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August 8, 2011 By

8 features of great small business websites (part 2)

In part 1 of this 2-part post I covered 4 features of great small business websites. As a re-cap the 4 features were:

  1. They are easy on the eye
  2. They are designed around a goal that is measured
  3. They are easy to maintain and get support
  4. They engage visitors

In this post I will cover the final 4 features.

Feature 5 – They showcase and prove something unique

In the sea of sub-standard small business websites the great ones stand out. They generally don’t stand out because of their flashy designs or their technical features. They tend to stand out because they do a good job at showcasing what it is about the business that stands out. For simplicity I will refer to this as a Unique Selling Proposition (USP). This is what makes the business unique and the website is a great place to showcase (and prove it).

Great businesses can articulate what makes them unique in a simple short statement and they support it with images, testimonials, guarantees etc so it becomes credible.

Feature 6 – They are personal, social and authentic

Thank goodness those wanky buzzword-filled brochure style sites have had their day. People expect more and people want to work with real, authentic, like-minded people. With the rise of social media this has become even more important because how people engage with your website is becoming a huge influence over it’s success (even in the search engines).

Have a look at this screenshot from Emerson Salon. You will notice:

  1. It’s not a traditional website – it’s a blog, with useful engaging content.
  2. The homepage features headshots of their key staff and it encourages you to ‘meet’ them with a full page dedicated to each one with good quality photos.
  3. You can see posts on the blog from a number of different staff members and you can even follow them individually on Twitter.
  4. Social media icons are at the forefront of the design – the facebook plugin shows almost 2,000 likes.

These are some examples but there are many ways to make a website more personal, social and authentic.

Feature 7 – They make it easy to find important information

The simple fact is you can get everything else right but if you don’t give visitors what they want (and quickly) they will leave – and do so annoyed. Great websites don’t forget about the small things. They understand their customers and potential customers and give them what they want. Some things that generally should be very easy to find are:

  • Contact information,
  • Store locations / opening hours – for retail businesses
  • Prices
  • Clear information on what the business does (yes some sites forget to mention this)
  • Clear calls to action – i.e. “Click here for a free quote” or “Enter your post code for your nearest store” or whatever the call to action is.

Their homepages aren’t cluttered with hundreds of modules about everything, they are able to slim the main design elements down to what the customer is looking for and what the business is trying to showcase.

Feature 8 – They get traffic

We build a lot of small business websites and I can tell you it is very rare for a small business owner to want to talk about traffic before we build them a site. This really is a scary thing – after all what is the point of having a website if you get no traffic?

In my view traffic doesn’t seem to get the attention it deserves. Search engine optimisation (SEO) does and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) does and both are important components of a traffic plan. However great websites don’t just get traffic from Google. They have a plan for getting traffic from a variety of sources. Here are some examples:

  • Offline methods (print advertising, email signatures, business cards, networking events)
  • Natural Google searches and Google local listings
  • Online directories
  • Search Engine Marketing (like Google Adwords)
  • Natural social media (sharing on Facebook and Twitter)
  • Paid social media advertising (Facebook ads)
  • Forum posting
  • Blog posting and commenting

These are just some examples. The important thing here is great websites have a plan for traffic. Their plan will outline what parts of the traffic generation work will be done by the business itself and what part will be done by external providers because some of this stuff is tricky. But they don’t exist for the sake of it and they don’t get traffic by mistake.

Review your website against the 8 features

Hopefully you got some useful tips from my 2-part post on 8 features of great small business websites. Click on the icon on the left to download a website review checklist which you can print off and use to measure the effectiveness of your own website. I hope you find this useful.

File under: Business, Web Development
June 16, 2011 By

8 features of great small business websites (part 1)

Only a few years ago small business owners with a website were ahead of the pack. If they had a CMS that ran the website they were seriously ‘out there’. Trust me, I’ve been building CMS-based sites for 5 years and in the early days we didn’t even tell people they were able to update their own sites because they didn’t want to know about it.

A lot has changed since those days. Systems like Joomla and WordPress are now mainstream, business owners are pretty tech savvy and most serious business owners know that its easy (and cheap) to have a dynamic CMS-based website. But all websites are not equal and these days you need to do something more than just ‘reserve your place’ online. So what separates an average small business website from a great one?

In my next 2 articles I’ll present 8 features I have discovered over the years that you’ll see on great small business websites. Here are the first 4 features.

Feature 1 – They are easy on the eye

Most people can appreciate good design – something that looks good. And I’m sure you will agree that having something that looks great and is effective at representing your brand consistently and professionally online is important. Bad designs turn people off your business and good designs aren’t that hard to achieve. Great small business websites look good. They start with a clean, professional logo and slick images and from there it’s easy to design a nice looking site. They have consistent colors, lots of white space and a modern and professional style.

Tip - If your logo and images are old and out of date replace them before re-designing your site. Fiverr.com or 99designs.com can be cheap and useful for the logo and professional royalty free stock photos are cheap and plentiful (try sxc.hu, istockphoto.com or dreamstime.com).

Feature 2 – They are designed around a goal that is measured

Steve Jobs knows about design. He said “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works”. Every great small business website has a purpose or a goal. This goal goes far beyond the elements of design but it starts with the design.

It’s common these days to fill up a homepage with all sorts of stuff – a banner, a slider, a menu (or 3), some news items, a twitter feed, a welcome message, testimonials etc). But from a design point of view what stands out? Is it clear what you want your customer to do?

The Xero.com site is a great example of designing around a goal.

  • There is a lot of info on the homepage but the most important part up at the top is clean, clear, and has plenty of free space / not much text.
  • The goal is obvious – ‘Try the world’s easiest accounting software for free’ which stands out as the call to action.
  • The goal is supported by images that showcase what it is, some brief text that explains why it’s different and an alternative course of action for people who aren’t quite ready yet (which will ultimately lead back to the goal).
  • In addition there are testimonials from real people (with photos) that re-enforce their message.

And of course having the goal is only the first step. Measuring it is critical and enables great website owners to know whether they are on track. Google Analytics is the tool of choice for small business owners when it comes to measuring website goals.

Feature 3 – They are easy to maintain and get support

Search engines and humans both love new and authentic content. It’s no longer effective to hire a web developer to change the content on your site. Great websites are updated regularly by the owner
and they can be extended and modified easily with 3rd party extensions. But not all content management systems are equal. Great small business websites give the owner freedom and control over:

  1. Adding / editing content
  2. Installing plugins or extensions
  3. Upgrading the system to the latest version when necessary
  4. Choosing support services like hosting and web development

A system like WordPress does all of this. It’s very easy to use, upgrade, maintain and extend. Everyone knows about it, help is easy to find and it’s free. It’s pretty hard to argue with that.

Feature 4 – They engage visitors

At the core of all small business marketing activities is the desire to land a customer. So it’s common for people to talk about ‘conversions’. However generating a customer is generally a long process and only a
small amount of visitors to your site can be converted right away. For this reason, great small business websites don’t just try to convert every customer. They try to get visitors to:

  • Consume and share content by creating compelling resources, text, video, PDF downloads etc.
  • Connect by opting in by signing up for a newsletter, following on Twitter, or ‘liking’ on Facebook.
  • Convert by buying something or sending through an enquiry once their trust has been gained through the first 2 steps.

Put simply they give away great information for free, they encourage people to share it and they build trust during the process while encouraging people to opt-in. This makes them effective at engaging most of their website visitors instead of just the ones that are ready to buy at that particular time.

Conclusion

Having a website is not enough these days but the good news is having a great website is not that hard once you know what to do. Start with a nice design, a purpose (which is tracked), a decent CMS which gives you the control you need and some great content and tools to share / opt-in and you are well on the way.

I hope you have enjoyed this post. In my next post I’ll go through the final 4 features of great small business websites.

File under: Business, Web Development
June 10, 2011 By

Steps to Take Before Ordering a Website

There’s a point when your company needs a website and the way you approach this project defines the outcome. There are certain things you do and certain things you need to know before you even start talking to website design companies. Here’s a short list of the steps to take in order to get great websites:

1. Research. What are your keywords? What do your customers look for? Google AdWords has a great tool to research keywords – enter one keyword and it suggests related keywords with an additional search info. Use this tool to create an extensive list of the most popular searches in your field.

2. Spy. Now that you have your keywords – it’s time to take care of competition. Google these keywords to find out who your main competitors are. What do their websites offer? Identify the leaders in your niche and use Quantcast.com to find out who’s going to make the majority of your visitors.

3. Budget. Building a website doesn’t end at launch. If you’re passionate about it – it doesn’t end at all. But even if you’re not – the basic promotion is a must. Budget for SEO, SMO, AdWords or any other pay-per-click program in advance. Use Spyfu.com to determine the approximate advertising budgets of your competitors.

TIP: Though you can delegate SEO and SMO to professionals, it’s strongly recommended that you get involved in pay-per-click programs yourself. You know your brand, you know your customers and what they want – you are the one who can grab their attention.

4. Write. Write ALL copy BEFORE ordering a website. Great website designs use actual texts during development process to ensure the best user experience. Remember to include as much of your keywords into the texts as you can – it’s good for SEO.

5. Formalize. Now that you have all that information – it’s time to create a technical description. Start with tasks and desired outcomes. Know what the “success” of the project is – it must be quantifiable. You can use something as simple as “an average of 1000 visitors a day” or something more advanced like “increase the sales of the product by 15% in UK”. Write it all down. Avoid words like “beautiful”, “good”, “a lot” or anything that’s not specific when describing a task. You don’t need to be technical, but you need to be precise. Include your keywords, information about competitors and all the graphical and textual information you’ve prepared. Make sure you describe your plans for the future of site and promotions you had in mind.

Once this is done – you have a technical description you can use to communicate with a website development company. You wrote it, you understand it and it suits your needs fully.

File under: Business, Web Development
May 12, 2011 By

One Site Or Two: What To Do When You’re At the Crossroads

As a small business, if you have a large site, should you split it into two websites or leave it as one? This is a difficult question that really has no right or wrong answer, but we’ll give you something even better: we’ll help you examine some of the ups and downs of both options to help you decide what’s best for you.

Maintaining One Large Site

Offering everything in one place is convenient for you and your target audience. You only have one set of expenses, one set of marketing and content strategies, one set of social media profiles, and only have to go to one location to update and maintain your content. When it comes to ranking and link juice, you have more pages use can use to rank and will be able to catch with the long tail.

Unfortunately, there are some downsides to having everything on one site:

  • Too much content can be difficult for users to wade through. They’ll have to go through more content to find what they’re looking for.
  • A larger site means a larger audience. This makes it far more difficult to target specific visitors.
  • The more general your targeting, the lower your conversion rate generally is, simply because you have to get visitors past the things they’re not interested in to get them through the sales funnel.
  • The wider your audience, the wider your reach has to be and the more spread out your marketing strategies need to be.
  • Larger sites require better databases and more resources to run than smaller sites (often split onto subdomains). Sometimes, for smaller businesses, this may go beyond your current resources.

Breaking Your Site Into Two Or More Sites

Splitting your website onto two or more main domains can have a multitude of benefits. Each site can be tailored to meet the needs of a specific audience, including the design and site architecture. Each site can have its own branding and carry its own loyal customers.

Financially, running more than one site may also have some benefits. Since you have two properties, you have two separate investments that can grow. Also, if something should happen to one of the sites (say it falls in the rankings, for example), you have another site that will continue to generate revenue until the affected site recovers.

With two sites, there is often the chance to benefit from the competition as well. You have two sites to conquer more of the market and a wider range of terms, products, services, and audiences. Also, it’s possible that if customers don’t buy from one site, they’ll buy from the other, which is often the case with real world stores.

Like with one main site, there are some downsides to consider with multiple sites:

  • You have twice as many sites to upgrade, create, and maintain.Both sites need consistent content, have current social profiles, and need fresh marketing ideas.
  • Both sites require links, SEO, and attention/traffic
  • You need two distinct audiences, otherwise you’ll dilute your offering.

Questions You Need To Be Asking

Here are a few things you’ll need to ask yourself before choosing a path:

  • Do you have two distinct visitors (buyers) coming to the site for different reasons?
  • Are you able to separate the site into two ‘themes’ to create two brands that can stand on their own?
  • Do you have the resources available to market, run, and maintain two sites?
  • Will you benefit enough to warrant splitting the site or creating two separate sites (ROI)?
  • What are your plans for each website? Is there a way to grow them both together, or will your expansions take the two sites farther apart from each other?

Have you split your site onto two domains or decided to run one large site? What have your experiences been?

File under: Beginners, Business, Marketing, Web Development
April 11, 2011 By

Business Overboard – Staying Afloat in Congested Digital Waters

Small businesses have enough on their plate at the moment simply making ends meet. As a result of the economic downturn and reduced consumer confidence there is just less and less money to go around.

In these times of squeezing personal budgets and the resultant squeeze upon your business, you may not have considered the potential power of your business website to help address the problem.

Your online presence

Do you have a commercial website for your business?

For those that do have a fully functional business website, does it attract visitors which subsequently turn into customers? The fact is that many smaller businesses have some form of online presence but just do not know how to maximise it. Spending a little time addressing your online business ‘address’ may well be the answer to many of your problems.

The old adage ‘if you build it, they will come’ does not really apply to websites in cyberspace today. Long ago when the internet was filled with just a few million web pages the chances are, you could be easily found and your services offered.

Not in today’s’ internet I am afraid.

The Mighty Google

Even during the infancy of the mighty Google which established itself during 1998 and immediately indexed over 26 million pages, saw that figure rise to over a billion in just two short years. In 2008 it revealed a massive one trillion URL’s had been catalogued and this number just keeps increasing.

This just illustrates the amazing popularity of the web and just how saturated it has become. Therefore, gaining a foothold for your business in these congested digital waters is difficult to say the least.
It is however not impossible, in fact with the right direction it can be quite a simple process.

There are a number of basic fundamental aspects to getting your site appreciated by the search engines and therefore ‘presented’ to searchers. By considering these fundamentals and applying them to your website you stand a much better chance of being recognised online.

4 Simple Steps You Can Use to Review Your Business

1. Title tags – are your title tags () used to display the headings of the pages on your website?

This important tag is one of the first a search engine spider will pick up and needs to contain information relating to the page. This is the tab at the top of the browser window which displays the title of the page. It is also the title which is displayed within the search engines results page and therefore needs to be clear and enticing enough for users to click.

2. Heading tags – do you make use of the H1, H2, H3, H4 tags within your content?

These are highly valued by search engines to help them establish just what your content is about. Think of your page content as a newspaper article, with headings separating the different sections of content on the page.

3. Description tags – are they fully completed and do they contain relevant information?

Again, this something which is used by search engines but more importantly is the snippet of information which is presented to users within the index. A good description and compelling call to action will dramatically increase your visitors.

4. Site Structure and navigation

This is a big issue, does your website have a good linking pattern and is it easy for users to travel around the site? User behaviour is very similar to that of a search engine spider in that links to different pages will be followed by both the visitor and the bot. If you have pages which are not visible from the home page both visitors and bots will not be able to find them.

These are just a small sample of actions you can take to review your small business website which if implemented should serve to better your website for both visitors and search engines.

File under: Beginners, Business, Web Development
March 3, 2011 By

Design and Print Terms Explained – A reference guide

I’m aware that as a Graphic Designer, working alongside Printers, there are a number of terms that we may use that mean completely nothing to a business owner. So I thought I’d write a series of articles that clearly explain some of these terms. You can use it as a reference guide so that next time you’re speaking to your designer or printer you know what they are talking about.

Graphic Design Software and File Types

Designers use a number of software programs with lots of different file types. Talk of Jpegs, Layered files, eps files can all get bit much. Here are some of the main programs and file types listed and explained.

The main programs used for desktop publishing in the Graphic Design Industry are Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Indesign.

TOP TIP: Inkscape, Scribus and Gimp are Open source equivalents of the software mentioned above. Open source, meaning completely free.

Adobe Illustrator

Illustrator is a Vector Graphics editor that is predominantly used for drawing Illustrations and Logo Designs. Vectors are graphics that are made up of mathematical points. Because of this, Vector graphics can be scaled up or down without loosing any of their quality. This is why software like Illustrator, is preferred by designers, to create logos. These can then be scaled to a large shop sign or to a small logo for your business card.

Main File Formats:

  • .ai – this is the original file format that Illustrator creates and can only be opened by Illustrator.
  • .eps (Encapsulated PostScript) – this file is a stand alone file that can be imported into other programmes like Photoshop or Indesign.

TOP TIP: If a Graphic Designer has created a logo for you ask him to provide it in .eps format. This means all the required information is contained in the file and you can send this to other Designers to use.

Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop is a graphics editing software. It allows designers to create and manipulate pixel based images in many various ways. Every image created in Photoshop is made up of pixels and the more pixels an image has the larger the file size will be. A logo that you have used on your Powerpoint presentation may only be 200 kilobytes where as an image used on a Billboard may be a few hundred Megabytes.

TOP TIP: File size is typically the reason why people try to send emails and they bounce back. The image is usually too big to get through the email or your Powerpoint file is too big because you’ve filled it with large images. Most email servers these days can handle files approx 10megabytes big. If you are sending larger images to people via email, try using a file transfer site like www.yousendit.com

Main file formats:

  • .tiff – (Tagged Image file format) – this format is typically used by designers in desktop publishing as it saves the file without loosing any of the quality. The files sizes are usually quite large.
  • .Jpeg (Joint Photographic Experts Group) – this format is used to compress files. The more a file is compressed the smaller the file size. But this also leads to an increased loss of quality. Files shouldn’t be saved as a Jpeg more than once as every time you save it, it looses more quality.
  • .gif (Graphics Interchange Format) – gif images are mainly used for websites as the compression allows for very small file sizes. gif’s can’t handle too many colours so it is best suited for simple images such as logos. It also allows for transparent backgrounds.
  • .psd – this file format is the original Photoshop format. It allows for multiple layers to be saved in the same file.

Layers, in Photoshop, are a tool that allow multiple images or effects to be placed one on top of each other. This allows for easy editing as each layer can be removed or amended quickly.

TOP TIP: Always ask for the layered files of any artwork that is created for you in Photoshop. This means that any future designers can easily manipulate the work using the .psd file.

A note about File resolution:
The following is a regular scenario in my day job. A designer requests an image file. An image is grabbed from a website and sent. The designer responds, saying that the file is not good enough quality and asks for a High Resolution file. Why is the designer asking for this?

All images have a resolution or dpi (dots per inch). The higher the resolution, the better quality the image. Designers and Printers usually work with files that have a resolution of 300dpi. This allows for the image to be printed at high quality. The resolution of your computer screen is 72dpi. When people optimise their images for the Web they reduce the resolution down to 72dpi as this dramatically reduces the file size. Any more than 72dpi is a waste as your screen won’t display any higher than that.

TOP TIP: If you have a database of images, keep one folder of your High-Res Images or your 300dpi images and a Low-Res folder with all your 72dpi images in them. This will allow you to quickly navigate to the correct file type when asked.

Adobe Indesign

This program is predominantly used for Brochure or Newsletter design. Quick and flexible page layout tools in Indesign allow for great multiple page documents.

Main file format:

  • .ind – This is the original file format for Indesign. Once the document is finished it is usually exported as a HIgh-Res PDF and then sent to the Printer.

A note about PDFs:
PDF (Portable Document File) – is an open format for document exchange. It is created in a program called Adobe Acrobat and can be opened by a free to all program called Adobe Reader. Designers use PDF documents because all the file information can be stored in one file format that can be accessed by anybody with Adobe Reader. PDFs can be saved as High Resolution files that are ready to Print. Once exported from a program PDFs can not be adjusted in any way. All the programs listed above can export PDF documents.

TOP TIP: If your designer has provided the final artwork as a PDF document, make sure that you get access to the original file format, wether ,ai, .psd or .ind, as the PDF document will no longer be able to be amended.

File under: Business, Technology, Web Development
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