At a time when an increasing proportion of services are being made available online, it makes sense to have a company website for your business.

Everything from TV licensing to car tax, insurance and holidays now involve transactions that are regularly done in front of a computer screen.

Indeed many such services are exclusively available on line – they have no real world counterparts – take price comparison websites and product review websites for example

The wealth of information and products available online has created a seismic shift in consumer behaviour – folks no longer pick up the yellow pages or the phone book when they are looking for products or services – their first port of call is often their PC and a visit to Google, or one of the other search engines.

Clearly the objective of every business is to attract, retain and serve customers at a profit.  A company website makes it possible to achieve these goals, often in a more cost effective way than ever before.

At one time the most important decision a prospective business owner had to make was ‘location, location, location’.

In other words it was vital to be sited where your prospective clients could find you – That’s probably still true today today for many kinds of business, but as the shift toward online searches continues to increase, a business’s online ‘location’ takes on increased importance.

The reason that so many businesses are online is simple – that’s where the customers are!

Whether you’re new to the Internet or an old hand, we can help you create the site your business needs.

We focus on creating web sites that are built around the Wordpress blogging software framework.

The logic behind this is simple – Google loves blogs and Wordpress is probably the most popular blogging platform in the world.

Combine the best software platform with good content and simple intelligent design, and you have a site that will be popular both with Google and your visitors – That’s a win – win situation!

Virtually every aspect of these sites can be changed by our customers – with hardly any experience! If you can use a word processor, you’ll pick it up in 15 minutes or less!

Wordpress is the ideal solution if you are thinking of upgrading or remodelling your current site – we can create a new look and a new framework around your current content to bring everything bang up to date.

The Wordpress platform is not only google friendly, but is easily configured to work effortlessly with GOOGLE ANALYTICS. Adding analytics to your site brings a whole new versatility and understanding to your site management – acknowledged as the best analytics available, the results and depth of insight are truly outstanding.

Your site can also be linked in to your Facebook or Twitter presence – providing a seamless content generating system, a sure way to raise your profile and encourage more site visitors.

Fast turnaround is our speciality, we can often complete a project in a few days, depending on the scope and complexity of course, and we have a simple pricing structure with no hidden extras.

]]> http://thriftysites.co.uk/why-use-wordpress/feed/ 0 http://thriftysites.co.uk/update-website/ http://thriftysites.co.uk/update-website/#comments Wed, 21 Apr 2010 11:52:08 +0000 Steve http://thriftysites.co.uk/?p=213

If your present site needs updating, Wordpress can be used to transform it into a Google friendly, up to date asset for your company.

The process is simple:

• Send us the address of your current site
• Tell us how many email addresses you currently use
• We’ll send you a quote within 24 hours

In most cases you will need to transfer the hosting of your site to us – so that we can install the required software for Wordpress to run efficiently – this is normally a seamless process – you should have no loss of email or site facilities during the changeover.

When we’ve agreed a price we’ll tackle the rework in exactly the same way as our normal business process

We’ll than build out your site using the existing graphics and text content, incorporated into a modern new design

The whole process can take as little as 7 days from start to finish.

Lead Acquisition Cost can be  a painful topic to many business owners for one of 2 reasons. Firstly they may not know, or secondly, they may be all too aware of the expense involved,  just getting the phone to ring!

It’s pretty easy to do some ‘quick and dirty’ maths that will either cheer you up – or make you take a long hard look at the ‘front end’ performance of your business.

Try this simple exercise for yourself.

Add up all the annual costs associated with your advertising and sales, divide by 12, then divide that number  by the number of enquiries you get in a month.  The figure differs wildly from one business sector to another of course, and is only a rough measure of performance – but it’s still probably higher than you imagined.

That’s the first part of the problem, figuring out roughly how much it costs to get the phone to ring!

Logically the next stage of the process should aim to figure out how many of those expensive leads get converted into paying customers,  So take the monthly cost figure from above and divide it by the number of customers coverted from the leads – Now thats going to produce a much larger figure, because unless we’re selling tenners for nine quid,  we are not going to convert every incoming lead!

These are the ‘Vital Statistics’ of any business that relies on sales – and that means pretty much every business!

Armed with these numbers, Lead Acqusition Cost and Customer Acquisition Cost , we can make informed decisions about how to change, improve or cancel the various strategies that make up our business plans.

Recently I’ve dealt with two business owners, in completely different service sectors, in different parts of the country – both were deeply shocked at the results produced by the simple maths exercise above. Each of them had Lead Acqusition Costs well in excess of £200. For whatever reason, this cost analysis had either eluded them, or gotten out of hand over the years. The simple fact was that every time the phone rang with a potential new client – it cost over £200. Once things are explained in that simple, matter-of-fact way, it’s easy to explain the benefits of new technology to people!

Both these owners have now reduced their dependence on conventional advertising, have simple, measurable  systems in place to measure where leads come from. Most importantly, they’ve increased the number of leads they get, whilst at the same time reducing the Lead Acquisition Cost by a factor of 5.

It’s easy to get sucked into the delusional world of Yellow Pages, Colour Pages, Directory adverts and other ‘Brand’ advertising’ – it’s a profitable game, for the ad companies.  I’m also pretty sure that some of their salesmen prey on the insecurities of business owners, making them fear that if they aren’t in ‘it’ , then their competitors will make off with all the trade.

But wait a minute! They’re probably telling the same tale to your competitors too!

All I’m suggesting is that you make up your own mind and base your decisions on FACTS, not FEAR.

If you want to reduce your ‘vital statistics’ give me a call or email me using the contact page