1. An Online Brochure

This style of website provides basic information to your potential customer or client about your business, your products and your services. Information such as operating hours, services provided and contact details is an example of what you may provide in a simple website known as an online brochure.

Fo example, this website would be relevant to a business or an individual that provides personal training and fitness boot camps.Their brand is primarily promoted by word of mouth from their existing participants; instead of the class members having to remember particulars about products and services and start times and contact information all they need to remember is a link to a website and refer their friends to it for more information. Not only that, a personal trainer can provide information such as galleries, directions, outline of classes, and this information can be sourced by potential participants 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

2. An Online Catalog

Just like an online brochure style website, this type is used to provide information to a costumer in more detail about your products and services. A past client of Hungry Dog Media was Luke, and Luke owned a landscaping business. He knew he needed a website but was not sure how it was relevant to him. We built a website for him not only providing all the basic information about his business but also a catalog of the different types of work and products that his customers could purchase from him. Previously, Luke would have to answer inquiries from potential costumers while on the building site physically laboring to build and complete landscaping services. Now with an effective website, Luke is able to refer these callers to his website to browse the different types of services that he offers and to choose particular styles of paving, rocks, plants and other components of his landscaping services.

3. E-Commerce

While your business may operate out of a small building, your products may be relevant and able to be sold on a world wide market. This is where a website with an E-commerce shopping cart will be very beneficial to you. Now while continuing to sell to your physical costumer base, you can also be selling to a global market, promoting your products online and handling all payments and ordering through an E-commerce shopping cart system.

Hungry Dog Media can build an E-commerce system for you, very inexpensively and without any ongoing or monthly payments, to operate the system. It is very easy to use and can be updated and operated as easily as using a word processor.

4. Lead Generation Website

This style of website is all about collecting contact details from potential costumers and therefore providing you, the business owner, with qualified leads for following up your products and services. A great example is a mortgage broker, they can use their website to attract people who are potentially looking for a new home loan or to refinance their existing loans. Using articles and tutorials and other content type, visitors can be attracted to their website and enter their details to receive a phone call or visit from a mortgage broker. This website now operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for this mortgage broker collecting qualified leads for them to pursue in the real world environment.

These are just 4 examples of the key types of websites that Hungry Dog Media can build for you to help you to grow and promote your business today.

Starting a facebook fanpage for your business, your products, or your service will not make it an overnight success. You’ll not wake up the next morning and find tens of thousands of new fans of your product or service, it takes time to build and it takes a strategy to see it happen.

But Everyone Is Doing It

As a teenager, I am sure the phrase “but everyone is doing it” is something you often used during negotiations with your parents. With social networking it is important to realize that just because it appears that everyone is doing it, doesn’t mean that you have to do it the same way. Don’t start a social media campaign or integrate it into your website just for the stake of doing it, you need to have a reason and you need to have a strategy for why you want to use it. Not every product and service will benefit by having it’s own twitter feed.

One important aspect to remember about social networking profiles is there must be a reason for people to want to follow or subscribe to your page. The ultimate purpose has to be to grow your followers or fans, which in the case of a business will equate to more sales.

There are two primary methods for how a business can use social networking – either being proactive or reactive. Let’s use twitter as the main example for this article.

Using twitter in a proactive method means that you are seeking to follow and find other twitter users to your profile. You can use different search techniques and software to automate some of the processes, such as picking up keywords and actively following people and engaging with them. The hope is that as you follow people then by default they will follow you back, or as you engage in conversation with them, they will reply and as such become a follower of your twitter profile.

The other method is reactive and too often this is completed in an automated fashion using software in which it becomes too obvious that it is not coming from a real person. The reactive method involves the use of keywords that appear in other users tweets. When someone talks about your product, or a topic related to your product, you use that opportunity to promote directly to them. This method is often characterized by seeing a twitter feed of the user, where it is the same duplicated content over and over again just directed at a different user. There is no value in that twitter feed, it is simply reacting to other tweets that are published.

With these two methods there is no right way, and there is no wrong way. This is due to the fact that every product or service needs to have it’s social networking strategy customized to ensure it is effectiveness.

If your business is a mobile car detailing service then a twitter feed that is reactively promoting to people washing their cars is not going to be specific to the regional area that you want to promote to. However in this instance a facebook fanpage will be very effective. The majority of a facebook users friends are within the same geographical location that they reside in – school friends, work colleagues, family members etc. Having a customer of your car detailing service ‘like you’ on facebook, promotes your business to a whole group of potential customers by word of mouth from a trusted source.

The strategy that Hungry Dog Media can help you develop is how to have your customers promote you on facebook for free. It is one thing to have a fanpage, it is another to provide and/or promote a call to action that turns your customer into a facebook fan.

Social media and networking is critical and if you are not taking advantage of it, you are missing an incredible opportunity for your business. However it must be used effectively, and with a strategy that sees real, measurable results; allowing you to keep using those strategies in growing your business.

1. The Google Age

Just last week we had our annual delivery of the yellow pages directory to our front door step. We collected it from the front door and in all honesty had to ask ourselves what are we going to do with this. To us, the thick pile of paper known as the yellow pages is simply something that sits on a bookshelf and is never utilized in our home.

If we need to find a business, locate someone who provides a service or look for somewhere nice to go out for dinner, we simply google. It has been many years since I have physically flicked through the pages of the directory to find something that I need.

With so many computers in homes and businesses and, even more importantly countless amounts of mobile internet devices, the need for your business to be visible online is critical. Regardless of the business that you operate, you are still better to be referenced in the most widely used business directory on earth, the google search engine.

Just because your business does not operate a product or service that can be sold online does not mean it is not an important resource for you to have a website. Even if it is just a simple online brochure which advertises your contact details, the range of products or services that you offer and allows for your business to be in communication with a potential customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

2. To Confirm Your Brand

Advertising plays such a big role in the world in which we live. Whether you’re turning on the television, the radio, browsing the internet, driving your car, or sitting in a picture theater we are constantly bombarded with advertising, and as a business you most probably take advantage of a few of these resources; as well as the age old promotion technique of ‘word of mouth’.

With these forms of advertising so much can be said and compressed into a single domain. Rather than having to list important contact information or details regarding a product or service, you can simply promote a web domain and have your potential costumers and clients visit to find more information.

Having a web presence allows you to be found and confirmed as the provider of choice for your product or service. Not only does it help potential customers and clients find you, but having an effective website allows those who are seeking one of your competitors to land on your business instead.

3. Operate 24/7

The third reason, and what I believe to be the most important, is one that we have already covered in the first two points; it allows your business to operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year in a global market. Even though you may be a small bricks and mortar business, your products can easily be sold around the world through an effective web presence that has an e-commerce shopping cart built into it.

Effective advertising and branding positions your business to be the first thought when a potential costumer or client requires the product or service that you provide. Building upon your real world brand with an established web presence allows you to do business regardless of the time of day and also regardless of somebody sitting in an office ready to answer the phone.

A colleague of Hungry Dog Media once replied to a late night request from a client to fix their e-commerce site informing them that they did not need to apologize for calling outside of business hours as e-commerce does not have business hours. A great way to expand your business and grow your sales and clients is to operate in a market that never sleeps. It does not abide by standard business hours and therefore is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; that market is the online world.

These are just three simple reasons out of a whole list of many advantages to you in having an effective web presence for your products and your services.

To ensure full functionality of your site with the current version of WordPress and your installed plugins, we recommend a process of duplicating and testing your site before upgrade. This is something that HDM can complete for you.

If you currently have a project in production with HDM, send us an email and ask to be signed up for the client portal.

That’s where Teach Me WordPress comes in. Our comprehensive series of video tutorials will take you from a total novice to supreme WordPress master, FAST. From the basic fundamentals of website construction to the finer points of style and design, our High Definition videos will walk you through every step of creating a dazzling blog or website. No tech-speak, just plain English instructions for powerful results.

At only $47 for three months access, learning WordPress is the best investment you can make for your online presence. If you’re not completely satisfied with our tutorials, we will gladly refund your purchase within 7 days.

Since inception timinganddelivery.com has grown into an expansive guide from the beaches and mountains of Vancouver to the skyscrapers and subways of Toronto.

Due to this growth timinganddelivery.com engaged Hungry Dog Media to re-design their currrent site and migrate to a scaleable platform in preparation for future expansion.

“As we began to grow the vision for our business became bigger than any one city or indiviual. To fully achieve what we set out to do, we need a scaleable model. We wanted to harness the power of our original platform WordPress yet achieve the results required.”

Moving the site from a single city setup to multiple individual sites was a challenging yet totally achievable process. We needed to consider the navigation functionality, ease of administration and most importantly a smooth transition to a new setup without loss of Google ranking and inbound links.

The obvious choice to fulfil the functionality expectation was to transfer the site to WordPress MU to allow for ease of management and future expansion. The site now uses WordPress MU at the root and hosts a theme designed as a landing page allowing visitors to select between the different indiviual city sites of timinganddelivery.com.

The biggest challenge was to move the original site based upon Vancouver to it’s own install without interruption. We utilized 2 key WordPress Plugins to achieve this. Firstly we setup the Maintenance Mode plugin to shut down the site to visitors. This allowed us to work in the background making the transition and theme changes without the site being visible to the public.

Once the theme was setup and the content had been transferred we setup the Redirection plugin at the old site which was now the WordPress MU install. We configured this plugin to redirect any external root level requests to the new Vancouver site. Now any old links may display a post to be found at timinganddelivery.com/%postname% but will be automatically redirected without interruption to timinganddelivery.com/vancouver/%postname%.

The end result has been a functional structure ready for expansive growth in the near future. The design has already received much praise for it’s aesthetics and functionality, as well as securing further sponsorship for timinganddelivery.com.

“Hungry Dog Media was able to do achieve all that we required, and then some. We’re happy to have met Adam and would not hesitate to recommend him to anyone.”

Visit Timing & Delivery.

We proposed to use the WordPress platform to allow her the blogging functionality as well as the ease of updating and adding site content herself. Two options were presented; build a complete custom site or customize an existing available template.

Noelle chose to source an existing theme and decided upon the StudioPress premium theme ‘StreamLine‘. Hungry Dog Media than undertook the process of customizing the theme to match Noelle’s existing artwork and branding, as well as ensuring a unique look to the template.

“When I decided to launch a website for me new business, I was pretty intimidated by the technology out there. Adam helped me choose the right tools and even more importantly he created valuable video-based training that gave me the knowledge I needed to mange my site long term”

At Hungry Dog Media, the setup and design of your site is just the beginning. Noelle had no experience using WordPress so we created video tutorials specific to her site to get her started. As with all our clients, we also provided ongoing support at no extra cost with no end date.