When developing a website, having a clear and easy-to-understand navigation is an important factor to ensure users can easily find what they are looking for. When naming your navigation links, be sure they will be easy for someone unfamiliar with your business or industry to use says Columbia-Missouri based Equal Creative. The links should also clearly describe what content the area of the site they link to has. When developing navigation, you should also consider how your site is laid out overall. It’s a good idea to make a list of all your website content and then decide what broad, overall categories each piece of content can be placed under. This structure should then be reflected in your navigation design. It’s also important for navigation to remain consistent throughout the website design. Having a navigation menu that moves around throughout the website can confuse users and interfere with the overall user experience on the site. Navigation structure and links also plays a key role in search engine optimization (SEO) since it helps spiders access all areas of your site.

When I first started working in the information technology industry in the 1980s it was for a relatively small company that had dared to take on IBM. There was significant investment in research and development and we produced products that were faster, cheaper, more efficient to operate and had features that really gave clients flexible options in how they operated their mainframe applications. We had no CRM software packages to help us manage our customers, but we had a customer centric attitude that was all encompassing. Despite our product advantages our success was due primarily to a customer relationship management solution that said “A Customer Problem Is Our Problem”.

That meant that any issue in the data centre – software or hardware, ours or any other vendor’s we were to be involved in problem resolution. We took away any thought of finger pointing that it was not our issue to deal with. Every time we hired a new staff member this attitude was the first thing that was ingrained in them. It was more than just a motto it was just the way we worked. It became the way that customer expected us to work and soon became the standard that others had to try and emulate. The result was not only satisfied customers, but a deep seated customer loyalty that was almost impossible to break. Not only did we receive years of repeat business, but the recommendations from our clients to others were invaluable.

When problems did occur as they will always do with technology our speed to repair with no questions asked was always a feature. At the same time, because we were dealing with mission critical applications problem escalation procedures were in place so that senior management was well aware of issues. Those relationships were equally important as we needed to recognise that there was an impact on our client’s business.

The competitive advantage we achieved through this enabled us to build a multi-billion dollar company worldwide.

Sending out promotional products to your customers is one of the best ways to market your business. Direct marketing is the marketing method you’d use to send out your products to your customers. Your promotional products might or might not be related to your business but when done right, it fetches you a lot more in terms of profits if not brand awareness.

It has done to be done right, though. The first step towards this is personalization of your promotional products. Some of the easy but effective ways to personalize your promotional products include, but are not limited to, starting with the name of the customer. Further, you can send a personal message to your customers or send a letter thanking them profusely for their patronage.

Personalizing your promotional items might look and sound like an obvious thing to do, but it’s something that many companies either ignore or forget. Personalize promotional products for profit. What’s your experience been like?

If you rewind the Internet clock a few years, you could generate a mountain of traffic by putting up any type of website. In fact, before search engine optimization took over the web, people were receiving crazy amounts of traffic for all the wrong reasons. As search engines started to get a little more savvy, people started to create better sites, with more relevant content than ever before, making sure that when someone searched for a keyword they got to a site that actually was about that keyword and not just stuffed with spam.

Search engine optimization is the standard for email marketing today, and it is used by nearly every major website that is respected on the Internet. For those that aren’t aware of its prowess, it’s important to start looking harder at implementation. Without adding the protocol to your pages, you cannot get the traffic that search engines can bring for free.