Mzuri Design Blog » Websites

The importance of good photography in ecommerce websites

Katherine — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 15:30:28 +0000

We’ve been excitedly looking through the final photographs from a recent photo shoot by Mark Langridge for Nikki Szabo Fabrics and Interiors. We’re busy rolling the photos out onto the new ecommerce website, a plethora of marketing materials and also starting planning for our PR assault. While huddled around a machine at the Mzuri offices pouring over the images for the first time, we all said in unison (a bit sad really, but at least we’re all on the same wavelength on this important issue!) that this is a perfect example of why it is important to invest in great photography for your marketing, particularly for ecommerce websites.

Nikki Szabo Fabrics and Interiors - photography for their ecommerce website

While researching online, or just browsing at the weekend and doing a bit of online shopping, I’m regularly frustrated by images on websites that don’t quite show the details such as colour, texture and detailing, that I want to be able to see before committing to a purchase. Bad photography is as much of a barrier for running a successful ecommerce website than poor search engine optimisation and design.

That is why it is such a delight for us to work with the images Mark Langridge has taken – they are not only bang-on-brief, they are sharp, considered, beautifully structured and, importantly with constantly evolving product collections – consistent. Mark will be shooting new products as and when they are ready, and this attention to detail and commitment to consistency will allow us to integrate these images into the website without them looking like a later addition. What’s more, they really capture the design and quality of the products that Nikki and Glynis have been developing.

Beautiful fabrics and furniture from Nikki Szabo Fabrics and Interiors

Good quality photography is just as important for team pictures on your website. Not all businesses will lend themselves to having team images on their website - but for the vast majority it is a good way for prospective customers to dig a bit deeper, get a bit closer and understand who they will be working with. We just love this picture that Mark has taken of Nikki and Glynis.

Nikki and Glynis Szabo looking lovely!

The new Nikki Szabo website will be launching soon, so keep your eyes peeled here for an update.

The shoe is on the other foot – launching our new website!!

Katherine — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 20:51:10 +0000

After a day of final tweaking, snagging and perfecting, our new website www.mzuridesign.co.uk finally went live this evening! Hurrah! A huge sigh of relief was expelled by the whole team who have endured several months of intense development of the site after about 2 years in the ‘planning stages’. Many an evening and weekend have been spent busily preparing case study information, service summaries, loading and tagging images and optimising every page etc; jobs which somehow never seemed to get done during working hours as we were doing ‘our day jobs’ working on client projects.

So, the shoe was very much on the other foot and it has given me really useful insight into the process of website development from the other side!! So here are my three top tips when approaching a major website development or re-development:

1) Take a team approach - The whole team at Mzuri have worked tirelessly to get the new website live. We split the work as equally as we could between us to keep workloads manageable. When it came to photography, we called in the professionals – in our case photographer Michel Focard – to shoot our portfolio for us. After 2 days hard graft by our work experience student Heather, collating our portfolio into an organised collection spanning 4 archive boxes, I hit Michel’s studio in Petersfield and together we shot pretty much the entire portfolio in a 7-hour session. We could not have done it without him; thank you Michel! www.focard.co.uk.

2) Start a wish list – think of your website not just as a one off project, but as a continually developing marketing tool for your business. It is inevitable that you will continue to come up with a great idea the moment it goes live; a new bit of content, a new product etc. Don’t worry about it! Embrace the work you have done so far and start a wish list of ‘Phase II developments’ so you can keep your site evolving. Set aside regular time in your diary to review the site once it is live and make those new development ideas a reality. We’ve already got a healthy list of things we’ll be working on over the coming months, so watch this space!

3) Just do it! I can honestly say the best thing about the shoe being on the other foot is how amazing it feels to launch our new website. We love what we do and the clients we work with and our new website not only helped us to take some time to remember all the projects we’ve been lucky to be involved with, it also enables us to show more people what we are capable of so in turn we can work with more companies doing what we do best. My only regret is that I wish we’d done it a year ago! So, if you’ve been putting it off, just do it!

Google’s new rules and the impact on social media

kate — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:53:33 +0000

Google’s recent announcements will have a big impact on how we all approach SEO and social media in 2010. The first change is that Google will now include real-time data in search, including status updates from Twitter, Facebook, Linked In and blogs. So your ‘tweets’ need to be brand aligned, relevant and timely! A recent article in B2B Marketing magazine describes tweets as needing to be ‘mini-press releases’ – a really good description to follow if you’re new to the social media arena. However, be careful, don’t just make your updates sound like a list of keyword search terms as users will know what you’re up to and you could risk damaging the value of your brand. You should always strive to be authentic and useful to your audience.

The other major change from Google is the implementation of Web History, an opt-out personalised search feature which remembers the sites you visit and places them higher up the search results. Smaller companies will be affected more by this move as it becomes harder to enter the marketplace where there are larger, more well-known players, who will appear more consistently in page 1 of Google. These businesses should perhaps look to more traditional methods of marketing, such as direct mail to get potential clients to search for them by name rather than by service. Funny how things eventually always come full circle!

Choosing the right content – SEO Copywriting

Paul — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 08:38:54 +0000

Whilst it may be obvious to some, the content on a web page is probably the key factor in determining the relevancy of the page to a particular topic. Google, the number 1 search engine used worldwide, strive to perfect their search engine algorithms to identify as accurately as possible what a web page refers to and to achieve this, aims to see exactly what a visitor to the site would see.

Although there are a number of tricks and techniques that you might read about, promising anything from minor to major gains in search engine listings, the best method is simply to write relevant content. If the title or heading of the content is clear and concise and the text on the page is targeted and specific to the subject being explained then both the visitor and search engine will have a clear understanding of what the page refers to and how it should be indexed in any listings.

It’s best to get it right first time, but as part of search engine optimisation, website content should always be reviewed to ensure that it contains the right mix of relevant information and the all important keywords, which is commonly known as SEO copywriting.

Keyword Analysis – Where it all begins

Paul — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 08:29:19 +0000

When keywords, also known as key phrases, are mentioned in relation to search engine optimisation, we often get the same feedback from clients who think that keywords are simply a list of words that can be added to a page, the result being that the page then appears in search engine listings for any of the given keywords.

It’s true that there is the scope to add keywords to a page, out of view to the page visitor and that this list used have a bearing on search engine listings but the influence that they have is diminishing. Using this method, the list of keywords is added using META tags, which are then read by visiting search engines but because of a human visitor not being able to see this list, it’s open to abuse and can no longer be relied on. Therefore, more and more search engines are dropping support for them and whilst it’s worth including them for any search engines still out there that do use them, Google categorically does not use them.

All of this being said, choosing keywords is an important first step in search engine optimisation as it serves to focus the content of each page. Typically, a page might have anywhere from one to five keywords associated with it but the more keywords selected, the greater the amount of content required to ensure a high enough usage of each word so that a search engine will be able to ascertain that the keyword is relevant.

It’s a delicate balance however, and using keywords too often in site content can lead to problems. If a search engine feels that techniques are being employed to trick it, then penalties can be levied which at worst will result in the site being banned from the search engine index.

In summary, keywords need to be selected to accurately and concisely describe the focus of the page and shouldn’t be too generic. They should then be included in the content of the page in a way that a visitor reading the page is left in no doubt about what the page refers to but in no way leaves the reader tired of reading the same keywords again and again, and again.

Keyword Analysis is the process of selecting these keywords and is the foundation to any search engine optimisation. The process starts by brainstorming to come up with as many relevant keywords as can be thought of. This list is then reviewed in terms of competition and relevance to ultimately arrive at the final list. As mentioned above, keywords should not be too generic as the competition could be huge and as an example, there’s no point aiming for a top 10 listing for ‘Wooden Frames’ if your business sells ‘Wooden Window Frames’ and not ‘Wooden Picture Frames’. Similarly, if your business only serves a certain geographical region, then any search engine marketing can be much more effective if keywords contain the region. Keyword Analysis also looks at alternative suggestions to find other commonly used words or phrases that may not have been thought of initially.

The end result is a list of competitive keywords that can be used across the site for page titles, menu links and page content, as well as in the text used to link to the site from external sites.