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https://availablegeeks.com/

Posts by David Muhammad:

hire-an-agency

4 reasons to hire a web design agency, not your BFF

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Starting a business of any size can be daunting. There are so many things to consider – bookkeeping, office space, furniture to fill the office space, insurance … and the list goes on! With all these costs it can be tempting to skimp where you can, and for a lot of startups this can mean asking a friend or relative to build your new website on the cheap.

While you may save a bit of cash initially by asking someone you know to build your website, this can actually cause big problems down the line and cost your business massive amounts of money – not just in terms of fixing inevitable issues that arise from a poorly-built website, but also in lost business revenue.

“For us, your website is not a side project, but a means to help you achieve your business goals.”

When looking for goods and services for most people the first thing they do is search Google, so your business website is your most powerful marketing tool available. While a friend might be able to give you a website for cheap, a well-designed website and the ongoing marketing expertise that an agency provides is an investment in the growth of your business in the digital age. Read on to find out the benefits to your business of having your website designed and built by experts.

Your project is a priority

When your friend is building your website for cheap or even for free, you can pretty much guarantee that your project will not be too high on their priority list, especially if they are busy with their day job and are doing your site as a favour. They tinker on your website in bits and pieces, and in the meantime you are losing out on potentially months of wasted income through lost leads.

With a web design agency, building websites is what we do. Your success is our success, so you can be sure that we want your site to be top notch, work well across all devices for the best chance of impressing your potential customers, and most importantly, get online quickly so your website can start working for you and bring in clients.

You avoid the “it will do” syndrome

Another problem with asking someone you know to create your site for low cost is that old chestnut, “you get what you pay for”. The combo of not wanting to ruin a friendship and not wanting to spend much is the perfect storm for a website that can look and feel cheap. You are less likely to feel comfortable speaking up, and on the flip side your friend is not charging much (or even anything at all!) so the incentive for quality is not always there, resulting in a “it will do” attitude on both sides. Do you really want your potential customers seeing your business as “cheap”?

Working with an agency, we understand that a quality business website or online store is an investment in the success of your business. We want to work with you to make sure we create an end product not only that you are happy with, but also that will help you achieve the goals that were the reason you wanted to get a website in the first place – marketing and growing your business. A web design agency has the experience and knowledge to understand what you need and turn that into a successful website, which a friend or relative who build sites on the site may not be able to do.

You know your website will be well-maintained

A website is like a car in a lot of ways – it consists of numerous moving parts that all must be well-maintained so that the whole functions as it should. Often if someone you know is building your website for cheap, it is probably not their day job and they will not have a contingency plan for maintaining your website on an ongoing basis. It’s the same as buying a brand new car and never getting it serviced and hoping it still continues to run!

When you trust your website with an agency, you know that they have the expertise to maintain your site to ensure that it continues to function correctly in line with the latest technologies, online marketing trends and search engine optimisation (“SEO”)  guidelines, such as page load speed and making sure your site is accessible on mobile – not to mention software and server upgrades.

You are investing in your business, not buying a one-off product

This is the most important point of all, and one which may shock you – you do not want a website.

Wait, what?

Let us explain – you may think that you want a website, but you’re really after is marketing for your business. Your site is a means to that end, so your business website should be a marketing tool, designed with amazing user experience and conversion in mind so that your website works for you, promoting your business and turning visitors into customers.

A friend or relative giving you a cheap website is a one-off product that might sit there untouched. What an agency can offer you is an ongoing service – a beautiful, mobile-responsive website that is a powerful tool in your ultimate goal of attracting customers and growing your business.

An agency can give you perhaps what a friend who builds website on the side cannot – years of experience in online marketing, applied with your business goals in mind specific to your industry and target market. SEO, email marketing, social media … if you have a great website but nobody knows it’s there and you’re not converting leads, the entire point is lost. Right from the beginning an agency can ensure your best chances of success in a competitive digital space.

As you can see, while it may be tempting to save a few bucks at the start by asking a relative or friend to build your website, you could be losing out on big rewards in the long run. A website can be a powerful marketing tool that can help you convert customers and grow your business, when amazing, mobile-responsive design enriched with user experience principles is supercharged with an online marketing strategy.

For us, your website is not a side project, but a means to help you achieve your business goals, promote your goods and services and help you stand out in a sea of competitors. Are you ready to take your marketing to the next level? Get in touch with us today to find out the ways we can help!

referral-marketing

Referral marketing – more powerful than SEO

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They say your best clients are your current clients. If your clients are happy, they can also be your best source of quality leads. As a business owner you are looking for new prospects and sales, and wouldn’t it be easier if an incoming phone call or email was from someone who already knows your product or service and is ready to go ahead? 

In looking around for the right way to get referrals, there is no great automated system that applies to all businesses. We’ve done the research! 

Here are two scenarios of a person approaching you to buy your product or service. Which would you prefer? 

  1. A person does a Google Search, and if you’relucky, yourwebsite might come up on the first couple pages of Google along with all of your competition. That person has to call around looking for pricing, or compare products, and their final decision to proceed with you or your competition is really just a leap of faith. They don’t know you regardless of the reviews or testimonials you have. Now it’s up to your quote to do the talking, and price is commonly a deciding factor. 

OR: 

  1. A person, perhaps at a BBQ or on holiday, mentions to a friend or family member (who is your current client or customer) that they’re after your product or service and your businessis praised and recommended. This person is likely to trust the recommendation of a friend or family member to approach you, perhaps without even researching your competition. You’ll most likely get a call from a person in the near future who is ready to go ahead with you even before you send out your quote.

It is extremely beneficial when a potential prospect knows a bit about you, how you operate or the quality of your products, and also importantly, how you are priced. You may be more expensive than the competition, but trust is an important factor in making a decision and so is knowing that they don’t have to do the grueling Google Search for a list of businesses to hopefully make the right decision. 

In looking around for the right way to get referrals, there is no great automated system that applies to all businesses. We’ve done the research! A simple follow-up call or email to your new client is all it takes. At Available Geeks Website Design, we have a referral system which is a simple natural process which is essentially an email and a link to a page on our website with an offer. It is geared to give a new referral plus our client a bonus. We know how precious time is so we feel an added incentive to our client could assist in making that recommendation happen! 

Don’t delay in reaching out to your new or old clients to make sure they’re happy with your business, and to offer an incentive for them to pass their praises about you to their friends and family. 

 
 

 

 
marketing-online

Reasons to use your web agency for your online marketing

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Every business owner knows the feeling – that Monday morning ritual of opening the web browser and sifting through the emails that have come in over the weekend. Hopefully a bunch of these will be new enquiries from customers, but inevitably you will start to get some offers from digital marketing companies and ‘SEO experts’ promising you amazing results and a page-one ranking in Google within weeks. 

These emails are often sent out en masse by companies, usually located overseas, who use bots to crawl the web, find email addresses on websites to add to their database, and send out email blasts offering their services. Or, they may even call you directly, doing the hard sell on why your site is underperforming and how they can offer a miracle cure to make business boom. 

Even we, as a website design and digital marketing business, get emails from these companies offering ‘personalized’ services, which just goes to show how much they are actually researching the businesses they’re targeting – that’s like trying to sell bread to a baker! 

If your website has not been generating quite as many leads or online sales lately as you would like, it can be really tempting to fork out cash to these companies as a quick fix to temporarily boost your ranking in search results. 

However, if their spammy contact information gathering tactics weren’t enough to put you off, anyone promising concrete search engine results should be a red flag as Google is constantly changing their indexing algorithms, and where you are sitting in search results among your competitors is also largely down to what they are (or aren’t) doing for their search engine optimization. Anyone promising a certain Google ranking is frankly probably just telling you want you want to hear. 

 
So, if you want to boost your website’s visibility, where is the best place to turn? 

The answer is right in front of you – your existing web agency! 

If you have had your website for a while and recently it hasn’t been performing as well as you hoped, you might hesitate on discussing your online marketing needs with the people who built your website – if they were so good at SEO, wouldn’t my site be on page one from the start? 

The truth is, while closely related, website design and development and search engine optimization are separate entities. While we design your website with best user experience in mind, and build your site according to search engine optimisation practices, getting a website built is just step one of your online journey. SEO and a solid digital marketing plan are the next stage to really ramp up your website’s performance – a website is not a static product; it should be a constantly evolving entity that adapts to new optimization practices in an agile manner. 

Even if your website is built with best SEO practices initially, the truth is that these standards can change. For example, a few years ago it didn’t really matter in terms of your search engine ranking whether you had a mobile responsive website or not – however, these days Google will actually penalize your website if it is not optimised for mobile. 

We know your website inside and out – we built it after all! It is also in our best interests as well as yours for your website and your business to be successful, so we can foster those ongoing relationships with you as our client and help your website adapt and continue to have the best chances of ranking in Google. 

You may not know it, but our range of online services is comprehensive. From your website concept through to production, development, testing and launch, the next stage of growing your business through online marketing begins! 

We work with you to come up with a solid digital marketing strategy, based on your needs and business goals. A great start is SEO and pay-per-click Google Ads to really start getting the traffic coming in. We can also integrate marketing extensions such as social media into your site, and newsletter signups to capture your existing and potential customers’ details to grow your client list and increase engagement and repeat business. 

eCommerce websites don’t get left behind either! We have a whole range of tried and tested marketing tools for your online store to increase sales, improve customer service and foster repeat customers. Send follow-up emails for abandoned carts to encourage people to complete their checkout, offer points and rewards or a free gift with purchase, allow shipping tracking, or even sync your catalogue with eBay, Amazon and Google Shopping to reach even more customers than ever before! 

An overseas SEO company sending out a mass email to thousands of businesses isn’t going to be too concerned about an ongoing relationship after they have done their quick, generic round of optimization, whereas we as your web agency want to invest in your business success. We are your partners in your online journey and can help your website adapt and change with the times, as we have that history with you as our client, and with your business and your website. 

Take advantage of our internet marketing experience today to help your website’s chances of ranking and help your business thrive online. We can work with you to assess where your website is doing well and what can be improved. Whether you need an entire website revamp to reflect modern design trends and positive user experience, or you want us to optimize your site for Google – together we can come up with a solid plan to boost your online marketing. 

 
 

email

Email better with Google

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We are always looking for better ways to help you guys out, and for 2020 we decided to make things a lot easier for one of your most important business tools – your emails! 

Emails are the major form of communication with customers these days in our busy modern lives, as well as within your company – not to mention usually the first point of contact with new potential clients through your website’s contact form. 

For all of these reasons your email setup is one of the most important things to get right for your business, and we have the answer! 

We all know that Google pretty much owns the internet these days, and for good reason – their solutions are efficient, easy and rock-solid, and this also applies to their hosted email service for business, known as G Suite. 

G Suite 

G Suite is a whole range of apps for your business, including email, calendars and cloud storage, and the best part is it’s super affordable and easy to use. A large part of our customers now uses G Suite as an investment in their business operations and would never go back! 

There are a lot of reasons not to host your business emails alongside your website, also known as ‘webmail’, and this system is being constantly deprecated and phased out. There are a multitude of advantages of using G Suite vs. webmail. 

  • Easy to setup – With G Suite, on your devices there is a one-click login and start sending and receiving emails. No more messing about with complicated POP/IMAP and SMTP settings which can differ on each of your devices! 
  • Easy to use – Like everything Google, the Gmail interface and apps are sleek and simple to help you manage your emails with ease. 
  • More storage – With G Suite you get around 60x more storage than the average webmail account. This means that all your emails, important attachments and files from clients, and business collateral are all stored safely in the cloud and can be viewed quickly and easily from any device – no more being on the phone and having to ask a customer to wait until you get home because the file you need is stored only on your computer! 
  • Sync across devices – Because everything is stored in the cloud, all of your emails and files are accessible wherever you are, on every device, including the computer in the office, your iPad and your smartphone on the go. Email chains update everywhere with the latest messages. 
  • Better for your website – Storing your emails and files alongside your website increases the strain on both. One large attachment from a client can send your disk limit over the edge which in turn can bring your site and emails down. With your emails separate from your site and also G Suite’s massive amounts of storage this is never a risk. 

With G Suite you’ll have access to all the innovative inbox features, collaborative tools, and unlimited cloud-based storage solutions that currently power over five million customers worldwide. 

As an Available Geeks Design client, if you sign up before the New Year, you’ll also get access to our team of local experts who are there to help you set up your inbox, migrate your emails, and help you set up your email software and devices at a time to suit you – free of charge. 

Some of the features included in G Suite Business with Available Geeks: 

  • Super simple setup – we do it all for you and organize migration of your current emails! 
  • Massive amounts of cloud storage for emails, attachments and files 
  • Cloud-based Office Suite 
  • Integrated calendars and chat 

For more information click here, or get in touch with us for a chat on how G Suite can power your business. 

Gmail 

Another good alternative to G Suite is to use your business emails through a free Gmail account. Like G Suite, our support team can set this all up for you so that your business emails will come into the Gmail inbox, freeing up disk space on your website hosting, and also so you can ‘send as’ your website email address – your customers won’t even know you’re on Gmail! 

The main benefit of Gmail is that it is free (G Suite is around $5 a month), and as with anything, the free option does bring a few limitations. 

You won’t be able to use Gmail in your email software such as Outlook or Mac Mail, instead accessing emails through your web browser. With G Suite, setting up your emails in your software and your devices is super easy so this is one aspect to consider. 

Another limitation is that unlike G Suite, with Gmail you will only be able to receive emails into one inbox. If you have for example an info@ address which several people need to access in your business, it might be worth considering if G Suite is better for your needs (which is still a super low-cost option!). 

With webmail as a complex and clunky solution, which is slowly being phased out as other alternative technologies evolve and get better to replace it, now is the time to make sure your business emails are rock solid, and the best part is we can set it all up for you! 

Ready to make your business future-proof? Get in touch with us today to make the move to Gmail.