you:

1. Explain how a Blog may help your site
2. Customise a Blog with your company branding and integrate with your website
3. Set up and configure your Blog
4. Show you how to administer the Blog
5. Optimise Blog content for search engines

Blog software is FREE!

But LW Design will configure, brand and show you how to use your Blog.

Prices start from as little as £400.00.