by Shaun | Jul 24, 2015 | social media
We have all heard over the past few years stories about the perils of social media posts when it comes to employees. An inappropriate comment can affect people’s employment prospects. Company HR departments have been known to check the Facebook profiles of potential employees prior to hiring. I believe there are instances where people have also been fired for careless posts.
Personally I find this utterly outrageous. What a gross invasion of privacy this is. OK I’ll grant that a post derogatory to an employer is not a wise career move for anyone to make, but as a general principle it seems that often the bigger a corporation, the more right it seems to have to exert control over aspects of an employees private life. If an employee can perform the work required and do it to a high standard, isn’t that enough?
But anyway, that’s by the by. The beauty of this social media thing is that there is a flip side. Social media can also bite corporations as well. It is almost mandatory for every company to have a Facebook presence. If you transgress what your potential customers see as fair play, instead of a nice publicity channel for your business, you get caned by the public.
Recently the Australian burger company Grill’d found this out, very much to their detriment. They recently fired a young lady for the heinous crime of complaining to the company because they were paying below what they were mandated by law to pay her and her fellow workers. She went to the union about this, and suddenly was sacked for “bullying”.
Unfortunately this young lady did not just go away, like most people in her position. She complained about unfair dismissal and sought her job back, which she was entitled to do under Australian law.
Then a really bad thing happened for Grill’d; the media got hold of the story. People found out. And people weren’t happy. Now this is where the beautiful side of social media comes in. It can’t be controlled by those who are so used to controlling the image of their company so perfectly in all other ways.
A social media backlash is a terrible thing. You have a corporate page to highlight how wonderful you company is and instead you have hundreds and hundreds of comments saying, “I’ll never eat at your establishment again”.
Then of course the inevitable press release from the CEO, saying things like, “misreported” and the inevitable “Our people are our most important asset”. But it’s too late by then. People are onto the company. They know that it’s simply spin and a slick PR company is trying to make this go away.
As one comment on their Facebook page said “In my experience, any company these days who commences a statement with “Our people are our greatest assets……..” usually, in practice have utter contempt for their staff. It’s the corporate version of “I’m not racist but………..”
There is even now a new area of – well I guess it falls under the banner of PR – social media reputation management. Personally I think the easiest way to manage your reputation on social media is not do things that a reasonable person might find socially unacceptable.
And this shows the beauty of social media. A many edged sword, I’ll grant you, with the ability to bite all areas of social strata but one where a company that transgresses gets absolutely caned. Are we going to see a new era where the bosses have to tread warily in case they incite the ire of ordinary people? Where treating workers fairly becomes the norm because if you don’t the resulting social media storm is toxic to your brand? I for one hope so.
At the time of writing you can still see the hundreds of negative comments on Grill’d’s Facebook page
by Shaun | Jul 21, 2015 | google
One of the most frustrating things I find about the state of online marketing at the moment is the hoops you have to jump through to get traction on search engines. The hoops are always hoops that are held up by big online media companies, strangely enough.
I recently wrote about how when Google says jump, we all have to say, “How high?”
Well the thing is, what Google is saying is that you have to jump through hoops that are social media hoops. You need Google+, you need Facebook, you need Linkedin, you need a Twitter account, you need Yelp. When it comes to all of these, how active you are on each of these channels can affect your visibility on the web. In addition to this you need to blog as well, and possibly find places to guest blog. But then just when you get busy guest blogging Google decides that guest blogging is no longer cool.
Then there’s link building. But don’t whatever you do pay for links.. you will get penalised! Directory submission? Better be the right ones.. or you will get penalised. You see, what Google wants is proof that you are popular, but if you try to fake popularity you are in trouble.
How many likes you get on Facebook for your business page and on your web page is something that Google checks for “social proof”.
Social proof works something like this:
If you have two adverts for a product that saves energy:
- The first one lets the customer know that they could be saving $54/month on their electricity bill.
- The second one lets customers know that 77 percent of their neighbours were already using the product.
Guess which one is more successful. In case you didn’t work it out, option two. People love social proof. They love to know that they are not alone in choosing something.
Now, I’m not opposed to social proof as a concept. It’s unavoidable. It’s simply the way people are wired.
However, what I am finding increasingly ridiculous is that businesses that are not web businesses having to jump through the hoops that are set up by a giant multi national American corporation.
If you’re a builder or an electrician, your job is to build houses or put in lights. It’s not to blog or put up social media posts.
Unfortunately, if you have a web page, that is what you are expected to do in order to get visibility on Google. Either that or advertise with Google at their astronomical pay per click rates.
The internet is supposed to be a place where the little guy can compete on an even footing with the big guy. As time goes by this appears to be be less and less true. Well unless they pay the tolls set by the big guys. It wasn’t meant to be this way.
For more about social proof check out this article from kissmetrics, social proof.
I shouldn’t complain, because what all this does is keep SEO professionals in work. However, I do feel for people whose business has nothing to do with the internet, but have to pay astronomical fees to an SEO to get there. Clients saying.. can you get me to page one? Well yes.. but..
by Shaun | Jul 15, 2015 | social media
I am a designer. I am a web strategist. This also makes me a perpetual student of design and of web strategy.
When I was a kid, the world was a simpler place. Of course everyone can say that. We are in a world where new technologies are emerging every single day. Of course life was going to be simpler back then – whether you grew up in the 70’s, 80’s or 90’s.
One of the things that was simpler was how a business publicised itself. It was easy really. Three options only. Newspaper.. actual paper, radio or television. In Australia television was where it was at to really make an impact. Three commercial channels. A population that didn’t really do anything in the evening other than stare mindlessly at the box. If you advertised on the telly you had a large, captive audience.
Times have changed dramatically. The internet.. it’s effectively infinite. How many years would it take you to travel from one end of the internet to the other?
One of the things about the internet is that because it is so vast, it is hard to stand out. Hence the importance of great – exceptional even – headlines in any page you create, in any blog post you write.
This hit home to me as I started to learn how to use Twitter. For a long time I avoided Twitter. Why? Well my perception was that it was full of celebrities telling the world about themselves and frankly I wasn’t interested.
Lately I have been revising my view. As I said I am a perpetual student of digital strategy. I leave no stone unturned when it comes to understanding web strategy. I realised that, like it or not, Twitter was a major part of the internet landscape. Just as it’s essential to move up the Google rankings, a presence on Twitter is almost mandatory for any business wanting internet visibility.
Anyway, I go onto Twitter and look at the hashtag #webdesign. It’s kind of relevant to my business. I see a bunch of posts. Everyone is doing it. I click on a few. But of course only a few. And which ones do I pick? Well the ones with headlines that look interesting to me of course. There could be other articles that are better. I’m not ever going to find out, because I won’t be reading them. It’s obvious really. If you don’t have a great headline, you may as well not write your article because it isn’t going to get read.
That is the beauty of Twitter. Getting a message across in 140 characters or less. That headline really needs to stand out and it needs to be brief – you have to have room for your url and your hashtags as well as your headline.
I recommend if you haven’t looked at Twitter before and you are looking to build an online presence, have a look at Twitter and see what I mean.
by Shaun | Jul 10, 2015 | NBN
It didn’t take long before the NBN concept was in trouble
It took one internet based service like Netflix to cause rumblings. Fortunately the issue isn’t capacity as such, just the price of data.
The politics around the NBN are rather fraught. I don’t want to get political here, but there is no choice with this one. Basically the NBN became a political football. Because Labor announced it, the kneejerk reaction on the other side of politics was that it was a bad idea. This was an appeal to a core demographic, the baby boomer demographic, that were less invested in future technology than the current internet generation.
The Liberal party came out and said that 25Mb to the home was all anyone would ever need. Anyone who knew technology and the history of technology knew that was a rather stupid statement to make. Bill Gates famously once said “640K of memory is enough for anyone”. Clearly he was a bit out there, with the average computer now containing perhaps 8GB of memory, roughly 8,000 times 640K.
The point is, underestimate where technology will go at your peril these days. There is so much that is available on the internet now that we could not have imagined in the year 2000. Only one thing is certain when it comes to the internet – it’s only going one way, bigger.
The idea that you are only going to need 25Mb is akin to the decision to create a one lane highway because that’s all the traffic that is using at that time. The people who travel down South Road in Adelaide know the folly of that thinking. In fact even 100Mb will probably start to get a bit crowded within 5 years.
So now Netflix has come along
Just one streaming video company, and already the limited bandwidth, limited download model is under threat. The NBN isn’t even rolled out and one new idea has caused a crack in its business model.
Now it’s easy to say, yeah but Netflix is just an entertainment service, it’s not that important. Wrong. It is a business. And like every business, it makes money, it creates jobs, it rents office space, it purchases equipment on which to run its business.
Yeah sure it’s entertainment, but not every new business that offers internet services is or will be entertainment. The highway that is built needs to be built not for the traffic that is now but for the how the traffic will be in the future. To my mind that means the capacity to scale, not just to a 100MB but to a Gigabit.
for more on this check out this Sydney Morning Herald article.
by Shaun | Jul 8, 2015 | Microsoft, Windows 10
About a month ago, Microsoft announced that they were releasing Windows 10 on July 29th. At the time I wrote that the Windows 10 release date was optimistic, given the work that I felt was still to be done on the product, and Microsoft’s own history of delaying releases.
From my perspective, it was the little things.. like the start menu that still doesn’t work and the ctrl – alt delete to unlock the screen that is hit and miss. It’s just not ready for mass consumption.
However, for good or for bad, Microsoft announced the release date. Now it appears they are backtracking on the date, although not officially.
Allow me to explain how a release can still be officially happening without being released to most people. People like myself, who get a thrill out of working with new technology, even though it isn’t mature, will get the first opportunity to download the product. Then, once all of the bugs have been ironed out, the rest of world will get a chance. How long that takes is anyone’s guess.
What this smacks of is corporate sleight of hand. I need to briefly explain how the rollout process of new software works. It starts with an alpha release. This is a really rough copy of the software, with lots of bugs. Bit by bit the the bugs are ironed out, to progress to a beta release. The beta release is usually pretty good, but still hasn’t got all the bugs out and isn’t quite as polished as the end product. Finally there are release candidates. These are effectively full production versions of software, but the company wants to limit the release to a select few people just to make sure that all is good.
Once that is explained it can be clearly seen that a release date that is only being released to those that are already on the Windows insider technical preview list isn’t a general release, it’s a beta test, or a release candidate at best. The general release is available at an undetermined date at some time in the future.
I understand and accept that a general rollout to a billion desktops world wide is going to be a challenge. I can accept that it may have to be staggered. What I can’t understand is why they committed to such an unrealistic date in the first place. And their explanation of the situation is about as credible as some of the explanations politicians give for their backflips.
For more about this read this article at Forbes – Windows release delayed and here, Microsoft’s own blog announcing the details of the rollout.
by Shaun | Jun 24, 2015 | Content Marketing
When it comes to the web Google is king (at the moment).
There is no denying that. At the moment worldwide, Google accounts for approximately 90% of search traffic.
This means of course that Google wields enormous power over pretty much everyone on the web. A page one spot on Google is coveted.
As a result Google guidelines are studied over and over again for that special trick that will allow you or your clients to skyrocket up the search rankings. It’s just what you have to do. Google says, “jump” and we all ask, “how high”.
Is there an alternative? Well no not really. You can’t buck the system on this one. You just aren’t seen if you do. Until someone else comes along who gets the same search volumes as Google we are stuck. They have managed to effectively monopolise the search engine market. Yeah sure you can use Yahoo or Bing – and get 3% of the search traffic.
Everyone who comes to me asking about SEO wants page one of Google.
I have to be honest with them. It isn’t that easy. Let’s face it, for any given search term, there are only 10 spots on page one.
You have to do what Google says to get anywhere near page one. Google wants your site to be mobile friendly? Time you got working on that. Google wants location data? You had better provide it.
The latest term to enter the lexicon in SEO terms is content marketing.
Let’s have a look at what content marketing is. From the Content Marketing Institute :
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Now to me that sounds a bit too much like gobbledegook, so in plain English terms, content marketing is about writing articles (content) like this one that both interest and inform readers, with the obvious end goal being that you turn readers into customers. What Google says is, “Quality content is the key to Google rankings”.
This is why I continue to maintain a blog on this website and why so many others are doing it too. That is content.
When Google bots crawl the web they are seeking to weed out the spammy types of sites from their search rankings. It’s why sites that have been around for a long time rank higher. It’s also why active sites (where there are frequent content updates) rank higher.
What Google doesn’t want is attempts to rig their search engine results. They frequently say create a site with people in mind, not search engines. That is where content marketing comes it.
Somehow Google know all. The algorithm they have created can distinguish high quality content from low quality content. Their own guidelines say:
“Your site’s content should be unique, specific and high quality. It should not be mass-produced or outsourced on a large number of other sites. Keep in mind that your content should be created primarily to give visitors a good user experience, not to rank well in search engines.”
Note that last sentence – a good user experience before search engine rankings. That is the crux of the matter. For years people managed to rig search engine results with techniques such as keyword stuffing. This approach is now likely to get you removed from Google altogether.
Google is constantly updating its algorithm to reflect what it believes its customers, the people who search using Google, want. Hence the drive towards rewarding sites with quality content.
To bullet point Google’s requirements when it comes to content, they are it must be:
- Useful and informative.
- More valuable and useful than other sites.
- Credible.
- High quality.
- Engaging.
You can read about all of these on Google’s own content guidelines, but I will also make one or two points about these myself.
When Google say credible, what they mean is that you cite references when writing an article. For example the links that are in this article are citing references. Another one that I didn’t know myself until now is an author bio. Google doesn’t want the internet to be anonymous. So expect to see a bio coming soon to my blog posts.
The other thing I wanted to discuss is engaging. Primarily your article has to be an interesting read. It also has to be free of spelling and grammatical errors. I really don’t know how they manage to determine that the content is an interesting read.. now that is scary – a computer program that can work that out.
Engaging content can also mean the use of video, images and infographics. This would explain the sudden explosion of infographics on the web. They are everywhere.
When it comes to video I must say I personally don’t like everything video. If I want to find out something, I want to be able to read it. That way I can skim through it to the parts that are relevant to me. Time poor. I don’t want to be watching a video that starts off with Britney who tells you she is from San Jose and that she’s an Aries.. and today she’s going to be explaining.. blah, blah, blah… I’m a bullet point kind of guy.
Same with infographics. If it’s a quickly digested graphic, sure. However there’s one guy on the internet, Neil Patel who lately has gone infographic crazy. He’s apparently some kind of SEO and content marketing guru. He’s got some great content tips but since he’s gone infographic crazy I can’t really follow his stuff as well. If you have to study stuff to get the message rather than skim it you lost me.
Finally, there is the question of content length. This is a hotly debated topic among people who clearly don’t have lives. Short content or long content? Four hundred words is a minimum. If you want to post your articles to some blogging sites, they won’t accept articles shorter than this. For a long while that was my goal. Now it appears I have to up that word count to 1,000 (as you may have noticed in this article).
I disagree with this very much. I believe in short, succinct and direct. I never did like the university idea where people were expected to write 2,000 word essays. It made people create essays that didn’t get to the point. It also haunts the business world, when someone writes a 40 page proposal that could have been explained in 3 bullet points. Crazy thing about this is they then write an executive summary at the front so that the busy executive can have the 40 page document explained in 200 words or less.
Anyway, whatever is my personal opinion on the subject doesn’t matter. What matters is what Google wants. Google wants image, videos, infographics, author bios. You want to rise in the rankings, you have to have that.
By the way, here’s the Google worldwide market share, just in case you were thinking you had an alternative.
by Shaun | Jun 16, 2015 | cloud computing, google
I have written before about cloud computing. I like the definition I heard the other day to describe what cloud computing really is. “It’s not in ‘the cloud’, it’s on someone else’s computer’.
And that is pretty much it. The thing is, to you the end user, that computer could be anywhere in the world. You don’t know where it is hosted. And as it would happen, as people get used to this, it doesn’t really matter.
Google’s offering is cloud platform. It’s the broadly the same as other competing services from the other big providers, such as Amazon and Microsoft. I’m sure each of these providers has their own promotional material as to why their offering is better, but with the state of computing as it stands these days, they are all adhering to certain standards, so it’s pretty much a muchness.
Allow me to explain now why it’s a good idea for businesses that run their own infrastructure to consider changing.
In the past, and for many businesses still, having physical computer resources that the company “owned” was/is important.
Now though, businesses still managing their own computer networks should take a look at how they are doing things and ask themselves if they need their own infrastructure. Infrastructure is expensive and there is so much of it to have to do it right. Your servers need to be engineered so that they are highly available (meaning if something fails, you have extra hardware there that means you won’t lose time or data), you need to back the servers up, make sure they are secure, have your own firewalls and intrusion detection devices, et c et c.
All of this needs to be maintained, so not only do you have the cost of the infrastructure, you have the cost of supporting it.
Then of course, the hardware needs to be refreshed every few years. IT can become expensive for a company that isn’t actually in IT.
When it comes to the desktop for many years IT support staff wanted to move everything to a server based model, with the workers’ desktop being largely a dumb terminal. For many years workers resisted that. A PC was “their” PC and it had “their” files on it.
This has always been problematic for IT support. Lots of time has been spent by desktop support professionals on efficient methods of upgrading desktop software, anti virus and security products et c. I am not across current best practise of doing these things, but I know the challenges that managing desktops will remain as long as there are desktops.
But now, the times they are a changing. Cloud computing is a game changer.
More and more corporate applications are web based. In addition to this standard desktop applications such as word are moving to the web as well. Finally, the dream of IT staff frustrated by desktop support of largely server based computing is being realised.
When it comes to the servers that offer services to the end user remotely, that too is changing. When Google (or other large providers round the world) offer their cloud platform, I would recommend that any company still using their own infrastructure start making plans to retire it and migrate their IT to Google.
Once you have done this, you simply don’t have the headaches associated with the support of your own IT environment. Google themselves handle all of the problematic aspects of support, such as security, backup, availability, load management and so on. Not only that, but I’d wager they will do it at a lower cost that the cost of in house IT.
On the downside of course, there end up being fewer and fewer jobs for local IT support staff. The price of progress.
For more information check out Google Cloud platform.
Disclaimer: I make no money from writing an article about Google. I am simply observing the changing face of computing.
by Shaun | Jun 9, 2015 | Uncategorised
A while back I wrote about the importance of the headline on your home page.
To recap, a headline is an essential element because it has to capture the attention of your visitor from the moment they arrive at your site. Not only that, it has to let the person know in a few words exactly what you website is about. Nothing worse than landing on a website and going, “So what exactly do these people do?
The next essential element I would like to look at are contact details. It sounds obvious doesn’t it? Unfortunately I still come across client sites that don’t have what I would consider to be a complete no brainer on their front page.
It’s simple really. I approach my clients needs in a two step process. 1. Get found. 2. Have a site that is worth finding.
When we address concern number two, having a site worth finding, the approach taken is to make it easy for potential customers.
Firstly, as already mentioned you don’t want customers wondering what you do. The headline and subheadline (more on the subheadline in another post) take care of that.
Next contact details should be easily accessible. If you can, phone numbers and email address should be at the top of the page. I say if you can, because sometimes it doesn’t fit the design. Designing web pages is full of trade offs. Certainly if not at the top of the page, then on the page somewhere. What a fundamental error to make.. not having a phone number and email address prominent on your page. You are after all trying to remove barriers to the the visitor becoming a customer. Of course if they have a hard time finding your contact details, that is clearly a barrier.
If you conduct business from a physical premises once again, this is essential information. Don’t make the client have to work at all to find out about your business. You may have a dedicated contact page where you have all your details in one place, including a map of where you are located, but there is never any harm repeating the information on several pages on your site.
You can also have a contact form on your home page as well. Once again it doesn’t matter if you have a contact form on a dedicated contact page. You can never have too many ways on you website for a potential customer to communicate with you. In fact, nothing wrong with having contact forms all over your site.
Your website is a sales tool. The ability of the client to contact you is an essential part of your conversion funnel. Remove all friction from that funnel.
by Shaun | Jun 2, 2015 | Windows 10
The big tech news of the last week is that Microsoft have announced that Windows 10 will be released on July 29.
My opinion on this is good luck with that. I have been playing with Windows 10 for a couple of months now. I think there are still plenty of things to fix up before they are ready for this and that release date is not far away.
Be that as it may, that is the day they have announced. In case you weren’t aware, they are providing it as a free update to Windows 7 and above.
Why are they doing this? Market share is the obvious thing. I have written before about how the rise of the tablet and internet browsing on phones has really hit Microsoft’s market share as far as devices with their operating systems installed.
Tablets and phones are largely running Android or Apple’s IOS. Microsoft needs to make inroads into that market. Windows tablets are a distant third. Whether they can improve that share remains to be seen.
But why is market share of an effectively free product important? One word. Apps. The rise of Microsoft can be tracked back to the dominance of their apps, primarily their office suite of apps. When you are sending a document via email the standard directive is “Can you send that in Microsoft Word Format?”
Yes there are other office suite offerings, but there is no doubt that Microsoft Office is the de facto standard.
But back to Windows 10. Is it worth upgrading to? I think the jury is still out on that. I am currently on the bleeding edge of technology by using a pre release version of the product. I know that’s not ready, without a doubt. But the finished product? Yeah I guess it will be ok. It will look pretty. For a tech geek it’s always fun to refresh the look of your PC.
Mind you, these days, I think Google got it spot on with their Chromebook. A Chromebook is Google’s low price, stripped down laptop offering. It’s largely just a platform for a web browser. I don’t think they got the market’s desire for the product right, but you can’t fault their logic.
Think about it. Eighty percent of the time I spend on the computer these days is spent using the browser. It is almost completely irrelevant what the operating system behind the browser looks like, because Chrome still looks the same. It is for this reason why Windows XP, a product that Microsoft retired a year ago still has more market share than Windows 8 and 8.1 combined.
Anyway when it comes out, Google “Windows 10 download and take it from there. As always, if you need technical help, get in touch.
by Shaun | May 25, 2015 | Wordpress
Time and time again people say to me, “Isn’t WordPress just for blogging”. Time and time again I say to the people who say this, “No”. It is in fact a powerful platform for web sites of of all kinds. One thing I want to focus on in this post is the use od WordPress for ecommerce.
WordPress has it’s origins as a blog platform, that is true. But now one in 6 websites worldwide use WordPress as their web platform, for all type of different websites, not just blogs. WordPress has evolved beyond being a blogging platform to something much more.
The naysayers (there are always naysayers) will say some reason why this shouldn’t be. The argument is usually along the lines of, “But it’s not meant for that”. These people are I guess what you would call purists. Nothing can evolve, everything is a snapshot in time. “This (product x) is a content management system, whereas WordPress is just a blogging platform. You can’t use WordPress as a content management system”.
What arguments like these ignore is that WordPress is indeed being used as a content management system. In fact more than any other platform. Why is that so? Is it because of the massive amounts of marketing put into the selling of WordPress? No. Actually WordPress is free.
So what other reason could there be? Why is WordPress a market leader? Well since there is no profit in the selling of it, there can only be one other reason. It is good at what it does.
So onto eCommerce. What about WordPress for eCommerce? Not a good idea? Well actually once again not true. There are several offerings for eCommerce available for WordPress, but in my opinion there is only one that is worth considering and that’s Woocommerce.
The basic package of Woocommerce is free. I love that. How did it happen that we manage to get so much for nothing these days? An entire website can be built with zero software cost as part of the budget.
Woocommerce does sell premium addons, but these are not really expensive. Also, you can create a fully functional shop without these addons. In addition to this, many other developers have written addons that have similar functionality to the premuim addons sold by Woocommerce that are free.
Of course the big question is, how well does it work? No one wants a site that’s full of bugs – a nightmare to run. Well the answer to that is very well. In the Woocommerce sites I have created, I have had no signficant problems.
A possible issue could be scaling. That is, how big a site can you make with Woocommerce? I must confess I am not sure of the top end, but a bit of research for this post found that there are sites out there using Woocommerce with 20,000 products in their product database. I think that is more than adequate for just about anybody who is reading this article. For really big eCommerce sites, you may want something more robust, but what we are talking about here is companies that have huge IT budgets.
To find out more about Woocommerce, you can check out their website – https://woocommerce.com/
Of course, if you need an eCommerce site created, I would be more than happy to hear from you.
by Shaun | May 21, 2015 | web content
Over the next few weeks I’m going to write an article or two about what is important on your home page.
Firstly, a little known fact. The average attention span is now 8 seconds – down from 12 seconds about five years ago.
If we assume that the home page is the first page a visitor encounters, you need to make a good first impression. And the first impression is the headline, so it’s quite clearly one of the most important thing you can have on your website.
You probably already have seen the power of the headline these days, because of the prevalence of “clickbait”. You know those posts on Facebook or down the side of a page you visit with a, “You won’t believe what she did” type of headline? You know you shouldn’t click, because you know that is what they want, but you do anyway, because you want to find out what she did. And after you have clicked you are left going, “meh”. But you still click the next one.
It’s the same with news website headlines. They need you to click. Their readership numbers are their lifeblood. So they craft headlines that make what is on the other side of the click look very interesting.
So that, in a general sense, gives you an idea of the importance of the headline. When it comes to your home page the numbers touted are that on average only 2 out of 10 go beyond the headline when they land on a website.
I find that figure unusual. Why, if you’re looking for something would you not quickly skim the page? Well I guess that is the nature of modern life. If it doesn’t look like this site can fulfil your needs, you want to be out of there and looking at the next website ASAP.
Your headline needs to say to anyone visiting your site, “Yes I can fulfil your needs”. If it doesn’t there are out of there.
I read a story about an advertising exec who rewrote the headline for a an advert over 100 times. That is the importance of the headline. Without a good headline, no one reads your copy. And if no one reads your copy, no one clicks your call to action
What does your headline need? It needs to be specific. It needs to be able to be read at a single glance. It needs to solves the user’s problem. Think of it like this. Every user that is coming to your website is coming for a reason. They want your business to be the end of their searches. Think about it. If you are looking for something specific, do you want to go back to the search results and continue looking, or do you want the next website you go on to be the one that gives you what you want?
That is the importance of the headline. To be able to tell someone in one second, “Yes I can give you what you want”.
by Shaun | Apr 22, 2015 | Uncategorised
What do you buy online these days?
I recall when the internet first really took off we had the dot com bubble. At that time I correctly predicted (don’t worry, I don’t consider myself to be some kind of guru) that it wouldn’t last. Some of the businesses that rose and fell were simply stupid ideas.
Fast forward 15 years and the internet has finally arrived for selling. I know from my own habits that I do more and more stuff online.
Banking? Well that’s a no brainer. For the most part I don’t really set foot inside a bank branch. The convenience is just too great. Bill paying and business transactions are obvious choices to do online. In the days before the internet, people who are old enough will remember queueing up at the gas company and the electricity company to pay their bills. You can’t beat the time saving you get not having to do that.
Bookings. If you’re booking accommodation, it’s to the net you go. Not just because of the speed and ease of getting things done, but because of the deals you can get; everything is on sale on the internet. You go to one of the booking sites, where hotels compete against each other and get some really good deals.
Travel. Obviously travel lends itself perfectly to the internet model. Once again, internet travel sites play one service provider off against the other to get the best price for the consumer.
Buying and selling second hand goods from classifieds. Does anybody look in the actual physical paper any more? I haven’t looked at a newspaper when it comes to buying and selling things like cars for perhaps 15 years.
Coupon sites. If I’m going out for dinner, the first thing I’m doing is looking to see some of the great deals you can get for dining from a coupon website. Why not get a deal where you can get a meal and wine at half the usual cost?
All of these examples are great, but they emphasise the transactional nature of the internet. What about physical products delivered to your door? For a while I have been sceptical about this. Some things people want to see and feel in their hands before they make the purchase.
I am still skeptical for some products, such as clothes. I can’t see bricks and mortar clothes stores vanishing in favour of online stores anytime soon. Why? Because clothes can look great in photos but not so good in the flesh. I know, having purchased clothes online that looked a lot better on the website than they did when I received them.
However, what I have been buying online lately is wine. This is a product that if you can get the right deal, you can make substantial savings. But what about shipping? Well to be honest, 9 dollars shipping for a dozen wine to be delivered to your doorstep? With the alternative being the time and petrol taken to get to the local bottle shop? If you balk at the price of shipping for such things, you’re not looking at the big picture.
So that is my opinion of the state of online selling. Why don’t you look at your business and see if it’s time you participated in the online market place.
by Shaun | Apr 14, 2015 | Uncategorised
I’ve said it before but I will say again with emphasis today, because I actually have a real world example to share.
Mobile website optimisation is no longer optional for any location dependent business. It is essential. If you are in retail or hospitality you are losing business every time someone looks up your web site on their phone and doesn’t like what they see.
Fifty per cent of searches on mobiles are done by very results oriented people. They want to find out right away where the business is, how to contact them, hours and in some cases what products are on offer.
If for example you are a restaurant, a menu is essential.
And the rule of thumb when it comes to mobiles sites is – “don’t make me zoom”.
Anyway, onto the real world example. I’d just finished lunch on a Sunday and I was in the market for homewares. One place I hadn’t checked out was a nationally recognised chain. I search for them and up came their site.
I was horrified to realise that their site was not optimised for mobile. I actually literally could not believe that a national chain of this size had not bothered with this. What were their IT people doing?
I tried to use their store locator, but they lost me as I zoomed in with my fingers to type in details to the field. I knew that in front of me was more scrolling hunting for the store once the search was complete. I have a very big screen phone, one of the biggest – 6.4 inches. I bought it specifically for the ability to browse web sites with ease. Well, to browse mobile optimised web sites with ease.
I chose instead to go to a competitor whose location I already knew. My spend on that day was $100. Not a lot you say? You’re right. But how many times is this happening? Imagine if it was happening to your business. Is it $100 a week you are losing? One hundred dollars a day? Five hundred dollars a day? It’s hard to quantify, but imagine in this case, 10 people made the search, with 5 of them seriously intending to purchase something. I don’t think a figure like that is unreasonable for a national chain, perhaps even conservative.
You can make a guess. Google analytics will tell you what devices access your site. If you look at the number of people accessing your site via a phone, you can know that 50% of them are looking to purchase. But you will never know how many of those visitors also looked at a competitor’s site and went there instead. You will also never know how much they were looking to spend.
People looking on phones want to make purchases. Don’t put up barriers to them by not having a mobile optimised site.
by Shaun | Apr 7, 2015 | Wordpress
I could just be terse and answer “No”, but that wouldn’t be fair would it? It wouldn’t really explain why WordPress is much more than a blogging platform. So I had better start doing some explaining.
Let’s start with examples of some of the biggest sites that use WordPress.
This should give you an idea how flexible WordPress is. You start to realise, well if people of that size have settled on WordPress as a platform.
So here is a quick list of a few pretty big sites that use WordPress.
Sony Music
Beyonce’s Personal Site
The Rolling Stones Website
BBC America
Mercedes Benz
Now that is just a short list. The list could go on and on and on, but you get the picture. Those are some major sites right there.
To add to that picture I can tell you that one in 6 websites are now powered by WordPress.
That is roughly 60 million websites. I would suggest also that number is growing all the time as more and more websites either convert, or as new sites are built more and more people choose WordPress as the default platform.
Why is it so popular?
The main thing about WordPress is that it is endlessly customisable. It is a great content management system (CMS).
But what is a CMS? For people who are not completely immersed in technology all the time the acronyms used by tech geeks can cause their eyes to glass over. But the term CMS is not hard to understand. It’s simply a system put in place at the back end of a web site that allows a user who doesn’t know how to put a website together to add content, such as updating photos or text without having to call their web designer.
I think most people would agree that is a good idea.
However, every time I say something like, “WordPress is a great CMS”, some tech geek with an axe to grind comes out and says, “It’s not a CMS” and then they go on and say, “Joomla is better” or Drupal or whatever it is that’s their favourite.
OK, it may be that these other offerings are specifically designed as a CMS and WordPress is considered first and foremost a blogging platform.
That may be so in a technical sense, but back in the real world where people don’t really care about “application purity” (to coin a phrase). The results are in.
Sixty percent of sites that use a CMS use WordPress. The next closest is Joomla with 7 per cent of the market.
So yes, WordPress may have started as a blogging platform, but now it is so much more.
by Shaun | Mar 31, 2015 | Uncategorised
I recently was asked to quote for a customer to do some SEO in his site. Naturally there are a couple of first steps in any job like this. The first is to do a search and see where they are currently ranking for major search terms relevant to their business. Then naturally you click the link to their site if you do find it.
Upon clicking the link I for this particular customer I found a half done site. What it brought to mind right away was that if I was searching for that service and found this site I would most likely look for another provider of a similar service.
It made me realise that sometimes, SEO is useless if your site isn’t worth finding.
The site was done on one of the online platforms that allow people to develop their own websites. This is all very well to use one of these platforms, but if you don’t know what you are doing the results can be less than flattering.
Now let me make it very clear. This business actually has an excellent product. You just wouldn’t know it from their website.
The stats on the web as an advertising tool for your site are simple. Ninety Seven per cent of people who are looking for a service or a product research the purchase online as part of their decision making process.
Think about your own behaviour when you search for products. The web gives you a vehicle to quickly make comparisons about various service providers without leaving your home. Once you feel that you have found a business that looks like it can provide you with the quality of service you desire, you may contact them via phone and then finally make a purchase.
If you are confronted with an amateurish looking website, it is likely to makes you move on to the next business. Your website is a virtual shop window to your business. If you think of it in that way you realise that if you are out shopping in a physical sense, if you don’t like the look of the business shop front, you don’t even go in. It’s the same with a website.
This is why it is usually more cost effective to put website creation into the site of a professional. One ot the main things about small business people is that they are usually short of time. When they do try to create their own website, they invariably rush it and leave it half done.
I would compare the small business owner getting a website done in their spare time to the person who chooses to do a home improvement like a pergola in their spare time. It is half finished for months. This is fine for a pergola in your backyard. Not so good for your virtual shop front.
By contrast, a it is a professional web designer’s job to make the site complete. And of course every site they do is an advertisement for their business too.
Your web strategy needs to be complete. No point having great SEO and people finding your site if it isn’t worth finding.
