Archive for the ‘News’ Category

 

Should you update your website in-house, or pay someone to do it?

Friday, June 19th, 2009

If, like many businesses, you are looking to cut some costs, you may want to look to your website as a potential area to start trimming. Moving the basic updating tasks in-house can end up saving you a bit of cash but it can also lead to headaches. In this article, we’ll look at what’s involved in doing website updating in house and the benefits of having a professional web design company take on your updating tasks.

Having regular updates to the news section gives website visitors a sense of comfort that the company is very active and that they are concerned about their reputation. Compare this with a company whose website has not been updated since, say, the 1990′s and you get an idea. It would be like a company never updating their printed catalogs or brochures. A website needs to be updated only a few times each year to be seen as being current by visitors. Showing a date on which the website was most recently updated will help to convey to visitors how long it has been since the last update.

For many companies, only a few pages of the website need to be updated–usually the news, products, and special events sections. Sometimes, changes in the company’s people will mean that the contact information needs to be changed, but for the most part, only the three areas listed above will cover the vast majority of website updates for any company.

Do, does it make sense to contact a web designer to make minor changes or do regular updates? Well, the answer is “it depends.” Do you have the capability of doing website-updates in-house, and do you have the time to commit to doing website updates?

If you have employees on staff who know HTML then you may be able to delegate the website update duties to them.

If you’re not fortunate enough to have an HTML-savvy employee, you may still be able to handle the website updates in-house if the website was designed using a Content Management System or CMS. Open-source CMS software like Joomla or Drupal, or even blogging software like WordPress allow users to update sections of the website simply by filling in forms. A lot of the heavy lifting of web programming will have already been handled by your web designer, meaning that you can handle the basic updates yourself without having to know anything about web programming.

If neither of these two apply to you, then you don’t have the capability for doing in-house updates and you may want to speak with your web designer about making in-house web updates possible.

Assuming that you have the capability to handle website updates yourself, the next question is whether you have the time to do so. The website is part of your company’s marketing function–it is an opportunity to project your company’s brand and reputation online. In the same was as your receptionist is the face of your company to your visitors, your website presents your public face to online visitors. Doing website updates will require time on your part to ensure that the website puts your best face forward. You are going to have to make sure that you put in the time to do high-quality updates on a regular basis.

The other alternative is to turn all of the updating tasks over to your web design company. While this will cost you a regular maintenance fee, it can ensure that website updates happen regularly. This way, you don’t have to worry about knowing HTML or learning how to use a CMS. However, this may not necessarily save you much time. A website design company should take care of their customers and that includes taking care of their online reputations, but at the end of the day, you are responsible for your company’s marketing function and you should be prepared to devote the time to it as you would any other marketing activity. Your website designers can not replace you in your marketing, but they can help you. Having experienced professionals in web design to back you up can be a huge benefit.

Ultimately, the decision to do website updates in-house or have them outsourced to your web design company is going to be about more than costs. It is going to be about how to best perform your company’s marketing online.

If you have any questions about the website design services that we offer, feel free to contact us. We are a Lethbridge Web Design company with over a decade of experience in web design, graphics, and web video, and we focus on elegant and attractive designs that are easy to use.

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Animation and Business Promotion

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

When should I look at animation in promoting my business?

For many businesspeople, there is no question that marketing is an important aspect of their business. Without marketing, the saying goes, there is no business. However, it is important to decide where to place your marketing budget for maximum effect. Animation is one place which can be used for very specific marketing impacts.

Animation is a medium that can elevate your company’s image. A good-looking, professionally designed animation can make your company look like a Fortune 500 company. This is because high-quality animation is associated with high production values. In reality, animation can be very cost-effective in giving a refined, polished, and professional look to your company.

Animation can showcase a product that does not exist. Architects have embraced the idea of animation to showcase homes and buildings that have not yet been built in order to give the viewer a feel for how the building will look—both outside and inside through a virtual tour.

Animation can educate and explain. If your audience would benefit by seeing a process or product in action, animation can show that off without the need for a live video shoot, which may not be practical in some cases. Animation allows you to show cutaways of machinery in operation, or exploded views of components, or break down a process into easily viewable steps. Regardless of whether you are constrained by your format—be it web or television commercial—the information that can be conveyed to the viewer with a well designed animation proves the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words.

Animation can get your message across by breaking through the clutter. Everyone in business has heard the phrase “break through the clutter.” Television viewers and web users are so besieged by marketing messages (the clutter) that they automatically tune them out. Animation can help get your message noticed. A well-designed animation looks different from everything else on television and this can attract attention, allowing your message to be seen even when the viewers have filtered out all other marketing messages.

If you are looking to elevate your company’s image and brand, to showcase your upcoming products, to educate people about your product, or simply to break through the clutter, animation gives you several valuable and innovative options. If you are interested in finding out more about what animation can do for your business, feel free to contact us.

We are a Lethbridge Animation firm that has been working with computer animation since 1993, and we are experts at computer animation and all the tools necessary to create outstanding, highly effective visuals. If you would like to get a better idea of some of the our capabilities of computer animation, check out our Animation and Multimedia page and our Project Gallery.

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Using a Website for Your Business

Monday, May 4th, 2009

A website is a marketing tool, which allows you to communicate a great deal of information to your existing and potential customers. You can pack a lot of data into your site—far more than you can convey in traditional radio, newspaper, or television advertising. While it may be worthwhile to think of a website as a brochure, the potential can go far beyond that.

Connecting a website to your inventory system can reduce a lot of the “do you have this in stock?” calls from customers, who can simply check your website and see if you have a particular item in stock. Companies with multiple locations can even show if a particular storefront has the item in stock. Coupled with an order system, they can even order the item online and pick it up at your store or have it mailed to you. There are several Canadian companies which use this type of system to deal with books, consumer electronics, and computers.

A website can educate your customers on how best to use your products or services. Having instruction manuals or helpful tips online as part of the site can not only solve a lot of customer issues before they start—which leads to happier customers—but can also attract new customers who come upon your site after searching for information you’ve placed online. More elaborate websites include videos and animations showing customers how to use your product or service.

A website can also become a community for your customers. By providing online forums and other places where customers can interact with you and each other, you can build up a loyal following that can be a valuable marketing resource. Your customers are having a conversation about your business anyhow, by passing word of mouth—the online forum on your site allows you to join the conversation.

The informative and interactive nature of the websites can make it one of the most powerful marketing tools for your business. If you are looking at setting up a website, consider all the possibilities and feel free to discuss them with us. We are a Lethbridge Web Design company with over a decade of experience in web design, graphics, and web video, and we focus on elegant and attractive designs that are easy to use.

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Website Promotion and Marketing

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

For many businesses, setting up a website falls into the same category as printing a catalog or brochure, or getting a listing in the yellow pages. It’s part of the marketing plan for the company, and people can go and look at the site to get information. And maybe, it just might end up drawing in some new business.

But to really ensure that you get value for the money you’ve spent your company’s website, you have to go to the next step of marketing your site in order make sure that it’s doing what it’s supposed to do. There are literally billions of sites out there, and it’s pretty rare that a search on Google or any other search engine won’t return dozens of pages of results. By properly marketing and setting up your website (through processes called Search Marketing and Search Engine Optimization respectively), you help to make sure that your website will appear early on in the search and be more likely to be visited by customers who are looking for you. After all, it’s far more likely that someone will visit a site listed on page one of the results rather than on page twelve.

It’s not enough to have your website show up in a search on your own company name. Although many people are turning to search engines as an alternative to picking up the phone book, the only people who are going to be doing this are the ones who already know about your company. Your website has the ability to bring in people who need your product or service but who may have never heard of your company, or who didn’t know that your company provided the product or service they were looking for. By marketing your website for your business category or keywords, you can bring your company to the attention of these new customers. Instead of looking for “XYZ Plumbing Inc.” on the web, people will find your company by searching for what you do and where you do it—for example “Lethbridge kitchen plumbing”.

And that’s where a Lethbridge web design company like Motion Digital Media Group can help Southern Alberta Businesses. We design sites so that the search engines visiting them consider the content important enough to rank them higher in the search results. By setting up the site organization, the tags, and the text and images properly, we can optimize the website for the search engines. And then we also provide regular updates and maintenance as part of the website promotion and marketing. The key is to provide regular updates of new content that will be valuable to potential customers searching on the web.

It’s all part of getting the best value for the time and effort that you’ve invested in your website.

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Motion Digital Media Group Inc.
277 Heritage Cresent West
Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada
T1K 7E4
Phone: 403-330-4462