North East Expo 2016

I had the pleasure of attending the 2016 North East Expo business event at Newcastle Falcons today (27/04/2016).

How to use a custom share button on your Squarespace site

I was getting frustrated by the same old facebook and twitter share buttons and most of the tools out there are either very standardised or complicated. I wanted to use my own style share buttons for some of my web designs. I have aimed the tutorial at Squarespace websites but the principles should work with any site.

Why I was surprised by Social Quant Twitter Growth Tool

I had previously tried a free trial of one of these services promising to get ‘Real’ ‘Quality’ Twitter followers for your business account and I must say that I was not really satisfied with the results. That is until I signed up with SocialQuant.net.

How Much Does it Cost to Have A Website Designed

What does a website cost?

You wont find many designers who will have set prices for website design and there is a good reason for that. 

Each project is so different with so many different options that the designer can use that most designers (including myself) want to give you the best price but also the best options for your project. In order to determine this, we need to look at each project individually and quote on the job.

Speaking from a my business, as a rule of thumb, a website design will usually cost between £500 & £2000 depending on what is required. Start-up businesses will usually have a limited cashflow which is why I also offer monthly payment options to spread the cost as it is in my interest too that your website is successful and in turn, your business.

Why hire a designer when you can build a website yourself?

There are many platforms out there such as Wix, Squarespace and WordPress etc. that let you build your website on a template. These are very good services and I use Squarespace for a lot of my smaller projects. I would encourage you all to have a go at building a website as even if you don’t get exactly what you are after, you will have learnt a lot more about websites than you knew before.

When you hire a designer, you are asking somebody to design your website. They may use a template based platform to keep the costs down, however, they will use a lot of design skills to maximise your conversion rate. Things like colour psychology to reflect the feeling that best suits your type of customer, complimentary colours for ‘Calls to Action‘, fonts that suit the brand, placing of key information and ensuring that you are giving the information in various forms to cater for the different types of customer. They will also ensure that your website is responsive to all devices and that there is a consistent flow to the site. These are just some the reasons that you hire web designers such as myself. We haven’t even talked about the image selections, infographics and manipulation of these.

Summary

There is a lot more to designing a website than just placing elements onto a template but by offering plans like monthly payments to help with start-ups, I hope that more people are able to have their sites professionally designed and stand out online.

If you would like to find out more about the monthly payment schemes or just want a free quote for a design, please get in touch.

Using Squarespace for Ecommerce Review

As my followers are probably aware, I am a big fan of Squarespace and it accounts for over 50% of all of my web designs for clients. I still feel that Squarespace is best suited to brochure style websites but it does have a feature for eCommerce which we are going to have a look at.

Google rolling out Material Design web-wide

Since 2014, Google has been redesigning its apps and services according to its own Material Design principles. Yesterday it announced on its design blog that an upcoming release of its Chrome browser (version 49.2) will adopt Material Design as its default rendering. Critically the new version of Chrome—dubbed Chrome MD—will override site-defined CSS in deference…

via Google rolling out Material Design web-wide — Webdesigner Depot

Is There a Link Between Self Employment & Insomnia?

It’s a genuine question that I am investigating!

I am sat writing this blog post at 4am after around one and a half hours sleep which seems to be normal for me at the moment. Admittedly, I may doze off at around 6pm for an hour tonight but these habits seem to have become prominent since starting my own web design business.

Digital Businesses Showcased in the North East

I recently attended the #GetDigital event in the North East of England organised by Creative North. This was one of the most successful events for Networking that I have ever been too in the Newcastle / Tyne & Wear Region.

Best Way to Send Email from your Domain

This is a question that I get asked a lot. It is usually quite straight forward to receive email from your domain address i.e. matt@switchtoonline.com but it can become confusing when you want to send from that address.

Which Social Media Platform to Use for Your Business

More and more platforms are being introduced to the market and it is hard to know which platform to use to get the best engagement for your business. I have looked at statistics and used my own experience to bring together a collection of statistics to help you choose which is the best platform for your business.