Floating Along with Your Website

It’s the nature of my job that I’m usually working on building sites or rebuilding them. I’ve got half a dozen right now that need rewriting, several needing new content, one about to go live, and several more waiting to be built.

But one of the great things about a website is that it will continue to work for you even when you’re not working on it. With you or without you, your well-designed and optimized website will do its job.

You have to update your blog regularly, of course. If that’s not on your daily to-do list or part of your morning routine, then you need to hire someone for it. Apart from that, though, your website can continue to do its job for you for a while without needing any updates. You can float along the river in your canoe, enjoying the peace of the surroundings (or fending off attacks on some other front entirely, if your business is like that), and your website will serve as part of your sales force 24 hours a day.

This is the danger, really. It’s easy to miss the moment at which you should have updated your site, and then you end up with a site that badly needs updating. That’s not what you want. It can be great to shoot the rapids in business: the thrill of new product launches, the challenge of speedy growth, the excitement of the Really Big Deal –that’s fun. Finding yourself in urgent need of a redesign you didn’t budget for because your outdated website is losing you business is not fun at all.

Ideally, you can see the need for an update ahead, and plan for it. How can you tell that it’s about time for an update at your website?

• Technology has changed. I see lots of websites with badly outdated code. They left it too long. Even if yours isn’t badly outdated, you might want to take advantage of some new things that have come up since mine was built. If you have Flash components that aren’t friendly to search, you might want to update to newer, more search-friendly options. If your visitors are mostly using modern browsers (you can find out through your analytics), you might like to take advantage of some CSS3 options.
• Business has changed. I’ve kept my content updated as things changed in my business. However, some business changes require design changes. For example, the increasing importance of social media means that most businesses should now include connections to Facebook, Twitter, etc. as part of the call to action on the homepage. For another business, new services or products might require a new section of a website.  If you don’t do your own content updates, you need to check your site now and then to make sure there isn’t some outdated information — old hours, a new product you should showcase, a change in staff — that needs correction.
• Fashions have changed. Let’s face it, there are fashions in web design just as in anything else. If your website looks dated, your business will look dated. Just as your office decor or your brochures have to be spiffed up every now and then to keep your company looking current and fresh, your website has to be updated now and then for the same reason.

You need a content refresh every few months. A design refresh should be on your calendar and in your budget every few years. Doing this essential maintenance will allow you to float happily along, secure in the knowledge that your website is doing its job for you.

Does Your Site Work?

We got back from Spring Break last night, various family members having spent the time in different places, and we decided to have dinner delivered to us.

As we aired out sleeping bags, unpacked bags, showered, and otherwise prepared to return to our daily lives, we tried to make a quick order at a restaurant online.Here were the steps:

• We waited through an animated introduction screen. While we had found this mildly entertaining the first time we saw it, we didn’t want to wait through it before being able to place an order.
• We searched with growing irritation for the place where we could place an order.
• We tried unsuccessfully to log in, thinking we had an account. While it’s possible that we should have remembered whether or not we had set up an account there, the response to our log in attempt could have told us that we didn’t have an account, rather than leaving open the possibility that we were using the wrong password.
• Having spent quite a while trying to get into our account, we concluded that we didn’t have an account and went to set one up. Then lengthy form was daunting, but we filled it out and hit submit — and waited for several minutes before realizing that it simply didn’t work.
• We phoned the restaurant and placed the order.

We are a calm and forgiving group. There are plenty of people who would have called some other restaurant instead, and gotten angry about it and told all their friends, too. It may be nothing to do with your company, really, but fails at the website can create negative responses to your company and even to your product.

If your website has added functionality, like a shopping cart or a form to fill out, check sometimes and make sure that it’s still working the way you think it is.

Website Misery

A recent study of small businesses found some surprising results.

The majority of respondents were dissatisfied with their websites in some way — 76% thought they needed improvements, 40% were unhappy with the amount of business the site generated, 23% didn’t like the quality of the design…

Well, it’s true that there are plenty of bad websites out there, but I’m not sure that these numbers necessarily show intense dissatisfaction. After all, we’re seeing that 60% are happy with the amount of business their sites generate, which seems surprisingly high. How many businesspeople are satisfied with the amount of business they have? And more than three quarters of respondents like the quality of their design — in fact, the percentage of people satisfied with their design is higher than the percentage who feel their sites could use improvement, and I’m inclined to think that most sites could use improvement.

Here’s the stuff that caught my eye:

• 44% said “Commissioning a website was a confusing or frustrating experience.”
• 41% said “Web designers try to confuse us with jargon.”
• 30% said “It was hard to find a web designer who understood our business.”

Now, this is a true/false test, and we’re still looking at 70% finding someone who understood their business. Having worked with everything from a stage hypnotist to manufacturers of biologicals, I know that grasping the nature of a business can be a challenge — though it’s a challenge that I enjoy. Not all of my clients understand my business, either. 30% doesn’t seem that bad.

Still — 41% believe that web designers intentionally try to confuse them with jargon? Nearly half found the whole business confusing and frustrating? Add those concerns to the feeling that these people don’t even get what your company does, and you can be looking at some unhappiness.

Those are distressing numbers.Clearly, we web professionals need to work on our communication skills.

But I’d like to suggest that you — if you ever find yourself in such a situation — take the bull by the horns.

If you don’t understand something, ask. It’s easy for us to lose track of which terms are jargon. You spend a few years referring to pictures as “images,” and you forget that most people don’t use that term in that way. Don’t assume that an unfamiliar term is being thrown around in order to confuse you.

If your web professionals don’t understand something, offer. It’s easy, as I said, to lose track of what’s jargon and what isn’t. Plan on spending a little time explaining your business, providing documents, or paying for research time. If it turns out not to be necessary you’re ahead of the game.

My own company makes a priority of communication, and we strive to make sure that the website building experience is a positive one. Numbers like these reinforce the importance of this goal.

What Makes Your Website Special?

I admit it; there are times when people like me, who specialize in things like usability and search, come into conflict with people whose primary goal with a website is to make it snazzy.

Not that I’m opposed to snazziness on principle. It’s just that when I see a designer’s eyes light up at the thought of making a really flashy thing happen on the screen, or hear a client say, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” — well, I can foresee that I’m going to have to be the one who says, “Yes, that would be fun, but do your clients really want a three minute auto-loading music video if they’re usually calling you at midnight because a family member has been arrested? I mean, maybe they’d like to get your phone number right away.”*

So I’ve been very happy about the new website Tom Hapgood and I are working on. The screen above shows you the homepage. If you click on that turned up corner, the translucent white sheet will lift right up and show you this:

The first screen in the photo gallery. Click on the arrow, and you can see more images:

More images with alt text, in fact, so this is good for search — unlike the rotating flash screens which completely baffle the search engines.

You can easily pull that white sheet back down, too, when you’re through looking at the picture gallery — no need to wait for the information you want. The white sheet also has a feed from the “What’s Happening?” page, so visitors can quickly check on upcoming events and specials.

Tom built this with  the open source jQuery javascript library, which web professionals are getting very excited about. This technology is CSS3 compliant and cross-browser supportive, so all visitors can see it. Since all the images have good, clear alt text, people with limited vision using screen readers will also be able to understand the site easily.

When you feel that your website needs some bells and whistles, talk with your web professionals about ways to provide that without interfering with usability and search. Skillful designers can do that. And your entire team should recognize the value of that goal.

* Yes, actually, I had that conversation just last week.

Filter Your Google Analytics

Sometimes I analyze websites’ analytics for their owners or for other companies. Sometimes I analyze current websites, including their analytics, so I can improve their performance or make sure that their new site does what they need it to. Sometimes I follow clients’ analytics as part of my work with them.

In all of these cases, I need to be alert to the possibility of internal traffic — the sites’ owners or staff visiting the website. You should be alert to this, too, if you look after your own analytics.

Not only can numerous visits from your own workers make you look as though you have more traffic than you really do, they can also throw off other aspects of the information available to you:

• Where are your visitors coming from? The percentage from your service area may be smaller than you think, if a lot of your local traffic comes from your own office.
• How long are people on your site, and how many pages do they look at? It’s great to keep your website open at your brick and mortar shop to give people information about your products and services — but it can skew the averages on these important metrics.
• How do people use your site? The way you navigate through your own site is bound to be different from the way other people do.

Filter your own computer, your office or shop computer, and your workers’ computers from your site’s analytics. Then Google Analytics won’t count any of your own visits.The little video above shows you just how to do it, and just how easy it is.

Editing: a Dream

I dreamed last night that I was editing web copy. It is possible that I had been doing that for too long yesterday; they say that dreams are the brain’s way of processing leftover stuff from the day that couldn’t get fully sorted out during waking hours. So there I was, still editing, but I had special tools that allowed me merely to think the edits, mentally click the button, and have them turn up corrected on the page.

How cool would that be? You’d think, “This needs to be warmer, livelier, and come in at under 375 words,” envision the radio button, and the text would be perfected.

Not actually going to happen.

Short of that, here are some ways to make editing as easy and successful as possible:

• Have a clear goal for your edits. Right now, I’m working on projects that need to be shorter, have a more natural sound, fit in with the rest of a website, and lead to more conversions — respectively. These are all great goals, and I appreciate my clients for having them so clearly defined. A general desire to make something better, a feeling that something needs changes because it hasn’t been changed for a while, or “Make it pop!” are not useful goals. 
• Save your edits with different yet clear names: Homepage1, Homepage2, things like that. I’m currently working on a project which has been edited by several people under names like “services_draft,” “services2,” and “new_design_services.” At this point, it’s impossible to tell which is the current version. However, it’s always possible that people — including you — might choose to return to an earlier version, so saving with different names is a very good plan.
• Go first for errors. If you’re doing general editing to improve something, catch as many grammar and spelling errors as you can, and update any inaccurate or outdated information. This will make the biggest improvement.
• Next, make some common fixes. Most web copy needs more direct and active language, parallel structure, and consistent phrasing. Make these improvements without taking out the essential keywords for search, and you’ll have something better.
•  Have someone else proofread for you. It is almost impossible to catch all your own typos and small errors, if only because you know exactly what you meant to say. Having someone like me edit the things you’ve written (or the things your staff person or even your inexpensive bulk writer has written) is a very affordable option because it’ll be done very fast. But even if you don’t choose a professional for this work, someone else will be able to catch the things your eye slid right over because you’d been looking at it for so long.

Social Networking for Business: a Book Review

Rawn Shah has written a well-researched and thorough examination of online social networking as it relates to business: Social Networking for Business: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs.

Shah examines some aspects of social networking that we don’t always think about. For example, it’s possible to use social networks as personal, non-social experiences, as limited social networks, as community experiences, as group collaborations, or in a variety of other ways. Social networks have a variety of possible leadership models, whether they are collaborative environments like Google Docs and Basecamp or public networks like Xing and Jigsaw. Recruiting members and evangelists to a newly-designed social network (your company’s Facebook page or your new membership-only forum, for example) has multiple potential points of failure.

My sense is that these decisions tend to be made on the basis of personal preferences or gut feelings. Reading through Shah’s analysis can give you a better sense of the possible consequences of these choices — and therefore can give you a better chance of making a data-driven choice.

This may be the rub, though — are you going to read this book? This isn’t necessarily a fun read. There aren’t any pictures, though there certainly are charts. There are no cartoons.

I’m not trying to talk down to my readers, here. I just don’t want you to think this book is going to give you quick tips on how to improve your business results at Twitter.

Here’s who should read this book:

• People who want to understand the nature and behavior of social networks fully in order to make the best possible decisions about how to use them. If “What the heck? Let’s give it a shot!” just isn’t your management style, this book gives you hard-to-find details and metrics to consider.
• People who want to have strong data in order to persuade management to finance social media campaigns. Analyses of how NASA and Disney have leveraged social media can be persuasive to people who really don’t see the point of Twittter.
• People who really love data and analysis. I’m one of those people, and I enjoy delving into the development of altruistic behavior as evidence of leadership in social network tasks. If you relate to this, then this book will be more satisfying to you than the lighter approaches.

If you’ve been looking for a book on social networking for business, and this one sounds too intense for you, consider Steve Weber’s Plug Your Business! , a less theoretical  but still thorough treatment of the subject.

How Not to Write Meta Descriptions

I’ve written before about how to write meta descriptions, but it’s clear that there are whole bunches of bad ideas for writing meta descriptions that I didn’t cover there. Herewith, a few things you totally shouldn’t do when writing meta descriptions:

•  Don’t forget to make one. Here you see what you get when you have no meta description.If you have sufficient content, actually, Google will often make one for you. This site doesn’t have enough content to allow that. 

• Don’t ignore the length. People can only see a certain number of words in your meta description and your title. You can make both as long as you want to, but you should at least check and see how it looks on the search engine results page. Here, the word “Bentonville” in the title is just confusing, and the long description doesn’t get to the point this lawyer wants to make until it’s too late (hint: you can’t see it).

•  Don’t code it wrong. In this case, the coding is incorrect, so Google couldn’t tell that the description was in fact supposed to be a meta description. They’ve just grabbed a sentence containing the company’s name out of the content. Does this make you want to click through and hire this company?

• Don’t give it away. This company has a web designer who has taken the opportunity to put the name of their company into the meta description. Your meta description should be about your company. I’ve covered the web company’s name, in case they did this innocently, not realizing that their client was supposed to get the mention. 

Possibly the funniest meta description I’ve ever encountered was one at a three year old site saying, “We need to put a meta description here.”

Do you know what your website’s meta description says about you?

Is PPC Too Expensive?

Though I’m usually alone at my computer (unless you count the dog), I do have some great virtual colleagues. One of these is Tami Dowers at Onsharp. She does paid search marketing there, while I specialize in optimization for organic search.

Yesterday, Tami said, “I hear people saying that PPC is expensive, but I think they don’t calculate the ROI on other marketing methods.”

She has an excellent point. I’m one of those who thinks PPC is expensive. I’ve seen costs per conversion of more than $1,000. And while I work with clients to get those costs down, I haven’t been positive enough about such campaigns to add them to my repertoire of services beyond doing it by request.

However, Tami was pointing out that most companies don’t track the ROI of their other marketing as well as they do the cost per conversion of their PPC campaigns.

Just how much do you spend on TV or radio ads, and how many customers come to you as a result? Exactly what did your last trade show or direct mail campaign cost you, and how many sales resulted?

Most companies don’t really know. The costs of the trade show get sorted out into travel, printing, and payroll as well as marketing. The broadcasting can’t be measured precisely — even those who are careful about testing and include coupons or special offers usually just compare one campaign to another, rather than calculating the cost per conversion.

I’ve written before about the costs of SEO vs. PPC and I think organic search is generally going to give you more for your money. However, comparing PPC with other forms of marketing may show a different picture.

As Tami put it, “I have a nice hot lead in my pocket: what’s it worth to you? It depends on your business.”

Can You Use Someone Else’s Web Content?

This morning I met with a prospective client for SEO services. We talked a bit about off-site optimization — linkbuilding, in his case, since his site only has 25 links right now. But we also talked about his plans to make a new website. I suggested that he needed to be sure to have content that did as well as or better than his current site’s content.

He was a little surprised. He planned to move his content from the current site to the new one, of course.

“Does it belong to you?” I asked. His current site isn’t a custom-built site. It’s more of a subscription. The domain doesn’t belong to him, and neither does the content. I could tell by looking. He wasn’t sure I was right on that.

We checked. Once we’d established that he didn’t own the content, he still wasn’t convinced.

“How different can one website be from another in my profession?” he asked. “How many ways are there to say things like that?”

Lots of ways. Infinite ways, in fact, considering how many words we have available to choose from. Nearly every sentence you say is completely new and unique.

I pointed out that lifting the content from someone else’s website was plagiarism. Not only could he be sued, but I could also be sued if I worked on it.

He didn’t mind. He’s a lawyer. “I’m in court all the time anyway,” he assured me expansively.

For the rest of us, this is not a good idea. The floor plan of your website may be much the same as other people doing the same thing you do. But your materials, colors, and decor — the content, in other words — had better be different.

Get Your Pictures Ready for Your Website

I’m fortunate to work with some true web artists. Their medium is light and electricity rather than paint and canvas, but they’re certainly artists, and if websites were always created by people like them, the web would be a more beautiful place.

Oh, well.

There are lots of times when we need to get pictures ready for the web ourselves, whether we’re artists with images or not:

• We need to add images frequently. On our blogs, for example, where we post every day. Or on our website, where we need to change the Featured Products or the Employee of the Week or the New Items more often than our webmaster is going to do it for us.
• We want to use our own photographs. Stock photos have their uses, but sometimes we need or prefer to use our own. And we may not want to pay for the web artists to do the production work, if we have more time than money.
• We want to do things on our own schedule. I’m fortunate to have an amazing webmaster, myself, but I have worked with plenty who are very slow to respond. In fact, I just read an industry study claiming that 38% of web designers miss deadlines regularly, so this may not be a group that can be expected to get your picture fixed up within the time frame you have in mind. If you have access to your site, you can do simple things with pictures yourself.

 

So let’s learn a couple of very simple skills. The picture at the beginning of this post is the kind of thing clients often supply. It’s a happy snapshot, just the kind of thing you might want in your photo album. and look at all the stuff in it — the exit sign, the random cords and electronic stuff, the high-contrast meaningless shape on the wall.

These things don’t look good on your website.

Fortunately, it’s easy to crop your pictures and remove most of the extraneous stuff. You’ll need a photo editing program of some kind. Chances are something like MS Paint, which is what we’re using here, came on your computer when you bought it, or with your camera. If not, you can download Picasa for free.

Open the program, use “file” or “open” (probably somewhere on the left hand side of your screen) to track down your picture, and then look for “crop.” In Paint, it’s under “Image.”

You’ll click and drag to make a box on top of your picture. Whatever’s outside of the box will go away when you click on “crop.”

The end result is a picture of just the things you want.

Now, this may not be just the things you want. You might want to include the fireplace, or the bass player, or to get the dog out the picture. You might also need a particular shape of picture — this one is sort of wide for its height. Because you might need to try a couple of different things before you get the image you want, it’s wise to save the cropped picture with a different name from the original. Imagine that this picture was originally called “band.” After you crop it, click on “Save As” and give it a name like “band2.” That way, you can always open “band’ again and give it another try.

The other very basic thing you can do is resize your picture. The snapshot we’re working with was a large file size to begin with — see? The top corner of the fireplace took up our whole screen. Using pictures this big can really slow down your web page.

It’s easy to resize pictures with Paint. Under Image, right where you found the Crop button, there’s also a Resize button. Click it, and it’ll ask you how much you want to reduce your picture. Try 20%, and if looks about right, go ahead and save your image with a new name. You might want the higher resolution version for some other purpose in the future.

If your photo editor doesn’t have an easy resizing option, you’ll find many resizing tools online. All of them will give you a smaller image.

When you have something complex that needs to be done to a photo, go ahead and hire someone with specialized skills. But for everyday use, just start with a reasonably good photo and use these two simple tricks to get your images ready for the web.

E-Commerce Options

A young cousin of mine asked how she could best set up an e-commerce site for her fledgling graphic design business. She’s planning to offer custom business cards for $100 a thousand, among other things. Like many new businesspeople, her goal is to keep her costs down while she sets up her business, and she can do all the design work herself, so she’s looking for the simplest option.
There are some questions you need to ask yourself when you want to get your feet wet with ecommerce:

• Do you have a brick and mortar store? A click and mortar operation certainly has an advantage. You can take credit cards and handle inventory through your current system, and you have staff to answer phone calls. Adding an online store can be very simple. However, the days when you could just list your products and tell visitors to call you and order are long gone. You’ll need a shopping cart and a secure way to take credit card information. If you use a stock catalog, the company that puts that together for you will probably have a stock website offer as well. Compare that option with the other options listed here to determine which is the best for your particular shop.
• Can you offer your stuff as a service instead of with a shopping cart? Some copywriters have ecommerce websites, so you can put that $1000 marketing kit into your basket and pick up a press release at the same time, but I just invoice my clients each month. My cousin can do the same; custom design work is a service as much as it is a product. As long as she makes it easy for clients to reach her, she can avoid the ecommerce dilemma entirely.
• Can you sell your stuff as an affiliate? Many of the items you might wish to sell can be done through affiliate marketing arrangements. Your profit on the items will be lower, but once you count the costs of the whole supply chain — getting the items, packing them and shipping them, handling the transactions — you may find it more practical to approach your selling in this way. While many people who do affiliate marketing earn very little, that may reflect the small investment required; many people do this on the level of a hobby and feel happy when they pick up $20.00. Approaching this kind of e-commerce just as you would if you manufactured the goods can get good results.
• Do you want a storefront? There are many choices for setting up an online store, from mass market solutions like Volusion to custom ones like Visual Cart. While you’ll choose the right one for you on the basis of cost, number of items you have to sell, and personal preference, none of these choices will do magic for you. You’ll still need optimization and marketing to succeed.
• Can you just add a cart to your website? If you plan to sell your items from your blog or your company website, you can simply add a PayPal button or a WordPress e-commerce plugin or a Google Checkout application. Be aware that all of these options require some technical skill. If you have a custom site, or are planning to have one, just ask your designer or developer to add one of these options for you. Cost and features vary considerably, and the overall effectiveness from the standpoint of design will depend on the skill of the person who implements it for you. If you’re using Adwords already, Google comes in very cheaply. PayPal gives customers the option of debiting payments directly from their bank accounts, and lets you do international transactions. Which of these — or comparable — solutions works best for you depends on the details of your business.

When you consider your options, consider scalability, too — that is, what will your next step be if you outgrow your first choice? Paying for more than you need at the beginning may or may not be a wise decision, depending how big your plans are, but you certainly don’t want to have a plan that will only work if you’re not successful.

Next Page »