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In a world of ever expanding, expensive technologies it’s not uncommon for small businesses to feel like very tiny fish in a large, corporation-dominated pond. While giant companies seem to swim along quite nicely, solo entrepreneurs and smaller teams are hit by recurring waves of fatigue, financial difficulty and stifling competition.

It is diving head first into this digital age, without taking your competition into consideration, which causes many start-ups to drown amongst the masses.

At Point and Stare, we don’t have any competitors – this firm was built with a priority of collaboration as I believe this helps us all to grown internally and helps others grow externally.
As mentioned in other articles, as the boss you cannot do everything, plus, staff and facilities are very expensive especially when you’re based in Central London.

Here, we look at some important reasons to collaborate with your competition, rather than battling against them and how you can get started.

Scale
Whether through hiring remote freelancers or collaborating with similar businesses in the field, the old saying still rings true: two/ three/ four heads are better than one. Collaborating allows you to be open to new ideas, input and inspiration, giving all parties involved the opportunity to create something in one year that could take a lone business much longer.

Speed
At Point and Stare, we know that technology is advancing at lightning speed, whether through the Internet of Things, apps or virtual reality. For small businesses, this can be a costly, intimidating feat, especially when large brands always seem to be one step ahead. Collaborating with other businesses allows you the unique opportunity to tap into these technologies, a move that could ultimately take your company to the next level.

Self-Awareness
Admitting that you don’t have all the resources you need is an important step in taking your business forward. Recognising your strengths and weaknesses will allow you to evaluate not only what you have to offer others, but also where your business could benefit and grow with external help.

Strength
Good relationships are paramount to any successful business. From those all-important PR campaigns to word-of-mouth referrals, knowing and talking to the right people will take your business from strength to strength. Be social, be seen and, ultimately, you will sell.

So, how can you implement brand collaboration into your business strategy?

Get out there
To get you started, why not arrange a local community meet up? Or you could even join one of the many online business support groups and networking organisations. The fantastic benefit of these platforms is that they give you the chance to network with other business professionals in an informal and friendly environment, which in turn can lead to very positive (and arguably more organic) partnerships.
My advice in these situations is to never go in with the hard sell, but to strike up relationships and look for those around you that could help you pitch for bigger/ better work.

Polished presentation
And, of course, you have to also present yourself in a professional light as others could be looking for your services. As we specialise in getting your company online, we strongly suggest that you spend a good bit of time working on your website to ensure what you’re portraying is what others want to be a part of.

Get organised
When working on a new collaboration you might find they are using a new way of project management a file collection service or processes. It’s always good to learn new stuff, especially if you discover a better way of doing things.
Be open and at least try them and, if you’re not comfortable, be prepared to say no and offer an alternative.

If you need more information or advice on any of the above or you’re looking to beef up your online presence, contact Point and Stare today. You never know, we might be able to collaborate with you.

In the excitement of getting your new business off the ground, it can be tempting to opt for one of the many paid templates that WordPress has to offer – they’re quick, they’re cheap, and they’re trouble free, right? Think again.

Planned obsolescence is as much a thing in the web design world as it is on the mass market; by choosing a premium WordPress theme as opposed to a bespoke design, you are essentially stamping an expiry date on your new website.

Here, we use our web design expertise to warn you of the problems you’re likely to encounter with a premium WordPress theme, up front, while outlining the benefits of a more personal and future-proofed, bespoke service.

Problem 1: The dormant designer
As a growing and thriving CMS, WordPress undergoes regular updates to ensure that everything is slick, smooth and running efficiently. Unfortunately, it’s not going to bring your beautiful new premium theme along for the ride, meaning it’s up to you and your theme’s developer to keep up and update your site accordingly.

Unless you’re a code wizard, an unresponsive developer can leave you not only in a daunting minefield of serious security threats, but also prone to functionality flaws.

Problem 2: Plugin predicaments
Without a bespoke design, you will probably need to install a variety of plugins and hacks to get your website looking and working exactly how you want and need it.

While too many plugins run the risk of slowing down your site or opening your site up to hack attempts, similarly they require a lot of care and attention. Without regular updates, you may even find that many of them cease to function altogether.

Problem 3: SEO stress
Making your website search engine friendly is crucial for driving traffic to your business. It’s worth noting that most premium WordPress themes will ask you to pay more to attract those all-important algorithm crawlers.

On the contrary, a bespoke website will only offer clean and concise code, ultimately ensuring the best SEO optimisation possible.

Problem 4: Forum foes
When things go pear shaped with a premium WordPress theme, your only choice is to scroll through endless, and often irrelevant, online forums.
The benefit of a bespoke developer is that in addition to knowing your website inside out, they are usually only a phone call away and more than happy to help you.

Problem 5: Relentless restrictions
With a premium theme you are often restricted when it comes to your contact form plugin or type of slider for example, meaning that if you change your mind and decide that a certain feature doesn’t work for you after all, you’re pretty much stuck with it.

On the other hand, a bespoke website enables you full control, meaning you can easily adapt and change your site as your business, and needs, grow.

Don’t run the risk
Using a premium WordPress theme means you could end up with an aesthetically identical site to your competitor, so when it comes to building a website as unique as your brand, it’s better to go bespoke.

Contact us at Point and Stare today for a design and build that’s timeless, professional and a better investment in the long run.

Contemporary web design emphasises lots of bold, dynamic visuals with minimal text. As a result, image optimisation has become more important than ever—particularly for business websites and specifically when targeting mobile users. Essentially, this means taking certain steps to ensure that your images are as web-friendly as possible.

Here, we draw on our web design expertise to share some of the key reasons to optimise your website’s images, with a breakdown of what image optimisation entails.

Reason 1: Improve website speed and usability
Firstly, optimising your images will significantly reduce your website’s load time, thus improving its usability. To optimise your images to load faster, they must be saved in a compressed, web-friendly format. This involves removing all unnecessary data saved within the image in order to reduce the file size.

Images can be compressed in two formats: lossy and lossless. Images saved in a lossy format only use enough memory to be sufficiently similar to the original image. However, when closely examined, slight differences from the original may appear. On the other hand, images compressed using a lossless format still hold all of the necessary data to reproduce the exact original image, but have a much larger file size as a result.

Either way, compressed images will allow your website to load much faster than uncompressed images—in fact, compressing your images can lower your total page load time by 80 per cent!

Reason 2: Lower bounce rate
Internet users are notoriously impatient, so speeding up your website’s load time with compressed images will help keep users on your site. In turn, this will lower your website’s ‘bounce rate’ (when users quickly return to the search engine) due to slow load time, and improve your search ranking.

Reason 3: Better social shares
Images are much better at grabbing your social media followers’ attention than plain text. So when optimising your website’s images, be sure to add the right OpenGraph or Twitter Card image tag to your section; this will ensure that your image is shown when you share content on social media platforms like Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter.

Reason 4: Improve SEO
Image optimisation also means making your images as searchable as possible, thus improving your website’s overall search engine optimisation (SEO).

To do this, give your images descriptive titles using relevant keywords so that search engines know what each image is showing. For example, a photograph of the Brighton Pier at sunset should be named ‘brighton-pier-sunset.jpg’.

Alt text should also be added to your image tag to tell search engines what your image is about. So for the example given, this would simply mean adding alt=“Brighton Pier sunset” to the end of the image tag. Also title tags should be considered for accessibility.

Using images that are relevant to the surrounding text is also crucial for SEO, as this will boost the search ranking for the image’s keywords.

Optimised images for optimum results
As you can see from the benefits mentioned above, there’s a lot to be gained from optimising your images. Admittedly, however, image optimisation does call for technical know-how and experience in order to achieve the desired outcomes—for example, if you try to simply resize the image on the web page itself using CSS, you won’t actually reduce the file size or subsequent load time.

So to ensure that your website images are properly optimised, giving your website the best possible search rankings, we recommend that you utilise the experience of a professional. For more information, contact us at Point and Stare.

The world is still reeling from the shocking revelations of the recent Panama Papers breach, the largest cyber security breach of all time. Eleven million documents and 2.6 terabytes of data were leaked from law firm Mossack Fonseca, circulating among hundreds of journalists and over 100 publications for an entire year before the story broke.

While the media is buzzing with the endless stream of scandals unveiled by the breach, here in the tech world, we’ve been focused on one burning question: how could a data security breach on such a massive scale possibly happen to a firm handling such sensitive information?

The culprit: poor data security
Allegedly, the leak can be traced back to a preventable email server hack, but what appears to have been the overarching issue that ultimately led to the breach was poor data security practices.

According to various reports, Mossack Fonseca’s emails weren’t encrypted, and its websites and servers were chock full of weak spots, making them an easy target for any dedicated hacker. Given that the firm was supposedly using a three-month-old version of WordPress for its main site and, even more shocking, a three-year-old version of Drupal for its customer portal, it’s little surprise that the hacker was able to siphon out such a vast quantity of data so easily.

A clear-cut solution to data security risks
For Mossack Fonseca (and so many of its clients), the Panama Papers leak resulted in sheer catastrophe, but for the rest of us, it serves as a crucial reminder of the paramount importance of website and email server maintenance. The firm could have easily protected its clients’ confidential information by implementing a proper website maintenance system to regularly upgrade its data security facilities, safeguard its files, and prevent server hacks.

As Point and Stare are experienced in providing website maintenance packages, we know first-hand that effectively protecting your data, and that of your clients, calls for a consistent, dedicated approach to IT security and website maintenance; after all, Mossack Fonseca’s WordPress based website was only three months old—yet its security plugins and core files clearly needed to be updated in order to secure the firm’s data and fend off any hacker attempt.

How to protect your data
As the Panama Papers scandal has shown, there is no one-off solution to data security. Safeguarding your information requires constant vigilance, continual upgrades, and a reliable data back-up system. This type of multi-pronged website maintenance strategy is the only way to ensure that your data and IT system are as fully protected as possible – not only from hackers, but also from the risk of lost or damaged hardware.

In short, if there’s one thing we can take away from the Panama Papers (aside from the need to be honest with the Tax Man), it’s that proper website maintenance is essential.

For more information on how to protect your business’s data and maintain your WordPress based website, contact us at Point and Stare, or have a look at our flexible website maintenance packages.

You’ve got to hand it to Facebook — the social media giant knows how to keep business booming. The launch in late February 2016 of its scintillating new mobile ad format, Canvas, has the marketing world buzzing. At the forefront of social media integration services for businesses, even we have got to admit that, at Point and Stare, we were like giddy schoolgirls when we learnt just how much can be done with this exciting new ad format.

What’s so great about Canvas?
Described by Facebook as a “full-screen ad experience built for bringing brands and products to life on mobile”, Canvas has two main aims: to allow businesses to create sleek, compelling mobile adverts, and to get users to perceive Facebook adverts as entertaining rather than annoying.

A ‘Canvas’ (as the Canvas adverts are referred to by Facebook) is a fully customisable digital space on which businesses can build bolder, more creative, and more interactive multimedia stories. Advertisers can now use any number of tools – vertical full-screen videos, carousels of images, panoramic shots, zoom capability, and call-to-action buttons – to engage their audience and deliver rich, visually captivating experiences.

As a nod to the impatience of today’s Internet users, Facebook has also ensured that Canvas videos and images load almost instantaneously and 10 times faster than the standard mobile web. That’s rather impressive, to say the least!

How Canvas works
Canvases are ‘post-click adverts’, so they appear in the News Feed like a normal sponsored post, and the immersive experience begins once the user clicks on the post. After clicking, users are taken to the interactive full-screen Canvas, where they can delve into a brand’s digital story without being directed to a third-party website or ever leaving Facebook.

What’s the catch?
There’s no denying that Facebook has created a downright thrilling advertising product with Canvas. However, there are a few things that businesses should bear in mind when considering advertising with this new mobile format.

Firstly, Canvases require a lot of bandwidth to run, which may deter users from viewing them. So consider your target audience carefully before investing in a Canvas ad campaign.

In terms of cost, the fact that Canvases are fully customisable means they aren’t cheap to produce, so you’ll need a sizeable marketing budget if you want to promote your brand this way.

The higher production cost means Canvases are best suited to either big businesses, or products and events aiming to build major hype as a one-off. As glossy and attention-grabbing as they are, Canvases are definitely not worthwhile for businesses selling low-involvement commodities.

Make Canvas work for your business
There you have it: the full lowdown of Facebook’s new frontier of mobile advertising. To learn more on how you can use Canvas and other social media ad formats to promote your business, contact us at Point and Stare today.

Why it’s time to find your social media niche
It was John D. Rockefeller, one of the most influential entrepreneurs in history, who said: “If you want to succeed, you should strike out on new paths rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.” As he was likely speaking around the early 1900s, it’s safe to assume that he wasn’t urging businessmen to veer away from the beaten tracks of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as social marketing platforms. Yet, roughly 100 years later, Rockefeller’s quote is spot on when it comes to social media marketing in the present.

Today, the best way to maximise the effectiveness of your social marketing spend is by doing exactly as Rockefeller suggests: now is the time to strike out on new paths, and these new paths lie in niche social media platforms.

Niche social networks: the new marketing frontier
While it’s become an expected standard for businesses to have a presence on at least one of the major social networks, these platforms are fiercely competitive, making it challenging and costly to get your content or adverts seen by your target audience.

Luckily, you can still make social media work for you, even with a limited marketing budget. Enter: niche social networks. These are the platforms that hone in on specific sub-industries, activities or interests, like Goodreads.com, for example, where users discover, share and discuss new books and authors. As you’ll see from our previous article “The alternative A to Z of Social Media“, there’s virtually a niche social network for every business – all you have to do is find the one that matches yours.

The benefits of niche social networks
Although their user base is admittedly smaller than those of the social media giants, niche social networks still have a wide international reach, some with millions of users. Channelling your marketing spend into these highly specialised market segments can therefore prove enormously beneficial for the following reasons:
Increased sales: With niche websites, you’re targeting the enthusiasts who genuinely want to see your content. This means you’ll get a higher number of viable leads that can be captured and guided along the sales funnel.

More engagement: Since the users on niche social media platforms are presumably enthusiasts, they’re more likely to share your content on major social networks, thus growing your audience organically.

More cost-effective: With fewer competitors jacking up prices or bids for advertising space, it generally costs less to advertise or promote your content on niche social media platforms. So for a lower marketing spend, you’ll target a higher percentage of people likely to engage with your brand and purchase your offering.

Find your social sweet spot
So take Rockefeller’s advice (and ours), and explore the new frontiers of social media to find the ideal niche network for your company. Like coming home to a small town, your business will get all the attention it deserves and an open-armed welcome from the enthusiasts in your niche industry.

For more advice or information on how we can help get your social media game up to scratch, contact us at Point and Stare today.