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6 ways to earn the trust of potentional buyers

Posted in Marketing, Web Design, Web Development on July 20th, 2010 by Talita – Be the first to comment
  1. Display testimonials
    Testimonials are a fantastic way of building trust and credibility. If you’re not already actively solicitng testimonials from your customers, start now! Customers love to know that they are buying from a popular, respected source and they love to feel part of a community. Testimonials add a personal touch to your website and help customers feel comfortable buying from you.
  2. Be contactable
    It’s important that customers have easy access to your contact details. They want to know that they are dealing with a legitimate business and that there is someone they can talk to if they have questions. Make sure potential buyers can easily find your contact page and include as much information as possible.
  3. Offer satisfaction guarantees
    Another way of making customers feel comfortable is by guaranteeing the products or services you are selling to them. Offering a money back guarantee will help relieve a potential buyer’s anxiety over making an online purchase. Online shoppers don’t have the benefit of meeting you in person or holding products in their hands, so you need to do everything you can to convince them. Satisfaction and money back guarantees let people know that there’s no reason NOT to buy from you. Make sure you specify the terms clearly so that there is no confusion down the track.
  4. Give something away for free
    Not practical for everyone, but if you’re able to give customers a demo, preview, video demonstration or free trial that will convince them they should buy from you, then do so. Giving something away for free is a great way of building trust with potential buyers. Don’t stop at the pre-sale point either - you can build tremendous loyalty and repeat business amongst existing customers by giving something away for free every time they purchase from you.
  5. Proof read and spell check!
    Make sure you proof read your content for typos, spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. You want your customers to know that you are professional and attentive.
  6. Make paying easy
    Use a trusted 3rd party partner website for credit card transactions and make the process as seemless as possible. Customer’s shouldn’t have to leave your website to make a purchase, this can be confusing and customers may abandom the process - unless of course you’re using paypal and then customers would expect to be taken to the paypal website.

School Website Design Case Study: Kenmore State High School

Posted in Case Studies, Web Design on July 10th, 2010 by Talita – Be the first to comment

Narellan Pools Web Design

Kenmore State High School

Kenmore State High School is one of Brisbane’s highest achieving public schools. It is located in the leafy suburb of Kenmore in Brisbane’s south-west corridor.
Reach: Australia
Launch Date: March 2010
Completed to budget: Yes
Completed to time-lines: Yes
Web Address: www.kenmoreshs.eq.edu.au/
Tasks: Joomla School Website Development
Technology: PHP, MySql, XHTML/CSS
Kenmore State High School were seeking a fresh look and feel for their website and a comprehensive content management system that would allow them to update their content quickly and easily.

The new website design features:

  • A clean and engaging look and feel
  • A large featured image slideshow with beautiful images - professional imagery makes all the difference on the web!
  • An interesting background effect featuring gradients and folds to bring the website to life and add a 3-dimensional effect
  • Lots of clean white space for text areas
  • A fixed width content area to fit a 1024×768 screen resultion which is currently the most common screen resolution.
  • 3 level dropdown and flyout menus to provide the easiest possible access to relevant pages
  • Breadcrumbs to show visitors where they are within the site structure. (i.e. You are here: …) This is a very important usability feature particularly in websites with a large and complicated content structure.
  • A comprehensive search function that can be used to find the information your are looking for quickly - another important usability feature of large sites
  • A cute favicon composed of elements of the school logo

The Joomla backend administration system allows administrators to easily:

  • Edit content across the full website
  • Upload documents to relevant pages - newsletters, forms etc
  • Maintain events in the school calendar
  • Maintain class time tables and supporting documentation

Please contact us if you are interested in a cms or intranet - we specialise in custom browser software development & ecommerce.

Other usability / seo features:

  • The logo links back to the home page (good for usability)
  • Full css based design and layout (good for seo)
  • All home page links point to the full url http://www.kenmoreshs.eq.edu.au/ rather than index.php to avoid link popularity dilution
  • Unique title tags (good for seo)

Internet Explorer 6 Support

Posted in Web Design on October 19th, 2009 by Simon – Be the first to comment

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (or IE6 for short), was released in 2001. This is about halfway between the birth of the web, and the current day.

IE7 was released in 2006, and IE8 was released in 2009. Both newer versions contain numerous security, standards and performance upgrades. Microsoft made IE8 a critical update as of May 2009.

This means it has been over 3 years since Microsoft officially stopped all support for IE6. The userbase for IE6 is in decline and according to many reports is below 5%.

As web developers, we’ve had to support IE6 for years due to it’s large market share. Since this is finally down to a minority, and since it has been 3 years since Microsoft has stopped supporting their own product, Kintek too has decided to discontinue support for IE6 as part of our Cross-Browser-Compatibility testing. Other major websites such as Google, Youtube, and Facebook are all officially dropping support for IE6 in the very near future. All previous versions of IE are insecure and pose a security risk to users running them. We can not encourage the use of dangerous software online.

Obviously, we are still dedicated to the best for our client’s sites, and neglecting 10% of potential customers is often not a viable solution. If a client requires IE6 support we can offer it on a case by case basis. We typically offer two solutions for IE6 support.

1. This first option is free. We will redirect IE6 users to a page which explains their browser needs an additional plugin to view the website. This installs Google ChromeFrame. This is an Internet Explorer plugin, which allows some websites (which explicitly request it) to be rendered using Google Chrome’s engine. This installation page will be consistent with the style and layout of your existing website, and will be extremely user-friendly. The Google ChromeFrame installation usually only takes a few seconds (and one or two clicks), after which the website will display perfectly in IE6.

2. The second option, is we can spend time creating manual fixes and “hacks” to correct the site for viewing in IE6. This is charged at our standard hourly rate. It is important to note that even with these fixes, IE6 will remain unsafe and is sometimes simply incapable of delivering “modern” content - such as highly dynamic menus, animations, etc. We aim for a “functional” version of the site in IE6, but often a highly attractive version is simply not possible.

Due to the rapid decline of IE6 we do not recommend this second option as a cost effective solution. The new computer operating system Windows 7 to replace Windows Vista and XP launches at the end of October and comes bundled with IE8 which means hopefully it will only be a matter of months before IE6’s marketshare has reached a negligible amount. Most statistics websites show IE8 out ranks IE6 as a percentage so the tidal shift has already mostly occured.

To provide cost effective solutions to the majority of our clients we cannot support IE6 by default. Thanks for your understanding. We value your business, and are always happy to discuss.

How to take a screen shot on Windows and Mac

Posted in How To's, Web Design, Windows on September 2nd, 2009 by maurice – Be the first to comment

How to take a Print Screen

On Windows

1

First press the “Print Screen” button located on the top right of your keyboard (pictured right). Make sure you have exactly what you are wanting to capture opened at the time.

Note: For best aesthetical results, press the F11 button before doing step one when in a web browser. This will make the web brower appear in the “full screen” mode.

2

Open the Start bar and click on “All Programs”. Then navigate to the “Accessories” folder and click on the program called “Paint”. (pictured right)

3

Once in Paint, click “Edit” located at the top of the screen, and click “Paste”. This should paste the screen shot you took in step 1.

4

Now click File > Save As. Pick an appropriate place to save the file, like your Desktop. Now, pick a suitable file name, and finally make sure the “Save as type” has “JPEG” selected (!Important!).

Please note, if you are planning to email the screen shot, picking anything other than JPEG could result in a large file and take a long time to send (and to receive at the other end!)


Click to Enlarge

5

Your screen shot is now ready to be attached to an email, uploaded online, posted on a form, or used in a variety of ways. Enjoy!


On a Mac

Mac has a lot more functionally when taking a screen shot. There are ways to take a shot of only the window you are in, or manually select with the mouse what area you would like to take a shot of. But for this article I will show you the plainest, easier way to do this.

1

Simply hold down Command + Shift + Option + 8. This will take a full screenshot and save it to your desktop.

2

Your screen shot is now ready to be attached to an email, uploaded online, posted on a form, or used in a variety of ways.

Bookmarklet to Inject Yahoo Reset CSS into any Page

Posted in CSS, Troubleshooting, Web Design, Web Development on June 9th, 2009 by madhava – Be the first to comment

Like any CSS Sushi Chef worth his Shio, you should be using a Reset CSS style sheet to bring all your browsers into line before you carve out your tasty styles.

However sometimes when debugging someone elses work which might not have a Reset CSS stylesheet, you might find yourself taking a few stabs in Firebug to see what could be the cause of their CSS woes.

This can be slow guess work looking through the DOM Tree finding the culprits, or you might be trying to find the problem in another browser such as IE-vil.

This little bookmarklet will inject the Yahoo Reset CSS into the page your on. Making any further guesses or adjustments you make less likely to be related to some default margin issues.

Drag this link into your bookmarks -> Yahoo Reset CSS Bookmarklet


javascript:(function (){
    document.body.innerHTML += '<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.7.0/build/reset/reset-min.css">';
})();