Does Your Website Look Like a Catalog?

A lot of the websites I've been working with lately have things that need to be moved. I'm advising one to get that "Download a Free Trial" button up where people can see it, another to put the name of the product in the Look at Me spot at the top of the page, a third to let their portfolio page show images to greater advantage.

"Get the goods into the shop window!" I seem to be saying a lot of the time.

But there is such a thing as having too much of your stuff in your shop window, too blatantly, and too fast.

Look at this homepage:



It has all these nice images -- and just as many more below the fold -- laid out rather like classified ads.

The effect is sort of overwhelming.

It's hard to get any overall sense of the company from this: you can't see the forest for the trees.

BruiseMD doesn't have so many different products, but they've actually got their customers checking out from the home page.



Both these companies make products which are specialized and new to many people. It makes sense in these cases to let the homepage introduce the product, the company, the concept even -- and then have the actual shopping going on at another page.

If you look at the navigation bars of these two pages, you'll see that each actually has a "Products" page, and Sweetiques has a store as well. They've just let the e-commerce content creep out onto the homepage.

Make sure that your essential message is highly visible, as BruiseMD has. They have the name of their product and what it does right up in the upper left hand corner where the visitors' eyes will naturally start reading their page. The "value proposition," as my client in the financial sector puts it, should be clear and immediately visible.

But then consider a little subtlety. Invite your visitors in. Let them get to know you. Make it easy to shop, but don't make the visitor feel that nothing else is going on at your website. (Check out "Friction at Your Website" for some further thoughts on this point.) Let the customers click to go to the catalog, mentally prepared to see all the goods.

The result will be a more upmarket look, a more useful site, and just as much shopping.

How Long Does it Take to Make a Website?

Tom Hapgood, a design prof with whom I sometimes work, claims that a year is a normal length of time for getting a website from idea to launch. The fastest one I've done this year was one month -- but that was from the client's contact with me to launch, so it could be that the client was thinking about it for eleven months first.

Coming back to say that Tom and I have now done several sites in less than a month -- and the factors below are still the determining ones.

What factors affect the speed of your site's preparation?

• Your initial planning and decision-making. I know people who've been planning a website for more than a year, and still haven't hired anyone or taken any steps. Sometimes people meet with me and then wait a few months before taking further action. This is fine. Just don't count from when you first had the idea and become impatient too soon.
• Your funding. Sometimes a site is conceptually ready, but the funds aren't quite in place. One site I'm working on right now had to go through some committees, and others in the past have languished while we waited for an initial payment. Here again, it's not a problem, but you can't start counting till the contract is signed and the deposit is paid.
• Your content. I can write a typical website in two to five hours. My part of a website normally is just a matter of getting on the calendar, and then the next day you have your site written. But there can be other factors. For example, if I send a draft and several weeks pass before I get the requests for changes, I will have moved on to other projects, and it may be a day or two before I get those changes made. Also, a project sometimes has to go through several people for feedback or approval. The travels of the content through channels can add significantly to the time involved. Sometimes, too, your web professionals may have to wait for you to send a picture, or some particular information. Here again, a site that's waiting for staff bios or pricing decisions can get moved off the front burner and have to wait its turn when you get the info sent in.
• The design. Different designers work at different speeds. Jay Jaro, a designer on the Onsharp team with me, usually has overnight turnaround. I also work with people who have to think for several days before even touching the keyboard. This doesn't reflect quality or dedication, just personal work style. It's something to ask about when you make your plans. The designer's work load apart from your project, your speed with responding to iterations, and the number of people involved in the project affect the speed, too. Sometimes you can get a slide puzzle situation in which the writer is waiting on the web designer for word counts, the web designer is waiting on the logo designer for colors and concept, the logo designer is waiting on the client for a response, and the client is waiting on the writer for an overall theme. Communication is key in cases like these, so that everyone knows who is waiting for whom.
• The engineering. Cutting and coding are the most time-consuming parts of the job, aside from thinking. Shan at Sharp Hue gives a basic estimate of 20 hours for the building of a basic website, as I give a two to five hour estimate for the writing of a website. It can vary. Some sites need more engineering than others. And once again, the more people get involved, the more traveling the files have to do, the more changes are made -- in each case, the more delays will be involved.
• The launch. If you go with a web firm, so that design and hosting take place together, then launch is just a matter of pushing the button. If you are moving your site, or having a design done and then placing it with a hosting service, there can be further delays.

I hope this helps with your planning. If you're in a hurry, here's what you can do to speed things up:

• Make up your mind quickly. I've seen projects wait for anywhere from a few hours to a few months for clients to approve a draft or a design. Often, there are a lot of people to check with or you want to live with the design for a while before committing to it, and your web professionals understand that. Certainly, it is always better to be sure than to pay for changes later. But decisiveness is the #1 way a client can speed up the process.
• Communicate clearly. Asking for a particular launch date doesn't guarantee completion by your target date, but it greatly improves the chances. Your web people can clear their calendars, or at least let you know whether your target date is realistic. And making your wants and needs clear from the beginning increases the chances of your getting what you want the first time around.
• Dovetail the work. With a clear idea ahead of time and clear communication, you can have everyone working at once, rather than doing all the steps one after another. Having a project manager, working with an established team, and working with people you already know are strategies to make this suggestion more do-able.

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Dynamic Content Without a Blog?

By "dynamic" here I don't mean "exciting." I mean changing. When people come to visit your site on Monday, it has something different from when they visited on Friday.

Search engines like new content. People do, too. People who idly drop by to see what's new will, when someday they need services like yours, think of you and drop by purposefully. Occasional customers who find your content useful will become regular customers. It increases your value to your visitors and makes your site more interesting.

The obvious way to do this is with a blog. What if a blog just isn't for you?

(You might want to check the comments at "Does Every Website Need a Blog?" before you decide, though.)

Anyway, if you decide against a blog, there are still ways to arrange for dynamic content at your website.

• Change your website often. Onsharp and SharpHue do this: they add new pages, drop in a video, expand the portfolio. They are both web firms, so it's easy for them. But you can do it, too, if you have a content management system, or if you have someone like me to make updates for you. Still, this is probably the hardest option.
• Share your knowledge. FileReplicationPro has a "Knowledgebase" full of highly detailed technical information. If you have questions about memory allocation for file replication, you know where to go. They've set this up as a wiki, so people can discuss and update it, and they can add to it whenever they have time. An easier option is to have articles, as Midwest Medical Billing does. You can prepare them with your word processor and email them to your webmaster to be uploaded.
  
• Host a discussion. The Stage Hypnosis Center has a lively discussion forum. People hang out there the way they do at Facebook. They pay for the privilege, which is a nice perk you can obtain after your forum becomes successful. You'll need to plan a forum application or bulletin board with your web designer, and you do need to nurture the conversation to begin with. In fact, I see want ads for people to initiate discussions at new discussion boards, but you can also just dragoon your friends and family into helping you out till you gain some momentum. At that point, you can keep things rolling with limited time and effort.
  
• Let people play. Brass Music Online has music samples to listen to, which are updated regularly. Offer free samples and change your offers frequently.
• Have featured products. Your local grocery store uses this trick. It used to amaze me when I saw grocery store flyers shouting "Canned tuna! 99 cents!" when 99 cents was the regular price. Why, I wondered, would people be deceived by this? It really isn't deceitful, though. Some customers may assume that featured items are on sale, but many are simply reminded of them. "Ah, tuna!" they think. "I haven't had that in a while," and they buy some. A Plus Educational has new featured products every couple of weeks and shoppers come to see what's new or just new to them. Since I make a point of also featuring those products in blog and lesson plan posts, the featured items tend to sell briskly, too.
  

I hope you're inspired by one or more of these options to consider how you might freshen up your website.

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Website Makeover

The good people at Liquid Dispatch, Inc. have a new web design. Here's their current look:



And here's their new look, written by me and designed by Tom Hapgood:



Actually, we're fixing the content on the right to keep all the items in the bulleted list to one line of text each, but this is almost the finished version. It has a more modern look and feel, the navigation is better, and the code is up to date, but does this have any consequences beyond mere aesthetic improvement?

Notice the differences, from the point of view of the search engines:

• The new version has more content, with more important keywords in important places, so the search engines can more easily tell what Liquid Dispatch does. It's still natural-sounding, and informative for the human visitors, but it's going to be more visible.
• The whole new site is available to the search engines. The old site had sections that couldn't be read by search engines at all.
• The part of the content that is just for the search engines is now more useful. The new site has analytics installed, too.
  

The new "about us" section is going to be important for human visitors, and therefore for conversions. Since their human visitors are looking for someone to transport petroleum products and liquid nitrogen and stuff across the country, reliability matters a lot. "About us" is the "you can trust us and here's why" section. This company needs one. Fortunately, they have many strong "here's why you can trust us" statements they can make. and even more fortunately, the content for this page can quite naturally be studded with their keywords.

Combining "contact' and "price quotes" eliminates a stop-and-think moment for their visitors. All "Hmm... what should I do now?" moments have the possibility of making your visitors give up and leave instead of following through with the contact. A smooth path from first contact with your page to conversion is a must.

So the new page should bring greater visibility as well as better responses from their customers. Definitely worth doing.

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The Five Second Test

I'm at various stages with various new websites that I'm writing. One is about to launch, one is at the mockup stage, one has the first meeting with the designer scheduled, after discussion with the client, several have had their content turned in, and one is in the "newly assigned" category.

As a result, I've been looking at a lot of websites -- old one, new ones, and planned ones -- with a critical eye.

This is a very good thing to do with your own website from time to time. And there's a great online tool that can help you with it: the Five Second Test.

This tool works very simply. You push the "start test" button at the site linked above, and you get five seconds to look at a website. You are then given time to place tags on all the areas you noticed and remembered.

This replicates the experience of visitors surfing quickly through search results or referring links before deciding where to stop and look around a bit more.

It doesn't replicate the experience exactly, because surfing visitors often have some information or goal when they arrive. That is, we've clicked based on the description or the anchor text of the link, and we're looking for something. We take those five seconds to confirm our hope that the site has what we're looking for.

Still, the Five Second Test gives a good indication of the kind of visual input that we find memorable and immediately comprehensible. It also tells the designer what is catching the attention and the memory of visitors.

When you're trying this tool, start by doing a couple of random tests. You may be surprised by what you notice and remember. The logo, perhaps? The phone number in the top right hand corner? The main image in the design may be what you notice. I got the main headings, but often didn't see the contact info.

The process of taking the test may give you some insights you can take back to your own website. For example, I caught the names of the companies only about half the time -- when there was a clear logo in the kind of place where I expect to see a logo. If visitors notice the name of our company as they surf through, they're more likely to remember and find us later. So this point seems pretty essential.

Check when you were able to remember the name of the company, and then see whether your own website fulfills those conditions. Determine whether a visitor would get enough information about what you do to cause him or her to want to stay. See how thoroughly you've hidden your contact information.

You can then, if you choose, upload a screenshot from your own website, or an image of the mockup for your new website (with the permission of the designer, of course, if you haven't yet paid for it or approved it), and get results from others' tests of your image.

Try it out. Share your insights, too.

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Web Development: Should You Buy Local?

For produce, there's no question -- the nearer you are to the source, the better.

When you want to hire someone to write, build, or host your website, is this also true? Do you need someone local?

There are advantages to working with a local person:

• You can meet directly, in person, if you want to. If you feel that you communicate better face to face, or you want to look at things and get your hands on them, local is better.
• If you really don't feel comfortable with computers at all, don't like email, and are just flat nervous about the process, then local can be better. However, I'm very comfortable with people who feel this way, so if your local guys just make it worse, you call me. 479-283-5593.
  
• A local person might be more concerned about you and your company's needs. Might not. But the big national hosting firm may feel less personally involved than the people who actually come into your business regularly.
  
• A local person might be more accessible to you, quicker to respond, and offer you better quality control. Not always. But sometimes you have better access, and sometimes you know ahead of time whether or not you will. There might be a better chance that you'll know some of the same people and can get a reference you feel confident about. And you have a better chance of being able to go to their office if you're feeling urgent about a contact.
  
• It can be good for your local economy.
  

There can also be advantages to going further afield:

• You can find specialists. The work that I do is pretty specialized. You may not have anyone in your neighborhood with the same skills. While most towns nowadays boast a web designer or hosting company, you can't always get the quality you want in your area.
• You may get a bargain. People in less expensive parts of the country or the world may provide equal quality at a lower price. Not always, but sometimes.
• You can find greater variety. Just as every region has its own ideas about barbecue, you may find that there's a regional style in web design -- the style taught at the local university or design school, in some cases.
  
• You can get a native speaker. If you plan to have a website in a language that isn't spoken in your local area, you should go elsewhere. A sentence or two, okay, use a dictionary, but any significant amount of content should always be written by a native speaker of the language.
• It's fun to work with people from far-off places.
  

I have clients and colleagues from all over the world. I enjoy getting to know them and learning about their businesses and homes. I also like working with local people face to face. You may find that you prefer one approach over the other.

Fortunately, your web content arrives fresh no matter where it comes from, unlike that produce.

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Friction at Your Website: Good or Bad?

Friction is a key concept in transportation, but it's also an important idea in commerce. Economist Thomas Friedman describes human contact during commerce as "friction."

You drive up to the gas pump, slide your card, pump your gas, take your receipt from the machine, and drive off. No human contact, just the essentials of the transaction. Compared with having someone come out to your car and ask what you want, fill your gas tank, clean your windshield, accept payment, take it inside to complete the transaction, bring your your change or a bill to sign, exchange some concluding pleasantries -- well, the friction slows the transaction down, doesn't it?

You can find the same contrast at websites. One e-commerce site may give you an opportunity to arrive signed in, select items from your past purchase list, and be out of there with a click or two. Another may tempt you with special offers, include a blog and tips and a community to chat in, and generally be a virtual hangout.

Do you want a smooth transaction at your website, or do you want some friction?

• What are you selling? If you have a commodity for sale, something that people need and will buy anywhere they can get it cheaply and easily, then you don't want friction. You want to get that car insurance, battery, or hotel reservation into the consumer's virtual hands as fast and painlessly as possible. If you're selling an experience, or something that people have to think about for awhile before committing to, then you need some friction.
• Can you upsell? Maybe your customers arrive with something basic in mind -- a packet of green tea -- but could be persuaded to hang around. Offer some recipes and health information, and they might add some matcha and mochi bites to the order.
• Don't forget the basics. I visited the website of a local bookstore last night in the city where I'm visiting. There's a lot at that website -- book lists, history, events... I may go back and read it sometime. It made the store look interesting to me, and might be something that keeps the regulars coming back. However, I wanted to go to the bookstore. Hours. location, maybe a phone number would have been handy for me. In this case, the friction could have prevented me from visiting the bookstore, and I walked out (once I found the place) with a dozen books. Basic info above the fold would have been a smart choice.

As with so many other issues of web design and web content, it comes down to usability. Figure out what your customers want to be able to accomplish without friction: getting your contact information, making simple repeated purchases, checking their accounts. Make those things easy.

Then offer a bit of community, a bit of opportunity for play or learning -- a bit of friction.

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Where Do Your Website's Visitors Come From?

One of the things you can learn by looking at your Google Analytics is where your visitors are when they come to your website. Just click on "Map Overlay" at your analytics dashboard, and you'll see a phrase like "3213 visitors came from 92 countries." You can then look closer and see the region, state, or city your visitors were in.

If it's a personal website you're looking at, you can respond to this with, "Wow, cool, people from Hungary come to see me!" If you've got a business website, this information can be more useful than that.

First, consider whether you can actually sell goods or services to people from 92 countries. If you have local business -- a brick and mortar store, a service that requires your physical presence, things like that -- then it may still be cool to have visitors from 92 countries, but you want the great majority of your visitors to be local. If they're not, then you need to do more linking with local sites, to encourage your actual customers to visit your website.

One company I'm working with right now sells chocolate. They're happy to ship, but not to tropical countries, and not to subtropical states like mine except in winter. So a preponderance of visitors from hot places would tell us that we're not focusing on the right geographical areas in our marketing.

If you have a national or a global reach, you can still benefit from the information. The school supply company I work with serves the entire country, but school calendars differ from one state to another. Seeing when New York's teachers start their Back to School browsing lets us target our marketing and plan for staffing and stocking needs -- if we relied only on the data from the local brick and mortar store, we'd miss those opportunities.

Watch for changes, too. A sudden spike in visitors from Milwaukee? Then you need to find out what happened there -- a radio show? a local mention of your name in the paper or of your product at a workshop? Find out so you can repeat the effect.

Finally, you can look more closely at a particular population's activity once they reach your website. Is the content your visitors from India choose to look at different from that most popular with your visitors from the UK? Do some countries have a higher conversion rate than others -- and if so, might you want to focus efforts on them rather than on the people who look but don't buy? Or do you just need to tweak your message to increase conversion from that other location?

The map overlay doesn't need to be a daily check, but it should be something you look at before your next marketing strategy meeting.

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Showing Off at Your Website

I'm not talking here about the technically flashy website. I'll talk about that some other time. Today I'm talking about content.

Not so long ago, I had some content sent back to me for being "braggartly." I didn't think it was bragging, but it's always easier to brag about someone else than about yourself, and my client just wasn't comfortable with the admiring tone I had taken about his company.

I rewrote it as a modest statement of fact. The client was happy, and it was probably just as effective.

Last week, I worked with a company that took modesty to extremes. It came up in conversation that they were a family business. "Oh," they said, "do you think people will want to know that?" With twenty years experience. "Do you think we should put that in?" And partnerships with most of the major players in their industry. "Is that important?"

You can take modesty too far.

But you can also take braggadocio too far. The! Best! in the World! doesn't really convince anyone, and it can turn off many visitors.

How can you make sure that your web content is not too modest, not too bold, but just right?

• Use facts. When you rely on facts, you're not bragging. The awards you've won, the number of years you've been in business, the quality materials you use, the quantifiable results you've achieved -- reporting these things isn't boasting.
• Let someone else say it. Faithfully repeating testimonials from your clients isn't boasting, either. Say "May I quote you?" and get those kind words onto your page.
• Spread the credit around. Mention the accomplishments of all the people who've contributed to the quality and success of your organization. Not only does this let your visitors learn more about your company, but it also shows that you value your workers, and that's an admirable trait.
  

My basic philosophy about marketing is simple: do something very well, and let people know it. With excessive modesty, you may be keeping your visitors from learning that you're good at what you do. With boasting, you move from letting people find out about your quality goods and services, to making them suspect that you value yourself too highly.

The peacock shows his gorgeous tail, and lets it speak for itself. He's on the right side of that line between showing and showing off.

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Does Every Website Need a Blog?

The smart people over at Hubspot sent out a missive recently saying, among other things, that every website needs a blog.

I've been wondering about that. On the one hand, blogs are great for search, traffic, and conversion. They let you rank for multiple keywords, they drive traffic (for some of my clients, blogs are their major source of traffic), they let you hold a conversation with your clients and customers, they provide an avenue for announcing news about your company, they give your website dynamic content, they bring people back to your website frequently -- what's not to like?

You really need a blog if

• you sell something. If you have products, then your blog lets you show those products, give tips for their use, and generally let people see what great stuff you have. Retailers all need blogs.
  
• you have news. If you bring out new versions of things, attend trade shows, are a good source of information on regulations or conditions that affect your customers, know stuff they might not know, or participate in community life, then you need a blog.
  
• you have relationships with your clients or customers. When you know the people you work with, they're likely to be interested in knowing about you and about one another.

But does every website need a blog? I was mentioned in the Wall Street Journal a week or so back, and since then I've had lots of folks taking advantage of my offer to do a quick free web analysis. Most don't have blogs. So, as I check out their websites, I think about whether I'd recommend that they have one or not. Lawyers? Industrial manufacturers? Moving companies?

Actually, I could imagine blogs for all those websites. I could even write blogs for all of them. Great ideas for that moving company are even now crowding my brain.

But I'm working right now on a website for a bulk liquid freight backhauling broker, and I haven't suggested that they add a blog to their site.

Perhaps you don't need a blog if

• you won't keep it up. If, like the dog in the picture above, you find writing exhausting, then you shouldn't have a blog unless you're going to hire someone to keep it up for you. A blog that isn't posted regularly is worse than no blog at all.
• your services are narrow and highly specialized. This is the case for the people at Liquid Dispatch. If you happen to need a bulk liquid freight backhauling broker, you know what they do. There aren't many nuances. They could still have a blog -- Marilyn and the boys are really interesting people, and I for one would read about their adventures, but they tell me they're "guys with phones."
  
• you're shy. I'm still trying to persuade the people at Liquid Dispatch to let me put their names on their website. I felt a bit of triumph when they decided to allow me to make them an "About us" page. They're not going to share their recipes for mojitos or tell us about their patio parties.

So if you are a shy person with a highly specilized service business who doesn't really want a blog and won't post to one if you have one, then you might not need a blog.

Maybe a Squidoo lens, though.

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Colors and Your Website

Have I said yet this week that I'm not a designer? I like to get that in every now and then. The things I do in the area of web design -- and I do a lot of those things -- are about usability, navigation, where things should go... The things that have to do with meaning and communication. I leave the graphic art issues to other people.

And yet, I often work with people who have to deal with colors in their websites without the aid of a designer.

Sometimes they're DIY website owners, or working with a stock template. This is never going to be the most effective plan, but plenty of people start out that way. Sometimes they have their website built, but have other things -- like their Twitter account or their blog -- which they control themselves. Sometimes they simply prefer to make their own design decisions, even though they have someone doing the tech stuff for them.

This post will discuss some very basic considerations about color and your web presence, in response to the kinds of questions people ask me about color. Usually I say things like, "I'm not the one to ask about color." When they persist, I can tell that they really need some basic assistance. So here it is.

The first thing to consider is how the color you're think of using will affect your visitors. Here's the current site for a new client of mine. We're going to be working on a lot of things, but the first question for the designer was, "Do you want to keep the colors?" The red looks bold and vigorous, yet down to earth, and red is what this site design is all about.



The effect would be completely different with pink, or seafoam blue, or with poison green. The new design will be more modern and more in keeping with the importance of this company in the industry, but with the same basic color, it will still have the same basic feeling.

Think about the kinds of colors people associate with your industry or your business, and consider going with those associations -- or intentionally breaking away from them.

When I had my own website designed, the first thing I said was, "Not black." I'm a tech person, an information worker, and a black background can give a hi-tech look. But one of the differences about my business is that people who aren't that comfortable with technology can be comfortable with me. So I wanted reassuring colors that would let visitors know that.

As it happens, I work for lots of tech guys, so the lack of a black background hasn't made them uncomfortable either. If you're not sure how people respond to the color you have in mind, you can test your website design and find out.

The next thing to consider is reinforcing your brand.

We have a joke at my house: if I say I'm tempted to do something out of character, like smack somebody, my kids say, "You can't do that. It's not your brand." This may not be much of a joke, but the point is that you want your customers to recognize you, whether they're at your website or your blog or your MySpace page.

Using colors consistently is one of the easiest ways to maintain your brand wherever you go.

Check out Onsharp's new web design portfolio -- it's a video, so you can see a number of color changes at that one site. Even though they're showing several different featured clients, each of which has a different set of colors, they've kept their own colors as a frame, maintaining a consistent look and feel. They're designers, so they can do stuff like that.

You can, too. At FileReplicationPro's Twitter page, I've changed the page to use their colors. This is extremely easy to do. You click on "settings" at your account, then "design," then "change colors."



I mentioned this yesterday, and someone emailed me to say that it wasn't that easy. How do you find the colors that match your website or logo? Sometimes you can just ask your designer, but not always, and sometimes you can look in your source code, but not always. You could just guess, but that isn't the best plan. Both the pages I'm showing you today use red, but they aren't the same red. How can you find the precise color match, out of all the possible colors?

I have a trick for this which I'll be happy to share. First, you need to know that online colors all have six digit numbers, called hex codes, which look like this: #f8d160. You can see examples at the Twitter "change colors" page. When you know the codes of the colors you want, you can match those colors easily. Here's an easy way to find them:

• Go to Big Huge Labs Color Palette Generator.
• Upload your logo, or a screen shot of your web page.
• Push the "create" button.
• You will see the numbers of the colors in your logo or website. If you only have a few, the creator will suggest more that would look good with what you already have.
• Now you have the numbers. Write them down someplace.
  

You can now put those numbers into the appropriate spots at Twitter and have your own somewhat branded background. You can download swatches for Photoshop, too, or copy the sample CSS, but if you know what to do with that, you probably don't need this post.

The third thing to think about is that colors on a website aren't always just for decoration. Often the color of text says, "This is a link" or "This is a link you've already visited" or "This is a new section, and we think it's important."

The essential thing to remember here is that, if you use colored text just because you can, you should quit it immediately. Your visitors are trying to click on things that ought to be links but aren't, and they will come to hate you.

The final point I'd like to make is that all this has nothing to do with search. The search engines don't know what colors you're using. Some otherwise good sources of advice on search will tell you that this means the look of your site doesn't matter. You can ignore aesthetics, they'll say, because that's not what's going to get you those rankings you want.

I'm going to disagree. Because you don't want good search rankings just so you can tell your friends, right? You want your business to benefit. And for that, the reactions of the humans are always important.

Basic Twitter Errors

There's plenty of controversy over whether the use of Twitter is beneficial for businesses or not. I've had clients contact me from Twitter (as in, "I read about you at Twitter and I'd like to hire you") so I think it can be, but statistically speaking, social media marketing may not give you the best bang for your buck (and SEOMoz's Rand Fishkin lays out the data for you in "Getting Honest About Social Media Marketing").

So, if you're going to use Twitter, it's essential to use it right. Avoiding those very basic Twitter errors from the beginning will maximize your return on your Twitter investment. I'm not going to tell you to be sincere and get involved, because you already know that. I'm not going to tell you to have good, useful content, because you already know that, too, right? I'm talking about the very basic structural stuff.

I've seen these errors in the tweeting of some of the wonderful companies I'm working with right now. Here's the first:



It's a nice Twitter background, there's a nice group of followers, and you might think that if you clicked on those things up there that look like links and buttons, you'd get to visit the website.

Nope. There's actually no permanent link to the website at all. There are links in the tweets, but the apparent links in the background are just a tease. Your Twitter page ought to link to your website, so that people who find you that way can readily visit your website. True, they can type in the URL, but research tells us that making it easy to visit increases the visits significantly.

And yes, that image above is a link. Go ahead, check it out! Sweetique needs a more user-friendly website and a linked-up Twitter page, but their products are very cool.

Here's another innovative product with a Twitter page:



Problem is, they're using it like ads. These people have a lot of interesting things to say, as it happens, but they're not saying them at Twitter. If the immediate visual effect of your Twitter page is that it's ad copy, people won't hang around with you much. Instead, try using facts, occasional links to other, related information, or announcements of specific events. You'll get a more varied, authentic look that will encourage people to stay and read.

The next example has a similar problem -- but it's worse:



Here we're not seeing just ads, but something rather like spam. When you use @ and the name of another Twitterer, it looks like a conversation. If you check back on these, you see that they're not in fact conversations at all -- the other participants aren't tweeting. They're ads being directed toward individuals. The effect of a whole page of this is -- a slightly disguised page of ads. You get the drawbacks of using Twitter for ads, plus the additional drawback of looking as though you're being sneaky, even if that's not your intent.

Another thing about the last two: they're both using the default background. You can change your Twitter page background with settings>design. Upload an image, remembering that much of it will be covered up by the center panel of tweets, change the colors to match your website, and you won't blend in with the crowd.

Twitter is the least time-consuming social media option, and perhaps the most widely used. It's great for authentic networking or as a virtual water cooler. And, just like physical-world authentic networking and water coolers, it can sometimes lead to good things for your business. So if you don't already have an account there for your company, go set one up. Spend a little time making your page look the way you want it to, set your blog up to go automatically to Twitter, and then -- well, get involved, be sincere, and provide some good and useful content.

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Website Music

Music at your website is a lot like kissing. We all like being kissed, but that doesn't mean that we want to be grabbed and kissed, willy-nilly, by just everyone. We all like music, but that doesn't mean that we want it thrust upon us just because we visited a website.

Indeed, we may like being kissed, but not want to be kissed in particular ways or at particular times. Just so, we may not like particular kinds of music, or may not want to have it start up when we're already listening to our own choice of music. We may not want to be kissed repeatedly when we are trying to get our work done (I can't be the only one who has ever had this problem), and we may not want to listen to that loop of music when we're trying to concentrate on a task.

In, fact, that was the thing that made me start thinking about this issue: a client forwarded an example of a kind of video he's considering adding to his website. While I admired the clarity and usefulness of the example, there was a little four-bar bit of music that repeated throughout the entire thing.

I found it distracting.

It is possible that there are four bars of Bach or Ben Harper or something that I could stand to hear 93 times while having some tech process explained, but that particular four bars wasn't in that category.

As is so often the case, once the topic had brought itself to my attention, I found it everywhere. While doing research for an article, I found myself at no fewer than five websites which began playing music as soon as they opened.

I enjoyed some more than others. And the thing is, since it's hard to predict how your visitors will respond to your music, there is the danger that it will cause them to close your website, to hesitate to return to it, or to hesitate to link to it, regardless of how they feel about your product or services.

Here are some possibilities for planning music at your website:

• Make it an opt-in situation. That is, let people choose when they want to hear the music. This musician's website has a page for listening, with an easy-to-find "listen" button. It's easy to listen if you want to, but you have a choice.
  

• At least, make it an easy opt-out. The button in the example just below is clear and obvious. A more subtle look like the one beneath it may lead visitors to click away from your site sooner than they would if they had a choice.
  

• Make it good music. This is almost unfair, since "good music" is an extremely subjective term. However, you'd be wise to avoid having midi files greet your visitors. While there was a time when midi files were the norm in computer music, that day is past. Midi files can still be useful for practicing music, but they're really not intended for listening to for pleasure. If you put a tinny jingle on your website back in 1993 to make it cool, it's time to remove it.

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How to Ask for Links

Your website will benefit by having links from other websites. Read more about this concept at my earlier post, "Linkbuilding: Getting That Natural Look."

You can get links naturally by having great content. You can buy links honestly, in the form of advertising. You can place links yourself, in a variety of ways. Still, if you're doing serious linkbuilding, you will have to ask people for them at some point.

How can you do this successfully?

Let's take a moment to define "success." Getting 25% of the links you ask for is considered a success in the industry. This is just speaking generally, though. If you only ask for links when you're really sure you deserve a yes, your success rate will be higher. If you send out mass emails asking for links from everyone whose address you were able to get by any means, your rate will be lower.

Today, I'm thinking about that middle ground. We're going to suppose that you've gotten links from all the really obvious people, and are moving on to the ones who might not have thought of linking to you. You need to persuade them a little.

Here's how:

• Remember it's not about you. Here's a link request I received:

"Dear Webmaster, We have visited your site http://www.rebeccahaden.com and found it quite impressive. We are dealing with a site which is based on the same theme of yours and looking for high quality related sites who can give me link backs. My site is having a PR of 3 and if you will give me a link back then definitely our site will also get benefited.This would be a win situation for both of us and I would really appreciate if you add my site with this information: Computer Technician / IT Support / IT Services. The TechServicesGuide is a completely free services that requires no obligation. A strategic provider of IT services is hard to find. There are no comprehensive IT directories available. We have the tools to help you on your way and the experience working with tech providers.Thanks & Regards, Administrator."



If this were a friend of mine saying, "Hey, I have a new site and I really need links. It's kind of related to yours, so can you give me a hand and link to me?" I'd do my best to help out. This is not a friend. This is someone who decided not to use my name or even his or her own name, and yet the focus of the request is definitely on my doing this person a favor.

Instead, focus your request on how a link would benefit the visitors to the site you want a link from. I'm not convinced by this email that my visitors are panting to have an introduction to a computer tech guy in Australia, so I didn't give this person a link. I did go look at the site, and I did respond, but that's just in case there was a human being involved in this email -- by no means a sure thing.



• Visit the website you want a link from. I'm sort of embarrassed to say this, because it should be obvious, but it's clearly not, based on the kinds of requests I get. A recent example was directed toward one of my clients (on my email address for their company). It came from a direct competitor, and opened with a description of their services in terms suggesting that my clients would be unfamiliar with the services the writer provided, but might care to pass along any of their customers who needed these arcane things done. That kind of thing is actually insulting.

Instead, visit the website, get to know it, and mention in your email the specific things you noticed about the site that make you think that their visitors would find your link useful and beneficial.


• Follow normal rules of courtesy. Make the effort to find the name of the person you're writing to. Share your own name. If they respond to you, thank them. You know, the kinds of things that distinguish real emails from spam.

If you know a little bit about linkbuilding, you may be thinking that this is a time-consuming way to go about it. Yes, it is. However, if you know a lot about linkbuilding, you know that this is the way to get valuable links.

Is Being Nice an Unfair Advantage for SEO?

A common thread runs through a lot of current discussions on SEO: being nice.

Your social media marketing efforts won't work, we're cautioned, if you're not sincere. You can do well by doing good, as consumers increasingly base their spending decisions on social responsibility and an increasingly flat-world sense of community. Google assures us that anything we do to improve the user experience will improve our search results.

There is, in these discussions, an underlying assumption that the readers are nice. You have to wonder why all these things are being written, since they merely remind all of us nice people that our niceness is to our advantage.

What if you're not nice? What if you're a grasping, covetous, money-grubbing swine? Should you be locked out of the benefits of SEO, social media marketing, and the online business community?

I'm not going to touch the moral question. I'm just here to help.

Here, for those who are not in fact nice, is a quick course in how to pretend to be nice, for the sake of your online business:

• Feign interest in other people. Nice people don't look at all their Facebook friends and LinkedIn connections as potential customers. They actually want to know about those little triumphs and new launches and even the really funny video their electronic friend feels compelled to share. If you're faking niceness, be sure to read these things and make an occasional response.
• Construct a human persona. As more online things are automated, being a bona fide human being grows in value on the web. While you might most often tweet about your company, you will be more valuable at Twitter if you can manage a pretense of having some sort of life outside of work. Pizza Hut is hiring students to hang out at their headquarters this summer, crafting bons mots for Twitter, and you can do the same if need be. But making an alarm at Outlook to remind you every couple of days to go type in a sentence about your thoughts or activities will also work.
• Become concerned about some issue. Even if you're not very nice in real life, there is probably some issue that can touch your stony heart. I care a lot about the environment, myself, and also about child labor. I'm moved to do pro bono work for education and the arts. I have clients who quietly support suicide hotlines or juvenile diabetes research or the Heifer Project, and it increases my respect for them. None of these issues may move you, but a couple of hours searching online will probably net you at least one issue that you can care about. Donate some time or money to the cause, give some links to organizations at your website -- you can show support with a fairly small investment, and it will help you deceive people into thinking you're nice.

Of course, I'm teasing. I know that you are actually a nice person. You know what? That's an advantage for online marketing these days. If you started out in business in the days when being neutrally, inhumanly professional made a company look bigger and more impressive -- or if you've just been so busy that you haven't taken the time to let your nicer side show -- let this tongue-in-cheek list inspire you to show that nice side.

For the good of your search rankings.

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Website Evolution

I wrote about website redesigns for SEO recently: redesigns to improve overall quality of a website, usability of a website, and search friendliness of a website. Today, I'd like to share the evolution of a website over a number of years. The site in question is that of A Plus Educational Supply, a brick and mortar school supply store in a small town.

Here's how the site started:


It looked like this for over a year. I didn't know the owners at the time, so I have no theories on why that should have been the case. But this is basically the equivalent of a phone book listing. It's better than not being online at all, but it certainly doesn't take advantage of the power of the internet.

After a year or so, the site moved on to this look, which it kept for several more years:



A site like this is still like a phone book listing, but this did at least have a link to the store's catalog, so there was some additional value to it. The effect of having "coming soon" messages on your website for five or six years is not going to be positive, but again it's better than not having a website at all.

This is where I came in. The site was getting some traffic, and a few orders, but not enough to pay for itself. The owner, Cindy Magness, said that she knew she had to have a website, but that it seemed like a waste. She was spending a few hundred a year on it, and it brought in that much in sales, but not in profits.

Because of the domain age, she had respectable PageRank and came up first on search for the name of her company, but otherwise didn't see much traffic from search.

This site actually had a content management system which would have allowed Cindy to update her site, but she didn't know that, and wasn't prepared to take advantage of the fact. It seemed clear that she needed a professionally-designed site. However, she also needed to keep her stock catalog -- creating her own e-commerce solution for a frequently-updated inventory of 5,000 SKUs wasn't a cost-effective or a practical option. Since she wasn't ready to go with a custom web page, I suggested that she have the company that took care of her catalog make a homepage for her. I wrote up the text and the meta language, Cindy provided the images, and we sent it off to the large company. Here's what they came up with:



As well as having onsite optimization for search, this site also had ongoing search engine marketing, as I did blogging and linkbuilding for it.

Traffic soon doubled, and sales tripled. While the downturn in the economy did hit this retail store, sales at the website continued to top that of previous years each month, and they've bounced back by now.

After eight months with this homepage, though, Cindy was still not completely happy with it. The results were good, but it's not a custom site and it doesn't look like one. The client also had more understanding of what the web could do for her, and wanted to branch out. She wanted to have dynamic content, to offer e-books and other items the stock catalog didn't carry, and to have a design that showed her own style.

Sticking with the stock catalog, we found a designer who could capture Cindy's vision. We're moving her homepage to professional hosting, with access so that I can update it for her. The new site should go live soon, and here is its new look:



What's the takeaway from this story?

• We have to recognize that the cost of the multiple versions of the site adds up to more than the cost of starting with a custom site. Sometimes you're just not ready to take the plunge, or the funds aren't in place all at once, but this is an inescapable consequence of doing "just for now" versions of your website.
• There is also an opportunity cost. Years of sales at the current level would have resulted in a far higher overall return on Cindy's investment, compared with what actually took place.
• That said,we should also recognize the benefits of having had a website -- any website -- for the length of time that Cindy has had hers. Domain age is an important factor in PageRank (Google's decision about how worthy your site is), and a website that just gives your business's name and contact info is still a web presence. Having a site of limited usefulness is better than having none.
  
• Being willing to make changes is also a good thing. Cindy didn't have the information she needed to make the best possible decisions about her website -- those are easy to make in hindsight, but Cindy works in an industry which has only recently begun to move beyond the stock catalog. I worked in that industry myself, and I can confirm that conference discussions of e-commerce always centered around the worthlessness of websites. Once Cindy was able to see beyond that, she was bold enough to move ahead with that new vision.
  

What's in the future for your website?

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It's in There... Somewhere!

Yesterday I finished up edits on content for a new website. One of the issues that came up frequently in the conversation was the idea of repetition. The client felt that we had already said things on some other page, so we shouldn't say them again.

I understand that point of view. I rarely write for print any more, but I do write for a couple of online magazines, and I teach academic writing. I haven't entirely forgotten about avoiding redundancy.

The thing is, we can't count on our visitors' actually going to all the pages at our website.

My client didn't want to hear that. "What's the point of writing all this, then?" she very reasonably asked.

All of our pages will be visited by someone. We have to write great stuff for the people who get to that particular page. But the way a website is read will look more like a flowchart than like a book.

I have an example for you. I've been working on a couple of cute websites with designer Jeff Wain. At one point, Jeff sent me a link to the majorly cute site whose screen capture you can see at the top of this post.

It didn't work as an inspiration for the preschool site we're working on, as he had thought it might, but it did look like the perfect place for me to buy a little gift I needed.

Here's their very nice and friendly-sounding page for ordering.



I went ahead to checkout, blithely ignoring the "terms and conditions" because, what the heck, I was just buying a little something there and they seemed trustworthy. I clicked on their link, sure, but I didn't scroll down the page. I glanced, concluded that they were talking about privacy and copyright, and clicked back. I think that page got four seconds of my time.

Had I actually scrolled down and read that page, as they wanted me to, I'd have seen this section clearly explaining that the company only ships to Singapore, and that the dollar sign refers to Singapore dollars:



I didn't. I completed my transaction. I was amazed at the low shipping costs that showed up as I checked out, and amazed also when -- after the transaction was completed -- I discovered that a favorable exchange rate made my purchase even less expensive than I had thought it would be.

What's more, I told all my girlfriends about this great place with extremely cute gifts and what a bargain they were. I might have posted the link on my Facebook page.

In order to avoid unnecessary suspense, let me tell you that the kind people at Pally Giraffe emailed and told me that they don't ship to the United States, where I live, but that they'll make an exception in my case. They could also have refunded the purchase price and not sent my order. I'd have understood. I think I'm going to have to send them a present to make up for their loss on my purchase with them.

Pally Giraffe tells us that they only ship to Singapore, and also tells us to go read that page where they say so. Problem is, I -- like the rest of the people who might visit your website -- don't use websites the way the owners want me to. I use them the way I want to. In this case, I saw the product page Jeff sent a link to, the About page, where I read and admired the company's statement of environmental responsibility but found no hint of physical location, and the shopping cart. I got that present ordered in about five minutes and moved on to my next email.

There are ways to design your site to encourage people to take particular paths through your site, but even if you've done that, you can't count on them. Your visitors are at your site for their own purposes, not for yours, and you're not there to say, "Hey, you're not using this website correctly!"

Here's what Pally Giraffe could do, if they find themselves suddenly inundated with orders from Americans needing gifts for little girls:

• Add their address to their home page and contact page, in hopes that foreigners will check on whether or not they ship internationally.
• Add a statement like "We ship only within Singapore" at strategic points along the path to purchasing.
• Get their IT guy to teach their shopping cart to recognize and reject foreign addresses.

A similar case came up recently with an online bookstore whose website I wrote. They weren't getting the orders they wanted, even though traffic was great, so I got some subjects and tested the website. The sticking point became clear very quickly: visitors had to register before shopping. This was explained on the FAQ page -- where people naturally weren't going before attempting to make purchases.

While I'm used to the idea of registering before shopping, the testers often descended to helpless clicking all over the page (you know what I mean -- if you don't do it yourself, you know someone who does) before discovering this requirement. Many of them were frustrated by the time they actually reached the registration page, and were no longer willing to register.

Here's the solution: when you plan your website, plan it with the user journey in mind. Instead of imagining it as a document people read through, try out the different ways people might navigate through it. Make sure your call to action is at every point at which people might decide to take action. Have any important caveats at all the points where people might need them. Put your contact information on every page, unless you really don't want anyone to contact you.

Oh, and if you live in Singapore, you can find some seriously cute stuff at Pally Giraffe.

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Sending Your Blog on Vacation

Blogs work best when they're updated frequently. If people drop by a few times and see no new content, they're likely to quit dropping by. If subscribers see nothing new for weeks on end, they're likely to unsubscribe.

If your blog has good result in the search engines, you're still likely to have visitors to your older posts through search, but it's generally good blogging practice to keep those posts coming regularly.

What if you're going on vacation, though? I taught my last class of the spring semester today. Since that's something I do on the side, that doesn't by any means imply that I get a vacation. But some people get vacations.

How can you keep your blog going while you're gone?

• Stockpile. I have some clients for whom I write a whole bunch of posts at once, and they can post them at their leisure. This is an economical approach to getting professional posts, but you can also do it yourself, writing things when you have time and posting them hastily when your mind is on other things. Just leave them as drafts in your blogging platform, or as text documents. Remember, though, if you cut and paste from MSWord or another word processing program, you'll need to check your posts in all the browsers your visitors use, to make sure they look right. Cut and paste into Notepad first to clean them up instead, if you prefer.
• Find a guest blogger. Ask someone in your field to fill in for you while you're gone. Or, if you'd rather, someone in an adjacent field. For example, your furniture store blog could have a guest blogger from an interior design service. Your lawn care blog could have a guest from a nursery or garden center. It can be a good opportunity for promotion for the guest blogger, and it can be good for you, too. Offer to return the favor some day for maximum benefits to both parties.
• Share your vacation. if your blog isn't too serious, you could post holiday snaps with captions. "Here I am in Waikiki," you could write, "looking for great new bargains for the store!" or whatever the case might be. Check with your accountant to see whether this makes your trip tax-deductible. Either way, it gets your blog done almost as fast as reading your email.

If you're not going on vacation, but just having trouble getting blog updating into your schedule, you can hire someone like me to take care of it for you, or check out my post on how to make time for blogging.

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