Into Wellington
Using Google Street view and Hyperlapse to create a journey video.
Best email newsletter tips and tricks
One of the the best tools you can use in the online web space for medium enterprise at the moment are email newsletters. This is because over time you can build a mailing list of people interested in your services and keep them in the loop. Someone looking at your business may not want to buy right away, but they see the value in the product or service you provide. Coupled with a good looking and informative website a good newsletter tool is like honey on bread – sweet with substance.
So how do you go about writing an effective newsletter?
Here are a few pro tips to get you started:
1. Create authentic relevant content
There’s nothing better than compelling content that people want to read. There’s an old saying that “The Best Story Wins” which rings true. No one wants to recieve dry uninteresting content in their inbox in the morning. Write about what you’re passionate about in a way that communicates that passion to others. And remember, you’re building an audience not trying to be all things to all people – use your personal voice.
2. Monitor your statistics
One of the absolute best things about our newsletter tool, is that it gives detailed statistics about who’s opening, what they’re clicking on and whether you’re hitting you’re target. This can be used in alsorts of ways, from testing interest in a new product line, to determining what parts of your business people want to engage with.
3. Make sign-up easy
Have a big call to action with a big shiny button that gives people a good reason to sign up. It only needs to be a single text field with a relevant message for the sort of audience you want to build. Things to avoid – “Sign up to our newsletter”; “Subscribe” etc.
4. Keep design consistent
Make sure that the newsletter looks like your awesome website. That way, when people click through they’ll feel safe and you’ll be sending a subtle message – “We’re professionals, and we leave bad design practice to companies who aren’t in Wellington.”
5. Write for an audience
Builders like hammers, and Print companies like paper stock. Know your audience and give them what they want. If you sell widgets, find the people who like widgets and sign them up. If you need help with this, then we can assist of course.
6. Keep it short and punchy
Unless you’re writing an academic discourse you should be keeping things short and sweet. If you’ve got a whole lot to say, then summarise the content in a short paragraph as a teaser and link to the article on your website from the newsletter. Get your point across in as little words as possible.
7. Best information at the top
Logic prevails here, but put your best most important content at the top, and not so top important info at the bottom. Many people will only scan the first few paragraphs so you’ve got limited time to get your point across.
8. Send it early in the week
Statistically speaking Monday to Wednesday is best for send outs. People must have a glass half full approach before hump day. You’ll notice this is less important though so it’s further down the page. If you have to send out on Friday, wear the cowboy hat and deploy!
9. Have a call to action
Get us to set-up a newsletter for you:
Contact UsUsing SVG graphics in WordPress
One of the great (relatively) new things on the www landscape that is slowly picking up weight is the use of SVG graphics for scalable vector graphics. What does that mean in English you ask? On a computer there are typically two different types of images.
The first and most common are raster based images such as .jpeg, .png, .gif, etc.
These use a grid of small dots or pixels to describe an image on your screen or paper, which tends to work well on screens as they are pixel based hardware items.
Vector graphics format
The second format, which is often used more for print files, are vector based images.
Instead of being made up of hundreds of thousands of tiny dots, these are made up of waypoints which describe the location of two end points of a line. For example, a square being rendered in vector, would have four points, that demarcate the four corners or points of the square on the page. A font is similar in that it is made up of a number of strokes and thus scales perfectly for print. This is demonstrated pretty well in the following image:
When to use SVG?
In short, use SVG when you want the image to scale without looking terrible.
Because SVG is vector based it won’t deteriorate in quality as it gets bigger. Raster images however, will start looking blocky the larger they get. You may have encountered this when you were trying to print a low quality image on a large piece of paper.
On the web logos, are a perfect use case for SVG. It means you can have your logo as big or small as you want without any loss of fidelity. Also, as retina displays become more common, we’ll see SVG being used where possible, as producing and implementing two sets of raster images, one for retina and one for normal resolution is a bit of a nuisance, especially when you throw mobile platforms into the mix.
WordPress and SVG
Wordpress as usual has some great out of the box plugins for incorporating SVG into your site.
They take care of a lot of the tricky implementation, and allow you to get on with creating the vector graphics. Below is an SVG image in its completeness. If you use the zoom function on your browser (ctrl + ‘+’), you’ll see that it remains perfectly crisp and clear, while the raster image above gets blurry.
Responsive Web Design for Mobile, Tablets and Monitors
One of the current technologies that’s getting a lot of attention in web design is something called Responsive Design.
What is responsive Design?
Responsive Design is building your website in such a way that it can detect what sort of device a user is looking at the site on, and respond to deliver a layout that best suits that device. This makes the content easily accessible to a wider audience by tailoring the viewing experience to their experience.
How does this effect my business?
Increasingly customers are using their smart phones and tablets to look for products and services on the internet. If your website doesn’t have a specific strategy to address these devices there is a chance that you could lose potential customers using these device types.
What does it look like?
If you resize the view panel (window) that you are using to read this post by dragging the corner, you’ll see this site has a responsive design that resizes and adjusts the layout depending on the screen size.
It looks a bit like this: (click to enlarge)
If you’d like to know more about how we can help your site have a responsive design – contact us
Contact Us
How our newsletter tool works
Last month we kicked off our freshly designed newsletter. This month we want to show you just how awesome the web can be and how to make better connections with your customers or email database through email campaigns and marketing.
Free Hosting Upgrades
To all our existing customers - We just upgraded your hosting for free. One of our customers had some specific requirements around domains they needed parking (holding pages for), and multiple email accounts. So we figured we’d give everyone the special treatment we gave them, and upgrade the amount of emails, domains, and databases for free. It’s part of our on going commitment to give you the sort service that will keep you coming back for more.
Standard |
Business |
Enterprise |
|
| Disk space | 100 mb | 500 mb | 2 Gb |
| Bandwidth transfer | 1 Gb | 5 Gb | 10 Gb |
| Email Accounts | 5 | 20 | 50 |
| FTP Accounts | 1 | 5 | 20 |
| Databases | 5 | 10 | 20 |
| Subdomains | 5 | 10 | 20 |
| Max parked domains | 2 | 10 | 20 |
| Max add on domains | 2 | 10 | 20 |
| Cost per month | $30 | $50 | $100 |
If you’re unhappy with your current host give us a call on 04-889-0991 and we’ll help you out.
Why we design and develop using WordPress
Here at Wellington Web, we use WordPress for 98% of the projects we design and develop. There are 5 key reasons why we do this, and why you can be assured that your site will rank among the world’s best.
1. Many of the top sites on the internet run WordPress
WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet‘s “top 1 million” websites and as of August 2011 manages 22% of all new websites.[5] WordPress is currently the most popular CMS in use on the Internet.[6][7] - source: Wikipedia
When something is wildly popular it often means that it’s a very good product. This is certainly true of WordPress which is used by all sort of companies from the news companies such as the New York Times to car companies like VW.
2. It’s like hiring 5000 developers for free
WordPress is Open Source and backed by a HUGE talented community of designers and developers. Because WordPress is so popular there are literally thousands of people constantly asking questions and discussing the best practice way of building sites on forums all over the world. This is why Open Source works so well, thousands of people engage in improving a commonly owned product for their own use. This means the support and documentation is second to none, and would otherwise require a budget similar to large companies like Google or Apple to sustain the sort of support and engagement that WordPress has.
3. It’s secure and allows automatic updates
The WordPress core files are updated on average every couple of months to ensure that WordPress continues to keep up with threats online. Because there are so many websites using the platform they also have extensive use cases about what can go wrong, and are ever vigilant to keep the system as strong as possible against hacking. We can update old WordPress installs and ensure that everything is running smooth for anyone with a WordPress site.
4. It’s built for Google and search out of the box
WordPress is constantly being updated and improved to meet the current standards of the world wide web, and this includes clean code and development techniques for ranking well in Google. Because WordPress uses templates that integrate with the core Content Management System, the documentation and output of html and css is very structured which Google loves. Also there are a tonne of great plugins that improve WordPress and make it cutting edge, which is why it is an obvious choice for successful companies worldwide. Which leads onto the fifth reason…
5. It has thousands of plugins that are free
It’s fair to say that most of our clients don’t have tens of thousands of dollars to spend on a website, but we can still build them a website that looks like they spent it. This is possible because of plugins. Plugins for WordPress are like apps for an ipad – they add functionality. Simply put, someone else has put in hours of work to create a piece of functionality that we can repurpose using a small amount of time and then pass the savings on – less hours spent means less money spent. But the quality is still right up there. The old saying goes that “there’s no sense in reinventing the wheel”, and this is true for web development with WordPress.
If your web project sounds like it might be perfect for WordPress or you’re looking for a WordPress specialist in the Wellington, Kapiti, Lower Hutt or Upper Hutt region then give us a call today on 04-889-0991 or use our quote form:
Get a quote nowDesign your website for mobile browsers
As the world wide web changes, New Zealand companies slowly update their websites to match trends and serve their customers better. As of this date, Wellington Web are responsible for hosting over 40 websites including Hutt Valley High School – one of the largest local websites in Lower Hutt with tens of thousands of hits per month. All these websites have an analytics and statistics package installed on them which emails our customers detailed statistics about their site and who’s looking at what on a monthly basis. This allows us also, to track what’s happening and see whether their sites are performing as promised – as we’re absolutely committed to building sites that bring a return on investment.
Some local mobile browser stats for January 2012
The use of mobile devices for browsing the internet is on the rise – overall 8% of all visits to our entire portfolio of hosted websites were on a mobile device. So what does this mean for businesses in the Lower Hutt and Wellington region, and how does it effect the design of your website?
- Your website at the very least needs to be able to be displayed in a mobile browser
- At best your website should be built in such a way that caters for mobile (try checking wellingtonweb.co.nz on your mobile to see how this works)
- Business is going to be increasingly done on the web via mobile
Given this is the case, can you afford to lose 8% of your online business to your competitors? Statistics tell us that the average user leaves a website after less than 12 seconds if they’re not engaged by the content and presentation.
So call us today on 04 8890991 if you’d like a free appraisal on whether your site is mobile friendly or not.
Website update and articles
Welcome to the new articles section of Wellington Web!
What’s this all about then?
In short – a new section to educate current and potential clients (and improve Search Engine traffic)
In the time that I’ve been involved building websites, designing interaction for users, and quizzing clients on target audiences to get the most out of the design and development process for their business website – one of my most common yet unexpected roles has been that of a teacher.Teaching people the thinking behind why I’m deigning or developing their website a certain way. Because we use the world wide web on a daily basis and it has become a common everyday tool, it’s easy to forget that the background systems that run the internet can be very complicated. One of the things I’ve always tried to do, is not to use jargon and “techspeak” when talking to clients – explaining the why’s of websites and target audiences in plain English. This appeals to us New Zealanders, because I think we’re naturally wary of people using jargon trying to “pull the wool”. So I’m going to start writing up some of those straight shooting, plain English bit’s of advice and information here – probably about once a month.
So subscribe to the newsletter in the sidebar >>> (or the RSS feed if you’re a techie type) and you’ll get the odd article about business on the web relating to the Wellington region and New Zealand.
How do I know if my website is good?
There’s a very simple way to know on a rough scale if your site is well built and functioning on the interwebs. Read on below to find out more.
After talking to a lot of business owners about their web requirements, and going through a back to basics questionnaire about why their business needs a website, its apparent there’s a general need around for businesses to find out whether or not their website is quality. One tool that I constantly use for getting a quick overview of how a site is placed is website grader. See the pic below:
It’s a relatively easy way to get a top down look across a number of primary internet channels about the quality of a site and it gives you a clear score out of 100. It’s really quite refreshing in our modern society to be graded in an old fashioned pass or fail way.
Although, the real measure of a site is LEADS. If your site is graded 3 out of 100 but generate several leads per day, then you probably don’t need to do much (although this scenario is unlikely). But if your site isn’t generating leads, or delivering key information to your specific target market, then there isn’t much point in it being on the web. So have a look at your site through the eyes of website grader, and if it’s not all that you thought it was cracked up to be, feel free to give us a call for some friendly plain English advice on what to do.
10 Hot Internet Marketing Tips for Business
To popularise any service or product, you need to apply sound marketing strategies. This is also true for popularising your site on the web. Internet marketing is one of the essential ways you can spread your business name to innumerous online visitors. Here are some of the top 10 tips that you can follow for your own website:
1. Monitoring Your Web Presence:
As you maintain a web presence of your company or business, it is important for you to keep a track on it. You may be curious to know whether your business name is gaining popularity or your strategies are not properly working out. By monitoring your web presence you will be able to trace user’s feedback on your services/products. You will be also able to find out things like whether someone else is using the same business name or whether your work is being used elsewhere without your consent.
2. Social Media:
Social media is a great way to promote your site. Spreading the word about services or products to your target market online. There are numerous social networking sites where you can create your business profile and showcase your business to the other members on the network. Social media networking can increase the volume of quality traffic to your site.
3. Maintain Your Own Blog:
Across the world there is a huge readership for blogs. So maintaining a blog is not only trendy but also very beneficial from an online marketing point of view. You can use your blog for personal purpose as well as use it as one of the promotional tools for your main site. To ensure maximum impact, you can sign up with popular directories for registering your blog and can popularise it through your social network sites. You can also popularise your own service or site by commenting on blogs maintained by others where you will get links back to your own site.
4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
By applying SEO techniques, you can improve quality and the volume of web traffic to your site. Its a great way to boost the return of investment from a site. With the right SEO you can reach out to more targeted audiences and will ensure the right keywords are noticed by search engine bots.
5. Online Branding in a Consistent Way:
For success in Internet marketing, all your marketing communication tools should be aligned with your businesses brand. By doing this you will be able to spread you brand presence in a more effective and consistent way. You can also reach out to your consumers and spread your marketing message more prominently. Consistent use of online messages enhances the chance that the right group of targeted people will see your marketing offering.
6. Use of Electronic Press Releases:
You can enhance your media exposure with help of electronic press releases. By publishing industry related articles and press releases on the web that are related to your business, you will be able to reach out to more of your potential customers. It also helps in developing links to your site as you’re providing value to your target audience.
7. Email Marketing Campaigns:
Through email marketing you will be able to interact more easily with your customers. It’s important that this type of campaign is relevant to your customers. Email marketing campaigns can be used to spread key business information and recent or breaking news that is interesting to your target market.
8. Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing:
For initiating Pay Per Click marketing, you are required to analyse the traffic pattern of the target keywords and phrases for your website. You have to find out your best performing ads to generate a good amount of traffic to your site. With the help of PPC marketing, the advertiser receives payment as users click on a particular ad or banner.
9. Marketing on the Web:
There are a whole range of different free online tools, that can help you market your business better. Sites like Delicious, Flickr, Amazon.com, Slide Share, You Tube etc can be used for this purpose by leveraging the existing audience base to spread information about your products or services.
10. Be an Expert in Your Industry:
If you have expert knowledge in your field, then you can answer different queries posted by users on well respected websites relating to your industry. If users benefit from your solutions, they are likely to follow you and as a result web traffic and links to your site will increase, improving your SEO.
In summary:
Taking a strategic approach to your online offering, and targeting specific markets is literally the difference between the success and failure of your website. No traffic means no business leads which means a waste of time and effort on your part, and even worse the potential of damaging your brand by providing irrelevant information to your audiences. When it comes to web design and devlopment, we can help you make more money by having a considered approach with your website.
Get in touch with us today.
E-Marketing
Use our proprietary e-newsletter system that enables you to measure all your email campaigns and deliver measurable success and failure rates dependent on the content you are sending to your client base.
Our system is able to identify users who opened your email, what they looked at and all the associated data with their visit to the links you sent them. Because the entire system is managed on the internet, you can send from any location and have several user accounts for collaboration.
The system is so easy to manage and operate, you can do the entire thing yourself. And of course if you run into any difficulty we’re always here to support you.
Example report
Click to view full size
Newsletter monthly cost
| Subscribers | 0 – 500 | 501 – 2,500 | 2,501 – 5,000 | 5,001 – 10,000 | 10,001 – 25,000 | 25,001 – 50,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly Cost | $30 | $60 | $120 | $240 | $500 | $1000 |
| Send Limit | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Call us today on 04 8890991 to arrange your newsletter package or contact us online