Marston Innovation - Web site services and Web Site Management

Just finished with another client web site, www.designsbygabby.com, this one focusing on e-commerce transactions, customer management and sales. It is a complete e-commerce solution and backend CMS system to sell hand-made jewelry from Designs by Gabby. A purple color scheme to made the companies colors and features such as mailing list management, product management, order management, full payment system and easy design changes via CSS.

A new client project being finished is www.specializedautismservices.com. A website to showcase the excellent and professional services of Kelly Redden. To highlight her specialized autism teachings, services and expert knowledge. The goal was to provide a clean, simple yet colorful and fun web design. If you have an autistic child or knows someone with one, this may be of great value, she is very good.

If you’re a business or sell/promote products and services online then E-mail marketing serves as a very valuable tool to utilize for marketing. With your products or services, getting new customers is an absolute must, but your current client base or the prospects looking to become customers can be equally important.
The hardest thing when aquiring new customers is gaining their trust in what you have to offer and proving to them the quality of your offering. The simple fact is they do not know you yet, they are “Feeling you out” so to speak. Even though online buying is becoming more and more common, there are still plenty of cautious prospects out there. But your current clients, the clients that have already bought from you with confidence, they know and trust you because they have already offered their confidence to you when they bought/showed interest in your offering.
This is where E-mail marketing comes in and sending monthly, quarterly or bi-yearly newsletters to your current clients. You’ll then leveraging that confidence they have in you to create back-end sales. This is very powerful, because as you may know your best customers are likely your repeat customers.
In this newsletter you will provide valuable content along with promotional offerings to your services. Insert news articles, tutorials and industry events that you think will be of interest to your client base. By then inserting many product offerings and promotional links back to your website you’ll generate the type of repeat traffic we are aiming for. From there the customer is back on your website, in a familiar environment that they have previously trusted.
So put serious consideration into your E-mail marketing initiatives because it could be one of your greatest assets. Its as simple as inputting a “sign up” form on your website for people to join. There are even ways to track the success of e-mail marketing campaigns and view detailed reports on that success. For more information on e-mail marketing visit our web marketing solutions page

I’m going to be talking about logo design for small businesses and independent professional and my review on a service I’ve used for logo creation.


Branding and marketing is without saying one of the biggest factors in marketing and exposure today. You need a logo that people will recognize and learn to remember, preferably one that is clean and to the point and at the very least conveys the theme of you business.



When working with my clients, many of them ask for logo design services and I point them to the best services I’ve experiences so far at a place called The Logo Company. After doing a lot of research for my own needs and looking at various companies to provide it, The Logo Company proved to have a streamlined workflow, very affordable price and extremely high quality work.


They were also voted “Best in Test” by Wired Magazine. I chose to go with their “Logo Design PLUS Full Business Stationery Design” package for $175.


I had a great experience with them and had a very easy time working with them to create a logo I was pleased with. It was simple as filling out the information form and going from there. Once I sent them that information via their website, a rep/designer by the named of Steve responded quickly. Luckily in my situation I already know a lot of what I wanted in the design but just didn’t have the time nor Adobe Illustrator skills to create it at the time. I sent a rough sketch of my ideas to steve and within a few days had a rough draft for my review.


All communication was simple and took place via e-mail. He gave me around 8 drafts to choose from at first. I had the choice to pick different design traits to consolidate into one or choose one design ad refine its characteristics to my liking. Through more email, we refined my design until I was satisfied.


After the logo was done I had an entire stationary package created around it including business card, envelope and stationary design. They gave me 4 drafts to initially choose from and I chose one to make a few small refinements to. Once that was done I was emailed a compressed document with my logo, business card, envelope and stationary designs in various formats and sizes. Also included was the master .ai and .esp file so that I could work with it myself. The entire process only took about a week and a half, though that was because I wanted many revisions done which they were happy to do. I suppose if you don’t need that many revisions done you could have it finalized in a few days.


I am highly impressed with the quality of the finished designs, the service and the speed in which they worked and would definitely recommend them to any entrepreneur or small business looking to affordably create a logo or business identity.

Currently I’m working on a new service. This will be aimed at the smaller volume websites and businesses that need to showcase their services/products via a website on a budget. Those that don’t need a completely customized website but something nice and that will work for what they need to do. I’m creating a series of clean, usable website templates that will be available for between €399 and €599 each and accomodate up to 10 pages.

This means quick turn-around and setup times as the templates will have already been complete. Unlike many of the “template” based websites out there, these templates will be 100% Marston Innovation originals and you can rest assured that thousands of other websites on the internet aren’t going to have the exact same website as yours.

This is planned to be launched within the next month or two so we have some time to get more templates complete. If this is of interest to you and you would like to look at a few of the already completed templates, please contact me.

As a sign of growth within the internet, NetRatings stated that search across the 3 major search engines: Google, Yahoo! and MSN rose 55% in the last year!

“The growth of search and the role of search in usage of the Internet has been astounding,” said Ken Cassar, senior director of analytics at Nielsen//NetRatings. “When you look at search penetration, it’s near 80 percent. The number of searches each person generates, it’s high. It would be intuitive to say the numbers can’t get any bigger than they are, but they’ve continued nonetheless.”

If you think that Search Engine Web Marketing isn’t valuable to you and your business, you might want to reconsider.

“Fifty-five percent of small-business owners plan for strong sales leading up to February 14, and 71 percent anticipate healthy online sales. Businesses are implementing online sales and marketing plans to ensure success.”

If your small business can capitolize, try to see how you can take advantage of this data. Feel free to get in contact if you need consulting.

“Online product offerings require solid visual design to close the deal for many shoppers according to a report released by interactive marketing solutions firm Questus.

Critical to making a decision to purchase goods on a Web site are site navigation (37 percent); the checkout process (32 percent); and product descriptions (38 percent). Perspective buyers left e-commerce sites without purchasing for a few key reasons. Twenty-nine percent didn’t want to register with the site; 22 percent of online shoppers found it difficult to locate products; and 17 percent left to find other e-tailers because they didn’t believe the site they were on was trustworthy or secure.

“We find that Web sites have three seconds to make an impression,” said Jeff Rosenblum, co-founder and research and strategy director of Questus. “The actual usability is more important than aesthetics, but at the same time aesthetics are critical.”

Clean site design is noted to be a more effective way of getting conversions from online shoppers, according to Rosenblum. “Information overload is a critical and consistent problem, and in this study we found that Web users were more likely to say that a site had too many links as opposed to too few links,” he said. ”

It is showing more and more how people crave simplicity and ease of use. Clean web design is being begged for more and more and its paying off.


Read the entire article here

Maintenance has been finished with regard to the last post. The software has been updated and minimal downtime was incurred.

Marston Innovation maintenance notification [Planned]:

Date: 12/19/2005 – 12/23/2005
Start time: 03:00 GMT
Estimated end time: 13:00 GMT



Services/Equipment: All servers
Type of work: Software upgrades
Purpose of work: Apache recompile, PHP upgrade & MySQL upgrade


Impact of work: See below:

In order to maintain the best possible hosting environment, we will be performing scheduled maintenance during the week of Dec. 19th, 2005.

During the aforementioned maintenance window, we will be recompiling Apache (keeping the same version), upgrading PHP to 4.4.1 & upgrading MySQL to 4.1.15.

Please be aware that the upgrade to MySQL 4.1.15 from 4.0.26 is a major update. Some syntax changes have been made & the password hashing in MySQL 4.1.x is different from the previous MySQL 4.0.x versions. We will be able to maintain the old hashing system for the time being. However, you should check to ensure that all of your scripts/web applications are MySQL 4.1 compatible.

There will be no downtime for the Apache/PHP upgrades. The MySQL upgrade will result in a loss of MySQL database connectivity for less than 5 minutes while the new MySQL system is installed.

The advantage of upgrading MySQL is a few fold. The 4.1 tree of MySQL resolves a few lingering bugs that affect a few of our servers; mainly related to connections that do not terminate. The 4.1 tree also brings support for additional languages/characters & sub-queries. The overall impact is a more reliable & resilient database server.

Please note that during this procedure, no data will be lost.

Should you have any questions or concerns related to the abovementioned maintenance, please feel free to get in contact: http://www.marstoninnovation.com/contact/

Regards,

Marston

support@marstoninnovation.com