I send such gifts to potential clients or “business friends” with whom I do little or no major business, but who usually go on to recommend my work to others. It’s my way of saying thank you for past recommendations and goodwill they have sent my way.

More often than not, it leads to sales further down the line, so being nice often translates to good business sense.

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 his virtual business. The following is printed here with his permission.

I find a lot of physically oriented businesses like Ross’ tend to neglect their online obligations, when, in a perfect world, they’d love to spend more time at the computer, working “on their business” rather than “in it.”

As a web designer, I have the opposite problem, but that’s another story . . .

A “Happy Christmas” Website Asssessment :

Dear Ross,

You recently asked me to give your website a critical once-over. Here is a list of simple changes you could do to improve your existing site without too much effort. Feel free to send these on to your webmaster.

Have a very merry Christmas and hopefuly we’ll meet again early in the new year . . .

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inactivity but more importantly, it could give some people a sense that the site is “old” or the business a bit “outdated.”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.
 
 

. . . Keep up the blog, Ross. Old posts make your site look old and irrelevant. Why not spend 20 minutes writing once a week after a morning ride? 300 words is probably enough. More words means more “conversation” and a higher search engine ranking, more custom etc. etc. Search Engines read. It’s actually all they can do. If you are constantly feeding their robot scouts with relevant and up to date “chat” about cycling, it’s only going to help . . .

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 2,000 unique vistors every month and a lot of two-way (customer / client) “conversation”.

Which brings me to my next point . . .

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 overseas companies. By doing this, it was perceived that Harvey was experiencing a bit of sour grapes because his sales were low and he was blaming online, cheaper retailers.

We need to engage customers and potential customers in a conversation. Shouting at potential clients using an expensive newspaper ad as a soap-box 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 one page shouty ads.

. . . You’re using WordPress which allows people to respond to your posts. Why don’t you switch on the comments facility? Presently people can’t leave comments on your posts (even the few you have up there). When clients (or potential clients) comment, try to respond to feedback in a meaningful way (within about 48hrs). 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 forums. 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” . . .

Allowing people to comment on your website gives them a bit of power. Plus, it’s kind of like seeing your name in print. Who doesn’t like being published?

In short, clients and potential clients are more likely to talk directly to you instead of talking behind your back on say, Iinet’s Whirpool forums.

Some buttons on the Canning Bridge Cycles navigation sidebar take users to another site.

As a general rule, main navigation should always link to on-site pages. Why not include a Useful Links page with brand decals linking off to company sites.

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.

. . . Rather than having a Brands button – call that page Links or Useful Links. Visitors assume that all links on your site will take them to on-site pages unless you tell them otherwise. When I clicked Brands I was expecting reviews, pics or a bit of research into the brands you supply. Linking to a company web page is fine if you politely let your visitor know what you are doing. Linking to other sites is fine, but try to be clear when you do it. If you need to link to other sites from within main page text, perhaps you could indicate this by drawing a small image with upward pointing arrow just to the right of the link . . .

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.

Let’s face it. Your Bikes link is really a link to your shop.

Sometimes people have a button called “Shop” – which will takes us to some kind of shopping cart with paypal gateway, but it’s a good idea to provide a separate link, and as with point 3, let them know they are going off-site. Your shop is on a different server – which is common practice – but you should really have a shop button that is not a main site navigation button.

What I mean by a shop “button” – is a graphic, in a prominent place somewhere in the margin or on the main page of teh site that links to the off-site shop.

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 seems to be about commerce. But that’s just an illusion.

Your “Rides” page is great. It could use a few more images, but it’s a great idea to have such a page. Good also to tell your customers how fast and how far they will be expected to go on their bicycles. I know I’m not too happy going more than 30kmh on my bike, so I can see that these rides aren’t for me. I wanted to see guys (and gals) having coffee and fun at the Cottesloe cafe you talk about. Shots of long macs with bike helmets, rows of bikes, clippy shoes etc. Gimme the fantasy and maybe I’ll pick-up my pace.

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.

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”.

It’s good that you have Frequently Asked Questions. Well done there. People need to know this stuff. Go crazy and tell them more. Collect questions while you’re in shop and them upload to your website during that one hour per week when you update your blog! ;)p

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. They are more likely to look at images than read. So give them images. Just make sure to tag them correctly for all the search engines to read.

I mentioned pics before, but you really should have really good, big images (as wide as your content area at least) throughout your site. PLUS a gallery! Some companies pay me to add this sort of stuff for them for them. For example, I recently created these pages for an Air-conditioning company.

• Air Conditioning
• Advantage Air

Pics, images, bike music. Anything that you feel could help bring your virtual presence out of the screen a little and into the viewer’s world.

I know your industry is pretty physical, but you might consider making it less physical and more “virtual” as time goes on. I don’t see why you can’t make your business work for you more – instead of you working “for it” like I suspect you’re doing.

All the best.
Edwin

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. I bought a bicycle off him!

PS. Thanks for the bike, Ross. It rides like a dream.

I’ve been thinking about defecting to iinet. Anybody had any thoughts on those guys? Thanks to Telstra – the decision to defect is now much easier and sooner than I thought. The maths on Telstra is easy to do. There’s no need to vote with your feet. Use your wallet!

I pay $30 a month for line rental, $20 a month for LOCAL calls and $50 a month (to iinet) for the internet. That’s $100 per month, right!? Iinet are offering the whole shebang for $60 a month – including free local and national calls and 5c/min calls to USA and UK.

So I’m there, baby!

Until Telstra fix up my phone line, you can contact me here for now.

Ugh!

— Rant ends here —

The only drawback is the 3 week wait. That’s 3 weeks without the internet. Arrgh! And the third week without a phone. And if you’re not at home to receive your new modem, it might be a bit longer for you to find out where it is and go get it.

So – the wait is the main thing. I’ll fill you in on how hard it is to install your new “Naked ADSL” when I get back from my Easter vacation…

To join the fun click : http://www.twitter.com.

format. Am I losing you?

It basically means you can have all sorts of news delivered right to your browser or email or feed reader software. Stuff like news, latest product offerings or even the content of this site.

Firefox calls the feed bit of their browser Bookmarks and IE stores feeds in its Favourites Center (probably a trademarked term – ugh!).

If you ever see the feed symbol (right) click on it and your browser should do most of the work for you. In Firefox, all my feeds are listed in one row across the top of my browser. Clicking on one shows me a list of stories or BLOG entries or software product updates produced by that company / blogger.

Try subscribing to this site’s feed by clicking here. You can always delete it.

Recently, I had a strange, ironic pleasure. I had to mark a whole bunch of website usability assignments for a unit I teach at Curtin Uni. The assignments were basically briefs for a proposed website. Oh my. Half of the assignments were great reads and even I (with my huge and accommodating mind) learnt a lot ;) . . . But some assignments themselves were just plain hard to use and so had a weird sense of comic irony about them. They wouldn’t open, or they were 1Gb heavy and wouldn’t download due to huge embedded movies and Curtin server file-size limits. In some cases, huge un-prepared images straight out of Dad’s 20 mega-pixel camera were embedded in Word Docs. I had to contact so many students to ask for something usable.

One assignment made no mention of what the proposed website would be for. It was fully researched and beautifully presented, but I had no idea what the subject or even the basic theme was. It could have been a proposal for a product site or equally – a service oriented site. I had no idea. Navigation would be here and the header was to be there. Everything inthe right place. BUT, the entire document was a complete mystery and so it was worthless. The student got a good mark because it was thoroughly researched with lots of cited comments – and at least it opened.

Take this BLOG entry as a word of warning. If your company name is “Generation Solutions” for example – while it may sound grand to yourself and satisfy a seeing the name in print need – nobody will know what you do.

Plus, the over-used and ubiquitous word “solution” these days, to me at least, suggests that your potential client has a problem. It’s almost offensive, but not quite. Read my BLOG about my personal take on the term business solutions. Not very emotionally rational.

So – if you do get a website – please do remember to add “we sell chairs” (or whatever you do) under your company title so people know where they are. It’s the single most important part of your site’s communication.

Plus search engines appreciate your simple tag. ;P

Imagine if I walked up to you in the street and said, “Hi, my name is Edwin and I do believe you are all wrong with that T-shirt. I sell T-shirts which will improve your look!” You’d have every reason to send me on my merry way. Why? Because I was being rude. You can’t walk up to someone, insult them and then expect them to buy stuff off you. And that’s the implication behind the word, “solutions”. You need fixing.

I have a problem with the way language is used on the net.

Solutions reminds me of that new word in world politics – concerned. “We are very concerned about the way your country is conducting business”. Translation: “You should be doing things our way. We can solve your problem. If you do things our way, we won’t be concerned and your problems will be solved.”

In both cases – there is an implicit should.

Here, at Geoffrey, we don’t try to solve your problem. What we will do is create a great website, for a reasonable price.

Check out my latest work and see if it’s the sort of thing you’re looking for.

Many students did the work or got an okay mark or passed. Thankfully, a small percentage of the assignments I received wouldn’t even open!

But the best assignments by far were the ones that communicated with me. Very few students wrote about the trials and tribulations of their programming adventures. The ones that did helped me understand their plight by carefully holding my hand all the way.

In this web-based topsy-turvy industry, it’s hard to find good communicators. If you are clear on paper (and in person of course) the floor is yours. Flattery will get you nowhere. Strong, clear communication (starting with small file sizes, labeled and commented work, links and illustrations whenever necessary, students) will get you anywhere.