Gorgeous truly believes in helping every woman to be her best, and to achieve this in a warm, friendly, professional environment. Relax in a friendly, comfortable and private beauty and nail salon.

View online: www.gorgeousnailandbeauty.co.nz

At The Cupcake Collection, we pride ourselves on making delicious treats that delight the eye as well as the tastebuds. We use the finest ingredients to create little works of edible art that never fail to surprise and delight. With flavours sourced from all over the world we have a huge range of tempting treats available to satisfy any taste.

View online: www.thecupcakecollection.co.nz

We don’t think it is rude to stare. In fact, we at Display Solutions aim to make people look as long as possible at the exhibitions and displays we create and consider it quite a compliment when they stare. When our work grabs attention, we know we have succeeded for our clients.

View online: www.display.co.nz

Eco Lodge Pakowhai is a newly built complex, offering budget accommodation in park-like surroundings. The land has been in our family since the late 1800s and was used to grow fruit and berries. We wish to maintain the property as a productive site growing fruit for our families and guests, and as a haven for bees and birds.

View online: www.ecolodge-pakowhai.co.nz

The sun is shining outside, the office windows are open and a scarf and gloves are no longer necessary commuting equipment. Spring is definitely in the air! It’s time for a spring clean and we don’t mean at home – we mean online. Just like your office drawers, your website can become cluttered with out-of-date and irrelevant material over time. If you don’t make time to periodically clean it out, you risk your website becoming ineffective. Here at TML Web Design, we think spring cleaning is always easier with a list, so here’s a handy checklist of hints to bring your website back up to scratch.

• Content – Is your content still relevant to your products or the services you are offering? Has anything about your business changed within the past year? Make sure that your content reflects what you want to say and the message you want to send to potential customers. Is it clear enough? Can visitors find the information they need? No one likes to hit a dead end, so it’s a good idea to go through the pages of your site and make sure that each one offers a link to more information, a call to action or a way to contact you.
• Images – Spring is a good time to take some new photos or splash out on a professional photographer. Good images can make all the difference in creating a website that stands out from the crowd. Check that your existing imagery is still relevant and update any images that look dated. If you’ve made any changes to your business in the past year, this should be reflected through new photos on the site. Think about whether your images are welcoming and invite people to buy your product or service. Spring is an ideal time to take photos, with clear blue skies, fresh foliage and all those gorgeous spring flowers and blossoms that can help sell your product. If outside shots are not suitable, check that you have adequate indoor lighting and that you’re not casting your own shadow in your photos.
• Videos – Videos can help sell your product or service online. It could be as simple as taking a small video from your digital camera and uploading to a free video hosting site like YouTube and then embedding it into your website. (If this sounds a little too technical, give us a call or drop us an email and we can help you out!) Visitors love to be able to see your products or services, especially if they are located elsewhere in the country (or world!).
• Blog – If you don’t have a blog, now is the time to get one! If you do have a blog, have you been making regular updates? You don’t have to be posting blogs every day. Updates could be once a week, once a fortnight or once a month. The important thing is to keep at it and keep it regular. It is disheartening to arrive on a nice website and realise their last update is a year old; it makes you feel as if the site is out of date, so why stick around? A blog helps you to communicate to your visitors, keep them up to date on the latest news and events, and encourage interaction. Not to mention those search engines really love that fresh content. Why not put a spring blog up on your site? There’s no shortage of things to chat about when we finally arrive after a long, cold winter to those stunning spring days, warmer temperatures, outdoor activities and the excitement of summer just around the corner! Your visitors and search engines will love you for it!
• Resources – Do you consider yourself an industry expert? Are you a knowledge base for your field of work? Why not utilise this information and share this on your website? This will not only offer further resources for your visitors, they will be more likely to return to your site again and again. You will be seen as a trusted source for information within your field and you will likely gain many more visitors who may be searching for such information through search engines and arrive on your site because of a particular article, etc. Resources could be as simple as including links to further information, or as extensive as writing dedicated information on your site or on your blog that helps to showcase you as an industry expert.
• Social media – If you don’t have any social media, you’re missing out! No doubt you’ve heard about Facebook and Twitter, and that’s just to name a couple. These are social media sites that are taking the world by storm and you need to be part of it! Make it easy for your visitors to share your information across social media platforms by creating a free Facebook and/or Twitter account. These can be linked with your website in a number of ways and can actually save you time by allowing your website to be the location for core updates which are automatically fed through to your social media pages. By including ‘like’, ‘follow’, ‘tweet’ and ‘connect’ options on your website, you are encouraging visitors to interact with you via your social media pages. If you are making updates to these sites and gaining fans or followers, you’re essentially exposing your business to millions of potential customers – if one fan likes your post, it will show on their page for all their friends to see, etc., etc. until you’re a viral marketing sensation! If you’re interested in the possibilities of social media, give us a call to discuss the many options and find out what might work for your business.
• Call-to-actions – Are you driving visitors to the right areas of your business? Make sure you have a clear idea of your website objectives and what you want people to do when they’re on your site. If you want to increase phone enquiries, do you have a call to action prominently displaying your phone number and a reason for people to get in touch? Do you want to build up your database to be able to send newsletter updates to your customers? If so, do you have a newsletter signup form easily accessible? Perhaps you could include a giveaway or incentive for visitors to subscribe. If you are clear on what you want to achieve through the site, check that your calls to action reflect this on your website.
• Design – Are your branding colours still the same? Do you still have the same logo? Certain designs and colours can start to date after a while. If that is the case for your website, small updates can sometimes make a huge difference. Neutral colours will stand the test of time, those shiny-looking buttons may not!
• Search engines – Let’s face it, you could have the best-looking website in the world, but if that site is not optimised to show within search engines then no one will find you. SEO is a broad term that covers a vast range of different elements that help search engines, like Google, to find you. It’s not a once-off job because the goal posts are always moving, so on-going SEO is recommended to keep benefitting your website and trying to climb the results ladder. Now is good time to analyse how your website is performing and look at ways of increasing this online performance, visitor numbers and sales. Here at TML Web Design, we have a range of SEO options, including on-going optimisation plans. Contact us to find out what we could do for you.
• Do a Google search – Have you Googled your business lately? Do you really know where your business is showing up online? You might be surprised to Google your business and find information about your business on some sites you didn’t even know about. It’s worthwhile doing this every so often to check that all information being published about your company is correct and up to date.

Finished? Ah, now doesn’t that feel great? And if you need a little help with your spring cleaning, give us a call and we’ll pull on our cleaning gloves and give you a hand.