Posted by Charlotte Lamb

A sunny and bright design in yellow and orange seemed the right answer when we were asked to design a website for Florida Home Owners Direct. The company had a striking logo with orange and purple and some great photography of the properties in Florida they maintain and let to holiday-makers on behalf of their owners. Keeping the design warm in colour reflected the climate of Florida and the cheerful colour-scheme also helped emphasise the fact that this site deals with holidays.

The site also needed some clever programming so the design needed to be flexible enough to cope with database driven content that would fill in boxes with text and pictures after a search of the site.

The site has grown over the years and there are now more properties and more information about the areas where the properties are located and all those attractions to visit in Florida. The site pages and the database have been able to cope with expansion and the site still looks easy to navigate and cheerful in design despite the extra pages.

The owner of the company now works in Florida but we are still able to implement changes and updates using email to communicate.

If you would like to visit the site please click here.

If you administer your own domain names, via your ISPs control panel, it is really important that you understand the different ways in which you can point a domain name at a website.

We have in the last week had 2 new customers who have selected the wrong method of pointing their domain names at their webspace.

The first had recently changed the name of their business and had purchased a second domain name and pointed it to their website using Web forwarding with a frame. The problem for them was they could not login into the admin area of their Blog via their new domain, they also could not get listed correctly in Google.

We helped them by making their new domain name the primary one associated with their website and set up a 301 redirect for their old domain. Now their Blog works correctly and they will over time the get correct listings in Google.

Our second customer had registered a domain name for a new business but then used web forwarding to point the domain name to their web space. This meant that even if you typed in their domain name the ISP’s domain name appeared as the address of their website. This made Google think that our customer had something to hide or they were trying to fool Google in some way, so they never listed the site.

Again, as with our first customer, we changed the way their domain was associated with their web space and they will now get their listing on Google.

I to Eye have written a newsletter on the subject of blogging and the benefits we think it can bring to any business. If you would like to receive the newsletter click the Home button at the top of this page and sign-up using the form on the home-page of our website.

We only need your email address and we will not share it with anyone else. Should you not wish to receive anymore newsletters just drop us an email to unsubscribe, easy.

There is a theory that colour can have an effect on how we behave and affect our mood. Red is associated with danger, or excitement, and is supposed to raise our heart-rate. There are also those who believe this effect can be harnessed by sports-people who wear red to compete, think of Michael Schumacher in his red Ferrari, and the Chinese athletes wearing red vests at the Olympics.

It’s not just in sport that this effect may be at work, the colours used by companies in their logo, their brochure and on their website can be used to help reinforce their company’s personality to their customers.

Opposite to red is the calming presence of blue, and energising shades of green are supposed to remind us of the natural world. Yellow is warm and optimistic and reminds us of the rays of the sun in a similar way to orange, a vibrant colour with a tropical mood. Black and grey are sophisticated and often used with technological implications.

Because we may associate these colours with certain moods sub-consciously it can be useful to carefully consider the colours you use on the materials you use for your business. It may be better to use red prominently on your PowerPoint slides if you happen to sell safety equipment than if you run a health spa, in which case perhaps blue or green might be wise.

If you want to create the right impression with any of your marketing materials then call I to Eye on 01962 737989 and we’ll make sure they get your message across to your customers.

Posted by Charlotte Lamb, Designer at I to Eye

If you have just started your company or if you work with services rather than products you may struggle to find images to use on your website, your brochure and flyers. This is where the growing number of companies that provide stock photography can be very useful.

Stock images are literally catalogues full of photographs grouped by theme, most of them are easy to find online. They are simple to use and the cost of using the images has fallen because there is lots of competition.

I have used iStock for many projects (www.istockphoto.com) it is a site that has members creating libraries of their images for sale (using a licence system) to customers of the site.

The site has a fairly good keyword search facility where a little dropdown menu of the kind of words it thinks you are interested in will appear after your first few letters. Once you select a keyword it will search for matching images and display 24 per page. There are also bits of film and flash files available that could be useful for multimedia projects.

The site uses a payment system where you buy credits and pay according to how large you want the image you require, for example on website design only you can often use the smallest version of the image (usually costing 1-3 credits) but on a poster or banner you may need a larger version to ensure good reproduction when it is printed. Do remember to read the small print about how the images may be used, if you want to reproduce the images on items that will be sold (like a book-jacket) then the licence may be different from the standard one.

Trying to think around the subject you are trying to illustrate, can be helpful with abstract concepts like ‘coaching’ or ‘advice’ and it may be useful to brain-storm some words to describe your subject to see what results you get by searching with them.

If you need to find the perfect images for your business but don’t have time, I to Eye provide a photo searching service, call us on 01962 737989.

Posted by Charlotte Lamb

Free information about websites and making best use of yours, design for print and tips for helping your business such as how to start networking are all covered in our new newsletter. If you would like a copy sign up here.

We need your email address but we won’t share it with anyone else. If you decide you don’t want to receive it anymore just tell us and it won’t trouble you again. Oh, and if there are subjects you would like to see us cover tell us by contacting us here.

Posted by Charlotte Lamb

If you want to meet up with other local businesses to make contacts then networking is a really effective way find customers and suppliers. I to Eye have been using networking for the last few years and we think it’s really effective, so here is a round up of some networking clubs in Hampshire:

BRX Hart - www.brx-hart.co.uk- Networking group based in Hook, Hampshire
Alton4Business - www.alton4business.org.uk - Chairman: Andy Manning
MBG Andover - www.andovermbg.com - Chairman: Darren Crannis
NHCCI - www.nhcci.co.uk - Basingstoke Area Office 01256 352275
Ecademy - www.ecademy.com - Online networking club

If you would like an introduction to any of the networking clubs listed above get in touch and we will introduce you as a guest.

Posted by Charlotte Lamb

Blogs are a useful tool for any business because they enable you to publish information online quickly with no costs.

With a blog you (and your colleagues) can inform customers about your company’s services and help them understand what you can do for them by proving that you know your subject.

Writing on a blog will give your website a more personal and friendly voice than may be appropriate elsewhere and build trust with your customers as you provide them with relevant news and views on issues that matter in your industry. You may also find your blog acts as a magnet to draw in new readers who then move on to your company website after searching the web and finding their search term covered in your blog.

 Some large companies also use blogs to encourage their employees to share information and expertise with each other and build a shared knowledge resource.

Finally, blog posts update your website and will cost you nothing. This will boost your search engine rankings as websites that are updated regularly are ranked higher than those that aren’t.

If you would like to start blogging call I to Eye on 01962 737989 we can set one up in minutes and have you writing your first post straight away!

Posted by Charlotte Lamb, Designer at I to Eye.

I to Eye have produced a new website for a local landscaping company owned by Sam Blackwell. The site gives him plenty of space to display testimonials from satisfied customers and images of the driveways, paths, patios, pergolas and fences designed and built by Sam and his team. Sam wanted to make his photos the centerpiece of the website to show customers the huge difference that having the features properly constructed makes to the final result.

The company already had a distinctive logo and it was important for Sam that the logo was prominently displayed so that customers could associate it with the company vans, shirts and stationery. The site design is simple to help visitors navigate through the pages. The use of neutral colours lets the photographs stand out, showing off the standard of the company’s building projects. Visit: www.geminilandscapes.com/.

If you don’t know where to begin with your website we can use our expertise to design one to meet the needs of your business. Your site will be there 24/7 to help find new customers and inform them about your services. Call us on 01962 737989 to get started today.

Posted by Charlotte Lamb.

I to Eye had never undertaken a survey before when we decided to find out what our existing customers thought of us. We intended to reinvent our marketing materials and we wanted to discover our customer’s perceptions of our service. We thought that through understanding what we are good at, or not so good at, then we could improve our services and promote the things we’re already getting right on our materials.

We set up an online survey, designed the layout and set up the questions and spaces for the responses. Then we emailed the link to our customers to ask them to fill in the blanks with their opinions. The survey software would collate all the information and present it to us when we logged in.

Our first job was to work out what we wanted to know. We decided to start with a general question about what service we had provided so we could also measure which jobs made up what percentage of our work as well as helping put subsequent comments into perspective. We then asked how we were doing on several aspects of our work and asked respondents to rate us over a 5-point scale. We also gave our customers a space to put any specific comments or complaints they would like to bring to our attention.

Another space on the form enabled customers to tell us if there was a service they needed but we don’t currently provide. This speculative question was not filled-in by most customers but the ones who did have given us three ideas for new services that we are going to use in our new materials.

We also wanted to find out if we would be able to count on our customers coming back to us with more work, and if they would recommend us to anyone else they knew or worked with. Were we doing well enough to count on our customers becoming our advocates to others? Lucky for us 100% of respondents said they would use us again and they would recommend us to others they knew.

The results have made us much clearer about our strengths and the areas we need to improve but the important thing is that until we asked we were in the dark. Now we intend to go away and come up with plans to improve our service for all our customers.

If you were one of those who responded to our pleas for information, thanks so much for filling it in. We promise we are going to be even better from now on.

Would you like us to design and build a survey for you? We can also help you put the results into action. Get in touch, we are sure the results will help your understanding of your business and eventually, help you make more money! Call I to Eye on 01962 737989 and speak to David Woodroofe about your survey today.