Presenting to Horsham Rugby Business Group
By Lewis Harman, 21 November 2024
Horsham Rugby Business Group (HRBG) is one of the largest and most dynamic networking communities across West Sussex, with a turnout of 30 to 50 members. Meetings are held at Horsham Rugby Union Football Club (HRUFC) from 8:30am to 10am on the third Thursday of every month. If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or local business owner in West Sussex looking to build connections and find B2B prospects, feel free to join us through the Horsham Rugby Club website. The November 2024 HRBG networking event was hosted by Richard Ordidge, sponsored by Benchmark Capital, and featured engaging presentations to the group from Adam, Phil, and, our lead software developer, Lewis.
Who were the speakers for November 2024?
Adam Harman is a furniture design consultant at SpaceMaker and spoke about his time as the captain of the HRUFC first team and how modern furniture design is built bespoke and tailored to your bedroom.
Phil Harraden is a senior manager at BDO and delivered a session on business services and outsourcing, focussing on simplifying tax and accountancy for small businesses across Horsham and the United Kingdom as a whole.
Lewis Harman is the lead software developer at Harmanised (formerly Web Design by Lewis Harman) who shared a forward-thinking talk about preparing your website for 2025.
Meet Lewis, our lead software developer.
Lewis is an accomplished software developer, graduating with First Class Honours in Computer Science from a Russell Group university. With over half a decade of expertise in software development and design thinking, he’s led agile projects that have delivered cutting-edge technical solutions trusted by our clients for use with high profile brands including Porsche Retail Group, John Lewis & Partners, ASOS, First Direct, Asda, and Virgin Atlantic.
Specialising in website development and backed by extensive research in modern digital practices, Lewis inspired the group with 5 actionable steps to help business owners prepare their websites ready for 2025. His presentation explored the latest trends in user experience, search engine optimisation (SEO), and assistive technology and motivated the group to take their websites to the next level.
5 research-backed steps businesses in Horsham can utilise to prepare their websites for 2025:
Firstly, make your website accessible. 30% of website users require assistive technology. The WAVE tool by Web AIM is a great way to find accessibility quirks and check if your website can be easily used by anyone, no matter how they’re interacting with your website. Vetted and verified users on TrustRadius recommend WAVE for basic accessibility checking on websites (2024), making it perfect for both non-technical and tech-savvy entrepreneurs.
Secondly, make your website digestible. Break down content into small chunks, and reveal information gradually with animations, to avoid overwhelming the user. In user experience design, Lewis says the experts call this progressive disclosure. Jakob Nielseon from the Nielsen Norman highlight how a progressive way of disclosing and organising information can boost understanding and extensibility through simplicity and power (2006).
Thirdly, make your website actionable. Choose powerful, energetic words – like ‘kickstart’, ‘epicentre’, and ‘unleash’ – to inspire fast decisions. And, if you need help with wording, simply copy your text into ChatGPT, and ask it to add Apple Power Words. Sean Foo from SpeechSilver identified how this is an effective marketing strategy used by competitive businesses across the world (2021).
Fourthly, make your website clear. Your customers aren’t mind readers. Keep your content organised, and reinforce what you want your user to do by reiterating your call to action. Lewis typically places his call to actions in the header too, keeping the action in mind as users scroll down the page. Page Laubheimer from the Nielsen Norman Group details how to use information architecture to boost the clarity of information on websites (2023).
Lastly, make your website searchable. Setup Google Search Console to claim your website, and make it easy to find on Google. You can also seamlessly monitor traffic from Google to your website. Ryan Jones from SEO Testing says it’s generally a very accurate tool, especially for impressions (2024).
As Lewis highlighted, it’s not just about having a website—it’s about having a future-proof website that drives engagement and growth. You need to keep working on your website to keep it alive and relevant. Therefore, it’s critical to use the tips yourself or find a reputable web designer to perform some upgrades for you if you want the best results from your website.
We enjoyed talking to you and hope to see you soon!
We’d like to thank Richard Ordidge from HRUFC for his photos and kind words and Stuart Ritchie from Start My Own Business UK for his kind words and photos too.
