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Your website is your online presence and so it should be as creative, beautiful and trustworthy as you and your business. Good design isn’t cheap, but it’s worth the investment as amateurs tend to make the same, potentially deadly mistakes in their DIY websites. If you’re contemplating using a template, or you just have done and you’re wondering why you’re languishing on the third page, read on…

Your content is illegible

You’ve spent a lot of time and money writing the content only to fall at the final hurdle when it gets dropped into the page and effectively disappears. If there’s no contrast between the background and the words, or there’s loads of fonts and sizes (including sub-microscopic), your visitors will have a headache and you’ll have a problem.

Too many styles

Letting DIY-ers loose with a template often leads to design disaster – it’s tempting to try out as many colours and styles as possible because it’s fun and new. That’s great until you go live and then it’s like releasing all the animals from the zoo at once.

You need to think about what your business is – do you sell up-cycled furniture? Gardening services? Different businesses have different online interactions with their markets and their websites need to do different things. Realistically, unless you have up-to-date web design training as well as green fingers, you need to engage an agency like Marketing Signals to work this all out for you.

Your site is hard to navigate

Once upon a time (1997, maybe), it was alright for visitors to struggle through your site. Now, however, an esoteric-looking landing page and fiddly navigation buttons will earn you serious bounces and not much else. Again, leave your site planning to those who know what they’re doing; it’ll be worth it in the long run.

Poor images

Thumbnail images that are so pixelated they look like the first glimpses of Pluto, or photos that have no real relevance or connection to you or your business… They just won’t cut it anymore and you need to get professional attention.

Your images should work for you – they’re not wallpaper, they define you and your brand and if they don’t say something they shouldn’t be there. As well as being relevant, your photos and images should be of the best quality, as well as the right size and proportion.

Too busy

You know that feeling when you walk into a crowded or chaotic junk shop or a jumble sale? There’s an online equivalent and it’s a messy, disorganised and overly busy website. Buttons everywhere, stacks of images, endless dropdowns and apps crowded together…

All this “noise” frustrates and distracts visitors so you need a bit of breathing space. You might worry that it’s empty or dead space, but any decent designer will be able to get the balance and flow just right.

You’re not mobile-optimised

This can render you dead in the water within weeks. Mobile browsing has overtaken desktop browsing and so if you’re stuck in desktop mode and your website doesn’t fit or work well on smaller screens, you’ll lose traffic in droves. Get mobilised!

 

Whether you start your own business or can do your job without needing to be in the office, working from home is a popular choice for parents.

But this presents a problem in many modern houses. We Brits live on a small island and housing is expensive. That means houses are on the small side and often those with a family living at home don’t have a spare room to use as a study. So we need to get creative and design a space that works well both as a place to work and a family home.

Here are some tips on how to do that:

Make your house a home

When thinking home decoration, you’ll almost certainly want to aim for a family home rather than an office. Your storage requirements will depend on your work – if you make a handmade product you’ll need more space than a business that can be run from a laptop alone, for example.  So when planning, make sure you include the storage space you need or your home may end up looking like a warehouse.

Creative places to put desks

Your desk doesn’t have to be obvious. If you look around your home, you may find a corner where you can tuck a desk so it doesn’t intrude. Look for alcoves, on landings and under the stairs. You could even add some curtains so you can hide the area away when you’re not working.

If you home doesn’t come with a corner that works for you, you could get a desk with doors on the front so you can tuck your files and computer inside and shut the doors at the end of the working day.

Work to suit your kids’ ages

Your proximity to your children will depending on their ages, so it’s best to plan this when designing your workspace. When children are small it may be hard to work around them, but if you can it’s likely to be quick jobs like replying to emails while they play on the floor beside you. So a desk near a play space is likely to work best, even if that’s a laptop on the kitchen table.

If your kids are older, you and they may want some more space. Here’s where tucking yourself away from the family hustle and bustle could make you a lot more productive, especially in evenings and school holidays! You may even like to consider being able to work from a mobile device so you can work while out and about.

If you really need an extra room

If you’re really desperate for a space of your own, you could consider a garden office. These aren’t cheap options as they need to be well-insulated and have electricity supply if you use them year-round. But it could still be much less expensive than moving house.

One of the most exciting times in your life is just after you have set up a business. However, setting it up is the easy part. The next thing that you want to do is make it grow. If you are like any other business entrepreneur out there, you probably want your new business to grow as fast as it possibly can. After all, that’s the whole point of the game, isn’t it? So how do you go about achieving that? Luckily, there are some tried-and-tested techniques for growing your business very fast indeed. Read on to find out how.

Make a Plan

So many new startups don’t have a solid business plan. Without a plan, you will soon find yourself floundering, not knowing what to do. It is also possible that you will become far more stressed than is necessary. Without a plan, it can often seem like you are never doing enough. So don’t do that to yourself. Set up a plan from the start; importantly, make it realistic, yet ambitious. There is no use is setting such high goals that you will never reach them, because you will always be disappointed. On the other hand, there is no point in not planning for some kind of considerable growth – that’s a recipe for disaster. Make a reasonable plan, and stick to it resolutely.

Image credit

Improve Your Systems

When your business is still young, making sure you have reliable systems is an absolute must. This is one of the most common mistakes new business owners make. They wait until they have started to gather momentum before treating the business to a decent set of systems. However, this is damning your business to failure. It is much better, in the long run, to get your systems set up properly from the outset – and make sure they are failsafe. Now is the time to consider all the technological details, from IT security to Payline Data.

Get The Staffing Right

Staffing is one of the aspects of your business which is likely to grow the most – and that’s just as it should be. Nonetheless, ensure at the start that you have the right number of people for the operation. Too many, and you will be haemorrhaging money. Too few, and your early customers will suffer. It can be a tricky balance to get right, but that’s just part of the fun of getting a new business off the ground. However, it’s not just about the number of people. It’s just as important to have the right people for the job. Ideally, the first person you should be hiring is an experienced recruitment consultant!

Adapt

Every business needs to adapt constantly – and yours is no different. To grow as quickly as possible, make sure you are always on the lookout for new trends. Once you have identified a trend, follow it and change it for the better. If you can mould your business into one which defies all expectations while delighting every customer, you will be off to a very good start indeed!

Knowledge is power: one of the best things you can do for your business this year is put consistent, thorough effort into training your workforce. Why? It’s simple: an educated workforce will do their jobs better, and might surprise you with their innovation and productivity. Ultimately, in-house training schemes bring more business to your business.

What can in-house training give employees?

In-house training can bring big benefits to employees. First of all, it ensures that (having gone to the trouble of hiring the right people) you’ll be investing in targeted, tailored programmes to develop your staff further. Whilst it’s great to keep hiring, it makes sense to maximise your existing resources too – especially when it costs so much to lose an employee.

Secondly, in-house training means your employees can improve or develop meaningful skills that they previously lacked by learning how to use software from providers like CIPHR, for example. The inevitable consequence of training is that your workers will become more efficient – they’re properly trained to perform the tasks and responsibilities you ask of them.

In addition, providing in-house training ensures that you’re more likely to hold on to your employees as there’s no need for them to go elsewhere to develop their skillset. Moreover, trained employees are going to feel more valued and respected than their non-trained counterparts, which ultimately makes them happier… it’s no secret that happy employees tend to be the most productive and profitable employees for a business!

What can in-house training give a business?

Done well, in-house training can help a business make more money. Why? One reason is that under-trained employees might cost a business lost time and money due to mistakes and inefficiencies. It makes sense, therefore, to invest in well-trained employees who are able to get the job done properly the first time round.

Another reason in-house training is so important is that employees value being formally trained. Titles, positions of responsibility and salary all contribute towards a feeling of satisfaction in the workplace, but workers also feel that formal development, training, mentoring and coaching is something they value very highly too. So, by developing an in-house training scheme, you’re more likely to retain your employees and ensure they’re productive and profitable for your business.

Finally, high quality in-house training will ensure you have the best people working for you, giving you a competitive advantage to help ensure you’re ready for change and growth.

Why is in-house training so valuable (versus external training)?

In-house training is occasionally better than external training. One reason it’s so valuable is that you can tailor it to your business’s goals, objectives and wider strategy. Furthermore, it might give you better control of the quality and consistency of the training being delivered to your workforce than external training can always achieve.

Finally, in-house training allows plenty of room for customisation, ensuring that otherwise generic topics are suitable, specific and relevant to your workplace. Above all else, in-house training will give you an opportunity to assess your business’s skill shortages. You’ll see the gaps that need filling!

Photo credit: The unbound book conference on reading and publishing in the digital age. http://www.e-boekenstad.nl/unbound Photo: Sebastiaan ter Burg