Time on your hands website screenshot

Time On Your Hands is a small consultancy based in Brisbane, Australia.  They provide SME’s, domestic customers and community based organisations with services to facilitate  improved organisational efficiency, along with a range of other services.

The owner, Bronwyn Tutty, approached Purple Dog as a result of a referral. Their old website was looking tired and was increasingly hard to maintain.  They wanted a refreshed site that would look vivid, offer easy navigation and provide enhanced editing capabilities so that it could be kept up to date with the companies latest news and showcase interesting articles using a blog.

After several meetings (via Skype), we agreed the nuts and bolts of the project – and away we went to produce the site.

Simple & Green

Here’s what we came up with – a clean, functional and easy to use site (click the images to enlarge)

* A front page slideshow
* Vivid colour scheme
* Blog and content management system
* Dynamic dropdown menu
* Scrolling testimonials
* …and rich content and images provided by the customer and edited by us.

The Client’s Response

Sol, thank you for doing a great job on my website. My original website I designed and put together myself, it was a bit of a fumble, hence my decision to use an actual Web Developer to create a newer and professional site, you successfully created just that. It was good to work with you and a relief to know I could request site changes and you would do what you do best and implement those. I’m incredibly grateful for all the work you’ve done and appreciate your patience with me in coming up with the finished product.
Bronwyn Tutty, Business Owner, Time On Your Hands

Visit Time On Your Hands website: www.toyh.com.au

tags

What’s the purpose of your website?

Consider this rather obvious, but fundamental question – most likely you’ll already know the answer: what is my business and who are my customers? Defining this clearly will help you to understand how you should be communicating with your audience.

Your next question should be: what do I want my website visitors (customers) to do while they are on my site? Again, it’s a fairly obvious question, but important to define nonetheless because it will help you to shape the  ideal “online experience” – and therefore the action you are seeking to acheive.

The primary site action you wish to achieve might be that your visitor makes a purchase, or perhaps contacts you for further information? The secondary action could be in addition to the primary, or it might be a substitute action that you encourage in case the first is not achieved, such as the visitor signs up to a newsletter, bookmarks the page, or suggests the page to a friend or submits it to a social networking site.

Defining your primary and secondary objectives will not guarantee any action, but it will certainly help you to refine your visitors online experience, and that can only be a good thing, both for you and them.

What content and design should I have?

Ultimately, if your site looks poor or does not function well, is hard to find or has poorly written content / images / videos, your visitors are unlikely to stay very long.

Research shows that on average, a person decides within the first 2 – 3 seconds if they want to read / watch the content on a website. That’s not very long to grab someone’s attention!

In this respect, it is absolutely essential that your website should:

1. have clear, easy to follow navigation;
2. look good and have a well thought out design that uses a consistent themes and colours (ideally that follow your branding);
3. contain interesting, regularly updated content (articles / images / video) that’s relevant to your visitor;
4. make it easy for your visitor (customer) to fulfil your site’s primary and / or secondary objectives – buy from you or contact you.

How can we attract visitors & keep them coming back?

Purple Dog offers a range of eMarketing services – such as advertising and Search Engine Optimisation, to help you attract new and repeat visitors to your website.  Here are some other ways you can attract and keep your visitors coming back.

Regular updates are good. Your visitors want to read fresh new interesting articles, not the same old boring content that’s been there for the last 6 months. If the content is fresh, your visitors will return.

Blogs are an excellent method for posting regular snippets of information, latest news or just something interesting that’s relevant to your visitors.  If you are selling specific products online, perhaps an article from the designer of that product – or if you’re selling services, perhaps a testimonial from one of your recent successes. Your visitors can subscribe to your blog with RSS and be notified each time you update it.

Email newsletters are also another excellent way to stay in touch with your customers, and encourage them to come back to visit your site.  However, it’s important to use the right email marketing software because email addresses do change and also your email might get marked as spam if not written correctly.  You’ll also have to compete with people’s “email time” – in other words, will people get to read it?

Social Networking is another good way to help promote your site and keep people coming back to visit.  You can read more about Social Networking here.

Special offers, sales, promotions, change of leadership, major partner announced, PR release – anything that is “newsworthy” and can be easily communicated will help you to ensure your visitors keep coming back.

Conclusion

Know what you want your visitor to do. Know how to make it easy for them to do it. Update your site regularly (great for search engines and for attracting repeat visitors), ensure your site looks good and is easy to navigate.

Talk to Purple Dog if you would like advice on improving your current site, to discuss a new site, or to talk about our eMarketing services.