A new blog (weblog) has been added to Driverskills, Driverskills Blog, which enables members of Driverskills staff to quickly and easily add news and safer driving articles to their website.

Furthermore, a new video section, Driverskills TV, has been installed to replace their old video section and enable Driverskills staff to upload videos in any format for display to the public with customizable tags, titles and descriptions.

Someone on an internet forum that I belong to runs a small business. She asked other members of the forum to proofread the text on her business’ website.

I had a look at the site and saw that

• Text was poorly justified and fonts were poorly spaced
• Contrast between text and graphics and background and graphics made the text hard to read
• The colour of the text changed in places for no apparent reason
• Product images were too small to see details
• etc.

What’s notable about this is that the business is a craft business, which means that the business owner needs to let customers know that she has an eye for good design – but her website sends the opposite message.

This is a problem that I often see when looking at websites for businesses that are supposed to be artistic – websites for craftspeople, photographers, painters and so on.

I find that websites for these types of businesses are often poorly designed. Many of them are made from cheap templates.

The owners of these businesses may save money on web design at first, but ultimately, they lose customers by telling visitors to their website that they really aren’t very good at what they do.

Here’s an analogy:

Let’s say you run an English language school, and you want your school to have a website.

Suppose, to save money, you have someone who doesn’t speak English very well write your website’s content.

On the front page of your website, in big, bold text, is the line:

WE LEARN YOU THE GOOD ENGLISH

Do you think many people would sign up for your courses?

Of course not.

Yet craftspeople and artists often do the equivalent of this.

They try to convince website visitors that they have artistic talent while ignoring the artistic quality of their website.

When visitors comes to a website, their first impression comes from the design of the page they land on – how it is laid out, what colours are used, and so on.

If it doesn’t impress them, they’re not going to bother to find out how many qualifications the business owner has, how many awards the business has won or how many products have been sold.

Of course, not every artist’s or craftsperson’s website is badly designed.

There are artists and craftspeople who understand that a well-designed website is essential for maintaining a good image and who are willing to make the investment needed to get such a website.

For examples of such well-designed websites, which were created by York Interweb, see

http://www.gsmithart.co.uk/

and

http://www.emillustrates.com/

Now that Christmas is almost here, I see a number of web design companies offering to build cheap websites for Christmas.

I wonder what is going to happen to these websites in January.

There is no guarantee that, in the months and years that follow, these websites will continue to be updated so that they attract visitors and generate sales.

The best way to get customers at Christmas is to develop a good reputation from January through November, so that by the time December rolls around, customers are already sure that they want to purchase from you.

At York Interweb, we create and maintain bespoke websites for all of our clients, taking our clients’ long-term goals into account. We want to help their businesses to grow in the years ahead.

We’re working on a new website: Historical People

Lots of interesting information to be found.

York-based advanced driving and skid pan training company, Driverskills, has arranged a deal with Adrian Flux Insurance to offer up to 25% off your car insurance when  you complete one of a number of Driverskills’ approved advanced driving and skidpan courses. To reflect this York Interweb has made some new graphics and updated Driverskills’ gift voucher shopping cart to draw attention to this great offer.

Details of the offer can be seen here: Advanced Driving Cheaper Insurance

Hopefuly, everyone reading this knows about the importance of Search Engine Otimization (SEO).  – If you don’t you can read about it here.

Of course,  making sure that people can find your website via a search engine is important. If they don’t know your website exists, they’re not going to become your customers.

But SEO is only the beginning. Once people find your website,  you don’t want them to look at your site for a few seconds/minutes and then leave (and not purchase anything, if it’s an e-commece site) without ever coming back.

What makes people come back to a website?

Try this simple exercise.  Look at the bookmarks/favorites you have saved in your browser. What was it about those sites that made you think they were worthy of bookmarking – that you would want to return to them in the future.

Do they provide information that is accurate, useful and easy to access? Do they make you feel good (joke websites, forums, video sites?) Have you purchased something from an ecommerce site and found the service, price and quality to be outstanding?

Is there anything in particular about the content or the  design of these sites that appeals to you?

Which websites do your friends and family members have bookmarked? Why?

Every now and then I see a van, or even a shop window on some occasions, where they have their website address displayed but underneath that they’re using some awful free email account as their contact address – e.g. yorkplumber@hotmail.com or joysflowershop@btinternet.com or, even worse, john.willison@freenet.org.uk or some other God awful, impossible to remember address.

Why they do this is beyond me. They already have a proper domain name like yorkplumbing.com or whatever, so it is a very simple task to setup contact@yorkplumbing.com or dave@yorkplumbing.com – you get the idea.

It makes me cringe to think of the wasted opportunities they’re missing, and the money they’ve wasted on lettering their shop window with something like jullie.smith.solicitorinyork@freenetserver.uk.com . No one will remember this. No one is going to write it down, so it’s entirely pointless! It also maddens me if a web design company hasn’t informed their client of the stupidity of using such a lame email address, and how easy it is to have a professional, easy to remember address instead.

If you’re one of these people using a free email as your company contact, do something about it now, – you’re literally throwing potential clients at your rivals. We’re only talking 10 quid a year max for a proper domain name with email addresses, so give York Interweb, or any reputable web design company , a call today and fix this debacle!

A section for Parker Baths was added to Assisticare.com today, along with a history of parker baths and how they came to be used for disabled people.