Web strategy & Web development blog

Archive for the ‘Better Company’ Category

How do you design website or enhance user experience?

Thursday, February 23rd, 2012
4 years back when we started our firm, there were very few user experience companies who were working on the marketing websites. In India I think there were none. Nobody in the web design community ever bothered about their customers’ company and their client’s customers. Nobody ever realized whether any customer will come from website or not. Everyone was bothered about page visits & look. We were the one who started thinking the site should be build to market & sell, with only a bit of knowledge in marketing.
Since then many people ask us this question in the title. The answer is pretty simple. We get into your visitors shoes.

Let me explain it a bit:

  • Your site visitors always have certain characteristics. These are the factors that decide the reason, they will become your customer for. These are human characteristics like aspirations & dreams, fear, doubt and also all troubled. We do some research on which of these characters come into play when they decide to buy from you. We design the UI accordingly.
  • We listen you. It has been always a part of us that let us do this before anything else. For us your customer comes first and then the next one is you. We feel every business want to have clients of a particular category or segment or mindset or working ethics and style. Like if you see in these 4 years we only took few projects. We rejected a lot of businesses than we accepted. In several cases we felt the businessman is not serious about his business. We do not want a client like that. So understanding your expectations is the best thing to know. So that we will be able to create a connection of people to you from their heart. Also you are the one who is dealing with the actual clients each day. So you are a better expert than us.
  • We sketch out a lot. Nearly everything a customer can think of getting from you. Then we categories each sketch according to the Characteristics and your priority.
  • We iterate few final sketch before we stop sketching your website design. We build the UI on each of those sketches.
  • We love real data. We test each design live for approximately for a month before we conclude what actually work and what not. Each little detail of your website.
  • Then we make the design permanent that works and give you the maximum result in terms of conversion. Sometimes even we make another design based on which part of each design contributed to sales.

Basically we study your customer, his family friends and influences > We take your opinion on what works practically > We design > We test > We respect the real world data.

That’s all there is no more…… So you can drop us your valuable comment now if you haven’t done it so far.

Are you the one company that can solve “Somebody’s” “Problem” in “some” “Manner” ?

Monday, February 13th, 2012

If you are so, then tell it to the visitors of your website. They are just waiting for you. Don’t shy. Don’t hide.

Please do not target all people who may or may not come to you. Think about the factor we just told. You are special in someway for somebody. Emphasize it then.

Here are few examples of identifying those:

  1. Even if you are selling Reebok shoes as others in the market and prices are same, you may be the one with best customer service (Zappos is a perfect example of it.)
  2. If you are the interior decorator who is specialized in using colors to make tense people calm down and feel lighter when they come home. You remove visual pollution & space pollution.
  3. __________________________________________________________ (Please let us know how special is you?)

Price shouldn’t be always the factor of difference. It’s something more, very much inherited in you and your firm/company.

We know you are missing us. About 8i Creations the Premier Website Strategy Firm

Friday, February 10th, 2012

We found you are missing us in our website :( And want to know more about us and our company. Please visit our About Us page here. What we understood in our research that small businesses are always interested to know who the people are behind your company. And if you hide, they don’t believe you. Own your services and own your opinion. Have an About us page. Have your photos and have your office photo too. Whether you are running from your home office. People are still going to like you for what you are. So until we are coming with a new about us page you can find us at: http://www1.8icreations.com/about/ Thank you for loving us so far.

How many customers we got from our website in January 2012 alone.

Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

Today we have an exact figure to share with you. From the month of January 2012 we completely converted 16.75% of the visit on our website. However 26.59% of the traffic was on the verge to convert.

Speaking in monetary terms:

  1. 70% of our site visitors were legitimate visitors (we can say our perfect target audience) worth Rs. 4,61,316.00/-
  2. However we only converted 16.75% i.e. Rs. 1,10,390/- (approx).
  3. The sure shot 10% who were very close to be converted worth Rs. 65,903/- we lost due to few problems we are finding the solution for.

Our prices were very low and we drove minimal traffic to our site. But anyhow we got a good result. In future we will convert even more as we are eliminating the problems, refining the site and driving much more traffic to our website.

While majority of Good sites convert only 9% of their site visitors to customers (sales) at max, only a few websites go over the 10%-15% mark. Please refer the SEO Chat article for conversion rate. We are proud that we are doing excellent in those regards having converted 16.75% of our site visitors to customers. We know we can do much better than this if we can take care of few small problems. We hope we will be converting 25% of our site visits soon.

If you need these kinds of result, please drop us an email at: biz@8icreations.com :) We do provide website strategy and web design services to small and mid businesses

Understand your customers first. We can design website for you faster

Saturday, February 4th, 2012
If you ever inquired about a website designing service from us, you would have heard us asking you, “Who are your customers? Who is your target audience?” followed by a bunch of questions like that. Even before we talk with you about design and price. Many people think- What the hell these people are talking about??

80% of time we do not hear a clear answer. Once I was asked, “Why is it so important for you to know?”

Our answer is: We make websites for your target audiences (i.e. your clients). They are the one who will give you money. Am I correct? Stop me if I’m wrong. (Even better you can tell the world we are wrong.) If we create a site just for anyone or just for your satisfaction then, people will see your site, your products or services, may like the website for the design or information, but will not purchase. The reason is clear and simple: he/she doesn’t have a need of it.

Understanding your customer is very important for us as your consultant. We need to look for solutions to make them opt for your business (products or services).

Therefore go and find out who is your customer first. It’s very important for your online as well as your offline marketing. Give us a perfect example, not a general view. Let me explain it to you with following two examples

  1. Example 1: Our customer is anybody who need a body massage.
  2. Example 2: Our customer is a businessman, stressed out, too busy and thus suffer from severe body-ache frequently.

Now you have correctly imagined we would prefer the narrowed down Example 2 as it clearly tells us about your customer, his pain and how your solution is going to help him. Now the person in Example 2 is the man who will definitely go for your massage if you are talking to him directly in a direct tone on your website. Got our point?

If you got your examples ready, contact us using our contact form. We will reply you by the very next day, be it a Saturday or Sunday.

If you do not want customers from your website, then excuse us

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

  1. We are not a usual website design company. We are a website strategy firm.
  2. However affording us may not be a problem for small businesses. But you should want to have more businesses from your website.
  3. We hate flashy designs if it has no positive effect on converting your website visitors to be your customer. There are plenty of other designing firms who can get you that. Just search in Google.
  4. If a website is not giving you profit then what is the requirement to have one and worst is spending money on it? We understand every website require time and effort to get business. But if you do not have a clear goal on how to convert more visitors from the day one, then better you should not have a website.
  5. Every month we take only few website design or website strategy project. So that we can give a good attention span to each project. Therefore if you do not want customers from your website, then excuse us. We may help somebody in need.
  6. At last we have faced the situation when everyone who visited our site liked it. We got thousands of visits. But nobody turned to do business with us. We don’t want anybody else to face the same frustration.

We are simply beautiful: We still belief

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

When we started our company I wrote a poem about us. About our simplicity, dutifulness, beauty and our belief. We still belief the same and still remained the same and promise will also be in future at every circumstances. Here is the song:


When there is a moon on the sky,
and you don’t know why!
Then a bluish-white light
encourage you to try.

If you can’t be full, but be dutiful
Make them happy, not leave them to cry.

Then up above the sky
The cloud says ‘hi’
To a bird with little wings
not a man with a fly.

The science, when goes deeper, become simple
We are not tough, we are simply beautiful.

Why do you guys operate from home offices ?

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012
Many people ask us why do you guys operate from Home Offices ?? Let us tell u our answers before u ask us that again:
1. We don’t have money. We don’t have money to spend on offices where actually no people will come. We are in such a business where we are often called to client offices and only less than a percentage of our client actually come to our offices. We have to spend our money in few other stuffs and technologies which actually give us a profit.
2. Our clients do not have a problem with that. The people who come to our offices do like the way we work here. We are out of show of business a long time ago.
3. The most important reason now: Where else we can do more that 18hours of work a day. We spend our productive time when it comes to our work. And we can take rest, prepare (innovate) a dish in our kitchen, spend some time in Gym, Watch movies or serials while discussing light business stuffs. So our productive hours goes to work which in turn creates best solutions for our clients and the non-productive ones go to our enjoyment and sleeping.
However we do not tell u that we will not ever move to a Full Office setup. But that will be when we will have a need for it.
“Although we will make sure that our houses will be in vicinity of our office, so when my partners will be busy in pillow talking with their better halfs I will be coding late night. Ha ha :) ” — Sanmaya
Many people ask us why do you guys operate from Home Offices ?? Let us tell u our answers before u ask us that again:
  • We don’t have money. We don’t have money to spend on offices where actually no people will come. We are in such a business where we are often called to client offices and only less than a percentage of our client actually come to our offices. We have to spend our money in few other stuffs and technologies which actually give us a profit.
  • Our clients do not have a problem with that. The people who come to our offices do like the way we work here. We are out of the show off business a long time ago.
  • The most important reason now: Where else we can do more that 18hours of work a day. We spend our productive time, when it comes, to our work. And we can take rest, prepare (innovate) a dish in our kitchen, spend some time in Gym, Watch movies or serials while discussing light business stuffs. So our productive hours goes to work which in turn creates best solutions for our clients and the non-productive ones go to our enjoyment and sleeping.
However we do not tell u that we will not ever move to a Full Office setup. But that will be when we will have a need for it.
“Although we will make sure that our houses will be in vicinity of our office, so when my partners will be busy in pillow talking with their better halfs, I will be coding late night. Ha ha :) ” — Sanmaya

A nice way to bring down dear Santa Uncle’s carbon footprint

Saturday, December 10th, 2011

@ethicalocean: We all know that with the end of December quickly approaching that Santa is busy getting everything set for his worldwide tour. The boots he has to fill sure can leave a large footprint behind, so we took a look at Santa’s environmental impact, and tried to see if we could help him run a slightly more eco-friendly operation. Click on image below to see details.

Santa's Carbon Footprint Infographic
via Ethical Ocean – eco friendly products, fair trade and vegan shopping.

We support this cause. May Santa uncle this year will drop his carbon footprints. We all love you Santa Clause :)

Starting Business Hurdles: Working for yourself

Friday, December 9th, 2011
You won’t imagine in your deadliest dream while planning for your business that working for yourself can be difficult. But in most businesses, generally in service based business, you will face this situation as we also faced in ours.

working-for-you

You can work for a boos in a company, all of us know how to work for others very well. But when there is nobody above your business, it depends on your mercy that you would work or not. Read more about it in my previous article on Misconceptions of starting a business. So people often advise you to choose a business that you would love to do most part of your life.

There are also several other works you need to do except the actual business theme. Those are the things necessary for your business but you would not love doing that like accounting etc. But as I told it’s a necessity for your business. So you need to give time to do those stuffs. It’s very hard for you to do those things on time. you’d love to spend those hours watching movie, shopping, sitting idle or even better just planning (all of us love to do those theoretical calculations. ha ha.. I also did the same). All of my partners also did the same until one day we realized we need to put a comma there.

It’s really terrific. So a self discipline of high standard is necessary. It’s a must to learn and practice for life for an Ultrapreneur.

This article is a part of my upcoming book “Ultrapreneur”
————————————————————————————
When I chose to do business, the questions that came to my mind were, “Why a lot of new companies fail?”, Why brilliant people (those who really have great ideas) do not do business? How my company should be? Should we work always or shall we go on vacation with all our family? Can’t we be only 40 people company and do not grow beyond? I tried to find out the solutions to my key questions with my partners in my firm. Here are those learning that we practiced in our firm & saw in some other business.
This book is for all of those who want to start their business or already started and picking up the ground.