Areoff gets Excellence in Website Design Award

Following hot on the heels of our 2008 award for Outstanding Online Solutions by Global Business Excellence, we are proud to announce that we have been granted an award for Excellence in Website Design 2008 by the prestigious Personal Finance Awards.

Areoff specialise in providing bespoke website design solutions to clients in the insurance and finance sector. Our approach to developing SEO effective websites that are visible, functional, usable and credible enables our clients to make more money on the internet.

Our experience of providing websites to clients in this sector means we understand the need to market effectively on search engines, promote products and services professionally, maintain interest amongst visitors, and make the process of application, purchase or enquiry as intuitive and hassle free as possible.

There has never been a more important time to capitalise on the potential to sell more products and get increased enquiries online in the current challenging economic climate and our website design services are tailored to deliver results for our clients.

In recognition of our award we look forward to delivering the same level of service to our existing and new clients in 2009 and helping them to capitalise on the benefits of trading on the internet in the current challenging economic climate.

Insuring against the credit crunch

It seems the credit crunch is certainly here and it’s got more bite than a fresh new apple. So is it time to cut back on spending on your online business? Certainly not. During times of economic uncertainty, selling online can prove to be more cost effective than traditional methods.

There will also be more people shopping around online to see if they can get a deal during this time. So the internet can be a win-win situation for your insurance and finance company. It’s an industry that is ideally suited to marketing and selling online – your products are commodities that are sold mainly on price and features rather than the more tangible aspects of say, clothing or cars.

So what’s best of way of investing your budget wisely when it comes to your online finance or insurance business?

First you need to take care of the essentials. Make sure your website is up to date, works fully in all aspects (that include forms that work properly and don’t produce strange error message), has positive and prominent calls to actions, positive sales messages and both easy and intuitive for your visitors. These are the basics that you need to make sure of in order to ensure the user experience of your visitors is as good as it can be.

Then you need to address other usability features than can make your online business more compelling for users. These can also help cut your costs. Setting up live-chat and call-back forms are an excellent way of interacting with visitors to your website as well as clearly presenting the more traditional forms of contact like telephone and email (yes, this is now ‘traditional’) Such features are often far cheaper to run than call centres and give visitors to your website an added re-assurance that your are friendly, helpful and dedicated to customer service.

And of course our old friend, SEO. If you are relying on paid-search through pay-per-click listing on search engines, you are probably suffering from hyper-inflation. The rapid increase in the cost of clicks for insurance and finance related searches surely eats into the returns you make on a sale derived from this method of advertising. This is where technical and content based SEO comes into play. On a longer-term basis, investing in SEO that will achieve you better results on the non-paid sections of search engines is better value for money, although not the instant hit you get with pay-per-click. However a sensible strategy and a long-term approach often results in better quality traffic for a lower cost per sale than clinging onto the top-positions in paid-search advertising.

At Areoff, we focus on enabling our clients to succeed on the internet in the long-term. We help bring about sustainable and effective results both straight away with good website design but also professional SEO services and consultancy that will enable our clients to see their way through the credit crunch and be poised to exploit the economic upturn which naturally follows.

When domain names can loose you the Dragons

I sat down to watch Dragon’s Den on BBC2 last night as I do each week for a mixture of entertainment, inspiration and general bemusement at some people’s idea of what makes a great business.

My ears pricked up when two gentlemen from Ireland wanted investments for a online recipe video website combined with a social network arena with revenue generation through advertising.

All was going well for the duo and it seemed the Dragon’s were interested in this internet venture, until the bombshell was dropped. Their domain name was very similar to another website doing almost exactly the same thing and the only difference was their domain was in the plural rather than the singular. Even the .tv extension was the same.

I leapt out of my seat at this and exclaimed ‘the Dragon’s are out!’. And sure enough they all dropped out quicker than you can say ‘domain name’.

The Dragons know the importance of domain name ownership and how confusion amongst potential visitors can loose you important visitors on the web. Your domain name is absolutely crucial to the success or failure of your website when it comes to marketing. It’s true that for SEO there may not be such a major issue because your website may be better optimized and therefore rank more highly than a similar sounding name. But when it comes to getting your brand out there and marketing your website in you have to own all the versions of your brand domain name and be distinctive. A grape is distinctive from a banana but ’4grapes’ is very similar to ’4grape’.

How many times has someone told you the web address of a site you’re interested in, or you’ve seen it on an advert on a train or billboard, and you get home to tap it in only to have forgotten whether it’s a .com or .co.uk? Is it plural or singular, is a word or numeral substitute(4 instead of ‘for’). If you do a search on Google you still won’t be any the wiser as to which site is which if they sound so similar and the one that comes top gets your visit.

Our client British Insurance knows the importance of domain name ownership and brand protection and owns .com, .co.uk, and hyphenated versions of their domain names to ensure that virtually everybody can find their products online even when they haven’t typed in the exact web address they saw in, say a newspaper article.

So when choosing domain names for your brand, choose wisely and a bit of extra outlay to register as many versions of your brand name possible is money well spent to catch all of the potential visitors out there. That way you’ll avoid the possibility of people saying “was it areoff.co.uk or areoff.com?”.

Visitors love to quote

I provide website design services for a wide variety of insurance brokers and IFA’s. Fundamental to the success of these websites is in implementing calls to actions. One method we employ in getting visitors to their website to go beyond the stage of just browsing and probably moving away to a competitors offering is to use calculators and quotes engines.

Google wants fast web page design

If you’re using Google adwords for your pay-per-click campaign then you need to read this post on their official blog.

Why should I give a blog?

At Areoff we’ve only just got round to setting up a blog to comment on the website design industry and to give our visitors expert opinion and information on making their websites generate more income for their company but it is proving to be both a fruitful and cathartic task.

I have a passion for the website design industry as well as making my living from it. Every day I come up with inspiration for new blog posts as I see things good and bad across the web. If you have a passion for the industry you are in and you can talk with some knowledge about your products then a blog is well worth considering.

Why should I blog? Well, it is a great way of marketing your business online since it gives your visitors a wealth of information about your products, services and the industry and shows that you are an expert in your field – most customers want to deal with specialists as they feel this will result in getting good advice when they want to make a purchase. This is perhaps the most powerful reason for blogging and this is clear from a payment protection insurance blog section we run for one of our clients. I would feel confident in placing my insurance with this company (even if they are my clients).

Blogs also draw a bigger audience as your posts as submitted and displayed in blog directories like Digg.

This means that your website will have improved SEO rankings and the likes of Google often display blog results in as little as one day. True, your visitor will end up at your site via a blog directory, but it’s better for a larger volume of visitors to come to you through another site than a lot fewer arriving direct.

The pages and pages of unique (because you’ve written it yourself or paid a content specialist like Areoff to ghost write for you) will help boost your website’s SEO rankings too since search engines are looking for relevant, targeted content to enable them to differentiate between the vast number of sites that may be selling exactly the same products and services.

So get ranting, I mean blogging today and be an authority on the web for your product and service.

I shall return to blogging soon with a post along the lines of ‘top 10 tips for blogging’.

Do you have a favourite icon?

Does your website have a nifty little icon to represent your company logo or brand that appears in the address bar of an internet browser?

This little icon is called the ‘favicon’ and is a small file that is uploaded to your website directory and displays alongside the web address, bookmarks and tabs for your website across various browsers.

So why do you need a favicon if you don’t already have one?

The obvious one is that your competitors have it and this means that their website will stand out more against yours if they bookmark both your website or have several sites open at one time. If the user has several tabs open in say, Firefox and they are switching between your website and a competitors to check prices or features, if their brand or logo is represented in the tab whereas yours is merely represented by the generic browser image, you may not get noticed and get forgotten in the competition for visibility and attention on the web (which is very brief and tenuous).

Just open your bookmarks list in your browser. Which sites get noticed first? Certainly not the ones with generic logos provided by the browser. It’s the ones that have their own brand or logo represented.

This image is easy to add and your website designers should be able to install a nice 16 x 16 pixel which represents your site. Because it is a very tiny image it’s not always easy to add your exact logo but as long as the colour scheme, design or an abbreviated version of your logo is displayed you will be visible and have a subconscious effect on visitors to your site. Remember your website is probably just one of a range that a user will typically visit in order to get the information they need or buy the product they want. You can even create your own custom favicon and upload this yourself if you have access to your webspace.

For more information about this and the many small but fundamental ways in which you can increase your visibility and compete to attention amongst other websites your visitor views, contact us today.

IFA’s are getting left behind

As regulation on IFA’s becomes stricter and demands for instant access to information increases, advisers needs to be up there with the big-boys and punching above their weight to stay in business.

Is your email address really yours?

At Areoff we conducted a recent study of local businesses in Essex and found that a staggering 42% do not own their own email address. This shocking fact was gleaned by looking at advertisings on buildings, vehicles and in local newspapers and magazines.