Sauce Software Blog

Seven tips to embrace your business on the web.

1. Make your website a daily tool
   Make your website a visited daily tool for your clients. A clear communication objective will help them  look for the information they require,  avoiding a phone call or waiting for a response. Your website is there to help clients everyday.
2. Identify your relationship with your visitors
   Why are they visiting your website, by studying your website traffic can give some clues on popularity of the different pages. This will help with building a sustainable relationship, and over time you’ll understand what works for opt-in and sales conversion.
3. Make it easy for your visitor to find the right information
   Visitors search for information in different ways, examples of the different search functions which should be on your website are;
   - Search function toolbar
   - Easy navigational menus
   - Categorised content
   - Uncomplicated and easy to use design flow
4. Let your visitor interact with your website
   Make your website the main area where clients or potential clients can contribute through comments, wikis, blogs , forums and  have available open feedback tools for honest input.
5. Make the content suit your visitor
   By categorising the content, visitors can choose by themselves what is important. You can also adjust content after the visitors have searched on Google. By understanding their search terms,  provides you with more clues on their buying patterns.
6. Make your website available through multiple channels
   Let your website accept traffic and leads from any other channels, like the following, different mail groups, partners and suppliers websites, e-marketing lists or RSS feeds.
7. Integrate your website with your business process
   Make your website become a natural part of your business processes, that way there will be no additional work required to keep your website up to date and alive.

Take your business heart to the web

For further information or if you would like to discuss your online requirements, contact Emma Puttick at Sauce Software.

P.S Keep your eyes open for the next Sauce newsletter with information about the new SauceOpen platform to be released shortly.

Emma Puttick

Tags: business, content, process, website ideas

…but zero to a search engine!

There are some who argue that it is useless to use alt tags in images from an SEO perspective. But most SEO experts claim that it does make a difference.

Sure, if you cram in 200 keywords in a single image, it will be useless and ignored. But use a few words that are unique, relevant and useful in describing the image will help search engines such as Google understand what its about.

Continue reading “ALT Tags : A picture means a thousand words”

Tags: content, images, SEO

Spring is well and truly in bloom now, and while you’re taking care of all your other business activities, have you been putting off a website spring clean?

… It’s not as hard as you might think to give your site content a creative lift and draw more interest by your site visitors. Here are a few important design tips to make your pages clearer, interesting and give that polished and professional look overall.

1. Graphical Appeal

Carry through your message in images.

It might sound like a no-brainer tip, but adding some well selected graphics or photos to your pages is great for evoking a response from your potential customers or info-seekers.

• Select some small photos to break up large blocks of text and try to make them as relevant to the text as possible.
• You can get your article’s text to wrap nicely around the image by using the editor’s image align options in the SauceOpen CMS.
• Where do you get images? – try istockphoto.com

This is a great way to attract a potential customer’s eye to a block of text; Putting in a catchy graphic near your critical sales point or call to action is a definite winner.

2. Are you listening? – Put Up Some Signs

In the way that we add images for allure, we can also use a tried and true technique often called signposting – put simply it’s the use of graphical elements, indention and blocking, bullets or numbering, or text styles such as bold and italic that makes your content much crisper and lucid.

1. People on the web have a VERY short attention span! so numbers and bullets are fantastic to use as people may skim most of the text, but bullets are usually read.
2. Bold and italic emphasis should be used within reason, but when really hammering home a point – are essential.

Continue reading “Don’t put off a spring spruce!”

Tags: tips, web design, website ideas

An example of a CSS document

You may have heard us web designers talk about it or stumbled upon this term before without much of a clue as to what is.

The definition:
Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL. (courtesy of wikipedia)

Still don’t get it? Basically, it is a document attached to your website template that helps us designers build your website. With CSS, we specify colour, backgrounds, positions, padding, lines, fonts, spacing – basically everything to do with how a page looks.

Now with SauceOpen, the editor that you use to manage your content has buttons to allow you to change colours, font-sizes etc. BUT this is not tied in with the CSS, rather the thing that makes a piece of text “green”, for example, is created directly on the page (in line HTML styles).

CSS vs inline styling

With CSS, it is applyed site wide. So you can specify all images to have a border. On the other hand, with inline styling, it is only specific to that instance. If you make this font green, it will only occur on this page and no where else.

Tags: code language, CSS, web design

We designers love spilling our creative juices over new opportunies to design for our customers. Design makes a huge difference, and with the internet growing raipidly, web users are spending less time browsing.

There are a few people who think webdesign is about pretty pictures – well its not! The copy, the skeletal structure of the page, and the order of information all is part of designing for a website. And the graphics and colours are used to highlight and tie it all together nicely.

Tags: web design