The .co domain has arrived!

The new domain extension .co has just become available. The country code for Colombia, .co is also a great choice for a company, commerce or community website.

Demand for the new .co domains is high, but we can check if  your preferred name is still available for registration. So don’t hang about, secure your .co – before someone else does. Contact LW design and we can register the domain for you and point it to your current website.

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.

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