Month: March 2023

With more and more people buying and selling products online, it is vital that your business has a strong online presence. Your website should represent your business accurately, be visually appealing and user friendly. You cannot underestimate the value of your website when it comes to attracting and retaining customers. A good website can increase your sales and brand reputation so it is important that you get it right.

If you already have a website for your business, this may be a good time to step back and re-evaluate what works and what doesn’t. Take advantage of free web statistic applications such as Google Analytics to see where users are coming from, what pages they look at and if there are any patterns. If you notice that there is a pattern in when people leave your website – for example, from one particular page – then it may be time to change that page. Think about creating a survey that ask your visitors what they think about your website. Feedback from the users themselves is incredibly valuable and will give you an insight into what they want from your website.

The design should represent your brand as accurately as possible. Think about who your target market is and try to choose colours that will appeal to them. A visually appealing website can play a big role in how your company is perceived. The more professional it appears, the more positive the perception of your company will be. However, ensure that the aesthetics do not overtake the functionality of the website as this should always be the priority. A website which looks great but doesn’t perform its intended function is useless.

Ensure that the information is presented as clearly as possible. Make sure that the content is laid out in a way which is easy to find and is as user friendly as possible. When we say user friendly, we mean in a way that is going to make things as simple for the end user to use as possible.

Once your website has been completed and it meets all of the specifications detailed above, you should notice a significant increase in visitors and sales. Of course, a well designed website is not always enough – you may need to implement an online marketing or SEO campaign in order to make sure that your website can be found by your potential clients. There are many web design and SEO companies who will be happy to consult with you over your needs to create a website that is going to do your business justice.

By combining all of these elements together, you can rest assured that you have created a website which is ready for success.

There are different ways of building and maintaining a website. The more traditional option is a static webpage which requires the code to be updated whenever changes need to be made. This is an option which is being used less and less frequently due to the time it takes to update and the fact that whoever is going to be doing the maintenance has to be proficient (to some level) in HTML code. It is likely that in the next couple of years, this will become almost completely obsolete as people are opting for more dynamic options.

Content Management Systems (CMS) are being used far more often, and they come in various forms. They allow the user to update content themselves and allow various functions and features to be added with no more than a few mouse clicks.

From a web design point of view, the CMS option is the one which is generally going to be encouraged. This is because the website does not necessarily need to be updated by the designer themselves. This reduces maintenance costs/time and allows the client to update the website independently without having to contact the designer any time a change needs to be made. However, to enable this functionality, it can be more time consuming to create a CMS website. It is almost always going to be a far more convenient option in the long run.

How do you choose which Content Management System is right for you? With so many different ones available, it can seem like a daunting choice. Firstly, think about what features are important to you. Do you want the ability to add new plug-ins? Do you need a WYSIWYG editor?

We’ll compare WordPress and CMS Made Simple in the table below. Of course there are many others systems available but these are the main two that we use here at PoLR.

Whichever Content Management System you choose, it will allow for greater flexibility in terms of updating compared to a static webpage. If you have any questions or need any help choosing the right solution for you, just give PoLR a shout. We’ll be happy to discuss the options with you.

We were recently at the American Museum of Natural History and prior to going we’d heard stories of how you need loads of time or umpteen visits to see everything. We had about 3 hours so were keen to make sure we saw everything we could and not miss the good bits – if you’ve every watched Night at the Museum than you’ll know there’s certain exhibits that you just wouldn’t want to miss!

Before we got to the museum we remembered reading something about an app for the museum so we nipped into a Starbucks and downloaded the free AMNH iPhone App to see if it could help us make the most of our visit.

From the iPhone Store:

Chart your own course at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City with AMNH Explorer—a new app that is part custom navigation system, part personal tour guide for the Museum’s world-famous halls.

When you first fire up the app you are given the option of finding specific exhibits, choosing a museum tour, finding the food outlets, locating the restrooms (which in a museum that size comes in very handy indeed!) and finding your way round with maps.

We chose the museum tours first which gave us an easy choice of tours to suit our needs and time constraints. We could have chosen specific ‘Night at the Museum’ tours to Dino tours but in the end we opted for the Highlights Tour as this would give us a taste of the whole museum but still let us see the ‘must see’s’ (Lucy and Dum Dum for example!)

What I really liked about this feature was being able to choose what we had time for without having to research what we wanted to see beforehand. We ended up choosing the Long Tour and it took us all round the museum in around 2 hours.

The other thing I loved about this app was that it gave further information about each exhibit which wasn’t always detailed on the exhibit information itself.

Once an exhibit had been visited we hit the ‘visited’ option and it let us easily keep track of what we’d still to see and where we still had to go. One comment about this feature though, we found that if we visited the exhibitions out of sequence then the preceding ones were sometimes marked as visited when they hadn’t been. Could be a bug, could be us accidentally hitting visited when we shouldn’t have!

The app was also great at helping us find our way, if we got lost (maybe just a few times…) then we just had to click on the ‘directions to here’ button and it told us exactly where to get to from where we were standing meaning we lost minimal time wandering around looking lost.

I really enjoyed using this app and would recommend it to anyone visiting the AMNH to get the most of a visit. At last look I could find very few in the UK that offered an app like this and it’s definitely something I’d be looking for next time I visit a museum.