Good images and photos can do so much to enhance your small business in the eyes of potential customers. Bad images and photos can turn people off rather than encourage them buy what you’re selling.
When it comes to those images and photographs do you take them yourself or do you use a professional?
Here on our Hervey Bay web design blog is a very a good reason why you should use a professional.
We received some promotional material in the mail last week for a new office block that’s going to be built in town. Construction hasn’t started yet so basically they’re selling off the plan and to encourage potential buyers the developer has had a very nice artist’s impression of what the building will look like drawn up.
It’s quite an impressive drawing too and shows a modern office block set in pleasant surroundings and fronting quite a broad street. If you didn’t know the town you could even look at the drawing and think that there was parking out the front of the office block too.
I’m sure that there are buyers from outside of town who will look at that artist’s impression and think that buying off the plan to get a jump on the competition would be a great idea. Unfortunately the artist’s impression isn’t quite in tune with the reality of the location. T
he street that fronts the new building is very narrow … there is no parking in the street and where the entrance to the building’s carpark is going to be is often blocked by traffic throughout the day by drivers queued up at a nearby set of traffic lights.
So the moral of this story is that if you want to buy or lease office space for your small business off the plan then don’t rely on an artist’s impression … go and have a look at the site before you buy and see if the artist who drew up the impression really was in touch with reality at the time.
If you’re running a small business online then these stats from the Internet Retailer will be of great interest.
… acknowledge your customers’ uncertainty.
In a world where our actions in the present influence the future, uncertainty is opportunity (Paul Saffo).
If you want your small business to survive these uncertain times then talk to your customers in terms that they understand and terms that have relevance to where they’re at right now.
Maybe it’s time to completely change your marketing strategy!
If you’re having trouble understanding how highly paid chief executives and highly paid politicians could let something like the current financial crisis occur I guess it can all be summed up in one word – greed. In fact it was more than just greed – it was something that was built in to the system and remains there even now.
Sadly that greed may never go away while small business and ordinary people around the world are forced to bail out the big end of town.
How did those greedy people do it? It’s a long read but The End of Wall Street’s Boom explains it all in detail.
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Even if you’re small business doesn’t do business with directly with Chinese businesses it’s quite likely that somewhere up the line from your business there’s a Chinese connection. That’s why, in these tough economic times, to keep a tab on just what’s happening over there in the worlds most populous nation … and the news is not good.
Here’s an interesting report on current business conditions in China and it’s something every small business person should read.
Wow, I see that it’s been two weeks since I last posted here! That means that I had better do something about that lack of posting otherwise I’m going to be getting rude emails and text messages from one of my daughters who checks this blog to see if Toni and I are still alive.
I do have an excuse though … we’ve just been swamped with work that all seemed to be on some very tight deadlines. We also had a server move tossed in there because Toni thought it might be a good idea.
Actually, it was a good idea … the server we were replacing was old and it was time to replace it with something better … so we did it. Most small businesses are never going to have to experience the trauma of a moving a heap of sites from one server to another so let me tell how Toni described it. She suggested that it’s about as traumatic as waiting for a baby to be born.
However, in amongst all the drama we received a very nice letter from one of our clients. Last month we built a website for the Gayndah Museum and last week they wrote to us to thank us for the work we had put into the site.
“The members who have computers and have had a look all agree that the colour scheme you have chosen is spot on and the layout is very easy to follow and appropriate.”
Comments like that from satisfied customers really make our day 
Does your small business receive compliments like that?
“It’s important to celebrate failure because it’s a learning opportunity” Maria Sipka – founder of Linqia.com
Sadly though some people never learn.
Whenever the economy looks bad you can guarantee that the number of work from home offers that arrive in your email will increase and the longer the economy stays bad the more offers you’ll receive.
If you’re one of those people who hope to weather the economic storm that we’re all facing by working from home then all those offers must look very attractive. Sadly though most of them are smoke and mirrors.
The promises these offers make are empty … the chance of you making money from one of these offers is almost nil and the end result will be that you will be worse off than you were when you first took that work from home offer.
Sure people do work from home but there is no silver bullet here. There are no overnight riches to be made online and the suggestion that you can make money by working from home for just a few hours a day is a fraud.
If you were hoping for something more encouraging than that then I’m sorry to have burst your bubble. You can work from home and there are some genuine work from home offers out there but the ones that are genuine require big investments in capital, in hard work and in time … lots of time.
So don’t be conned out of what money you have by those work from home offers that look too good to be true. The bottom line is that they are too good to be true and they’ll just take your money and leave you in a bigger financial mess than you’re in already.
Every small business should be part of their local community – and by that I don’t just mean doing work for other local businesses. What I mean here is that every small business should pitch in and help the local community wherever help is needed.
Here in Hervey Bay the community needs help to build something that’s never been built by a community in Australia before … a patient transfer facility at the local airport. In Hervey Bay at least five patients every day of the week are transferred to Brisbane for further medical treatment and, just like every other country airport in Australia, that means the patient has to be transferred to one of the Royal Flying Doctor Service planes out on the open tarmac in every type of weather you could imagine.
Some members in the community decided that it was time we treated those patients to something a little more civilised and so the Fraser Coast Patient Transfer Facility Committee has been formed to raise money to construct a special building that will allow patients to be transferred to the aircraft under cover.
While Toni and I are not part of the community our small business has joined many other local small businesses in sponsoring this worthwhile project. The Fraser Coast Patient Transfer Facility website went live today.