EST Commerce – Page 2 – Online Business Advice

Planning For a Successful Integrated Digital Strategy Part Three

Once you have support for the digital strategy and vision, it is time to document it and find the right suppliers to support implementing the component parts of the strategy.

Create & deliver your strategy

Capture the strategy in a document, but be mindful that this is likely to change. Business requirements can change quickly and the digital strategy needs to be able to respond, so plans cannot be set in stone, they may have to adapt throughout the year.

Outline the goals of the strategy and the approach that will be taken. Then get formal signoff as needed, from the various areas of the business who are key to delivering the strategy and whose support will be required to implement, fund and approve the milestones throughout.

Communicating the strategy to the business is an important step, so the business knows what the digital goals are and how they’re going to be delivered. This is also a good time to re-enforce those stakeholder relationships you’ve been working hard to create.

Planning For a Successful Integrated Digital Strategy

Having worked in digital for 15 years, in a number of different roles and within some large and complex organisations, I recently gave a talk about achieving a successful integrated digital strategy, which contained a lot of tips based on these experiences. Breaking down the content of the talk into a series of articles, I hope that readers will be able to use some of these tips.

When planning your digital strategy, it is important to remember:

It can be a complicated time, the business you work in might be complex, and the digital strategy itself can require an understanding of technical capabilities (or limitations) Add to that the fact that the landscape is constantly moving, and it can be a difficult challenge to define what you want to achieve using digital.
The strategy is not a static item. It is something that needs to be defined and documented, but it is likely to change and may sometimes have to adapt quickly to the business that might be changing around it. Strategic digital marketers need to be prepared for this.

Digital marketers need to understand how digital fits within their organisation, the various stakeholders and touchpoints, in order to shape a digital strategy that truly supports the business and its goals.

Align digital objectives with business objectives
It is important to understand what the business aims to achieve overall and how digital can support these objectives.

Planning For a Successful Integrated Digital Strategy Part Two

An important part of getting any digital strategy implemented is ensuring that the right support is available – this means getting the right people to support the ambitions and securing enough budget to implement the strategic plan.

Understand your business in a local/global context

Look at your competitors and other businesses to see what they’re doing in areas you want to focus on, such as email marketing, social media, website. Understanding the existing activity in a particular area of digital marketing can provide some insights into what is engaging the audiences of businesses in your industry.

Compare your own activities and identify where you need to improve. This can be done through formal audits and benchmarks, or informally. Even if done at a very basic level, capturing this information creates a baseline to measure against in future. Being able to identify where your competitors excel in the digital space, may also help get buy-in from senior stakeholders.

Does The Notifiable Data Breaches Scheme Apply To Your Business Or Organisation?

It is difficult to escape news relating to data breaches and company databases being hacked, as it seems like every other week there is another which takes place. Whilst consumer law is in place to ensure that companies comply with data and privacy protection matters, in practice the law is not capable of stopping a determined hacker on the other side of the world from hacking in and stealing the personal data of a business’s customers.

For that, rigorous data protection and security are required and if your business does not yet have this in place, then our advice is that it needs to as soon as possible so that you are complying with current privacy laws especially the Privacy Act of 1998.

Planning For a Successful Integrated Digital Strategy Part Four

When implementing the digital strategy, it is now time to look at tools, processes and the impact that the digital strategy may have on the organisation.

Tools

When choosing which tools to use for implementing your strategy, ensure that the tools are measured for their ability to deliver on the business objectives – consider the strengths of each type of tool and how well they will support the strategy.

Make sure to define the business requirements before looking at tools, as there’s a risk of getting caught up comparing tools and potentially missing a key requirement.

While there are lots of tools that can do multiple things, such as email marketing tools that also manage social media marketing campaigns and include detailed analytics capabilities, these tools might be over-complicated or more expensive than what you really need.

Be clear on what you can afford to compromise on without losing any capability that is strategically important.

5 SEO Actions To Improve Your Furniture Design Studio’s Search Engine Rankings

If you own a furniture design studio, according to the SEO consultant Peter Brittain, one of the most effective ways to attract new clients is by taking steps to boost the ranking of your website on Google. In doing so, whenever someone who is looking for a furniture design studio enters a relevant search term, if your website ranks well, it will be one of the first to appear.

This does not happen by magic and takes a degree of time and effort, but it can be done, especially if you follow some simple SEO actions. These activities help to increase the relevance of your website in the eyes of Google for the search terms you are targeting. Here are those 5 key SEO actions…

Top Tips To Add A Mobile Friendly Edge To Your Business

Because mobile devices have smaller screens and less processing power, a site designed for desktops is bound to take ages to load. Considering that most visitors don’t have the patience to endure prolonged loading times and there’s plenty other similar websites out there, having a non-friendly mobile site presents the risk of losing new customers to your competitors.

The good news is that creating a mobile-friendly version for your website is quite an easy and straightforward process. Following are some tips that can help you make your site more accessible to visitors browsing via their smartphones or tablets.

Plan the layout carefully

By far the best solution for a mobile version of your site is to choose a simple design that makes navigation seamless for your visitors. Don’t forget to add thumb friendly buttons and call to actions that automatically load your phone number when tapped.

Keep the landing pages simple

Although the advancements in the industry are impressive, mobile devices still lack the processing power of a desktop computer. Therefore, they’re unable to render more sophisticated designs, such as flash for instance. In general, it’s best to avoid using flash altogether and only integrate images in situations where they’re truly relevant. Otherwise, you’ll just increase the site’s loading time and risk losing numerous potential customers.

iPad Apps for Web Designers On-the-Go

Sketching and Drawing

Some of your best design ideas are probably thought of while on-the-go, right? This is why it’s great to have a sketching and/or drawing app handy so that you can draw up a quick sketch or more detailed if you prefer. If you use public transportation to get to work, this is one of the best ways to pass the time – by doodling or drawing.

ArtStudio for iPad

With ArtStudio for iPad you can draw, paint, and even edit your photos – all while on-the-go. It uses advanced mathematics to attain the highest level of quality. ArtStudio is great for beginners and pros, and includes drawing lessons with step-by-step instructions.

Sketch Club

Sketch Club combines standard digital painting and drawing tools, vector art, old school pixel art, and new procedural tools. It even supports VGA and HDMI output so that you can display your design ideas on an external monitor or projector to clients.

Inspire Pro

Inspire Pro is an advanced painting app with numerous features. Its key feature is the ability to simulate wet oil paint on a canvas. This is great for giving your web designs a unique look. It also has some of the best color blending capabilities that you’ll find on an iPad app.

Design the Perfect Navigation and Make it User-Friendly

Browsing from one page to the other of a website can really be confusing and frustrating. So much so, that many users simply give up. As a web designer and developer it is essential to plan your navigational menu, taking the user’s’ point of view into serious consideration.

A simple menu is not always enough for a user-friendly interface, and it may need specific requirements for it to be more streamlined.

Each individual type of website needs specific navigational requirements, depending on what type of users, services and products it is trying to target and market. Here are a few stereotype websites and the best changes that you should implement in order to keep your readers interested and motivated to stay on your website.

How to Find all that Content on News Websites?

News websites are a head-scratcher as they have a huge amount of content to place, which can easily lead to confusion as to what news is relative to which category and so on. The navigational menu is an absolute priority; otherwise the news items are lost on the readers.

A simple navigational menu on the top bar with a home button and several categories is simply not feasible, as readers would not be able to explore many other important facets of the website. People using news websites are looking for content and information, thus they need a more extensive navigational system within which to browse and find the news item, they are interested in.

Easy Ways to Get that Creativity Spark Back

Find Inspiration from Websites Showcasing new Designs

If you are lacking in inspiration and need to get your creative spark back, then browsing through websites that showcase designs by different web designers can help you get your magic touch back. This process of stimulating your capacities does not intend to be a copying exercise, simply a way to incorporate and develop new design ideas.

There are many websites that provide extensive design galleries through which you can browse and find inspiration from; however, not all specialize in showcasing creative designs, specifically for this purpose.

Some Excellent Sources of Inspiration

Web Creme:

Web Creme is one of those websites that focus specifically on the designing of websites, and if this is what you are looking for then you will find your part of action with Web Creme. When browsing through this website you will find a large number of websites that are showcased every day, which concentrate on the quality of their design more than any other element.

The websites that are on the show here, are real websites designed by genuine professionals, they are not websites designed following other models or using theories of conception.

Advanced Horizontal Flash Menu – Joomla Module

Advanced Horizontal Flash Menu for Joomla 1.5 – 2.5 with Administration Control Panel for multiple flash menus customization.

Advanced Horizontal Flash Menu Features:

– Unlimited numbers of Flash Menus on website
– Advanced Horizontal Flash Menu has transparent background
– Tooltip on mouse over the flash menu item
– Use custom URL or select Article as Flash Menu item
– Special glow and shadow effect on mouse over
– Icon Size 256×256, 128×128, 64×64,48×48 or 32×32
– Icon file format PNG, GIF, JPG (transparent PNG recommended)

When you install com_AdvancedHorizontalFlashMenu, demo menu Flash Menu is installed by default.

You can either edit default flash menu, or you can create new ones by following steps below:

To create new flash menu:

1. Navigate to Components –> Advanced Horizontal Flash Menu

2. In Advanced Horizontal Flash Menu Control Panel click on New icon (upper right)

3. Enter new menu name (without spaces) and click on Create icon (upper right).

(New Menu is created in Control Panel and new module is automatically installed with the name of that menu.)