Google has said that one of their greatest challenges for 2012 is the large number of advertisers who do not have a strong mobile presence.  With Australia having such a high smartphone penetration (above the UK, US and Japan), having a solid mobile strategy is vital to success.  Last year, over 20% of the internet searches in Australia were from mobile devices*.  That is a huge number and shows just how necessary a well-constructed mobile presence is.

Despite the growing popularity of smart phones in Australia, nearly 80% of businesses advertising on Google do not have mobile optimised websites*.  That means that those users who make up the 20% of internet searches coming from mobiles are constantly being taken to poorly performing sites that are not meeting their requirements. Is that the first interaction you want someone to have with your business?  As the saying goes, the first impression is the last impression. So would you want someone’s first impression of your business being shaped by a website that cannot function on their chosen browsing device?

This lack of mobile optimisation is very frustrating for users, but presents an excellent opportunity to businesses.  What to stand out from the crowd?  Get ahead of your competitors?  Increase your sales?  Then get a strong mobile presence and wow your potential customers with an easy to use, informative mobile site.

*Data from Ipsos Research study done in conjunction with Google.

So you have this beautiful new website with shiny buttons, loads of great, helpful, useful, quality content that is easy to navigate and directs customers to the reasonably priced products and/or services that you offer.  But who is going to see it?

So you sit up late at night spamming everyone in your address book, joining forums and shamelessly plugging your website (and possibly getting banned from them in the process). You run out of steam and stop.  Then you watch the traffic you were slowly building drop back off too.  You know you have a great site with great content so why is traffic dropping off so quickly?

Do I have to do everything myself?

No, you don’t have to do everything yourself.  Adding Facebook Like buttons, Twitter Share Link buttons and Google Plus 1 buttons is a great way of inviting your visitors to share that great content with their friends and hopefully so on.  Implementing the code is as simple as configuring the button via any of the links just mentioned, and copying and pasting the provided code to your website. If you have a content management system, you can often paste the code to your template, and it will be included on every page.

My personal opinion is that Facebook and Twitter are the two most important ones to date, but with the rise of Google plus and the way it can affect your search engine rankings, the +1 button is becoming more and more important.  But that is probably not all you should use.  There are so many other great services that allow visitors to share your website with people they are connected to.

Here are a few popular ones:

• AddThis
• ShareThis
• LockerzShare

The theme of this month’s blog is ‘new year, new site’. But if you already have a website, how do you know if it needs to be improved, or if you need to get a new site altogether?  By doing your own site audit, you should be able to identify any areas that need to be upgraded in order to make your website a success.  To do an audit of your own website, here are some steps to follow:

1. Make sure you know what business goals you want your website to achieve before you start.  Do you want to be making sales, generating leads or creating a brand identity?  How are you measuring the success?  Do you have realistic targets in place?
2. Once you understand what you want the website to achieve from your perspective, you need to look at it from your customer’s point of view.  Why are they visiting the website?
3. Start from the beginning of your customer’s journey.  How do they find your site?  Do you show up in search results for relevant search terms?  Do you know what your audience is searching for when they come to your site? Do you have links from your social media pages to your website?
4. Once you reach your website, remember to think like a customer.  Navigate through the site.  Look for specific products or services.  Fill out an enquiry form.  Try and find your contact details.  Make a purchase if you have an ecommerce store.  What is your experience?  Can you find all the information you think you need?  Is it easy to get specific details that would make your customers feel at ease – sizing information, shipping costs, delivery times, phone numbers, and office / store locations?  This list of what people are looking for can go on and on, but you should know what you customers want.  And if they can’t find it on your site, they will look elsewhere. Remember, it only takes a few seconds for a potential customer to move to your competitor’s website.
5. List everything that you weren’t happy with, or found difficult, on your site.  Ask family, friends and colleagues to go through the same process and see what they come back with.

Once you have identified any areas that need to be fixed, changed, deleted or added, you need to weigh up whether your current site structure will be able to provide the necessary functionality.  I often meet clients who want to build on their current site as they have already invested in it, which is understandable.

However, sometimes the resources required to build on existing sites can be much greater than the resources required to start again.  This can be for a range of reasons, such as the site using an old or ill equipped platform, old coding practices or poor site structures.  While having out dated development techniques on a website is not always visible from the user end, it can seriously delay new developments and can hinder any SEO activity.

So if you are looking to move your online presence forward in 2012, start by doing your own website audit.  You will then be in a better position when talking to a website developer or digital agency.

Flash is great technology, and it certainly still has its own uses on the web. At the same time, it needs to be removed from many other places on the web.

If your website is using Flash for an image slideshow, drop down menu, or even to display some page heading text in a fancy font – we need to talk.

Using Flash for these elements has been negated by the introduction of CSS 3 and jQuery, and jQuery Mobile. In the last 12 months alone, the increased support from Adobe and also web browsers for CSS 3 and jQuery has made for some really exciting possibilities when it comes to web design and front end development.

Below are just a few reasons to move away from using Flash on your website:

Long Page Load Times

As a user, Flash on websites can be a real pain. Flash elements generally take a long time to load, as they have to rely on the Flash Player plugin to render the content rather than the browser itself. Using CSS 3 or jQuery provides super lightweight solutions to all your old flash components using far less code and will make the page load much faster. You should find more users staying on your site for longer, rather than leaving when they’re told they need to update their Flash Player to view the site.

Limited Mobile Support

Flash on mobile? Forget about it. iPhones cannot play any Flash, period. Android devices can currently play Flash content. However Adobe recently announced they will be dropping Flash support for mobile devices, which effectively means we will see a further decline in the overall use of Flash on websites.

So what can be used? HTML5 and CSS 3? Certainly. But if we’re looking to replace the need for Flash on mobile, we can go one step further – using jQuery Mobile. jQuery mobile is a very cool framework that allows us to create mobile websites with all the interactive trademarks of a mobile ‘app’. This means screen transitions, swipe navigation, popup dialog boxes and so on. Check out www.itsimple.com.au on your mobile to get an idea of what it’s like.

Non-SEO Friendly Flash Headings

Another use for Flash, which I touched on earlier, is text and page headings. Using Flash to render text is not a great idea, especially from an SEO perspective. Google still has trouble reading Flash properly, and as a general rule, HTML based text is always the best. The reason for websites doing this to begin with, is so they can display non-web standard fonts on their web page. But again, this isn’t the best way to go about doing it.

The better alternative is to use Google Web Fonts. Using this method, fonts are rendered by the browser rather than relying on flash. Because the fonts are stored in Google’s cloud, they can be viewed by anyone, regardless of what fonts are installed on their computer or mobile device. Mobile users and anyone with an out dated Flash player will be able see the site as it was intended, if you use this method.

So while Flash does still contribute to some applications on the web, it’s not something that should be used to implement site features, such as image slideshows or drop down menus.  With the development of CSS 3 and jQuery, there are smarter and more user friendly ways of getting the functionality that we use to have to rely on Flash for.

Thinking of starting off the new year with a new website? When it comes to the success of a new site, it’s all about good content that helps improve the user experience, according to Matt Cutts from Google. Good content has more of a chance of getting linked to, which means that your rankings will improve. After all, in Google’s eyes, every link equals a vote towards your site.

Even an aged site can really get favourable results with new content. Google likes to update users with the latest articles on each topic, so if you refresh a high page rank page with new content, it’s going to be enough to push it to higher rankings.

When it comes to having a good site, content is one of the easiest and quickest updates you can do to improve your rankings. This is because Google bots read content on sites, but currently they cannot read images effectively.  So if you really want to communicate with Google to improve your rankings, then you need to do so via up to date, quality content.

People will often put most of their attention into the ‘look and feel’ of a site.  And while this is an important aspect, contributing to user experience and how your brand is perceived, it is only one part of a successful site.  Too often people have the content as an afterthought, leading to confusing messaging, lack of keywords and therefore low site rankings.

It is vital to the success of your site that you understand how important content is.  Bill Gates didn’t say “content is king” for nothing back in 1995, when the internet was in its early years. These famous words support the importance of having quality content on your site.  And you can guarantee that when Matt Cutts from Google says something about content, there is going to be a lot of supporting data backing it up.

New Year’s Eve is always about friends, parties and the resolutions you make but rarely keep. Well for me anyway. If one of your resolutions is to make sure your company’s website gets an overhaul in 2012, then listen up…

Your website plays an important function in your brand image and communications strategy. You shouldn’t compromise design and/or development when considering the options. Cheapest isn’t always the best – we have seen many examples of $350 websites that just do not deliver, or in some cases, even function. Going with a local provider may seem like a higher investment; however the results should outweigh the investment.

Before you engage a provider there a few pre-engagement items that you needs to have ready:

• A brief for the designer/developer/agency to review. This should clearly state the objectives of the site and what you are expecting from the result
• Brand guidelines for the designer to follow
• Compile a list of sites you really like from a design and/or functionality perspective. This provides so much valuable information to the team
• Content that you want on the site – this is normally what holds a site up. If you need the content written, let the people you are talking to know. They can either write the content for you or give you details of someone that can

Hopefully you receive a detailed proposal that allows you to understand all that will be delivered in the project. If not, ask for clarification on anything that seems ambiguous or is not clear.

Then comes the fun part – well for us anyway. Working through the brief and designing/developing the site. This should be a fun experience for you and your team too. There can be some challenges in finding a balance with what presents well from a design perspective and what will be accepted by the client, but it should be a collaborative effort so you need to expect that.

Remember some these points and your new site will be live and working hard for you about 6-10 weeks:

• purpose of the site – what do you want from the website? More client engagement, acquisition, transactions etc.
• who is your target – identify your target and consider them
• functionality – how easy is it for visitors to engage with your brand online
• design – your site design should reflect the elements of your brand
• mobile – you MUST have a mobile optimised website

By now, I think it is safe to assume that most of our blog readers have their own website, or work for a company with a website.  So with 2011 coming to an end, it is the perfect time to start thinking about what you can do to improve your current online offering – it can be the perfect way to start the New Year.

1. Test your site

It constantly amazes me how many sites have broken functionality.  It only takes a few minutes to go through a site to test forms, check links and ensure all navigation features are working.  Yet it seems so many people don’t bother.  Websites aren’t something that you can ‘set and forget’.  They take ongoing maintenance if you want to be successful.  Obviously in the perfect world, nothing would ever break.  But even if everything is functioning as it should, there are still improvements that can be made.  Which takes me to my second point…

2. Remember your customers

It’s important that you love your site and find it easy to use, but it is even more important that your target market does as well.  When developing a site, your target market should always be kept in mind to ensure they have a positive user experience.  You should also be undertaking regular website audits to ensure that this user experience remains positive.  You often see sites that were great to begin with, but with content additions, changes in product offers or new marketing campaigns, they have become messy and confusing for customers.  Spend some time going through your site from the perspective of your customer and see if any changes need to be made.

3. Update content

While new content additions can ruin user experience if the site architecture is not taken into consideration, adding new content and updating current content is a great way to freshen things up.  People will be less inclined to continually visit a site that never changes, so updates give them something to come back for.  Add a ‘specials’ or ‘news’ section, create content around any new products or services you have or just improve the content you already have.  Not only will this help with repeat visitors to your site, but can assist with SEO as well.  Remember, content really is king.

4. Get social and do it well

Ok, so this point might not improve your actual site, but it can improve your overall online presence. Social media can be a great way to connect with your customers, get your brand messaging across and increase traffic to your site.  However, it can also damage your brand if done incorrectly, and in some cases turn into a total PR nightmare (hello Qantas…).

So before you engage in this step, just take a moment to look at how your target market behaves online and develop a strategy to relate to that.  There is nothing worse than clicking through to a company’s Facebook page to see they only have 4 ‘fans’ and haven’t done any updates for six months.  Facebook and Twitter are always the safe options when it comes to social, and can provide a great way to communicate with your customers on a more informal level.

5. Have transparency

This last point may seem a little dull, but I think it is so so so important, especially if you have an online store.  For a standard website, customers still need to be able to see where you are based, how to get in contact, and information regarding your company.  Don’t hide this information away, as it can make people lose faith in your brand.  I never trust a company that doesn’t have a phone number and address that can be easily found!

For ecommerce stores, the need for transparency is even greater.  What are your shipping costs and delivery times?  What payment gateway do you use?  Is it secure?  What’s your refund policy?  Do you have a sizing chart?  Answers to all of these questions should be obvious to customers, and should be obvious before they need to start looking for them.  Have a shipping calculator?  Well, don’t wait until the payment page to show it to customers.  Put a link to it on the product page.

Being transparent in all of your policies and processes may seem like overkill, but it helps to develop your customer’s trust which in turn means repeat visitors, more enquiries and higher sales.  And that is what we are all after, right?

When I started this article, it was going to be about the usability and customer experience of an e-commerce website, but as I started typing and thinking about it more, I realised what people don’t know is the day to day running of e-commerce websites. Having built them for clients, run them myself, and been an end user of more e-commerce websites than I can count, I thought I had better share my experiences with you.  Whether you are about to start an e-commerce site or you are already running one, here are some points to think about in order to make a better service for your customers, increase trust, and improve sales.

Be contactable and responsive

If it is possible, get a 1300 number and display it in the header of your website.  If not, provide a contact page with a contact form and a landline phone number (optionally).  Once you have these things easily available and not hidden on your website, be responsive.  Emails should be sent to your smartphone so that you can respond easily and quickly. If a customer has a question and they get a quick response, they are more likely to buy your products with confidence. If you have a phone number – answer it.  If that is not possible, have an answering service with a professional sounding message dedicated to that website/business and return those calls ASAP.

Offer support

If you don’t want to be receiving phone calls day in day out, and the contact email form seems generic and unspecific, offer ticket support from your website.  This is particularly good for online services, subscription based models and SAAS (software as a service) models.  It sets an expectation for the customer, and the tickets can be categorised to be responded to by the correct person in your business (if it is larger than a one man operation).

FAQ knowledgebase

By adding items to your FAQ knowledge base regularly, you will increase your chances of customers seeing the answer to their question there before they contact you.  In an ideal world, we could put up a website that is 100% self-service and nobody would bother us with customer support/service questions.  That is just not how it works in the real world of e-commerce, but contact can be reduced if the customer can easily find the answer to their question.  On your contact page and support page, include a search box for the FAQ knowledge base.  Say something like ‘Why wait for us to get back to you? Check our knowledge base for a quick and easy solution.’

Send your products on a regular basis

Having an e-commerce store can often mean working from home. Whether it is full time or part time, make a schedule for sending out your products.  That will create a consistency of service. Whether you are doing it every day or every second day it is a job like any other so treat it like that. Have a schedule for filling orders and sending them.

When it comes to e-commerce websites, there are a few different factors to take into the design. Just like a bricks and mortar store, your online store needs to showcase your products in an attractive manner and let users browse through your offering just as easily as they would in a real store.

Your home page is the first impression, so it needs to grab the user’s attention and communicate your brand positioning, just like if they were walking past your store. Featured products can be put on display show what’s on offer. Or even better, having a large image banner with big bold text with an offer will surely entice anyone landing on your website to check out what’s inside.

Your category or ’browse’ pages display the different areas of your store, where the customer gets an overview of everything on offer within a certain category. The product snapshots in this area should be well spaced out, and provide a clear image with the product name and price. The thumbnail images used to show your products should be large enough to show the product well so customers want to click through for more information.

Clicking into one of these products is where the customer is going to get more ‘hands on’ with the item. This page is crucial to the shopping experience because depending on the way the product is presented, the customer will either leave it or add it to their cart. The information on this page should be formatted so the customer has no trouble getting an overview of everything they need to know about the item.

Product images are key to how well your products are going to appear online. The thing to keep in mind, whether you’re sourcing images directly from the supplier or taking the photos yourself, is consistency. The images need to all appear the same size, with the same lighting and the same background. If half your products have a pure white background, and the others have been taken against a concrete wall, it’s going to really make all your products looks dodgy.
Navigation is also very important, as we don’t’ want the user to get lost while shopping. Similar to if they were shopping in an actual store. Categories, menu items and a breadcrumb trail should all be clear to the user.

So if you’re thinking about starting an e-commerce website, you should ensure that you make the customer experience as easy as possible.