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Ready to own a Coppertops website?

By investment, I’m not just talking money. Designing and building a website takes money, time and energy from you and time, energy (and creativity from us).

But why is it worth putting the time, energy and money into building a website for your business?

It’s your shop window

It’s a cliche because it’s true. Your website is the primary representation of your business online. It should showcase the best of who you are, what you do and how you can help your customers.

It is the piece that you own

This one is often overlooked but is crucial and has a few parts.

Any content you post on any social media platform is vulnerable to changes they make.

By posting content on a platform you agree to obey their rules

You are trusting their algorithm to show your content to the right people consistently and at the right times.

You are vulnerable to the platform going offline either temporarily or permanently – if your entire business is on the platform this can be extremely disruptive or even cause it to collapse.

Your website belongs to you and as a result, is fully in your control. So it should be the central part of your online presence.

We suggest digital marketing is like a wheel with your website at the centre and each of your other elements forming the spokes to give the results which form the tyre and get you moving.

It will get you found

If your website is built correctly and optimised for SEO then it will be the main way that you will be found in online searches.

Analytics on your website will give you more information on your users’ behaviour than any other platform, which will allow you to improve your performance over time.

It can grow and develop with your business

If your site is well built then it will allow you to add elements to it as you expand your business.

For example, if you want to enable bookings, an online shop, or even online courses, you should be able to add those to your existing website without having to start over.

It can link with your business

Your website should be part of your business, it should be linked in with your existing workflows and should make your life easier by reducing admin while increasing your sales.

If this is not the case for you then please get in touch, we would be delighted to discuss your website and how it fits in your overall business.

In summary…

Depending on your web partner, the cost of your website in terms of money, time and energy will vary wildly.

At Coppertops, we aim to give you the best bang for your buck, the biggest return for the minimum investment and to get you online as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Our websites are built to ensure that you won’t outgrow them, so you won’t need to start from scratch when you grow your business.

We build your website into your business so it works for you, not the other way around!

Whether you are building, rebuilding, or fine-tuning, we’d love to talk to you.

I’m delighted to tell you that we have two new Coppertops on the team.

Keely and Declan joined the team last Wednesday and have been fantastic additions already. Both are in the 3rd year of their E-Commerce in Retailing course in TU Dublin and are with Coppertops on work experience until September.

I’m so excited to work with Keely and Declan on many projects over the coming months.

Welcome to the team!

We have 2 weeks to go, the last minute shopping is being done, how can you market your business for the last part of 2021? Let’s do a quick run through some Christmas marketing ideas.

Keep it fun

Nobody wants to get all serious at this time of year, so keep it light and easy. It’s a chance to have a bit of fun with your audience, your potential customers, and you are more likely to get some interaction as a result. Christmas marketing often does better when it doesn’t feel like being sold to.

Make it a no brainer

People want to get stuff done, they have a long list and not enough time. Make your offer simple and easy to say yes to, your customers are more likely to buy and will probably thank you for saving them some thinking time!

Bundle up

No, I don’t mean wrap up warm although with the weather this week that’s also a great idea! Bundle up your offers to make it even easier for people to say yes, buy and checkout. The fewer steps from a decision to making payment the better for you and for your customer. Bundles make Christmas marketing easier and more effective.

Think ahead

If your products or services don’t really suit a Christmas related sale why not look at offers for the New Year?

For example, over the next week, we will be making our 2022 web and social media offers available to our clients (new and existing) to make sure our work calendar is full going into January.

New year offers can be an element of, or all of, your Christmas marketing campaigns.

Gimmicks

Christmas may be the time of year when gimmicks are most acceptable, once you don’t take them too seriously!

For example, use the 12 days of Christmas in a creative way or add Christmas decorations on your website and social media profiles as well as in your marketing graphics.

Give

It’s the season for giving, and there are many ways to do it.

Reward loyal customers or followers with a gift or a special offer.

Donate to your favourite charity and ask your customers or followers to follow suit. Marketing ideas should include giving your customers a glimpse of who you are on a personal level, so this is a double whammy as the charity benefits and it builds trust in your business as well.

Team up

Those bundles we mentioned? Why not make them a combined effort with another business that has a product or service that compliments one of yours? This works well any time but in particular as part of your Christmas marketing as it makes life easier for your customers as well.

Host a Christmas themed live stream with another business owner – make it fun and engaging.

This has been a quick summary of some nice and easy marketing ideas for your small business in the run-up to Christmas, we hope that you can make use of some of them.

DIY website builders seem like the easy option. This is certainly the message you’ll get if you watch a few videos on YouTube, with ads for all of the self-build website platforms out there telling you how simple it is. And I’m not going to lie, building a website is not difficult. Adding text and images to a web page should be a simple task. Shocked that a web developer would tell you that? Let me explain.

The part of my job where I put the content onto each page or post and change colours is not the part where my skills are most in play. That’s the easy bit, let’s be honest, it’s the fun part!

The rest of it is where my clients get the full benefit of my skills and experience. The part where we decide which piece goes where, how the structure and layout of the site will work best and what the aims of your site are in terms of working for your business. The part where we assess whether your site is working for you and optimise it to improve your results. The part where we link your website to the other elements of your business to automate where possible to reduce your admin work.

It’s all about the process

When you do anything repeatedly over a number of years you will naturally develop a process and a system for doing it. It is so important to us here at Coppertops that our clients get the best results that we have an extra incentive to fine-tune our process as technology and people change over time.

Parts of our process are impossible to explain, parts of it are purely based on having done this so many times before. This experience allows us to quickly figure out what will work best for your business or what layout looks best for your customer. This piece is absent with a DIY website builder.

To illustrate what I mean here I’m going to give an overview of how our web development process works. We use similar processes for our other services.

Review and Assess

To start we look at what you have. Your business, your website and social media. What you do, how you do it and how online marketing fits into that.

This allows us to come up with a plan for your build. With a DIY website builder, you need to plan the site yourself, too.

Structure

We create a layout for the structure of your website at a wireframe level – pages, functionality, user flow. This allows us to focus on how your site works before getting distracted by how it looks.

Design

We create a mock-up to show how your website will look. This allows us to test out the design and allows you to see and approve the proposed layout, fonts, colours, etc before we start to build the site.

Review and Approve

We go through the proposed wireframe and design with you to ensure that you are happy with both.

Build

Once we have an agreed layout and design, we go ahead and build your website. As I said earlier, this is a piece that can certainly be done yourself but in my experience, it will take longer and is less likely to get you the result you want. A good portion of our clients came to us at this point after they tried the DIY route and got too frustrated!

Review and Test

Another review level. I know, but these stages are crucial to make sure we get to the right end result. We review the build and test to ensure that all of the pieces work correctly. We also check to make sure your website is responsive (works on any device).

Publish

Final checks and tweaks as we launch your website and make sure all is working correctly.

Management

Once your site is live you become a management client, we are always taking care of you and your website. With a self build website, you are on your own here.

Post Launch reviews

We come back and check in on your website as well as complete an SEO review to make sure everything is working correctly and effectively. Google Analytics data can help us to fine-tune and tweak your site to make sure it is running well.

So what will it be, DIY website or Website Developer?

So the choices are endless but your first choice is this, do you want to spend the time on a self-build website or would you prefer to go through the Coppertops process while you focus on the rest of your business?

We look forward to hearing from you!

This Green Friday / Black Friday we are offering a hefty discount on the items that we feel can make the biggest and fastest impact on your business. These offers are valid for one week only (until Friday 3rd December) so don’t delay!

Questions? Contact us here