Posts tagged website design
Taking Over the World: Setting up Your Site for Effective International SEO
Feb 18th
The Internet is the great equaliser, allowing small businesses to compete with large, and everybody to put forth their own opinions. While there are some advantages to being a big fish in the WWW pond, there are also some tricky issues to contend with. The first of these is hosting and targeting for international websites – today we explore some SEO based recommendations for businesses that are trying to take over the world! More >
5 Essential Website Success Tactics for 2010
May 27th
Right now we’re going back … to the future! We spend a lot of time talking about the timeless SEO and internet marketing tactics. Here are the up-and-comers for the year that will continue to be important for the rest of 2010.
Google Local
It’s like ordinary SEO, only smaller and easier! Get onto that Google Local page and start prettying it up if you haven’t already done so.
Load time
This new SEO ranking factor might not carry a lot of weight, but it really is a no-brainer. Get a good host, and keep your pages lightweight.
Do your Facebook/Twitter/MySpace pages
Everybody else is on here … and if your business has dedicated fans, they are probably actually searching for your profile.
Create a mobile site
Even small, local sites need a mobile version to cater to users-on-the-go searching for goods and services through their smartphones.
Check your analytics
There’s no sense throwing money at SEO without knowing what results it is creating…
5 Website Development Stages For Usability Testing
May 18th
Usability testing has been the flavour of the week, and if you’re as fanatical about this ultra-useful web marketing activity as we are, you’ll consider doing your testing at every one of the following five stages of website development…
- Planning stage
Before you even have a rough idea of what your site will include, do usability tests on your competitors’ sites. If you haven’t already used these sites, you can even use your own team as the test subjects! - Sketch stage
When you have some rough (but not too rough) sketches on paper, take them to a user sample to see if they make sense, and if the titles are clear enough. - Site design stage
Once you have the proper design formalised, print out some sample pages and do the same as you did above. Ask your users to explain the navigation. - Prototype stage
When you have your HTML prototype up, check that your users can get around (as much as is possible) and they understand how to do key tasks - Dress rehearsal stage
When you have a complete usable version of the site, spend a fair bit of time testing before you finish everything off.
Top Excuses for Ignoring Usability Testing … and Why They’ll Cost You!
May 13th
We’ve been talking about usability testing this week – one of the internet marketing activities that most people don’t bother making the effort with. Here are the top 5 excuses we hear for not doing usability testing … and why (just like not having your homework done!) making an excuse only hurts you in the end.
Is that a REAL excuse?
- We don’t have time
If you don’t have time for testing, you’ll have to find time to redo parts of your site down the track - It costs too much money
Ditto above … besides, if you videotape your usability tests subjects, i=this internet marketing activity is actually very cheap. - We don’t understand what we’re testing
There are literally hundreds of usability and web marketing gurus to outsource this to nowadays! - I don’t know how to do usability testing
I’ll explain in a single sentence
. Grab a few people from your target market, ask them to perform the basic operations you’re expecting users to engage in on your site and give you a running mental commentary, videotape them doing so and watch where they had trouble later on. - We don’t have the equipment
What equipment? All you need is a computer, a desk and two chairs, at a minimum.
You see … there really are no excuses for ignoring the most important beginning internet marketing activity.
Focus Groups vs Usability Tests
May 11th
In SEO, analytics is the be-all and end-all. If something shows up in the numbers, it’s good … if it doesn’t, then it isn’t 
. However, you wouldn’t be the first person to realise that it’s smarter to try and test some aspects of your site before you implement them – the way you do that is with focus groups and usability testing. These two activities aren’t the same thing – here we check out the major differences in their web marketing purposes.
Focus groups
These are usually used in the design stage of a website’s development, or during a re-design. A group of users will all sit around a table and give their reactions to a page, or aspect of the site. They are better to have in the initial stages of website creation – they help sort out overall, abstract-type problems that could affect your internet marketing later down the track.
Usability tests
These are much more specific tests, aimed at getting a typical user to try to perform a task on your website. You’ll have to incorporate some usability theory into your website design long before you actually do usability testing. Here are some guidelines for good usability testing:
- Grab a couple of users to test VERY early in the picture
- You can’t test on yourself. It just doesn’t work.
- Remember that tests won’t ‘prove’ anything – they’ll guide you in a better direction. No company in the world has the budget, or the will, to actually ‘prove’ something in the usability arena.
Ideally, you’ll use both of these internet marketing pre-development tactics to ensure your site’s success!
“My Website Has a Dream…”
Apr 29th
One of the most critical parts of a SEO & web marketing campaign is the goal you have for that particular site. Without a goal, you can spend many thousands and never see any return. Today we are looking at some different goals that your website might have; keep yours firmly in mind to get the best out of your web marketing.
To fill out a contact form
In many businesses, contact needs to be made before any sales can occur – in that case you would optimise your web marketing to reflect that.
Register/subscribe to the site
You could also sell subscriptions to your site, if you have a lot of valuable, unique content. As this makes you money, it is an end in itself.
Buy a product or service
An obvious primary goal!
Subscribe to a mailing list
This is a secondary goal – you may want people to give you permission to market to them in future, to increase your chance of achieving a primary goal.
Read your content
This can be either a primary goal (like for blog sites), or a secondary goal (for blogs affiliated with corporate sites, for example).
You have to know what you want, before you tell the customer what you want them to do … and before your web marketers will know how to help you!
Top 3 Accessibility Tips for Web Pages
Apr 14th
90% of the world’s web searcher use Google when they need to find something. It is tempting to forget about that 10% in your internet marketing … until you realise exactly how many individuals that percentage translates to! The same is true of designing accessible web pages. The number of people who don’t access the web ‘normally’ is small percentage-wise, but enormous in terms of pure numbers. Today we look at the top 3 tips for creating accessible web pages.
Can your website speak to everybody?
Use alt tags
Having alt tags allows people using screen readers to know what an image on your page is. It follows that your alt tags should ideally be descriptive of what the image is!
Include a text-only version
Create a text-only version of your website, which will not only make the page load faster and work better with screen readers, but help you identify semantic gaps that you may not have realised existed when the page has its graphics and Flash elements.
Include descriptive text for audio and video files
This one is great for non-impaired users who prefer to skim-read as well! Of course, for impaired users, this is a critical step, whereas for able-bodied users it is an option.
How to Redesign Without Killing Your SEO
Apr 9th
For most website owners, managing a redesign while keeping internet marketing rankings intact is one task that is just a bit too technical. What your internet marketing firm has on hand is the book “68 Best Practices for Redesigning a Site Without Loss of Rankings’. Today we give you the ultra-short version .
Changing URLs
It is not well understood that Google does not rank domains, they rank pages. So, if you change from a .asp platform to a .php platform, all of your URLs will change, and as far as Google knows, you are a completely new site.
URL changes are managed with 301-redirects on your old pages, and eventually your new pages will start building up their own Google juice. The way you manage the redirects depends greatly on your site size and purpose … expert internet marketing advice highly recommended.
Adding Flash
Your site is doing well, and you can finally afford to add some Flash. As long as you don’t go overboard, and don’t include basic, necessary info with in Flash, you should be alright.
Changing content
Do this with ultimate restraint, if you already had great rankings. If your site wasn’t showing up in the top ten or twenty, then you can rewrite with gay abandon!
Why Does the Internet Suck?
Mar 18th
Ha haa! We hear so much about the benefits of the web, SEO and internet marketing… its power to make money, to connect people with other people and with products, to give us more decision-making power and information … etc etc etc. People never stop extolling the virtues of the internet. Today I’m going to tell you why the internet completely, absolutely, sucks! And then, most likely, kiss and make up with it – “Let’s stop the fussin’ and the feudin’!”.
The internet is not impressed at our assessment
1. It’s a black hole for time
We all know exactly how much time the internet can waste. Entire weeks of your life are at stake. Information is fascinating … but not always useful in a broad context.
2. We depend on it … but it isn’t always dependable
Your connection to the internet arises out of a complex array of different factors. Your computer, software, hardware, the phone line, your ISP all collaborate to get you online. If one link breaks … all hell breaks loose!
3. It creates angry, mean people
This phenomenon, I’m sure, arises out of the same mechanism that makes us instantly angrier every time we get behind the tonne or so of metal, glass and plastic that is our car. When there is a keyboard, a screen, and in many cases entire continents between us and other people, human consideration is greatly lessened. Unfortunately.
4. You can’t always trust it
If I had a dollar for every time a Nigerian princess had contacted me, for every time a company had claimed to be able to either enlarge or shrink various parts of my body, and every time I had been told I could make over $40 per hour working at home, I would be a rich, rich lady.
5. Sometimes, we don’t need all that information
One very real effect of the internet on our collective psyche is the way it dispenses us to worry. We now the intimate details of people killed in natural disasters across the world, about exactly how many kidnappings occur every minute, and how often someone is diagnosed with cancer. But SHOULD we?
6. It’s permanent
If you’ve ever bookmarked an awesome link and gone back to find it a week later, only to be informed that the site hasn’t paid their hosting fees, you may dispute this point. But a very real fact is that if you have posted it on the internet, even if it has since been deleted, it may still exist in some form in somebody else’s internet history – or at least, the Google cache.
Our relationship with the internet is definitely more love than frustration … it’s like a marriage. It takes work to have a happy life together, but you know that leaving is not an option!
Slippery Websites – Do You Have One?
Mar 16th
I love the metaphor of ‘slippery’ for a website – I can just imagine the site trying to hold onto visitors that are like egg white … they fall apart in your hands and slip down your wrists. Or the site itself can be like a slide – people arrive at the top, and quickly make their way off at the bottom. If your SEO can get people to your website without a problem, but have trouble making the money you should, we look at some steps to take to slow the journey.
Is this how slippery your website is?
1. Find out who you are selling to
So, so many companies say “We sell to whoever needs our products”. This may be true – but every company finds that a large portion of their customers are derived from a certain demographic segment. They might be mostly women, they might be mostly of childbearing age, and they might be mostly located within your physical area. Demographic analysis of your current customers is the first step to getting rid of that slip.
2. Understand your market
Understand their preferences for colour, their design sensibilities, the way they search for information, etc. Then pander to those sensibilities in your website, whether or not they also appeal to you. Everybody is different … and the only people you need to please are the ones that are keeping you in business.
3. Do usability studies
Jakob Nielsen is the grandfather of usability (often the grumpy old man of usability, actually J), and his blog at www.useit.com has lots of good usability info, hints and tips for where you might currently be going wrong. Of course, there is no substitute for an expert eye in this arena … many web marketing specialists work on usability and web design as well as SEO.
4. Build trust on your website
If you don’t have SSL security certificates, a https: connection for your credit card entry page, security certificates for programs like Verified by Visa, etc, there are few customers now that would entrust you with their money.
5. If you have an ecommerce site, link to other products from many places
If consumers can’t quickly find what they want, or don’t see any indications that you might have what they want, they will often click straight off. Use Top Seller widgets, ‘Also Recommended’ sections, and include ‘Customers who purchased this item also bought’ sections, a la Amazon.
Conversion optimisation is a big topic and you can spend years refining it – but without it, every SEO dollar you spend could be wasted.