When you look at your dashboard at Google Analytics, one of the bits you should always notice is the Traffic Sources. The first view you have is a pie chart showing how your visits are distributed among Direct Traffic, Referring Sites, Search Engines, and Other.



Here's what those terms mean:

• Direct Traffic is people typing in your address or going straight to it from their bookmarks. Sometimes lots of direct traffic means that you have an easy to remember URL (good for you!) and it's just as simple for people to type it in as to search. Sometimes it means that you haven't filtered out your staff. If you have a high proportion of direct traffic, check to see whether it's new visitors, in which case you've got a good URL and people looking for you by name. Lots of direct traffic from return visitors is good news, too, of course, but filter out people working for you before you make plans based on that.
• Referring Sites is what you get when people follow a link to your website. This lets you see what kind of links send traffic, so you can build more of those. It also lets you know when you've gotten featured at Stumbleupon or Digg. And it helps you find sites that have linked to you without your having requested it.
• Search Engines refers to people who found you by typing something in at a search engines like Google or Yahoo or bing.
• Other is anything else, often email (though that can also show up in Referring Sites).

Click on "view report" under the pie chart and you'll get more detail:


You can see that these two examples show different patterns. The one above shows fairly steady traffic from all three sources. The one below doesn't have much direct traffic, but it's fairly steady through the week, while Referring Sites and Search Engines rose at the end.



As with most patterns, changes are often the most interesting thing. When you have your quick look at your analytics each day, changes should be what you're looking for. When you see a change, find out the reason for it. If it's a good thing, do more in that direction. If it's not so good, then it's time to change your strategy.

Bear in mind that the pie chart is about percentages. An increase in search traffic can show that your SEO efforts are paying off, or it can show that more people are looking for one of your keywords, or it can show that your direct traffic fell because you got around to filtering out the people who work on your site.

At the Traffic Sources report page, you can look at lots more data. For example, you'll see the Top Traffic Sources, which is a list in order of popularity of your traffic sources. You'll see the top five on the main page, and you can click on "view full report" to see all of them.

Google is very likely to be your #1 source. For most of my clients, a major referring source comes next. Direct traffic is usually in the top five. For many, social media such as blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook turn up here.

Again, changes are what you want to notice. When I see a directory in this list, I suggest thinking about a paid ad at that directory. When I see a new source move into the list for the first time, I run right over and check its conversion rate for the site's goals. The information here can help you make well-founded strategic decisions.



The Traffic Sources report page is also the starting point for lots more detailed information. You can narrow down your focus and see where your direct traffic is geographically, or all the referring sites and their conversion rates, or what keywords people are using to reach you (you can use your keyword data strategically, too). You can also check the performance of your adwords campaigns from this menu.



Explore the Traffic Sources page. You'll find it a useful resource.

Labels: Google Analytics, SEO

I had the opportunity to read a pre-publication version of Mitch Joel's new book, Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone. Click on the link for some previews.

Back when I was an in-house marketing person seeking to figure out how to make our website profitable, unlike those of everyone else in our industry, I tried very hard to find a good book on SEO. No luck. Now there are books on the subject, but they tend to be out of date as soon as they hit the shelves, so I haven't yet found one that I'd recommend to anyone who knows where to find blogs on the subject (for example, you).

Six Pixels is a worthwhile book on social media and its use for business.

Joel explains some of the key points that bloggers like me keep making and businesspeople keep ignoring -- like, this isn't an overnight thing, you have to be sincere, and it's more like networking with other humans than it is like advertising, so quit thinking you can do it with an automatic program. He gives a lot of background and persuasive detail, and also a lot of specific, practical advice to get from "Huh?" to success with social media.

You'll find definitions and explanations of key terms that may stump you if you're new to the topic, checklists to think about if you've been using social media for a while and aren't quite sure you're doing it right, and ideas for the near future (are you really taking mobile devices into account when you plan?) if you're successful with social media and want to keep being successful.

There are in this book history lessons going clear back to 2000 when, Joel says, the common view of bloggers was that they were members of the lunatic fringe holed up in their basements writing about cats. There are insightful discussions of major social media platforms and sites. There are intriguing case studies.

There are also thought-provoking discussions of some of the tougher questions around social media. How can you monetize your involvement, or measure its value to your business? What kind of community is developing around social media, and how does it relate to your community in the physical world? What about privacy?

I'm planning to share Six Pixels with my colleagues, and I think our discussions of it will have a positive impact on our businesses. I'd love to discuss it with you, too.

If you're interested in social media, you should read this book. You can pre-order it at Amazon.com, and you probably should.

Labels: books, social media

Another popular question in response to my post on what it costs to build a website is this: "I'm just starting my business and I don't have any money. What's the cheapest way to get a website?"

I give the people who ask this question the best advice I can, while also being honest enough with them to admit that a good website costs money. Most people who plan to make their own websites on the cheap never actually do it.

However, one of the people who asked me this question has made her own website, and she did it overnight. Alesha Clanton, of Baby I Do! event planning, built herself this website:



She deserves some free advice.

First, she has it on Tumblr, with a mirror site at www.babyido.tk. The .tk sites are so strongly associated with spam and shady practices that this really wasn't a good plan, mirror sites are never a good plan, and Tumblr isn't the place for a business. When she's ready to have a professional website, she'll have to get a new domain name and she'll lose some customers in the transition. I've discussed this before, so I'll just say -- this new business is worth the $10 it costs to register a domain name.

She's chosen a free template. It's appropriate for her business and it suits her, but it's such a popular one that she's not going to get the visual recognition she wants. She might consider going elsewhere to choose a template that she won't see all over the internet:

• Free CSS has a large collection, and it tells you how often each has been downloaded -- pick one that hasn't been downloaded too frequently.
• Free Web Templates is another source.
• Free Website Templates is another. There are lots around. You'll notice a lot of overlap among them, so it may not really be worth scouring them all; I mostly mentioned this one because it says that its templates "come with freedom."
  
• web designer magazine often has free templates from Boxed Art tucked into its issues. They have useful tutorials on their site, and lots of templates available for members.
  

Alesha has set her business up at a blogging site, but she could try to remove the evidence. The title where she ought to have her business logo, the date, and the word "photo" all take away from the professional air she wants. Her navigation buttons go to empty pages. Being sent to an empty page encourages people to leave your site, especially when, as in this case, those pages don't all have buttons to return to the homepage.

Tumblr allows users to get into the html and make changes. Alesha could probably find and change those elements that make her site look like a blog when it isn't one.





Alesha could also change these URLs to actual links at the same time, making them far more useful. She could make the words "Hours" stand out so people wanting to know her hours could find them more easily.



I'd get rid of the very tentative "if you are interested" too. I mean, readers know not to call if they're not interested. It would also be good to have some information about the services, prices, and so on. Having a look at her competitors' websites might give her an idea of the kinds of information people expect to see, and will find at other sites they'll check when deciding whom to hire.

Alesha jumped right in at Twitter, too:


It would be more effective if she matched her Twitter background to her website. This would allow her readers to recognize her, help her brand her business, and encourage an air of trustworthiness.

She has started with messages to people, and that's good, but she should also try to share some information. Information about her business, certainly, but also useful things her readers would like to know. Since Alesha's target market includes brides, new moms, and their friends, she could link to articles with tips for parties, and since she's pitching to a particular geographical area, she could give info about local venues and businesses.

Alesha is also taking advantage of Facebook and other free networking sites, which is a great idea. She should make sure that she links them all up to her website, and that she edits any private information from before she started her business so that it supports what she's doing now.

Taking these steps will allow Alesha to start out with a more professional look in the first place, making an upgrade easier in the future, when her business takes off and she's ready to build a professional site.

Since I wrote about how much a web site costs, I've had lots of questions about the subject. One of the most common is, "Why do prices vary so much?"

I really understand this. When prices of an item are as variable as the costs for building a website, it's hard to feel confident about what you're paying. So I'd like to discuss some of the major factors that affect the price of a website.

Domain registration

The domain name of your site is the web address, or URL, of your website, such as YourBusiness.com. I've written before about choosing your domain name. Domain registration is a necessary cost, but it can vary.

Registering a domain is cheap: about $10 a year. Some hosting companies do it for free if you use their services. One young woman who has been asking questions chose to go with a .tk domain, since she could get that for free, but these domains are strongly associated with spam and shady sites, so this isn't a good business move.

Others choose to use a free site without getting a domain name, but this has a danger: when you succeed in your business and want to upgrade your site, you'll have to get a new URL, and will lose all the ground you've gained in search results and faithful customers. My education blog is in this position, actually; I set it up at Xanga.com years ago before I knew better. Now it's above the fold on the front page of Google for an amazing number of popular searches and drives traffic nicely for various clients. When I move it to its own domain name, I'll have to start over with SEO to bring it back to its current level. Boy, do I ever regret that.

There are places that will charge you more than $10 a year for domain registration. If they're going to do some research and assist you in choosing the most effective URL for your business, it can be worth it. If not, then don't pay more. The main thing to remember is that it's a first-come first-served system, and there's no benefit to waiting around. Just go ahead and register that domain name.

Hosting

This is the fee that you pay monthly or annually for the space you occupy on the web. It can range from nothing at all to hundreds per month for managed hosting. ToMuse has a comparison chart for a wide variety of mass market companies, and you probably also have local options. I work with a local web firm that charges $25 a month for zero downtime and 24/7 service.

In my recent conversations, I've found that people can get very exercised about the question of hosting. Often this excitement focuses on getting the most bandwidth for the lowest price. I've worked with lots of clients who had lots of different hosting arrangements, and I'd say that trustworthiness and good service are, in real life, much more often the issue than the amount of bandwidth. I've also found that sites with free and cheap hosting don't actually perform as well as those with professional hosting. Often, too, there are multiple fees and add-ons which add up to as much as professional hosting before you finish.

Here's the thing: if you aren't prepared to pay for your business's website, then you're not in business.

Your website, whether you're an online or a brick and mortar business, is the first thing most of your customers will see, and the main way they'll know you. Some longtime business owners haven't caught on to this yet, and some brand-new businesspeople don't think this will be true for their businesses, but it's a fact of modern life.

So if you're thinking that you'll go with free hosting in spite of the disadvantages, or you're putting hours into comparing the specs on $6.95 a month hosting with $9.95 a month hosting, then it may be time for some serious thought about your business plans. It seems to me that many of the people who contact me for advice on getting a free website for their businesses are planning to fail, and hoping to put as little investment as possible into their businesses so they won't lose much when they do so.

I have a successful online business, myself, and so do my clients, so perhaps I can't really advise people who plan to fail at theirs, though I do my best to be sympathetic.

My personal feeling is that free hosting makes sense if you're not in business. Your average $5 a month plan offers you no real advantages over free hosting, so why pay? However, I have heard some cogent argments on the other side from people who plan to pay a small amount for their hobby sites. Fine. If you're in business, though, you should budget for professional hosting.

Design

To this point, we've been talking about differences of a few dollars up front or a few hundred dollars over the course of a year. When we get to the design and building of a site, we're getting into the real differences.

People responding to my post about the cost of a website included both people sharing quotations they'd had for $10,000 or more and people assuring me that they could do it themselves for free with an instruction book from the library.

Here are some things to think about:

• Overhead can affect the cost. A web firm which has to pay salaries and light bills is going to have to charge you more than a student working on the kitchen table. A web firm is also likely to have access to specialized software, copywriters, engineers, their own servers, and people with varied skill sets who can do the particular task required for your particular needs. If the bargain rate is based on low overhead, then it may not reflect poor quality work. If you don't need the benefits of the firm, choosing a freelancer instead can offer real savings. Make sure that you know exactly what the low-overhead choice is planning to do. Will they code your site as well as designing it? Will they provide the content? Will they upload the files with your host? Will they make changes in the future if you need that done? There are a lot of steps in building a web site, and unless you go with a full-service firm, those steps may not all be included in the price you're quoted.
  
• Time can affect the cost. One of the more astonishing bids sent to me in the course of the conversations I've been having came from a designer who charges slightly less per hour than I do. This designer did both content and design, though not coding, and helpfully gave time estimates in the cost breakdown. My client was concerned that the designer I'm working with and I might be overlooking something. I sat for a while trying to imagine how writing a contact form could take the same amount of time I take to write a five-page website. Eventually, I just had to admit that I didn't know why that designer was planning to take so much longer than we were. Since web design is generally done on an hourly basis, an efficient worker can save you a lot. Someone who does it badly and has to go back and do it over -- or be replaced by someone else who does it over -- can cost far more, though, so check out the portfolio.
  
• Hourly rate can affect the cost. I work with some excellent designers who charge relatively low rates because, for example, they're students or they live in an inexpensive country. I charge less myself than some others do, because I don't want to price myself too high for the small businesses I like to work with. But you have to realize that right now business is very good for people in my line of work. Everyone who is actually good at writing or designing websites has plenty of work and is being paid well. There is no motivation for us to discount, and basic economics is going to tell you that this tends to mean that prices are rising, not falling. Before you choose someone with a low rate, make sure you know why their rate is low.

Even given this information, there may not be any very obvious reason for a price difference between two firms or between two freelancers. Look at their work and check their references, and choose someone who fits your budget.

Copywriting

You can write your own web content, and many businesses do. It's usually a mistake. Writing for the web is a specialized skill, just as web design is. It's not the same as writing an email to your friends, or a print ad, or even a sales letter. And your content has the largest effect on your success with search and conversions of any decision listed in this post. "Content," as we all know, "is king."

Copywriting is also never the expensive part of a website. I write a typical website in two to five hours. Most business owners will spend far more time than that, and their results won't be nearly as good. Writing your own website is simply false economy.

My rates are typical; I've seen much lower rates for much lower quality and higher rates for people with greater overhead, but generally the rates among professional web content writers don't vary as much as the rates for designers.

SEO

As a general rule, your website is not going to be visible just because you launch it. You have to draw it to the attention of the search engines. This involves both onsite and offsite optimization.

Onsite optimization means building and writing the website in such a way that the search engines as well as the human visitors find it appealing. This makes an enormous difference to the success of your website. I see sites every day that have been built without any understanding of SEO and are therefore not doing their job.

This is a specialized skill, and you have to expect to pay for it. Clients I work with have often spent thousands of dollars on their websites and still languish on the back pages of the search results. They have to compare the loss of business over the years with the cost of having their site done properly. If you're planning a website, you can avoid the losses by having it done properly in the first place.

Offsite optimization means submitting your website to search engines and directories, engaging in social media, providing your site with rich content, and all the rest of the stuff I write about here.

You can do much of this yourself, if you have the time and the knowledge. With a good website, you should be busy enough not to have the time.

Prices for these services vary widely, too. Fargo web design firm Onsharp charges a set-up fee of $250 for on-site optimization, and monthly fees for off-site services. Fayetteville web firm Sharp Hue includes on-site optimization in the design and offers offsite optimization at hourly rates. I offer both hourly rates for specific services and monthly rates for ongoing maintenance.

There are companies offering SEO services of various kinds at various rates all over the web. The differences in prices and services are even greater than those for design. My advice, if you're shopping around, is to study up enough on the subject (reading this blog is a good start) that you can tell what's being offered to you and make a confident decision.

Conclusion

I hope this discussion has clarified some of the factors involved in pricing of websites. My advice is still the same: determine how much a new customer will bring to your business over the course of the year, and use that information to set your budget. Then you can figure out how to fit the website you need into your budget.

Labels: budget, SEO, web content, web design, web hosting

It's a small thing, but one that can make a big difference to your future relationships: not the remote control, but the question of whether to write your website in first, second, or third person.

First person means using words like "I," "we," and "me." My website is written in first person. Using first person gives a friendly, personal air. My relationships with my clients are friendly and personal, and using first person conveys that. In fact, one of the things my clients will tell you they like best is that I sincerely care about them and their businesses and do all that I can to help them succeed. I want my visitors to know that about me.

On the other hand, first person can put you in the position of talking about yourself a lot, which may not be comfortable for you, or appropriate for your business.

When using first person, you can choose between saying "I" and saying "we." One of my clients is a sole proprietor, but uses "we" to recognize all the other people he partners with in his business. Another uses "we" to disguise the small size of the business -- it's going to be bigger in the future, so why not go ahead and start that way? Another of my clients has a fairly large team, but prefers to keep that one to one feeling, so he uses "I."

Second person uses "you." Studies have shown that people respond very well to "you," so I use second person a lot, too. Particularly if you solve problems for people, your visitors are really thinking about themselves and their problems when they come to your website, so second person can have a sense of immediacy for them.

Using second person can make it difficult to talk much about your company, unless you also use first or third person. It can be very good for sites which don't need to provide much information about the company. It also works well in combination with the other voices, if you have the writing ability to mix it up well.

"He," "she," and "it" are the pronouns for third person writing. Third person is a more formal choice. It can make your company sound larger, it can give a professional feeling, and it can allow you to keep some distance between yourself and your customers.

A website I'm working on right now has an "About Us" page mentioning two different family businesses which are partnering on the project. Using third person allows equal emphasis on both without implying that customers will be dealing directly with both. Third person also provides the level of formality which is most comfortable for the companies.

Any of these choices will work; it's a question of which feeling you want at your website: friendly, customer-centered, or formal.

Here's a very important point: be careful about mixing the different voices. I'm not saying not to mix them, because it can certainly be done. I'm saying that it takes skill. Many of the first drafts of web content I receive have text that meanders from "I" to "you" to "we" to "the Company" for no particular reason. This can be confusing, and as irritating to readers as ... well, as channel surfing when your spouse is watching a movie. It's safer to choose one and stick with it.

Labels: web content, writing

When you do online retail sales, your content may be primarily a catalog: pictures and brief descriptions of your products. People are coming to shop with you, after all, so they just need to see the goods. Your thoughts about your online presence may be mostly about your shopping cart.

But keyword-rich content can do wonders for your e-commerce business. Particularly if what you sell is a commodity -- that is, people can buy the same things from many sellers -- then you need to give your customers a reason to buy from you, not from someone else.

Providing a good shopping experience is part of that, of course. But don't overlook the value of useful content in sending customers your way.

• Blogs can send you traffic. If people come to your blog for your valuable content, they're likely to click through to shop as well. Obviously, your business should have a blog. But you can also benefit from content at independent blogs. My educational blog provides teachers with lesson plans, ideas for classroom themes, and useful links to other websites. It also provides links to my clients' websites when they have something useful to the readers, and why shouldn't it? This blog is second only to Google organic search in sending traffic to my educational supply store client, and it does a good job for other clients as well.
  
• Articles can send you traffic. Good, interesting articles at respectable article supply sites like eZineArticles are often republished, increasing the influence of the links placed there. As with any use of content for marketing, the information has to be honest and useful. Answers to questions your customers ask you can be a great starting point for this type of article. If someone asked you, there are probably plenty of people asking Google. Providing the answer demonstrates your expertise and brings people who need your products to your website.
• Content on your own site can bring search traffic in. The content I write in support of people's products often ends up higher for search than their websites, where they may have only that photo and description. I figure that's okay, since visitors are likely to click through to the client's website. However, making the descriptions on your website richer is likely to bring visitors to you directly. Add a recipe for your cooking ingredients, or a fashion tip for the clothing you're selling, and you not only add value for your customers, but you also give the search engines something to sink their metaphorical teeth into.
  

Labels: ecommerce, web content

I've had similar conversations with some new clients recently. "How can you think up new things to say at my blog every day?" they ask dubiously. Or, "I don't think there's enough material for a weekly blog post. I can't think of anything." Or, "It takes me an hour just to think of a topic. Are you sure you can do this?"

A related conversation came up with a long-term client, too. He has staff members post snippets at Basecamp for me to work with. He was disappointed in his staff's literary efforts. "The post you did had so much more depth," he complained. "The developer's posting was shallow."

"I can work with shallow," I assured him. I can't develop custom software. The developer and I have different jobs. My job in that company is to take a casual sentence from the developer and turn it into a thought-provoking (and business-producing) blog post.

And that's the thing about a company blog. Unless you happen to be a writing company, you may not have someone who's really suited to writing your blog. Here are some of the people companies often choose to do their blogging:

• The CEO, because he knows all about the company. I see the thinking here, but the chances of the CEO's having plenty of free time to spend blogging are slim. The CEO may have great communication skills, but blogging is hardly ever the best use of his or her time.
• The secretary, because he can type. I can hardly even bring myself to discuss this one, because the difference between writing and typing are so obvious to me, but it's a very common choice. The secretary probably also knows all about the company, and he or she is probably also very busy.
• The marketing department, because that's what the blog is for. The marketing department is often a very good choice, because they're likely to have some writing skills, and yes the blog is for marketing, in the final analysis. Traditional marketing people, however, may not understand how search engines work, and they may not understand the concept of inbound marketing. In that case, you can end up with a blog that's just a succession of slightly disguised ads, and that's not what the blog is for.
• The intern or the owner's spouse or the security officer, because he has time. If you have a nice person hanging around the office without too much to do, you may be tempted to give him or her the task of blogging. I can see the thinking on this one, too, and I have sympathy for it. Unless the person in question happens to be a skillful writer, it's not a great choice. This person doesn't usually even know all about the company.

I recently read a claim that every company needs a fulltime person to handle social media (blogging, Twittering, sites like Facebook or LinkdIn). I think that's probably not true for small companies. However, you do need someone specialized to take care of that blog for you. Here are some options:

• The person who writes for pleasure. If some staff member keeps a journal or writes short stories as a hobby, then take advantage of that skill set and make that person your blogger. They'll probably be slower than a professional, but they may be willing to do it on their own time as a volunteer.
  
• The photographer. Use a picture and a caption for most blog posts, and just finesse the writing part. Of course, this only works if a) your photography is good and b) your business lends itself to this kind of blogging. It can be excellent for retail. This can be a good time to bring the secretary in -- a poorly written caption with grammar or punctuation errors makes a terrible impression.
  
• A professional. In most cases, a professional blogger like me can do your blog better and more cost effectively than the people on your staff. That's not what you hired your staff for. Sheer speed is enough reason for most companies to hire a pro, since the cost of a fast professional blog post is usually less than the cost of diverting staff to the task.
  

In the conversations I've reported above, the real answer is, "That's why you hired me." I'm good at this. Not everyone is. If your company builds things, or grows things, or sells things, then go on and do what you're good at and let someone like me do your blog. It's the most sensible approach.

Labels: blogging, writing

Labels: ecommerce, Google Analytics, online marketing

In the first post on planning web forms, we thought about your visitors' initial response to your web form, and your initial goal: information seeking.

Let's take it a bit beyond that. The way you set up your contact form can influence the choices your visitors make.

I want to emphasize that we're not talking here about manipulation. We're talking about creating harmony between your company and your visitors.

I'm thinking right now about a web form for a new website I'm building with Shan Pesaru for an upscale chocolatier who does custom, private label chocolates for nonprofits and corporate promotion.

When we think about the user journey for this company's customers, we know that their search for information is likely to begin far in advance of their need to order. The retail consumer of fine chocolates is likely to pick up a jar of the company's chocolate seashells spontaneously for a gift, a souvenir, or even a bit of self indulgence. The symphony orchestra currently considering using their private label chocolates as fundraising items at their concerts isn't likely to make that decision so lightly.

They need figures to take before the board, they'll be holding committee meetings and discussing it with their community partners, they'll be looking at competitors, and they'll be using their annual planning calendar to choose the best launch date for the private label chocolates.

A corporation intending to choose private label chocolates for tradeshow giveaways or corporate holiday gifts will have an equally lengthy procedure.

At what point in this journey does the company want to engage the organization?

The decision isn't like the conductor's decisions for a symphony. It's like the decisions of the players in a bluegrass band. When to move to the second part of the tune, when a player will take a solo interlude, when to make a key change or a shift in tempo -- each of these decisions will influence the next move of other band members and change the direction of the music as a whole.

Just so, your web form can influence your relationship with your customer. If we limit the number of information fields to the essentials, as we did with the software company, then we encourage the greatest posssible response and increase the number of leads.

However, if we ask for more information and offer more interaction, we limit the number of leads but ensure that those leads are hotter.

Here are some examples of web form elements that limit responses:

• additional information about the visitor's company or organization, especially questions designed to elecit the size of the organization, such as "How many employees in your company?" or "How many locations?"
• additional information about the visitor's plans, such as "How soon do you expect to make this decision?" or "What is your anticipated budget for this project?"
• expressed contact intentions, such as "Submit this form and a sales representative will call you."

These items in a web form will discourage those who are merely toying with the idea, and tend to solidify the resolve of those who are serious in their interest. Answering these questions requires more thought and more certainty about the resources involved, and will cause the visitor to envision using your goods or services in a clearer and more concrete way.

You'll have fewer responses, but those you receive will be nearer a decision.

How can you decide which way you ought to go in your contact form? Here are some questions to consider:

• How much staff time is involved in responses? The software company offers an automatic free download with no human effort on their part and no real cost to the company. They want high volume. A company that needs to craft an individual proposal or quote for each prospect may want to pre-qualify those leads as much as possible.
• Can you provide samples? The software company's download is a sample. Someone who is thinking only casually about their product is likely to be swayed by trying it. This is true for the chocolatiers as well, but the cost and logistics of providing samples is completely different.
• How important is it to build relationships? Some products and services are likely to be one-time purchases with quick decision-making. Others require nurturing of relationships that last over a period of years and may lead to many future business relationships with others. Where your company's offerings fall along that continuum affects how important it is to you to build your house contact list for the future.

For the chocolatier, the best decision may be to create two web forms: one on the Contact form which encourages a high volume of additions to the email list, and one on the Private Label form which narrows the field to people who are ready to talk with a sales rep.

Good planning will let you use your web form to make beautiful music with your visitors.

Labels: call to action, online marketing, web content, web design

I was talking with a local businesswoman yesterday, a woman whose business caters to brides. It's hard to get help, she said.

We hear a lot about how hard it is to find jobs nowadays, so I was a little surprised.

"It's hard to find someone you can really rely on," she amplified. And, as we talked more, it turned out that she meant it was hard to find a good salesperson. She had good reasons for thinking so. But you know, this woman is a friend of mine. Finally, I just had to mention the one salesperson in her business that I knew about.

Her website.

I was hesitant, because of course I'm biased. I write websites. It's easy to get an exaggerated idea of the importance of your own field, since you're in it all the time. There was that minute during which I thought, well, maybe people planning their weddings don't go online.

Sure.

The internet is now the main source of information for Americans, I had to point out to my friend, especially people as young as the average bride. Not to mention the fact that the modern working woman planning her wedding does at least some of that planning in the evenings, when human salespeople aren't working and that online presence is all that's available.

"I have a website," she objected.

"True," I agreed,"but people looking at your website can't tell how wonderful you are."

We both thought about her website: the tiny, muddy pictures, the old-fashioned design, the poorly-crafted text, the "Map" page with no map...

Having this website as the major source of information about her business is like having a dim, disheveled, inarticulate salesperson going out to represent her.

It may be hard to get good help, but it's certainly not hard to get a good website.

She looked uncertain. The cost was on her mind.

A new website costs less than the income she can expect from one bride. The significant number here is not the cost of a new website. It's the cost of all the brides who pass her up for someone who looks better online. A good website is the cheapest good salesperson she'll ever have.

Labels: online marketing

There are a couple of different issues in that one question.

The first question is simple: are there rules about using images from the web, or can you just grab some from another website to save time?

There are rules. You can't take images from the web and use them as though they were your own. You can get permission to use them, or buy them, or make your own.

If you're putting together a website on a strict budget and you want to save on images, there are places where you can get royalty-free images cheaply or for free:

• Dreamstime
• Free Digital Photos
• 123RF
• iStockphoto
• Stockxpert
• Stockxchnge

All these place have rules, but they explain them clearly, so just follow them and you're set.

There are also any number of freelance photographers and graphic artists around, and they need your support or there won't be any more free and cheap images for websites. Someone has to do that work, and if it doesn't pay the bills, no one will. So consider doing a search for artists in your locale.

Having established that images are easy to come by, the next questions is a little more complex: should you use stock images (those store-bought pictures like the one in this post) or should you use photos from your own business?

Here are some advantages to using your own images:

• They give a sense of authenticity. You don't really believe that the woman up there at the top of the post is one of my clients, in my office, debating what images to use in her website, do you? A lot of the pictures I use here are in fact photos taken by me or members of my family who are kind enough to share the contents of their cameras with me. Using pictures of your staff, your buildings, your customers, and your products helps your visitors learn more about you and envision themselves working with you or your products.
• They provide information. An image of your brick and mortar building helps your web visitors find you when they seek you out in the physical world. A photo of the particular tennis racket that you make gives people more information about your product than a stock photo of people playing tennis can. I have a client who has pictures of her dog in costumes on her website: this tells you things about her funloving nature that you couldn't get from the average stock image.
  
• They're under your control. If you want to show your product on a rustic bench with a waterfall in the background, you can do it. Whether stock images of your product show it that way or not.
  

There are also advantages to stock photos:

• Some businesses don't lend themselves to photographs. I've worked with people who sell software, freeze-dried animal body parts (for research), and IT support. There's not much you can do with pictures of those items. Your building may not be photogenic. You may work out of your home. You may simply not have the skills to take the pictures, or your products may be hard to shoot well, though a professional photographer can be your solution there.
  
• There are reasons to use models. Those cozy shots of all the staff together are great, but you may not want to update your website every time your staff changes. You may not be able to get permission from everyone who ends up in your photo. The preschool website Jeff Wain and I are working on is a perfect example -- parents often don't want their children's pictures made public, and the children themselves may object when they get older. Plus, the picture of you with your client may actually not show the feeling of being your client as well as the stock photos people are more accustomed to seeing.
• You may want to portray an underlying truth. You shouldn't use stock images to deceive people. However, your up and coming new business may not yet have the highly professional look you plan on having eventually. If you'd like the kinds of clients who would choose that glass building with the revolving doors, and you can provide the services they need, but you operate out of your parents' garage -- well, no one needs to know that.

There's one more extremely sound reason to use stock images: to get the job done. If getting those pictures taken has been on your to-do list for three weeks and your web designer is waiting, then you should go ahead and get stock images. Realism is valuable, and sometimes being realistic about what you can and cannot do is the kind of realism you need.

Labels: web content

Web forms have been on my mind lately. For one thing, I've been helping Fargo web design firm Onsharp get the word out about their opening for a Web Project Manager (click on that link and apply if you're qualified and live near Fargo -- they're a great team), and this is a task that involves filling out lots of web forms.

For another, I've been assisting backup software makers FileReplicationPro to plan a new web form, and that discussion included many more viewpoints than such discussions generally do. This is because we were hanging out at Basecamp talking about it, an approach which tends to get more input than the usual IM exchange.

There are two big questions when you plan your web form. The first is what information to include or request.

As a general rule, people get antsy if you ask too many questions on your web form. They get tired of typing and give up, or they begin to wonder why you want to know all these things and decide not to tell you.

So your first goal should be not to ask for any more than you have to. And that means that you need to ask for the things you really want to know.

For FileReplicationPro, it seemed to me that we didn't need people's physical locations, but we did need to know their position in the company.

"They're CTOs," FileReplicationPro assured me, "or IT team leaders."

But what if they're not? What if they're office workers whom someone has instructed to find some data security software? Or small business owners with limited technical knowledge but an awareness that they need to back up their data? In that case, we need to be using completely different language when we write to them.

We never really need to know where in physical space they are. So, while there may be a natural inclination to start a form with name, address, and phone number, by giving up some of that we get to ask the visitors' position in the decision-making process. This information will let us target our content instead of just guessing.

When it comes to the questions you ask, your web from should be, as Einstein said of something else entirely, as simple as possible, but no simpler.

The next issue is how the form looks. Look at these two different approaches to the same hypothetical form from Angela Peace's web design class:




The first design, by Brandi Samuels, lays out the options very clearly, while the second relies on drop-down menus and bunches the choices together in a less readable way. The second approach creates a smaller form, but it may still be daunting to the visitor.

Your designer will have quite a few options for getting the information you want, once you decide what that is. You can make your visitors use a drop-down menu to choose their state, for example, or you can let them type in their two-letter abbreviation. I live in Arkansas, so I don't mind the drop-downs much usually -- but having to scroll down to North Dakota for Onsharp over and over was something else. People visiting your site during a coffee break may resent those extra seconds. Do you have the kind of volume that makes it worth inconveniencing your visitors in order to have some automatic sorting of the response data?

You can give them, as in the examples above, default options -- which of those designs do you think will lead more customers to choose a service plan, the one that starts with three years or the one that starts with "none"?

Consider testing a couple of different approaches to see how visitors respond.

Does your web site have no response form at all? The preschool website Jeff Wain and I are building currently doesn't have a form. The preschool owner hasn't had a website before, and she's used to getting contacts entirely by phone.

But a web form, however simple, will allow her to track conversions a bit better, build up her email list, and perhaps reach the busy working parents who search for a preschool in the wee hours of the morning and don't remember to call her later.

So I'm thinking that we need to add a contact form. Name, phone number, and email address should be plenty, and I can rely on Jeff to make it look great.

Labels: call to action, online marketing, web content, web design

Introducing Josepha Haden.

It was just a year ago that I commissioned a website for myself. After having been an in-house SEO for a bit more than a year, I took up freelance SEO work on a full-time basis.

It's gone well. In fact, I try not to whine too much about it, but sometimes I have too much work. I turn work down with great frequency, something I would not have envisioned a year ago, but sometimes I have too much work that I want to do, for people I'd like to work with. Having too much business is, like having overly gifted kids or being excessively beautiful, the kind of problem for which it is very difficult to get any sympathy.

Therefore, if you're going to whine about having too much business, you have to whine within your own family circle.

So I did. And I was fortunate enough to have someone volunteer to train as a linkbuilder and join me in providing foundational linkbuilding. Josepha is a member of KCSEO and has a day job with the word "analyst" in the title, so it's no surprise that she has turned out to be very good at linkbuilding.

Just the other day I was talking with one of the clients she's been working for during her training. Josepha's finishing up a five-hour linkbuilding campaign for this client.

"Some of the guys think we should go with one of those SEO companies that promises to get you on page 1 of Google," the client said.

"Well, let's have a look," said I. We brought up Google and typed in some search terms.

"There you are," I said. "Oh, and look, there's a link Josepha got for you -- and there's another, and another. You're all over the page."

We tried a few more, with similar results.

Clearly, Josepha is out of the apprenticeship phase. I'm delighted to have her working with me, and delighted also that I won't have to turn down so many people in future.

This morning I found in my email the very best kind of feedback on an assignment: "It's perfect!"

I'm not going to pretend that I don't like getting things exactly right on the first attempt.

But there are other kinds of feedback that I like almost as well.

• Here's exactly what I didn't like, and how I want it changed. The first draft is always my best guess, based on careful listening and research, about what will work for the client. Feedback like "It sounds like we're bragging" or "It needs to be warmer" or "I wanted it to be more fun" tell me not only how to change the particular assignment, but also how to adjust my guess for the future.
  
• Here's why I don't like it. Sometimes the reason for a change clues me in to a need for explanation on my part. An explanation about how the choice I've made helps searchers find the client's website may help the client see the benefit of keeping it. Knowing the reason for the dissatisfaction can also help me come up with a solution that will please the client and still meet the goals of the project -- often a solution that neither the client nor I would have thought of without pinpointing the dissatisfaction.
• Here are my pet peeves, or my industry-specific quirks. I hate the word "utilize." Just do, that's all. I have clients who like "e-mail" and others who like "email." "Hauling" isn't incorrect when speaking of liquid freight, but it just isn't the term they use in that field. We all have preferences. They don't need to be defended, either. They're important information and should be passed along as soon as they occur to you.

And there are some kinds of feedback that aren't that useful:

• "Hmmmm....." Actually, I loved that. I really got that response once (or perhaps the designer I was working with did -- it was hard to tell) and I was so amused by it that I told all my friends. But it doesn't convey any information beyond "I don't like this," so it isn't going to lead to improved results. Some of us are more articulate than others. If you find yourself unable to say what needs changing, you might need to meet face to face or by phone and let your provider ask you questions till you figure it out.
• Saying nothing. If you're not happy with your freelancer's or your firm's work, say so. Just being unhappy and accepting it isn't good for either side. It can happen that you reach a point where you feel that the person you've hired just isn't up to the job (didn't you check their portfolio first?), but chances are they've just misunderstood what you had in mind. Professionals don't get hurt feelings when you ask for changes -- we want you to have what you want.
  
• Rewriting it completely. I had this happen once, and I really didn't know what to do with it. It wasn't as good as what I'd written, and editing it would have been a different assignment. I think I said, "Do you like this? Good!" If your freelancer's work inspires you to do your own writing and you like it better, that's fine. Their job is done. It just isn't feedback.

Keeping these points in mind will help you get what you want -- which is your goal, and your provider's goal as well.

Labels: communication, web content

When I first started doing online marketing as an in-house SEO, one of the most difficult things for me to determine was what success would look like. What kind of results could we realistically expect? How would we know when we had succeeded?

I think this is one of the reasons that we get so focused on being #1 at Google, or on increasing traffic to a certain point (both good things, but not always the best primary goals): those things are measurable, and you can tell when you've won.

Still, it's a fair question. And a hard one to answer. Some companies get better results than others. Some companies have better products than others, or better follow-through, or perhaps even better luck. What part of your results can definitely be attributed to SEO?

Recently I had a rare opportunity to do a direct comparison of two directly comparable websites.

I've been working with A Plus Educational Supply for a full year now. When I started working with them, they had two websites: one each from the two main stock catalog companies for educational supply dealers. The two sites were comparable in importance and usefulness, similar in traffic and overall quality, and neither of them got many orders.

A Plus hired me to work on one of the sites. I found out about the other one in the course of my initial research, but they asked me to concentrate just on one of the sites, so I ignored the other.

The fortunate site got an SEO makeoever, a blog, linkbuilding, and regular monitoring and response to analytics. The unfortunate one just continued as it had been.

How do the two compare after a year?

The unfortunate one had no PageRank at all. It didn't get crawled by Google. It had no links, except one from the company that hosted it. No orders arrived through it. The domain name is still registered, but the owners let their hosting lapse at the end of the school year and it is no longer online.

The fortunate one has thousands of links and a PageRank of 3. Their sales over the past year are 600% higher than the previous year, even though this has been a very difficult year for their industry as a whole.

Interestingly enough, their traffic is not much higher than it was. Their rankings are better, and their traffic is better focused -- it's their customers rather than random visitors -- but their conversion rate is enormously improved.

The same company, the same people, the same products, the same location, the same economic conditions -- the only difference between the two websites is that one got ongoing web marketing efforts and the other didn't.

One is very successful, and the other is dead.

Labels: linkbuilding, SEO

Recently I've been involved in a very lengthy discussion on how to choose the best URL for your website. This may seem like a very top-down kind of thing, and sometimes people are inclined to skip over it, but it can make a big difference for search and traffic.

The first website I conducted SEO for was called educationstationteachers.com, belonging to a company called The Education Station. It was a horrible choice. It's long, hard to remember, hard to see -- that is, it's difficult to look at it and grasp instantly what it says -- and impossible to guess.

I don't know why the owners chose this name. If you're choosing a URL, let's make sure that you don't make the same mistakes.

• Find out what's available. My favorite place to look is Psychic Whois, where you can type in the beginning of a possible name and get a list of available options. Your first choice will naturally be YourBusiness.com if you're a business or YourOrganization.org if you're a nonprofit, and Psychic Whois will tell you whether you can have that URL.
• Think about the top-level domain. That is, will you end your domain name with .com, .org, .biz, .net? If you make money from your website or from the company your website represents, then you need the .com ending. This is what people will guess and type in.
  
• First try to be guessable. If at all possible, use the address that people will be most likely to guess and type in. For The Education Station, it would have been educationstation.com. Ask people what they think your web address would be. Make them guess. Tally the answers and go with the most popular one.
• Then, try to be memorable. Onsharp, a Fargo web design firm, uses onsharp.com, which is exactly what you'd guess. You won't forget it, either. They have a very high proportion of direct traffic, because it's just as easy to type it right in as to search for it -- or even to bookmark it.
• At least, be predictable. One of the participants in the conversation I mentioned proposed www.signoooorama.com for a business called Sign-a-Rama. While there is a whimsy and coolness to that name, using the "O" instead of the "A" which the business uses, combined with the difficulty of getting the right number of "O"s typed in, makes this a bad choice. Your URL needs to have an obvious connection with your business. It can't just be evocative. You goal is to get visitors there.
  
• Use your keywords. All things being equal, Google gives higher placement to sites with the keyword in the URL. The name of your business certainly ought to be a major keyword for you. If for some reason you can't get signarama.com, you may be better off with signsYourTown.com than with some variant on Sign-a-Rama.
• If all else fails, be short. Among the many problems with educationstationteachers.com was the length. Even people who found it easy to learn and remember wouldn't care to type it in. "Bookmark it!" we'd say cheerfully, and that's good advice, but it's better to have a convenient URL in the first place. Not shorter than your actual business name (see "Be guessable" above), but no longer if you can avoid it.

If I couldn't get MyBusiness.com as my domain name, I'd think seriously of changing my business name.

Shan Pesaru and I just finished making a new website for a local church.



They had the common problem you find in churches and other non-commercial organizations -- a website built by a member who volunteered, and then didn't keep up with it, and lots of people getting access and making changes and no one remembering how to get back in and fix the resulting mess...

They really needed a new website.

However, since their previous website had been unusable for some years, their members aren't in the habit of using it. They want to get the membership, which naturally includes people of many different ages and levels of technical comfort, to use the new website as a primary source of information.

Succeeding at this will allow them to reduce the amount of time the church secretary spends answering the same questions, the number of group emails they send out, and the money and other resources they spend on mailings.

They also want to make sure that people looking for their church online, or for a Methodist church of any kind in their town, can find them. (Secretly, they want to be above the big Methodist church on Google, but they are pretending that's a joke when they say it. After all, they're a church.)

So they're essentially in the same place that a business would be, upon getting a new website. You want your current customers to visit your site regularly, and you want potential new customers to be able to find you.

The things they need to do are the same things you need to do when you get a new website:

• Submit your website to the major search engines. Here they are:

• Tell your current customers about your website, and give them a reason to check it out. A store might choose to have a drawing among all customers who go to their website and fill out the mailing list opt-in form, a coupon available at the website, or a sale on online purchases only. The church has a blog at their website, and is e-mailing members asking them to send in items for the blog. Chances are excellent that members will then tell one another to go look at their pictures on the blog, and once there, they'll be invited to explore and to bookmark the website.




• Take the opportunity to announce your new website. Press releases, articles in your local or industry papers, mentions in your newsletter (and while you're at it, start transitioning to an electronic newsletter), and face-to-face invitations to visit your new website are all completely appropriate.
• Twitter, add a link to Facebook, request links from your clients and vendors -- any place on the internet that you have access to is a good place to mention your new site. While "We have a website!" isn't news, "We have a new website!" is, so go ahead and share your exciting news with your online community as well as in the physical world.

Chances are, you feel a little bit like someone with a new puppy, anyway, especially if yours is as nice as this one is. Go ahead, while you feel like bragging, and brag a little bit. Check your rankings and analytics after a couple of weeks and see whether your site has naturally done what you want it to do, and at that point you can decide whether you need an online marketing plan.

Labels: online marketing, SEM

I've written before about cute websites, and one of the big questions about them: namely, should you have a cute website?

There are industries that just shouldn't.

Schools, however, especially elementary schools and preschools, can have the cutest websites they please. There is no upper limit on cuteness for teachers of children. I work with this population, so I know whereof I speak.

Designer Jeff Wain and I are working on a preschool website right now, and you can see his initial concept for the site at the top of the page. We'll be adding a photo, but it already has a very cute look.

His design for A Plus Educational Supply is another very cute site designed to appeal to teachers:



Jay Jaro did a great design for my environmental lesson plan page over at SmartPay, even with the challenge of including one very cute page at a more serious website:



And my own design for Teaching with Fairytales is also verging on the cute:



If your business caters to teachers, or if you are in fact a school, you can be as cute as you wanna be without sacrificing professionalism or appropriateness. Cute is your business.

While Jeff used a little red schoolhouse and an apple to good effect in his designs, you can also step away from the traditional education images. Jay's jungle look reinforces the idea of ecological responsibility that's part of SmartPay but also brings to mind concepts like growth and fresh new ideas. Animal mascots, whether a real dog or a cartoon tiger, are fun and appropriate for schools. Kids -- as long as you've considered privacy issues -- are always great.

When it comes to colors, these examples are using pink, blue, yellow, green, and red -- kid-friendly colors -- but in combinations, intensities, and textures that keep a degree of sophistication as well as fun.

And think about your vocabulary, too. When you're talking to teachers, you're certainly fine with fun and cute, but remember that these are educated professional people, too. Don't talk down to your visitors. A few years ago, one of my favorite school publishers brought out a series of books called "Technology for Terrified Teachers." Big mistake. I think most of those were thrown out after they languished on the clearance racks for a year or so. Teachers aren't terrified. In fact, a group of people who spend most of their workdays surrounded by mobs of children are probably pretty tough.

Just because you've got a cartoon tiger on your site, it doesn't mean you can get away with treating your visitors as though they were kids.

Whether you're a school, or serving schools and schoolteachers, strive to combine a serious, professional air with a cute, fun look for maximum effect.

Labels: web content, web design

Sure you do! You just haven't thought of it yet. When you're twittering for the sake of business networking -- and also taking care of your business -- it can be challenging to come up with that daily tweet. But consistent presence is the backbone of good social media marketing.

Here are some suggestions for you:

• If you're one of those over-zealous twitterers who started off tweeting every few minutes, calm down. Once or twice a day is plenty to keep you on the radar of most of your followers. The ones who follow hundreds or thousands of people may miss your tweets, but -- do the math -- they're not really reading all those tweets anyway. The people with whom you're actually networking will appreciate the fact that you don't take up their entire screen every time they look. A few tweets a day over the long run will be more effective than spurts of intensive tweeting followed by silence for weeks when you run out of steam.
• Join conversations. See what the people you're following have to say, and respond to them. If the people you're following aren't talking about things that interest you, you're following the wrong people. Try using the search box to find people who are talking about things that interest you.
  
• Share information. Twitter has become one of the best places to go to find cool blogs and articles, since people tweet the things they enjoy and find useful. You can do the same. When you find an interesting article online, or a book (search for the author's website to link to) you'd like to tell people about, tweet about it.
• Report on your company. Seriously. Your customers want to know that you have a new product, or a sale, or a new version of your software or whatever it might be. They're your customers. They don't want to see ads all the time, but they want your news. They may even like to see your link on their Twitter screen often enough that they can be reminded to go and visit your website now and again.
• Be a little frivolous. Don't be frivolous all the time if you're tweeting for business. You don't want your customers to get the impression that your new phone or the flavor of yogurt you're having for lunch is the main thing on your mind. You also don't want to Tweet as you get arrested or cope with a hangover. But an occasional glimpse of the personal is nice. I set up a new Twitter account for Clevertech yesterday (see how easy it is to make a custom background that sets you apart from the other Twitterers?) and the very first bit of news was that the CEO is headed to Amsterdam. I'm intrigued, aren't you?
  

Think of Twitter as being like those little conversations you have with people as you ride in an elevator together in your building at work -- not time enough for anything earth-shattering, but plenty of time to start developing a bond.

Hey -- come and visit me at Twitter, too. I want to know what you're doing.

Labels: social media

I'm working with designer Jon Schleuss on a website for the local chapter of the American Association of University Women, an organization to which I belong and which I support wholeheartedly.

Last night I presented information about the planned site to the board of directors. Knowing that one of the main goals for the group was to increase diversity among the membership, and that the average age of the association was 60, I was confident that a new, usable website would be something everyone would value. I don't believe in stereotyping older people as lacking internet savvy (my mother is a popular blogger), but I'm also aware of the research that tells us that younger users rely heavily on the internet for information.

People under 50 don't use phone books or printed maps. Half of all executives under 40 use Twitter. People under 30 may conduct their entire lives from their Blackberries and iPhones. People under 20 have never had a better information source than the internet.

So I was assuring the group that their goal of reaching younger university women made a functional website essential, and there was widespread agreement, especially among the younger women present.

So far, so good.

Then we looked at the site structure, and one of the older ladies saw that the directory was to be online.

"I hate the internet," she said. "I spend too much time reading emails. I'd never go to a website."

There was some real distress there. The rest of the over-seventies were looking pretty tense, too.

"You don't carry a computer around with you," one said. "What if I need someone's phone number?"

There was a moment of silence while the rest of us -- the ones who do carry computers around with us -- readjusted our thinking to the idea of needing to look up a phone number and dial it on a telephone.

"I can't find anything on websites anyway," another objected.

"Maybe we can print it out, too," someone said. "We can have both."

I suggested that it would be easy to print copies on demand whenever someone wanted a physical copy, and one of the women asked whether it could be a PDF.

"I'll have the file, " I said, "so I can easily make a PDF for printing."

"Can you copy something from a PDF and put it in an email?" the woman wanted to know.

We had a bit of a conversation about PDFs and what they're for. On the other side of the room, the woman who hates the internet was speaking in scandalized tones about the fact that without a printed yearbook we wouldn't know what the upcoming programs were. Those who weren't still coping with the PDF question began discussing the difficulty of getting the programs set up a year in advance for the sake of the yearbook.

"You don't need to set them up a year in advance if it's online. You can change it any time and keep it up to date." That was me, trying to make the website more appealing. I pointed out that it was easy to email things to people if the things were on the internet already. We finished with a clear split in the room: the Facebook crowd, who were happy, and the others, who weren't.

My goal: to get everyone happy with the final product.

Here's the original concept mockup that Jon came up with. The stock image at the top will be replaced by images of women of different ages and ethnic backgrounds, and of course there'll be real content there, but this is what I had come up with in discussion with the president and secretary of the organization, and Jon carried it out nicely.



We had already thought about the importance of using black text on a white ground for visibility, and also about having very straightforward navigation. Jon went with a good amount of white space, and clear headings on the sections.

After the board meeting, I think we also need to have very obvious navigation buttons, even more so than usual. We need to keep them identical on all the pages. Assuming that the reluctant users make the effort to get to know this website, we need to make sure than they can easily find those phone numbers whenever they want them.

Those of us who've been using the internet since the '80s -- whether that's when we were born or when we first got email at work -- have grown up along with the internet, and we know how it works. There's no reason to expect people who retired in the '80s and haven't gotten fond of the internet in the interim to have that knowledge.

That doesn't mean that older people aren't visiting your website. In this particular case -- and perhaps in yours as well -- we know for sure that a lot of the potential users of this site are going to be pretty old. We should design the site with this in mind.

But it's something to think about for many businesses. Right now, somewhere out there, someone is giving a PC to her grandpa and showing him how to visit that online fishing tackle store or music website. Is yours the next one he'll try?

Labels: accessibility, usability, web design