Morawska Group – Website Design

Last year Leah had the opportunity to meet Jenny Morawska at a business lunch. They chatted over lunch and then again afterwards about their business interests.

Jenny is the managing director of The Morawska Group. She is a senior executive and consultant with extensive international experience and impressive track record. Her work in areas such as peace building, return on human capital and knowledge economy made her an inspirational client to work with.

For close to four years Jenny had been working on getting up a website for The Morawska Group to no avail. She contacted us in January with an urgent need to “get a website up in the next couple of weeks”. We were able to meet her deadline by building on work that had been done in her intial design phase and add some additional options.

Here is Jenny’s take on the project:

“Leah and her team at Working Solo really live their values – they are innovative, creative and they deliver! I have been extremely impressed by Working Solo’s ability to quickly assess our needs and then to add further value by suggesting simple and manageable technical solutions and offering new ways of approaching our requirements. In addition they do what they say they will do! Working Solo keeps us informed of timelines and are highly responsive. Overall an exceptional client service experience.”

Jenny Morawska
CEO The Morawska Group

Check out the site…

Dream Dancer – Website Design

Recently we completed the design of dreamdancer.com.au, a website for civil celebrant Nancy Battenburg. Nancy discovered that many young couples in NT and QLD were looking for their marriage celebrants online and thus decided to have this website designed as support for her role as a civil celebrant.

Nancy’s core specifications were that she wanted a clean, crisp and professional look to the design. The only other major request was that we include some of her favourite colours, primarily purple. With a logo already available to us we worked with this, using the colours of this eye popping image to highlight key aspects such as high level headers and links. To keep it clean and professional we designed the body of the website on a white background and a bold purple sidebar for the navigation. A key to keeping the website looking crisp and clean is to maintain a consistent design and presentation across all pages.  The use of suitably sized borders creates the element of space, making it easy for the eye to follow.

As with many of our client projects the Dream Dancer site has been designed on a Wordpress platform. This will also give Nancy a great opportunity to share her wisdom and experiences via the blog embedded within the site.

Nancy has been a joy to work with and we would recommend her to anyone looking for a celebrant for an upcoming wedding, vow renewals or naming ceremony in NT or QLD.

Shopportunity – Redesigned Website

Late last year we had the opportunity to redesign the website for our client Shopportunity.  The initial design had used a little too much of the pink and yellow colour scheme of the logo and the target of the redesign was to tone down some of the colour used on the site, whilst still keeping the branding of the logo and colours.

Shopportunity are a consulting practice specialising in helping FMCG companies standout from their competitors by increasing relevance and appeal to shoppers.  They provide insight, strategy, implementation and training services.  The site is a supportive part of their marketing strategy and is used to provide information about the company and services, as well as using the blog to provide useful information to clients, prospects and the industry.

The site is a Wordpress installation and we went about creating a new grayscale theme that would just use the pink of the logo in the highest level headings and insert colour via the images used.  Have a look at the Shopportunity site and see what you think of the balance between the bright colours of the logo,  the grayscale of other elements and the fresh white background.

1 Thing That Will Improve Your Website This Year

I was reminded yesterday whilst reading Seth Godin’s “Small is the New Big“, that even with bag load of online strategies to grow your business, that there is really one 1 key to having a successful website.

You should be focusing your website efforts on …
turning strangers into friends, and friends into customers.

It is both as simple and as focused as that …

Now remember the goal isn’t to turn strangers to customers (that is too much hard sell).  You want people to get to know you and you to know them.  When they become friends before becoming customers then you have a much better chance of understanding and meeting their key needs.

So my challenge to you is to come up with just 2 things you can do this week that will achieve to goal of turning strangers to friends and friends to customers.  If you want you can share what 2 things you plan to do below.

How to Confuse Your Website Readers with Underlines

Is your website a game of “which link is a real link?” Do readers try to click on what they think is a link only to find that it is actually just underlined text?

If so PLEASE go and fix it now!

Over the past few weeks I have been coming across many sites that have been underlining text for emphasis (here is the real link to the last one).  There are many other tools that you can use to add emphasis to words – bold and italics for example.  When it comes to underlining words that is now an accepted web standard to indicate a hyperlink.

This is a simple thing that you can do to increase the readability of your site, limit the confusion (and link hunt) of your readers and improve the standards compliance of your site.

QUESTION:  What are the things that websites do to confuse you?

Is It Just Me?

Ever tried to got to a website (or even visit your own) and you get the dreaded message telling you that the site is inaccessible?  You get “helpful” messages like problem loading page, unable to establish a connect or connection timed out.  Yeah like that helps most people.

If you are like many people you don’t quite know whether it is the site or it is your connection.  Well here is a handy tool that can help.

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

Enter the domain that you are trying to access and see whether it is you or it is them.

I was finding that Twitter was there one minute and gone the next so ran it through Down for Everyone Or Just Me ?

Passionate about Technology and Sustainability

You may not be surprised that I’m passionate about technology but you may not realise how passionate I am about sustainability. Sustainable living, sustainable business, sustainable resources, and a sustainable lifestyle … my passion covers many areas.

This month’s theme at The Calm Space is passion and I decided to share my twin passions of technology and sustainability and contributed an article called It’s Not Easy Being Green in Technology. It shares tips on how you can take a sustainable approach to your technology.

There are many other good articles this month in the areas of writing, reading, relationships, organisation and others.  Why not drop by now, or over the next few weeks and be inspired.

Website Review – My Day Off

This week’s site review is the was the website of the week last week at Blog Whammy ….

website : My Day Off
url : http://www.mydayoff.com.au/

This site is written by Anne Maybus, the owner of Beauty Banquet. My Day Off is a resource blog that provides you with tips about kicking back and relaxing as well as stories that are designed to tickle the funny bone.

suggestions for change :

• The About link is currently giving an error as there is no page there. Fixing this would be the number #1 suggestion. People want to know more than just the information you provide, they want to know who you are. Remember people do business with people they like.
• My #2 suggestion is to change the permalink name from the generic (http://mydayoff.com.au/?p=247) to a link that has the post name (also know as the post slug) as part of url. This can be done in Wordpress (the platform that My Day Off uses) via the Options Menu. Having keywords in your url can improve the search engine optimisation of the site.
• The About page error is going to a generic “404 Error” page. Consider adding your own customised 404 page.
• Remove the “by admin” author information under the Post Heading or change your username to something more meaningful.
• I would suggest that you move away from the username of admin (to generic and to easy to hack into).
• Fix the problems that are stopping the site from validating (why validate?)
• Add contact information and/or link to contact page above the fold. How would someone contact you if they particularly liked what you had to say (or wanted to send you a sample to review on the blog).
• The RSS Feed link is not labelled well and will not be obvious to people who don’t know what the orange box means. You should have a more user friendly description like “Subscribe to RSS Updates” and the option to “Subscribe to Email Updates” should also be provided. Feedburner can help you with this and with managing all aspects of the feeds and subscriptions to your blog.
• Change the name of the “Uncategorized” category to somehing more meaningful.

Keep up the great work Anne and keep providing us with some tidbits that help make the world of the WAHM and small business woman a little lighter.

If you have any feedback on the site or questions about what I’ve had to say then just join the conversation in the comments.

Website Review – Small Business Ideas

This week’s site review is the website of the week at Blog Whammy ….

website : Small Business Ideas / Heart Harmony
url : shttp://www.heartharmony.com.au/IngridCliffBlog.html

This site is written by Ingrid Cliff, the owner of Heart Harmony – a human resource management consultant and freelance copywriter .

suggestions for change :

• The photo and details about who you are are warm and inviting. I would suggest that you add details about how to contact you on the blog – don’t rely on them clicking on the link to the website for them to find out more about you.
• Consider moving from a separate website and Blogger-hosted blog to a combined site on platform such as Wordpress. At the moment any traffic and link love that your blog is getting is not providing the same level of SEO (search engine optmisation) to your website. If they are combined into a single platform then there is common branding and common traffic targeting which should result in improved page rank on Google and overall traffic ranking on other sites.
• Fix the problems that are stopping the site from validating (why validate?)
• The RSS Feed links should have a more user friendly description like “Subscribe to RSS Updates” rather than fees and the option to “Subscribe to Email Updates should also be provided” (Feedburner can help you with this and with managing all aspects of the feeds and subscriptions to your blog).
• Seeing that make sure that you carefully the site, have backups of the data, and be aware of some of the problems that Blogger-hosted blogs give to others. When your blog is an integral part of your business marketing then you need to use a blog platform that is under your control and is predictable and reliable.
• This is possibly just a personal preference but I believe that the “tweets” break the flow of some strong content-based posts. I’ve also found that many small business owners are not aware what Twitter is and these tweets maybe a little confusing for some and distracting for others.

Ingrid’s tips for small business owners in managing their staff and business are a godsend for those of us who don’t have our own HR departments. Keep up the great work Ingrid.

If you have any feedback on the site or questions about what I’ve had to say then just join the conversation in the comments.

Site Review – Small Business Dive

This week’s site review is the website of the week at Blog Whammy ….

website : Small Business Diva
url : smallbusinessdiva.wordpress.com

This site is written by Donna-Marie, the owner of Jacaranda Business Support Services and editor of Business Mum’s magazine.

suggestions for change :

• People buy from people that they know and like so it is important for readers/prospective buyers to know the name and a little about the person they are buying from. A photo here would be a great inclusion (just to make it that bit more personal) as well as a couple more paragraphs about you – don’t rely on them clicking on the link to the website for them to find out more about you.
• Increase the size of the headings in the right hand sidebar to draw more attention to them..
• Move from a separate website and Wordpress-hosted blog to a combined on the Wordpress platform. At the moment any traffic and link love that you blog is getting is not providing the same level of SEO (search engine optimisation) to your website. If they are combined into a single platform then there is common branding and common traffic targeting which should result in improved page rank on Google and overall traffic ranking on other sites.
• Fix the problems that are stopping the site from validating (why validate?)
• Contact information and/or link to “contact us” should be on the blog and not just on the website and above the fold.
• Contact details should have a phone number (recommendation from the Australian Consumers Association is to only buy from vendors who display “Contact details including a contact phone number for customers“. A Contact form would also be a good idea.
• The RSS Feed link (currently only showing as Subscribe to Bloglines) should have a more user friendly description like “Subscribe to RSS Updates” and the option to “Subscribe to Email Updates should also be provided” (Feedburner can help you with this and with managing all aspects of the feeds and subscriptions to your blog). This Subscribe information be placed at the top of the sidebar just under “About”.
• Recent Entries and Categories links should be swapped around with the Recent Posts just under the Subscribe links and the Categories under that.

Donna-Marie obviously has a passion for small business and for helping business mum’s achieve their dreams. It seems that we share a common passion. Keep up the great work Donna-Marie.

If you have any feedback on the site or questions about what I’ve had to say then just join the conversation in the comments.

Next Page »