How to Pick the Best Web Hosting Company

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Because a lot of thought, planning, and money goes into creating the perfect website for your business, you want to be sure it gets the traffic you are aiming for and that the website can handle everything that is thrown at it. This is where the web hosting company comes into play. The web host is the service that publishes your website so others will see it. It provides a company with the actual server space to store all its content and looks after the file maintenance involved in the site. It is easily the most important component in building your site.

So, before you just go ahead and randomly select the first web host that you find, you may want to take some time and use these tips that will help you pick the best web hosting company for your specific needs.

Keep the Three S’s in Mind

A simple way to go about picking a web host is to always keep the three S’s in mind. These S’s are security, support, and speed. Each of these plays an important role, and if even one of these is lagging, the entire site and the user experience will suffer. Each time you investigate a web host, you need to ask about the three S’s and get detailed specifics.

Of course, there is more to it than just the three S’s, these just happen to be the most important criteria to watch for.

Be Aware of Your Specific Needs

It’s also very important that you are aware of your specific needs. It’s hard to shop for a host when you don’t even know what you need. Give thought to the website you are building. If you want to use something simple like WordPress, how much web traffic you are expecting? If you need any sort of special software for the site, do you know what this is and how to get it? Certain hosts will cater to specific criteria, which will help you to narrow down your options and find that perfect fit.

How Reliable is the Server?

Web traffic is fickle in that it will only stick around and stay strong if the website performs smoothly and as it is intended. What this means is that you need a reliable server that can handle your traffic without needing to “time out”.

When speaking to a potential web host you want to ask about their “uptime”, this is the time the website will be up and running, and is reliable. When a website crashes, it’s not unusual to lose more than just traffic, you can also lose out on a large number of potential sales.

What Kind of Pricing is Offered

Budget should always be on your mind when shopping for a web host. You want to find a package that offers everything you need, doesn’t have any surprise costs built in, and fits your budget.

Picking a web hosting company isn’t something you want to rush through. It’s important to do your research, take a good look at your options, and make sure you weigh all the pros and cons before making a final decision.

3 Things To Know When Hiring A Web Hosting Firm

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There are many things to learn about operating in the online world, and some strategies are more successful than others. This doesn’t mean you should be any more or less hesitant to begin your time online because your customers will demand it long before you consider it a viable option. What matters is that you keep a solid understanding about how to best progress during this time. Not only will the following tips give you the best understanding of what to look for when hiring a web hosting firm, but they should also help you stop making bad choices when you’re unaware of all the implements a solid online strategy needs to work in the first place.

Reliability

Your firm simply needs to be as reliable as can be. Otherwise, there’s no doubt going to be plenty of issues regarding the way you firm looks to your audience. If you’re simply not online long enough for them to complete whatever they intended to on your website, you will look unprofessional, and worse, not worth doing business with. This will be all very well and good if your firm deserves this, as it can improve your service understanding. However, if this happens as a result of not being able to express your online medium because another service is failing you, that is a sad state of affairs. For this reason, reading reviews such as this A2 Hosting review before you buy can give you good insight into how well the service performs under pressure.

Support

How accessible are your web hosting agencies? Do they have 24/7 support, or are you reliant on their office times to help you out of a sticky spot if their services go down in the middle of the night? As you hope to be an engaging and wonderful platform for your customers to experience, you should also hope to be treated in the same way by the web hosting platform who are attempting to keep your good servicing upkeep by any methods they possibly can.

Advice

How much advice is the firm offering you? Are they happy to give you solid and practical solutions for problems you may be experiencing, or do they leave you in the dust to figure it all out yourself? Depending on the level of experience you have with websites, this might be better off in either intense or limited quantities. Only you will know what works best for your firm, but you must be ready to communicate it. If the advice is an option which is covered by the cost of your usage, you may be able to negotiate a better price if you forgo this service, but don’t worry if this proposal is rejected. Keeping on top and happy about your internet servicing requires that you feel satisfied with the methods being taken to keep you online, and if you feel like the first you’re using is happy to explain to you their methods, you are more likely to feel happy and able in your commission.

With these tips, you’re sure to experience customer satisfaction.

How Can a Brochure Help Your Business

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The company brochure has a rich history. It’s been an affordable way for businesses to share information about their products and services for decades. Since the days when it first became possible to run off a few hundred brochures with pictures and a few well-chosen words to inspire prospective customers to part with their money, there’s been a use for this classic sales tool.

Let’s look a little deeper at how different kinds of brochures can help market your business, event or activity better than it’s done today.

The Promotional Brochure

The most basic use of a brochure is as a promotional tool to introduce a new prospective customer to the brand or company. In many cases, they’ve never heard of your company, but something has peaked their interest. Rather than look around your showroom not knowing what to consider first, being able to hand them a ready-made brochure is an excellent way to direct their initial interest in a productive way.

Staff can flip through the pages to highlight areas of interest for them based on asking a couple of initial questions to see what their needs are. With a brochure that’s organised into logical sections covering activities, history, product lines or another way that divides up the information so it makes sense, the staff can help move prospective customers forward in their decision-making process.

The Product Brochure

A product brochure features either a selection of your best-selling or latest releases. In some cases, a full catalogue is created which covers your entire product line, but this is less common now. When walking into a UK showroom, being able to find a brochure with some of the products available is a fast-track way to see what the business offers. As long as the sales staff know their products well, they can then greet the customer and augment whatever information is already provided in the product brochure once they know which item the customer is most interested in.

With cheap brochure printing, it’s even possible to come out with a monthly brochure printed as a limited run to provide information on the latest releases which is the reason many customers visit a retail shop in the first place. Print brochures take some of the initial workload off the sales staff too which allows them to direct their energies more effectively to close a sale more often.

If you’re planning on producing a monthly magazine style brochure, you’re likely going to need a lot of copies to distribute. This means that you’re going to have to research a brochure printing company who can handle high-quantity orders. One company known for this is print24 who can print in batches of up to 50,000. If this is something you know you’ll need, you can read more about the service on their brochure printing page.

The Trade Show Brochure

For businesses that go to the expense of renting a booth at an industry trade show, it’s critical that they have both informational and promotional products for attendees to take away. The list of possible items runs the gamut from branded t-shirts to coffee mugs to several brochures covering the various brands and product lines.

Grabbing the attention of people at a trade show isn’t easy. It requires great design to get the most out of the latest brochure printing to deliver an eye-catching handout that will get the person returning to the booth to follow up later. For businesses in the beauty market, having several print magazines covering beauty tips and a few of your select products added for good measure is a good way to go. Also, don’t skimp on the trade booth design which gets people into the booth in the first place.

Brochure vs. Magazine

It depends on what you wish to share with customers whether you should use magazine printing or get a brochure printed up. Magazines tend to include more glossy photos and a greater number of pages. The binding tends to be fixed with a magazine, whereas a brochure has a variety of available bindings that all work well.

When the material is going to be browsed together, then a spiral binding makes it easier to open it up at a page and keep it there for a longer look. A salesperson wanting to point out the benefits of a product or service is aided when the page stays open where they need it so they can focus on the customer.

Getting the Ordering Right

It’s important to consider the shelf life of the brochure before ordering. Will it be used to promote this month’s special offers, contain information relevant for the current quarter or provide some historical perspective to extend its relevance? You want to order enough copies so that you don’t run out, but not so many that an extremely topical brochure no longer has much relevance. Therefore, a balance must be struck between the size of the print run, how many brochures are expected to be required, and the shelf life or usefulness of the information contained therein. Doing so maximises the value that the business receives from each batch of printed brochures.

Brochures are very useful to a business. Any company that meets customers face-to-face or has a need to send out product or company information in the mail will certainly find a brochure helpful.

How to Help Employees Communicate by Email More Effectively

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Email is still considered the primary communication tool in the business world. Today’s business landscape may have shifted further towards video conferences and short messaging platforms, but the majority of formal business communications are still conducted via email. There is no sign of emails being replaced by other means of communication either.

Despite the common use of emails, not all professionals know how to use them properly. This is exactly why we still see mistakes such as incorrectly using CC instead of BCC happening in the real world. As an employer, you can play a more active role in helping employees communicate by email more effectively.

Email-Related Training

Despite the importance of emails, most email etiquette and skills are learned through experience and real-world practice. Sure, there are a lot of resources and websites that specifically share email-related knowledge and tips. That said, very little formal training is provided in school or corporate training programs.You can reduce the number of mistakes your employees make when communicating via email by providing them with such training programs. They are easy to find and will even help employees fine-tune their email content for effective business communication.

It is also a good idea to provide employees with training on the tools available to them. In Outlook, for example, you can sort emails automatically, forward emails with certain marks to other recipients, and even automate everyday email tasks (i.e. adding a calendar entry for meetings and invitations).

The Right Tools for the Job

There are also additional tools designed to really boost email productivity and effectiveness. Customer Relationship Management or CRM platforms, for example, are capable of handling, logging, and documenting email communication. These comprehensive databases enable sales officers to keep track of their conversations with clients without ever missing a beat.

The same can be said for research tools. Let’s say you want your sales team to connect with new potential clients. Provide them with a tools such as The Email Finder to be able to research and verify email addresses. Click here to learn more about email verification can really boost your employees’ email productivity.

Monitoring

Monitoring is always a tricky subject to discuss. Is it ethical to monitor business emails sent from @yourcompany.com email addresses? Ethics debates aside, email monitoring is a proven way of boosting the effectiveness of business emails nonetheless.

As previously mentioned, CMS platforms can now keep track of email communications between sales officers and clients. That simple tracking feature is very valuable when it comes to developing strong relationships with clients since it allows your employees to personalize the tone of the conversation based on past emails.

Tracking also gives you, the employer, a clear picture of how emails are helping the business thrive. This, along with the previous tips we covered in this article, will help you assist employees in using their email addresses more effectively.

3 Major Benefits of Effective Web Design

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article
Photo courtesy of Pexels

Web design is about so much more than creating a pretty looking store space. Of course, every brand needs an aesthetically pleasing web page. But there are several key aspects of web design that can make the difference between your online business excelling and prospering or it falling flat on its face in the first year of operation. Remember, the success of any E-commerce company relies heavily on the brand’s visual presentation: this forms the majority of what potential consumers know about you. So make it effective. Here are five benefits of well-managed web design.

Creation of a Consistent Brand Identity

Brand identity is essential to create the impression of a consistent, reliable company. Most people are prone to mulling over the appearance of one aspect of their business at a time. First a logo. Then perhaps a font. Then a color scheme. This is likely to form a rather mish mash aesthetic when all of the different aspects are put together. Professional web designers such as Ignite Digital, however, look at the bigger picture from the start of their projects. They will have an idea of how absolutely every part of your business is going to fit into their design scheme, whether it’s web pages, affiliated blogs, business cards or advertising. Always bear in mind that one, stable and reliable image is bound to make a much more positive and lasting impression in consumers’ minds than five different images that appear as though they could appear to five different companies.

Drawn Out Pageviews

Yes, you want to bring plenty of traffic to your site, so clicks are important. But you don’t make any profit from individuals who click your homepage and leave straight away. You need to keep people on your page, browsing different areas and perusing different collections and products to see your traffic convert into sales and profit. In a world saturated with web pages and web vendors, it will take something pretty impressive to encourage an audience to stay on your page for longer than a few seconds. So collaborate with experienced designers to create an eye catching and engaging homepage.

Content Form and Structure

You need to ensure that your products and collections are presented to internet users in their best light. You want your customer to feel confident enough in the product to invest their hard earned cash in it. Effective web design can help with this. Options such as zoom or rotation on product images, links to sizing information, delivery options and terms and conditions and well-placed product descriptions in an easy to read font all go down a storm with consumers. You also want products displayed on individual pages, allowing customers to focus on the item they’ve clicked separately to all of your other stock. The key to a successful site is simple navigation and minimalism.

These are just three of the benefits that effective web design can bring to your brand. Needless to say, there are plenty more. So get started on creating a brilliant business web page.