QdM News

Its been a bit mad here lately. So this years newsletter is pretty much strictly the holiday dates for you all.

Here they are:

• Office Holiday: 13th December – January 16th
• Last Website Updates in by: 10th of December
• Maternity Leave: 16th March – 31st June 2012.

Work has been mostly website upkeeps but I have one new one that I MUST post about… sometime soon. Happy Holidays everyone. Get in touch anytime with urgent matters. Get in touch with new work or ideas before the 10th of December or after the 16th of January. I will be ready to work hard when I get back refreshed and ready to go.

Click to visit the site

A bit of an experiment I am running at the moment – is having two blogs. I know that its well documented that you should have only one. I think these people assume we all have one main passion and interest and they most certainly overlap. Sometimes my interests MIGHT overlap, but really, sewing, fibre and art don’t really mix with geeky old web design. When it comes to getting good visitors to my business blog – ones that have been searching for banana cake really are not the people I am after.

In the interest of keeping my life simple – all of my old posts will stay on this blog, but from now on my physical world the latest crafty project or sharing links and photos – these will be done on the other blog – called “Made Happy”. I chose the name after alot of thought and brainstorming and it felt pretty accurate.  The design is super simple. I have lots of design in my life – infact I am still trying to redesign this site! I thought I would like it all pared back to basics so that photos and content took center stage. Enjoy having a look around I have written a few posts to start on. You will still get web design related information here and whatever is happening in my business’s world.

On this topic. To all business owners who are based in Christchurch. If you are open for business – make it painfully obvious. No room for shy violets here. Blazen it across the sky’s! Start networking online, among your friends tell everyone to tell everyone to get you some work. Run some sort of special or competition to help motivate people to take action now. People want to help us out right now so you may get much more work through these channels to help get you back on track and not eating into the “incase” over draft or savings account.

I also want to give you some links on way the online community can help you here.

Social networking

-Setup a Facebook Business Page to get updates out quickly and easily (more on promoting and creating this page later)

-LinkedIn is hugely useful and powerful for business’s and individuals. Setup your account or dust it off and get it full of recent information and start asking for testimonials (this is my weeks task!).

-Twitter. This is popular among some groups of people. Flick me an email to see if yours is one of them.

Newsletters

Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor let you setup account for free and send out beautiful emails to your clients. Use them! They have templates you can personalize for free. But if you need a hand It may cost less than you think for me to set something up for you. So just get in touch.

Blogs/Websites

Blogger and WordPress both let you setup blogs for free using their templates. Perhaps start one of these to keep your customers updated regularly on new premises ect. If you would like a custom one or help setting up the free version let me know.

Online shops

Dremus and Shopify are similar to the above, its online software pre-setup to sell your products. Choose your shop URL (domain name) and template, upload your products and you are away. These are not free. But worth the $$ in my opinion. I have a few shops in the works right now using this software. Let me know if you need a hand setting up and we can get you selling online.

If all of these overwhelm you, just pick ONE that makes the most sense to you. Have a go at setting it up. Don’t forget to talk talk talk… tell everyone you are looking for more work or have products to sell.

The guilt will go when everyone else in Christchurch has all the need to move on as well. The reality is there will be people with nowhere else to go living in houses that drafty, surrounded and sitting in silt and damp. With no water, or sewage. Fortunately the power people have been amazing at restoring power to much of the city already. I hope the water people can move as efficiently in the next week. Then there are those scrambling trying to find somewhere to live after loosing their homes.

I am still very much overwhelmed by whats happened and the job we now have ahead of us but I keep focusing on what I need to do right now. One of those is move into the new house – first as a rental because the banks (to add to everything else) have frozen all lending. Even though we have a contract saying we will get the money. Plus full insurance. Hopefully very soon the fact we still have jobs and the house is fine means the bank will go back to being helpful. Or we may just be out of a home, although I am trying not to think about that!

Today I work  and call the carpet cleaners to come in the clean the carpets ready for the new tenants in the place we are living in right now. Keeping moving and buying things in Chch will mean that it bounces back much faster.

Righto then – time to work!

Mrs Cake

Mrs Cake is an inspirational food blog written by Rosa Wakefield in Wellington. She had been writing it for some time before deciding to get a professional design done by myself! I had so much fun coming up with something to suit her personality and style of writing. Rosa by then had some pretty firm ideas on the technical side and just needed me to make it happen.

I have decided I rather like designing blog themes – they are such personal things, its like a visual form of writing up a cool character. MMMmmm, maybe i should think about book covers next! I have been inspired by this job to look a little further into template design for the likes of blogger – if I ever get the spare time I might try my hand at creating a few pre-made ones for purchase. In the meantime I get to create ones from scratch for inspiring writers like Rosa (be warned her website will make you want to bake naughty yummy things!)

Here’s what Rosa has to say about her new site and the design process:

“Dealing with Simone was a fantastic experience, and I was amazed at how spot-on her design was – everything about it was perfect first time round. She was very thorough and asked me many questions to understand where I was heading and what I wanted – which was great, since I had a lot of ideas about what I wanted my site to be but completely lacked the skills (and design finesse!) to make it happen.

The go-live had me super excited and as soon as the new design was up I started getting fantastic feedback on how great it looks now, and also how much easier it is to navigate. My blog profile has improved heaps since the re-jig, which for a hit junkie like myself is pretty exciting.

I’d definitely recommend Simone – she was very attentive and really understood what I wanted, and came up with then implemented a stunning design which exactly fit the brief. I am completely happy with the outcome and am so glad I asked her to do this for me – thanks so much, Simone! “

Thanks Rosa!

Some of you may not know but I grew up in retail. Because of that I know how big Christmas is – how it can make the rest of year possible and how it is definitely not a holiday. If the conversations on facebook are anything to go by online shops these days are really coming into their own. People will buy the all their presents online to avoid traffic (the vehicle kind) and the Christmas shopping madness – and the awful Christmas music that comes out EVERY year (scroooge). For this reason if you have an online shop you need to be looking at what your customers may be wanting out of it – and how you can introduce products to them that suit their needs, making the money you need to get through the rest of the year.

Here is a list of things you can do right now:

*Go through your products and segment them into groups – example groups could be: Budgets, sports, hobby, father, daughter ect. Create a page that recommends a list of products for each segment, link to it from your home page, your newsletter, facebook page, twitter account ect.

*Use your “related products” the part of the site. When your in the backend of your site within the product details page and you can often choose what other products people may like – that then appear on the product details page on the front-end of your site. Start relating them by your segments – be it price, sport, craft type and the like. Keep the ideas flowing for your customers, they will appreciate it.

* There is a little less money being splashed around these days. People becoming more careful with what they spend.  They still want to buy gifts but now its more important to get something the recipient will actually want – not a gift that will go straight to the Salvation army in the New Year or be used to be given back to you the following year! Vouchers are getting pretty popular for this very reason. So promote them on the homepage and throughout the site.

* Email Newsletters – Nothing annoys me more than newsletters that offer me no value whatsoever – its just news about the company when really right now I have shopping to do, work to finish and BBQ’s to go to. In this busy time Newsletters can be useful or a hindrance. Giving away information and special offers make a difference in how many people will open and actually read your newsletter without hitting delete.  Its here you can help by giving ideas on what to get people – offer them rewards, list gift ideas give them the odd discount code, let them know your Christmas opening hours and wish them a Merry Christmas. To coin a phrase think “outside in”. Make the time they took aside to read your newsletter count!

* On the blog. Use your blog to create not only news about your company, new products or product reviews but news about the season and whats going on over Christmas. Even create gift idea lists for “the father in law”, “the sister who lives far away” not only linking to your products but even other sites that have products that compliment yours, this is not only good to your reader and the other company – but will create goodwill that may end up in links back to your site – which is all good for google! The point is to create a buzzing festive atmosphere on your sites with great content.

* Buying local. For all sorts of reasons people are doing this more and more. If you have local products, organic products, free range – anything thats a buzz word being used and people care about – make sure you more that just mention it in the small print. Its a BIG selling point.

* Social Networks – If you have a Facebook page or Twitter thing going on. Use them! A few ideas: Post one day only specials, facebook competitions, ideas for gifts, cool links to anything online your customers might like… the point is to get them seeing your logo on their feed so they remember you when its time to shop. Its a fine line, but be careful not to overdo it so they don’t hide your updates! Outside in, outside in!

* Seasonal changes to the site. Every site does something different to promote the season. Banners, specials, Merry Christmas’s at the end of auto emails. Anything like this is awesome and gets people in the mood to shop. Just make sure you write yourself up a list of exactly whats been changed and when its all over take it down – remind your web designer to take it down, make sure that stuff is not up halfway through January…. even worse November the following year!

Alright I have bombarded you with enough tasks to do! Have a great Christmas. If there is anything I can help with let me know!

snowpool.org

Snowpool is a website for people who are taking a vehicle to mountains for a ski or snowboard to post their plans and offer space up for those needing a ride. Its a custom built system by Patrick Davey back when he was a carless student that loved a day skiing on New Zealand ski fields.  I finally got my paws on the site to give it a wee face-lift. Its now setup to be able to work in Australia, US and Canada. So help save the planet and share car space to your favorite mountain at the same time!

This is also where you can order your Christchurch Earthquake tea-shirt – get in before 3rd of December for the last order. Tea-shirts designed by me!

Today while I write up some little posts on the latest sites to come out of the QDM web design studio I wanted to share with you where I pickup my tid bits to help myself and my clients along when it comes to marketing.

Newsletters
Join up and unsubscribe if you don’t like them!

• Campaign Monitor – Newsletters on email marketing.
• Etsy – Joining up as a “seller” will get you the emails aimed at marketing your business.

Blogs

• SeoMoz – Search engine stuff
• Google webmaster Central – Search engine news and important info.
• Seth Godin’s blog Awesome author who writes about marketing and business anthropological style and is funny too.
• One Woman Marketing – One woman who does it all and talks about it. Great place to get ideas on workflow and general marketing.

Books and Online Guides

• Mail Chimps - Resources on email marketing
• Google Guide – Search engine optimising guide
• SeoMoz Guide – Search engine optimising guide

Podcast to listen too

• Internet Marketing

Right thats it, I don’t want to bombard you too much. Flick around have a look and subscribe to the ones that appeal. Off to eat some chocolate.

Kiwi PyCon 2010

Since these guys have many talented programmers and web types in their midst all they needed me for was some design work. For this job I started out with a briefing followed by a wireframe then the design.

This design was handed over to them in Photoshop and they cut it up and got it working by themselves. I helped out a bit later with a bit of CSS trickery. But it was all their hard work really. Hope the conference goes well guys!