Design your way out of the recession…

“You have to spend money to make money” may not be something you particularly want to hear in what has recently been named as the worst recession since the 1950s. But design alone can be enough to secure your position in the marketplace, drive your business forward and kick start the end of the recession for your business.

A Design Council report has recently been published which shows how design can make the difference between success or failure for your business in what are clearly trying times. The stats make for interesting reading, with “over half (54%) of the firms surveyed thinking design would contribute to a large or great extent in helping maintain their competitive edge in the current economic climate.” Similarly, “53% thought that design had become more important in helping the firm to achieve its business objectives over the last three years.”

This is all very well and good, but given that this is a report from the design council and you’re reading about it on a design agencies Blog you wouldn’t expect it to say anything negative, would you? How does this work in the real world? How can you realistically expect design to make the difference? How is spending money on design going to effect the way you do business? Allow us to explain;

First of all, apologies for this, but we’re going to be blunt and get down to the basics here. If you have badly designed stationery, that you print yourself using generic photocopier paper on your inkjet printer then chances are you are going to look unprofessional in the marketplace. Bad design is every bit as damaging to your business as good design can be beneficial. This applies to everything from your business cards (the first ‘design’ impression you are likely make with a potential client) and your letterhead and comp slips, right through to your marketing materials and advertising. Just a simple aspect like this can make such as massive difference to the way your business is perceived and can certainly be the difference between making a sale, winning a contract, receiving an enquiry or just being passed by.

The same can be said for your website. The number of people we’ve come across who’ve had someone say “I’ve got a mate who can build you a website for £50’ only for them to realise 2 years down the line that they haven’t ever had a single enquiry via their website is quite scary. There are no shortage of people out there who can build you a website, but that doesn’t mean they can design you a website. The same way as there are plenty of people who could cut your hair, but you wouldn’t necessarily let them…

The public are more design savvy now than they’ve ever been. Several companies have led the way, shown the rest how it’s done and it’s forced everyone else to take notice. For years Apple made the computers that were used by designers and the creative industry, but their products didn’t reflect this. Then the iMac came along, followed by the G3, the iPod, iTunes, the G4 and G5 and now the iPhone. Design completely changed the companies fortunes and the public suddenly realised that design was something they wanted in their lives. Now people don’t own an MP3 player, they have an iPod. For the last 50 years nobody owned a vacuum cleaner either, they had a Hoover. But then Dyson out designed them and now people go out to buy a Dyson – and they really mean a Dyson, not a Hoover!

There is absolutely no reason why your company can’t make design work for them in the same way. Take this case study from the Design Council for one. Quirky design, clever typography and a completely design led approach to the whole way the business thinks has created an instantly recognisable brand. Recognisable is the keyword here, as recognisable leads to memorable, memorable then means it’s your company people think of when they want a particular product or service. By presenting people with something that raises a smile or an eyebrow you can cement your place in your customers minds and become the company that people want to deal with. This is the power of design and it might just be your key to waving goodbye to the recession.

If you want to get together for a free, no obligation chat to see how design could be made to work for your business then give us a call or drop us an email.

If you build it, they will come….

In the film ‘Field of Dreams’ Kevin Costner built a baseball field in his crops, upset his wife, became a laughing stock in the local community and nearly went bankrupt. But the advice was true, he built it and they came. If only the same was true of the web.

For years people have been under the illusion that if you simply build a website you’ll be inundated with customers and become an overnight success, but it takes more than just building a site for it to become a business. Imagine you were opening a business on your local high street but had over 100 million other local business’ to compete with and over 1.5 billion potential customers. You’d have to do some pretty serious marketing to let people know your shop existed, but this is what you’re up against on the web. So how do you find what you’re looking for? You use a search engine, right? But making your site visible in the search engine rankings for what you want to be found for isn’t as easy as you might imagine. Welcome to the world of Search Engine Optimisation.

At B&M we spend a lot of time trying to make our clients sites as visible as possible to search engines. From the design of the site all the way through the way we build it to the images and text used, we are looking to improve the search engine rankings. Measuring the success of these techniques hasn’t always been that easy though, which is why we have just finished a trial using Advanced Web Ranking, a website ranking software.

After 30 days of usage, we have to say we’re impressed. The information takes a long time to gather (we usually leave it running overnight) but the data available is detailed, easy to understand and gives us genuinely usable information to either react to or pass on to our clients. While we monitor the amount of traffic visiting our clients sites though Analytical software as well as getting feedback from our clients on how their websites are performing, this lets us collate tangible information that goes hand in hand with this information.

So how does it work?

You feed in the searches you want to be found for and the search engines to query. AWR then checks each website, leaving just enough time between each search to stop the search engine from thinking this is an automated search and blocking your IP address. You can then see where your website is positioned, the improvement/deterioration in the sites position as well as an analysis of the keywords on your site.

A series of reports can be generated which show this information over a particular time period, which is especially useful for us when building a new site for a client as we can perform a before/after report once the new site has been deployed. Likewise, it gives us the scope to measure the success of changes or updates over a period of time. All of this information can then be cross referenced against a particular search and a particular search engine, allowing you to focus on very detailed pieces of information.

Another particularly useful tool is the ability to see the top sites for any of your searches in a particular search engine. Invariably these are your main competitors so being able to measure your sites positioning against them is invaluable. More often than not once you have secured good search engine positioning, it becomes a case of maintaining that position as your competitors react or update their sites. By being able to monitor the shifting position of your site in direct comparison to your competitors you can react to these changes, helping maintain a great position in the search engine rankings.

Finally, and probably the best part of all is that this is Mac software! It’s no secret that B&M aren’t exactly fans of anything Microsoft so the ability to use this on the vastly superior Apple platform comes as great news!

We are continually looking for ways to better serve our clients and the best possible software has long been part of this. We always strive to offer the best value for money too so anything that can add value to our service is always welcome. Advanced Web Ranking has just become another way for us to do this. Fingers crossed we won’t be building a baseball field outside the office any time soon though…