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3. January 2008 by admin.
| I just returned from St. Catherine, after giving an hour and a half lecture at Brock University at the OALT Annual Conference about Colour at the Work Place, and as I walked in I found this report on my desk: ________________________________________________________ First time in the last 10 years, release of a report on how many people using the internet today. Number of Internet users statistics by comScore Networks Released on March 2006 USA – 152 million users As you can see the numbers are very large, in any country, still our neighbors are the leading once as they ware 10 years ago. None the last our country is growing and increasing in the online space presence. Face it, we can’t just ignore those numbers, if you understand these are your and your friends, family and other businesses big opportunity to get online and target those 19 million users in order to sell, promote, advertise and get known in the country. Imagine yourself if you have a web site and you market this web site, have it in the search engines and give out your business cards with the online address, 19 million online users are there to view your web site, meaning to view your company, services and products. Also don’t forget of what kid of potential do you have in online sales, open an online store, don’t pay rent, don’t buy the stock, don’t employ warehouse workers, practically no monthly expenses and 100% income, just click and sell. Wow, that is definitely something to be proud of! Think about it… you open up a business to cell… I don’t know, plastic cups, what would you need for it? You definitely need an office, for the start some small room that would be as your start-up warehouse, buy some starting stock, and oh boy we all know none of the suppliers or manufacturers will never give you credit, so, you have to buy a starting stock, spend money and your time to show your products to potential clients, without a clue if they are going to buy from you or not. Lets analyze the whole picture now and we are going to talk about minimum, office – $1,500 / month = $9,000 / first half a year (start-up), room/warehouse - $1,000 / month = $6,000 / first half a year, stock – 10 cents per cup / 10,000 cups for the start = $1,000, gas fro driving around $200 / month = $1,200 / first half a year, your minimum income for only the necessary expanses $1,500 / month = $9,000 / first half a year, and I’m not even mentioning the rest of unplanned expanses that all of us get once in a while and not the advertising and marketing. Well, now let’s calculate your first half a year needed minimal budget for just a start-up is - $26,200.00! Don’t you think this is a bit too much? You are going to spend nearly $30,000 for something that are 50/50 it can work or not. Online store expense at our company: $6,000 to $12,000 for designing, programming and building it, one time fee, domain for a year $38, web hosting for a year $200 to $1,000, online marketing, advertising and traffic flow to your web site $600 to $1,500 and you have your fully operated store with a huge products database and online payments processing system and invoicing engine. Let’s calculate this type of store for the first year (not half a year) and in this case we will take the maximum budget for it - $14,000! How much did you saved by having an online store? Well if we are going to talk here about half a year as you would need first half a year at least for your physical store, than we would take the $14,000 and divide the amount in half and we would get the half a year budget of $7,000, there is a big difference between $26,200 and $7,000. If you would take your physical store budget which is $26,200 and multiply by two that you would need for the whole year, and we get - $52,400 First year budget – Online store: $14,000 / physical store: $52,400 52,000 minus 14,000 = 38,000 ? and this how much you would save by having it all online! If you are just into promoting your business services or products online, we can help you with that as well we’ve been producing small to medium promotional web sites for the past 3.5 years with a success and growth of our clients businesses. Our starting prices today for a promotional web site is $750 and mind you, when other companies in our industry give you fixed price for a simple 4 page web site, they would never tell you what do you get for your money, here is an advice… ask them and you’ll be surprised that you get nearly nothing for the price you pay… afterwards they will start charging you for every extra image, element, color, and so forth. We give you the freedom of choice of how many colours, how many images, how many elements, etc. we design our projects from 0 to 100 with no exception, our web sites are fully designed no mater what was the price charged for that specific web site. If you or anybody else that you know of, is planning on opening a business, we are here to help you start your business, we know how and definitely can save you money! |
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3. January 2008 by admin.
Internet users can take just one-twentieth of a second to decide whether they like the look of a website, new research has found.
“Visual appeal can be assessed within 50 milliseconds, suggesting that web designers have about 50 milliseconds to make a good impression,” the Canadian researchers report in the March/April issue of the journal Behaviour & Information Technology.
Dr Gitte Lindgaard and colleagues from Carleton University in Ottawa confirm that internet users are a fickle lot.
The team did this by flashing up websites for 50 milliseconds and asking participants to rate them for visual appeal.
When they repeated the exercise after a longer viewing period the ratings were consistent.
The medium is the message
The finding comes as bad news to anyone hoping to convey information, says Sue Burgess, an Australian researcher who evaluates website usability and senior lecturer in information management at the University of Technology Sydney.
“There’s no doubt that people do respond very quickly to websites and decide very quickly whether to stay on them,” she says.
The appeal of a website is usually tied to color, movement and interactivity, she says, with the way the information is structured coming second.
Burgess says it’s unclear whether the internet is changing our ability to concentrate for long periods our if we are adapting to the medium.
“There’s so much information and … there’s always going to be a lot of clicking around just to see what’s there,” she says.
The halo effect
Australian associate professor of psychology Bill von Hippel, from the University of New South Wales, says it takes about 50 milliseconds to read one word, making this a “stunningly remarkable” timeframe in which to process the complex stimuli on a website.
“It’s quite remarkable that people do it that fast and that it holds up in their later judgment,” he says.
“This may be because we have an affective or emotional system that [works] independently of our cognitive system.”
In evolutionary terms, this ability helped us respond rapidly to dangerous situations, he says.
The study also reflects the so-called halo effect, von Hippel says, where an initial bias towards something drives subsequent judgments.
“This suggests that we make very quick judgments based on some sort of emotional reaction and our more considered judgments still reflect that first impression.”
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3. January 2008 by admin.
It’s imperative for a company to have a quality web site today - but many firms are still throwing up web sites that are just poorly designed or overly complex. Poor navigation (menus and overall site structure) when coupled with low quality graphics is really problematical (!) - Online visitors think less of your company as a result which will hurt revenue in the long run. Many think just doing a minimal job is sufficient but they aren’t factoring in how close your competition is! On the web any potential customer is only one click away from seeing a high quality web site that is well designed and conveys a quality image.
A good rule of thumb when budgeting for a web site is to assume you will pay approximately $250-300 USD per page - this should include your graphics design, setting up registration forms, etc. This may sound too expensive for many companies but for better or worse perception is reality in the online world! So, don’t short change yourself, put some resources into your web site and be prepared to continue to do so - it’s now a vital component of any company’s ongoing marketing processes that needs constant upgrading (PR, print, etc.) materials.
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