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Is your website generating new business for you?

Is your website doing what you want it to? Is it as good as it could be? In the current economic climate, your website is one resource that is worth investing in. It works for you 24 hours a day, seven days a week but is often forgotten about. When was the last time you reviewed the way your site works, how visitors react to it and how effective it is in representing you, your business, products and services?

Web usage continues to increase rapidly and new ways of interacting and communicating are evolving fast. What was effective or even acceptable a few months or a year ago may be failing to engage your target audience now.

Make sure your website is still working for you.

BoxStuff Spring Offer

Call us now for a FREE review of your current website and on-line communications strategy.

We will arrange a time to review your site with you and answer any questions you have about how to improve the effectiveness of your on-line activities.

Simpler Site Navigation

When a site has considerable breadth and depth of content, finding an easy way to navigate through it becomes increasingly challenging. The familiar and mostly very effective metaphor for top level navigation is tabs with second level submenus located in a secondary bar (e.g. Amazon, Apple etc). When a third level is required, we often see another menu appearing in the typical left or right hand column next to the content. Then to help clarify where you are within the site, the breadcrumb menu is deployed.

A different way was brought to our attention by the bright folk at Teehanlax who blogged about a new concept which they christened the ‘Tabbed Breadcrumb’ menu. As it’s name suggests it combines the tabs and the breadcrumbs and multiple levels of navigation in to a rather elegant and satisfying solution.

We decided to try it out on SailingNetworks.com:

Below are a series of screenshots showing the top, second and third levels of navigation using the old and new styles.

Top level (new)

Top level (old)

Second level (new)

Second level (old)

Third level (new)

Third level (old)

And we like it. So we’re also making it an integral part of the admin interface for all our web apps….

Bad Customer = Good News

My view of the client obsessive with detail has gone through a fundamental change. No longer do I dread another tweak or minor amend, I now relish every update. Have I become tamed? Is age mellowing the creative fire? Neither I hope, it has just became clear that growing a business in a sceptical market means listening carefully, attention to detail and doing the ‘leg work’.

If your lucky enough not to have the time to listen there’s a new industry who’ll do it for you – www.feefo.com

Double digging / Back to the land

After agreeing a fresh crop of salad leaves for a friends wedding I set about marking out a fresh vegetable patch. The maths meant a large area – 200 people, 1 square foot per serving (allowing for death and disease – to the plants not guests) = 200 square foot. Paced and marked my mind went to thoughts of Monty Don; sleeves rolled up, relishing a bit of sweat and toil. I only achieved one trench, back acheing I ’m now aiming to do a trench a day . . . but I will get it done. www.bbc.co.uk/bloom/

How do I relate this to the current economic climate? Easy, do the groundwork now. Only the strongest ideas will survive but if they grow in this climate the future looks pretty good.