AVARA Website Design & Marketing

Latest Website Designed - HGV/LGV Training

2009-09-23T10:40:00.000-07:00

HGV/LGV Training

A website designed to enable visitors who are looking for HGV/LGV training to find an independent training provider in their area by means of a postcode/town search.

Latest Website Designed - Debt Collection Ireland

2009-09-07T02:45:00.000-07:00

Debt Collection Ireland

A website designed for Recoup Limited, an Irish Debt Collection Company. The website has been optimised for the Clients keyphrase of 'debt collection Ireland' to achieve high search-engine rankings.

Latest Website Designed - Incognito Make-Up

2009-07-17T01:50:00.001-07:00

Make-Up Artist in Surrey, Hampshire & Berkshire

A website designed for Incognito Make-Up Artists. A single page site for a new company which can be expanded as the company develops it's portfolio and services.

Latest Website Designed - Wenman Park Homes Ltd

2009-07-04T02:25:00.000-07:00

Park Homes

A website designed for Wenman Park Homes Ltd to showcase their park home estates and new park homes throughout the South of England.

Latest Website Designed - Response Link Ltd

2009-07-04T02:23:00.000-07:00

Sales Lead

A website designed for Response Link Ltd specifically optimised for capturing enquiries for business Clients seeking sales leads.

Latest Website Designed - RefluxEase UK

2009-07-04T02:19:00.000-07:00

Acid Reflux Pillow

A website designed for RefluxEase UK to sell their health pillows to UK based consumers, target market aged 40+.

Advice: Why Have A Small Business Website?

2009-05-09T07:58:00.000-07:00

A view that is still surprisingly common is that a small business by nature doesn’t need the exposure created from a website. Small business owners have many reasons that they feel a website isn’t an appropriate advertising medium for their business, the most common reasons being:

Most of their customers are local and will therefore already know their business exists.

They already have sufficient advertising coverage in the Yellow Pages, Thomson Local and their Local Paper.

They think it will be too expensive to have a website.

They don’t use the Internet themselves.

So let’s deal with each of these issues to ascertain if the assumptions made are correct. We’ll use the example of Mr Brown who owns a cleaning company in Anytown and doesn’t have a website for all of the reasons above.

1. We’re a local business so people already know we exist.

Many small businesses have built a solid foundation within their local community and its right to assume that many local people will be aware their business exists. However, it is also equally right to assume two other facts. Firstly, that not all potential customers are local and secondly, even local customers may not use your business regularly and be fully aware of your range of services services, pricing, opening hours, products, etc. Let us look at two potential examples where Mr Brown’s lack of a website might lose him business

Mrs Jones has been made executor of a late relatives property in Anytown and the property requires cleaning before it is placed on the market. Mrs Jones lives over thirty miles away and therefore has no local knowledge of cleaning companies in the area the property is situated. The easiest way for Mrs Jones to find a suitable cleaning company is to search on the Internet for ‘cleaning companies in Anytown’. Unfortunately Mr Browns Company is nowhere to be seen but his competitors are easily found by Mrs Jones.

A firm of Letting Agents want to find a carpet cleaning company in Anytown to recommend to their Landlord clients. They are aware of Mr Browns cleaning company but aren’t aware that Browns Cleaning Ltd also conduct carpet cleaning. Instead they search online for ‘carpet cleaners in Anytown’ to find a suitable company. If Mr Browns Company had a website, the Letting Agents would have discovered his company offered a whole range of different cleaning services, including carpet cleaning.

2. We’re in the Yellow Pages, Thomson Local and the local paper.

Before we examine this objection in depth, it’s worth pointing out that over 80% of adults in the UK now have Internet access either at home or in the workplace. Advertising online should be considered a ‘must’ for small businesses rather than a supplement to ‘traditional’ advertising. The reason? Cost.

Every time your phone rings with a potential new customer who has responded to an advert in a traditional advertising medium, it costs your business a set amount of money; your cost-per-enquiry (CPE). Put in simple terms, if you have 100 customer enquiries a month and you spend £200 per month then each enquiry has cost you £2.00. It is surprising how little analysis most businesses conduct for this crucial element of their business expenditure. Establishing the CPE across all of your advertising media will quickly determine which ones are providing value for money and which aren’t.

The following table illustrates some CPE data taken from our own research.

	Website	Yellow Pages	Thomson	Local Paper
Initial Cost*	£99.00	£0.00	£0.00	£0.00
Monthly Cost	£15.29	£150.00	£100.00	£50.00
Number Of Enquiries	40	40	30	20
Cost-Per-Enquiry	38p	£3.75	£3.33	£2.50

* Website set-up cost of our starter package is spilt over 12-month for comparison purposes. £99.00 set-up and £6.99 per month for hosting and management.

As you can clearly see from the above table, the CPE for the three traditional advertising media are on average almost ten times more expensive than for enquiries from a website. To put this into a typical situation, when was the last time you picked up either the phone book or local paper to find a product or service as opposed to searching for it online? The other obvious benefit a website has over traditional advertising is the amount of content you can include in a website is significantly more than you can feasibly have in a physical advert. When it comes to the Yellow Pages and Thomson Local, the companies with the biggest marketing budget are the ones that get noticed whilst smaller companies are left trailing at the rear of their relevant sections. With a website, you can compete with bigger companies on an even playing field.

3. It’s too expensive to have a website.

Having established that a website will give you a significantly cheaper return on your advertising budget than traditional media, we can examine the pre-conceived notion that many small businesses can’t afford a website.

At AVARA, we have specifically designed our website packages to ensure that the up-front cost is as small as possible. Our started package is only £99.00, fully inclusive and means you can have an online presence within one week. With hosting and management only £6.99 per month thereafter, the ongoing costs is negligible in comparison to other advertising media.

To put this into perspective, we contacted our local newspaper to enquire about the cost of lineage advertising in their’ Trades’ section of the newspaper. The cost for a twenty word advert was £20.70 per week or £89.70 per month! Costs for the Yellow Pages and Thomson Local are significantly more for a medium that is becoming less and less effective with the rise of online searching.

There are still many website design companies around who do charge extortionate prices for their services but at AVARA, our entire business model is based on providing exceptional value for money to our clients. Equally, we are 100% confident that our websites will increase your business enquiries significantly so every penny you pay us will be achieved back through increased sales many, many times over.

4. I don’t use the Internet.

There are still many smaller companies where the owners don’t have Internet access for a variety of reasons. Whilst they may not see any benefit themselves to being online, there must be an appreciation that they are now in the minority and the majority of their customers will have Internet access.

Despite this, if a client wants to benefit from having a website they can without having access to the Internet or even a computer. Our Enquiry Text Alerts service will send a text message to their mobile phone with the details of every enquiry submitted through their website. So if Mrs West submits an enquiry to a website benefitting from the Enquiry Text Alert system in place, the business will receive a text message immediately containing all of Mrs West’s contact information and the nature of her enquiry.

We hope this information has helped you to reach a conclusion on the many benefits of having a website for your business but if there are nay other questions you may have, please contact AVARA Small Business Solutions on 0845 307 6177 and we’ll be more than happy to give you the answers.

Advice: Choosing A Domain Name

2009-04-15T01:39:00.000-07:00

Tell fifty people you are about to choose a new domain name for your business and you will inevitably receive fifty differing opinions on the matter. Unlike choosing your business name, there are other factors which also need to be considered which you may come to regret later if you overlook them. At AVARA, we have listed the factors that should be considered when you choose your domain name. We have tried to put them in some order of importance with the most important coming first however every customer’s situation is different. For more tailored advice on choosing a domain name for your business, call AVARA on 0845 307 6177 or visit our website, www.avara.co.uk.

1. Where In The World?

If your business is based in the UK, you really should use a co.uk domain suffix. This is important for two reasons. Firstly, when potential customers are scanning the listing in a search engine, they will want a UK based company. Unless you are selling your products worldwide, you don’t want potential customer to overlook your web site because they assume it’s not for a UK based company. If you need a local Photographer, which website would you be more inclined to click on?

www.smithphotography.com

www.smithphotography.co.uk

It’s pretty obvious that the latter company is UK based whilst the first one could be anywhere in the world.

Secondly, search engines will also give more weight to co.uk domain names when somebody searches for ‘results from the UK only’, as they can with most major search engines. A .com domain name doesn’t allow the visitor to determine the geographic location of the business without visiting the website so may deter customers looking for a local UK based company.

2. Size Matters.

Whilst having a long domain name won’t necessarily harm your website with search engine ranking, you will have to live with it for the life of your website. Let us give you an example. Robert Griffiths owns a kitchen fitting company and wants a domain name for his new website. Without a great deal of thought, he decides upon:

www.robertgriffithskitchenfitters.co.uk

There are two issues with the size of this domain name. Firstly, if you can imagine the website being advertised on the side of a vehicle or a shop window. It would take some detailed analysis from somebody trying to decipher the actual words in the domain name, let alone being able to remember them. Secondly, can you imagine how annoying it will be for Robert Griffiths every time he has to relay his website or email address to somebody? Inevitably he will have to spell out the entire domain name to everyone and there is far too much opportunity for somebody to make a spelling mistake with the domain name when emailing him or entering the web site address into a browser.

There are a number of better alternatives that Robert Griffiths could have tried, namely:

www.griffithskitchens.co.uk

www.griffit.co.uk

www.rgkitchens.co.uk

Personally, griffit.co.uk seems a strong contender as it’s only a short, two syllable name and has a relatively catchy ring to it. There is also a good chance that the domain name will not have already been registered. Don’t be put off by not having your actual company name in the domain name, it’s far more important to have a short, catchy name that people can remember than a detailed description of your business.

3. Say It How It Is.

I’m sure there a thousands of company owners across the country who rue the day they thought they’d be a bit too clever when naming their business and website. We came across a number of particularly good (bad) examples:

www.ezylet.com (Easy Let)

www.xcite-energy.com (Excite Energy)

www.hispeed.co.uk (High Speed)

The problem with the three above examples is that in every case, when you refer to the website address or email address for somebody within each organisation, you will have to spell out the domain name because of the non-standard spelling. The first example, Ezylet actually commissioned a very expensive series of radio adverts and spent valuable air-time spelling out their website address because of the quirky spelling.

If your company is already established and the business name has an unusually spelt or difficult word in it, don’t fall into the trap of the three companies above and carry it through to your domain name. If the owners of the three above business had come to AVARA for advice, we think the following domains would have been far more appropriate:

www.easyletting.co.uk

www.exciteenergy.co.uk

www.highspeedcouriers.co.uk

Whilst the above domains may not have been available when the business owners came up with their domain choices, it would have certainly been worthwhile spending some time considering possible alternatives.

4. To Hyphen Or Not To Hyphen?

There is great debate about the use of hyphens in domain names. Some people think hyphens help to break up words and make reading a domain name easier whilst others think hyphens just make describing your website address much more difficult. Let’s take the example of Robert Griffiths and his kitchen fitting company again:

www.robert-griffiths-kitchen-fitters.co.uk

www.robertgriffithskitchenfitters.co.uk

Whilst the first example is certainly easier to read, can you imagine being Robert Green and telling a customer your website or email address? “Yes Madam my email address is Robert at Robert, hyphen, Griffiths, hyphen, kitchen, hyphen, fitters dot co dot uk.” Do that seven or eight times a day and you’ll soon regret your choice of domain name.

However, there are times when using a hyphen is almost a necessity. For example, if an un-hyphened domain name you particularly want has already been taken then the hyphen alternative may be the only option. For example:

www.surreybuilders.co.uk – domain name already registered so try,

www.surrey-builders.co.uk

In the second example, even with the hyphen the domain is still easy to remember and has six syllables (sur-rey, hy-phen, buil-ders) which is just about acceptable for a domain name unlike Mr Griffiths with his fourteen syllable domain name.

To conclude, the use of one hyphen in a domain name is acceptable although you are adding two additional syllables to your domain by having one so just try to keep to the six syllable rule with the actual words you hyphenate and you’ll be okay.

5. What’s In A Name?

Let’s imagine you own a car parts company in London. You may think that the most obvious choice of domain name would be www.londoncarparts.co.uk because it is actually a term people will search for rather than a business name. Unfortunately it is highly likely that the domain name is already taken by somebody with the same thought process. However, if you type the phrase ‘London car parts’ into Google, you’ll find that not one of the websites on the first page contains the domain name ‘London car parts’. More interestingly, if you did own the London car parts domain name, you wouldn’t be guaranteed a top position within Google just because of the domain name alone.

You can further test this with just about any descriptive phrase or word to see how Google delivers its search results. It does make for interesting research and somewhat dispels the myth that a domain name needs to include the searched phrase or keyword to attain popularity with Google. Indeed if that were the case, what relevance are the following website domain names to the products or services they offer:

www.ebay.co.uk
www.monster.co.uk
www.amazon.co.uk
www.google.co.uk

Despite these websites being hugely popular, none of their domain names have any relevance to what their respective companies actually do.

Having a domain name that includes a description of your product or service really isn’t something to fret over. Search engines are now highly sophisticated and use complex algorithms to determine the best website results when a visitor conducts a search. Whilst there is some evidence to suggest that some search engines do still use the domain name as part of their search process, the main search engines now go far, far beyond such a simple search element.

The only other issue you might want to consider is from a descriptive point of view. For example:

www.jonesfencing.co.uk a Surrey based fencing company might prefer.

www.surreyfencing.co.uk

The coin a famous marketing phrase, the second domain name tells the audience
“exactly what it does on the tin”, i.e. that this website is for a Surrey based fencing company. The first domain name only tells the audience that Jones are a fencing company but on the flip-side, it does create an awareness of that company and its brand which is also highly important.

To conclude, there are many, many factors to consider when choosing the right domain name for your company so why leave it to chance? Contact AVARA Small Business Solutions on 0845 307 6177 and we’ll be more than happy to give you free advice on your specific requirements.