As a follow-up to’ Make Your Website Design Engaging, not Frustrating’ I thought it might be useful to give you some honest to goodness practises that will help your web pages load faster without breaking the bank.

Starting with the very basics:

1. Images – very pretty, adds colour, interest and supports the textual based content on your website page, an image speaks a thousand words and all that, but also adds weight. By weight I mean the amount of data that is on the page and has to be requested and served by the web server. Now don’t get me wrong most websites have images but all too often, I come across the website that has IMAGES, Large (imposing on the page), pointless (offers nothing to the user) and Heavy (takes valuable seconds to load).When designing your website page make sure your image adds value to your page, are correctly edited and well proportioned in size for the page that they sit in and correctly compressed.
2. CSS– where possible use CSS files for layout and formatting. Your browser can cache the style and format of your page form an external CSS and loads your page a lot faster than if it had to parse through longwinded style script tags on every load.

Tables– try to avoid using tables for anything other than data, and nested tables are a definite ‘Don’t Do’. It takes the browser some time (valuable time) to work out which end tag belongs to what, match everything up and render your web page correctly.

3. Duplicated Code – If you are going to use the same piece of code multiple times throughout your website then you might want to think about putting it in an external script file. This way your browser will already have it in cache and will recall it much faster than if it has to run the script multiple times.
4. Clean Valid Code – Clean code is king. Search Engines love it, reward it and on top of all that your browser will render well scripted tags faster than any ill formed tag. If you happen to be using a WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) HTML editor, take care to remove the (never ceases to amaze me) oodles of unnecessary, pointless scripting.

If you’re unsure what any of these tips mean then you should ask your website developer or you can ask us (we will be happy to help) by either leaving a comment on this post or emailing us directly, we are really friendly and tend not to bite.

Are ‘Under Construction’ web pages damaging your business? If your website has pages with ‘Under Construction’ live on the web then they are almost certainly costing you enquiries, leads and sales. You wouldn’t allow a customer to walk in your showroom only to tell them you were unprepared to help them. You wouldn’t answer the phone and say, ‘Sorry, were under construction’. You wouldn’t add a page to your new brochure or catalogue with Under Construction across it, so why do business owners allow pages with Under Construction on them live in their website?

Offending Web Pages on the Increase

Under construction pages seem to be back on the rise, I have come across several in the last couple of months, prompting this article. This is nothing new, a new website or new section of a current website goes live unfinished with the words ‘Under Construction’ accompanied by a horrific animated image. Why? I have never found a satisfactory explanation to this and it is usually the fault of the website design company. Some website design companies seem to be waiting for copy (the text to go on the page) and some seem to be pushing a deadline. The worst offenders may even be developing the client’s site live in the web (which is simply unforgiveable).

Whatever the reason, if you have these pages on your website, now is the time to decide that you need to either finish them or remove them. If it is up to your web designer then nag them constantly to get this sorted (and vow to never use them again). If you manage your own site then you can get them finished or take them down. If you don’t want to remove them completely then you can just remove any link to the pages.

Do this one thing for your online business before you do anything else. Under Construction web pages send the worst possible signal about your business to all who view them. Your website is your most valuable online ‘Real Estate’. Treat it with respect

How often have you used a website and gotten bored and left because of the website design? It’s probably not very often. If you’re buying a book or movie on Amazon, you search for it, find it and buy it. You might read a few reviews or browse for a few different comparable books or movies, you might get bored with the book or movie you bought from the site, but you are unlikely to get bored with the website itself.

Now count up all the times you have left a website because you were frustrated or fed up with trying to find the information you were after. If you use the web regularly then you almost certainly counted into double digits.

 You know the sites I’m talking about. They might have a flash introduction or the pages will be loaded with images that make the page take ages to load. The menu doesn’t seem to make sense and leads you on a wild goose chase and you get ‘de ja vue’ as you feel you are going around in circles trying to find the information you wanted. Eventually (or possibly, quickly) you leave the site, curse its name and never return.

Bottom line: Your visitors are far more likely to get impatient and fed up with your website than they are likely to be bored.

To underline a point, when Facebook redesigned its website a poll of its users revealed that 94% didn’t like the changes. When Amazon changed its menu it took me a while to get used to it and their sales took a dip because of it. Were the users of these sites protesting and demanding change? Not a bit of it, in fact when Facebook brought in its news feed in 2006 there were organised protests against the changes.

So Where Does it All Go Wrong?

In  (very) short, it goes wrong when you choose style over substance. Or to put it another way, it goes wrong when you choose to forget about what your website objectives are and concentrate purely on thinking ‘That looks cool!’
The old statistic is that you have eight seconds to grab your users’ attention and after this they will leave. This stat is proven in study after study and is generally accepted by most, but flashy graphics in isolation are not the answer. These same studies also state that users look for ‘visual clues’ in that eight seconds to work out if they are in the right place (or on the right page) and an effective use of these visual clues on your web page will help you ‘hook’ the user to find out more. 

Using Visual Clues Effectively

Flash animation

Flash animation is eye catching and naturally the users’ eye will be drawn to it. So if you are going to use flash animation then it must re-enforce the primary messages and encourage the user to stay. Be aware that page load time is a big reason for users to get frustrated and if they are faced with the ‘loading’ progress bar, your cool graphic may well have the opposite effect that you intended.

Images

Supporting images are helpful for users to find their way. You may think this is obvious, but having an image for the sake of it is not helpful. So if you sell baby clothes then a picture or a montage of pictures showing smiling babies wearing your product range is going to be a big clue to your users that they are in the right place.  But if a photo is not appropriate then don’t crowbar one in. A graphic image showing a sales chart or carrying other sales massages will be more appropriate if you need to break the page up.

Headlines

This is probably the most important element of each page. The text on your page has been crawled and indexed by Google and Google is where most website owners I work with find that the majority of their traffic comes from. So it makes sense that if you put a relative, attractive, attention grabbing headline this is going to be of immediate interest to a user. They are going to read it and realise that this page is in tune with the Google search that brought them here. Then they’ll start to read the rest of the information that you have added to your page.

Once you’re your using your website design to engage with your customers you then have a chance to convert them into a customer.

According to Nielsen, worldwide usage of Social Media Networking, such as Facebook, twitter, blogs etc is up 82% on the same period last year and with many companies adopting and enhancing their existing marketing strategies this is set to rise even further.

According to a study by BrianSolis.com in 2009  over 80% of professional usage of Social Media goes un-measured. Although Social Media Usage in the Business Sector has been around for some time, the requirement for consistent and continued ROI (Return on Investment) figures form such marketing methods means that anything you invest time into needs to prove its worth and have its performance measured.

Monitoring Software such as Google Analytics is free to use and is key to providing the data you need to build an accurate picture of your Social Media foothold in the marketplace. Date such as:

• Traffic Sources
• Network
• Interaction

 … Can be the difference between a tumble weed blog and a credible source that users come back to time and time again.

The most important thing to remember is to measure your Social Media Activity for your company. Monitoring Software will provide a mountain of data, but is only useful if you are collecting relevant data that you can turn into useful information and fits with your SMMS (Social Media Marketing Strategy).

Monitoring Area Ideas to help you get started

• Track your referrals – this will give you an indication of tandem or child feeds that are working well and those that you either need to allocate more recourses or drop from your SMMS.
• SMID (Social Media Interaction Duration) – It may be prudent to analysis the amount of time that your visitors and lingering on your site. This might help you build a picture of your visitors interests.
• Bounce Rate – are your visitors leaving within a couple of seconds? Perhaps your page isn’t clear; your copy may need changing or may need more interest adding.
• Interaction – are your articles getting comments? What are the comments and are you responding to them?
• Membership – are your followers, subscribers or members increasing? If not why not?

If your effects aren’t working then change them! For more Tips on maximizing your web social Media or online marketing efforts subscribe to our newsletter.

With Millions of new websites being added to the internet every day it is easy to understand why your little website might get lost in the cloud.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization needs to start with the very basics. Simply launching a new website and expecting search engines (and in turn potential customers) to find your services is unrealistic and simply not going to work. As always with computers (which is all we are talking about here) they do exactly as we tell them. You cannot be subtle about this you need to tell them (search engines) in no uncertain terms, to go and look at your new website, shout it from the roof tops and send up a “Notice Me Flair” about how great your website is.

Search engines like to search and while they often struggle to keep up with the sheer volume of new websites, files and data they do give us the perfect method in which to flag ourselves and make ourselves noticed.

Simply submit your site to the Search Engine, tell it where to go and look and it will. Simple.

Google: http://www.google.com/addurl

Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html

Alta Vista: http://addurl.altavista.com/addurl/default

Bing:  http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx

A Word of warning:

Submit your website to the search engine by hand only once in any one month, constant submissions will be seen as spam  – check with your developer to see if they have done it first before you submit.

And just as a final point most search engine submissions will have a security text request on them. This is so that they know if it is a human or machine request. Be careful of companies that promise to ‘submit your site to all major search engines’, this usually means that they are using an application for submission and rest assured the search engine bots will know so enter them by hand that way you know you have done everything you can to be heard.

During my regular trawl through the business forums last week I came across a post from someone who is selling fashion accessories at their local markets and the giving the profits to local charities. They had a really low budget and so they were looking for sources of cheap advertising.

Unfortunately, advertising will often fail to give value for money, especially if it is used in isolation, small quantities or with a limited budget. I wanted to help, so I offered some tips on other marketing and promotion ideas that can yield dividends without costing very much money. An abridged version of my reply is below.

Hi

I think you should consider this from a rounded marketing approach. Don’t just think about advertising, which is probably going to be too expensive for you, think about other methods of promotion that will require time without costing too much.

1. Press Releases.

 There are a few free press release websites that you can load press releases to. Also, contact your local paper with interesting things you are doing, new lines of jewellery, other activities. When you have been going 1 year, tell them. You are a charitable organisation, so they are going to be happier to print it than if you were just a new small business. You are clearly a big hearted person who cares for others, doing something other than moaning about your situation, a real can do person. The press will love writing about you. 

2. Blogging

Your on the web so set up a free account at blogger.com and start writing about the things you do. Make it personal and interesting. The people you met at the various markets, the new lines of products, how sales are going, are you nearing a target, etc. Once or twice per week if you can. Put the blog address on any offline marketing you do (leaflets, cards, press releases, etc)

3. Twitter

So if you are blogging then try micro blogging. Set up a free account. Follow a few people who are interested in jewellery (search twitter for those users) and then try to write a few tweets of your own. Be upbeat and amusing. Tweet a few times per day if you can. People will start to follow you.

4. Facebook

Again, its free. Set up an account and start a fan page. You can upload photos of your designs and get feedback on them. Also you can profile the charities that you are helping. Every time an amount of money goes to a charity, find out what it does, then let people know.

5. Recognition

There may be awards in your area and nationally that you could win. Business people pat themselves on the back all the time. There may be something like the Pride of Britain awards in your area. I am sure that someone knows about the great job you do and if you were nominated for a local hero award then you could raise your profile and sell more jewellery and do even more good.

 6. Personal Representation

Try to put yourself in front of as many people as possible. On days that there is no market you might want to try contacting local organisations either on the phone or in person. You could try to sell directly to the people you talk to or ask if you could have a small table with samples that you could sell during lunch time or at home time. Again, make a point of letting them know that this is charitable work, they are more likely to allow it. Maybe business centres with a lobby area or larger organisations with plenty of staff could be good locations.

 All my ideas are designed to be cheap or free and generate buzz around your business. The more people talk about your business and how great your products are and what a great job you do for charity the orders will start to come in. 

I really do wish you all the best of luck with this. Let me know if I can be of any further help. 

Phil

You can read the full post thread at the UK Business Forums,  http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?p=1142952#post1142952

If Aileen gets in touch to say how things are going then I add it to my blog.

In the year 2010 most of us have come to the same conclusion that marketing has changed and success only really comes to those that position themselves apart from the rest move with the time and stay on top of their game.

Some companies are quiet happy sticking to the traditional methods of marketing that they have always used, and that’s fine, but now is the time to give you that competitive edge and really stride out ahead.

By using current and flexible marketing technology practices, such as e-mail marketing, social media and mobile marketing to drive traffic to your SEO (Search Engine Optimised) website you will soon see the ROI when an increase in website visits turn from “never visited website before” to “Just looking” and finally onto “ready to buy.”

Don’t make your users work too hard to find you

Very simple but often overlooked. Your website should be working for you constantly and if it’s not you need to consider why not? Think about the content of your website, think about how you can generate buzz about products and services displayed on your pages. Put into place your search engine strategy and don’t lose sight of your end goal … engage your visitors, generate interest and convert that interest into revenue.

Today’s web market place is made up of a variety of tools (categorized into Social marketing) e.g. email Marketing, twitter, facebook, alone press releases etc and are in the main free to use and in part your path to a successful online presence.

In simple terms the link between you, your customers and potential customers is the search engines and you need to shine big and bright.

Generate a website that is clear to navigate, full of factual and easy to find information about your services and products and then shout about it from the roof tops.

Striving to get to the top of Google isn’t a bad goal but get the basics put in place first and remember that measuring progress is one of the most important parts of your search engine strategy.

Four Tips to get you Started

• Know your market place and where you are going to position yourself in it.
• Follow best SEO and SEF practices  
• Create your search engine strategy
• Measure, Measure, Measure with something like Google Analytics

Subscribe to our online marketing newsletter and we’ll send you the very latest tips and tricks to help you with more exposure on the web with less exposure of your wallet.

Social Media networking such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc have over the last year grown massively and are very much the ‘In thing’ to be part of and as a business using this method of new age communication (Social Media) can be the loud speaker you never thought you had.

According to the Internet World Stats website the latest figures show that 1,733,993,741 of us use the internet and while not all of these users will be regularly active either in networking or a potential client it does give us a huge platform to sell our wares.

Armed with the information that we have a huge audience, it is not unreasonable to assume that a percentage of that audience is interested in what we have to offer, or perhaps not just interested but actually looking for what we have to offer and for whatever reason just didn’t know about us. Enter your business stage left!

The camera is rolling, your centre stage and the world is listening.

By creating this online arena, you are not just providing information to the world but gaining information, feedback and comments (good & bad) back that help you to grow, improve and promote your business and services. Creating a community of like minded people that interact, explore and collaborate could set you up nicely within your community and deem you a noteworthy source.

Creating these accounts and communities is free, total free and budget wise is an ideal solution for those on limited marketing recourses however, be careful, the downside to this type of marketing and exposure does require constant attention to reap any real benefit. 

Don’t underestimate the time commitment that this will consume. Allocating specific time each week (or more often if you can) to update and interact with your community is a must if trust is to be built.

Social media really does come under the category of ‘You must put in, to get out’.

Join us on Facebook and Become a fan of our business Pages and you can follow more of our Social Media blog articles. 

The term itself “Social Media” often causes confusion and misunderstanding and I, myself have heard it explained in seminars and workshops with at least three different slants, so let’s start with the basics.

‘Media’ is not a new term that businesses are not used to using; however the term media now applies to many different areas, the main two being, Industrial Media and Social Media

Industrial Media is commonly referred to as “traditional”, “broadcast” or “mass” media, and basically uses the good old pen and paper, newspaper, TV and radio. The content of which is delivered to you, not by mail (well sometimes but) by the author. The content is written, read or broadcast in full and although offers feedback ability, that feedback does not form part of the content. Interaction starts and stops with the delivery method and the person that is consuming the media.

Social Media (also under the banner of Web 2.0) is radically different to that. Social Media uses the internet and web technologies to deliver and transform content with the start of the content being OTM (One to Many) generating the MTM (Many to Many) viral structure. Businesses will often refer to this as UGC (User Generated Content)

Social Media is designed to be highly scalable, highly interactive and most of all very informative.

Examples of Social Media are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, blogs …  the list goes on for some time but the idea being multiple inputs providing greater, deeper information – like the snowball effect.

How Do I Benefit from Social Media?

Other than the really obvious one of access to an array of information, you can also provide and array of information that others find interesting and repeat/ forward all over the word!

Google LOVES content, it’s not human, and it does care if your pictures are really pretty, it’s a computer and computers read information and the information on the web is HTML code – simple.

Every blog article, forum post, tweet that generates traffic, buzz and interest in your web pages is gold dust. If it’s on the web it’s HTML and Google is reading it.

Google has launched a plug-in that for want of a better phrase transforms Microsoft’s IE8 Browser  into Goggles own Brower,  Chrome .

With Google’s version offering faster launch, faster searching and better compatibility we may well find that a whole in the market place as just been filled nicely.

 Research released in August 2009 by Net Applications (a US based market research firm), Internet Explorer sat with a comfortable 67 percent of the worldwide browser market, while the Mozilla –Firefox Browser had a respectful 23 percent and Apple Safari’s browser had 4 percent.

As it currently stands Chrome has been making ground on Internet Explorer, so what will this new development do to the web usage trends

Google’s Chrome Engineering Director Linus Upson indicated that he would be very disappointed if the Browser’s market share has not increased to 5 percent on its second birthday and double again to around 10 percent a further year on.

Attempting to not only scrap the surface of the browser users Google’s Chrome Team are determined to knock the Microsoft Giant of the firm foothold held for many years by making its first distribution  deal with the one of the hardware market leaders Sony. Although the financial specifics of the deal are being held close, it has been described as experimental.  However they are already in talks to increase their distribution with similar computer manufacturers to boost distribution.

Check out all the browsers available, the good, the bad and the down and out ugly.