Twitter, Panties, and Buzz

How did a little company with a single product and a homemade website get mentions in national magazines?

Linda Yellin explains in her column in More Magazine that she discovered the specialized lingerie company in question “when, for reasons known only to the panties, they started following me on Twitter.”

Naturally, I checked them out. I figured they’d be doing all the social media stuff we always advise. They’d have an intriguing background at their Twitter profile, an excellent self description, plenty of informative and entertaining tweets, relationships with relevant tweeps, and a nice link back to a terrific website, as well as regular links to awesome original content they created.

Nope. They’ve tiled their logo as a background. Their tweets are repetitive and, apart from obvious promotion, consist mostly of “Have a great day!”  Their followers are mostly auto follow and spammy, and they appear to have no real relationships — pretty much all the messages to them are “Thanks for the follow” with the occasional “Why is this panty company following me?”

In other words, this company simply follows thousands of people, focusing mostly on auto-follow-back accounts so they won’t follow way more people than they have followers. Then they choose journalists and follow them — they don’t spam them, apparently, or act aggressive in any way; they just follow.

Say that our of the 160,000 or so they follow, 500 are journalists who might write about panties. Say that, of those 500, 100 notice the follow and are intrigued enough to click through to the company website. Some percentage of that hundred journalists have been intrigued enough by this unusual product to read about it, and a few have written about it.

I’d like to know whether those write-ups have led to lots of sales, but the panties and I aren’t on those terms, so I can’t tell you.

If you have lots of time (or, perhaps, some low wage offshore workers), you could do this, too. It’s a gamble, but it’s one that paid off for the panty company. Their undergarments retail for $52-$85 each (and apparently this is their half price sale), so they’re probably a high profit item. It might very well be worth the gamble.

Before trying this approach, ask yourself some questions:

• Do you have something unusual enough to be buzzworthy? If this company were, say, an excellent local sandwich shop, this method wouldn’t have worked for them.
• Are you willing to swap the benefits of social media done right for the possibility of getting some buzz? It might absolutely have been worth it for the panty company. Make sure it would be for yours before choosing this route.
• Do you have another idea for what to do next? This isn’t a long-range strategy. It’s designed to create buzz about an innovative product, and it seems to be working. It’s not designed to create regular customers — which is what you need for a successful business.

Updating Website Design: What Does That Mean?

When you generally like the look of your website, but it’s not doing its job for you, you may need to update the design — not to go with a completely new design, but to transform the look you have into something fresh, new, and effective.

That’s what we’re doing for Uncle Sam’s Safari Outfitters, a local sporting goods and Army Surplus store. Their current website, which you can see in the screenshot below, had a lot of the characteristics they wanted: nature photos, a natural color scheme, their Uncle Sam logo, social media connections, and a simple navigation that showed the basic categories of products they carry.

Unfortunately, other companies with the same name come up first when people search for Uncle Sam’s. Their site doesn’t show up at all when people search for the kinds of products they sell. They don’t use web analytics, so they don’t know whether the current website brings customers into the store, but they know that they want it to do so. They also want to be able to update the site with new product information, blog posts, announcements about sales and events, and videos showing the fine points of their products.

We’re working with designer Paul Fraley of Fresh Eyes Design on this project. Paul kept the original color scheme and used nature photos, but his redesign is a hardworking one: our content is incorporated for better communication with the search engines, major selling points are highlighted with graphic elements, and the all-important message about the products carried is incorporated in a way that adds to the site without detracting from the look of the photos.

This is a WordPress site, so it’ll be easy to add new information regularly, the key to getting plenty of repeat visits. That should also help Uncle Sam’s get the search rankings they deserve, as the oldest sporting goods store in the region and the only military surplus store. With a dynamic, professional looking website to send people to, their social media — which includes plenty of amazing photos on Facebook — will be more effective in sending them customers.

Analytics Archaeology

Web analytics give you the information you need to make informed decisions for your online marketing strategy… if you’re collecting the right information.

What if you haven’t been? Is it possible to reconstruct information?

We ran into this question recently while working with an engineering company.  They were paying out fairly large sums for PPC (pay per click) advertising on Google and bing, and they were getting calls from new customers, so they felt happy. Naturally, if they could reduce the amount they spent and still get those calls, they’d be even happier.

Usually, this is a fairly simple matter. We look at analytics to see what’s going on, develop a strategy, and implement it. In this case, the paid ads weren’t showing up in the web analytics — or not in a way that could be identified.

This case is a good example of how a little lateral thinking can let you make up for missing information. Here’s what we did first:

1. We looked at the analytics for the Adwords account, saw some common patterns, and made recommendations based on what we saw there. You should always keep an eye on your ads’ performance and tweak your set up in response. The client made some changes in his ad text and bids, as well.
2. We updated the content, and the client also had the code updated. These improvements in the site lowered the cost of the ads. I used to work with a PPC specialist who said Adwords is like an auction where the price of the chair depends not only on who else is bidding, but also on how good the chair is going to look in your house. Another way to look at it is to understand that Google wants to earn a certain amount of money from their page, so an ad that gets more clicks and a site that satisfies Google’s customers better will pay them more, and your price per click goes down.
3. We asked the client to connect the Adwords and analytics accounts (here’s how) so we could see the paid traffic and the organic (unpaid) search. At this point, if there had been goals set up, we could have compared the conversion rates of the two types of traffic, and within a couple of weeks we’d have seen some information.

There are two problems, though. First, there are no goals set up: conversion for this client is a phone call. Second, he’s paying out hundreds a day on his ads, so we want to be able to get some data for him as fast as possible.

First, we can take a broad view. We checked the traffic sources for the few days since we finished taking the steps described above (the chart below is on the default dashboard of Google Analytics; we’ve removed the specific data for our example, but you’ll see the actual numbers on yours). We can see that organic search is bringing in the majority of the traffic, which is what we like to see. We can also see that both direct and referral traffic could be increased, suggesting that some linkbuilding and social media would be beneficial.

Now, we can hone in on the data. We can’t check conversion rates, but we can compare paid traffic with the site average on other metrics. Our paid traffic information is new, but the site average is based on long-term data. We see that the paid visitors spend more time than average on the site — just over 38% more. This is a good sign. On the other hand, we can also see that the percentage of new visitors is actually lower for paid traffic than for organic search. Our client is paying repeatedly for the same visitors.

Moving in closer still, we can look at the cities from which clients come. Fortunately, our client has a national market, and his service is specialized enough that he can track his new customers’ cities. We can see, when he gains a new customer from Schenectady, whether this new customer came from paid search or from organic search. We can also tell how many times they visited, and whether they kept clicking through the ad, or if they came back directly.With a little math, we can determine the conversion rates we need. In this case, it looks as though the ads are doing a good job, so we just need to bring the cost per conversion down as low as possible.

If your business wouldn’t give you this information, that just means that you have to look from another angle. Keep digging until you find a way of getting a good guess at the information you’re lacking.

In this case, we can come up with a good list of actionable items from our digging:

• Set up measurable goals on the site, whether with dedicated phone numbers, compelling contact forms on the ad landing pages, or specific landing pages for each ad.
• Rework the ads’ landing pages to encourage customers to come back directly instead of revisiting through the ads.
• Now that the cost of advertising is going down, shift some of that investment toward linkbuilding and improved landing page design to increase organic search traffic, referral traffic and conversion.

In short, when you don’t seem to have the information you need, begin collecting it — but also dig for it in other ways and work toward actionable discoveries.

E-commerce Challenges

America’s Depot, a new  full-service office supply ecommerce store, has just launched.

Seems like a great time to talk about the challenges of online retail.

America’s Depot was designed by Tristan Pittard of TaGG Studios and implemented by Nathan Mills on the Magento platform. Magento claims to be the most popular ecommerce platform in the world, and I see no reason to disbelieve them. It’s an open source CMS big enough to handle lots of products.It’s used by companies like Samsung and The North Face.

It’s also known for being slow, complicated to work with, and expensive (though, since it’s open source, it’s possible to use it for free if you don’t want the support of the enterprise version). Their native search is terrible, too, but there are extensions to help with that — and with many other issues, too. We’d never use it for companies with just a few products, but it can be a good choice for serious retail.

This is a good example of the first challenge of ecommerce: the shopping cart. It used to be that everyone hated their ecommerce shopping carts, though there are now enough choices that we don’t hear this as much any more. We usually use WordPress for small-scale ecommerce, and have had great results with Shopp (check out Trout Fishing in America) and with WP Ecommerce (check out FreshPlans). I’ve worked with the CMS of osCommerce, Volusion, and I forget all the rest, and I think it’s fair to say that all of them have their quirks but they can all be figured out with determination. Web Appers reviews 15 of them if you want details, but your best bet is likely to be choosing the one your developer knows best.

Once you’ve chosen a platform, give yourself reasonable time to get all your products into the database. You may be able to upload much of your list, but remember that the descriptions you use affect your search success. Good, unique descriptions make a big difference to your success. Multiply the number of items you plan to offer by 3-5 minutes each, at least, and schedule time to get all the products into the online catalog.

It’s probably fair to say that the one sure thing about the second challenge of ecommerce — getting all your products into the catalog — is that it will take longer than you think it will.

The third challenge is fulfillment. America’s Depot is working with a business wholesaler, and they’re smart to do that. I’ve worked in the past with folks who thought they’d save money by packing up all the products and shipping them to customers themselves, but it usually didn’t work out that way. Unless warehousing and shipping is actually the center of your business, or you really have just a few products, it can easily cost you more to do it yourself.

If you’re planning to manage your own fulfillment, try it out before you make a firm decision. Determine all the costs, including packaging, postage, and the price of taking packages to the shipper or arranging for pickup. Pack up some imaginary orders and measure the time involved in doing so. Calculate the cost of keeping all your products on hand, or of arranging rush shipments to fill an order quickly.

Modern shoppers expect to get their stuff fast and they resent paying for shipping. They’re intolerant of out of stock items, too. Get a reputation for poor customer service, and you’ll be out of business fast. That’s why you have to figure it out before you launch your site. You may not get orders when you’re first launched — but you might. Screwing up your first few because you haven’t worked out the details is a sure recipe for failure.

Payment is the next issue to consider. PayPal and Google Cart offer ways to accept payment with little upfront cost, but the percentage of the payment that goes for fees is high, and some shoppers are still nervous about using these services or unwilling to set up accounts before shopping. You should plan to accept credit cards, and you must make sure that you have a secure means of doing so. We use Authorize.net and PayPal, but there are plenty of alternatives. Sitepoint has a list. Since there are laws governing this industry, you may be safe just choosing the cheapest option, but be sure to count all the extra fees. Consider whether you’ll need to accept American Express, whether you’ll ever want to accept physical cards (at a trade show, for example), and which services mesh well with your shopping cart solution.

Got all that sorted? You still need a great website and a good integrated online marketing plan if you intend to make money from your ecommerce venture. America’s Depot is using social media including blogging, a community service program, email marketing, ongoing SEO, and paid advertising. If your plan is “if build it, they will come,” you should do a bit more planning before you get started.

This list may seem daunting, but it’s much less complex — and less expensive –than building a physical store. Ecommerce is easier than IRL retail in many ways. Just don’t let that fact blind you to the real challenges of ecommerce.

Lab Report: Post Panda

We had the interesting experience of being smacked down by a Google algorithm update last month. We’ve never had this happen before on any of our sites, including any of our client sites. Algorithm changes are usually good for us, for the simple reason that we always focus on good content and visitor usability, eschewing all questionable SEO tricks.

So when our lab site, FreshPlans, lost half its traffic from Google (not bing or Yahoo) between October 13 and October 14, we saw it as a good opportunity to figure out what had gone wrong and what to do about it.

Nah. We tried hard to figure out what we had done wrong. I often find that our clients can’t see anything wrong with their websites when we can see the problem immediately (a good reason to hire people like us to do a site analysis for you), so we may just be overlooking it. But we did scour the site and listen closely to all the rumors about the algorithm change:

• We were out of the country when the change took place, so our daily postings had gone down to no new postings for a week. It seems excessively strict to chop someone down for going three days without new content, but we got right back into the daily schedule as soon as we returned.
• We have lots of outbound links at FreshPlans, since we direct people to good teacher resources elsewhere. We’re definitely curating, not link farming, but we went ahead and did more posts without outbound links.
• We have some affiliate ads on our lab site, and we do play around with them occasionally in an experimental way (lab site, remember?). We don’t feel that our ads are too aggressive, though. We saw no way to scale them down, short of removing them altogether. We had just installed Adwords, a Google product. but it’s hard to believe that Google would smack us down for using their product. We backed off on including affiliate links within our text — no lists of books, even though that’s something teachers appreciate.
• We heard a rumor that the change had penalized companies that didn’t have geographic information, which FreshPlans did not. We added a street address to the Contact page.
• We also heard that bounce rate was involved, and FreshPlans had a high average bounce rate. It’s still higher than we’d like, though it had gone down somewhat until the adventure of the vampire babies. I’m going to write more about bounce rate tomorrow; it’s too big a question to go into here. Suffice it to say that we worked on decreasing our bounce rate.
• Another rumor said that it was not so much websites as keywords that had been affected — that is, sites that focused on keywords with a high level of black hat activity had gotten smacked. That makes sense to me, since I know that terms like “free lesson plans” and “printables” are rife with bad SEO behavior. We don’t focus on those terms, but they do come up naturally in the stuff we write about, and “lesson plans” was our primary keyword. Again, we backed off. We usually send people elsewhere for basic information and give specific ideas on how best to use that information in the classroom, but instead we’ve been providing information (biographical data, for example) even if it’s readily available elsewhere online. Obviously, it’s thoroughly written and researched original content.

Obviously, these aren’t discrete, scientifically tested changes with all the variables controlled. With the high level of seasonal change we see at FreshPlans, and knowing that it usually takes a couple of weeks for changes to show fully, it wasn’t practical to test each possibility. You can test user response efficiently, but not robot response. So we made changes one at a time, and didn’t see any immediate striking effects, and that’s about all we can say.

So did all this make a difference for us? Here’s the traffic for the relevant time period, compared with the previous year:

 

Here are the raw numbers for weekly Google organic traffic during the relevant time period in 2011, compared with the same time frame in 2010:

2011	2550	1445	1405	1522	1443
2010	1066	1106	1084	1129	1232

As you can see, 2011 showed a severe drop following the algorithm change between weeks 1 and 2, where 2010 showed a rise. The following week, Halloween, both years saw a drop as teachers quit looking for seasonal lesson plans and began using what they’d chosen. The chart for 2010 then resumes its steady upward trend, while 2012 continues to bob up and down.

Naturally, we don’t like this. But what can we learn from it about responses to Google algorithms?

• While we did lose significant traffic, we’re still up significantly from last year, and Google continues to bring us about two thirds of our traffic. What’s more, we may not be seeing the steady week over week increases we’re accustomed to, but we’re also not seeing a complete loss of traffic or a complete lack of growth. We conclude that a site can recover from a smackdown.
• Google uses hundreds of different factors in their algorithm and makes hundreds of changes each year. We’ve always said that the math doesn’t favor the idea that you can focus on one little trick and expect any results. We see no indication that any of the narrowly focused changes we made had any effect. Even though we continue to believe that FreshPlans is a high quality website, we still have to take the same approach we always do when people come to us for help with a Google algorithm smackdown: add good content, improve usability, and watch for gradual improvement.
• Right before the algorithm change, Google search had jumped up to over 70% of our traffic. We make sure, in our business, not to let any one customer provide more than 30% of our income, since we know that nothing in this life is certain and we don’t want to have a crisis if we lose one customer. We didn’t draw the same conclusion about website traffic sources, but now we think we should. If you see nearly all your traffic coming from one source, get to work on those other sources.

Probably the most important outcome for me in this experience has been a greater degree of compassion for people whose sites have gotten hit. I’ve been sympathetic, of course, especially for people whose income has been affected, but there has definitely been an underlayer of “Come on — treat this as a wake up call and get that site cleaned up” in my mind when I see people getting agitated about algorithm changes. We’re proud of FreshPlans, and it felt like a game of chutes and ladders when we were affected by the update. If you think we’re being blind to the flaws of our website and have advice for us, I’d love to hear it.

In any case, I now know how it feels. We’re working right now with a company that got smacked by the original Panda update, and I can see why. We believe that we can help him. We believe that FreshPlans will bounce back, too. But we can see the process through the eyes of the unfortunate site owners now, and that’s probably a good thing.

Not Ready for a Website? Dos and Don’ts While You Wait

If you have a business, you need a website. No question. You are losing money every day you do without a site, so don’t even think you can’t afford it. Just get one.

What if you don’t have a business, though? We know a girl who is getting ready to launch a nail polish company as soon as she figures out the manufacturing issue, and a guy who has a dream business he’s going to start once he finishes school. They’re not ready for websites yet.

We also know this band, which will provide our example. They don’t want a website yet because they don’t have enough recordings of their music, they don’t have time between classes and day jobs to look after a website, and their bassist moved to Austin so they need to replace him before they can accept any more gigs. They’re not ready for a website.

If you’re in this position, what should you do while you wait? “Nothing — I’ll think about it when I’m ready to build a site” is not the right answer.

Do

• Get your domain name. Right now. It costs very little to register the perfect domain name, and it can cost a lot to get it out of the clutches of someone who buys it for the purpose of selling it to you. If the name of your company (or band) is available, get it. If it’s not available, get the closest you can, or change the name of the company to something you can get. Read more about this issue: “Should You Choose a Global Domain?” and “Choosing Your Domain Name.”
• Gather ideas about your brand. Basement Brew has a hard time thinking about things in visual terms, so they’ve looked at some other bands’ sites, and they commissioned a few headers to get some ideas about what they might like. Having a clear idea about how you want your site to look can really speed up the process. Use a site like Pinterest to collect images to help you clarify your thoughts.
• Get your content together. Basement Brew is working on getting some good recordings, photos, and videos. A company like ours can help with these things, but it can be a lengthy process if you want lots of things on your site: product photos, testimonials, reviews, and such should be gathered up and kept in a file so you can find them easily.
• Establish an online presence. Basement Brew set up a page at Bandcamp and a Facebook page. You can do as much of this as you are likely to keep up. When you get your website up, go back and add links.

Don’t

• Set up lots of free sites. Some companies create and abandon multiple sites at free venues while they’re thinking about having a proper website made. See our social media advice on how to determine whether or not to set up your social media profile all over the place. With the caveats in that article, it’s generally good to have control over your company name in as many places as possible. However, it’s not good to have badly designed sites all over the web with your name on them. They will come back to haunt you.
• Establish a negative social media presence. Without a website or an IRL business, you may feel anonymous. Don’t get to feeling so anonymous that you think you can post nude hot tub photos or engage in virtual screaming matches with people. Once your site is up, people will search for your name. You don’t want competition from stuff you should have kept private. Hint: nothing on the internet is really private.
• Wait too long. The longer your site is up, the better it will perform; longevity is part of the search engine algorithms. As soon as you can, get that site up and working for you. Basement Brew isn’t quite ready, but they can expect to get more gigs with a website than without, and websites can be updated easily. If they have a website but don’t work to promote it, they won’t suddenly be overrun with traffic and fans. Neither will your business.

Your Website’s Call to Action

When you’re driving on the freeway in the U.S., you’ll be sure to see a hamburger on a billboard. Not just any hamburger, but a hamburger with lusciously red tomatoes, crisp onions, glistening lettuce, plump buns, juicy meat, and cheese melting into a perfectly placed sigh of gooey deliciousness. This highly styled burger may have little in common with the sandwiches available at the place that pays for the billboard, but it is designed to catch the eye of a hungry traveler. There may be a bit of text, even a slogan, but the important part is the name of the restaurant and the “Exit 86″ or “5 miles, left on Broadway” announcement.

The idea is that people on a freeway often have driven for a while and are far from home, they are likely to be hungry, and the sight of this perfect hamburger will tempt them to leave the freeway and drive to the restaurant mentioned on the billboard.

I saw one of these billboards the other day. On the other side of the road, I saw another billboard: “EXIT Buy real estate.”

Huh? Drivers might get hungry and pull off the freeway for a meal. Will they see a command to exit and buy real estate and think, “Gee, you’re right, I ought to look into a ranchette right now”? Not likely.

Just so, your website’s call to action needs to be appropriate for the visitors to the page it’s on. At your homepage, that’s pretty straightforward: the main thing you do, your primary selling point, should be right there. “Here’s what we offer and here’s how to get it” is the effect you want.

Sometimes, though, there’s an inner landing page that needs its own call to action. This is true for Dr. Jane Bluestein, an educational consultant and speaker whose #1 most popular page is an interior page with an article on conflict resolution. Jane built her own website, and we suggested she simplify the navigation and make it more usable.

However, this particular page has gotten some pushes from Stumblupon and similar sites and gets thousands of visitors who aren’t coming to Jane’s site to buy her book or hire her to speak.

The page in question is a handout from one of Jane’s presentations, though, and it is based on her books. People who are interested in this article (and analytics tells us that they stay on the page long enough to read it, so we can safely assume that they are interested) may also be interested in the books and presentations if they have the options pointed out to them.

It would make sense to add a callout, a special button for the people who have come to this page by seeking information about conflict resolution.

A callout is a visually striking button that is separate from the main content of the page and leads the reader on to another page — usually a sales page.

At right you can see an inner page of the website for Kansas City roofer Bill West Roofing. There’s an infographic about ice dams which brings visitors to this page, and it includes a callout — the bright colored circles on the far left.

This page has changed a lot since then, actually, and it no longer has the special offer. That’s one reason to use callouts: to call visitors to take action on something temporary. Adding a button which is not part of the main design allows you to remove it when the special offer is past.

You can also add one to a particular page without having to alter your basic design. However, you may want to use a callout button as part of the design of your inner pages, as the Kingsmill Resort does. Someone who reaches their inner page through search can easily book a room without having to navigate further.The callout is a golden bar — assertive, but not aggressive.

A callout is often a sunburst or other eye catching shape, but it could just be a strong text link if that’s what you control at your website. For Jane, the cover art of the book could be a good option to drive traffic to her bookshop, or a visually strong line saying, “If you enjoy this handout, hire Jane for your next professional development meeting.”

Once she places the callout, she can watch her analytics to see whether more visitors to that page respond to it by clicking on the button, and of course she’ll watch to see if her hires and book sales increase.

The key, though, for this type of call to action is to identify the products and services which will appeal to the visitor to the landing page in question. From Jane’s analytics, we can see the keywords that bring people to the page and the pages they tend to go to next, so we can match up the callout to their apparent needs.

Just as the hamburger billboard is probably more successful than the “EXIT Buy real estate” one is, a call to hire Jane or buy her books on conflict resolution will be a better choice than an ad for her book on handwriting.

Find a Need and Fill It

Some online businesses are simply the web presence of an established business. Some are the product of a person wanting to make money online. Others, like today’s example, are the result of an individual or company’s seeing a problem they can help solve, and developing the solution online.

STP Group is a tax technology group — a company focusing very specifically on software for tax professionals. They watched the complications of state sales tax filing grow as states seeking new revenue sources turned to the internet. The combination of lower consumer confidence in a shaky economy and the growth of ecommerce put states in a bind. We’re all supposed to pay sales tax on our internet purchases, but in practice most of us figure that online shopping is a way to save on sales tax.  States, seeing this, determined to figure out a way to get their piece of the pie.

Tax pros call this issue “nexus,” and as state laws changed, e-tailers faced complications. Each state collects sales tax in different ways, with different forms, rules, and processes. As long as a store only had to pay its own state tax, this didn’t matter. Now, a company may have established nexus in a number of states, and will be required to register and file taxes in all those states.  Noel Hamm of STP Group assures me that states aren’t out to get small businesses — they have their eye on the sales tax on things like airplanes purchased online or the revenue of giant etailers like Amazon — but the cost and complication can be daunting. STP Group saw that software which could simplify this process at a price small businesses could afford was needed, and they decided that they were the guys to fill this need.

They took the very sensible step of figuring out just who needed this software, and came up with Betty, an accountant for a small to medium company with an IT department and just one accountant. Betty doesn’t want to have to go to IT, she wants to maintain control over her own files, and she doesn’t have a fortune to pay for complicated software that she won’t be able to use without help — see the desire to maintain control of those files.

Noel wrote up some notes on the product, told me all about Betty, and let me write up something for Betty, Google, and Bing, which sounds a lot like a 1940s musical group: girl, comic, and crooner. Actually, it’s a sensible strategy. Instead of saying, “I’ve got some stuff — let’s make people want it,” STP group said, “We have stuff some particular people want — let’s write and tell them about it.”

This allowed us not only to use the keywords the audience will search for, but also to use the phrases that will resonate with them once they arrive: “Take back control,” “a solution you can handle yourself,” “You’re in control,”  “test drive it in your own work environment.” We’re talking right to the people who need this.

Can you do the same?

Undertaking a Video Project

Over the weekend, a loosely organized consortium of Fayetteville creatives got together to make a video. Since it’s a holiday and I’m blogging anyway, I’ll tell you about it.

During the afterparty following WordCamp Fayetteville, the talk had turned to the way people keep the same old browser long after they ought to update it. Sean Borsodi of Sharp Hue was, I think, advocating caning or something like that and there was some loose talk about the intelligence of people who still use IE6.

I pointed out that many people think Google is their browser. We can’t expect people who don’t know what a browser is to keep theirs updated. Just today, I read in a forum a question from a guy who wanted to know what department of Google he should apply to in order to have his page titles changed, and I am not making that up.

Nor am I suggesting that there is something wrong with people who don’t understand the internet. I’m fairly sure that most of the people in the conversation that evening can neither sail nor sing a motet, so who are they to speak, and I wouldn’t know a carburetor if one bit me, so I sure can’t talk either. We can’t all know everything.

I did, however, suggest that if we went around to people’s homes claiming to be from Google, everyone would just let us update their browsers for them. As I recall, I told this to Sean with such a degree of conviction that he joined in, and before we knew it, we had a TV series planned, modeled on either CSI or Power Rangers.

There was wine involved.

Still, when Angela Belford of the Belford Group called me the following week to ask when we were going to film the PSA on browser updating, I thought it still sounded like a pretty good idea.

I think it was Ernest Hemingway who said that an idea that still sounds good the next morning probably is a good idea.

I wrote the script and we got the cast together. From left to right in the photo on the right: Christopher Spencer of Ozarks Unbound, Eric Huber of Blue Zoo Creative, Josepha Haden of Haden Interactive, and Angela Belford of the Belford Group.

Tom Hapgood, one of the most useful guys I know, hooked us up with filmmaker Michael Beaulieu, whom you see below left.

We got together on Saturday morning and shot the thing in about an hour and a half, counting coffee and calling the person who forgot. It’s still in editing, so we don’t yet know how it looks or how it will perform. However, the experience has given me some new takeaways for slightly more ambitious video productions.

While I’ve done lots of scripts for various clients, I’ve only produced small, simple videos. If this is true for you, and you feel ready to step it up a little, it’s wise to recognize that there are differences. For example, you need a cameraman. You need a storyboard. And someone will definitely forget something.

We set up the scenes and ran the lines a couple of times with Mike watching through the lens to make sure everything was as it should be. Rosie was right by Mike with a Flip Cam in case we lost or missed something or needed back up for the sound. I watched with a clipboard to prompt and to maintain continuity (the movie word for making sure that, if you opened the door with sunglasses on, you’re still wearing them when you go through the door).

We shot all the outdoor scenes together so we wouldn’t have problems with light changes, and then did the interior scenes. If we had thought ahead properly, we would have brought plenty of lights so we could have produced exactly the effects we needed. However, we had beginner’s luck and the daylight cooperated enough to make it work.

This was a lark, but we’ve spent enough time working on videos to learn from other people’s mistakes. We had a script and we asked everyone to memorize their lines, even though it was quite short. We had a copy of the script on hand when we shot, and we let people adjust their lines if they needed to in order to sound natural. We chose people with pleasant speaking voices and when it wasn’t right, we did it over. We paid attention to potential wardrobe malfunctions and redid the scene when the airplane flew over.

We kept it simple. We had fun. We’ll see how the product turns out, but the process was excellent.

UPDATE: You can see the results at YouTube or at our post, Update Your Browser.

Do You Love Your Horrible Website?

At left, you can see a screenshot from our newest website, a site for a dental office in Kansas City.

Often, our clients can see that their old websites are unattractive and in need of an update. Crossover Dentistry, a dental practice in a wonderful old building in a downtown art district, didn’t feel that way about their site.

They had lots of Flash, lots of jazzy stuff, special 3-D renderings of their space, and a Virtual Gallery of their artworks that rotated and displayed the pieces in playful ways. It was a cool site.

It was not, however, a usable site. The office manager wanted patients to be able to book their appointments online, to download insurance forms to fill out, and to see clearly all the procedures the office does. At the very least, she wanted people to realize they were looking at a dentist’s office, not to leave because they figured they were at an art gallery’s site.

Our usability testers hated the site. We chose them for their artistic tastes, but they got angry and disgusted when they tried to figure out the website. It had a lot of dead ends and pages that didn’t work, and finding basic information was just too difficult. You can see a screenshot from the old site at right. Imagine trying to find out whether they would accept your insurance. 

As for the search engines, they didn’t even offer the site at the top of the page for the name of the clinic when people in the neighborhood searched for it. Instead, a clinic with the same name in another state got that place.

Like so many of our clients, Crossover Dentistry had already invested a lot of money in their website, and they had a limited budget for a new site. Still, they realized that they were losing patients every day they had a non-functional website online.

The challenge for us was to create a new site with the painterly feel of the old one, on a tight budget — but a site which actually worked.

We began by sorting out the site and coming up with an architecture that would really work for what they needed as a business. We took their content and optimized it, added more content where it was needed, and found a premium theme and plugins that would provide much of the functionality they wanted, plus the dash and flash the old site had — without the use of Flash.

We asked designer Tom Hapgood to work with us on the project. He was skeptical about using a theme rather than starting from scratch. However, when he saw the old site and heard what the site owners wanted the new site to do, he could see that a completely custom site would never fit in their budget.

Tom customized the theme, using his artist’s eye to create something special and beautiful with the code that was already in the theme and the images supplied by the dentist’s office. With the new, optimized content and a basic linkbuilding campaign, the new website ought to provide a good marketing vehicle for the site owners.

Compare the old page at right with Tom’s new inner page, above left. The overall shape is similar, but Tom’s page is more sophisticated. The old page has flash navigation that romps around when you hover over it, while Tom’s has simple, highly usable navigation — but also a translucent overlay that provides style without interfering with usability.

The homepage has multiple panels — you can see one at the top of this post — which tumble about in some very cool ways. Not having to code that special gallery shaved many hours off the job of building the site, yet the way Tom has implemented it, and the images the site owners chose, will make it unique.

The key to keeping what you like about your horrible website lies in identifying what you like about it. Previous attempts to keep parts of the Crossroads Dentistry website while fixing the problems had failed. Instead, we recognized the characteristics that they liked and brought them into a new, practical design that will look good — and also do its job.

Anatomy of a New Website

We work mostly with established websites that need to get better results, but there’s something exciting about a brand new website. The first time ever website of Coco McAtee, a sex education speaker and educator, has just launched.

This is a WordPress site designed by Suzanne Hurtig and built by TitusD. Haden Interactive did the text. The homepage features a slider gallery and dynamic recent posts. There are lots of other snazzy things going on, including a PDF brochure to download, videos on many pages, and an events calendar with a couple of different views.

WordPress sites allow this level of complexity without the kind of expense a traditional site would require. However, the factors that make Coco’s site a good one would be true for a traditional site as well.

Let’s look closely:

Coco has just seven main items in the navigation of the site. Each one is clear, and there are drop-down menus under each for more detail. This lets visitors find their way to what they really want without confusion or effort.

Coco’s site has her favorite tagline, “Telling the truth about bodies,” as an image in a panel where it won’t confuse the search engines. A clear statement of just what she offers and how to get it is in the upper left “look at me” space where both the humans and the search engines can see it right away.

Since the main thing Coco wants her visitors to do is to call and sign up for classes, the contact information has to be very clear and accessible. This is a good thing for all business websites, actually. Even if you don’t really want people to call you, providing contact info looks more trustworthy.

 

There’s also a nice, clear “Book Coco” button on every page.

Below the fold where you can’t see it, there’s lots more optimized text with plenty of information for people who like to read a lot, and for the search engines. The amount of text you can see would simply not be enough, but putting plenty below the fold does the job without spoiling the design.

Coco’s new site has the information people need to understand what she does and decide whether to hire her. It has resources that make it a good choice for search engines to offer people looking for information about her subject as well as for people who are ready to make a decision on hiring a speaker or taking a class. It has a bright, positive feel that accurately reflects Coco’s persona and product.  It’s a great example of how to get your business online.

 

Website Makeover: Branding

When local manufacturing representatives Vertz and Company decided they needed a new design for their website, they weren’t very concerned about SEO.

They have exclusive territories for their manufacturers and they’ve been in business for a long time. They have a sales force that calls on customers and keeps business coming in. They don’t rely on their website for leads.

However, their sales force knew that the old site didn’t show the company to best advantage. The old site, shown on the right, contained the information needed, but it didn’t have a strong visual message. Its design suggested an old fashioned company that didn’t keep up to date, or perhaps a company unwilling to make an investment in its online presence. Either way, it wasn’t a website the sales force was proud to show to potential customers.

We brought designer Tom Hapgood in to create a new site with us. There are some very big differences between the new one and the old one:

• The old site was a DIY “turnkey” site, the kind you can make yourself with a dashboard from your hosting company. The new one is professionally designed. In our experience,  a professionally designed site will always perform better than a generic one.
• The new site is on WordPress. We find ourselves using custom WordPress more and more these days. In this case, the company needs to be able to make updates fairly frequently, and they didn’t want any special functionality (though the proliferation of plugins and specialized themes for WordPress is making that less of an issue). Tom used Pods and HTML5 to get a good balance of ease of use and robust functionality with completely up to date code.
• The site architecture is much cleaner and simpler on the new site. Not only does this improve usability, but it also makes the new site easier for search engines to understand. We’ll make sure to use 301 redirects to lead people who have been using the old site to the right pages on the new one.
• The new site has a rotating banner, another feature we’re using in most of our sites now. In this case, the company requested this feature, and we used it to show the industries Vertz and Company serve, as well as to add an exciting visual element.
• The new site uses the red and black of the logo, along with the owner’s favorite blue, much more effectively than the old site did. The shade of red is a better match for the logo, and it’s brought in with subtlety throughout the site instead of being used just in headline bars. Blue is strongly represented in the many photos used throughout the website.
• The new site also has a lot more content than the old one, and it’s optimized for search. While the owners weren’t thinking about search, we think they’ll like having increased visibility on the web. See our post on Specialized SEO for more detail on this point.

The new About Us page, on the left, is more visually appealing than the old one, shown above. The same information is organized in a way that allows more of it to appear above the fold — the whole page will show on the larger monitors most industrial companies currently use.

The new site will reinforce the positive impression made by the sales force.

What’s more, we think it’s likely that the new site will surprise Vertz and Company by bringing them leads. We’ve seen it happen before.

If you currently consider your website low priority because you don’t rely on it for leads, ask yourself — would you like to rely on it for leads? If so, what’s keeping that from happening? Does your website give an accurate image of your company?

We think that the new Vertz and Company website gives a more accurate picture of the company’s importance in the industry. It expresses their expertise and experience in a way that the old site didn’t. We’re looking forward to seeing the results.

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