Category Archives: Business

Maintaining Your Online Reputation

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”

These words of the most successful investor worldwide, Warren Buffett, need no explanation. It is quite true that it takes you a long time to get your name in the good books of people. And all it takes is just few minutes to get it ruined. However, with the help of a good SEO company and by being attentive, determined and proactive, you can save your name from being blacklisted.

Today, in the age of social media and online business, the potential customers readily provide their feedback. This is because they take it as their responsibility towards the company. But, being a business/ brand owner, how to deal with that feedback is your area of concern.

A good piece of advice from leading online business advice websites is, you must not get discouraged if you receive a negative review on your website. Yes, it did take you long to reach where you are right now, but consider these bad reviews as a staircase to your betterment. Here are some ways to tell you how you should respond to a bad review such that it won’t portray a negative image of your company.

Even if you have already arranged for a professional carpet cleaning company to come to your childcare centre in order to clean your carpets, there is still a little bit of work you need to do first. This is to prepare your centre and, in particular, your carpets for cleaning to ensure that everything runs as smoothly as possible.

There are basically five steps to properly preparing for your childcare cleaning to happen, and here they are:

Vacuum The Carpet

Before any carpet can be cleaned properly, especially if it is going to be done professionally, it should be vacuumed. Most any commercial cleaning companies will do that anyway, but it does no harm for you to do so as well.

This is especially the case on those areas of the carpet which are most used, as these are likely to have more bits of small grit and dust, which you would want to remove at all times, whether the carpets are due to be cleaned or not.

Move Your Breakables

Professional cleaning companies will always take the utmost care when cleaning your carpets, but as they go about their work, they may come across items which are valuable or delicate. Here we are referring to any unique pieces of art or furniture, and other breakables that will be difficult if not impossible to replace.

For insurance reasons, they would not normally move these on their own, in case they break them. That is why it is always a good idea for you to walk through your centre in the areas which are going to be cleaned, and where possible, move items which are breakable out of harm’s way.

If you are trying to create a memorable brand name, the logo design you use for your business will play a big part in it, but not necessarily straight away. It takes time and energy to get a brand well-known and it may never go international or even national, depending on what it is. That’s not to say the logo is any less important.

When it comes to logo design, it is important to be both creative and unique, even though the latter may difficult to achieve. At least you can put the various elements together in a way that makes it unique and stand out from the competition. A good logo is not created in 5 minutes simply by doodling on a piece of paper. You need to think what your company is about and try to incorporate elements of it into the logo. Apple has done this admirably with the missing ‘byte’ from its apple symbol.

Testing the user experience of your new or redeveloped website should be an important step during the process before the big launch. Undertaking expensive website design, redesigns, redevelopments and upgrades can all be for nothing if the final product results in a site that is not logical, easy or targeted perfectly to the intended user. Once you understand the way users interact with your website, you are in a much better position to gain their attention for longer and to ultimately convert them into customers (or whatever the overall goal may be).

How To Undertake User Experience Testing

Paying a professional usability testing company to undertake testing for you is not within the budget of every webmaster or small business owner. While this methods provides arguably the best results, alternatives are now available that allow advanced user experience testing for a fraction of the expense of a professional consultation.

Many amateurs throw up a website any old how and wonder why they don’t get any visitors or any conversions from the few visitors they do get. While such a website may be fine for personal use, a business website or blog needs to have a more professional look and feel.

This happens via graphic design. It has been explained this way: Design in not just to do with looks, it has to do with how it all works. So what are the essential components of graphic web design?

• Some people concentrate of the first page to the exclusion of other pages. In fact, each page of your website needs to have a clear purpose that caters to the needs of your visitors. It should inform, entertain or amuse and give a clear call to action, offering at least one way to allow your visitor to interact with you.

• Good communication. This does not mean being wordy. The best communication is short and to the point. If it must be long, it should be broken up with white space, bullet points, attention grabbing subheadings, images and even video.