Why everyone should love wireframes

Why everyone should love wireframes If you’ve never used wireframes, you might think they sound like something from the borders of geek-land, but they’re an amazing tool everyone should know about. Wireframes make website creation (and marketing collateral like email templates) so much easier: Used well, wireframes can: enable decisions to be made about content structure and required content length. link the content together to demonstrate effective user journeys. create outlines (frames!) for how content blocks will look, in the same way an architect’s drawing show the structure of a building. indicate where calls-to-action (CTAs) need to be. experiment with features like sliders, carousels, accordions and pop-ups without doing any site build. develop functioning headers and footers. understand where downloads, archiving and outside linking will be needed. develop the internal linking structure. Not only that, but you can make all these crucial decisions before the expensive parts of creating a site, designing it and building it, even begin, saving significant time and money in design and build. Where do we start?: You need to understand who you’re trying to influence and what you want them to do. These objectives are called site goals and your site needs to be structured to help your users reach these goals. If the communication you use to drive traffic to your site is working well, people will be coming to the site for the right purpose, so it’s the site’s job to deliver on the promise you have made. Planning how to get your users from their landing page to the site goal involves mapping their ‘user journey’. Check here for advice on how to create effective user journeys. Wireframing in practice: If you’ve never worked with wireframes before, do some reading up on current user experience (UX) principles. Just search ‘user experience’ and you’ll see lots of good resources. If you already have a good relationship with either a designer or a site builder, by all means get them involved in the process early on. My experience is that wireframing dramatically improves the briefing process and helps everyone understand what the site is there to achieve. You should certainly allow your designer and builder to have input into the wireframes, but do not allow the user journeys to become disrupted or over-complicated. You could actually just draw wireframes on paper but there are many wire-framing tools available. I use Mockplus (www.mockplus.com). It has a ton of flexibility and mainly works using drag and drop functionality. It is easy to share wireframes and all users can leave notes on layouts. ‘Responsive’ layouts: There’s an argument to say that providing the best user experience means separate sites for desktop and mobile. However, the cost and practicalities of maintenance generally mean organisations have one site that works across all platforms. Software that supports a multi-platform site is known as responsive because it enables the site to ‘respond’ to the screen size and format of the user’s device and present the content accordingly. In practice, this usually means re-arranging rows of content into one long column so when you’re working with content use one, two or three rows, not more. This is why so many sites use this format. Wireframing your home page: Unsurprisingly, start with the home page. The home page is still the main landing page for most sites, so deserves special consideration. You have seconds, literally, to grab a user and engage them enough to begin their journey. So you need to have identified the most compelling content for that user and it needs to be prominent on your home page. All the user journeys for your priority audiences need to start high up on your home page. Make sure you have an attention-grabbing piece of content at the top of your home page. This will normally be a visual of some kind, imagery or video. If you use any kind of animation, make sure it moves quickly and if you do use video , optimise it so it so it doesn’t slow down your page load time (even a 2 or 3 second delay could cause a user to leave your site). Use the 2 or 3 column idea to arrange your content and make sure there’s a good balance of text and imagery. Imagery will grab users but good SEO also relies on text. An image-only homepage will not work well in search. Move onto the next level pages on your site which will contain the next most important content to keep a user on their journey. Progress through each level until you reach the goals you’ve set. In most cases, there should not be more than five levels, including interactions like contact forms or downloads. Header and footer: Once you have a good idea of your most important content and user journeys, you can begin to plan out what will be in the header and footer. Complex drop-down menus in the header are not mobile-friendly so avoid them, especially if your audience loves mobile. Create links to your main content pages and add a search box if you’re, say, a retailer and have a relatively complex site. Header should also contain a contact mechanic of some kind and your phone number. Do not have more than one row of navigation options in your header. Remember, you have 3 or 4 priority audiences and you know which content is most important to them, so use the header to create direct links to it. There has been a move towards ‘expanded’ footers in the last couple of years and for some simple sites an expanded footer can almost become a site map. Expanded footers are more mobile-friendly and people are used to the idea of swiping down a site to find content. Organise the footer using the stages of each user journey in list form and link to the content in your site. Add social links as needed and a contact mechanism. So download a wireframing tool and get started! Wireframes are

User journeys: How this simple idea can transform the effectiveness of your website.

User journeys: How this simple idea can transform the effectiveness of your website. The internet may be over 30 years old but we’re still in the early stages of understanding how different it is from the media which preceded it. Most websites still don’t recognise that their visitors control their site experience and how few site visitors actually do the thing the site owner wants them to do! Far too often, websites are created from an ‘inside-out’ perspective. An organisation takes the ways it thinks about itself and builds its website to reflect them. What it actually needs to do is think ‘outside-in’. Why are users coming to your site? What problems are they looking to solve? What do you want them to do? At the heart of this thinking is the path these high value users will take through your site, known as a user journey. User journeys should be simple, connecting a site user to a site goal. Your site goals could be buying something, calling you, using a contact form, signing up to a newsletter or webinar or downloading some content. The role of a user journey is to map the steps that get the user from their landing page to the goal in as few steps as possible. It should never be more than five! The key steps are at the beginning, the moments of truth where the content and general site feel have to be right or the visitor will leave. When someone arrives, they’ll make an immediate judgement about whether or not to go further. This judgement will be influenced by a number of factors but there has to be an obvious hook that shows you have some understanding of their needs. Don’t forget about load speeds. As little as 3 seconds is enough to lose some visitors if yours is a B2C site. Once someone has made the first two steps, they are much more likely to go further and reach the goal but they need ‘hygiene’ factors like clear next steps, simple and non-repetitive form-filling, obvious calls to action and reassurance like accreditations or user reviews. Go through this process for each of your priority audiences, normally no more than 4, and this will help you build an invaluable picture of what content your site needs and how it should be organised. You will find some important content featuring in every user journey. Make sure this is as strong as it can be and uses your keywords. Initially, some of this will be guesswork but, as so often, Google Analytics (GA4) will provide with a ton of data to improve your effectiveness. If you’re refining your user journey rather than creating a new site, look at the most popular content on your site now and the main entry and exit pages. Many B2B sites are surprised by how much traffic their ‘Team’ page gets but people like to know the people they’re dealing with. If you understand GA4 well, you can use it to monitor your goal completion. This is OK as a top line measure but IF you set up your journeys and goals properly, you should be getting much more obvious business benefits, such as more sales, contacts, sign-ups or downloads, and you’ll need better measures than GA4.  A website should be part of your tool kit for reaching your business goals, like any other business asset, and fill a demonstrable role in your organisation’s success. Understanding what your priority audiences come for and what you want them to do is fundamental to maximising its effectiveness. Create compelling user journeys and your site will give your visitors what they want. Structure them to deliver the benefits you want too and your site performance will be transformed! Consultancy Strategy Public Relations Learn More Research Customer Insight Surveys and Analytics Learn More Digital Website Development Email Campaigns and SEO Learn More Creative Brand Development, Design Social & Influencer Marketing Learn More

Hashtag strategy: the why, what and how of successful hashtags

Hashtag strategy: the why, what and how of successful hashtags. Hashtags are an essential part of a content and social strategy, enabling your content and feeds to be searched and found by people ready to engage. They are so all-pervasive that they appear in song lyrics and everyday speech and major news events are built on social media using hashtags. People follow the hashtags that signpost what’s important to them. So how can you make them work for you? The rise of the hashtag: In Sept 2007, ‘tracking’ was launched allowing Twitter (X) users to follow topics and this eventually became the all-powerful hashtag. Twitter had no monopoly on the hashtag and when Instagram launched in 2010, reaching a million users in just 2 months, hashtags were central to its success. Pinterest soon followed suit and Facebook belatedly came to the hashtag party before the TikTok juggernaut propelled hashtags to the forefront of social success. Hashtags do not dominate FB in the way they do Twitter, TikTok and Instagram. Even LinkedIn encourages users to tag posts with hashtags and hashtag search on LI does work very well.  What hashtags should you use? The purpose of a hashtag is give your content a signpost that makes it findable. Platforms filter content using hashtags and connect users with relevant posts and videos. First, you need a keyword list. Check this post out. Your chosen hashtags must come from your keyword list and the idea is to carefully select hashtags likely to be searched by your priority audiences. Consistency is absolutely vital and you should create a list of no more than 10 ‘evergreen’ hashtags. Enter the hashtag you’re considering on most platforms and you’ll be able to see how many times its been used and how current that usage is. If you work in a well-established market sector, some of the hashtags you choose can be generic and this will help spread your net wide but you can and should refine them with more specific terms. So perhaps #carinsurance with #newdriver and #offer. There are a number of free hashtag tracking tools which will help you make decisions. Awario is a great paid tool and not just for hashtags! Hashtags can be used by anyone, even brand names cannot be ‘owned’ so you should always check what kind of use is already being made of the hashtags you’ve chosen. There are obvious benefits to using existing hashtags as this implies current interest. The inability to ‘own’ a hashtag also means they can be taken over, as companies like McDonalds and Walkers Crisps have discovered to their cost when their campaign hashtags were used to post negative comment. Alongside your ‘evergreen’ hashtags, you need to develop specific hashtags for campaigns, events or properties like TV/radio stations and shows, books or movies. If relevant, individual people or characters can also benefit from a specific hashtag. Effective hashtag use: Do not post on Twitter (X), TikTok, Instagram or LinkedIn without using an evergreen and specific hashtags. We recommend a maximum of 8-10 hashtags per post. Relevance is key. Don’t overuse hashtags and certainly don’t create entire posts out of hashtags. People are searching to find something they’re interested in and won’t appreciate posts made entirely of hashtags. Hashtags should be as short as possible as social platforms have character limits. Shorter hashtags are also less likely to be misspelled. As hashtags are always used without punctuation, check your chosen hashtags for alternate and inappropriate meanings. #edsheeranalbumparty was an actual hashtag! Hashtags not only bring viewers to your content but if people then see good, relevant content in your feeds, they will also follow you. There is a belief that an effective way of using hashtags on Instagram is to post something and then add your hashtags to the first comment box for the post. The principal benefit seems to be adding as many hashtags as you like but you’d have to wonder whether anyone has enough relevant hashtags to make this tactic effective? Tracking hashtag success: Initially, you will see immediate response through likes, retweets, views and new followers. However, its important to differentiate between indicators like these and outcomes. You must measure hashtags against your organisational goals, not against metrics which may be easy to influence but are only a step in the process. Set up your content and social structure to deliver organisational goals, like site visits, subscriber sign ups or purchases, and establish metrics which actually measure whether or not they’re being achieved. Deployed skilfully, hashtags are a powerful content and social tool that can increase engagement and build social audiences. Choose carefully, use often and track the results! Consultancy Strategy Public Relations Learn More Research Customer Insight Surveys and Analytics Learn More Digital Website Development Email Campaigns and SEO Learn More Creative Brand Development, Design Social & Influencer Marketing Learn More

Email open rates are plummeting. Does it matter?

Email open rates are plummeting. Does it matter? Email has been one of the great success stories of digital marketing. The opportunity to speak directly to your audience using a platform they can control through a device personal to them is much too great to pass up. Email volumes shot up 60% in the first two weeks of the pandemic in April 2020 and this volume has become the new normal. It is so ubiquitous that an entire etiquette has built up around it, when to reply, how to sign off, the dreaded ‘all office’ threads and, of course, inbox zero. But we’re noticing an increasing issue with email actually arriving and, as a consequence, who’s actually seeing it. Not just marketing email which is subject to a whole range of barriers and pressures, but person-to-person email too and sometimes email going into junk when the sender and recipient are known to each other and may even by replying to a sent email. And with our clients, we’ve seen large percentages of an opted-in database apparently not opening a single email over an extended period. Why is email suffering? There are a number of reasons why this is happening: GDPR has failed to reduce the amount of email being sent. While the intent behind the regulation is good, in practice the advantages of emailing people directly mean that senders routinely ignore the regulations. On both a corporate and personal level, phishing scams are endemic and can still reap huge rewards for their perpetrators. As a consequence, corporate systems and email clients (Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook) have been introducing their own privacy controls to block suspicious email. These systems (spam filters) look for trustworthy domains and block any they believe to be untrustworthy. Innocent but new domains are often caught in the net. Apple took this even further, preventing the pixels added by senders to register activity in an email from firing. This prevented any data from emails sent to Apple addresses being provided to senders. Even if an email makes it through the filter, it can be tagged in a way that discourages opening, such as ‘this message is from a mailing list’. Apple Mail even offers the recipient an opportunity to ‘unsubscribe’ without opening the message. There are corporate wars being fought, and email is a battleground. My personal email has an icloud.com suffix (which is exclusive to Apple) and I also have a Gmail account. If I send an icloud.com message to my Gmail, it simply never arrives, not even being allowed the indignity of the spam folder. So what can you do to improve open rates? For every domain you send email from, add an SPF (sender policy framework) record. This will help authenticate it for recipient systems. Do not ‘scrape’ data or obtain it in other suspect ways. People whose details you’ve captured in his way are very unlikely to buy from you and your domain’s reputation will be affected. Don’t email people who haven’t given you permission unless you can strongly argue ‘legitimate interest’. Legitimate interest isn’t simply ‘I want them to buy my product’, that’s not sufficient. Use a legitimate interest assessment form in case you need prove you carried this assessment out at a later date. If you regularly send emails to a list, use an email platform like Mailchimp or Active Campaign. Your emails might be tagged as coming from a list but the platforms have much greater credibility with email clients because they use their own assessment tools on your data and domain. Email platforms will warn you about activity you’re undertaking using them if it might affect their reputation, let alone yours. Don’t bombard your database. Say something authentic and valuable each time you email and recipients will appreciate this. For corporate communications, use a different platform. WhatsApp and Slack work extremely well and are more reliable than email. But does it actually matter? Yes, on one level it absolutely does. Even if you can’t rely on the numbers being completely reliable, the trends are. How your database (or sub-sets of it) responds to one subject line but not another or one offer but not another is valuable commercial information. On another level, its never actually mattered and there is even some debate about what an ‘open’ actually means. Opening email is an indicator, not an outcome. An outcome would be someone clicking a link and you don’t need open rates to know how many people do this. Of course, no-one will click a link who hasn’t seen and opened your email and been motivated by your messaging! There is a detailed summary of email open rate issues by econsultancy here. Consultancy Strategy Public Relations Learn More Research Customer Insight Surveys and Analytics Learn More Digital Website Development Email Campaigns and SEO Learn More Creative Brand Development, Design Social & Influencer Marketing Learn More

Unleash the power of a great keyword list

Unleash the power of a great keyword list! If you’re running any kind of online initiative and you’re not using a keyword list, just stop, now. Rebuilding your site? Writing a blog? SEO? Social? PPC? Yes, just stop. If you don’t have a keyword list I really don’t know how you’re making so many of the decisions that matter. You’re wasting your time and money. Search is such a critical success factor and, for the time being, all search is text-based.  So you need to be disciplined and strategic with the words you’re using, Even with video, as yet, there is no reliable way of searching a video’s visual content. So search engines use the title, description and text tags added to the video to decide what a video contains and rank it in search accordingly. Voice search is effectively text-based rankings delivered aurally. What is a keyword list? Though it’s a somewhat innocuous name, ‘keyword’ is absolutely appropriate as the list will unlock the doors to the digital space you’re trying to occupy. The list will comprise around 25-30 terms that your priority audiences may use to search in relevant areas and terms you want to use to define your organisation’s digital presence. They can be single words or phrases but the skill is in getting your keywords as close to actual searches as possible. Understanding your audience and their search ‘intent’ is fundamental. These are people who probably don’t know you but you need to know them, especially the language they actually use when searching. Don’t use ‘alcohol dependence’ if your audience says ‘alcohol addiction’ (this is genuine example). In certain circumstances, a keyword list can run to dozens or even hundreds of terms but let’s start with a basic list which can cover the most common terms associated with the space you want to occupy. How do you know which terms to use? There’s plenty of help out there, some of it free, some of it needs paying for. There should be terms on the list that define your organisation, a combination of factual descriptors, positive terms you want to be associated with and, if it’s relevant, geographical indicators. Combining these might give you a term like ‘Best Scottish smoked salmon’ that is powerful in positioning your organisation online. Knowing what your market wants is a constant learning process but these are useful guides: Search terms in Google. You’ll see who’s ranking well for those terms. Check those entries out and see if there’s anything obvious they’re doing that you can use. When you’re searching, take note of the ‘related searches’ Google shows at the bottom of every page. These are terms Google knows other people are using when searching this topic. If you have a Google Adwords account, Google will suggest alternative terms you might want to consider including in your keywords alongside the ones you have entered. There was a time when Google Adwords would also give you search volume data but not any more. A very useful paid for tool is Keyword Tool which gives search volumes for any term and can be filtered by search engine, territory, language and several other factors. Other excellent tools (which have some free features) are Ahrefs and SEMrush. They can provide further keyword suggestions, including volume and ranking difficulty, and show which keywords your competitors are using.  Link up your GA4 analytics data stream to your Google Search Console website property. Like most things with GA4, this is not as easy as it used to be. Add the search console report to GA4’s Reports section and you’ll be able to see  the top search terms. Search volumes are an excellent proxy for interest and demand in any given area. Even if you don’t believe the data is exact to the nearest search, a term with 10x the search volume of another is clearly more relevant and valuable. The ‘questions’ tab in Keyword Tool also shows what questions people actually use while searching and this is a great resource for content planning as writing content answering those questions will have a ready-made audience. Clearly, some terms are extremely valuable and it will be very difficult to ‘own’ them but consistent use with carefully chosen qualifiers will produce results. Once you’ve made the keyword list, what do you do with it? It might be easier to say what you don’t do with it! The keyword list should be used in website page titles, website copy and headers, image captions, image tags, video titles and tags, press releases, boiler plates, blog content, tweets, posts and hashtags. It needs to be your ‘go to’ resource whenever you are producing any kind of content you’ll be using online. Google says they want helpful and relevant results, so write naturally and don’t overuse keywords (keyword stuffing) as content written like this will get penalised. Using a keyword list effectively takes discipline and time and it is important to benchmark your current position so you can measure your progress. Do not be tempted to make short term changes if you don’t see immediate results, keep working with your terms and your search results will improve. A good keyword list is one of the most valuable digital assets you can create. Refine it over time as your audience’s needs change and it will handsomely repay the time and effort you have put into it. Consultancy Strategy Public Relations Learn More Research Customer Insight Surveys and Analytics Learn More Digital Website Development Email Campaigns and SEO Learn More Creative Brand Development, Design Social & Influencer Marketing Learn More

What PR is, and what it isn’t.

What PR is, and what it isn’t. Really this blog could be a couple of lines long. PR is the art of relating a business, individual, cause, message or product to its public. It isn’t sales and it isn’t an SEO tool for generating backlinks. Can good PR help with sales and help with SEO? Yes, of course. But that shouldn’t be the core ambition of a good PR strategy. In my view, PR is also more than just ‘getting things into the press’ – it is about understanding public sentiment, tapping into it, respecting it and ensuring your business or organisation (or that of your clients), is fit for purpose. At the heart of a good PR strategy is the story you’re trying to tell. A good story garners the interest of the media you’re targeting, the public you’re trying to reach and ultimately, any stakeholder you want to influence. And make no mistake, PR is about influence – and the story you create needs to influence the reader. A good PR consultant doesn’t just churn out content and relentlessly throw it at the wall, ‘spray and pray’ doesn’t work. A good PR consultant takes the time to understand their client’s long-term business objectives and creates a strategy that helps them on that journey. One outcome of that strategy may be coverage in media, it may be content developed for sales teams, it may be a founder/ c-suite specific strategy of speaking engagements, and, of course, it may be all of that and more. There has been a growing trend for clients  to request ‘link backs’ for coverage achieved too. And while this is a logical ambition – it isn’t what a good PR strategy is set up to do. Requests for a MOZ-rating of XYZ or something similar is not the right approach. There are publications that may not rank well, but their morning email blast reaches hundreds or thousands of exactly the right people, so being featured in them is absolutely worthwhile. A good PR person will help their client understand this and will clearly outline how it adds value from the outset. Coverage remains the ambition for PR people but the economics of publishing have dramatically swung in favour of paid opportunities as budgets are squeezed at publications and readership fragments across an ever-expanding sea of titles. Earned coverage has never been more aptly named and achieving it is becoming more and more difficult by the week. So PR must not stop at achieving it. A good PR team now understands what to do when the coverage is achieved, how it can be shared on social, used to update clients, or utilised in sales collateral. Great PR can be invaluable to any business. Not just for spreading news about the stories that matter to you, but also as an adviser on broader growth strategy. PR isn’t a way to convert sales, a way to achieve bank-links or a way to generate leads. It can help but that isn’t the purpose. If that’s what you had in mind when you started looking for PR advice – you’re already heading for disappointment. Consultancy Strategy Public Relations Learn More Research Customer Insight Surveys and Analytics Learn More Digital Website Development Email Campaigns and SEO Learn More Creative Brand Development, Design Social & Influencer Marketing Learn More

How much should a website cost?

How much should a website cost? One of THE key questions when launching a new site or rebuilding an old one……but the answer is not straightforward. It’s like asking ‘how much should a car cost?’…….it depends what you want it to do. If you’re an airline wanting to compete in an extremely dynamic search sector, sell open seats up to a year in advance, luggage and meal options, car hire, hotels and insurance, promote offers, pay securely, check-in, collect and protect data, encourage newsletter sign-up, recognise 000s of individual returning customers, remember their preferences and account history? A lot. If you’re a one-person photographic business that simply wants to showcase previous work and have people contact you? A little. You will easily find cheap (or even free!) ways to create your organisation’s website but this is not a place to skimp. You can almost guarantee any customer, prospect, journalist, influencer, potential employee or supplier will visit at an important moment. It has to work. And by work, we mean enabling users to easily reach their goals and deliver measurable organisational benefits for you. A website should be expected to deliver in the same way any other business asset would, so measure the business benefits against the costs and establish a clear ROI. What essentials should you plan for? the right content. You need the content required to effectively ensure your users complete their user journey. No more, no less. Your website is not a repository of everything you’ve ever done! a well-organised structure with clear navigation. Structure comes before design and must involve some type of wireframing. Good structure is essential to great user experience (UX) and the site delivering on the goals you need it to achieve. good design. Good design will enhance content, structure and navigation but you should not commission a designer until you have agreed wireframes. a flexible and future-proof tech platform which enables your site to run quickly and securely and can easily be updated. Site load speed is vital for good UX and SEO. You will need expert advice on this, it is not a trivial decision, and the earlier in the process you have this conversation, the better. mobile optimisation. Your site must function at least as well on mobile as it does on desktop. Mobile-optimisation is also one of Google’s key ranking factors. A very common approach is to use a ‘responsive’ website theme and this will take much of the strain but you will need to check all formatting and functionality on mobile as they are not infallible. Allow some budget for tweaking the mobile version. good hosting, including SSL. It is a big mistake to assume hosting is a commodity and to opt for the cheapest you can find. Hosting companies lower prices by loading more and more sites onto the same server. This can cause serious load speed issues and hamper site performance. You’ll need an SSL certificate. These were once only used for transactional sites but Google has decided site security is a ranking factor so every site now needs one. Accessibility. If you’re expecting high levels of users with disabilities, you’ll need to plan in site accessibility. Even if you’re not, this is always a good feature to build in.  SEO. You need your site to be found in search and to do SEO well, you should talk to an expert.  You should spend as much as you have available in getting these areas right. What adds cost?: 1. Selling something. A good e-commerce site requires each of these processes to work well and you’ll also need to deal with data security, traffic peaks and troughs and ensuring site availability 24/7. Shopify is really an excellent e-commerce platform for most small retailers. 2. A large volume of content: Creating content, structuring content and updating content all have cost attached and will have an impact on site structure, navigation, server capacity and site speed. If you are a huge retailer with 00s of products, this will be necessary and vital but if you’re, say, a news organisation, you need to have a disciplined archiving system which limits the content displayed. 3. Customisation: If any part of your site is built from scratch by a developer, this will increase build costs and, most likely, site maintenance costs. There are perfectly good off-the-shelf tools for almost any site functionality and they generally come with a lifetime of free upgrades. There’s a reason why over 40% of new websites are built on WordPress. There may be circumstances, such as high level security or customisation needs, where a customised build is justifiable but for most people in most circumstances, off-the-shelf will normally future proof the site and have cost and compatibility benefits. 4. Using the wrong design firm: Design can make a huge difference to the effectiveness of your site but good web design requires a different set of skills than, say, print design. For instance, websites are interactive and a good designer will build in features like rollover colour changes and click confirmations to emphasise functionality and improve the user experience. Your site designer also needs to understand the differences between desktop and mobile and accommodate them in the design. For instance, there is no cursor on mobile and, as a consequence, no rollover action. It is worth paying more for a designer who can tweak the wireframes to improve the mobile user experience. Assuming you have a company logo and colour palette already established, your site design should look as consistent with your other communication materials as possible. 5. Content upload: Compellingly telling your story with video, imagery and text, adding this to the site’s content management system and properly optimising the content for search are vital to the site’s success but often underestimated when creating a new site. In the long term, adding new content to the site is something that should be managed internally so consider using the content upload process to train your people with the