A Simple Model To Start To Make Social Media Work For Your Business

To many businesses starting out to try to make social media work for them, there is a confusing plethora of sites and things that they can do and set up. There is also plenty of good advise on what you should do: listen, have conversations, being helpful, being human and authentic and involving people and shouldn’t do: broadcast marketing messages. But where do you begin.?


Here’s my take on an approach and a strategy and model that you may consider using to get started.

• Your website is where you want people to come and as an end result you obtain business from the Internet.
• Your blog is where you publish yourself and your expertise and knowledge; where you want your reader to be educated, entertained or at least interested.
• Your Twitter profile is where you let people know about your blogs, events and achievements and communicate and interact with others.

Think of it as a triangle, with each corner linked both via the web and via various interactions. For example: you write a blog, you announce the blog through twitter, someone finds your tweet in a search in TweetDeck, they may look at your twitter profile or read your blog, they may even comment on your blog or retweet it. At each point they may go to your website to find out more and so on…

One of the advantages of these tools is that you can do a lot to give your twitter profile and blog the same look as your website and even make your blog URL appear as part of your website. This allows you to maintain the consistency of your branding and image and build upon it.

This triangle model is certainly not the be all and end all, but you may find that it is a good start and a way into the world of the social web. As you use this and other social media, you’ll find that not only will you engage with potential customers, but also add caffeine to your search engine optimisation since Google and the like are now putting more emphasis on the social networks.

Text resizer is now available in Opnes Websites

For those clients for whom it's important to make their websites more accessible, they can now add a text resizer. 

Simple to use, visitors will see three options on the top right of the page:

A+ which increases the font size
A- which decreases the fonr size
A +/- which resets the font back to the original size.

Make your website look more stylish and impressive by using an image and video gallery

Most websites offer photograph galleries but very few offer galleries that can display videos as well as images as standard to their clients. This week saw the launch of this new additional capability in website solutions provided by Opnes.

As this is another new component of the ever growing Opnes Content Management system, Opnes clients can now easily upload images or link to videos from sites such as YouTube to create image and video galleries on their website. The galleries use a light box application simular to that found on popular sites such as Facebook and gives a stylish and impressive look and feel to the website.

When images and videos are uploaded, titles and long descriptions can be added providing the site visitor an user friendly front end to access the photograhs, graphics and videos. Site visitors can flick between images and easily or just click on a thumbnail for larger viewing.

For more informaiton about Opnes Website Solutions as provided by West Sussex Websites and the latest feature available, please checkout the website at www.westsussexwebsites.com

An Internet Opportunity for Takeaways

There has been a rapid growth in websites that offer an online ordering service for local takeaway establishments. This is a great way for them to reach a wider audience of customers. They allow customers to order from the comfort of there own homes at a time that suits them and saves confusion or inaccuracies that may occur over the phone. However, each takeaway is competing with those on the same website.

So what if takeaways were to have their own website and provide the service themselves.? This would give them the ability to promote their own business, the website being there as there shopfront on the internet and have the added attraction of making easy for customers to place orders.

Some of the larger pizza chains are already doing it with their own bespoke websites. These are costly for smaller establishments, but there are now more affordable solutions. Based on modified ecommerce functionality, a content management system can provide takeaway menu pages that takeaway owners can maintain for themselves and update their menus whenever they want. Intergrated SMS messaging services can provide customers with order confirmations.

If you would like to find out more, take a look at: www.westsussexwebsites.co.uk.

Clients can just a click to receive your details from your website via SMS

We have just launched a new function from Opnes Website Solutions that makes it easy for vistors to websites designed by us to have the contact details of the owner of the website sent to their mobile phone directly as an SMS message.

The website visitor simply clicks on a icon / link within the site (located on the home and / or contact page) and fills in their mobile number.

Once they have submitted this, they receive a text message containing the website owner’s Business Name, Telephone Number and Website Address.

The recipient is then able to save this information on their mobile for future reference as required.

The owner of the website has complete control over the information that is sent and once set up, the sending of the messages is all handled automatically.

This is a great add on for businesses such as hairdressers, taxi firms, takeaways, locksmiths and plumbers who want to ensure that their potential customers can have their contact information ready to hand – quickly and easily!

A Favicon for your Website.?

Short for “Favourites Icon”, the tiny favicon is an extra touch that gives your website a more professional look and makes it stand out that little bit more. As well as replacing the browser’s default images appearing next to website names in the lists of bookmarked websites (favourites), they show up all over the place. You’ll find them next to the websites’ URL in the address bar of a web browser, on tabs in tabbed browsers, against website addresses in the browsing history and as a desktop icon for internet shortcuts to your site.

As part of your branding and image of your site, the favicon usually reflects the look and feel of your web site or your organization's logo. Since when displayed in a browser, the size of the icon needs to be a tiny 16 by 16 pixels, the challenge is to be able to come up with a recognisable design. If you already have a logo you should first have it reduced it to the 16 by 16 pixels size to see if it holds up. If it doesn't look good at this size, work with the 64 by 64 pixels canvas and try creating a simple design such as an image or letter(s) that represent your organisation incorporating colours from your website's palette.

Although most browsers will accept other formats such as GIF and PNG, the norm is to use the ICO format, the file being saved in the web root directory as favicon.ico. This format has the additional advantage of supporting a number of versions of your icon with different resolutions. Since 48 by 48 pixels icons are usually used for the desktop shortcuts and a scaled up 16 by 16 pixels image will probably look blurry, an icon of this size as well as others to cover other eventualities can be added to the favicon.ico file for this purpose.

Once you have your favicon, you may find that it isn’t displayed when you have a look at your website. Depending on the browser, you may need to delete caches, temporary files or the browsing history. Another trick is to place a ‘?’ at the end of the URL which will trick a browser into thinking the page is new and not cached. To complete your implementation of your favicon, you may also want to use a prompt to encourage visitors to you website to bookmark your site. When having such a feature added to your website, you should note that although this can be done via a pop-up window in Internet Explorer, most other browsers require the visitor to use CTRL-D.

So if you don’t have one, go ahead and ask your website design about getting a favicon.