End of Year Check Up for Your Wesbite: Off Site Optimization

Our new linkbuilder, Jonathan, has been doing some end of year checkups for our clients, and it’s a good thing he has.

Here are a few things Jonathan has caught:

• A phone directory listing with the website linked to the wrong business
• A business directory listing with no website link at all
• Multiple listings in Google Places with slightly different info
• Listings that allow videos and photos — with no videos or photos
• Listings with outdated information

It’s easy to miss these things. We rarely go check out our own Yellow Pages listings, we forget that we had linkbuilding done a few years back when we had a different address, and of course many directories collect their own business data without checking to see whether our business has a website.

Run a basic check of your business’s online presence just by Googling the company name. Bing it, too. Make sure that your listings are accurate and that they contain links to your website. While you’re at it, see how you look on the search engine results page. Do you have weird meta descriptions or pages with no titles? We see that all the time with new clients, just because people don’t often search for their own companies.

You can also check your backlinks with Google Webmaster Tools or Bing’s Webmaster Central. Webmaster tools give you a list of your backlinks so you can make sure they’re all as they should be, and maybe get a sense of what you could be missing.

Check your social media, too. Do you have multiple profiles? Have the people representing you online left the company? Do all your people have links to your website at their profiles — and is there anyone who shouldn’t?

We’re looking at a few small fixes for our clients. If you have a real mess on your hands, and you can tell you won’t have time to see to it yourself, give us a call. Our new number: 479.966.9761. And yes, we know it’s going to take quite a few hours to find all the listings of our old phone number all over the web and replace them.

It’s all part of the end of year website chores.

End of Year Check Up for Your Website: Under the Hood

We’re working with Hapgood Design on their redesign of the website for a local nonprofit agency.

The agency needed an update for the sake of more current content and a fresh look, but the main reason they just had to have an update was that their old site was obsolete from the point of view of the technology.

This naturally happens to websites as they age. Technology changes, so having a very old website is like having a very old car, computer, or stereo. There comes a time when you just have to give up your 8 tracks, no matter how good they were when you got ‘em.

The new site is almost ready (that’s a mockup of it at left), so I don’t feel bad about showing you some of the tech issues at their old site. Chances are, if you have an old site, you’ll find some of the same problems at your own website.

One of the biggest problems is having your text on the page as images rather than as words. Grab your logo, tagline, or other content with your mouse and try to pull it out of place. If it’s a picture, you can, as you see in this screen shot. The name of the organization is part of a picture. The same is true for their slogan. In fact, there are no actual words on this page at all. That means that search engines can’t read it — and neither can people using assistive devices like screen readers.

If your page behaves like this, it should be rebuilt. If you like the look of it, you can rebuild it to look the same, but it’s probably a good time to start fresh.

In the early days of the internet, text and pictures were put into their places with tables. This site was built with that technology, so when you load a new page, bits of it appear gradually. The screenshot below shows how the page looks as the different sections load.

 

You probably don’t know that your site does this, because you visit it often enough that you have a cached page on your computer. Use a different browser or a different computer to check your site and see if it behaves this way. If so, you need to have it rebuilt.

Another problem that often happens with older sites is that links get broken and pages disappear. This means that visitors get lots of error messages. In the case of this website,there were a lot of 404 messages, and they carried visitors off the website entirely.

The new website is highly usable for staff and visitors, attractive, and gives a much more accurate representation of this important agency.

You can easily update content (words and pictures) at a website, and you can sometimes tweak a design. If your site uses outdated technology, though, it has to be rebuilt. There’s no way to fix it without starting over, any more than you can fix an 8 track player so it will play MP3s.

Put your website through its paces and make sure that everything works for the new year.  If you need a hand in doing that, call Rosie at 479.966.9761 and get on our calendar. We’ll be glad to help.

End of Year Check Up for Your Website: Design

Does your website need a redesign? If it’s been a few years since it was built, it probably could use a design update, at least. See Your Website: Update, Refresh, or Redesign? for some questions that will guide your decision on whether you need a new design or just a new look. Sometimes replacing the header and the photos — a content fix — will be enough. If you really need a new design, though, content fixes won’t be enough.

Often a redesign is mostly a matter of hiring a great designer and letting them get their work done. Sometimes, though, you have specific concerns and points that have come up in your end of year checkup (or a site analysis at any point in the year) and you have specific things you want to improve.

We’re doing a redesign for a site right now for The Retreat at Skyridge, an Ozarks cabin resort. We built their site a few years ago with Sharp Hue, and there have been a number of changes in the meantime.  Now they’re ready for a redesign.

Over the years that they’ve had their website, Skyridge has learned a lot about how it works and how they want it to work. They had a lot of ideas about the design, a lot of materials and photos to contribute, and a lot of specific intentions from the point of view of search. This wealth of input has made the process more collaborative than a lot of redesigns, and that’s great.

But we (Haden Interactive) and the designer (Tom Hapgood) are not close enough to Skyridge to be able to meet directly around a table very often. We found that emails and phone conversations weren’t getting the ideas across well enough and we needed greater clarity.

The solution for us was Notable, a clever tool that makes it easier to talk about a design. You capture a design at Notable from a website (as in, the design at your current site that you want to change) or a file on your computer (as in, the mockup you want to discuss) and Notable will give you a nice clear screenshot. You can upload a variety of file types or use a wide range of browsers and devices — important, since the capture from your browser or mobile device may not be what your designer is looking at.

Now you can go to the specific place on the design that you want to discuss and add a number. No more conversations like, “Are you talking about the line at the top right? The very top right or the part where there’s a picture of, like, a pitcher or something?”

You can immediately write a note, and that note will be neatly lined up by the picture.

Others can comment on your note, so discussions about a particular element stay together. This is a great relief for those of us who’ve left notes in Basecamp like, “I don’t see Image #44756 on the homepage– do you mean the one with the wires on the side looking kind of like a tree? Or are you talking about a different file from the one Jo posted this morning?”

In fact, this is exactly what’s so great about Notable. You can be just as specific as if you were sitting around the screen together pointing at things — plus, you have a record of all the comments everyone has made. You can export the resulting discussion as a PDF and save it in a file cabinet if you feel like it, providing a paper trail, but Notable will save all the discussions for you in the cloud where everyone can return to it whenever they need to.

Some other great tools for the design checkup and redesign processes:

• Google Analytics in-page analytics tell you what visitors to your site click on and what they ignore. Most of our clients find this surprising — what we think our visitors do isn’t always what they do.

• Crazy Egg produces heat maps and other visual representations of visitor behavior that can help you decide whether your site needs major changes.
• 5 Second Test is a good alternative to grabbing people to test your site or your new design. Viewers see a design for 5 seconds and then answer questions about it. You can upload your design and let people give you feedback in several different ways. The problem, to my mind, is that so many of the people who volunteer to test stuff at 5 Second Test are themselves designers or web pros that the results may be less reliable than those with naive subjects. However, the short time frame increases the chances of reliability.
• Spyrestudios has a list of usability tools including those above (which we use) plus a bunch we haven’t tried. Let us know how you like them! Several of them give you good ways to measure and track the responses of your human testers, too.

Balancing Text and Other Media

What’s the ideal balance between text and visual media — or is there an ideal balance? From the point of view of search engines and of users, you need both.

End of Year Check Up for Your Website: Content

Right now, when things are probably relatively quiet at your website and possibly in your business as well, it’s a great time to give your website a check up and see if there are changes you want to make for the new year.

We’ve been doing a live refresh for 8th & Walton, a company that specializes in retail training. The issues being addressed at their site are very likely to be the same ones you might want to address at your website:

• Duplicate content Since they have courses that cover similar information — for example, how to use Retail Link, a tool designed for Walmart suppliers, with special courses for Puerto Rico, Canada, and the United States — they had a fair amount of duplication from one page to another. This interfered with their success in search. Take the time to rewrite duplicate pages so that each one offers some unique, useful information.
• Consistent voice Several different people had written course descriptions at different times. This makes a lot of sense from the point of view of logistics, and we see it all the time — staff bios written by each staff member, pages for different programs written by their respective program directors, etc. The problem is, you end up with a very different effect from each section. For 8th & Walton, course descriptions ranged from dryly academic to playful, while the courses themselves are consistently dynamic and intensive. Realigning the descriptions to give a consistent voice gives a more accurate picture of the courses, and sounds better.
• Parallel structure A related issue turned up in the listing of course objectives and learning outcomes. Some began with imperative phrases like, “Harness the power of Retail Link to maximize results” and some began with more formal sentences like, “Participants will understand the top five metrics for consumer satisfaction.” It’s just a difference in style, but any page will be more appealing when all the bullet lists begin with the same kind of structure. On the page you’re reading right now, I’m using an adjective plus a noun for a bold-faced introductory phrase each time. You may not be ready to analyze things that much, but you can still tell when things are alike.
• Active phrasing In general, more active language sounds more direct and appealing to your readers. “Essential practices for advanced retail mathematics will be covered” sounds more formal and less lively than, “Expert presenters will show you how advanced retail math can improve your bottom line” — no matter how you feel about math. Active phrasing puts the subject before the verb.
• Strong verbs Thwacking a ball is a snazzier activity than hitting it. Honing your skills sounds jazzier than just improving them. English has the largest number of words of any language — about 750,000 — so there’s no reason not to pick the most evocative one when you’re writing.
• Important keywords At the same time, we have to remember that some of our readers (the search engines) are machines. They can’t be expected to get all the nuances. If  “retail training” is the phrase people usually use to find services and products like yours, don’t switch to “shopkeepers’ development” or “vendor in-service.” Use the terms your customers and potential customers will actually use to look for services like yours, and get creative with the words in between those essential keywords.
• Accurate information Do you update everything on your website each time a change takes place in your business? If so, good for you. If not — and that would be most of us — this is a great time to catch things like a new location or a change in focus. I’m going to update my client list this week — how about you?

If we’re honest, most of us probably should have a bit of a wash and brush up on our site content every year. Do it now and start the new year with a nicely polished up website.

End of Year Check Up for Your Website: Platform

The traffic at your website is probably at its lowest point of the year right now, so this is an excellent time to give your website a check up. Before you look at the things you might need to change for the sake of your visitors and your site’s performance, though, think about a big question that’s about you and your business: is it time to change the platform on which your site is built?

You might have built your site in a way that no longer works well. For example, all-Flash sites are a mistake from the point of view of search, and you might regret yours now. Or you might have had a traditional HTML/CSS site and now you want to be able to update it yourself. You might have a website built with a DIY system or a free blogging platform, but be ready to move up to a professional website.

If you think you might want to rebuild from the ground up (so to speak), ask yourself a couple of big questions first.

Do you need a CMS?

The first big question is this: do you want to be able to update your website yourself? If so, you’ll need a content management system, or CMS. Read our Fast Guide to Content Management Systems for a quick overview of your options.

Pros to having a CMS:

• You can update your site on your own, or have your web pros do it more quickly, which usually means less cost and less lead time.
• You will therefore be more likely to keep it up to date.
• Search engines love fresh content, so you’re likely to get better results if you keep your site up to date.

Cons to having a CMS:

• You can mess up your website. Most clients who have a CMS do mess up their websites at some point. It can cost you more to get it fixed than to have your web pros update it.
• If you have a CMS, you may feel that you ought to use it, so you put those updates on your to-do list and never get to them, instead of having your web pros do it for you in a timely manner.
• Content management systems aren’t as easy to use as people who use them all the time think they are. If you only update once a month or so, the amount of time involved in figuring out everything you f0rget in between times is probably not worth it.

Our one final note about using a CMS is this: be very wary about using a designer’s house brand. We put most of our websites (including this one) on WordPress these days. We’re openminded, though, and use in-house CMS for our clients just as cheerfully as WP or Joomla. We can’t help but notice, though, that  a solution with a large developer community, like WordPress, is way more likely to have problems and limitations identified and solved than one that relies on a single developer to keep it up to date.

Are you doing e-commerce?

E-Commerce solutions range from things like Magento which are all about ecommerce and only secondarily happen to be useful for creating websites, to stock catalogs with all the shopping and fulfillment taken care of behind your home page which is sort of Scotch taped to the front of the store, to WordPress plugins. The number of SKUs you plan to stock and how often you plan to update them should be the driving factor in your platform choice.

We’ve worked with companies that are stuck with their ecommerce solution, no matter how much they hate it (and most people do hate their ecommerce solutions), just because the idea of migrating 3,750 items is overwhelming, or because their business depends on having access to an ever-changing database of currently fashionable items. That’s a good reason to stick with a particular platform.

If that’s your situation, then the question becomes not what’s the best platform for your business, but how best can you make your current platform work?

If you’re planning ecommerce for the future or you’re at the end of your rope and ready to change, however complicated it may be, then, focus on the shopping cart and choose the best one for your business. Then get a good developer, designer, and copywriter to make the site look the way you want it to. It’s easier to hire people to work with the platform than to try to force a platform to do things it really isn’t suited to.

Final note on this point: there are other things besides ecommerce that may call for this kind of thinking. If you use a particular type of real estate listing that requires a certain type of back end structure, for example, or have a franchise site that has to be on the parent company’s platform, you will have to work with what you’ve got.

 

Once you have these big questions answered, you’re ready to talk with your developers and designers about which platform would best meet your needs. We think the most important question at this point is, “Why do you recommend that platform?” If your designer believes that a completely custom static site would make it possible to create exactly the unusual effect you want, and you don’t need a CMS or a shopping cart, go for it. If your designer wants to use Squarespace because he can’t make sites in any other way, get a second opinion. At Haden Interactive, we work with different designers and developers and we’re comfortable with multiple content management systems, so we can always think in terms of what’s best for you rather than just what we know how to do. If you’re going with a shop that specializes, you might want to choose your platform first and then hunt for a specialist, rather than doing it the other way around.

Offending People at Your Website

Yesterday Rosie expressed shock when, upon mouseover, she saw that a photograph on a website had been labeled “African-American-businesswoman1.” The image in question had been placed so badly that my shock over the margins and stuff kept me from asking her what part she found offensive: calling a female businessperson a businesswoman? feeling the need to identify her ethnicity? numbering her?

There were several possibilities. So it is with the photograph on this blog post. Some visitors might be offended at seeing a holiday mentioned here which is not celebrated by everyone, and which is for many people a religious observance. Others might be offended by the wine — either because they disapprove of alcohol or because they don’t feel it should be associated with Christmas. What’s more, I titled this picture “Xmas-wine,” and I know that there are people who, being shaky on history, are offended by the abbreviation “Xmas.”

One possible response to this issue is that these people should get a life. I don’t think that’s the best response. Here’s why:

• You’re not there when people see your website. For all we know, the person who placed the photo of the African American businesswoman may herself be an African-American businesswoman, and that may be her preferred term. If she explained that to us, we wouldn’t be offended by it. Without that additional input, your visitors can’t take these details into account.
• You don’t want to alienate a segment of your target population. A client who sells tax software was advised by his designer that there should be pictures of bikini-clad models on his website. While some visitors might find that appealing, chances are good that a large number of people who buy tax software will be offended by this approach, so why take the chance?
• You’re probably not making a point. If you’re making a point of some kind and you’re prepared to offend people in order to do so, more power to you. Using the term “businessman” or “businesswoman” probably isn’t a matter of principle for you, though, so –again — why take the chance? Many of the things people may find offensive at a website are small things, easily changed.

If you decide to take our advice and avoid any possibility of offense at your site, how can you identify possible problems?

• Check for common issues. Things that smack of sexism, racism, or belittling of other groups of people for their age, abilities, or other characteristics are high on the list of possible offenders. It’s the 21st century, so you can probably recognize these possible problems. Religion and politics are other areas of potential offense; if your site isn’t about either of these subjects, consider avoiding them.
• Test your content. Testing your content is a good idea anyway. Try to include among your testers some touchy people. Pay attention to what they say, even if you think it’s silly or oversensitive.
• Check all the elements of your site. Rosie was bothered by the alt attribute of an image, something many people never see. There’s a whole website devoted to unfortunate domain names — make sure yours couldn’t be included there. There may be lots of parts of your website that you don’t think of as public which a visitor might see.

When you give your site its end of the year check up, examine it for potentially offensive content. It’s just not worth taking the chance.

Who’s Talking About You?

In a novel I was reading last night, a pop star grumbles bitterly, “They should have just left us alone.”

The brisk response: “You should have told your publicist that.”

It can be that way with your online presence. Most of our clients want greater visibility online, but reputation management can also be an issue. One of our newer clients is associated with one of those brands people love to hate, and another is soliciting reviews for his new product. In both cases, we need to be aware of what people are saying so we can respond or alert the companies.

What’s the most efficient way to keep track of what people are saying about your company?

• Google Alerts is our longtime go-to solution. At your Google account, set up alerts for your company name and the main keywords describing what you do. Any time something new is said on the web, Google will notice, and once a day you’ll get an announcement in your email listing the new mentions. A+ for convenience, but the alerts miss lots of social mentions. For large companies that get talked about a lot, you’ll end up with an enormous number of mentions to sort through, and that can mean a lot of clicking. We won’t be giving the Alerts up, but they’re not the only tool you’ll want to use.
• G+ lets you save searches with the Sparks feature. In our testing, they frankly did a pretty bad job — most company name searches sent us lots of irrelevant stuff and missed lots of mentions. At the moment, Google+ is not a useful tool for reputation monitoring.
• CoTweet and similar social media management tools let you do the equivalent of a Twitter search. If you’re there anyway, it’s handy to check, but it’s no better for monitoring the web than simply going to Twitter and searching.
• Social Mention does a good job of finding online mentions, not just at Twitter and Facebook but also at YouTube, StumbleUpon, blogs, news feeds, photo sites, and all kinds of places you wouldn’t want to have to monitor yourself. What’s more, they sort things out for you. You can see at a glance the ratio of positive to negative comments, the strength of your brand in social media, whether it’s mostly just a couple of people talking about you (inckuding yourself) or whether there’s lots of buzz, how often you’re retweeted, and more. It’s a free service, available at SocialMention.com, and we see no downside to its use.

• Klout is a tool that measures a Twitter account’s influence. We don’t find it completely reliable, but we think it’s pretty good for finding out who is important in the conversation about your company. Most of our clients are the most influential speakers about their own companies — but not all. If someone else is in charge of your company’s reputation at Twitter, you need to a) make friends with them and b) get better at Twitter. Other Twitter accounts that influence people when it comes to your reputation should be on your radar.
• Technorati is nice for blog posts about national brands or popular subjects. They don’t present irrelevant results or spam disguised as blogs, so  we like them — for national brands or popular subjects. Small businesses won’t find themselves at Technorati.
• Whos Talkin had far more results for most of our clients than Technorati, and it includes Twitter and Facebook as well as blogs. Find it at WhosTalkin.com and use it for free without having to register. It won’t save your searches or send you alerts, but for a routine check in or linkbuilding purposes, it’s handy.

This list doesn’t include paid tools, because we really haven’t found any moderately priced options that seem better than the free ones. Hubspot, Radian6, Raven Tools, and CustomScoop all have their fans, but they’re all also serious investments. We don’t want to compare free tools with tools costing thousands a year, so we’ll leave these services for another occasion.

Of the free tools listed above, we’d usually suggest a combination of Social Mention and Google Alerts, but it depends on your particular company and your particular needs. The right tools for linkbuilding aren’t necessarily the right tools for building social media presence, and the right tools for reputation management aren’t necessarily the right tools for customer relationship management. Call Rosie at 318.572.6002 or email Rosamond@HadenInteractive.com to arrange for a custom strategic plan for your company.

The Four Phases of Social Media

When it comes to social media, you can’t succeed if you jump in with both feet trying to make a marketing splash.

This isn’t a revolutionary new idea or anything, but we still find that many of our clients haven’t found a way to think about it that doesn’t make them feel like they’re wasting time.

On the contrary, you’re working strategically towards important goals.

To make this clearer and easier to grasp, we have an infographic for you. It shows how we approach social media for our clients. We explore, using data to determine the best social media channels for each company.

Then we establish a presence in those channels, creating good content that makes you look good when people come to check out your profile or page.

Then we engage customers and prospective customers, never forgetting to continue providing useful content and to watch for new opportunities.

Finally, we extend that successful presence with creative marketing initiatives.

You should do the same. How fast and how far you go depends on your resources, of course — the more time you have to put in, the faster you’ll progress — but the process should be the same. You can download our PDF  to remind you.

Color of the Year 2012:Tangerine Websites?

Pantone’s Color of the Year may not be something you wait for eagerly each year, but it probably affects you more than you realize. In 2011, when Pantone elevated Honeysuckle Pink to Color of the Year, a whole lot of people (and websites) started using shocking pink for the first time. It’s because the Color of the Year becomes ubiquitous: we see it in the stores, in ads, in magazine spreads, and it seeps into our consciousness even if we don’t ever know what the Color of the Year is. Or even that there is a Color of the Year.

The Color of the Year for 2012 is Tangerine Tango, a red orange.  I’ve been predicting cobalt blue or red orange, so I was mentally prepared for it. Still, this is an in-your-face sort of color,  not one we use a lot.

How’s Tangerine Tango going to play on websites?

We’ve never built a mostly-orange website, but Customer Dynamics is a handsome blue and orange site:

Kansas City realtor Ken Jansens’s site isn’t Tangerine, but it’s proof that an all-orange site has a lot of energy.

With so little orange in our own portfolio, we decided to search the web for some juicy sites. Here’s what we found:

Justin Bird’s design site is more burnt orange than tangerine, but we like the sense of movement — including the blinking bird.

Closer to tangerine than most, Orange Amps gets a sense of loudness from its color choice — perfect for the company.

Our friends at Sharp Hue are using orange to draw attention to their “Request a Quote” button.

Tangerine Design had to be orange.

Same for Tangerine Sweets. They’re not great with content, but the red orange and blue is arresting.

Bravura Coaching & Image uses tangerine in a softer way.

Vandelay Design has a page of orange websites if you’re hungry for more. None can quite be called tangerine, but it wasn’t Color of the Year when they posted that page: we’ll be seeing a lot more of it in 2012.

SEO Tip #29: Video and SEO

Moving a Large Website

Having a mature website on an old domain is a great advantage from the point of view of search, but a lot of sites like that haven’t been updated regularly, and need a complete redesign and rebuild. We’re working on a couple of sites like that right now, and seeing complaints about this type of job in forums all over the internet has moved me to offer some suggestions for overcoming the obstacles and enjoying the rewards.

Don’t try to keep the current organizing principle. Sometimes the current organization makes sense, but often it has just grown organically over the past decade or so and there’s a better way. When we moved Trout Fishing in America’s  13 year old website, we did keep the archive of old newsletters, but we pulled out the things that had gotten stuck into a general news category with them and put them in places where users could find them.

We’re working right now on a news aggregator site that doesn’t really need to move all its syndicated stories since 1998. The content that’s moving (and there’s a lot of it) shouldn’t remain in chronological order, simply because users won’t be coming to find a story that ran in 1999 — they’ll be looking for the specific information from that story.

We’re following these steps to figure out the new site architecture:

• Understand what users are looking for and how they’re currently using the site. If you have analytics to work with, this job becomes much easier.
• Think about new ways you want people to use your site. Sometimes you want people to interact with your content in different ways, and a redesign is the time to achieve that.
• Sort the current content into the categories that make the most sense for users. During this stage, some site owners get attached to the status quo. Try to use data and user experience models more than gut feelings. Consider also the new content you plan to add — we want websites to work for the visitors and for the owners and web pros who update them.

Dig till you find everything. We’re working on a site update with Hapgood Design which led us to a lot of error messages: much of the current site is just missing. I used the Wayback Machine to find the old content, and the site owners were relieved it had turned up. On a hospital website’s redo last year, I found a number of pages which had gotten unlinked from the main site. Use the search operator “site:URL” to track these stray lambs down. Sometimes pages have gotten lost because they’re no longer needed, but sometimes it was an accident that never got fixed.

Optimize the content while you’re moving it. It may seem faster to import everything and figure you’ll update it later, but in real life this doesn’t work well. Not only will your site be a mess on relaunch, but you’ll miss the opportunities for greater insight and improved site architecture that inevitably come up while you’re working on the content. This is also a great time to fix the page titles, URLs, and meta tags. What’s more, if you don’t have the time to do it right now, you probably won’t have the time to redo it right later.

If you’re struggling to get a large site relaunched, consider getting professional support. Call us at 479.283.5593, or email Rosamond@HadenInteractive.com to get on our calendar.

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