Save Time - Do It Yourself...

Remember when you had had to wait ages for your “web guy” to make the changes to your website and then he’d charge you a small fortune for the privilege? Kilted Chaos believes that changing the words and pictures on your website should be easy, so easy in fact that you don’t have to waste time waiting on others – you can do it yourself.

We at Kilted Chaos push the use of a blog platform for the simple reason that it makes it easy for you – the non techie – to tell visitors about your business. This doesn’t mean that we’re going to give you a website that looks like a blog – the last thing you need is to HAVE to write new stuff for your site – unless your business is writing – that’s probably the last thing you need.

When we design your website it is highly unlikely that we’ll use the word “blog” in the menu navigation, nor would we suggest you use the word “News”. There’s nothing worse than clicking on the news menu on a website and reading a post that’s 4 months old. We suggest using headers like Promotions or Specials – this is where you write about what your business has on offer this week, this month. In the same way that you would change the signage in store to reflect a new promotion – you change the text on your website.

Kilted Chaos will show you where to quickly and easily put your words and images so that your site is always up to date and looking good. It’s like using Word – only easier.

Contact us.

Photo Credit: Torley on Flickr

What Do Your Customers Need?

- Want your customers to know each other?
- Want your customers to buy from your website?
- Want to show off your menu?
- Want to show your customers Videos?

- What do your customers need?
- Tell us and we'll do the rest find out more....

Who Are You? Who Who, Who Who…

We’ve just started working with a new client, taking their site from an old blog style layout to a more modern look and feel. Towards the end of the initial consultation, I asked the owner the question: “Who are you?” This flummoxed him for a minute – “Good question” he says, “No-one’s asked me that for a while!” [flickr]http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarchi/567321168/[/flickr]

Now we’re not talking about some existential ego trip here, what we’re talking about is your brand. When a customer comes to your website, they will form a view of your business within the first couple of seconds – even before they read a word of your text. The layout of your front page, the colors used, your logo and where it is, any images on the page and the navigation – all of these will be taken on board and evaluated against the thousands of other websites that the customer has seen.

Your website is a reflection of you, of your business. So, what kind of a business are you, and we’re not talking: “I am a Plumber” or “I own a series of Laundromats” – we want to know what kind of a plumber you are – are you efficient, are you always on time, do you use the latest gadgets to get things done quicker and cheaper than your competition? Are your Laundromats clean, do you invest in the latest technology, do you offer extra services, and are you running a current deal for students?

When you work with Kilted Chaos we will listen to you and incorporate who you are into how your website looks and functions. That way, when a potential visitor arrives at your website, they will see you for the dedicated, passionate and outstanding business that you are. Well you are, aren’t you?

Photo Credit: Sarchi on Flickr

Small Business Owners – It’s easy to be found

So you run a small business – maybe it’s a restaurant or a store, maybe you offer a service like an accountant or a plumber. You know a little about online marketing, you might even have a website that hasn’t been updated since you paid an SEO consultant to get you on the “front page of Google!” You’re good at running your business but think you don’t have the time or budget to market yourself properly online.

HELLO – It’s 2009 – things have changed.

It is easier now for people to find your business than it has ever been – the development of tools such as blogs, texting, smart phones and yes, Twitter have resulted in a stream of information that is constantly being updated and accessed by your competitors and your customers. If your business competition is within 20 miles and you don’t have an updated dynamic website, then you are going to lose to the business owner who does.

Click here to read more on how small business owners can effectively use Twitter – this post is less about what it does and more about how you can do it. We know as small business owners ourselves that incorporating a new system into daily business operations is a challenge. If it isn’t easy to do then it gets put on the sidelines like many other things.

Kilted Chaos’ approach to social media and online marketing is to make it as easy as possible. We deliver budget conscious yet professional websites that integrate with your social media marketing. We then show you how easy it is to create a business oriented Twitter stream and encourage you to write occasionally about your business – and that’s it. That’s all you need to start with.

If you get hooked and find that investing more time in social media marketing is improving your bottom line (and we think it will) then we’ll show you how to take it further. Contact us.

Twitter is a Broadcast Medium

You run a small business; you want new customers to find you and you want existing customers to come back. You’ve heard that Twitter is some kind of social network that helps you “have a conversation” with customers, but you can’t see how it could add value to your business.

STOP!

Stop thinking of Twitter as some kind of newfangled social media / social networking tool and start thinking of it as a broadcast medium.

Here’s a quote from a pretty successful CEO talking about how he uses Twitter:

“I use it to spread the word when we announce a new Alltop site. Twitter for me is a broadcasting tool. It's not a "social medium" at all.” Guy Kawasaki, Alltop CEO

This is how we think small business owners should be approaching Twitter. The social element absolutely exists, but it only happens as a result of your initial broadcast – it happens when somebody, a potential customer perhaps, finds and reacts to your message.

Your tweets are not only accessible to people on Twitter - your tweets are indexed by the search engines and therefore available to the 300 million searches that happen on Google every day.  At Kilted Chaos we say that "It's easy to be found" and we truly believe that.  It is easy to take 2 minutes in your day and write a tweet from your phone or your computer saying what you are doing - it is - it is easy!  We will show the tools to use and how to go about it - it is not rocket science and you don't need to read a manual.