The blog of dynanti web design

Posts tagged web site

Why we try not to use Flash on our web sites

Mar27
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Derek

We saw an interesting advertisement for the Toyota Auris on television earlier this evening and thought have a look in more details on Toyota’s web site. We loaded the web site and visited the Auris page.

Toyota Auris web page - needs Flash

However, we were very disappointed to find that there were no details about the Toyota Auris on the web page we were directed to by the web site’s menu system. We spent a couple of minutes trying to find the information we wanted but couldn’t. We were just about to leave the web site unsatisfied when the message below the image was spotted…

“This page has been designed to be viewed using Adobe Flash. Please click here to download the latest free Flash player.”

Visitors to your web site may not be as determined to obtain the information they want as we were and an incident such as this on your web site could result in a lost sale and the visitor telling their friends and colleagues that there’s no point visiting your web site as it doesn’t work.

Posted in Usability, Web development - Tagged , , , ,

Don’t skimp on your web site because times are hard

Jan04
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Derek

It has been said for hundreds of years that the eyes are the mirror of the soul. Well let’s bring that saying into the twenty-first century…

Your web site is a mirror of your business

Times are hard and costs do have to be cut, we’re all doing it. However, we need to be careful that we don’t cut the wrong budgets and cause our businesses to lose more money than the cuts we make are intended to save.

Take your web site. Clients and prospects use it to gain information about your business and the services it delivers. Even if visitors don’t buy off your site today, they may be bookmarking it for the future.

You need to keep your web site up-to-date and assure visitors that your business is active. You need to keep visitors informed of your latest offers and deals to encourage them to use you. Finally, keep emailling clients and prospects – it instills confidence in your business during these depressing times.

If you neglect your web site visitors can be lead to believe that your out-of-date web site reflects your business.

Posted in Marketing - Tagged ,

It’s time to get your house in order

Jan04
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Derek

It’s that time of year when everyone’s starting to think about fitness, dieting, quitting smoking, eating less food and clearing out the junk. But what about your business, what have you resolved to do there?

The new year is an excellent time to start being more organised and pro-active about your finances, marketing, quoting procedures and data management. Spreadsheets can be the perfect tool to help you with this, they’re not just for counting and adding up!

Excel Ace logo

Excel Ace

One of our business partners, Excel Ace Limited, is an expert in the field of setting up Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to help you in all aspects of running and managing your business.

For one client they have built a dashboard that links together data from Sage Accounts and many other spreadsheets to provide them with a two-page view of their business performance in areas such as finance, quotes, labour, debtors & creditors and referrals. The best thing is, the spreadsheet is automatically populated whilst they continue with their existing day-to-day processes – there is no additional workload!

If you’d like to explore the opportunities that Excel can provide your business then contact Excel Ace to arrange an informal chat to see what it can do for you! And please don’t forget to mention that you found them on the dynanti web site.

Posted in business - Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

How video can help your business web site

Dec10
2010 Leave a Comment Written by Derek

Video can raise your search engine optimisation prominence and bring in new customers…if you do it right.

We’ve recently teamed up with a video production and marketing specialist in Southport and can now offer this service to all of our clients, but why should you? What are the benefits to your business? More importantly, will it be cost-effective?

Phil Hilton from Sight and Sounds Ltd explains…

How can a small company build visibility for a product or service in a big marketplace? Uploading video to websites such as YouTube can be a surprisingly powerful tool for gaining visibility in search engines. Businesses who’ve tried it report this strategy offers huge advantages over hosting video within their own website. Printable Promotions, which provides promotional giveaways such as reusable shopping bags, achieved significant search engine prominence with videos.

“I make sure to add value,” explains Stacie Long, operations manager. “I’m not talking about price, or saying ‘Buy, buy, buy!’ I’m giving you information about the product.” For instance, one popular Printable Promotions video shows how to fold the reusable bag into its own inner pouch, making it easy to carry in a pocket. “A still picture wouldn’t really explain it,” she says.

TubeMogul provides details analysis of how many times a video is watched, and YouTube has a similar feature. If you add a query string in the URL link from the video to your site, you can tell when traffic arrives from a particular video site. By using this system,  you can find out that a video hosted on  Sclipo, a video sharing site devoted to instructional videos, may have a higher clickthrough rate than the other sites, though a lower number of viewings overall.

Businesses have been racing to get their websites video-capable over the past 12 months but just uploading a video to your site is not enough. If used correctly, a web video will increase your sales exponentially – generally a minimum of 38%, and an average of 71%. A higher quality video adds more credibility than simply you in front of a webcam. INFORM visitors about your products and/or services. MARKET those products and services by including a call to action, and EDUCATE visitors on the benefits of choosing your business to supply their needs.

Whether you sell a tangible product, or an intangible service, create a brief video demonstrating the product in action, or the process of the service. Seeing things in real-life situations makes the idea of utilizing it more real, and many times can also make a complex product or service easier to understand. Have fun with it and see your sales grow!

If you are interested in adding a video to your web site then please contact us and we will be pleased to meet with you and discuss your requirements.

Posted in Marketing, SEO, Video - Tagged , , , , ,

Welcome to our new blog

Aug01
2009 Leave a Comment Written by Derek
WordPress, a state-of-the-art publishing platform

WordPress, a state-of-the-art publishing platform

Blogs are a useful supplement to a web site; they allow the interactivity that a ‘brochure’ web site does not offer and nor should they – they are there to show visitors what our business are all about and how using them can benefit you.

A blog is much more personal. On them we can post articles about our business, our market sector, or products and actively encourage feedback from our audience. This feedback can be invaluably helpful, not only to use, but the blogs other visitors.

We’ve used WordPress for our blog because it is stable, easy to install, easy to use, secure and robust. There are also hundreds of freely available themes (templates) and add-ins (programs that provide blogs with additional functionality) with which WordPress blogs can be tailored.

It is our intention to post to our blog at least once a week to keep you abrest of developments in the business world, the digital world (we can’t escape it these days), the world of web design and marketing and life in general.

So, we hope you enjoy reading our articles and musing and do remember that this is an interactive site and your comments are most welcome.

To receive automatic notification of changes and additions to our blog, why not sign up to our RSS feed. You can also follow us on Twitter.

Posted in Blogs - Tagged , , , , , , ,

About dynanti

We are a professional firm of web designers, located in West Lancashire. Derek, our Senior Partner, holds a First Class Honours Degrees in Web Design from Lancaster University and teaches web design courses at Southport College and on a one-to-one basis.

Sponsorships & Accreditations

Copyright & Legal

Copyright © 2009 - 2011, dynanti LLP.
All rights reserved.

Please feel free to link to and quote from any content contained within this web site. However, we do frown against the wholesale copying of content from this web site as it is illegal. Please respect the ownership of our content.

Back to Top