Keep your website up to date without touching the code.

Below is an assessment I sent to Ross at Canning Bridge Cycles. He’s become both a friend and associate over the years, but even he admits there’s a lot more he can do with the virtualside of his business. Naturally, he doesn’t know how to write website code but there are many things he can do to his site. The following is re-printed here with his permission.

How to make your website work harder for you

1.The pen is your sword. People don’t like to write, but search engines love to read. The Canning Bridge Cycles web site has about three blog posts written over a 4 year span. I don’t need to tell Ross that this suggests major on-line inactivity but more importantly, it could give some people a sense that the site is “old” or the business a bit “outdated.” One page invites (more experienced) riders to join a weekly group peloton around the river. I know that Ross still organises these rides because only a few weeks ago, he nearly knocked me off my own bike when riding to work.
 
 

A few years ago I built a site for the Bicycle Transport Authority. I’m pleased to say they now have a thriving and very active community of cyclists with up to 5,000 unique vistors every month (thanks to Google’s Panda update). They have a lot of two-way (customer / client) interaction.

Which brings me to my next point . . .

2.Don’t be Harvey Norman. Harvey Norman got into a bit of hot water early in 2011 when he (and a consortium of like-minded retailers) placed a full paged ad in the West Australian asking the government to charge GST to his overseas competitors. By doing this, it was perceived that Harvey was experiencing sour grapes because his sales were low. He was blaming online, cheaper retailers.

Harvey needed to engage customers and potential customers in a conversation, rather than using his might in the form of a shouty newspaper ad. Shouting at potential clients using an expensive newspaper ad is not “conversation” and will probably lead to (as it did in the Middle East) a little “civil unrest”. Most of us can’t afford $100,000 ads.

Gone are the days of one-way advertising. The Harvey Norman strategy didn’t play out too well for him. Rather than writing in the newspaper margins, people responded to Gerry’s ad in an embarrassingly public way using Twitter, Facebook and online customer satisfaction forums such as Iinet’s Whirlpool.

There’s a moral to the Harvey Norman story. Business need to listen to their customers and not talk so much (ie. “sell”). The latest (annoying) term for doing business is “conversation marketing” but starting that conversation is really more about customer loyalty than it is about old ideas about “marketing” . . .

3.Main Navigation. Some buttons on the main Canning Bridge Cycles navigation sidebar take users to another site. As a general rule, main navigation should always link to on-site pages.

It’s also a good to not open outbound links in a new browser tab or window. It’s a bit like saying good-bye to a customer in your shop, but when they turn to leave, they find your hand in their back pocket. So it was great NOT to see this common practice.

Linking brand decals to their respective sites is similar linking your main logo back to the home page. Nobody really questions it.

In the web design industry, it’s generally considered bad netiquette to open a new window, the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) hasn’t even included the ability in the strict xHTML 1.0 mark-up specification.

In other words, soon you won’t be able to open new windows. Having said that – the W3C do change their minds a lot and pop-up links might come back.

4.Got an off-site shop? create a special graphic for it.It’s not unusual to link to another (separate) site where credit card payments can be made securely. In fact, setting up a secure server with real-time bank transacting is an expensive business and – y’know what? It’s probably not worth it. Google and PayPal have really simple to use payment systems, some of which can be built into your site.

What I mean by a shop “button” – is a graphic, in a prominent place somewhere in the margin or on the main page of the site that links to the off-site shop. Clearly linking to an online shop re-enforces trust.

5.Onsite Community. If you’ve managed to create an onsite (or offsite) community, then you’re winning. The web is all about community. It was originally designed for people to communicate. Because we monkeys love to trade, we’ve all stuck our businesses up there and it all seems to be about commerce. But that’s just an illusion. It’s really about connecting people. People will only trade with people that they can trust.

The web is and always worked best as a connector, a community creator. I remember stumbling across a community of used teabag collectors. They were spread out all over the world. In any one city there probably wasn’t enough people to fill a small scout hall, but across the world, I found a virtual scout hall meeting in full swing.

6.Have a FAQ.One valid way to use your website is to “field” phone calls. It’s a repository of all those repeat questions one gets asked on a daily basis. An FAQ is the sign on the door which says, “Must read before entry”.

7.Pics, Vids, Audio.. I’m sorry if this sounds offensive, but we are all really a bunch of perverts. That’s right. What other animal has devised a system where it can watch repeatedly, the days of lives of other animals in a public forum? I’m talking about TV. And if you take just the evening news into consideration, you’ll get a sense of just how obsessive we are. People love images. We are more likely to look at images than read. So give them images. Just make sure to tag them correctly for search engines.

That’s pretty much a summary of the message I sent Ross and it’s certainly going to give him something to talk about over the Christmas break. I normally charge about $250 dollars for a full, 20 point website report. But if you are reading this, for January only, I can do a proper report for your existing website for $175. But only if you’re reading this. Knowing how these things go, you’ll probably get me to update a few pages on your own website.

Hopefully you got something out of this. I know Ross did.