One of the most important things on a startup’s agenda is to give a professional first impression. The company might be a one man show, but it can still look professional. A professionally designed logo, business cards and letterhead are the first items that are required. They form the front line in the quest for a professional first impression. We will assume that the company has these designs already and will focus only on the internet.

The internet is a great way for a company to hold the latest information in a central location where anyone can view it. We suggest getting yourself a domain that is short and as easy as possible to remember. Try to order only domain extensions such as .com or .co.za. Ordering cheap domain extensions such as .org.za or .za.net will save you R50 initially, but it will cause you and your clients endless troubles. Changing the domain name later has its own problems. If a client remembers your company name they will likely guess the extension to be .com or .co.za and rarely will they try .za.net.

If you shop around for a web hosting company then you should inquire about their cheap, HTML-only, packages. You don’t need a database or 100 email accounts. Look for a package that has enough email accounts for each employee, plus your Info email account. Have 3 email accounts available additionally in case of short-term growth.

Now you have your domain and email accounts. It is now ready for your website. To keep your expenditure low, you can get your web designer to make one web page. This page will hold your branding, a summary of your services and products and your contact details. These one-pagers are great for a basic online presence without the cost of a full website or a big monthly hosting package.

The benefit of having only the one page initially is that you now own the domain already so no-one can register it later. The web page can be updated at little cost since it is only one page. Later, when your company has grown, you can then increase the hosting package and then have your web designer create the full website with detailed information and interactive functionality. These one pagers are also quick to create.

One benefit of having one page initially is that you can take the rest of the money that you might have spent on the website and push it into online advertising. Pay per click advertising, is a low risk, low cost way of getting target visitors to your web page.

Contact Us if you have any questions regarding web hosting or online advertising.

The minimum requirement for a person to visit a website is for that person to know that the website exists. Unless you have a good budget for traditional print marketing with a strong call-to-action to your website, you will need to make your website famous through online methods. Let’s assume your website is designed well with a logical strategy. What would generate quality traffic?

• Submission to search engines

  The minimum requirement for inbound clicks is to add your website to the major search engines. This will at least give you the possibility of being found. Submission is a simple process where most of the search engines will ask for the title, description, keywords and URL (website address) of your website. Initially your site will land at the bottom of the pile. If you have followed basic Search Engine Optimization rules then you should get at least average results. Do not use search engine submission software since it will likely add your website address to directories that have been blacklisted by major search engines, thus severely penalizing your rankings.

• Submit to Web Directories
  Submitting your website to web directories will give your website another point of entry. Try and submit to all the local directories possible. This will hopefully increase your inbound links. These will also count as votes for your website. This will boost your search engine rankings in search engines such as Google since it monitors the amount of websites that link to your website.

• Post messages to related forums and blogs
  Create yourself an account on forums that relate to what your website is about. When you post on the forum or blog you might be asked to supply your website address. If your website address appears in the post then it counts as a vote for your website. Do not do ‘post spamming’ by taking the same general message e.g. “Yes, very interesting” and posting it everywhere. If you build a good relationship with the people on the forum or blog then they will link to you from their websites. Links from websites that relate to what your website is about will be counted as a strong vote, thus improving your organic search engine results.

• Viral Marketing works
  Create a competition on your website with a decent prize. Ask the participant to answer a basic question about one of your products or services. To complete their entry they should then invite 3 friends. These 3 friends will then receive a personalized email from your website saying “John Doe has invited you…”. Seeing the name of their friend will automatically make the email more trustworthy and worth opening. Avoid using spam words such as ‘free’,'discount’,'competition’,'win’ etc. Some corporate email servers have stringent spamming policies and might block any email even slightly representing spam. The email should be short with a strong call to action and a straight link to the competition. You will require a ’seed’ base of email addresses to send the original invite to. DO NOT BUY EMAIL LISTS. Use your own list of client email addresses. If you don’t have a list then you could try just setting it live on the site and use another way to seed the viral competition.

• Online Advertising
  This is the most effective way of getting targeted visitors to your website. Online advertising is cheaper than printed advertising when you consider the targeted nature of online ads and adding the distribution costs of printed advertising material. Printed adverts are generally not targeted and are pushed onto the recipient. There are three main methods for online advertising. You could buy a banner advert that is permanent on a host website, but you don’t know if the people viewing your ad is your target market. Your click-through rate would likely by dismal. You could increase the targeted aspect of your ad by buying keyword banner space that will show your ad when the visitor searches for a specific keyword or browses a specific related page. These would be like Ananzi’s banner ads where you buy keywords that will show your banner. This type of advertising generally require a flat fee per month per keyword and you are not really guaranteed of any results. Lastly, you get Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. This is the most effective way to only pay for results. And the results are double-filtered targeted results. Pay Per Click generally comes in plain text ad formats such as Google’s sponsored result listings. You do not pay for an impression (the availability of the ad for viewing). You only pay if someone actually clicks through and lands on your website, thus ensuring exclusivity for that moment. You also choose when your advert shows by choosing the keywords that relate to that advert. Your ad also states what your service is about. If the visitor clicks on the ad to go to your website then they have been through two filters, thus making sure they are looking for the service that you offer. The average cost of a click is R2.50 in Google and about R1.20 in Search24’s Adengine. Would you pay R2.50 to have a targeted person virtually walking into your store or business to browse what you have to offer?

When you create your new company you will likely need to hire a graphic design company or freelancer to come up with your corporate identity. The graphic designer in charge of your project will come up with a couple of logo ideas that he thinks will work with your company. You will compare them, trying to think how it will look on letterheads, business cards and billboards. Odds are that you are not a graphic designer. You are likely the founder/owner of a business consultant company, an engineering company, marketing company, retail company, car dealer etc. All of the logos look great compared to what you would have designed yourself, but how do you choose the best one or direct the designer into the right direction?

Here are a couple of tips when deciding on a logo :

• Choose colors that work.
  The chosen colours need to fit with your institution or vision. Some colours are standard for some companies e.g. blue usually works for financial companies, warm colours work for restaurants and pubs, green work for home and food, red works for marketing companies, dark colours works for nightclubs etc. A great resource for choosing a colour scheme for your logo can be found at : http://kuler.adobe.com/
• Choose fonts that are legible.
  The font (text style) used must still be readable when scaled down. Companies frequently ask for cursive, natural looking fonts or creative twirly fonts. A lot of over-twirly fonts are too difficult to read since you cannot distinguish between different characters. A “T” might look like an “F” or an “N” might look live a “V“. If the words cannot be read then there is no need to have the text there in the first place. Choose clear fonts that even a toddler can make out.
• Keep the logo shape compact.
  Most logo’s have an illustrated part that accompanies the name of the company. If the illustrated part makes the logos’ overall shape too wide or high then scaling it down, so that the width or height fits into a specific design area, will cause the smaller parts of the logo to disappear. Keep the logo roughly square shaped or just not too wide or tall. This will allow you to scale the logo down without losing the smaller detail.
• Background or not?
  When you have finished your logo then you might be required to send it to suppliers or business partners for inclusion into their designs. Your logo looks great on a white background, but perhaps the project that the logo will be used in uses a green background. Your text is written in green. The other company’s designer makes your logo’s background transparent and imports it into their project. Suddenly the green text in your logo disappears on their green background. Here you will need to make a decision on contrasts. In the world of corporate identity you are allowed to have different variations of your company logo. You can choose to place your logo inside a box with a border around it, or allow glow or shadow effects on your logo to bring the design out. You may also have a logo that has a neutralizing border on all shapes and text. This border, made up of any matte colour, will act as a buffer area between the logo and the background. Supplying your logo with a transparent background will allow the other designer to use his own intuition in placing it so that the contrast remains. You will still have the final word on the acceptable usage of your logo. The best precaution is to ask for the logo on different colour backgrounds when in the design cycle.

And here follows the number 1 requirement of a great logo :

It must be memorable.

Make a logo too complicated or too bland and it will not be remembered. Top-of-mind awareness of a brand can, of course, be hammered into anyone with a big enough advertising budget, but if you are running a SME then making the logo interesting is all you have to work with. Keep the logo simple and try not to fall victim to analysis-paralysis.

Contact Us if you want some free feedback on a logo design.

Static and Dynamic
Websites can be built in either a static way where all the pages are created manually and linked up internally in a manual way or by using a Content Management System where pages are added by using an administration interface and pages appear automatically. Each method for building the website has advantages and disadvantages.

Static Website

Pros

• The website technology is simple and the web designer will know how to add pages later
• The initial design can be done in Photoshop with placeholder text. The design is creative and can be changed easily before being made browsable
• Uploading pages and images is easy since the designer has done it many times
• The website will be a unique creation
• No database is required for a basic website, allowing for less technical knowledge and perhaps cheaper hosting costs

Cons

• The website will have to be maintained by the web designer as the technology is generally too advanced for the client to use
• It will take longer to create the website if there are a lot of pages
• The designer will have to make sure that the website is Search Engine Friendly by designing it like that from the beginning
• It will cost more if additional functionality has to be manually programmed

Content Management System

Pros

• There are a lot of free templates out there for most CMSs
• It is very easy to add new pages when the site is already complete and the administrative area is understood
• Free plugins can add a lot of powerful functionality while only paying for the implementation time by the designer
• The original developers of the CMS are always updating the package, making it more secure and efficient
• The CMS is already Search Engine Friendly

Cons

• Using a widely used template might make your website look like a spam site by Google and thus ranked low
• Changing a template can be tricky and time-consuming
• Creating a good template from scratch is time-consuming
• There is a steep learning curve for the designer if he hasn’t used the particular CMS before, adding onto the cost and time required
• Possible increased hosting costs, since most CMSs require a database on the domain as well
• A learning curve when it comes to using the administrative area of the CMS
• The CMS file structure is widely known, allowing hackers to know the inner workings of your website
• The original programmers might stop supporting the CMS and no updates will follow
• Upgrading the CMS to the latest version can be a nightmare
• If something in the CMS stops working it can be difficult to browse through the code to find the problem, adding to maintenance costs

How to choose the solution for your website

You would choose a static website development if :

• That is the only way your designer knows how to make a website
• If your branding is pretty complex and you want a unique looking website
• Your website is small (about 5 pages) and you don’t intend updating it a lot
• Your web hosting package does not include a database
• You don’t have time to update the website yourself anyway and will pay the designer to update it now and then

You would choose a CMS solution if :

• You don’t mind spending more in the beginning to be able to add a lot of content later in-house
• You need a website quick and do not mind too much that the design is vaguely based on a template
• You need the powerful plugin functionality that comes with the CMS
• You need a new look and you want all the functionality
• You have the requirement and time to update the website in-house

CMS Examples
Here are a couple of examples of free CMS software that can be downloaded and used to create your website :

• Wordpress (Cognite.co.za was built using this)
• Mambo / Joomla
• Drupal
• OpenACS

Conclusion
Both static and CMS websites can work for you. Listen to what your web designer can do since you will likely be working with him for a while to come. Contact Us if you need any help with choosing the right solution.

Let’s take the process of designing and printing a company logo. A graphic designer designs his artwork by viewing the project on his computer monitor. He will play around with colors, shapes, textures and fonts and produce logo concepts. He emails the logo to the client to view and give comments on. Time, cost and distance might require emailing of artwork. The client loves the logo and emails him back to say that this version is now signed off as the accepted version. The designer chose a specific blue because it represents the open skies. The client viewed the logo on his monitor and loves the blue too.

The day arrives and the logo has been printed on a business card. The client looks at it and says, “Hey! This is not the right blue! The blue I signed off was darker!”. It seems that heads will soon roll. Someone is to blame. Is it the designer that accidentally changed the logo to another blue before sending it to print or did the printer company alter the design and ended up with a different blue? Perhaps all of the above. Perhaps none of the above.

Here is a list of reasons why colours on electronic designs might differ from printed designs:

• Monitors work in the RGB (Red,Green,Blue) colour space while printers use the CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black) colour space.
  Designs look fine on a monitor if they are designed in RGB to begin with. Converting them to CMYK might make them look odd on screen, but they will print correctly, to a certain measure. It is difficult to sign of an image file that is currently in CMYK mode while viewing with an RGB monitor.
• Monitor settings differ.
  The designer was sitting in a darkish room when choosing the blue and his blue looks vibrant. The client was viewing the same design in a well-lit room, making the blue seem lighter. The designer uses an LCD display and the client uses a CRT monitor and the vibrancy differs. The contrast and saturation settings on each monitor might differ as well, rendering the blue with different values.
• Each printer in the world prints colour slightly different.
  Sometimes it is really obvious and sometimes it is almost impossible to see the difference. Normal desktop printers are definitely not something to do colour proofing with. If you print the design out on your desktop printer then a slight shortage on any of the colours will make the colour come out wrong. There are a lot of factors that can influence even the most expensive printing equipment. These include altitude, humidity, the current heat of the printer, age of the printer, quality of ink, the paper that is being used, special coatings on the paper etc. Even viewing the same printed material in different lighting conditions may make the colour seem different.

Tips on getting the most accurate colour
Go to your nearest printer company and ask to see their Pantone colour matching system. Each coloru in the Pantone chart has a matching number. Most design applications have the same Pantone charts built in so that colour matching is easy. Read up on Pantone at Wikipedia. Make sure that the file is converted to CMYK (If not designed in it originally) before sending it to print. Some printer companies might ask for colour separation prints which the leading design packages can produce. It is also important for the designer to choose the correct colour management profile in the design package.

All in all, it is possible to get near perfect colour matching, but signing off a piece of artwork on screen leaves one open to colour discrepancies later.

What does a web package generally look like?
Below is a typical list of the summarized features of a package :

• 1 GB disk space
• 2 GB monthly traffic
• 3 FTP accounts
• 100 email boxes
• PHP 5 or ASP.NET

We will now take a brief look at these features.

Disk Space
The disk space mentioned is the physical hard drive space allocated to your website. This space will need to contain your website files and any emails that have not yet been downloaded from your email boxes. Websites are generally between 2 mb and 50 mb with all the web pages, images and downloadable documents included. Email boxes are generally checked every day so the email is downloaded and cleared from the server daily.

Monthly Traffic
This is generally the most important thing to look out for (Apart from the operating system). Your monthly traffic cap includes all files uploaded and downloaded by your web designer through standard maintenance. It also includes all the pages and images browsed by your website visitors as well as the sizes of all emails and attachments sent and received. In a small company of about 5-10 employees with a standard website, the traffic will be around 400 – 600 mb (1000 megabytes = 1 gigabyte) in a month.

FTP Accounts
FTP (File Transfer Protocol) accounts are different user accounts that make it possible for someone to log onto the PC that is hosting your website’s files and upload or download files. The program used for FTP’ing is just called a FTP Application. You can get a free FTP program called Filezilla here. One FTP account is generally enough to maintain a website. If you want a client or someone to upload files to a folder on your website then you can create a FTP for them with their own login details. You can then also specify the folder that they have access to so that they will not be able to access any other part of your website.

Email Boxes
An email box is another name for an email account. An email account is an email address that is connected to your domain such as johndoe@mydomain.com. You can also get email aliases that are not real accounts in themselves, but allow you to create an account such as info@mydomain.co.za and then let the email forward to johndoe@mydomain.co.za. Do not create too many email accounts for your domain. Rather focus on having all general email from your website being sent to info@mydomain.co.za. This will simplify the communication with your clients.

Another tip is to disable the catch-all account. The catch-all account is an email address that will receive all email that have been sent to a non-existing email account on your domain e.g. imfo@mydomain.co.za. The idea behind the catch-all is to still receive the email even if the person sending it mistyped the receivers name. The problem with the catch-all is that spammers do not know the email addresses that exist and will send spam to non-existing accounts e.g. business@mydomain.co.za, marketingmanager@mydomain.co.za and it will end up in your inbox. Place the onus on the client to type out the email address properly.

Depending on the size of your company and the list of departments you should only create one email account per person then general accounts such as info@, sales@, marketing@, management@, accounts@ etc. One for each main business function. If you are a small company between 1 to 10 people then only use info@ in addition to the employee email accounts.

PHP or ASP
First off, websites are generally hosted on either a PC running the MSWindows or Linux operating system. Depending in which programming language your website was created in, you will need to choose one. Programming languages such as ASP, ASP.NET etc will require MSWindows. Programming languages such as PHP requires Linux or a MSWindows operating system that can run PHP code. Web sites that are created in plain HTML (.htm and .html file extensions) can run on any operating system since there is no programming language involved, just basic HTML scripting. If in doubt then you can ask the hosting company which package will suit your website.

Conclusion
With a basic understanding of these web hosting features you will be able to choose the package that will satisfy your needs without costing you a bundle.

You can contact us if you have any queries on the hosting package that will suit your needs.

The good thing about Google’s search results are that it saves you the time to browse through a web directory’s structure, drilling down to the right category. The problem with that is that the websites that appear in the first couple of pages might be of companies that have a lot of money or whose websites might have been around for a while. These bigger companies could pay for a better laid out website and pay for external links to the website etc. All of these billable tasks will allow a company to get a better ranking in the search results, thus appearing in the first few pages of the search results.

The benefit of using a web directory is that it puts all of these companies on the same level, stripping away any possible manipulated advantages. Let’s look at a typical scenario: You have gone on a holiday and came back to a garden that looks like the Amazon rain forest. You need garden services. You go to Google and type in “Garden Services Johannesburg”. You will get quite a few results, but the first few pages will show websites that might not be the best or the cheapest. Sometimes a web designer might set up the website to be found when ‘Johannesburg’ is typed in although the plumber is in the south of Gauteng.

The best way to get multiple quotes quickly, without going down the search results of Google, would be to go to a web directory, drill down to Garden Services and then see ALL the companies available and not just those that have good Google search rankings. The description of the directory entry would help with the location of the plumber. Open each link in a new window while holding Ctrl-Shift in and clicking on the link (Internet Explorer). You can then just quickly browse to the Contact Us page of each website and contact that company for a quotation.

Here are some good South African web directories to help you out :

• Ananzi (Click on SA Directory)
• SouthAfrica.co.za
• Aardvark

What you should do…

• Provide the text content in either MSWord or Text document format.
• Organise the content so that it can be easily associated with its proper location on the website
• Send good quality images (At least 800×600 pixel resolution and in .gif, .jpg, .png formats)
• If the image is really big, make is smaller using a program such as Photo Resizer…
• Spell check the content before sending it and make sure it is correct. This will remove the need for duplicate work on the designer’s side
• Clearly mention where the images must appear within the website if they are content specific

What you should NOT do…

• Include complicated layouts inside your MSWord document
• Email image files that are 2 megabytes and above that might clog your or the designer’s inbox
• Send the content late, thus not giving the designer enough time to incorporate it into the website
• Give content (especially text) that are duplicated from another website since it will negatively influence your Google ranking
• Tell the designer to get the content from another website. This greatly slows the content integration
• Give a hard copy (paper printouts) of the content. If the designer has to retype the text then it creates a huge delay and might introduce a host of spelling and grammar mistakes
• Give hard copy versions of images for scanning. Rescanning an image drops the quality of the image. Rather try and find the original electronic version and email it

The basic rule of thumb is to keep the content as simple as possible and to organise it in a logical fashion. This will save you and the designer a lot of time and money.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cGFUzdUOmI]

Bandwidth – Bandwidth is basically the amount of data that is transferred across the internet to your PC. If you have a broadband connection such as ADSL, 3G etc then your bandwidth capabilities are more, resulting in faster browsing and downloading speeds.

Browser – Your browser is the desktop software application that you use to browse web pages. These can be Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari etc.

Page Timeout - A timeout occurs when you view a web page, but the website server takes too long to send the page to your browser and a timeout occurs.

Business Branding Pack - Logo, Business card, Letterhead and other business stationary…

Cache - The cache of your browser is way to store images and pages on your PC so that you do not have to download it again when viewing the same page. A problem might occur when an image or file is updated, but your browser still loads the old version from your PC instead of getting the new version from the website.

Click-through Rate (CTR) - This is the percentage of people that view your website advert and clicks on it to get to your website.

Conversion Rate - This is the percentage of visitors that arrive at your website and actually contacts you to make a purchase or makes a purchase through your online shopping cart.

Credit Card Payment Gateway - There are multiple South African companies that offer credit card payment services. Usually your company will need to be registered as a merchant at your bank and use your online merchant ID to perform credit card processing.

Database – This is a selection of files that represent the tables of an excel spreadsheet, split into columns (fields) and rows (records). Databases allows your website to perform advanced information processing functions.

Design Savings Account - Graphic Design Agency retainer.

Email Servers – Email servers are split up between POP3 (receiving) and SMTP(sending) servers. When you set up an email account you will generally have to provide these server addresses such as pop.mydomain.co.za and smtp.mydomain.co.za.

Flash - This is a technology to allow advanced animation and interfaces using the Adobe (Formerly Macromedia) Flash package and player.

Freeware – This is software applications that are made available for free download and usage. Both private and commercial use are allowed.

FTP – This stands for File Transfer Protocol and allows Cognite to transfer website files to your webserver, thus updating your website. Without the FTP connection details (server address, user id and password), we will not be able to connect and upload new files.

Google Analytics – This is a service provided by Google that tracks your visitor behaviour on your website. A small piece of software code is installed on each page of your website and that helps with the tracking. The analytics helps you to make better decisions about the health of your website.

Impressions – Each time a Google Adword or similar advert is made available for viewing (Not specifically noticed) it is called an impression. You might have thousands of ad impressions for each click-through to your website.

Javascript – This is a scripting language that helps a web page to perform advanced interface functions. Javascript is downloaded with the web page and is executed on your PC, thus saving unnecessary page loads.

Online Advertising - See SEO Alternative, Google Adwords PPC

Open File – An open file is generally the name given to the original design document of a piece of artwork. This might be in the form of a Photoshop (PSD), Corel Draw, Quark, Indesign files. These files may be changed later if an update is required.

RSS – Really Simple Syndication is a way to make your content easily available to subscribers using a RSS reader software application. When you update your website with a new page where RSS has been set up, the subscriber will automatically be alerted.

Server-side and Client-side - These terms refer to where processing occurs regarding the viewing and interaction of a web page. When something happens server-side, the page is altered on the web server before being sent to your browser for viewing. When processing happens client-side, the special processing will happen inside your browser on the page already downloaded.

SSL - Secure Socket Layer is a way to encrypt the information that is being sent between your browser and the web page you are viewing. This is generally used on Internet Banking websites so that passwords and IDs are difficult to intercept.

Stockart - This can refer to logos, photos and other imagery that you might have of your company and it might refer to high quality photos available on the internet that may be used in graphic design projects.

Traffic – This refers to the activity of visitors on your website. If you have a lot of visitors to your website then you have a lot of website traffic.

Bandwidth Usage - This refers to the amount of data that is transferred either from or to your web server. When your website is hosted it will attract visitors that view the pages. Each page that is downloaded will require the server to send data to the visitor’s browser. The page and the images sent then adds to the amount of data used (bandwidth used). Email attachments received and sent also adds to the bandwidth.

Website – A website is a collection of pages and images that are connected to each other with links and made available for viewing through the global network called the internet.

Website Hosting - See Cognite’s service.