In other words, leave nothing to chance and plan your marketing and delivery campaign like a military operation to give yourself the best chance of success.

Name the day
A deadline is a useful aid when you are launching a new product or service. It gives you a timescale to get all the details of your new item pinned down as well as to work out where you will sell it, who will buy it and what marketing you need to do to spread the word to those people.

Can you deliver?
When launching a new product multinational companies send out their stock and have it ready in the shops so that the moment their marketing and advertising campaign starts the product can be bought by customers in their local shop. Can your customers get hold of your new product or service as soon as they hear about it? Will your website handle the sales, do you need to set up e-commerce facilities? You need to be able to deliver straight-away if you are going to get the best return on all the marketing and advertising activity to promote your new product or service.

Get all your ducks in a row
All of your marketing materials should be ready to go in the days leading up to your launch. Your materials will need to be designed, copy written and printing timescales taken into account. Wether they will be posted, handed out at events or posted online make sure that every activity is timed as carefully as possible to reach people on our launch day if possible to give you the biggest coverage possible. Use existing social networking accounts to promote the launch online.

If you can also write a press release to support the new launch you may be able to get follow-up publicity following your big launch day that will reinforce all the other marketing activities.

Create Design Studio provide graphic design services for printed materials as well as design and build services for websites and e-commerce sites. We can also help you with marketing ideas and using social media to promote your business. Please call us for a free consultation on 01962 737989.

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Photos are a vital ingrediant in most websites because they act as a visual foil to all that text that tells visitors what you do. Getting your website images the right  size, resolution and style will give your website a professional look. Here is the Create Design Studio guide to using photographs on your website.

The techy part
The web doesn’t need the same resolution for your photographs as you need in order to get good printed photographs. Using some photo editing software change the resolution of your photos to 72dpi and save a copy of them so your original file remains untouched.

The web also uses RGB colour, not CMYK as printers do, check your photograph is in RGB colour using your photo software.

Size your photos to fit the space available on the webpage, big photos take longer to download (worth considering if your customers are unlikely to have broadband, work on a shared connection in an office or are viewing the site on a mobile device) and getting your photos to fit snugly alongside your text makes the page look more considered and professional in design. You’ll use pixels rather than centimetres or inches to size photos for your web pages. as a rough guide most web pages will be from 900-1200 pixels across and considering you’ll want to have text to fit in then you may want to aim for  300-600 pixels in width for your photos.

Representing yourself and your business in photographs
Whether you want to have a picture of yourself on the site or not depends on how useful you think it will be to be recognised by customers or site visitors. If you are self-employed and have a personalised business it might be part of your branding to feature your photo on your website and on your other marketing materials.

Feature your office or premises on your website to help customers recognise it when they visit. If you work in a prestigious building or character office showing it on your website can help give visitors an idea of the personality of your business.

If you have company branded vehicles these may also feature on your website and will help customers recognise your employees when they are out delivering or providing services. Your vans can also feature your website address so they can help new customers to find you online.

Product photographs
If you sell products then photographs of what you stock are vital to help sell them online. Make sure these photographs are on a white or black background to isolate them where possible and make sure they are clear and sharp. Include thumbnail sized versions as well as larger ones so that visitors can see details of each product. If it isn’t clear from the photograph what size the item is try including a scale to help visitors see the size of their product. Some products may also need to have more than one image to show different aspects of the item or how it is used. The more information the better where selling online is concerned because visitors cannot handle and explore the item as they would in a shop.

Creating a mood with photographs
It can be useful to use photographs a part of your website to illustrate what kind of company you are, what kind of customers you have or to visually explain an idea central to your business. These ‘mood and style’ photographs may form part of your corporate branding and reflect the personality of your business. It can be worth taking time to choose them carefully and try running them past a neutral third party to see if they spot anything that you don’t. These photographs can be sourced from online photography websites, although prices can vary widely, and consider buying a higher-resolution version just in case you want to use the image later on printed marketing materials.

Choosing a photographer
A professional photographer will give you great results and images that are sharp, well lit and well composed but they may cost more than using stock phtography or taking the photographs yourself. If you choose to take photographs yourself think about not just your subject but what appears in the background of each photo: plug sockets, piles of paperwork, rubbish, unattractive views and so on. Take some test photos and look at the light on your subject, is it flattering? It is possible to get useful photographs by taking them yourself but always be aware that without care you could be giving your business ‘amateur’ looking photographs that do it no favours.

Create Design Studio can help to source and implement photographs into your website and design them into printed marketing materials too.

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Create Design Studio’s Guide to the Essential Features for Any Website

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