Archive for the ‘Web Sites’ Category

I’m not often accused of brevity, but this was a little too long to get out in a Facebook update.

In the past few weeks, I’ve heard a few business owners say that they don’t know if their website is doing anything for them. If you feel the same way, stop doubting. I could cite the preponderance of research that shows how people are researching online more and more before making decisions, but I’ll let you peruse it yourself:

Google results for “online research offline sales”

The point I want to make is this: if people you do business with have visited your web site, then it is contributing to your sales. When someone writes you a check, do they say, “gee, I’m writing this check because your floors are clean and your products are nicely arranged on the shelves”? No, but if you have dirty floors and products jumbled together in heaps, people will buy less. Same thing with a website.

photo credit: Paul Bailey

Think of a website like a storefront.

No one loves analogies more than I do. I’ve even used analogies to explain analogies. But sometimes they can be dangerous. If an analogy provides a mental model that mostly fits, it can blind a person to important truths.

A website is like a storefront, and it is nothing like a storefront. A storefront has one main entry point. A person can evaluate the storefront from the outside. A store owner has a large degree of control over the experience people have as they walk through the door. A website has many entry points. In fact, visitors coming from search engines and social media sites rarely come through the front entrance. In the case of TwoOctobers.com, 14% of visitors land on the home page.

Web designers often create a user experience that assumes visitors will see the home page of a site. In the worst cases, basic information establishing credibility and business focus only exists on the home page. When you think about how people are experiencing your site, you could be doing yourself a disservice.

Designing for Entry Page Behavior

A few things to think about when designing pages and navigation:

• Watch for hot entry pages and spend a little extra time on those. On this site, The Top 10 Free Places to List Your Business is the number one entry point. I’ve already gone back a few times to improve the post and tune the user experience. And I should probably be doing more. It is likely that your site has similar such entry points. Do you have a dusty old blog post or service description page that garners a lot of traffic? Spruce it up! Link to other related and popular content from that page, and consider adding text that explains who you are and what you do.
• Don’t think of navigation as a hierarchy of categories (unless you are in the hierarchy-of-categories business), think of it as signage.  Good signage doesn’t try to tell you where everything is all the time, it focuses on what is close by or likely to be important to you.
• Allocate design effort based on how people are using your site. Joshua Porter of User Interface Engineering proposes an approach that is the inverse of most people’s thinking: visitors spend most of their time deep in site content, so spend less time on your home page and more time improving the user experience of popular content sections. Read his article Prioritizing Design Time: A Long Tail Approach for a better explanation.

Data points on this topic – check out the articles too, they’re very good:

• Andrew Hanelly of TMG Custom Media looked at web traffic for 20 different sites. For most, the home page was the entry point for fewer than 20% of visitors.
• Joshua Porter found that the home page accounted for less than 10% of page views on www.uie.com.
• Gerry McGovern, author and CEO of Customer Carewords reported on a general trend of diminishing traffic to sites’ home pages. I also really like Louise Hewitt‘s suggestions in the comments:
  • Usability test from a non-specific location (e.g. a blank desktop) and ask the user to complete the task.
  • Present sub-page wireframes first and then ‘collect together’ with a home page at the end of the design presentation.
  • Include non-page based designs for user journeys that start before the site is accessed and end after it.

A few weeks ago our accountant asked for suggestions for getting a basic website up. And today I got the same request from another friend. I’m putting my recommendations here so I can point others to it when the need arises.

There are lots of different ways to skin this cat. And while I’ve tried a number of hosting platforms and content management systems, what follows is just how I would go about building a basic site. No more, no less.

1. Sign up for Bluehost. http://www.bluehost.com/cgi/info/hosting_features – Bluehost will provide everything you need: hosting, WordPress, domain name registration and email. It retails for $6.95/month, but there are almost always promotional deals available. Google “bluehost promotion” to look for promotions if they don’t list one on the features page.
2. Bluehost will walk you through the steps of getting your site set up. Bluehost will also help you find and register a domain name, or instruct you on how to use a domain name you’ve already registered.
3. Go to the Bluehost CPanel administration tool (log in if necessary) and add WordPress under Software/Services.
4. Log in to WordPress and go to Appearance > Themes > Install Themes – find a theme you like and install it. You are better off sticking with a pre-made WordPress theme versus having something designed. There are many good, free themes available.
5. In WordPress, go to Pages > Add New and create a home page
6. In WordPress, go to Settings > Reading and set “Front page displays” to “A static page” and specify your home page as the front page
7. In WordPress, go to Appearance > Widgets and configure your sidebar(s). You will want to remove the bloggy widgets that are there by default if you won’t be blogging. But a few thoughts on that: a blog doesn’t have to be a journal of your thoughts. Blogging in WordPress can be treated as an easy way to create articles or pages that relate to specific topics. You can configure WordPress to not show the date of posts, you can call the blogging page “articles”, and you can update articles over time. So instead of blogging about your cat’s latest hairball, you can use the same functionality to easily maintain a few articles of content that demonstrate your business’ expertise. And while I firmly disagree with the pervasive advice that every business should maintain a blog for SEO purposes, writing topical articles can help you show up in search engines.

From there, I think you will find it fairly easy to add pages. If you don’t want to use the blogging capabilities,  you can create a new page and specify that as the posts page (in the same place as step 6) and then make that page private under Visibility on the edit page screen. That will remove it from navigation.

What I like/don’t like about Bluehost:

• Like: it’s not the cheapest hosting service around, but it’s pretty close and they have lots of online support information and have been very responsive when I’ve had questions. They also have a ton of different tools and modules available if your needs outgrow WordPress.
• Don’t like: I’ve had some problems with my email getting blocked by spam filters, presumably because other Bluehost clients are abusing email. I solved this by switching my email hosting to Google Apps. There may also be cases where a big hosting provider like Bluehost can hurt your search engine ranking. If your site is hosted on the same server as other sites that a search engine has flagged as spammy, you may suffer guilt by association. I haven’t found this to be a problem, but I’ve heard others make this complaint. This problem could happen with any hosting provider.

What I like/don’t like about WordPress:

• Like: it’s easy to use, has lots of free plugins, lots of support and is well optimized for SEO without customization.
• Don’t like: there’s not much I don’t like. It is designed as a blogging platform first and foremost, so can be tricky sometimes to make it less bloggy, but plenty of businesses use WordPress to build basic, non-blog sites.

Ta-da! You’ve built your web site! WordPress has lots of free plugins available, so over time you can add almost any feature you can think of. If you have any other tips or experiences you’d like to share, please add them to the comments below. And let us know if you’d like help growing your business.

Guest article by Greg Danford, marketing writer and content strategist.

I’ve been thinking a lot about small businesses lately. Partly because I own one, but partly because I spend a lot of my day working with them. Small businesses, or growing businesses — since no business that I know of aspires to be small forever — all have one thing in common: One person or a few people all wearing a lot of hats. That’s just the nature of the beast. Because most entrepreneurs can’t afford appointment secretaries, full-time bookkeepers, a director of sales and marketing, or many of the other jobs found in large organizations, these people find themselves doing just about everything, usually out of necessity.

So when it comes to marketing their businesses, which is really just a fancy way of explaining to potential customers what they do, “going it alone” comes naturally. Some business owners believe that access to a pencil and paper and an English degree means they can write their own content. The truth is, it does look easy, and for a handful of business owners it is. But for most, nothing is more intimidating than staring at a blank computer screen.

This is the point where a writer is usually brought in, albeit reluctantly. While these companies know they need to hire someone to write their content, they also hate giving up control. The key is to give your writer the best chance for success, which starts with striking a balance between you maintaining some control without handcuffing your writer’s creativity. Here’s something else to consider: No one is going to know your business better than you, and any writer who tells you that he or she does is probably someone to be avoided. What you’re really looking for is someone willing to tap into what you know, then put it in a voice that existing and potential customers will find compelling. Creative writing is one thing. Good marketing copy is something else altogether — it accomplishes a clear objective, and it puts your passion for your business into words. When you read it, you’ll instantly recognize it.

This is the first guest article on the Two Octobers blog. On this blog we seek to provide actionable advice to local business on how to market online, but we have much to learn ourselves, so from time to time we will be asking our friends to contribute their insights. If you have perspectives or ideas you’d like to share, please let us know.

Greg Danford helps small businesses and major brands craft messaging and create engaging web content. He works from his studio in Burlington, Vermont. Visit www.danfordinc.com for examples of his work.

Several days ago, I found myself struggling to get this site to handle secondary navigation – meaning a layer of navigation below the top level. Specifically, I was trying to add pages below the Services page, but more on that in a second. This site is built on WordPress, which is both a hosted blogging solution at wordpress.com and a blog-centric content management system (CMS) that can be installed on any server (wordpress.org). I am using the latter. In WordPress, you can apply themes which alter the look and feel of the site. There are thousands of free themes available, as well as themes you can buy. The theme I was using for the site was nice to look at, but not very easy to extend beyond a basic blog.

I spent quite a bit of time trying to make the old theme work, and tried a bunch of new themes. I was reaching the point of total exasperation when my friend Kris suggested that I check out Artisteer. Artisteer is a software tool for creating and customizing WordPress, Joomla and other CMS platform themes. I installed it yesterday, and within hours had created a new theme, which is now being used on this site. Artisteer works a lot like a word processing program, allowing you to select elements of a page and select between various options regarding layout, colors, fonts, etc. What it does under the hood is to generate the cascading style sheet (CSS) files and images necessary to implement a theme on your site.

I described last week how I think most local/small businesses should stick with a themed, template driven CMS like Joomla or WordPress, rather than building a custom web site. Artisteer makes that process a lot easier if you don’t want to use one of the free, pre-built themes already available. It is also a lot of fun to use, because the WYSIWIG interface of Artisteer makes changes appear right before your eyes, and the engineers who created it have a pretty good idea of what works and doesn’t work on a web site. Even if you are a master of CSS manipulation (I am not), Artisteer makes the process of creating and editing styles blazing fast.

And why was I adding a Services page? That is because I am getting ready to launch a new business venture with Kris, the friend mentioned above. We have been working together on the new theme, as well as the copy for the site. Have a look at the services and about pages to get a better idea of what we will be doing, and check back soon for a more official announcement of our business launch.

This is a screen shot from Artisteer, taken when we were pretty close to done with the new design:

To demonstrate the flexibility of Artisteer, I also created the WordPress theme below. In fact, this theme only scratches the surface of what Artisteer can do. It took fifteen minutes or so to change colors, fonts, background images, etc. Artisteer also allows you to change the style and location of navigation, make 3D buttons, and a host of other options. I created this theme because I love monkeys, but Kris prefers the theme above. In the spirit of partnership, I’m going to concede this one.

This post may sound like a big advertisement for Artisteer, but really I just wanted to tell people about a very useful tool I found. I don’t have any connection to Artisteer. If your needs are similar to mine, I recommend giving it  a try. You can do so for free, and if you like it the license costs $50 for the Home and Academic Edition or $130 for the Standard Edition.