We have been lucky at Strawberrysoup. Since we started back in 2005, we have achieved consistent growth from two to twelve employees and feel that we now have the perfect balance. There is no doubt that we found it very daunting when we hired our first employee, but we were lucky – we started them part-time, they had another job running their own business and eventually they became full-time, so it was a smooth transition with minimal risk.

From there, growing to twelve seemed less terrifying. For sure, if we think about our monthly salary bill, it can get a little scary, but we have more than enough work to cover our costs at the moment, so there’s no real panic.

We never really had a growth plan either to be honest. There was no magical number that we were aiming on achieving in terms of team members, we were just seeing how we went and if the more people wanted us to work with them and we didn’t have time in our project planner, we hired.

Staying ‘small’ is the way forward

We feel that there is real benefit in remaining small. Officially, we are no longer small (up to 5 employees) anymore, but classed as a medium, however we are still small enough to change with the times and make effective decisions without the bureaucracy of larger corporations or agencies.
Since our first employee joined us, we have worked really hard to make Strawberrysoup a fun place to work. We wanted people to wake up on a Monday morning and want to come to work, to look forward to seeing each other and also socialising outside of work.  If people feel happy at work, it ultimately reflects on their work with a higher quality being produced with more creative results.

It becomes difficult for talent to shine amongst the hundreds of other employees. Some would argue that this is the responsibility of the heads of departments in larger agencies, but we know each of our employees as friends and understand their strengths and weaknesses, so projects and work can be apportioned appropriately.

Faster changes, better executed

In the current economic climate, things are changing. Customers want solutions to their problems faster than ever and for the best value. This coupled with the fact that our sector is one of the fastest advancing industries, with new technologies and ideas being generated all the time, we need to ensure that our business can keep up.

From experience, this becomes increasingly difficult to do as a larger agency. Multiple levels of management and a convoluted thought process mean that decisions can take weeks with all stakeholders needing to be involved and happy. This has been explained to us as the same concept with boats and ships.

A cruise ship is massive. It carries hundreds of people across wide open seas. In order for it to change its course, it needs planning, space and lots of resources. Compare this to a smaller yacht. Changing its planned route is simple, can be done in a small space and with minimal impact. We would without doubt prefer to be a smaller yacht.

Growth plans for Strawberrysoup

At the moment, we are planning on remaining small and agile. For the level of work and our project commitments in the near future, our team is more than capable of delivering fantastic creative, sound technical and friendly account management.

Don’t get us wrong – we work with some fantastic larger agencies who are doing great work. They have larger teams of individuals that focus on their core areas and do a really great job. We take our hats off to them for remaining stable and being able to grow as large as they have, it’s just that at this stage of our business, growth is our secondary objective, with quality being number one.

We love Twitter at Strawberrysoup. It’s a great way of socialising, keeping up to date with friends, learning about new things and generally keeping in touch. We use it from both a personal and a business perspective, however we try to keep the two very separate.

We are not professional Twitter marketeers with thousands of followers, and we don’t claim to be, we just enjoy having the ability to share our knowledge, news and interesting snippets with the Twitterverse.

Success isn’t solely dependent on what you tweet,  but we have found that the nature of those 140 characters can seriously effect your follower quality and general interaction from your audience. Remember that it’s not all about the number of followers, but the quality of your followers.

Keep it interesting

It is really important for us that our personality can be found in our tweets. We think of our followers like an extended friend-base that are genuinely interested in who we are and what we do, so they like to interact with us via Twitter.

We don’t share information like “getting out of bed” or “drinking a cup of coffee” as neither of these add any real value to our audience. Nor do we subscribe to services like FourSquare that continue to share our locations throughout the day – who really cares?

We have found that many of our followers are web designers along the South Coast (but there are exceptions!) so we prefer to share interesting articles that we find on blogs, tutorials and find out what our followers are up to.

Bragging

Everyone gets good news every now and then. We are no exception, so its nice to share when you win an interesting pitch or new project. We do think however that if 99% of your tweets are about awards you are nominated for, new jobs that you have available, how amazing you are, how many global clients you have – it tends to alienate people and they will soon get bored.

Apply the same rules as if you were interacting face-to-face. You wouldn’t brag about how successful or great you are to your friends or a group of people you have just met – it’s no different on Twitter.

Getting the balance right

We follow about 200 people right now. This number is likely to increase due to the amount of people using the service from around the world. Of these 200 people, we probably only know about 10% of our fellow Tweeters, so why do we follow them?

The majority offer some form of value or entertainment. Some are very well connected in the web industry, so can offer us insight to events that we couldn’t make. Others like to share interesting articles or links that we might find useful. There are others that take us away from our daily routine with jokes or humorous content.

Whatever the reason, we follow them as they get the balance right. They don’t promote themselves as amazing in every way. They may well mention a new project that they are working on or what they are up to, but they get the right balance – this is the key.

Networking Rules

Networking as you will have heard is an important aspect of modern business. It is also one clouded in skepticism and name badges. Use Twitter as a networking tool. Interact with people that you would like to get to know without awkward silences or those mandatory “the weather has been good recently” conversations.

One of our highest profile clients were gained via Twitter. We had caught the eye of some followers that worked at a large web design agency and were asked if we wanted to work on the project with them. This was both a fantastic opportunity to work on another high profile client, but also to get to know the agency better and work on other projects.

Conclusion

Twitter is no doubt a useful marketing tool. Remember that it’s not all about you, you and you. It is important to give your followers a reason to follow you and be interested in what you have to say. Try to stick to a set of informal rules that you can set yourself and remember – don’t brag too much!

If your business focuses around selling products to consumers, you will no doubt be looking forward to the festive period. Even during these tough economic times, consumers love nothing more than braving the cold and splashing their cash on their loved ones.

Over the past few years, eCommerce has jumped in leaps and bounds and now more and more of us are shopping online in the comfort of our own homes. But how can we ensure we are making the most out of our online business?

This article aims to describe the tools and techniques that you can use on the run up to Christmas to bolster your sales and take advantage of increased spending.

Create a Blog

A blog is a great (and free) way of describing, reviewing and publicising the products that you stock. Use each post as a showcase for your favourite products. By creating a blog and consistently adding new content, this content will be distributed around the blogging networks.

You can download WordPress for free and install it within 5 minutes if you know what you are doing. There are also thousands of different themes available to choose from to make sure your blog suits your branding and looks unique.

If you don’t know how to install a blog, you can always use WordPress.org and signup for free. They will host your blog, but they are designed for non-commercial use, so be careful as they could get removed without warning if they become overly commercial.

As your blog gains momentum in the number of posts and subscribers that it has, you will find that you start gaining some great search engine rankings for individual products. An product/lifestyle blog that has been created for this purpose can be found on Dennis & McGregor. Within each blog post, you can create a simple button to direct users to your product page if you wish.

Signup to Google Base

Google loves creating free services and their Base service is no exception. All you need to do is get your web developer to create an XML file (a simple text based file) containing your product information such as title, condition and price. The XML file can be uploaded to Google Base or automatically retrieved every day by Google from your website.

Once you have this file up and running, register with Google Base and within a couple of hours your products will be displayed on Googles “shopping” tab for everyone to see!

This tool is a great way of increasing traffic/sales on your website for specific products and comes with a suite of reports to use.

Setup an eBay store

eBay is a great way of selling your new products online. As well as the well-known auction style listings, you can setup your very own eBay store for £15 per month plus listing/sale fees.

The process is really simple and a product can be added by either using the list functionality on the website, or by using software created by external vendors such as iSale (for Mac) or Blackthorne (for Windows). eBay will give you a wide range of product options to select, the ability to host your images, add a description and choose a price.

Payment can be made in various forms too including cheque, cash on delivery or BACS. The most popular option is PayPal – a free to signup service that charges you a percentage fee each time you receive money.

Another benefit of using eBay to promote and sell your products is that eBay gets some great search engine rankings. You will regularly see your eBay listings popping up in the search engine results when searching for your products in Google, Yahoo or BING.

Register with Etsy

Etsy is a fantastic way of selling products that you make. This obviously won’t be relevant to every retail business, but if you make your own posters, jewellery, clothing or home products, Etsy will be perfect.

Etsy basically works by you uploading your handmade products to the website, choosing a relevant category and adding your product information. End users can then search, browse and view your products online.

It costs just 20 cents to list an item on Etsy for 4 months plus a 3.5% transaction fee when a sale is made, so its a great way to increase your online sales.

Use Google Adwords

This is a great tool to use in short bursts over Christmas. As well as your natural search engine rankings that you have obtained through your website, blog and eBay store, Google Adwords can be used to promote even more.

Adwords is ultimately a method of displaying adverts at the top and right of the Google search results. Users then see these adverts, click on them and are directed straight to a product, category or information about your business.

The service is fully customisable and can work on any scale of budget as the adverts stop showing when your daily budget runs out. As a guideline, your daily budget can start at £5.00 per day to receive a good level of traffic, but this really depends on your market.

To find out more about Google Adwords, there are some great articles and tutorials available online such as Adwords Learning Centre.

Advertise on BuySellAds

BuySellAds is a reasonably new service which lets you display visual adverts on well known websites and blogs. The beauty of the service is that if you know that your potential customers frequent a particular blog or website regularly, you can advert on it!

Budgets are determined by the number of impressions that each website gets, with the higher visitor counts costing more money. You can easily advertise your products or services on websites/blogs that receive thousands of impressions (visits) for relatively little money.

The whole service is fully trackable and you have access to reporting showing you how many people saw your adverts, clicked through to your website and what the effective cost per click was.

From a billing perspective, the traditional model for BuySellAds has been to pay monthly, although they have just launched a pay-per-click model now too.

Summary

As you have read, there are many opportunities to increase your online sales over Christmas. The key to success is preparation as some of the options available take a few months to gain momentum (such as blogging to gain search engine rankings).

Related Links

• WordPress – http://www.wordpress.org or http://www.wordpress.com
• Google Base – http://www.google.com/base
• eBay Stores – http://stores.shop.ebay.co.uk
• Etsy – http://www.etsy.com
• Google Adwords – http://adwords.google.co.uk
• BuySellAds – http://www.buysellads.com

You already know about the importance of having a well structured, usable and professionally designed website so there is no point in preaching to the converted about this – but what about the content?

We have found that from a client and agency perspective, content is regularly thought about during the final phases of the process. The sitemap has been created, wireframes are signed off and the design looks beautiful. Now the development has been finalised, tested and handed over to the client – who is looking after the content? Lets just knock up something quickly….

Evolution of Content

Strawberrysoup was very different 5 years ago. There was just two of us and we were working out of a shed in a garden. The content of our website was therefore describing a completely different business and targeting different potential clients.

Neither of us were particularly good at English during school, so writing content always seemed like a long and arduous task, especially when faced with the task of writing lots of very similar pages such as portfolio items. On the same principles, we are reasonably technical, so when describing our services, the content contained a lot of jargon which meant that our potential customers struggled to understand certain aspects of it – so improvements could certainly be made!

What is Copywriting?

From our experience, a copywriter is ultimately someone that amends or rewrites content so that it makes more sense and is easier to read. Very similar to a UX analyst or usability technician, a copywriter makes content usable from a readers perspective.

We found the process quite simple and any good copywriter worth their weight will be flexible in how they work. They should initially ask questions aimed at understanding your business and its objectives. Following this, they will work with you to highlight a tone of voice that should be used throughout the content, such as informal, professional or approachable – Strawberrysoup was all three.

We work with a Bristol based copywriting agency called Writers and they have made the whole process very simple for us. They have spent the last month or so revamping the Strawberrysoup website content (still to be added to our website!) and we are really pleased with the results.

An Example from Strawberrysoup

After our content was reviewed, our copywriters identified that rather than explaining something in a clear and concise paragraph, we waffled and used over-complicated words to bulk out our content. It’s not always about shortening the content, but restructuring it so it makes more sense and is easier to read. An example of this is on our About Us page:

Strawberrysoup was launched on the 1st of June 2005 by two university friends (Neil and Keith) who had always dreamt of running their own design agency. They chose to specifically target small and medium sized businesses who were looking for a reliable and professional web design agency that they could work with, at a price that they could afford.

Now four years have passed, and we have evolved into an 8 strong team, working with a wide range of clients from small SME’s to large multinational blue chip organisations.

We still stick to our core principles of being 100% approachable, friendly and professional in everything we do. We also care about how running our business effects the environment.

Here is the new content which is much more logical:

A bit about us

We’ve expanded our team from just two in 2005 to eight today, and developed a healthy client list and portfolio along the way. We started by helping local businesses, and we still do. But we now work with large blue-chip multinationals, too, and plenty of other businesses and organisations in between.

With our combined expertise, we can allocate the right people to any job, large or small. You can find out a bit more about the team here, or get in touch to discuss a project.

Why choose Strawberrysoup?

Every website should be inviting, easy to use and enjoyable. And as well as being visually impressive and in tune with your business, it should give visitors the information they’re looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Get it wrong, and they’ll go straight to one of your competitors instead.

So as well as being excellent creative designers, we’re also here to think like your audience and offer strategic marketing expertise.

And to complete the picture, you’ll find us an approachable, helpful team who do what they love and love what they do.

Keep the Search Engines Happy

Whilst having beautifully worded and concise content is essential to end users, we must remember that having fully search engine optimised content is just as important.

There is always going to be a fine line between content that is too heavily orientated to promoting keywords and content that reads like a professional novel, and your copywriter should be able to give recommendations on this too.

Remember that well optimised content will direct users from the search engines to your website, but what is the use if they cannot read the content or understand what is being described once they get there?

Summary

We would always recommend asking someone like a copywriter to review your content.

And don’t panic – it doesn’t need to be a professional agency. Ask someone who can cast a fresh view over the information. You can ask a friend or member of your family to help out – you will be surprised at how the content will improve after some outside help.

I started my year long industrial placement with Strawberrysoup back in August, where I was welcomed with open arms. Since then, I have been treated as a regular team member and worked on a wide range of exciting and unique web design projects.

The experience I am gaining has enabled me to develop my interpersonal skills including client & colleague communication, problem solving, decision making and finally sales and marketing.  I am also pleased to say that I have further developed my web development knowledge and skills and am sure that these will help me develop my future web design career.

Over the past four months I have been able to put the theory that I have learnt to date from my degree into practice and have worked on over 20 different projects with each website being completely different from the last.

The main skills that I have been using on a day to day basis are:

• Flash (Using Action-script),
• XHTML
• CSS
• Basic PHP
• Accessibility
• Focusing on WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) Compliance

I have had the pleasure of undertaking the build of several websites from the design stage to project completion.

Working from the design phase of each project has given me the opportunity to further develop my self confidence and the ability to use my own initiative – making decisions about how to break down the site into dynamic and non dynamic areas. This is important when working with StrawberrySystem (Strawberrysoup’s own bespoke CMS), as the clients require the ability to add, edit and remove certain areas of the website.

Working for a professional web design agency has given me lots of valuable experience and I have learnt many new things to date including how to effectively manage projects, work with clients and develop industry leading websites.

Strawberrysoup have given me the opportunity to meet and work directly with small and large scale business projects, creating and developing anything from a small brochure site to huge bespoke e-commerce websites which sell thousands of products.

Working at strawberrysoup for the last four months has been a very enjoyable whereby I have gained much valuable experience which I know I will be able to apply to my future career.

When I started Strawberrysoup with Keith, everything was reasonably simple. He focused on generating sales for the business, whilst I was in charge of designing websites and putting them together.

These roles worked very well for about a year – we gained a good range of clients and both of us knew our roles within the business and we could both handle the workload without a worry.

Now we are nearly 4 years on from the birth of Strawberrysoup, we have grown quite a bit. We started with 2 of us, now there are 7. We were working in a garden shed in Chichester, now we have 2 offices in Chichester and Bournemouth not to mention the fact that our service offerings have almost tripled!

As we have evolved as a business, we have had to try and evolve to become managers and business owners – and the task is harder than it might sound.

When you own your own business, you become very possessive and want everything to be done to the highest quality. You know that if you do a job, you will do it right (most of the time) but when you have a team of people doing your work – how do you know they are doing a good job?

I would give you the following advice:

1. Always hire the best staff available – you may have to pay higher salaries, but the benefits of having staff you can trust, believe in and admire far outweighs paying them slightly less.
2. Don’t micro-manage – when we first hired, I always wanted to check what they were doing, reviewing their work, testing their knowledge and ultimately getting on their nerves. I think that it is important to give them space to work for themselves and if they get stuck, they will ask for help and advice.
3. Have regular review meetings – we sit down as a team once a week to discuss all of our current projects, problems we are having or concerns that we have – this is very important as it lets Keith and myself to gauge how the business is performing, but also lets our team know that we are listening and understand their pressures/concerns.
4. Don’t be afraid to give someone responsibility for important aspects of your business like the accounts or customer management. I look after our daily accounts, but get our accountants to manage the payroll and end of year accounts. We have also give our team account management responsibility for certain clients. This was a big risk at the start, due to the fact that if an account wasn’t handled effectively, this would directly influence the business and our bottom line. The risk paid off and we have had nothing but positive feedback (including a couple of thank-you cards and even a cake – well done Pree!)

In summary, I think that we have been very lucky with the team that we have chosen to work with. Delegation and growth is a daunting prospect whilst at the same time being exciting as it can leave you with more time to do important things – like trying to evolve and grow the business.

We would like to welcome our two newest members of the Strawberrysoup team!

Stuart joined us just over a month ago and is an experienced PHP developer. He will be working directly with Jaime on all of our larger more complex websites and is a great addition to our already skilled team.

Greg has joined us from Bournemouth University and is on his industrial placement for one year. He has lots of experience in frontend web design, XHTML and CSS so we can’t wait to utilise his skills on some of our new projects. Greg will be working directly with Pree on our content managed websites and we hope he learns a lot from us and us from him!

Good luck guys and we look forward to working with you both.

We have recently welcomed the new arrival of our red corner sofa into our office – which we now predict will become the main meeting area for clients and friends (even though we have a 250sq ft conference room)! It has been aptly named “testing sofa” already so watch this space

We are pleased to announce that Neil (Fred) has just got engaged to his long term girlfriend, Sarah (Wilma)…

Neil popped the question whilst away with Sarah for their 4 year anniversary in Wales. We wish them the best of wishes for the future and are looking forward to the wedding in July 2008! Here is their very own website – neilandsarah.net (quite sad we know!)