Reports suggest that recession in the UK will not be over till 2nd quarter of 2010 and that the money made by Fortune 500 has shrunk by 85% to US$99 billion only.

There are two takeaways from this for you – 1) People are holding on cash and thus, your business will have harder time finding new customers whether you are B2B or B2C and, 2) Your cost of acquisition of new customers is going to go up, purely because of extra money that is required to be spent on marketing.

It is thus, vitally important that you take a hard look at the money you are spending on production of goods and services. If you are an online retailer for example, it means the money you are spending on designing, developing, maintaining and marketing your website.

What you would normally spend £5,000 on could cost you just £1,500, if you a choose value priced vendor.  About an year earlier, that may not seem like much of a difference, but now it makes one hell of a difference.

The cost of web design, development or maintenance is very important and can change everything. Let’s do some basic math. If the website cost £5,000 and you try to sell products worth £50 of which you only get half the money as profit, you would need at least 201 orders to stick (not refund) to make a profit. If you sell a product for £20 you would be profitable after 501 sales.

Now that the website cost is only £1,500 you only need to sell only 16, £100 ticket item to make money. If you go with selling £20 product, you only need to sell 76 of them.

Remember, these calculations about the number of products you need to sell have been made assuming, a jaw-dropping 50% profit margin. Now imagine these numbers taking into account 10% of 5% margin. Can you get 5000 new customers? If not, how will break even?

Working with a ‘Value Priced’ agency alone can mean all the difference between being profitable or not.

Think about it!

-    Mukul Gupta

Indus Net Technologies’ creative service team has launched a new blog to share the latest in the world of design (web design and print design). They call it D’ZINE ZONE!
http://www.indusnetacademy.com/dzine-zone/

Go and indule yourself. I can promise you – it will be a treat for your eyes (and mind – if you are a designer).

Way to go guys!

TemplateKingdom 2.0, an Indus Net Technologies venture has recently put up a free web template section on its website.

This section will list templates which are available for free download. Each template will include full source files, W3C validated HTML code and CSS files for instant use. To download these templates, you simply need to register at TemplateKingdom.com.

Registration is absolutely free and takes less than 10 seconds! Once you are registered, you can download these templates from your member’s area.

Please note that all FREE templates are under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. You are free to download and use these templates in any way as you wish as long as you give a link back as credit to TemplateKingdom.com

 

Attractive designs do get attention. It can also get good visitor-customer conversion if some best-practices are followed. But the question is – how can attractive designs get traffic to your website?

They can! or,
They can at least help your site in getting good traffic.

Here is a simple technique posted by Daniel on his blog.

• Design an attractive web site. Or get it designed through one of the many web design agencies around. Make sure that the site is coded in XHMTL/CSS2.
• Now, submit these websites to several CSS galleries which has sprung all over the Internet. If your design is decent enough, you will surely get accepted. However, if your design is outstanding, you may get featured sending in hundreds of visitors!
• Now, design enthusiasts may not be your target audience (BTW, if they are, then you have struck a goldmine). Still, you get multiple listings and they link to your website, which ultimately helps you in getting better link-popularity and therefore higher rankings in search engines. In my opinion, you should not miss any opportunity to improve your link-popularity.
• Here are some links to the “List of CSS galleries”

• http://www.themoleskin.com/archives/the-definitive-css-galleries-list/
• http://www.virtualhosting.com/blog/2008/inspiration-overload-100-css-galleries-you-need-to-check-out/
• http://css-tricks.com/examples/WebsiteGalleryRoundup/
• http://www.nuff-respec.com/technology/css-gallery-roundup
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2006/12/21/creme-de-la-creme-of-css-list-of-css-galleries/

Now, if it looks like a daunting task (frankly speaking, it is!), do not give up.

Indus Net Technologies has a special service to help you focus on your core business and take care of different kind of manual submission (including CSS gallery submission) for a small fees. It is called Submit2Please.

Contact one of our sales representative / your account manager at Indus Net Technologies to get started. Or drop us a line at info@submit2please.com

 

When it comes to design, size does not matter – creativity does. In fact many times, small is beautiful.

The Indus Net Technologies’ web design team has proven themselves yet again with a relevant, memorable and creative favicon for their website – Hire-A-Designer. It has been recently shortlisted as “50 Outstanding Favicons” by Smashing Magazine.

Check it out here: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/03/21/favicon-episode-6-black-abstract-and-hand-drawing/

Favicons may be a small part of a website, but it goes a long way in creating its brand identity among website visitors who have very short attention span. And yes, these favicons do stand out when a person reviews his “Favourites” or “Bookmarks”, making it a good marketing tool.

Congratulations to the design team!

 

Indus Net Technologies will be exhibiting its capabilities at Internet World 2008, Earl’s Court, London between 29th April and 2nd May.

See how:

• We can take your website to the next level and make it a lead generation machine for your business.
• If you are an Internet service company (web design, web development, Internet marketing), we can reduce your cost of production and help you take up business that you are unable to address due to your overflowing order book!

Do drop in for a chat!

And let us know in advance, so that we can send you a FREE invitation card.

See you there!

PS: You might not know us from our title brand. So if you are dealing with any of our group brands, the invitation stands for you – Design2Please, Script2Please, Submit2Please, Host2Please, EasySiteEdit, TemplateKingdom, Hire-A-Designer, ClickWorkForce!

 

Few months back, one of our ventures Design2Please.com had been covered by ArtzMania.com, a popular e-magazine amongst designers and design lovers across the globe. We are honored that ArtzMania has featured our portfolio in their e-mag. Thank you! It can be downloaded here (Magz issue > Issue 6, 34MB, .exe)>>

Notes:
Design2Please.com is the affordable web design services venture of Indus Net Technologies. A team of 90+ full-time web designers are working for this venture and  serving more than 1500+ clients spread over 35+ countries. We are serving in 2 modes: fixed cost web design packages and full-time or part-time dedicated hiring.

One of our ventures, Hire-a-Designer.com, recently got covered by CSSMania.com. CSS Mania is a very popular website which lists great website designs. We are thankful to CSS Mania guys for considering our website and featuring it on their site. You can see it listed here >>

Notes:
Hire-a-Designer.com allows you to hire designers on full-time, part-time or hourly basis. This model is can save you atleast 22.5% of cost against any fixed price quotes calculated even at $12/hr.

Unlike the freelancing project portals, we are accountable for the results and ensure that only qualified designers work for you. The designers that you hire will be our full-time employees and they will work exclusively on your assignments for the duration of the contract.

Moving out from unique selling concept we have just implemented multiple template selling model in TemplateKingdom.com. Previously it was exclusive selling and we used mark templates as “sold” once purchased. In the new model one template can be purchased multiple times.

As a natural change, cost has come down and our templates are more affordable than before. This will help us to reach more people and give them the feel of our unique/creative design style!

To add, we are working on the new look for TemplateKingdom.com and planning to implement instant template download system (shopping cart) keeping the market demand in mind. We will also launch some new offerings soon, such as: template pack, few categories of templates etc.

Stay tuned!

Adobe has revamped the Photoshop logo with a new tagline (“See What’s Possible”) to match the feel of the software. It will be released soon with their new product set. It’s nice, bit web 2.0ish, but not sure how they will manage it in b/w!

Adobe press announcement says:
“To represent this rich family of products, Adobe is introducing the Photoshop visual logo. This logo will soon appear in all Photoshop-related marketing, so keep an eye out for it. The Photoshop logo on a product, service, or technology, represents the rich legacy, technical quality, and attention to detail that has made Photoshop the gold standard in digital imaging.”