No modern business can be a success without solid web presentation. Most of the entrepreneurs understand this very well. Web design services are in demand now and will be asked for many years to come.

However, not every website will make a business thriving. It should look trendy, use advanced technologies, be simple, user-friendly, and comply with the latest web design and development standards. If you are a web developer, this compilation will help you build such kind of website quickly, without extra efforts, deliver it to the customer and take your money for a great job.

Business & services WordPress themes for the compilation were created by TemplateMonster.com, a famous industry leader.

Buying templates from the experienced, highly professional companies like TemplateMonster guarantees your and your customers’ satisfaction. The templates will be easy to handle, which will free your time and the result will exceed clients’ expectations. By the way, the guys from TemplateMonster have more than 26 000 of templates in stock, but their inventory is being replenished daily.

Please view this 2-minute video to know about one of their latest releases – Monstroid2 – a multipurpose WordPress theme.

The theme takes the first place in our list.

But this is not all good news for today. The company launched a new service for its partners and clients. It is TemplateMonster Web Studios Catalogue.

The best thing about this catalogue is that it is useful both for end users looking for professional assistance and web design studios seeking for the ways to expand their client base and increase their income.

The Catalogue includes a list of all web design studios and freelancers who have successfully completed TemplateMonster’s certification and proved their high level of expertise of working with TemplateMonster’s WordPress, Joomla, OpenCart, PrestaShop, HTML5, Magento, Drupal, and Moto CMS themes.

The Catalogue features an extended list of TemplateMonster’s partners. The availability of integrated advanced search form allows people to come across the right studio in their location quickly and easily. Thus, one can filter all partners by country, city, and CMS they work with.

The Catalogue also includes a rating chart. Depending on the number of projects you have launched, you receive a rank on the chart. The greater amount of released sites results in higher rankings.

TemplateMonster’s audience vast, it consists of the users of different backgrounds and skills levels. A list of certified partners allows them to come across the best studio or a freelancer who can get their theme customized in the short run.

A person who buys a template is not necessarily aware of what to do with it next. How to get it installed and modified according to personal needs. That is why they start looking for third party agencies who can do the job for them. TemplateMonster Web Studios Catalogue saves the users’ time on search and helps them come across contacts of certified partners who know how to work with TemplateMonster’s themes.

In addition to being listed on a certified partners chart, every freelancer and web design studio can let the audience know more about their services, recent projects, story, and read TemplateMonster’s feedback on a separate profile page. This is where you can locate personal information, contact details, links to social media profiles, a list of CMS that your studio works with, pricing, and any other information that you want to share. Whenever a client reaches the page, he/she can get in touch with a studio via a request form.

Hopefully, the above info was useful for you. Are you ready to view the showcase of 20 best business & services WordPress Themes right now?

Have an efficient browsing!

Read More at 20 Best Business & Services WordPress Themes

What You Need to Know Before Building Your Small Business Website

Having a website for your small business is essential. However, keep in mind that “Bad sites – ones full of mistakes – are almost as damaging as having no site whatsoever.”

There are number of errors you can fall into when crafting your website. You could have a terrible design or overload your site with text. Or you could have poor CTA’s and keyword targeting, thereby failing to convert visitors.

Because of the many details you need to consider, as well as the potential pitfalls, creating your business’s website can be overwhelming. You have a lot to consider, from how you want to advertise your business to how much and what kind of content you want to publish.

The first decision you need to make is whether or not you want to design your site yourself or hire someone else. Your answer to this question will narrow down how you should proceed. So which option should you choose?

Make Sure That Saving Money Is Worth It

One of the biggest influences on your decision will likely be cost. The expense of building your own website is going to be rather high when it comes to the number of zeros on the bill. There is no question that you will get what you pay for, but what you pay for also depends on precisely what you want from your website. There is no such thing as “one size fits all.”

Perhaps you want to establish a website that is more on the complex side. Maybe you’re looking for page after page of displayable content, each with its own child pages that branch out and interact with other pages on your site.

In this case, you will probably want to contract outside help to keep your project from getting too crazy. It’s easy to start out with a simple task only to discover that it is a lot more involved than you originally thought.

For example, suppose that you have a few products that you’ve already built out. Let’s say that one of them is an eBook for marketing automation. It is filled with gated content for email opt-ins that will bring consumers through the conversion funnel.

However, because you have to widen your funnel on the front end, you will need a substantial and robust blog. Your blog will need enticing and interactive graphics. You might need polls, a Disqus plugin, and a standout share bar, as well as CTAs splashed throughout each of your blog posts.

While you might know how to market your product, you could lack experience in developing a robust and beautiful blog. And building your blog is key to your success, so you will need a team that has had previous experience with gated content projects. In this situation it is far better to hire outside help than to handle everything on your own.

When You’ll Want to Do It Yourself

On the other hand, you might want a simple and straightforward website with minimal fluff and pizzazz. In this case, it could benefit you to look into what it takes to construct your own website. If building your own site is the best option for you, doing so will save you time and money in the long run.

What’s more, crafting your own small website from scratch can give you the skills to eventually be able to create one that is bigger and more cutting-edge. Start small on your own, and keep building on your knowledge.

The truth is, web design is not that hard to learn. There are many courses out there, as well as shared knowledge online. What might be most helpful is a course on web design and creation that trains you in the Java language.

Java is one of the many languages that computer software understands, and it is also one of the most popular. C++ is another well-known coding language with which you might be familiar.

Once you are immersed in the lingo of computer and web-based commands, the overall concepts will click. Then you will be able to leap back and forth between different computer-based languages.

Taking courses in web design will not merely allow you to overcome obstacles that will certainly come your way. The courses will also give you ideas for your website that you would otherwise not have considered. Educating yourself in this way can be a great strategy for setting yourself up for success as you build your site.

Remember, Creating and Maintaining Websites Takes Time

If you do decide to take the leap and construct your website on your own, then you should know that it will take time. Rome was not built in a day, and your website will not be either.

Building an entire website from scratch is tough, but worth it in the end. If you take the proper first steps, such as receiving a Java certification and training, you will streamline the time you spend working on your site.

No Matter What, Have a Plan for Debugging Your Site

Whether or not you decide to build your website by yourself or with an experienced web designer, you need to think of your site as a living thing that, much like you, can get sick.

“Getting sick” takes the form of overloading and crashing. Sometimes websites garner too much traffic for the server to support, and all that stress can cause the server to overload and crash. Other times, your coding (or your designer’s coding) might have a lapse that causes the site to crash.

When these events happen—and they do more often than you think—you should have a solution that will enable you to get your site debugged. If you hired a firm, chances are they will jump on the problem immediately and take care of the issue for you. But if you built the site yourself, you should know what to do when it gets buggy.

There Is Pride in Creating Something Amazing from Scratch

There are website building platforms out there that allow you to get a free site simply by clicking a few times. But those platforms (such as WordPress or Wix) tend to be very limited in terms of what they permit you to do.

That is why having the ability to construct your very own site is such a great skill to have under your belt. You can fix any issues you might encounter on your own. You will save a ton of money in the long run, and you will also have the pride of crafting something amazing with your own two hands.

Read More at What You Need to Know Before Building Your Small Business Website

According to data from the Direct Marketing Association, you can expect a ROI of $38 for every $1 you invest in email marketing. This fact is further established by statistics from Monetate — based on an analysis of over 500 million shopping experiences — that found that email is the highest converting source of traffic… converting more than search and social traffic combined.

In fact, email is so powerful that it consistently accounts for the most holidays sales — in Black Friday 2015, email accounted for 25.1 percent of all sales. That’s the highest of every traffic source, and much more significant compared to the 1.6 percent of sales generated by social media.

With all these facts established, it is important to realize that there’s a right and wrong way to go about email marketing. Statistics from Microsoft reveal that the inbox of the average email user is made up of 50 percent newsletters and 20 percent social network updates. To help you get the best from your email marketing efforts, I digged into research to present you some proven ways to do more effective email marketing.

Incentivize People to Join Your List

If you ask many people what the fastest way to build an email list, they will give a variety of answers ranging from investing in social media to having neatly designed forms and a clear message encouraging people to sign up. But, what indeed is the fastest way to build an email list? Offering an incentive!

By offering an incentive, many people have been able to quadruple the number of subscribers they get on a regular basis, permanently. In fact, offering incentives is so effective that Flyte New Media was able to increase their monthly subscriptions by 5,000 percent simply by offering an incentive. The initial message they used to try to get people to sign up was “Join Our Mailing List.” By changing this and offering an incentive, however, they were able to massively boost opt ins.

Segment Subscribers from the Get-Go

The traditional way of building an email list is to have the same sign up form on all pages of your site, lumping all users together and sending them the same messages. With this traditional approach, if you run a marketing blog someone who is interested in getting more traffic and someone who is interested in improving conversions will be getting the same message. Of course there must be a better way to go about this!

By segmenting your subscribers — right from when they sign up to your email list — you can ensure that you’re able to send only relevant, targeted messages to subscribers. In fact, segmentation is so powerful that, in a study, MarketingSherpa found that it is possible to boost conversion rates by up to 208 percent simply by sending targeted emails to segmented subscribers instead of sending the usual batch-and-blast messages. Data from Mailchimp also shows that segmented email campaigns usually result in 14.64 percent higher open rates and 60 percent higher click through rates.

Send More Frequent Emails

Most people email their list infrequently — perhaps once a week or once a month, based on the assumption that they do not want to “disturb subscribers.” But how effective is that? If you are sending an email once a month or once every few months, there’s a high likelihood that most of your subscribers won’t even remember you.

In marketing, there is a rule of 7 that says that the average customer needs to see your offer at least seven times before really noticing it. In the same way, more emails is always usually a good thing — especially if you have been very infrequent with your emailings. UK insurance company Aviva was able to record massive gains simply by increasing send frequency. By increasing send frequency, Aviva was able to increase unique clicks by 304 percent, email revenue by 45 percent and requested insurance quotes by 48 percent.

Of course, this should be done artfully — too many emails is one of the top reasons people cite for unsubscribing from email lists. However, if done properly, sending more emails will always improve conversions, revenue and traffic.

Run Giveaways

Exactly how many subscribers can you get from a properly run giveaway? For Josh Earl, a giveaway resulted in almost 200,000 subscribers and a massive 3,418 percent increase in email list size in just 11 days.

If you’re experiencing slow email list growth and want to give things a boost, running a giveaway can really turbocharge your list growth. Here are some tips:

• Start by preparing something special you can offer to subscribers. It could be a paid product you own, a popular paid product in your niche or a widely recognized gadget. Web Design Ledger constantly offer top gadgets in their giveaways with massive success.
• Make it a condition that people share your giveaway and sign up to your email list to participate in your giveaway. Give people bonus points for inviting their friends to participate in your giveaway.
• Automate your giveaway; you can use a plugin like KingSumo Giveaways.
• Notify top blogs, publications and influencers in your niche about your giveaway and get them to share it.

Optimize Your Email for Mobile Devices

A lot of emails are not optimized for mobile devices, and the result is that they end up being ignored or deleted. Research shows that a whopping 65 percent of all emails get opened first on mobile devices, and more shocking is the fact that 75 percent of emails will be deleted if they can’t be read on a smartphone. If as much as 75 percent of your emails are deleted, what’s the point of email marketing?

Here are some tips to optimize your emails for mobile devices:

• If possible, send your emails in plain text.
• If you have to use a template, try to use a responsive email template.
• Effective mobile email goes beyond just sending mobile compatible emails — also make sure the links in your emails are properly optimized for mobile devices.

Automate Your Email Marketing Efforts

To do email right today the importance of automation cannot be overstated. Automation is so powerful that research shows that it can boost email opens by 8 times, result in 6 times more revenue and boost conversions by as much as 50 percent.

Right now, email marketing is much more complicated than sending the same email to everybody at the same time — with some email service providers, you can automate emails to be sent to people based on what they click, based on their time zone, based on which of your emails they open and based on other factors. In fact, some email service providers are already experimenting with Artificial Intelligence to monitor people’s habits and optimize your emails for them accordingly.

It is important to make effective use of the automation features offered by your email service provider, or switch to a more sophisticated service if your current email service provider doesn’t offer automation features.

Send to Unopens and Unclicks

Data from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering that analyzed 16 billion emails has found that 90 percent of people who don’t open your emails within 48 hours will never open it again. There are many reasons for this, but it’s especially worth noting that people are overwhelmed — over 2.5 million emails are sent every second.

When a good portion of subscribers are not opening your email, it can be because people are especially busy or because your email subject line is very busy. Regardless, it doesn’t end there — resending your email to those who did not open it at first can significantly improve your open and clickthrough rates — seven-figure blogger Pat Flynn reports an extra 10 to 15 percent increase in open rates simply by re-sending emails to people who failed to open his first email. Entrepreneur Neal Taparia records an increase in open rate of up to 54.7 percent by re-sending to subscribers who did not open his emails. Here are some tips:

• Wait a few days before resending emails to those who have yet to open — since 90 percent of people will open their email within 48 hours, you can wait three to four days to resend.
• Change the subject line of the email you’re resending — if you use the same subject line, some email clients will simply merge it with the old email, giving it less visibility.
• Let people know that you’re re-sending the email to them because they didn’t open your first email.

Read More at 7 Data-Backed Tips for Effective Email Marketing

Picture this scenario.
You have a lineup of ten people in front of you and you have to guess which one is a consultant. I bet you 20 dollars that you will spot the consultant almost instantly.
They are known to be people-oriented individuals who inspire trust through their professional look and leverage their knowledge to grow your business. Usually, the professionals from this industry put a lot of time and effort into their image, perfecting aesthetics to inspire trust and empathy.

Now, the challenge is;

How do you design a website that serves as an online consultant?

What makes a page feel trustworthy, professional and straightforward while looking good at the same time?

Designing a website that serves as a virtual salesman can be difficult. It’s very unlikely for a  consultant to pull out a complex gaming laptop with flashing red buttons and alien looking design during a meeting or while pitching.
Analogously, a consultancy website shouldn’t be flashy with complex design elements and widgets popping out of everywhere.

You have to dress to impress!

What you are looking for when designing a consultancy website is simple design with practical, actionable information on it. Call it, the web design equivalent of MacBooks.
A great theme that fits this description is the consulting WordPress theme by Stylemix Themes.

This theme conveys a great amount of vital information and is an accurate portrayal of the consultancy company.  While displaying all this information, they still found a way to do it in an easy to follow manner. The theme has clearly been optimized by a CRO professional and it has a great marketing team behind it. Today, we are going to use this theme as an example for how to build a consulting website without compromising aesthetics.
So without further ado, here are seven elements every consulting website needs.

1. Human Interaction

This comes without saying, a consultancy related website should focus a lot on human interaction. Undoubtedly, adding that personal element to your brand, your website can be one of your brand’s most effective weapons.
Starting with the header image depicting a person smiling or a friendly face from the consultancy team and finishing with a chat integration; these are elements that are reportedly converting your users.

2. Trust

I’ve always been fascinated by the power of typography and colors. Typography in branding is important because it carries the message of the brand.
Very often you can actually understand a brand’s identity just by looking at the typography before you even read the words.

People are subconsciously trusting fonts like Baskerville or Helvetica more than a font like Times New Roman or something similar.
Michael Berut says

“In a way, typefaces are the graphic equivalent of the human voice, and each voice has a specific timbre and accent. In my mind, Baskerville speaks with a calm, confidence-inspiring English accent, sort of like Colin Firth. No wonder it’s so trustworthy.”

You can read more about that here.

As far as colors go, the color Blue actually creates chemicals in the body that are soothing because they slow down human metabolism. Blue is commonly used in situations where diplomacy or negotiation skills are required. This is just one reason why it makes a great main color for a consultancy website.

3. Validation

Quality validation through case studies and testimonials is still alive and kicking. Although it might seem a bit mainstream and overused to display testimonials or logos of companies you’ve worked with on your website, it still is a powerful marketing technique.
Since it’s crucial that you build credibility, it’s recommended for consultants to show pictures of their office environment, provide thorough background information, highlight their accomplishments, display logos of companies they’ve worked with, and include case studies. Showing your physical address on your website will also clearly communicate to clients that you are fully accessible. Another interesting technique I’ve seen being used by consultancy companies or development companies is showing the industries or the technologies you are proficient on. For example, this web development company has seen a 36% increase in conversions since they’ve implemented a slider with all the technologies they master and work with.

The consultancy WordPress theme has a similar feature and you can easily customize it to convey the message that resonates best with your user personas.

4. Clear Call to Actions

Call to Action, the three words you hear as often as “I love you” and “Made in China”.
Although everybody is talking about it, a Call to Action is consequential and can seriously influence your conversions. Although this theme gives you the possibility of having two CTA’s on your homepage, that isn’t recommended. Multiple calls to action lead to cannibalization, so you should focus on what’s relevant for your users.

5. Blog

List or Grid? Now that’s the real question. We all know that content marketing is tremendously important for growth, so I’m not going to talk about that very much. But if you’d like, you can read more about it here. However, let’s take a look at blogs from a design perspective. The two most popular blog layouts are the grid and list layouts. I personally find the grid layout a bit more practical since you can scan through all the titles faster and find what you are looking for.

A grid layout is excellent when you have a very information-heavy site (like many blogs) and add a sense of order and structure to a design.

6. About Us Page

A study conducted by the folks from Blue Acorn states “On average, visitors to an About Us page were five times more likely to make a purchase than those that didn’t. They also spent an average of 22.5% more on their purchases. In cases like the one below, where the About Us page was of very high quality, the results were almost double that figure…These figures represent two things. First, people who look at your About Us page are more likely to buy and more likely to spend more. Second, the better the page is the more these figures increase. It’s not a question of whether or not you should have one. It’s about having the best page possible to maximize your revenue..”

Web designers should know that the “About Us”  page is, on average, the second most viewed page after the homepage. A consulting website should have an about us page with three major components. A “meet the team” section where they can find out who the consultants are that they are working with, an explanatory video to visually illustrate the firm’s beliefs and mission, and lastly, the company overview.

7. Practical

I asked Brandon Howard from All My Web Needs to give me his feedback on this consultancy theme from a technical perspective and here are the pro’s that he found and what makes this theme practical.

• They have several different pre-loaded color combinations to choose from.

• The theme is coupled with Slider Revolution.

• The theme is coupled with Visual Composer.

• Love the ability to insert parallax background images in those sections where the content scrolls but the background stays put.

• Pre-integration with WooCommerce is a huge plus. Not sure that it makes a big difference for consultants, but it expands the capabilities of the theme and makes it a viable option for a variety of other business types.

To be honest, we don’t review themes very often, but looking at what this theme created by the amazing theme from Stylemix Themes has to offer and it’s capabilities impressed us deeply. Alongside the features mentioned by Brandon, the theme has 18 layouts, including three RTL layouts in Hebrew, Persian, and Arabic.

We asked a few other professionals for their feedback on this theme and here are their answers.

The Consulting theme is a great looking responsive theme that is ideally suited for consulting firms or can easily be changed a bit to work for any small – mid sized business.  One of the main things I like about this theme is that it has a built-in Job board where you can list your internal jobs or even just use this a local job or specialized job directory in the field you are in. Usually, this feature would be an additional expense yet it is included in this theme. The pre-built template pages they have for service listings is a really nice and professional touch. This will make it much easier for anyone to create a stand out services page. This will save you from having to hire outside help to create a spectacular page for you. Another great feature is that it has themes to work with Woocommerce if you wanted to also setup an online store to sell anything.  All in all the Consulting theme from Stylemix Themes is a great and professional theme that is easy to use, even if you are not a ‘webmaster’.

Rob Boirun

CEO

PopNet Media LLC.

I do believe that the Consulting WordPress theme has a great combination of a corporate feel whilst still having plenty of modern necessary WordPress features.

Sites which are designed for services must have a corporate look and this is, of course, something which is set in people’s minds from the current websites which they would visit.

As a recognized winner of an Envato award, this is a sentiment which is shared by many people, making the choice of this theme a sure winner. (If it’s popular on Envato, it’s going to be popular with the public).

One thing which I’ve found necessary for modern WordPress themes is the drag and drop page builder. For a modern web designer, and for the person who will be administering the site, a drag and drop page builder is a real necessity. It makes a great difference for me when designing using a page builder, because I can set up brand new (complex) pages in hours with ease.

David Attard

DART Creations

This theme is very interesting, on the surface, bundled with a lot of beautiful layouts and designs. However, it makes me wonder whom this theme targets. Is this for the small business owner who has no experience with WordPress? Alternatively, is this for an agency or other WordPress enthusiast to be able to launch a beautiful site more quickly?

The install was fairly straightforward if you are familiar with WordPress. I was able to get up and running in under 10 minutes following the well-written included documentation. When you install the initial theme encourages you to download 14 recommended plugins by default.

The only issue I encountered when installing the theme was an error when I tried to activate visual composer.

I found this puzzling because it encouraged me and even offered nag screens to download the entire recommended plug-in suite. While this may be useful for someone who is setting up their initial WordPress site, be confusing for people who do not know what plug-ins they want or need. The best example of this is Woo Commerce. I am a fan of installing the fewest number of plug-ins required to do the specific tasks. Installing the recommended plug-ins are completely optional and I only wish I had better direction for people to know what they may or may not need.

After the theme is installed, you can either build off of that or choose one of the many included demos to import and build off. The included demos are nice because it gives you a jumping off-point without knowing anything about WordPress.

Something to be aware of, however, is the demo that I imported without images weighed in at 1.54 MB. In today’s mobile connected world we need to make sure our sites load very efficiently.

However, this can easily be mitigated by optimizing images and leveraging performance improvements inside of WordPress. One plug-in that you may want to consider is JCH Optimize which is an excellent caching, compression and build image optimizer.

As far as managing the customization of the theme is concerned. I found it easy to modify the essential elements provided you follow the included documentation. I would not recommend this theme to any person who has no experience with any CMS. On the other hand, I think this theme could be a workhorse for someone developing sites for consultants and professional service firms. The large variation of included demos allows you to ease the multiple times and not have it be noticeable for your portfolio.

Mike Demo

BoldGrid evangelist

Read More at 7 Elements Every Business Consulting Website Needs

With the advancement of technology, sometimes it is good to move forward quickly, but sometimes it is good to connect with the past and use trusted precedents for print. With Letterpress Business Cards you get an old style printing method that has evolved from functionality into an art form. At Jukebox Print we understand that human creativity, just like the human body is constantly surpassing itself and raising the bar to new heights. By surpassing ourselves in Letterpress, we tested our skills and perfected the art and the result is the ability create unique things never seen before.

While we understand that looking at a picture of a Letterpress Business Card might not warm your soul quite like looking at a painting by Matisse does. Even still, we hope our work inspires you. Maybe after this, you will think Letterpress Business Cards are as cool as we do.

Circular Business Card

These 2″ Circular Business Cards were produced in fine detail with 15 colors of Letterpress. The final touch is exquisite pastel pink Painted Edges.

Jean Jullien Business Card

These unique die cut cards were produced for the Parisian designer Jean Jullien. Finished off with painted edges.

Lion Business Card

We took the challenge from designer Ksyu Deniska to create this intricate card with eleven colors of Letterpress and strokes as thin as .02 mm!

Don’t Try Studio Business Card

3ply Layered Business Cards with 5 colors of Letterpress made for Parisian designer Monge Quentin.

ABSOLUT Business Card

Letterpress is the perfect complement to other specialty print processes such as foil, as shown here with the beautiful black ABSOLUT card.

Ribbon Business Card

This cute ribbon-shaped card is the perfect design for an event planner.

Pillow Texture Business Card

This luxurious business card features a 3D embossed pillow texture with letterpress, making this one of the most expensive business cards around.

Deer Embossed Business Card

Wonderful 3D embossed card with a subtle touch of letterpress.

Bloom Creative Business Card

Combining creativity with functionality these cards feature 9 colors of letterpress with a deep impression, white foil stamping, and 3-ply layering. Each card has a unique color backing.

Vintage Business Card

This vintage Letterpress project was produced on paper from the late 1800’s! These cards were produced for Setback and Jukebox will soon provide the ability for people to order cards on real, vintage 100-year-old paper. These will truly be the most unique and original cards. The old style of printing combined with the antique paper makes this piece uniquely special. You can feel and smell the history of these cards and they are the perfect cards for any vintage selling company.

Ice Cream Business Card

This cute ice cream business card was generated with seven colors of letterpress. The color in the design is the result of immense details and pulls of a great retro look.

Pineapple Business Card

The cutest business card, a custom die cut in a pineapple shape with letterpress and gold foil.

Leather Business Card

Letterpress and real leather, a perfect combination. A multi-use as a hang tag that can double as a business card as well.

Seashell Business Card

3D embossed to the shape of a seashell with simple letterpress type. This card may look cute but is very difficult to execute!

Paint Swatches Business Card

T

his simple, colorful business card doesn’t seem so simple once you realize it was created with 19 different colors of letterpress!

Foxyards Business Card

Another stunning combination of Letterpress and 3D embossing.

Typewriter Business Card

This custom die cut typewriter is the perfect card for an old school writing enthusiast.

Read More at 17 Great Letterpress Business Cards That Define Past and Present Craftsmanship

This is the question you are likely to be pondering, setting out for website development services. With all the possible benefits and desired functionality in mind, you definitely want your website to provide the greatest ROI possible. Take a closer look at the website development cost structure to make sure nothing slips your mind.

One-time expenses to take into account

Preliminary stage or ordering the meal

However invisible it may seem, precise requirement specification (including project cost and time estimation) is the first cost point. Yet only on paper, the website already needs investments. The more in detail you agree on the website’s functionality and look-and-feel from the very beginning, the fewer reworks will be needed once the solution is ready.

Website design or plating the dish

Website design prices vary based on the required components and supplied media content. For sure, re-using a template is a more cost-effective option than a custom design, but finding a template that will support your brand identity is not so easy.

In general, the website will need universal elements (such as buttons and icons) and content-specific parts. As for the latter, by providing your own multimedia content you cut down on the cost of creation or buying licensed stock images. Still, don’t overlook the need to additionally invest into integrating you multimedia into the overall website design.

Targeting mobile users, you may be considering a responsive design to guarantee convenient interaction with the website across a range of screens. Note that it’s necessary to cover the expenses for every screen size you’d like the website to be compatible with.

Website development or cooking the main course

Development costs depend on a website’s size and capabilities. What’s the number of pages: 10 or 210? Do you need custom functionality? And what about integration with the CRM, ERP, databases, mobile apps, etc.?

Apart from the number of pages, their content matters. Large multi-page websites, complex from the user perspective, can have simpler structure than smaller solutions with a bunch of custom elements. More advanced functionality without doubt costs more. Enhancing your business and enriching user experience, the following features will simultaneously raise the development total cost:

• e-commerce tools (shopping cart, payment processing)
• collaboration tools (forums, chats, contact forms)
• admin features (membership, user management, database reports)
• social media support (Facebook, Google+, Twitter), etc.

How about a money-saving tip? Getting started, define the functionality you need and split it into three groups:

• must-haves for today
• must-haves for tomorrow and
• nice-to-have features

The website is supposed to get the job done. Period. Trendy features will let the website look cool and similar to the popular ones, as well as make set-up costs skyrocket. Planning growth and focusing on the current needs, you’ll stay on budget. Besides, consult with the service provider on the changes in requirements: perhaps, there’s a more cost-effective option to implement a desired idea.

Website redesign or a dinner with your own ingredients

Looking for these tempting minimum redevelopment costs, ensure you don’t get into a mousetrap. Apart from adding new functionality, quality website redesign implies preserving the assets you already have. This means redesign should embrace accurate content migration, keeping your SEO-equity, enhancing performance and scalability.

According to our internal research, content migration may take up to 50% of the overall development costs. Why so? You may choose a new CMS or go for content reformatting due to the prior use of WYSIWYG editors and multimedia that is highly dependent on the website’s layout.

Getting licenses or buying ready-made meals

Once you go for a CMS-based website (e.g. the one on Episerver CMS), the initial payment is extended with license fees. However, the use of powerful CMS systems helps to save money by reducing the development efforts required for complex websites.

What is more, license fees are not only about CMSs, some of the features, such as mailing or payment services based on specific software, are not always free.

Testing or tasting

One more cost point is website testing. For sure, developers involved in the website delivery will do some testing before the solution release. However, as the owner, you are interested in a website that is not only bug-free, but also convenient to the user and secure from intrusion. Then set your alarm clock for the testing time.

Usability testing will show whether the visitor finds your website convenient. Therefore it should be carried out before the solution launch. Ideally, the testing group’s members should be close to your target audience, even though this may increase the cost. Overall, be prepared for two-three rounds of usability testing to get a really user-friendly website.

Penetration testing is to be taken regularly, say, once a year, so as to reinforce existing security controls against a possible intrusion. The testing fees range depending on the time and amount of parameters tested.

On the whole, it’s not a good idea to get usability and penetration testing done by your website developers. Why not? Due to the lack of:

(a) Look from outside

As for usability testing, a person engaged in website design and development will not look at your website from the user perspective without bias, just due to having more knowledge, experience and desire to understand your website.

Penetration testers not engrossed in the website development, will not only use the latest tools, but also look more thoroughly for weak points and vulnerabilities.

(b) Specific expertise

The test results’ quality depends on the testers’ competencies. For usability testing that includes skills to make good tests and elaborate recommendations concerning usability issues. Penetration testing requires experience in defining the intruder model, vulnerabilities detection, visual demonstration of the possible damage and more.

Finally, before the solution is rolled out to the market, you will also need acceptance testing to be sure the website complies with your business requirements provided earlier in the preliminary stage.

Other cost factors or sprinkling the seasoning

Needless to say that delivery deadlines and solution complexity (both in terms of the design and functionality) will affect the total website cost. But there’re some other hidden factors to consider:

Internal team time lags

Make sure your team, involved in collaboration with the developers, reviews and gives feedback quickly. Otherwise, you’ll face additional costs just to cover the extra time spent on ineffective communication. In addition, try to focus on the truly valuable parameters, as nitpicking results in higher costs with almost invisible changes from a website visitor perspective.

Blurred project concept

Many companies provide a definite number of website design patterns, say two or three, as they allocate particular time for the planning stage. The customer’s ever-changing requirements lead to extra creative research and reworks, which results in higher delivery costs. Therefore, to save money, come up with a realistic concept of the future website and stick to it.

Regular costs to keep in mind

A website is not a one-off buy. To enjoy it up and running, you’ll have to make regular payments, either for merely staying online, or for updates to improve the website performance and remain competitive.

The former includes regular payments for the domain name and hosting just to reserve a place for your website in the Net, as well as fees for SEO to ensure your target customer can quickly pick up your website out of many. Unless you are savvy enough to engage in on-site content improvement, link building, keyword research, and optimization, chose a quality service provider to regularly, say, annually, carry out SEO website audit and optimization for you.

The latter, payments for maintenance, cover the bug fixing and updates to adjust to the changing environment, like a new browser launch, or the need for additional functionality to enhance UX and security level. Growing along with your business, the website will also require scalability and performance optimization to handle the soaring number of visitors and data amount.

Overall, to stay healthy, a websites needs money injections on an ongoing basis, which are likely to keep increasing. The larger your website becomes, the more data and visitors it processes, the more resources it requires to be active. Still, this money is just the necessary amount of fuel to keep your online vehicle moving.

Turnkey solution vs a cook-it-yourself approach

Let’s face it. Full cycle website development done by a tried and tested service provider will cost two-three times more than bringing together website parts delivered by small standalone companies. However, as a reward for extra payments you’ll get:

• Worries off: no need to fit together the solution parts by yourself
• Guarantee: confidence in the end solution quality
• Consistency: for instance, the design won’t damage performance or search engine visibility
• Valuable details in focus: as with content migration, no loss of users, traffic, URLs
• Collaboration: your involvement in the development process to get the best-fit website
• Thought-out processes: quick move through the development stages

Overall, despite the reduced initial costs, the construct-it-yourself approach will require from you sufficient IT industry knowledge. Otherwise, you can end up with spending more on reworks than on actual full-cycle development from the start.

Bringing it all together

Planning a website development budget, make sure it covers not only one-time costs, but also the hidden and regular expenses. For sure, you’ll be constantly enticed by the low-cost offerings, but stay skeptical.

In the end it’s up to you to decide whether to cook at home, get a snack in a fast-food cafe nearby, or dine in a Michelin-starred restaurant. However, not every diner will serve both quality and sophisticated dish, and amateurs won’t get the difference until they suffer indigestion.

By Vadzim Belski, Head of Web Development Department at ScienceSoft

Read More at What Costs Should Website Development Budget Cover?

For many designers, developers and agencies, customer service can be a burden, slowing down the day, stifling the creative process. It doesn’t have to be – here are five things to try today to turn support from your enemy to an ally.

1. Make Support Flow

If support is frustrating, consider the perspective of the customer. They’re in touch because something has gone wrong and can’t find the answer to their query. Ensure you have the steps in place to handle this and avoid cranky customer support.

Like your sales funnel, channelling customers to a make a purchase, support needs to be thought of as a funnel, directing customers to the right place to find relevant answers to their queries. For example, if you’re fielding support queries from email, Twitter, Facebook, contact forms… STOP. Direct all queries to a central support location, a single contact point that customers can find answers or reach out directly if needed.

Sketch out your support process flow, identify key pinch points – where customers are getting lost. Place as much documentation online as you can, ideally before any email or ticketing systems, and help customers to help themselves.

Make support flow – capture queries, direct to a support center, then to a contact form connected to email or support ticketing software.

2. Choose the Right Tools

Email is great for one-to-one communication, but how good is at tracking persistent queries, analyzing time spent on support and delegating issues to the appropriate personnel? Ticketing systems tackle these points, but introduce their own nuances – who wants to log into a separate ticketing system just to see the status of their support request or post a reply?

Some try using a forum to offer support, but experience dictates otherwise. While it can be great for a community project, for a paid-for product, customers will have little tolerance for the digressions and thread hijacks that appear to be par-for-the-course with forums. Managing the community and keeping discussion on topic is not conducive for good support.

Tools such as HelpScout offer the best of both worlds – support tickets can be created from emails or a web form. They can then be handled like any other tickets – delegated, tagged, notes added. Crucially however, it’s all transparent to the customer, the response is sent directly to their inbox and they can just hit reply to follow up on a query.

To minimize support queries hitting your ticketing system in the first place try using a dedicated support center such as our WordPress Knowledge Base products, which centralises documentation and support topics, acting as a gatekeeper to your support request form or email. We use it ourselves and it has helped customers resolve issues themselves without needing to wait for a response from our support team.

Useful support tools to check out today:

• HelpScout ticketing software.
• KnowAll knowledge base theme for WordPress, documentation and support hub.
• Trello for making notes on ongoing issues, project planning and delegation.
• Bitbucket for tracking issues and effective software version control with git.
• Slack for the day-to-day discussions, replace instant messenger apps, incredibly useful integrations for keeping the finger on the pulse of support and sales.

3. Listen to Feedback

Though the customer may not always be right, they usually have a point. When tickets are closed, a follow up is great way to find out what went well and what could have gone better. This can be used to improve the support process flow.

Documentation feedback is great for gauging how well a guide or walkthrough is hitting the mark. At the end of the articles in our knowledge base we have voting buttons for visitors to rate article usefulness. Once they’ve voted they can submit comments which are reviewed by the support team to help refine the article and improve the helpfulness metric.

Feedback should be quick and easy for the customer. Review feedback on an aggregate basis, one irate customer may be an exception, but persistent similar comments are a sign that further action should be taken and regular review of customer feedback is a good starting point for refining the overall support process.

Write down your top ten comments from customer support and devise an action plan for each, the plan could be to do nothing, but by being aware of issues and tracking them effectively can help you better manage support in the long run.

Feedback is vital in establishing the success of your support center. Use it to improve and refine your articles.

4. Use Support as Your Brand

Great support is what we offer at HeroThemes, both by selling the products which help our customers deliver it and leading by example. It’s an ongoing process, but support can become the cornerstone of your brand by inspiring confidence and allowing potential customers to discover your products and services with SEO rich, accessible documentation, testimonials from well serviced customers and clear guides explaining your products.

This approach justifies the time and cost spent on support – no longer a time sink, support can be a marketing tool and a customer acquisition strategy in itself. Good and bad, people will talk about the experiences they have with your support team, so a proactive attitude is more crucial than ever. Invest in the right tools and people for the job, good documentation can not only reduce repetitive support emails but lead to increased sales.

Each aspect of the support process can be tailored to match your branding, the right balance of friendly and professional is key. Set expectations in the documentation to help reduce over-demanding requests, demonstrating any limitations of your products and pre-empting questions that could arise. Link to relevant third party documentation or further reading material to create jump off points if visitors get stuck.

Create a support branding document for your business that outlines standard responses and policies, try to avoid canned responses, instead use it as a framework for providing consistently great support.

5. Don’t Take it Personally

Support is like any relationship that can have good and bad days. The key is not to take it personally and understand that support is a process that is there to be crafted, worked on, improved, and with the right tools and people, should become an asset.

You need to remember that customers are reaching out for support from a position of confusion or frustration, something has gone wrong- see the opportunity to turn that customer into an advocate. For whatever reason, this may not always go right, but the learning potential from each interaction is there to build better support processes and flows. Don’t take issues to heart, but do take the time to understand what went wrong and where things can be improved.

Conclusions

Support is seen as a dreaded demon, a drain on resources. But it need not be, try the suggestions from each of these five tips to see how they can improve your business today.

Focus on building support that flows, with the right tools to match your customer base and service expectations. Listen to feedback from your customers and leverage support contact points to enhance your brand. Finally, don’t take it personally, treat it as any other process in your business, to be nurtured over time.

P.S. If you’re looking for an all-in-one knowledge base solution, consider the HeroThemes KnowAll theme, quickly create a brand-able and customizable support site that works with a range of ticketing and email systems.

What support hacks do you use to get through the day? Let us know in the comments below.

Read More at 5 Customer Support Hacks to Try Today