First Principles

There's a common misconception that an important part of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is to place 'Keyword Meta Tags' into the site code.

Comments I get often sound like: 'I want to appear in Google for "Exclusive Widgets" and someone told me that you should put in a meta keyword tag to make that happen'.

The truth is that while we're happy to embed meta keywords in the code if that's what you want, Google and other search engines place no relevance on meta keywords.

When creating ecommerce websites for our clients, part of the planning process is to advise on how to get the best outcome from the website.

And in the case of ecommerce, the best outcome is more sales.

One thing that is often overlooked with online sales is that you need to appear credible.

This is especially true if you are a small to medium business. Chances are your users haven't heard of you until they've arrived at your site from a search engine. Before they give their credit card details to you they need to have a high level of trust.

The look and feel of your website as well as specific details about your business immediately build trust in the user's mind. Being able to find out more information about you when they want to increases that trust.

Here's a checklist to consider produced from information in a Stanford University credibility study:

Negotiating is an important beginning to many projects or agreements, and no matter what sort of business you're in you will need to negotiate in one way or another with both your customers and your suppliers.

Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury is a practical, informative guidebook to help you negotiate effectively.

Google Maps results often appear above other listings for a location-based search in Google, so having your website shown on the map can give you a significant advantage over the other businesses that are only shown in the normal organic results.

So how do you get your business to appear in the Google Maps?

There are three basic actions you need to perform to get your listing to appear in Google Maps:

One of the most exciting things that your business website can do is increase the recognition and perception of your brand.

Branding

As a small to medium business, increasing your brand's fame is often one purpose among many in the marketing and advertising that you do both online and in other media.

"Branding" means making sure that people hear about your business in a consistent, positive way, and connect it with solutions or emotions that relate to your product or service.

This is very important for ongoing recognition and sales, so even if you are advertising a specific product or offer you should think about the lasting impression that your ad will leave with the viewer. Use every ad or public interaction to produce a positive impression or memory.

This article continues on from the first in this series where we learnt that the goal of your website is the most important factor in deciding how it will function and what it will look like.

One possible purpose for an online presence that is often overlooked by small businesses is the way in which having a website can save you money.

Think about banks for a perfect example.

Banks used to employ lots of staff to serve customers face-to-face, whereas now the majority of banking payments and transactions take place over the web using a secure banking site.

Drupal is a CMS (Content Management System) that we use so that you can edit your own website.

However, Drupal can be used for much more than this simple task - it's so powerful and flexible that entire complex web applications can be built around the Drupal framework.

This 57-second video from PingVision is a (very) brief introduction to Drupal.

Bing is a new search engine created by Microsoft as the latest tool in its campaign to take control of the web. But can it outshine Google?

At first glance, Bing appears to be based so closely on Google that it's hard to spot any real differences.

The design itself looks like Google, despite the added background images. Yes, there's the search box. Yes, there's the go button. Yes, there's the links to other types of content searches, like image and video.

The returned results page is even displayed in a similar fashion to Google's results.

In web design we use a 6-character hexadecimal code to represent each colour, it's a little technical if you haven't used it before but every web designer will understand what I'm talking about.

Using hex for a colour means that we use a string of 6 characters made up of numbers 0 - 9 plus the letters A - F to create each colour.

This week I was thinking about how we can use the letters part of this equation to make colours that spell a word. This is geeky on two levels: a mix of web-design geek and anagram geek.

Below are some of the words that I came up with that can be created as colours. I could only think of a few that work properly, and a few more that slightly cheat by being combinations of two-, three- and four-letter words.

It's fun: the colour "beaded" could be used for a jewellery site, while "facade" should always be used for those scam phishing sites that pretend to be someone else.

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle was orating in the town square long before he could check his email or tweet his thoughts, but what he understood about communication is still relevant today.

Aristotle taught that to be an effective communicator we need three attributes, which he named ethos, pathos and logia.

Ethos

Ethos means something like 'credibility' and is the Latin root for our word 'Ethical'. Aristotle taught that we must have a credible reputation so that people will listen to what we have to say. Become an authority on a subject, write about it and conduct yourself professionally both online and face to face. Ethos is yours.

I've said before that content is the most important thing to have on your website. Content is still King on the internet as long as it meets the desires of a new generation of readers. With good content you can attract visitors and keep them coming back.

So what sort of content should you have, and how can it work best for you?

To answer this question we need to think partly about the target audience your site is aimed at.

I'm looking here at internet users who have not heard of you before, people who come across your site as the result of a search or link, but who have no relationship with you already. One way we can think about these users is by identifying them as being in one of three categories based on their needs and behaviour: hunters, browsers and grazers.

The internet has a short but interesting history, starting well before Tim Berners-Lee invented the 'web' as we know it now. The whole story of the development process is shown in this animation created by German designer Melih Bilgil when he was a student.

In the first part of this series I pointed out that the goal of your website is the most important principle to consider right from the start of your website project.

One of the most obvious purposes for your business website is to make sales.

The most classic sales site is a simple online store, an eCommerce website that sells products like books, computers or any other simple products.

Your website's place in your overall marketing is important, and I was reminded of this by an email I received recently from Jay Conrad Levinson of Guerrilla Marketing.

While a website can be a very valuable and low-cost form of marketing, it is not a magic bullet. It requires planning, careful content creation and ongoing promotion through other media channels if it is to truly succeed.

A website is sometimes seen by business owners as a static asset rather than what it truly is: a tool that needs to be used and cared for to be most effective.

Here's the checklist that Levinson prepared to help you create a winning website. Consider the eight steps and ask yourself if you've paid enough attention to all eight.

Your website can be one of your best assets but let's face it - for lots of people the money they spend on their website is wasted.

A friend of mine - let's call her Carol - is a classic example. She runs a furniture business. She told me, 'We got a website a few months ago, but it hasn't done anything for our sales.'

Her business primarily advertises though brochures and the local newspaper. Each ad includes their website address, but a visit to the site shows that it focuses more on the business than the products, provides very little useful information and doesn't engage customers. It's got some photos of bedroom suites and table settings, but Carol says most of those are out of date anyway.

What's the problem with this picture?

  Amid the doom and gloom talk of the current financial environment it is important that small businesses use their resources as carefully as possible. Follow these tips to evaluate your current site and make any improvements needed. With a professional website you'll attract more customers and from there more of them will make purchases or contact you - providing you an important competitive edge.

1. Clearly show people what you do

When a potential customer views your page it should be quick and easy for them to see what your company does. This means having a single, succinct phrase or short sentence as the main headline on your home page, with some brief, clear dot points and directions included below if necessary.

So, you've got Google Analytics installed on your website and you've figured your way around the interface as shown in one of my previous posts.

You can now produce reports and see lots of detailed statistics about who your website viewers are and what they're doing on your site. Great!

But what do all those statistics actually mean?

Sometimes Google Analytics' abundance of information can be a little overwhelming, and it's hard to know what figures are important and what's good or bad - especially if you've never run a website analysis like this before.

This video is part of a series produced by the Analytics team at Google, and it guides you through what the different statistics are and what they mean.

Google Analytics is a piece of software that tracks visitors to your website and then tells you about them.

It records an amazing array of data, including where the people are coming from, how long they stay on your site and which pages are the most popular. It also includes tools to drill down through the data in a variety of ways, so you can see detailed reports on specific keywords, visitors or cross-reference other demographic data.

Although Google Analytics is made by the same company as Google search it's a totally different product, so don't be confused by the name. It gets its data about your website using a small piece of code embedded on your pages that reports back to your analytics account, it doesn't actually track anything using Google search.

Recently I've had two different clients feel that their sites are outgrowing their current hosting plans, either by running out of space or by loading... very... slowly...

Sometimes these problems are easily rectified with the current hosts or may be caused by a temporary glitch on the server computers that is quickly set right. However, if problems are consistent or if you are setting up your site for the first time I have put together some of the most common hosting solution that I offer to clients.

There are many hosting companies offering different solutions out there, this is simply my own experience of the ones I have found to be the best with a simple explanation of how some of the packages work. Also, this is by no means comprehensive and I'm really talking about hosting suitable for small to medium sites.

Reviews are a great way of adding user-generated content to any website, but what happens when your reviewers turn nasty and leave very critical comments? Not only does it reflect negatively on your own site, but here in Australia there can be legal ramifications.

The laws I am talking about are regarding libel, the written form of slander. It prohibits a writer from damaging the reputation of someone else, known as 'defamation', and the laws are designed to temper the power to falsely sway public opinion that an unscrupulous member of the press or other influential writer might have.

Neither freedom of speech nor freedom of the press are constitutionally guaranteed in Australia in the way they are in US. Instead, there are several acts under which civil or even criminal action action may be brought, with statutes in some jurisdictions providing for fines and even imprisonment for serious offences.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Evangelism on the web

Evangelism is one of the most important parts of the church, and the internet can be used to help us with this task as much as the previous two uses mentioned.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Building Community

“A true Web site is a gathering place – a watering hole that people
will go to so that they can meet other people who go there.”
- Leonard Sweet.

The internet is becoming a larger part of our culture. More than 50% of teenagers use the internet every day, with average usage for this age group at 1.5 hours per day. Gen X-ers, who are now well into their 30s and 40s, are also huge internet users, and even older generations are catching on.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Did you know that here in Australia we have 14 million internet users? In a country of 20 million or so people that's a lot. When you consider that a simple website can reach any of those people and costs less than a yearly ad in the yellow pages (in some cases it can cost nothing at all) it's an easy and important way for a church to express itself. The web is an opportunity that we should be taking advantage of, both as individual churches and as a whole.

In this series of short articles I want to talk about three ways that a church can utilise the internet through having its own website.

1. Advertising
2. Building Community (Covered in part 2)
3. Evangelising (Part 3)

 

1. Advertising

“The Internet is becoming the town square
for the global village of tomorrow.”
- Bill Gates

Here's an experiment. Unplug your mouse and monitor, and try to use your computer.

Even browsing the internet becomes next to impossible. Yet for many people who have sight problems or other physical disabilities, this is what they are faced with every day.

Many of the websites we produce are dynamic. A lot of people don't know what this means - even the people we build them for - so I would like to give a simple definition and an explanation of when a dynamic site is needed and when it isn't.

Please note: this is a very simple explanation designed for people who are new to this concept. If you're after more, try wikipedia.

Dynamic website: a simple definition

The word 'dynamic' in this context means 'characterised by continuous change, activity, or progress'. In the case of a website, to be dynamic means that content of the page has the potential to change every time the page is loaded.

For instance, a very simple dynamic site might show the time and date in the corner. This date stamp will automatically be updated every time a user loads the page so that it shows the correct date and time.

A website that is not 'dynamic' is considered 'static': every time it is loaded it will be the same.