We operate in a funny industry. Some people think we're web designers; others see us as web developers. It has something to do with the fact that some graphic designers build websites, and some software developers build websites too.

A website doesn't just have to look good. If that were the case, it would be a one-page brochure. Websites have to work - the navigation has to work of course, but more than that, the website and its surrounding online strategy have to be thought out and engineered to make the business behind them as effective as possible, whether or not the website has 'transactional' features.

Good graphic designers, like good software developers and e-markeeters, build the needs of the business into everything they do.

At Oxford Web we're fortunate enough to have a great mix of skills in our team, including graphic design, software development, and of course business process development and e-marketing.

And while our website reflects the latter skills pretty well, up until now it wasn't really showing the very best of our graphic design.

So we've created a microsite, http://graphic-design.oxford-web.co.uk, to showcase the best of our graphic design work.

Hope you like it.

Adobe announced recently at its "Max" conference that Photoshop and other Adobe products would be moving to a subscription model.

I can understand websites which use a subscription model - you (the customer) are regularly using services which they (the supplier) need to constantly maintain.  Or a service like dropbox, which maintains a set of file servers constantly connected to the internet so that your computer can use them at any time of day or night.

Downloadable software, on the other hand, has been written, tested, and finally made available via a shop, downloaded onto your computer, and is expected to work as written.

It's a bit like electricity - you can buy it in the mains or in a battery.  But charging a subscription fee or software that should just work is like trying to charge a subscription fee for a battery.

On a side note - lots of great graphics have been created with GIMP!

OK, so you've worked hard at getting visitors to your website, and now they're coming in droves. The only slight problem is.. they're not buying anything. What do you do next?

First of all, let's talk about where they arrive.

The page a visitor first sees when they come to your website is called a landing page. If they've typed your domain name into a browser's address bar, they will normally come to your home page, so that, for those people, is the landing page. But you can create multiple landing pages for different purposes:

• business card
• email signature
• online advert

Equally, the search term your visitor types in may lead them to one of your internal pages that closely matches that term - so any page on your website could be a landing page.

Ideally your landing page should be tailored to the needs of the visitor. If they've come looking for information about your house cleaning robot, for example, give them a quick reminder of the key facts and ask them to buy,  If they're looking for a competitor's widget, give them the comparison table and ask them to buy yours.  And so on.

Your customers are on a mission

What's next?  Typical visitors will have a purpose in visiting your website, so the fewer clicks from the landing page to the destination page the better.  If there can be a button on the landing page that adds the product to their basket and takes them to checkout, showing whatever discount they've earned, great. From that point, the fewer clicks to secure their purchase and thank them for it, the better.

A short path to the target page means not a lot of words on the way

While you want to satisfy curious visitors, investors, prospective employees, and search engines with a whole range of relevant and interesting content, once you've examined the optimum path from landing page to destination page, you'll see that you cannot squeeze all of your amazing copy onto those few short pages.  Blaise Pascal wrote "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I've written a long one instead".  Why not take the time to make it short and snappy (without getting rid of your in-depth pages elsewhere)?

A word about "squeeze pages"

'Squeeze pages; is a horrible term; I don't know who invented it. Probably an American who had read a marketing book about how to invent categories so that you can be the best in them. What do they do? They combine a landing page and a destination page, and a lot of spammy "convincing" sales talk in between, and they tend to be very long. Well, guess what? They look like the web equivalent of the shopping channel. They're not for you.

(for previous episodes, try the "The website that grew" category)

Nancy was surprisingly willing to trust Kate's judgement, but had a few questions.

"Can you tell me what factors might prevent the shop from taking 500 online orders every month?"

"I suppose - if people don't find us, or find a cheap competitor, or find a competitor's website easier to use."

"OK, those seem like they might be real difficulties."

"We're investing money with Hugh; he's going to make sure that the website is found."

"Hmm, it doesn't say that on the cost breakdown."

"OK, I'll ask him about that."

"And what about competitors?"

"We need to put effort into the website to make sure it's providing great value, great service, and it's unique.  I think we've learned our lesson there."

"But your job..."

"I'm going to get John and Martin on board.  They can make updates when they're not serving in the shop.  And I will check up on them at least once a week."

"You're very keen on this."

"Yes, I suppose I am.  Seeing what Hugh's done in the past, I can see us running a successful online business here."

Nancy asked if Kate had spoken to her husband John about the proposed developments.  Kate told her that she really wanted Nancy's agreement in principle first, and so Nancy agreed to go ahead with the idea as long as they had a manageable budget for search engine work, and if John was happy.

Hugh proposed a mixture of Google ads and what he called "natural search".  

Google ads appear on the right hand side of the search results whenever you conduct a search on Google, and sometimes at the top.  For your ad to appear, you must bid on a price per click - whether it's 10p or £1, it's your choice.  But you only pay when your ad is clicked.  You can make the ad appear for a number of different search phrases or partial phrases, and you can create different ads and watch how they convert into sales.  For example an ad that advertised your product as "cheap" may get lots of clicks but not generate any sales - so normally you will run diferent ads and compare their performance before whittling them down.

"Natural search" refers to all of the results that are not advertisements.  Google will quickly run through the web pages it knows that are relevant to the search phrase that has been typed, and compare them, for importance and relevance, before displaying them in an order derived from that comparison.  To become more important and relevant takes work on the website copy and structure, and looking at how other websites refer to and trust the website you're trying to promote.

Hugh proposed a sliding scale of costs, starting with a small dip into Google Ads to test the water.  At last Nancy was happy with the proposed costs and Kate spoke to John.

John was happy too, so the work began.

When we talk about publishing the written word, at any point in its history, we are talking fundamentally about putting the written word in front of readers.  There have been many different phases of this activity, triggered by many significant technologies.

Writing itself seems to have had various origins, including in Egypt the transition from broadly significant symbols in the famous Narmer palette, to symbols signifying sounds, which can be used to construct words.  It wasn't easy to bring early writing to a wide audience, but one form of publishing was of course carving words on temple walls for all (who could read) to see.

The temple carving process was:

• costly, requiring special tools and trained craftsmen
• permanent

Meanwhile, writing on less permanent media, such as papyrus, was developing, and this had other problems:

• required large amounts of manpower to reach a wide audience
• prone to copying mistakes
• easily destroyed

Of course, several thousand years later the next development in publishing arrived - the printing press.  William Caxton introduced the printing press to England, though he did not invent the process.  At first, printing presses were crude affairs, using moveable type to construct pages, which had to be disassembled to construct the next page, and so on, so to make the best of the technology you had to know how many copies you were going to print, as new print runs required doing the same thing all over again!  The printing press made it:

• easy to make multiple copies
• difficult to amend a just small part of the copy
• impossible to correct what has already been printed and disseminated

As printing developed, so did writing and publishing. It became easy to become a prolific novelist, though publishing practices as late as the 19th century were different to what we have today - with novelists like Dickens and Trollope being published first in serialised form in newspapers.

The role of the publisher was essential, both for the newspaper serialisation (the publisher was the newspaper, and the distribution was almost universal) and the book form (publishers took care of selling to book shops, something authors could not do by themselves).

Six hundred years on from the invention of printing, we have an advance in technology (the internet) which has led to a number of changes in the process of publishing the written word. These changes include: 

• The devaluation of the written word (even if publishers charge "too much" for online editions, many people are writing copy and placing it on the internet for everyone to read without paying a penny - this blog, for example.
• The devaluation of publishing (electronic self-publishing can happen through online book-sellers or just via a personal website, while paper self-publishing can be done cheaply through an online printing firm).
• The increased power of the new book media - e-readers can bring the "printed" word to you more quickly than ever.
• The return of serialisation - some authors are viewing e-readers as an ideal medium for publishing serialised books.

Far from simply introducing a "publish" button, the internet has taken us off into many interesting avenues - and at a faster pace than ever.

What's next?

We welcome two recent arrivals to the Oxford Web team: Greg Joy and Sue Head.

Greg joins us as part of his placement year studying IT at Oxford Brookes University.  He is already proficient in HTML, CSS and PHP coding, along with a few other languages such as Java.  He has been hard at work on one of our ecommerce websites.

Sue's background covers engineering, project management, and software sales, and joins us as a project manager, aiming to ensure that our customers' requirements are carried out to the bet of our ability and to our customers' satisfaction.

There has been a large amount of speculation very recently that Apple is working on a new wristwatch computer.

Of course, wristwatch computing is not new.  As far back as 1980, I was able to play with a wristwatch calculator (with bright red LEDs) which could perform very basic calculator functions including addition, subtraction, division and multiplication.  The buttons were fairly fiddly but it did the job.

Science fiction for a long time heralded wristwatch communication - from Dick Tracey to the Power Rangers - and that too has been a reality for a little while - LG for example brought out a wristwatch phone a couple of years ago.

But the universal computing/communication device has of course become the smart phone, which provides a screen big enough to see things on, and big enough to tap out messages.  Does it end there, or is there a 'next step' - onto the wrist?

Proponents of the technology may argue that with an ultra-high definition display, a wristwatch-sized device can still display useful information.  And that we don't need keyboards any more, given the ability for phones to recognise the human voice and act on it.

So if size is perhaps not an issue, what's to stop this new gadget becoming Apple's next massive hit? If anything, I'd say it's the inconvenience of having to have it on your wrist.  

Think about it - a phone can be in any position.  It can be propped up or held close when you're reading; it can sit on a car dashboard; it can be held at arms length when you're sitting on the tube with no room to move your elbows.  Having to move your arm to a particular position to use a device would effectively kill it for me.

Have you had any experiences with wrist computing?  Let us know!

"What do you want to achieve with the online shop?" asked Hugh.

"I want to supplement the shop's income." said Kate, "so that we can be more profitable."

"And what does that mean in terms of volume of orders?  A hundred orders a month?  A thousand?  Ten thousand?"

"I really want 500 orders a month online."

"How many customers come to the real shop right now?  As in, how many different people do you see in a month?"

"I'm not sure.  It's probably around 500, but some of those would come back several times in a month."

"OK.  Whichever way look look at it, you need customers from outside Aylesbury, which means advertising online.  So if you're aiming for 500 new orders, you should build something solid, that works, and that brings people back to the site, and something that grows.  When you get to 500 you should be fairly certain that the next month is going to bring more orders, and so on, month after month."

Kate was sceptical.  "How can I be sure that this will happen?  And what's it going to cost?"

"It's not cheap, but cheap will get you the results you're getting now.  We know what works because we've done it before, but it will need your input."

Kate's problem now was that she couldn't spare the time, and John didn't want to. "What if I can't provide much input?  Can you help?"

"We can provide more day-to-day help," said Hugh, "but it is more expensive.  What about your shop assistant - er.. "

"Martin."

"Yes, can he spare any time?"

"Not really, but I think I might be able to persuade John's mum to get involved.   She's started using an iPad and she loves it!"

"OK.  That sounds good."

Hugh and Kate chatted about how the online shop would attract and retain customers, and Hugh promised to put some figures together.  They agreed to ditch the getyourdomainsnowuk.biz shop and start again with a completely bespoke shop (though built on some readily-available open source software that Hugh had used before).

After 3 days, Hugh came back with a proposal and an estimate.  The estimate contained the following figures*:

*Please note that the prices in the table above are completely made up; every shop is different and it is no use extrapolating these prices for your individual circumstances.  A web developer will normally discuss your plans, and tailor the solution to your requirements, the speed at which you want to grow, the technology available at the time, and so on.

Although Hugh's pitch had sounded convincing, and he'd also included examples of websites that he'd built which were doing well in terms of sales and visitor numbers, Kate baulked at the cost.  But she sat down with a spreadsheet and worked out the return in investment, and became calmer.  "Once we hit the 500 sales mark", she thought, "it will take just 8 months for the profits to pay off the website."

She did think that John and Nancy would be difficult about the cost, and she resolved to get at least one more quote.  She searched the internet for local web shops, found a few, and fired off some enquiries. She arranged meetings with the ones who seemed most friendly, and in due course received two more estimates, one cheaper than Hugh and one more expensive.  

Then she organised a lunch with Nancy, and we'll find out more soon....

When I dipped into my electronic post bag this morning I was surprised and delighted to find an email offering me money.

It wasn't in exchange for my bank details; it was from a very nice man who wanted to write a "high quality original article" in the form of a sponsored post on the Oxford Web blog.

As you may imagine, alarm bells had already begun to ring in my head.  What's going on is that someone who wants to get better rankings in Google wants to use a number of high ranking websites to create content to link to their website.

"What's wrong with that?" you may ask.  I'm a cynic with a lot of things, but the whole idea behind Google's "link juice" algorithm is that websites earn kudos by having other websites rate them highly and therefore link to them - not that they should pay for it and at the same time downgrade the level of content on my site!

I read on.

"Oh, by the way, I'd like to know if linking to a gambling website would be a problem for you..."

Yes - it would be.  And you can read more about why if you buy Graham Tempest (our customer)'s excellent novels - here!

And that link is free of charge...

It has been brought to our attention recently that if you share a link using "Linked In", it will cache the title and descrption of that link indefintely, so that if someone else shares it two years later and has made significant changes, the "preview" given by Linked In, which includes the page title, won't have changed from two years ago!

Say I share a link today to Green Living Energy's blog post on the new Electrical Safety Register, http://www.greenlivingenergy.co.uk/the-electrical-safety-register-.  The "window title", a.k.a. "meta title" of this page is "The Electrical Safety Register".  

So far so good.  

If in two years Green Living Energy have deleted their blog and post a damning indictment of the Electrical Safety Register, entitled "How the Electrical Safety Register has failed" (not likely but bear with me), and happen to post it under the same URL, i.e. http://www.greenlivingenergy.co.uk/the-electrical-safety-register-, and I want to share it on linked in, it will come up with the title in bold underneath my link "The Electrical Safety Register".  It won't check the title, despite the fact that it was first shared over 2 years ago.

Not a genius bit of programming - but forewarned is forearmed!

When you walk into a shop or an office, you expect to get a feel for the owners' character, vision, and ethos. Walking into a small independent East Oxford coffee shop, for example, you might see mismatched crockery, antiques, union flags, Bovril jars, pictures of letterboxes, and war posters, which give a homely, "made in Britain" feel - whereas if you walk into a coffee shop chain you'll see a reduced colour palette, all matching crockery, smart new furniture, large scale black and white photography, and uniform typefaces and signage.

But having stepped in, your next step will be to order a coffee. If the shop owner has trained their staff well, your conversation (i.e. your "ordering experience") will be at one with the ethos of the business. Perhaps in the chain they'll refrain from certain forms of addressm like "love", or "my dear", and perhaps in the independent shop they will be more flexible about what you can have and how they can accommodate you.

A nice website design isn't enough to portray the character of a business. You need to expose some of your thoughts and ideas, your philosophy and ethics. And you can't do this with "Home", "About us", "Services" and "Contact us" alone! 

So write about what you know, what you think of the regulations surrounding your industry, what your customers are up to, and what new services and products you can offer - but above all, write!  And if you need help setting up a blog to do just this, hopefully you'll know where to come.

Sad to announce, the final event of Oxford-based networking group "Ladies and Gentlemen that Lunch" has taken place.  We supported this group for a number of years with a website which:

• Allowed the group to manage content via an online content management system
• Allowed members to update their profiles for an online directory
• Allowed the group to post events and take payment for events

If you're interested in networking events near Oxford, you could try Refer-On or the Late Breakfast, but if you're interested in meeting us in an informal setting to discuss websites (including design, building, and optimisation) we're planning on running a few  seminars in the new year (2013) - please register your interest here.

I was at a very engaging and informative presentation this morning by Mark Salisbury from the Oxford Knowledge Company, who reminded us that the Apollo 11 mission to the moon reached its destination with the aid of 4 computers which were each similar in processing power and storage size to the ZX81.  The problem, he said, was that now we have desktop PCs which are thousands of times more powerful, all we do with them is write documents, send emails, and browse the web..

Mark went on to discuss the needs of a modern business, and how computers can automate processes within businesses to save time and avoid mistakes.  

Do you have a business where you have to type each invoice by hand or manually transpose information from one system to another?  Or do you have a website and CRM system which don't talk to each other?  Are there any boring tasks which you think could be automated with the use of some nifty technology?  If so, it may not be as hard as you think!

Do talk to us or the Oxford Knowledge Company if you're interested in making your business processes better.

Kate decided to try adding 10 products to the ecommerce package she'd bought, 5 different types of cheeses in two sizes.

After photographing the cheese on her iPhone, she uploaded product descriptions, photos and prices.

The off-the-shelf commerce system made her put things in categories, so she eventually decided to put two of the cheeses into a category called "strong" and three into a category called "smooth".

On the design side, she had to choose from a number of colour templates, which didn't quite match the "Smiths Fine Cheeses" site, but looked OK.

When everything was ready, she added a link from the Smiths Fine Cheeses site to the new shop site.  The address of the shop site was http://www.getyourdomainsnowuk.biz/shops/aylesbury-cheese-shop, but that didn't matter, as customers went directly from Smiths Fine Cheeses and weren't particularly going to notice.

A couple of months passed, and there were two orders on the system - Kate's first test order for some Smooth and Creamy Oxfordshire Cheese, 500g, and an order from someone in Oxford for some Buckinghamshire String Cheese, 2 x 500g packages.  The order from Oxford caused some excitement as they worked out how best to wrap and post the cheese.  The shop had some great cheese boxes but they hadn't thought about the outer packaging.  They realised after processing the order that the postage and packaging cost way too little at £2.50 and ought really to be more like £4.00.

Another month passed and no orders.  The profit on the one genuine order was more-or-less wiped by the problem with the packaging price, and the cost of the ecommerce package at GetYourDomainsNowUK.Biz was £8.99 per month, so the net loss so far was £26.97.

Meanwhile the real world shop itself was flourishing.  Due to some new developments in Aylesbury, more passing trade was coming through the door and buying the speciality cheeses on offer.  

But Kate was bothered about the online shop, and decided to speak to Hugh again.  

More on that next time!

I was at a meeting this morning where the speaker advised adherence to one simple message in your marketing, citing the example of Heineken, who, discovering that the one purpose of lager was to refresh, came up with the famous campaign about Heineken 'refreshing the parts other beers do not reach'.

It was an inspirational talk, only slightly marred by the fact that the speaker went on to discuss a mind-bogglingly confusing array of products and services, some current and some in the pipeline, relating to their own business.

It's challenging inside our own business, when web design isn't a new thing and there are so many new companies barging in on the market.  Do we find a niche, like websites relating to care of aardvarks, or do we stick to what we do best, designing, building, and improving websites?  And where's the USP (unique selling proposition)?  Surely that's what everyone else does - isn't it?

Niches are very important, but it's not necessary to have just one, and at Oxford Web we have been digging fairly deep niches in four main sectors - membership organisations, education, small to medium sized businesses, and public sector - and so we like to think that we have something to talk about in each of those niches, and that we understand the needs of customers in those sectors.

So what's our one simple message?  "Making websites work".

When people ask us for a website, be it "only four pages" or "hugely complex" (our customers' own words, which were turned on their heads) we help them think about who they're aiming at, and how to say it on the home page with a simple message, leaving the "inner" pages of the website to explain everything in more depth.

What's your one simple message?

YES

Let's assume that search engines work for users - that is, the search engines have the best interests of users at heart. If I search for "Oxford Web Designers" I want links to the best web design companies in Oxford, and if I search for "Aylesbury Cheese Shop" I want a cheese shop in Aylesbury. The search engines want to understand this, and their no.1 priority is to provide this information, before bombarding me with ads and other services - because without the quality information, there is no core service around which to hang the ads and the subsidiary stuff. 

Some commentators would like you to believe that this is not the case, and cite good evidence, but in the case of Google, ultimately, the overwhelming evidence - over the last 14 years - is that they believe in this core service.

When you run a search on Google, its job is to return a list of web pages in some sort of order. And the order is a combination of relevance to the search phrase and importance.

It's mildly complicated for a computer to find out how relevant a page is; it's immensely difficult for a computer to rate one website above another. It's difficult enough for a human, and humans can normally make use of more information - for example in rating the BBC website I use the knowledge I have about the BBC's offline activities (TV, Radio and so on). I also happen to have worked for the BBC (as a temp at BBC Worldwide, in my youth!).

Google has very little to go on in comparison, but over the years has added many measures to its measuring toolkit (also called its "algorithm" by some). So for example Google will find out about:

• how long your website has been around
• how much content you are adding to your website
• how other websites rate your website, and how important those websites are

These major measures of importance are not a secret, and that's where the problem lies, because there's a whole industry built around tricking Google into thinking their customers' websites are more important than they really are.

And when I say "tricking", I mean cheating, lying, and generally spamming the internet with a load of junk.

For example, there are SEO people who generate thousands of robot-built pages in order to trick Google into thinking that a website's content is growing. Or SEO people who generate fake websites linking to their customers' websites.

When search engine people say they use "white hat" techniques, by the way, what they mean is "black hat". Nobody actually admits to being "black hat".

What they're trying to tell you with the "hat" business is that they're wizards who employ magic (that's a warning sign already), and that they're techniques generally fall under Google's radar.

But Google generally finds them out - as we know from the "panda" and "penguin" updates. And your website rank will suffer as a result.

NO

Search engine marketing, done right, identifies what people are searching for when they want to find your product and service, and how to make your website genuinely more relevant and important.

If you're doing it right, you are not going to suffer, because, as all the evidence suggests, Google is genuinely interested in promoting relevant and important websites.

A genuine search engine marketing company will help you to:

• Analyse the market
• Create relevant niche pages
• Structure the information
• Build genuine content and links

And your website rank will not fail to grow.

According to the bbc website today, the UK government recently spent £100,000 on facebook ads as part of the "Great" marketing campaign.

The BBC's correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, wonders if the Facebook "likes" produced by the campaign were worth the advertising (the cost of a "like" is something like 43p).

Of course, if all the facebook fans are going to cancel their Marbella plans next year and stay in Great Britain, the GDP generated might be significant.

But the BBC reckons that the "likes" are not worth an awful lot.

It's one thing to set up a facebook page; it's quite another to spend money getting people to visit it when there's no clear conversion process.

As one comment puts it: "Is it a waste of money, you ask? When was THAT ever the main concern in Government spending?"

For previous installments, see the tWtG topic.

In the meeting, Hugh asked John what his budget was. "We have a budget", said John, "but I want you to come up with a price first."

Hugh explained that there were lots of ways to build an online shop, and that it was no use designing a Jumbo Jet when all that was needed was a production line Ford Focus.

"I just want people to be able to buy cheese on the website.  It can't be that complicated, can it?"

"Well," said Hugh, "first of all you've got to consider the catalogue side of things.  Are you selling cheese in pre-defined packages or do you want people to be able to order any size or weight?"

"Any size" said John.

"Then you can't use an off-the-shelf shopping cart system," said Hugh,  "because they only let customers decide on quantity, 1, 2, 3, and so on, not weight, like 250 grams."

"OK, well suppose we stick to the cheaper system."

"Then you've got to consider the checkout process.  The off-the shelf systems usually send customers through quite a laborious process to check out.  Investing a bit more will give you more control, and we can integrate additional ways of checking out, like checkout by Amazon, to make the process even easier for customers who already have an Amazon account."

"For the moment, let's stick with the off-the-shelf checkout."

"OK.  Then there are things like how you keep in touch with customers after they've bought something.  Ideally you want to send them follow-up emails to remind them how good the cheeses were, and giving them offers and discounts if they come to the shop again. "

"Well what do we get 'out of the box'?" asked John. 

"OK, I think I get the picture, and I think what you need is "instant shop" from getYourDomainsNowUk.biz.  This isn't something we specialise in, but it's easy to sign up and get started, and theyprovide lots of help.  Once you get set up, we can link to the online shop from the website and people will be able to buy from you."

John and Kate looked puzzled.

"I'm referring you to getYourDomainsNowUk.biz because it will take some investment to create something really good that's going to attract and retain a lot of customers.  But I can sense that you just want to get started with something simple, and perhaps if it starts to take off, we can discuss the possibilities again".

John and Kate agreed, and so when they got back home, Kate took a look at getYourDomainsNowUk.Biz and signed up for their "ecommerce starter package".  She hadn't got far before she had to start adding products to the catalogue, and needed John's help for that.

A belated welcome to our new team member Botond Butuza, who has been working with us on a part-time contract for the last few months.  Botond has been working on some of our online shops and small business websites.

Also a warm welcome to Benny Szabo, who has just started a full-time post as web developer in our Oxford web team this week.

Benny and Botond are based in our Oxford office.

To explain the first part of the title, doubleclick are one of the notorious advertising companies supplying so-called "3rd party cookies" to track your likes and dislikes across the internet, saving your information across multiple websites (those websites, of course, who use their syndicated ads). 

By saying "notorious" I have of course prejudiced the conversation, but if they can prove otherwise I'd be happy to retract.

Now to explain the double take..

I bought a laptop today from a well-known UK retailer. A few hours later I was sent (by a friend) an unrelated article hosted on a well known UK newspaper website. Hitting the article, I had to do a double take, because my laptop was being advertised in a prominent banner.

On refreshing the page, my laptop again... nothing else, no ads for probiotic yoghurt or online degrees, just the exact laptop I'd just bought.

"What's the problem?" I hear you ask; "isn't this convenient for you?".

Apart from the fact that the ad server wasn't clever enough to know I'd actually bought the laptop and probably didn't need two of them, these are the kinds of ads which brought about the cookie law which we all hate.  These are the people for whom the law is actually created.  The law is only for the bad guys.

The fact that the cookie law was introduced to curb these people is bad enough, but the fact that they're getting away with it while us law-abiding citizens are having to ask users for permission to store cookies is also a pain.

Why are their activities bad?  Here's a small example: suppose you have legitimately been using your work laptop to look for things you'd rather your boss knew nothing about (like a new job). Then when your boss is in the room, job ads display on every website you visit... it doesn't make for a happy boss. Or suppose you didn't want to tell your parents you were pregnant yet, but baby clothes and pregnancy test ads are displaying when you're doing homework in the lounge..

Do I care enough to report the Guardian website to the information commissioner? Probably not, but undoubtedly they will have to change their policy soon..

The point of twitter, it seems, was all about keeping in touch with your friends, at first. It was heavily mobile-led, and using twitter you could keep in touch about the minutiae of life by jabbing your mobile phone's number buttons, or your on-screen keyboard, or your blackberry keyboard, and the message was sent.

What happened to twitter was that the communication turned political, and people realised that lots of interesting things were actually being said, and so institutions like the bbc started using it as a litmus test of opinion or what have you.

Now, menshn.

Menshn is trying to be what twitter is now. 

This means that it hasn't got that wonderful attractiveness that drew people to twitter, and it has boxed itself in, unlike twitter, which evolved.

I register.  I login.  I look around, and I don't feel compelled to participate.

Is it just me?

But of course, we'll see.

For previous installments, see the tWtG topic..

A month went by, much the same as any other, and John happened to be serving in the shop one Saturday afternoon when two Danish tourists walked in.

"Good afternoon", said John.

"Good afternoon", said one of the tourists, "We found you on the internet.  Can we try some of your Yorkshire Mature cheese?"

"Yes, no problem" said John, and lifted one of the cheeses onto the counter, cutting a couple of small slices off with a cheese knife and offering them on the tip of the knife.

"Absolutely delicious" said the Danes, "can we order this back home?  We're from Denmark."

"Err.. yes, we can do a telephone order; I'd have to look up postage prices."

"Can we order them from the website?"

"No, not at the moment.  Would that be easier?"

--

Back home, Kate was the one dampening John's enthusiasm. "We may have one internet order.  That's not going to pay for Hugh to develop an online shop for us!"

"But think of the potential!"

"I think we need a meeting with Hugh.  It's about time you got involved in the website and understood some of the technical stuff."

"OK, set it up"

So she did.

I spoke to someone recently who quoted David Rock as suggesting that the pre-frontal cortex (the part of the brain responsible for thinking as opposed to memory) is a little like a stage in a theatre, with the actors on the stage being the things you're currently thinking about. Too many actors clouds your thinking, which is why when you get to work in the morning it's a useful trick to get some larger piece of work out of the way rather than diving into email! The audience in the theatre are your memory; to recall something, you bring an audience member up onto the stage. 

The computer "desktop" works in a similar way.  Have 20 windows open, and you're likely not only to spend time hunting for the right window or getting distracted by other windows, but also (in my opinion) you will worry in your subconscious about background windows you're not using.

But large computer screens are very useful in showing more of the window you're working with (so that you have more context - or more of a rounded character for your "actor", and have to remember less) and of course showing one or two windows side by side, related to whatever you're working on, which has the same effect.

Having tried out a 10 inch laptop for various pieces of work (not just programming but document writing, emailing and so on) I can safely say I'm not interested in a tablet PC (of any size, let along a 10 inch screen half obscured by an on-screen keyboard). 

Many of my acquaintances, however, tell me how their tablet PC has changed their life...

So what do you think?

It's a question I've been asked a few times over the last 15 years I've been working in the IT industry, and things haven't changed.  While you can only get a very small spread of prices if you want to buy, say, a loaf of bread, curry, or a laptop, asking for a bespoke computer solution can elicit responses from 'well within budget' to 'way off the scale'.  

I beleive that the problem is twofold, and lies both with the customer and the supplier.

The customer

While specifying "exact requirements" is pretty easy with a laptop (250GB hard drive, no optical disk, 13 inch screen, 4GB memory, Windows 7 64 bit please), it's less easy with a software system or even a website.  What you're buying isn't delivered in a small black box; it's a team of experts who understand not only your business but also how best to build future-proof and useful systems. The tendency not to regard a website or business system as a return on investment doesn't help - if it's an expense, I want the cheapest please!  It has to do X, Y, and Z, and be quick about it!  Good customers first work out how the technology will help them, and convey this carefully in their requirements specification, as well as buying the best, in order to help themselves in the future.

The supplier

In a crowded market, the customer is king.  Or at least that's how they are sometimes perceived. This perception can be felt most strongly by struggling companies, who need the sale no matter what, and are therefore prepared to offer cut-throat prices in order to get it, even making a loss in the process. Because of these, you may get wildly differing prices for what is basically the same perceived system.

What can you do?

If you're specifying a business system right now, discuss your expected return on investment with your suppliers.  There may be a fear of doing this because you think it may raise the price, but they'll be just as keen to show you that they're the best of the bunch who can deliver the right technology.

Also make sure you go to at least 3 suppliers, and when you have your estimates in, ask each supplier why their estimate is so different from the others (if indeed it is). This will enable you to get an idea of the differences in approach and the differences you might be seeing in a finished product.

Finally

What has changed over the years is that certain types of business problems have become easier to solve with off-the-shelf technology - for example, if you had asked for a shareable online spreadsheet system 15 years ago, it would have cost you dearly, but now you can simply use Google Docs for free.  But as with healthcare, this only raises the ambition of the buyer, who wants to solve increasingly complex problems. Are you over-stating your problems, and could you get a return with a simpler solution?

For previous installments please see the tWtG topic.

Kate got back in touch with the first company she'd asked about search engines.  The managing director, Hugh, replied with the following:

Hi Kate
Good to hear from you again.  Can you come and meet us at our offices?  We're in a converted barn outside of Willowvale.  It would be useful if you prepared a list of what you want to achieve with the website.
Kind regards
Hugh

Kate organised a morning off work and drove the 15 miles out of Aylesbury to find the Willowvale barns. Hugh's company, Willowvale Interactive Media Partners, was a 3-man company based in a long barn with one room. One of Hugh's colleagues made coffee and they sat down to discuss the "Smiths fine cheeses" site. 

Kate started to explain how they had contracted a search engine company to look after their "internet ranking", and that this company charged a fee every month, but Hugh interrupted to ask what the purpose of the website was.

"It's to bring in more business."

"Can you explain about what kind of customers you'd like to attract?"

"Anyone that buys cheese."

"Including people who buy cheddar at the big supermarket?"

"Yes, if we can change their habits."

"Do you want them to come to the shop, or are you interested in selling over the internet?"

"Shop at first - we don't want to invest too much until we can see what the website can do."

Hugh understood Kate's caution, but advised against trying to attract everyone to the shop. He introduced the idea of putting the shop on the "tourist map". Kate was very responsive to the idea, and they discussed a few new pages the website could have, in order to connect with Aylesbury-related searches.

Hugh also explained that changes at Google were shaking up the search engine optimisation world, preventing optimisers from improving a website's rank entirely through linking, and placing more emphasis on content. 

They got onto technical details.  Hugh asked how the content was updated.  In fact, Kate's brother Harry had built the site with Dreamweaver, and it wasn't easy for Kate to update, so they agreed that Hugh would change the website to use a content management system.

A week or so later, it was all set up, and Kate was able to add a couple of new pages designed at attracting tourists to "Aylesbury's famous cheese shop".

John was still not convinced.

Google has released a new website called "Think Insights" (www.thinkwithgoogle.com/insights) which aims to keep the rest of us informed about trends in the digital world.

When you get there, you may be tempted to stare at it blankly and perhaps look a bit forlorn, just as early internet users did with search engines.

In fact it is a bit sparsely populated at the moment - but whatever your market, there is interesting and relevant stuff to be found.

Imagine we sell products online.  Click "research library", then "drive online conversion".  You get a series of whitepapers describing how different businesses used the internet and other media to achieve this.

Going mobile?  Click "planning tools" and "getMoMeter" to see how your site looks on a mobile device.

This site is not going to revolutionise your business overnight, but it's definitely one for bookmarking.

I've just got to level 6 in Spanish.  And I'm starting French, in preparation for the summer holiday. It's very easy, and fun, but you need to practice, practice, practice to improve.  

I'm talking about duolingo.com, the new website from the creators of re-captcha.  Captcha is the annoyingly obscure set of words you have to re-type in order to prove you're not a robot, and the "re-captcha" version makes you transpose old printed books as you go.  Duolingo works in a similar way, in that part of the learning process is translating texts from languages you're learning into your native language.

Duolingo's strength is in numbers, and it requires lots of users to translate the same sentences in order to reach a conclusion about how good the translation is.

What I've noticed is that many translators don't seem to be native English speakers (you can see and rate other people's translations) but presumably that gets ironed out in time.

The overwhelming impression I get is that duolingo is fun.. it's easy to practice and learn; you do it in short bursts and you can see your progress displayed as a nice graphic.

So if you're going on a French, Spanish or German holiday in the near future (other languages will be added), give it a go!

Part 4

Time passed, and the website was forgotten.  John took on some of Martin's ideas for improving the layout of the shop, but all in all, the shop simply plodded on.

At the end of one month, Nancy (John's mother and the shop's book-keeper) was going over the accounts and found the £100 paid to the search engine optimisation company.

"What's this, John?"
"Oh, that must be that company the missus hired to put us on the first page of Google."
"Is it working?"
"As far as I know, yes."  John paused.  He called through to the living room where Kate was enjoying a small glass of red wine: "Kate?"
"What is it, hun?"
"Is that search engine thing working?"
"What search engine thing?"
"That company you hired to put us on page one of Google."
"Hang on, I'll check."

Kate fired up her laptop and searched for "cheese shops in Aylesbury".
"Hey!" she called, a few moments later.
"What is it?"
"Looks like it's working fine, we're in the number 3 spot!"

John looked at Nancy and frowned.  Nancy frowned too.  "How is this helping us, John?"
As if having exactly the same thought, Kate appeared in the doorway.  "What are we expecting the website to deliver?" she asked.
"I probably haven't given it enough thought, to be honest." answered John.
"If we fail to plan, we plan to fail." Nancy murmured.

"OK", said Kate, how about we take it out of my brother's hands and talk to a proper web company?  If they're any good, they should help us decide what to do with it, and at the very least it should be sending new customers to the shop.  Half of Aylesbury doesn't even know about us."
"If that means spending more money, .. then I'm not sure." John ventured.
"Look, what if we halt the Google stuff for a couple of months but put the money aside for some website improvements?"
"I don't like to offend your brother, Kate."
"Don't worry about him; he'll be alright."
"OK, let's give it a go.."


Notes

• When you have a website, have a regular review to ensure that it is working hard for your business.
• Being no.1 on google is nothing without an effective website.
• Take advice from more than one person about what makes an effective website.

If you haven't read part 1 of this two-part article, please read it now!

Now we've looked at what your website is for, let's jump straight in to the various types of website:

A high/increasing number of transactions (consumer or business)

If you're already making a net profit, congratulations.  If not, you will probably have a business plan that tells people you'll start making x per month within y months.  In the meantime you have to pay for overheads.  You need to double your efforts to get to this point, including working really hard on milestones, because it doesn't come easy.  At the same time I would double the "y" figure (how many months it's going to take to get into profit) so you can have a buffer against every eventuality. Having done this you should have a sum you should set aside for overheads like staff and premises. Include any stock, but try not to hold too much (but you've thought about this, haven't you?). After that, spend everything on building traffic and a high level of usability into the website.  If this means £50,000 then do it.  If it means £5,000 then do it.  If it means £500 then you probably need to have a re-think, because no matter how talented the web developer and how crazy the deal, this isn't going to rocket you into internet stardom and consistent profits.

After 6 months you will start to see a trend. If that trend is flat or trending downwards, something's not working, and if you can't figure out how to turn it around, it may be best to pull the plug. No-one said entrepreneurship wasn't risky. On the other hand if the trend is upwards, isolate what's causing it and create a budget around a more focussed set of improvements. After that of course, you just need to measure and repeat!

Membership services

Here as with any website, you need to be looking for a web developer who has experience with the kinds of features you want to build. An experienced web developer will know the "architecture" of the planned website before you even meet.  Quite often there will be a "base" piece of software with bespoke elements on top to provide exactly what you need. This "base" software, which may be called a content management system (CMS), should have a minimal or zero cost. It's the bespoke pieces you need to worry about.

The law of diminishing returns will eventually help. Say you have asked for features A, B and C, which seem to be no problem at all for your prospective web developer.  These cost, say, £7,500. Your other 'dream' features D and E cost £5000 each - but won't obviously make as big an impact as features A B and C.  Ask yourself if you need them from day 1 and what benefit they are going to give your business.

Big organisations may benefit more from these "additional" features because their membership will be prepared to - collectively - fork out for them. So while a small trade association may be content with the A B C feature set, larger organisations with thousands of members may be looking at A B C D E F and G (and spending, say, £20,000).

A corporate website for a company whose business is transacted offline (consumer or business)

Having thought carefully about the impact your website could be having on customers, you now need to think about investing in a good website to make that happen.  Not only does your website need to function, it needs to attract business, look good, and keep up with web standards. All this means that going to an instant, do-it-yourself web shop is not an option. But there are a huge range of options, so you need to be guided by someone you can trust, and who's done similar things before. Your first year budget should be in excess of £1500 (for very basic sites) and under £100,000 (because normally if £100,000 is starting to be limiting, then something is probably wrong with the planning or the talent).  Typically, if your website is information-only, you'll be looking at the lower end of that scale, but you must budget for design, which takes up more time if your business has a large "footprint", and content architecture, which becomes more complex the more content you have.

Information only, or peripheral services

This is a bit of a wildcard - for example you may be aiming to build a micro-site with a game, or a mobile site, or some wacky new idea thought up by marketing. However, if you're at this stage you probably have a good idea of how to get people to the website and a good idea of how much profit you will bring in per person.  If you're going to attract 100,000 people and convert half into buying your £10 product, They're going to spend £500,000.  Your net profit on the purchases may be more like £200,000, so a website spend of £50,000 would be OK.

On the other hand if it's going to be difficult to quantify the effect, you may want to leave out the bells and whistles and concentrate on what you can afford.

Customers often ask if they can amend the "keyword metatags" or add "keywords" to their website.

Keywords have traditionally meant:

1. Words or phrases which people type in to search engines in order to find your website.

2. The keywords meta-tag, a hidden part of your web page which lists a number of keywords (in the hope that search engines will read it and use it to put your website first in the list as a response to people searching using those keywords).

Unfortunately, having your site appear on page one for a keyword is completely unrelated to the keywords meta-tag.

Did I say unfortunately?

This is really quite fortunate, because it makes websites which are really about those keywords (or themes) look a lot better than websites which are not about those themes at all.

So for instance, if your website has a page about lemon trees, which goes into depth about how to cultivate them and how many different types there are, then those clever search engines will identify that page with the phrase 'lemon tree' (and all sorts of other related phrases).

Google won't get any clues from the keywords meta-tag.  In fact, it ignores the keywords meta-tag completely.

Here's a link to Google's article explaining that keyword meta-tags are completely ignored: google says keywords meta-tags are ignored.

So if you want to be no.1 for lemon trees, what do you need?

• An interesting, readable page
• Links to that page (preferably from a variety of sources)

Interestingly enough, there are meta-tags which are useful, particularly the 'description' meta-tag, which appears in the list of search results when your site comes up.  Use this to 'entice' people to your website.

For more info, search our website for 'seo'!