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So your website is looking a bit old, it doesn’t really do much. Yeah, there’s some good info on there but people don’t seem to be converting.  Sound familiar? It’s clearly time to put some money down and do something about it.

The next problem is how much money do you have to put down and where should it be spent?  Your site might just need a face lift to make it look more up to date.  The reason you might do this is the same as the reason you would paint or decorate any bricks and mortar business.  This is a representation of your business online, and it should be treated the same as your business in reality.

A good way to find out where your business is falling short online is to use the website yourself.  Check out what other successful sites in your market are doing too. This will show you how customers are going to perceive your business in comparison.  Be careful when you do this, because there are a lot of sites out there with plenty of bells and whistles that might look exciting and ‘fancy’ when in fact these additional features are detrimental to the overall usability of the website.

More features do not always make a good site. Sometimes limiting the features can create a better, more simplified user experience.  Just think of Apple.
Is your call to action visible enough? Does it look inviting? You would not have a retail shop and make it difficult to get to the counter to make a purchase. You would make it tidy and it would be clear where the counter is.  Don’t try and trick people by hiding your checkout, your pricing information, or your general call to action.  They will only get frustrated and leave. Be confident in your product.  Be proud of your service.  And make it clear to people what your site does, and how they can enquire about or buy your product/service.

Like anything in business, a website requires attention, maintenance and care; otherwise it will start looking dated and possibly make your business look dead.  This might be the opposite of how your business actually is. With existing clients and customers returning constantly, your business might be doing well.  But how well is it performing in an online environment?

I’m sure I am not the only one who has come across a website that looks like it has not been loved by its owner. That looks like nothing has changed, developed, or progressed in the company since 2005. The websites forum has tumbleweeds in it and the last post was 3 years ago in a thread called “Hey everyone, we now have a forum!”.  This raises loads of issues and I hope to cover at least a couple of them with this article.

Websites have a life cycle that business owners need to be aware of to make sure their business is well represented online.  Too many businesses leave it too long to move to the next step because they do not see the value in it or they feel like they have just finished the site and do not want to work to maintain or improve on it.

To keep a website fresh and improve on the customer/user experience, websites should have a 6 month cycle (or even 3 month for web/online services) that allows for improvements of any size or scope to be completed.  Here are some examples of areas that can be reviewed:

Menu and content structure

Is it easy to use?  Are people finding what they need?

Checkout facilities

Are people not completing their purchase? Where are they dropping off?

Advertising placement

Are you making money from website advertising? Try placing ads in different areas of the site and monitor their performance.

Forum

Does the site have a forum? Is it dead? Get rid of it. A lot of sites have a forum because they can, not because they need one. Users often do not participate, even if your site has a decent amount of traffic.

Aesthetic Design

When was the last time your websites aesthetic design was reviewed? Does it look like it has come straight out of the 90’s? (animated gifs and fluoro text on black backgrounds are a dead give-away – LOL).

Hopefully your website is not looking too old and dead, but don’t forget the importance of maintaining a regular review cycle to keep it alive and looking well.

Ok, so this title doesn’t sound that great but don’t let this article title fool you. We are all the ‘impatient’ and ‘lazy’ public when it comes to surfing the web. I find myself becoming more impatient with websites that take too long to load, have lousy navigation that makes it difficult to find the information I am looking for or have too many big slabs of text to scan through (yes scan, not read) before I find my relevant reading material.
So why don’t sites streamline their content and decrease the amount of text on their pages?

Unfortunately, in order for Google to see us and rank our site as having good quality content we need these slabs of text to get indexed. Well-crafted content will help boost your websites search engine performance while making it comprehensive for the human user.

Here are some tips to help overcome the problems we (the impatient and lazy public) have created for ourselves on the web.

1. Host your website on high quality server.
   This is a tricky one, with so many hosts out there and pricing ranging from a couple of dollars per month to a couple of hundred per month, it is hard to separate the good from the bad.  If you are developing the site yourself, jump onto forums and ask for advice and recommendations. If you are hiring a developer, ask them. They should be experienced with multiple suppliers
2. Long loading flash sites
   Flash (I believe) is not for full websites.  Often you will have to sit and wait for an entire site to load before you can start browsing it in flash.  I will often just close the window and move to the next site when I see that loading bar slowly make its way across the page.
3. Don’t bloat your site with fancy scripts
   With the rise of jQuery and html5, we are seeing more and more sites loaded with JavaScript.  While there is nothing wrong with JavaScript, we tend to see sites loading multiple scripts that have been pulled out of tutorials, or downloaded as jQuery plugins and overcomplicate the web pages. This is totally unnecessary most of the time.  JavaScript can be the perfect tool when it is well written, but is only necessary if you want a simple rotator or tabbed content section that breaks up those big slabs of text left for Google to chew on, or to improve the user experience in a functional area of your site. Other than that, code ripped from multiple sources to make your site seem fancy for the sake of it can often affect in-browser performance and cause visitors to move on.
4. Summarise your content
   Use headings to break up your content, but also make them informative and relative to the detailed content below them. Your website is not an essay, it is more like a brochure promoting and selling your service or product.  Information should be in broken down content that the user can explore more deeply if they choose to.
5. Site map
   If your site content is extensive, a link to an html site map in the footer is a must.  People need to navigate your site with ease, but they also need to understand where they are clicking to – so make page titles and site map links informative and well organised.
6. Searchable content
   If you are going to make your content searchable, make sure the results returned are accurate.  There is nothing worse than trying to search a large website that has a terrible search engine.
7. Videos on the home page
   One of my favourite features (if well implemented) is a video on the homepage of a website that offers a particular product or service.  I have noticed this on multiple websites that offer a service and increasingly on the android market. This is great because you get to see the concept of the product in action and an explanation of how it is going to benefit you.  But be careful, having a video is not enough to do the trick; there are several elements that are crucial if you want to pull this off properly.

• The video must be professional
• Usually rather than have someone talking to you, an entertaining presentation with illustrations tends to be more effective
• It needs to be short and to the point
• It must be opt-in rather than opt-out. This means absolutely NO AUTO-PLAYING. It may seem like a good idea to have it play automatically but most people will get annoyed and just close the page to get the sound to stop. The only thing more annoying than an auto-playing video is this

So there are a few ways to create content for your site that is efficient and effective, that gives the user what they are after, and make the web a better place.  If you have any ideas to add to this, please leave them in the comments below.

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

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.

The last two articles discussed the decision to either develop an entirely different mobile site or adjust the current one to look good and work well on mobile devices.  Now let’s talk about the user’s ability to do what they need to do on the mobile site.

Let’s say we have a feature rich web application that we have developed a completely separate mobile site for.  Understanding how people use your web application when on a mobile device is truly important.  There might be some features the user doesn’t have time for when they are on the move, so including them in the mobile specific version of the site would be unnecessary.  On the other hand, what if the user really wants to access a particular feature for some reason?  That brings us to the question:

Would my visitors need to access the full website from their mobile device?

People are generally less patient when browsing mobile sites in comparison to sitting at a desktop with a full browser and faster internet connection. They really need the main basics of your site quickly on mobile BUT if they can’t access something they know they could access on the full site, they will get annoyed and be less likely to use your service/product.  If it’s not possible to include all of the features of your full site in your mobile version, a link to your full site is a good way to give your users/visitors access to everything they need.

How do I know what they want?

Deciding on what features are required and essential to the mobile experience depends on the site itself. The use of analytics, user testing and customer feedback, via more personal means such as one on one contact, are a few ways of finding out how people are interacting.  There are also some other great user experience web services available.  One that I particularly like for analytics and useability testing is www.clicktale.com

This is the second post in the Moving to Mobile blog series.

There are many things to consider when moving your website to a mobile friendly format.  In the last article I talked about the options for redirecting visitors or implementing mobile templates.  Here are some things to think about when choosing the format:

How big is the job?

If you have a big website that would take a lot re-development or re-design work to achieve mobile greatness but aren’t ready to give your website a complete overhaul, you can opt for the redirect method.

What technology is your website using?

Because of the popularity of ‘new’ devices such as smartphones and tablets, these devices are using ‘new-school’ browsers.  In short, HTML5 and CSS3 stuff that works on Internet Explorer 9 (shudder) and up works on the majority of smartphone and tablet browsers (and often better).  The drawback to mobile browsing is that iPhones and iPads do not support flash.  If your website was developed using flash for major website elements, you will want to create a mobile specific website and direct all mobile users to this.

Another example of technology affecting this decision is if you have an older website that uses a table based layout.  There is really not much that can be done to make tables mobile friendly, so if you are not ready for a website re-design, you would be best to redirect to dedicated mobile site.

This is the first article in a series of development articles about moving your website to a mobile friendly format.  This article starts with the basics.

Where do I start?

There are so many options when it comes to mobile websites, and because the concept is still relatively new, there is no one correct way to present a mobile website.  What may work for one website may not be appropriate for another.

The options

I mentioned before that there are many options involved.  These include ways to detect browser and device type and what to do when the device is identified as a ‘mobile device’.  Here are the two main options to think about:
Mobile templates – detect the device screen size and adjust the way the page is displayed to suit.  This would also include what content you would like to be displayed.  This method will keep you on the exact same website as the full one without any URL redirection.
Dedicated Mobile Website – This method would detect if the visitor is on a mobile device and re-direct them to the address of the dedicated mobile website.  This could be a sub-domain, a completely different domain, or just a sub-folder on your website.

How do I choose?

Selecting the right option for your visitors and for your site is important and can be costly if poorly implemented. Throughout the rest of the series I will aim to get you up to speed with what to consider when moving to mobile, and how to implement it well.

This is something I came across when I was looking for a date picker for a project I was working on.

The project required date selection in specific formats and as a php developer who has a focus on user experience, I didn’t want to have to validate the form after submission, so I figured a date picker was the way to go. As I’m not great with JavaScript (just the basic functions), I needed to find a component that would be easy to implement and would do the job well.

Check out these jQuery UI widgets

This jQuery UI is GREAT! The widgets are really simple to use and configure, even skinning options are available so you don’t need to do anything just set up, and download whatever you need.

The other great thing about this is (for the calendar at least) it works with Adobe’s SPRY validation. So you can make the date format specific in case someone tries to type it in manually, or required etc… The only problem I had was validating on blur seemed to cause a small issue, so I did it on submit which for JavaScript is heaps easier, and gives a better user experience than doing a php validation. Just remember to double check and clean your code after submission with php because this is not going to do it for you.

Anyway, a long story short, I look forward to using more of these in my development and I hope you do too.

Fonts are just one of those things you need to settle for when you are developing websites, usually Arial (Halvetica for Mac), or Georgia. But Google Code is helping us out with this issue by giving us Google Fonts!

I just stumbled accross this one today while looking for blog ideas to add to my list and i just coudn’t resist sharing it right away.

Non standard web fonts!

This is just one of a few (and presumably growing number of) fonts Google is currently serving. I haven’t yet tested it in all of my installed browsers, but according to Google it is supported by the latest popular browsers. However for Internet explorer (as usual), the results can vary depending on where the code is on the page.

To implement this code just reference the hosted script like this:

<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Orbitron' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

And create a style for it like this:

h1 { font-family: 'Orbitron', arial, serif; }


more fonts can be found here: http://code.google.com/webfonts