The Key Elements in Web Design for a Small Business

A small business’s website is a crucial aspect of its marketing and branding endeavours, as it’s all about attracting eyeballs to the business website. Potential customers visit a site explicitly for its content and navigation, which are critical for the success of a business webpage.

Let’s check on the essentials of web design for small business:

Target Market and Objective

It’s vital to first delve into the research pattern of your target audience and the objective of your webpage before getting the webpage designed. The content and design of your website is based on your target market and your business model. Clarity on these two parameters signifies added readers, subscribers, trades or leads depending on the objective of your webpage.

Design

The web surfers have very less concentration span. They quickly scan through a webpage to check the content before engaging themselves. If they believe they are on the correct page, they slow down to read the full storyline. To augment the user's exposure to the small business web design, simplify the homepage with basic colours, designs and organise the content for more eyeball scans. A flashy design, with dancing images on the page just does not add any value to the website and are difficult for downloading on smart phones and tablets.

Navigation

Many websites fall short to be able to be navigated properly and inadvertently create an exasperating experience for potential visitors. The small business web design needs to have seamless navigation structure to keep visitors hooked on to its site. The website navigation should be effortless and natural for the user; so it's imperative to make the pages and sections easy and logical with the use of icons, logical groups and location information.

Content

The user on the net are looking for something specific, the web design for small business should ensure to impress them with well written, valuable and green content. The website should be most up-to-date with information about the company and products or services for customers to perceive and gauge the magnitude of your business. Fresh and green content is also a hit for SEO, you can refrain from getting your content stale by integrating a frequently updated blog or linking it to your social media tweets.

Many small business entrepreneurs tend to cram their homepage with extraneous items resulting in an unprofessional, cluttered, overwhelming and unreadable page. If a user cannot follow the content, it leads to low traffic, a high rebound rate and a poor page rank leading the small business back to the drawing board to start afresh!

Dispelling Some Myths Associated with Hiring a Virtual Secretary

Many business owners nowadays are opting to delegate their secretarial work to a virtual receptionist, rather than appointing an internal full time secretary. Appointing a virtual employee is one of the finest business decisions that a small business setup can take to keep their overheads low without compromising the quality of work.

In spite of the advantages the model brings to the table, it has strong reservations amongst some owners of small businesses. Let’s discuss about the common misperceptions prevalent regarding outsourcing of work to a virtual assistant and ways to overcome the same.

Not sure of the model: Any professional is certainly accustomed to deal with employees in person. However, gradually it is seen that the interactions and communications with staff are taking place most of the times online or virtual with the use of phones, Skype, e-mail, video conferences. This model is no different from that, in fact you eradicate the necessity of physical proximity and can source first-rate talent from anywhere in the world.

Not confident of what work they do: The thumb rule is that they can do similar capacity of work or more like your in-house virtual secretary. Stimulate your thought process to understand the advantages of virtual delegation; it can be an element of leadership effectiveness that can translate into further growth of your business. Stay focused on what you do best for your business - thinking, writing, and consulting and offload the rest of the work to a virtual assistant.

Disconnected from daily business issues: This holds true for all organisations, when the field staff and interstate branch offices are all located and working remotely, disconnected from the daily routine business concerns. Like them, you need to connect with your virtual assistant through weekly conference calls, skype or social media.

Working hours of virtual assistant: Get clarity on the work by enlisting the priorities, estimate the time for each task and then offload the same with proper deadlines.

Monitoring and evaluating performance: Well, this is an ongoing challenge for any employee concerned and the evaluation process is simply based on the performance or output given to business.

Trial and testing: The virtual assistant agencies do not assign a virtual receptionist randomly they find. They understand your specific needs and then follow a rigorous selection process.

Share your virtual employees: This depends on the scale of your work; and your capacity to outlay – for it can be easily customised by the agency to suit your needs.

Misuse of important information: You can tackle this problem by appointing a virtual secretary from a reputed agency with proper reference and background checks of the assistants done and applying appropriate policies in place with agencies, for protection of personal and critical business information.

Be open and stop perceiving the model as an added expense. With time, this can augment your business or your career to the next level. It is definitely less pricey, less risky and an ideal investment decision, and a good alternative to hiring a full-time employee.

Big ! is Not the best for Mobile application Logo Design Cairns

Logo design needs to begin with a great idea or concept, sketched with some visuals to fetch life into it. Graphic design Cairns firms say that the toughest challenge is in the application logo to be conspicuous amongst thousands of other designs.

As individuals, we are accustomed to perceive that big sizes at all times are better. The element of size for us authenticates boldness, and an intrinsic value stating bigger objects pack more punch! However, in the domain of logo design specific to mobile applications, being big is a crime! It is regarding communicating the power of your brand in a small icon.

Let us discuss the parameters for designing the world of small logos, intended for mobile applications.

Striking

The logo design Cairns companies strive to create logos for various application platforms in small-sized icons, yet striking on their own right.

Space constraint

It is implicitly difficult to express your ideas in such a small space. The mobile application images can vary depending on the medium; however, a standard specification of 16 by 16 pixels is what is followed.

Clarity

The other challenge is to keep the same clarity of image in the minimised or small canvas. The icon may look grand on its own, but when scaled down to actual size it may be difficult to distinguish the intrinsic details. So it is imperative to create a simplified, brighter and bold logo that can draw the same idea but with better clarity.

Color Palett

The latest technology in mobile screens has far superior color profundity and smoothness, but they differ widely with the diverse mobile models. In consequence, Graphic design Cairns companies make it necessary for their designers to work within the original 16-color palette to maintain consistent high-class color shades across all mobile devices.

Visual legibility

The logo design should at least match tangentially to the full-sized logos from the parent brand of the product to give a seamless brand identity of the product across various mediums.

Simplicity Ideate more but keep the visual simple, as elaborate icons in a competitive market place does not come out well on small screen devices.

Adaptive

The last leg of challenge in creation for logo design cairns firms lies is tuning them to be adaptive to gear up for functioning, in all standard or landscaped orientation. It is a real balancing act of optimising and creating a logo for desktops, tablets and mobile devices with diverse screen sizes and interfaces, without affecting or slowing down the applications or devices.

It is all about the perception in designing, as many graphic designers consider it an art, but considering mobile application logo designing, it’s definitely real science. The processes of designing are well laid out - you need to blend them with your ideas to make a winning edge in this fiercely competitive world of logo designing!

Benefits of Hiring an Online Personal Assistant for a Startup’s Processes

It’s always a hard-hitting task for a green field venture to decide on whether to hire a virtual assistant, or to handle everything on its own. In addition, for a home start up, it also becomes difficult to accommodate the assistant’s workplace. However, with all that a startup business demands, it’s convenient to outsource some of the business tasks to an online personal assistant.

Let’s discuss why a virtual assistant works in favour of a start up.

Time and Value

Outsourcing your jobs to an online assistant will dramatically shrink your secretarial tasks and add to your time to commit for the growth of your business. If you look into the value proposition of the model, the per hour outlay on a virtual assistant is much less in comparison to the real value you create for your business.

Cost

To hire a full time in-house personal assistant would be an additional outlay of a fixed salary, benefits, entitlements and training for a person. This generally is simply unaffordable and an avoidable outflow for start-ups.As an alternative, a monthly flexible fee paid for the services rendered by online assistants is lucrative for start-ups.

Outlining Business Processes

The start up company requires outlining the workflow processes for marketing, sales, and administrative tasks, ahead of hiring the personnel for respective functions. A virtual personal assistant can do an incredible job in putting the written process documents for a start up, saving time for the founders.

Business Communications

A start up requires being very active on networking and social media along with general communications on emails. An online assistant can come to aid in handling company emails, sales queries, live chat windows and getting the onerous task of month-end reports on time. A virtual personal assistant can competently manage all these jobs at a negligible cost to the start up.

Reaching the Market

In a start up, when you launch your product, all the back end processes need to be streamlined, along with collection of post launch queries and feedback from the market. An online assistant works proficiently to take care of all the pre and post launch activities so that you can focus on the product launch.

Iteration and relaunch

The initial product launch is never streamlined and do encompass teething issues. Quite a few times, there might be requirements to iterate and relaunch the product quickly. An online assistant collects and focuses on customer’s feedback for businesses to act upon and make modifications or additions on their product.

Most entrepreneurs need a paradigm shift of their thought process to outsource some business work to an online personal assistant to ease the company’s overheads, and at the same time, not bring in any compromise on business processes.

Benefits of Designing a Website with a Freelance Web Designer

Every business, whether it’s a non-profit organisation or a business oriented one needs a website. The web is now the centre of our universe and hence the content, interface, appearance, visibility, and target audience of the webpage are deemed as the most vital facets while designing the site.

A web designer has a critical role to play. In fact, the hiring of a web designer is one of the most crucial factors in deciding the success of your website. There are myriad of companies, agencies and freelancers rendering their services in the market and as a small business owner, you need to make the right preference for your business.

Let’s discuss how a freelance web designer can meet the challenges of web designing for small business houses.

Why go for experienced designers?

All agencies categorise the assignments to fit the budgets or project cost of the clients. Quite often, junior designers are allotted to work on projects of small business houses. Although a junior web designer not essentially signifies a bad designer, but it is advisable to appoint an experienced designer, who could be a freelancer, in order to work on designing the website of a small business house.

• Expertise

An experienced web designer, who may be a freelancer, possesses awareness and understanding of SEO, content management and other site development technologies, which are quite important while designing any website.

• Cost Advantage

The website design cairns freelancers provide innovative and interactive deals than any other designing agencies at competitive prices. Generally, any agency gets the work outsourced for completing the task. Technically, a freelance workforce does the web designing process. It’s always advisable to go directly to a freelance designer in the first place as this could turn out to be a cost effective decision. The competitive edge of the freelancers is in their amazingly low overheads. In comparison, the overheads of an agency are high. The rate per hour of a freelancer is very low.

• Focus

Web designing agencies are involved in large projects as they are scalable and a small project works out unprofitable for them. In contrast, a freelance designer is prepared to take on all size and capacity of projects and usually focus on giving customised solutions to the small businesses.

• Flexibility

In distinction to various web design companies, website design cairns freelancers proffer their clients with the biggest asset ‘flexibility in operations’ that perfectly suits small business needs. Flexibility is the most important freelancer’s asset. They also think out of the box and work on a project in different innovative ways and in order to hasten work, may also rework on their earlier schedules.

The freelance web designers are self-employed individuals. They are seen to be mostly passionate and accountable to deliver the job before the stated deadline. A sincere freelancer would proactively attend to your calls and resolve all your queries with interest to create a positive impression, to be recommended and referred by you to newer leads.

Benefits of a Professional Copywriter and Bookkeeping Tools for Small Businesses

There are many errands associated with running your own company, and in the midst of your juggling act, some small, but imperative tasks can get overlooked.

Let’s explore how professional tools in small business bookkeeping and a professional copywriter can help save precious time and energy for small business owners.

Bookkeeping tools

Smart, insightful bookkeeping tools assist and provide solutions, that signal when customer bills and invoices are due and send real-time reports too that help you to gauge financial state of affairs.

i) Cloud computing

There is a shift from PC based small business bookkeeping to the cloud which provides a plethora of bookkeeping and accounting applications that are advantageous for small business owners. They enable users to work remotely from any computer or hand held device with an internet connection. The applications automatically create back up data as well as grant access to information for other business stakeholders.

ii) Automate to stop human error or duplication of work

The use of automated system dramatically saves your time and increase the accuracy of data transferred and accounted in the financial statements. With this fresh breed of online bookkeeping tools, there is reduction in the chances of all bookkeeping errors in business.

Professional copywriter

 

Although it seems simple and easy to do copy writing, sometimes it’s a good initiative to call for a professional copywriter to write the content of your business. Let’s discuss why it’s imperative to have copywriters for your business.

i) The bandwidth and focus 

In the world of content and copy writing, fresh and premium content will always influence and build customer connection. A professional copywriter is trained to understand the strategy behind the content and creates effective articles customised for your business’s growth. He or she is a perfectionist in regards to language, tone, meaning, structure, and the finer points of grammar and its usage that often get neglected by untrained writers.

ii) Professional Content 

Along with the creation of daily content for your business, you entail a specialist to handle your social media space and write e mailers, subscription letters, messages, and tweets to convert fans into customers. A business may also require a specialist on a particular subject to write an article or a SEO based content that doles out business along with good ranking in search engines. These professionals are also well aware of the recent trends, flaws, rages in the content writing world.

iii) Expert Opinion and Guidance 

The winning edge of any professional copywriter is in its proficiency to strategise all customer feedback, survey responses, and social media interactions with customers. Their direct access to customer data, changes the perspective of your content directed to customers.

However, although a talented, well-trained copywriter can help you find your strongest possible marketing message, but as the business owner, you are the one who is ultimately responsible for your story!