More and more people are embracing social media as a way to engage with businesses and rather than sit on hold in a telephone queue, consumers are turning to media conduits such as Twitter or Facebook as a way to deliver complaints in a way which offers the personal satisfaction of knowing that other consumers are able to view and share your tweets. Twitter can replace a call centre when it comes to dealing with questions and complaints but that doesn’t mean that a business can save some money by employing this useful tool. In fact, it requires a higher level of customer service because businesses need to deal with social media discussions and complaints very quickly. Greviences are no longer channelled through one-to-one discussions over the telephone. Now, because your tweets are in the public domain, anybody can contribute and share with others so businesses need to monitor and/or respond to all traffic almost immediately. It’s what consumers expect. They know that the power balance has shifted towards them and digital battlefields can now be created. This has the potential for businesses to need more staff, not fewer and could therefore prove to be costly. Are you ready?

“If you are actively engaging in social media you are setting up an expectation amongst customers that they will receive a response, so you have to be geared up to fulfil those expectations,” Richard Dodd – British Retail Consortium

Some years ago, If I needed to create an e-commerce store, I would have to do what I could using Dreamweaver and all my additional plug-ins and hand-code the rest. Even after ironing out all the glitches (and there would be many) I would be left with something far from perfect but at least functional. These days however, there are a huge number of off-the-shelf solutions available at very reasonable cost so people like me don’t have to keep re-inventing the wheel. Most of these solutions are available white-label so that designers and developers can re-badge it and tell their clients that they did it all themselves! I’m straight with anybody who’s interested and delighted that I can now spend a few quid to download a software solution which works right out of the box and saves me days or sometimes weeks trying to hammer pieces of code together. WordPress and PrestaShop are now two of my favourite solutions when it comes to building and expanding the function of a website. If my peers say: “It’s not how ‘real’ designers and developers do things”, I remind them that:

When we are looking to buy a car, we don’t usually hire somebody to build it in their garage when we can pick from dozens of far better ones sitting right there in the showroom; We can still choose a colour, the wheels and the engine and they are more reliable, cheaper and available right now! …and if you ever need repairs, you won’t have to take it back to the same guy who built it.

Why should buying a website be any different?

Platforms like WordPress are being continually developed by enormous teams and communities of third-party developers many of whom do very well creating themes, extensions and plug-ins, each of them hoping that many people will buy and use them. There is a huge opportunity out there for talented web designers and developers to develop and sell WordPress themes: They are carefully developed and then downloaded and tested in real market conditions with regular improvements made along the way to reflect customer feedback and improve popularity. To do this yourself, you’ll need to know PHP but even if you’re a web designer who buys and uses WordPress themes and you don’t have the skills or inclination to develop your own themes or plug-ins, you still have a very important role to play because things can still go horribly wrong.

And this is how… When these beautiful, slick and well-oiled creations reach the web designer’s client with the chequebook, that’s when personal taste and ego can take over. If you have a small web design business like me, it’s important not to let all that brilliance get watered down at the last gate. I understand that there’s always a financial carrot dangling in front of you and you feel you must dance for it but it’s your responsibility to maintain the design integrity. There are many website owners who, because they are paying for it, wish very strongly to make their own mark and don’t consider what will appeal to, or what might be important in their customers minds. Clear navigation can easily get muddled for want of a bigger logo or a shopping basket can be removed to make room for a photograph but design is more than just making things look pretty. Useability and user experience is the key.

Each time you remove something that has been put there to make life easier for the customer, it affects their experience. Most web users are only interested in having an easy and uninterrupted user experience online. They browse through websites without conscious awareness of the salient visual elements but will immediately take notice if something interferes with their journey for example if something they expect to find is not there or hidden.

There’s an old adage I remember which says; “Don’t take down a fence unless you know why it was put up” so if you are using a premium WordPress theme which has the endorsement of many, bend and twist it to suit your needs by all means but please don’t destroy the fundamental feel or function of it. Users won’t berate your website client for their poor experience, they will be punished silently and you will get the blame.

The British Government have thrown their support behind WordPress with a shiny new website design. Have a look here…

http://www.number10.gov.uk

Hi XXXXXXXX,

I’ve inserted the analytics code in your home page now and considered your position. By far, the best way to achieve good rankings these days is by having plenty of relevant text content and back links from other websites. I don’t know who your competitors are but I can bet that they boast plenty of content, incoming links and a strong social media presence. This will give their websites additional authority and ‘trust’ from Google when it’s deciding which pages to display to it’s users.

We can add additional text to your existing site and cross our fingers but it was designed when the web was a less crowded place (almost five years ago, in fact). In recent years, a whole industry has evolved from SEO (search engine optimisation) through the needs of people to get their website seen. In my honest opinion, to compete with those, I would need to suggest that you have a re-design to include the current best practices and at the same time, making it as future-proof as possible. It was only last year that Apple declared that they would not support Flash which meant that many websites like your own will show missing elements when viewed on Apple mobile devices (iPhone and iPad etc). This is at a time when more people are starting to use mobile devices to use the web than desktop computers.

I would love to say that I could make improvements without affecting the fundamental appearance of your existing site but to try and optimise it further will not provide the results you need. However, the cost and effort of trying to do so can be offset creating a fresh new site. You’ll be surprised how much cheaper a new website is these days, not because it’s a more competitive industry but because there’s better and cheaper technology out there. It would make sense to keep one eye looking at social media and discover how that might work for you too. Lots of web people claim that it’s a golden ticket and it does have a useful place in business but to what extent depends on the way it is used, your natural inclination to use it and of course, your target demographic. I’ve attached a link below to an example of a recent project which, if we used your existing images and text content, can be re-created for your brand at less than £500 inc. The customer was in a similar position to yourselves and although it was completed just a couple of months ago, I can already demonstrate evidence of significant search engine rank improvement. It still looks very nice but is tailored toward employing new methods such as guest comments and blog posts to self-generate website content and incoming links. Please let me know if this might interest you. Please also let me know if I haven’t made any sense!

http://www.arranlodge.co.uk

Regards, James

The hardest part about designing websites is telling people what I do. It’s because being a ‘web designer’ is suffering from an image problem these days. The job title has been adopted by anybody with a casual interest in design or I.T. and O.K., I admit that it’s not to hard to pick up a book such as ‘The Idiots Guide to Web Design’ (Yes, there is such a book) teach yourself HTML and throw a web page together but web design is about design, and has little in common with computers except by using the internet as a conduit to deliver and receive information in a succinct and intuitive way.

Some professional website designers have adopted alternative obscure job titles to try and distance themselves from the ‘after school’ crowd but that only muddies the water, leads customers to even more confusion and adds to the perception that web designers are a bunch of iPod wearing skateboarders in ridiculous trousers who have no idea of what a business might need or how to overcome their objectives. It’s a sad fact too that some people consider design to be a case of just making things ‘look pretty’ and fail to understand the value of things such as; branding, user experience design and information architecture. But then, this demographic might get on well with the skateboarding or I.T. kind.

However, it’s not all bad. Position your brand – A good designer should be able to elevate their own efforts above the rest without too much trouble by using their knowledge and experience of PR, Branding, Marketing and SEO to justify why their customers just might need to spend a bit more to get something which is effective. Don’t enter into battle with the spare-time ‘designers’ Choose your space, occupy it and draw a line between you. As the adage goes… Never argue with an idiot: They will drag you down to their level and then beat you with their expertise!

When I created websites ten years ago, getting successful results in the wild web was quite an unsophisticated task but now it’s a very crowded place. Market forces have established footholds and it takes effort and money to compete just like it does in print or any other advertising media. The days of ‘Build it and they will come’ have looooooong gone and we’re just going to have to get used to it.

So please don’t expect miracles from your designer… You might find the quickest, the best and the cheapest but they won’t be in one place. Think about what your business really needs and go from there. – you reap what you sow.

Many people get anxious when they discover that on some websites, there is the ability to search and display statistics relating to other domains including analytics and WHOIS ownership data. They feel uncomfortable that the information is in the public domain and don’t realise that anybody could gather that data if they knew where to look. If you use the Firefox browser you can install a great little plug-in called Collusion which shows you in real-time who’s tracking your web movements and privacy campaigners point the finger at Google but everybody’s doing it. Why are people so reluctant for such information to be freely available but willingly upload far more personal information to Facebook for eternity? Well, that’s because well-oiled machines like Facebook and Google make it so easy for us to offer it. They know that people will generally choose to ignore the detrimental aspects of something if they can achieve short-term gratification.

Data-mining isn’t such an issue yet because there isn’t a great deal that can make it useful. The practical applications are still in their infancy but in many ways it’s beneficial because it should eventually create an all-round better user experience for everybody.

So I’ve begun reading ‘The Singularity Is Near’ by Ray Kurzweil. It’s hard work but interesting. I hope I do end up as a digitally enhanced being when I’m old like he suggests, otherwise I won’t be around long enough to finish the book – it’s huge!

I’m investigating Transhumanism right now. It ticks all my boxes but requires a serious leap of faith. I’m not an athiest; far from it… in fact I don’t believe in athiests, but it all started when I read about ‘The Singularity’. Google it. It brings a whole new dimension to being ‘in the cloud’.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” – Steve Jobs