Before launching the site after a round of thorough test run, there are still a few critical checks to be done. We list them below:
1. Are the design, structure and navigation foolproof?
2. Are all images and pages uploaded properly on the hosting server?
3. Is there an index.html (or index.htm) in each and every folder?
4. Are all the pages correctly cross-linked?
5. Are any under construction pages left behind? Leave them for the next round of your website update. The ‘under construction’ label tells only one thing to the users: the site is not professional!
The checks should preferably be made from several different destinations and computers. They should be done not in local (c:///mysite) mode but on the Internet (http://www.mysite.com).
However, the whole exercise at times can prove to be extremely time-consuming and costly. This is why you should look for services that are willing to offer web site designs with the basic features and technology needed for improved placement on search engines and internet directories. The goal of a reliable website design and development company is essentially to provide truly affordable services to small and middle size businesses.
Of course, once your site is tested and made live, the critical task is to keep it dynamic. Regular visitors of a website will know it inside out almost as much as its webmaster. If the site is not regularly updated, and fails to provide fresh content, the visitors wouldn't have a reason to come back. They would slowly lose their interest.
Showing posts with label websites. Show all posts
Showing posts with label websites. Show all posts
Monday, June 22, 2009
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Queen launches new-look website
The Queen has relaunched her website at a Buckingham Palace reception in the company of the world wide web's inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
The royal site, which started in 1997, now includes more video material as well as historical documents.
Queen Victoria's journal in which she describes trying out Alexander Graham Bell's new invention, the telephone, is to be among the new features.
About 250,000 people around the world visit the site each week.
The Queen stood in front of a bank of nine screens and clicked a remote control to re-launch the site.
The Monarchy site's homepage appeared showing a range of simple menus and tabs which it is hoped will make it easier to navigate.
In a speech, Sir Tim Berners-Lee said the website "celebrates a really important part of the British cultural tradition - the monarchy - and is a great resource for the people within Britain, so it deepens that culture.
Tim Berners-Lee: "The number of things people do on the web is amazing"
"But at the same time it's there for anybody to see it from other countries, where they really don't understand how the monarchy works - what it does do, what it doesn't do - so now they can go and look."
When the site was first launched, the Queen spoke of how some parents and grandparents found the internet "a bit of a mystery".
BBC royal correspondent Peter Hunt said while the site should be more user-friendly, the Queen is only going so far into cyberspace.
"We can't e-mail her and there's little prospect of the Queen blogging, conducting a webchat or indeed twittering," our correspondent added.
The Duke of Edinburgh appearing in an advert for the Playing Fields Association, 1951
The site was visited more than 100 million times in its first year, making it one of the most popular locations on the internet at the time. And in the week of Princess Diana's funeral, some 35 million visits were recorded.
Royal.gov.uk is not the only presence the Queen has on the internet. In 2007, she launched her own channel on the video-sharing website YouTube.
The Royal Channel features her Christmas Day message, and recent and historical footage of the monarch and other members of the Royal Family.
Neil Patel, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
The royal site, which started in 1997, now includes more video material as well as historical documents.
Queen Victoria's journal in which she describes trying out Alexander Graham Bell's new invention, the telephone, is to be among the new features.
About 250,000 people around the world visit the site each week.
The Queen stood in front of a bank of nine screens and clicked a remote control to re-launch the site.
The Monarchy site's homepage appeared showing a range of simple menus and tabs which it is hoped will make it easier to navigate.
In a speech, Sir Tim Berners-Lee said the website "celebrates a really important part of the British cultural tradition - the monarchy - and is a great resource for the people within Britain, so it deepens that culture.
Tim Berners-Lee: "The number of things people do on the web is amazing"
"But at the same time it's there for anybody to see it from other countries, where they really don't understand how the monarchy works - what it does do, what it doesn't do - so now they can go and look."
When the site was first launched, the Queen spoke of how some parents and grandparents found the internet "a bit of a mystery".
BBC royal correspondent Peter Hunt said while the site should be more user-friendly, the Queen is only going so far into cyberspace.
"We can't e-mail her and there's little prospect of the Queen blogging, conducting a webchat or indeed twittering," our correspondent added.
The Duke of Edinburgh appearing in an advert for the Playing Fields Association, 1951
The site was visited more than 100 million times in its first year, making it one of the most popular locations on the internet at the time. And in the week of Princess Diana's funeral, some 35 million visits were recorded.
Royal.gov.uk is not the only presence the Queen has on the internet. In 2007, she launched her own channel on the video-sharing website YouTube.
The Royal Channel features her Christmas Day message, and recent and historical footage of the monarch and other members of the Royal Family.
Neil Patel, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Effective Online Marketing in a Recession
The Chinese curse, "may you live in interesting times," must have been coined in a business climate similar today's. The credit crunch and its reverberations are being widely felt, nowhere more so than in smaller organizations that have fewer marketing resources than the big boys.
Marketers need help to navigate these tricky economic waters while staying focused on profitable expansion rather than contraction. If you can grow, even in these times, you will emerge on the other side of the economic crisis ahead of the competition.
Creativity, combined with on-demand marketing tools, will help. When budgets are tight is the best time to try new and less-costly techniques leveraging Web 2.0 technologies.
What Is the Right Marketing Mix?
Web 2.0 technologies offer new ways for you to reach your audience for little to no cost. Customers have become inoculated to tired methods like email and even pay-per-click. Waiting for them to visit your Web site is simply insufficient to drive growth. Instead, the new generation of marketing tools includes things like social communities, Web site syndication tools, gadgets, and RSS feeds because they are online ("on-demand"), scaling to any size of audience. The best part is that most Web 2.0 technologies are easy to use and are, often, free.
So which Web 2.0 marketing tools can best help you promote your Web site, content, and applications? Remember that before using any of these you must first work out what specific strategic marketing goals you are trying to achieve. Then, see how some, or all of these options, can work together to achieve your goals.
Social networking platforms are extremely popular now. Create a page on Facebook or MySpace for your company or product. Or you can create your own social network at Ning. Populate your page with gadgets and fresh content. Start a group or a fan page so prospective and current customers can stay in touch.
Web site syndication tools put your Web site on the move. For example, if you put the best elements of your Web site on a community toolbar that sits in the browser, then your company goes everywhere on the Internet that your customer does.
Any content or application can be made into a gadget/widget, which is a simple distribution mechanism because it can be hosted on any Web site, and is easy to install into a browser, social-networking site, personalized start page, or toolbar. Check out Widgetbox, where you can easily make your own widgets.
Syndicate your blog or your Web site with an RSS Feed. Don't wait for people to come to read it. Make it available as an RSS feed, which will be sent to them whenever you update the blog. Most blog tools include an RSS creation tool. These feeds can also be hosted on social community page, community toolbar, and personalized start pages.
There are also some great sharing tools, like ShareThis, which can make it easy for you to syndicate product announcements, press releases, blog updates, media coverage—any content you want—to your various networks simultaneously. It's a better delivery mechanism than simple email because it delivers your content to myriad places, like email lists, your Facebook page, etc. with only a few clicks. Moreover, it can track and measure the entire life of the information.
Analyze It: Is It Working?
The most successful Web 2.0 marketers establish measurable goals and then consistently track the results. Set your specific campaign objectives and establish performance goals for each deployment method.
These goals should be aligned to business needs: for example, conversions to membership or purchase; increased site traffic if you are ad revenue based; and conversions from social networks to your Web site.
Gadgets/widgets can help you measure return traffic to your site and repeat purchases. A tell-a-friend or sharing tool can help you capture the power of your word-of-mouth campaigns and measure conversions from social media.
Most importantly, and unlike email analytics, all these tools and their analytics provide instant feedback so that you can react in real time to campaigns that are working (and those that are not).
Optimize It: Make Adjustments Where Needed
Use your analytics to determine what is working best, and then invest there. Tweaking your program based on analysis should allow you to quickly see results. Success begets success. For example, when you update new content on your Web site and your customers are immediately drawn to it time and time again, you want to be able to syndicate this positive experience with other users.
In some cases, the results will surprise you, but trust the data. Just as importantly, if it doesn't work, stop wasting your time. Ignore emotional attachments to popular campaigns if they don't prove their worth.
Anecdotal feedback from prospective and current customers is just as important. Give your visitors and community ample opportunity to provide feedback about your site, campaigns, and products, and make adjustments accordingly. For example, online surveys are easy to deploy and can centralize the results for comparison.
Web 2.0 technologies are easy to adjust and refresh so that you can react more quickly and tweak your campaigns on the fly.
In Perspective
Waiting for the larger economic picture to improve is not going to make the path ahead any easier. Proceeding with targeted and cost-effective marketing campaigns could mean the difference between success and failure during the downturn. It is worth noting that 16 of the 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average started in downturns. Will your business be number 17?
Marketers need help to navigate these tricky economic waters while staying focused on profitable expansion rather than contraction. If you can grow, even in these times, you will emerge on the other side of the economic crisis ahead of the competition.
Creativity, combined with on-demand marketing tools, will help. When budgets are tight is the best time to try new and less-costly techniques leveraging Web 2.0 technologies.
What Is the Right Marketing Mix?
Web 2.0 technologies offer new ways for you to reach your audience for little to no cost. Customers have become inoculated to tired methods like email and even pay-per-click. Waiting for them to visit your Web site is simply insufficient to drive growth. Instead, the new generation of marketing tools includes things like social communities, Web site syndication tools, gadgets, and RSS feeds because they are online ("on-demand"), scaling to any size of audience. The best part is that most Web 2.0 technologies are easy to use and are, often, free.
So which Web 2.0 marketing tools can best help you promote your Web site, content, and applications? Remember that before using any of these you must first work out what specific strategic marketing goals you are trying to achieve. Then, see how some, or all of these options, can work together to achieve your goals.
Social networking platforms are extremely popular now. Create a page on Facebook or MySpace for your company or product. Or you can create your own social network at Ning. Populate your page with gadgets and fresh content. Start a group or a fan page so prospective and current customers can stay in touch.
Web site syndication tools put your Web site on the move. For example, if you put the best elements of your Web site on a community toolbar that sits in the browser, then your company goes everywhere on the Internet that your customer does.
Any content or application can be made into a gadget/widget, which is a simple distribution mechanism because it can be hosted on any Web site, and is easy to install into a browser, social-networking site, personalized start page, or toolbar. Check out Widgetbox, where you can easily make your own widgets.
Syndicate your blog or your Web site with an RSS Feed. Don't wait for people to come to read it. Make it available as an RSS feed, which will be sent to them whenever you update the blog. Most blog tools include an RSS creation tool. These feeds can also be hosted on social community page, community toolbar, and personalized start pages.
There are also some great sharing tools, like ShareThis, which can make it easy for you to syndicate product announcements, press releases, blog updates, media coverage—any content you want—to your various networks simultaneously. It's a better delivery mechanism than simple email because it delivers your content to myriad places, like email lists, your Facebook page, etc. with only a few clicks. Moreover, it can track and measure the entire life of the information.
Analyze It: Is It Working?
The most successful Web 2.0 marketers establish measurable goals and then consistently track the results. Set your specific campaign objectives and establish performance goals for each deployment method.
These goals should be aligned to business needs: for example, conversions to membership or purchase; increased site traffic if you are ad revenue based; and conversions from social networks to your Web site.
Gadgets/widgets can help you measure return traffic to your site and repeat purchases. A tell-a-friend or sharing tool can help you capture the power of your word-of-mouth campaigns and measure conversions from social media.
Most importantly, and unlike email analytics, all these tools and their analytics provide instant feedback so that you can react in real time to campaigns that are working (and those that are not).
Optimize It: Make Adjustments Where Needed
Use your analytics to determine what is working best, and then invest there. Tweaking your program based on analysis should allow you to quickly see results. Success begets success. For example, when you update new content on your Web site and your customers are immediately drawn to it time and time again, you want to be able to syndicate this positive experience with other users.
In some cases, the results will surprise you, but trust the data. Just as importantly, if it doesn't work, stop wasting your time. Ignore emotional attachments to popular campaigns if they don't prove their worth.
Anecdotal feedback from prospective and current customers is just as important. Give your visitors and community ample opportunity to provide feedback about your site, campaigns, and products, and make adjustments accordingly. For example, online surveys are easy to deploy and can centralize the results for comparison.
Web 2.0 technologies are easy to adjust and refresh so that you can react more quickly and tweak your campaigns on the fly.
In Perspective
Waiting for the larger economic picture to improve is not going to make the path ahead any easier. Proceeding with targeted and cost-effective marketing campaigns could mean the difference between success and failure during the downturn. It is worth noting that 16 of the 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average started in downturns. Will your business be number 17?
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Do i need a website?
Q: My business is very small, just me and two employees, and our product really can't be sold online. Do I really need a website?
A: That's a good question. In fact, it's one of the most important and most frequently asked questions of the digital business age.
So should your business have a website, even if your business is small and sells products or services you don't think can be sold online? My answer in 1998 is the same as my answer today: Yes, if you have a business, you should have a website. Period. No question. Without a doubt.
Also, don't be so quick to dismiss your product as one that can't be sold online. Nowadays, there's very little that can't be sold over the internet. More than 20 million shoppers are now online, purchasing everything from books to computers to cars to real estate to jet airplanes to natural gas to you name it. If you can imagine it, someone will figure out how to sell it online.
Let me clarify one point: I'm not saying you should put all your efforts into selling your wares over the internet, though if your product lends itself to easy online sales, you should certainly be considering it. The point to be made here is that you should at the very least have a presence on the web so that customers, potential employees, business partners and perhaps even investors can quickly and easily find out more about your business and the products or services you have to offer.
That said, it's not enough that you just have a website. You must have a professional-looking site if you want to be taken seriously. Since many consumers now search for information online prior to making a purchase at a brick-and-mortar store, your site may be the first chance you have at making a good impression on a potential buyer. If your site looks like it was designed by a barrel of colorblind monkeys, your chance at making a good first impression will be lost.
One of the great things about the internet is that it has leveled the playing field when it comes to competing with the big boys. As mentioned, you have one shot at making a good first impression. With a well-designed site, your little operation can project the image and professionalism of a much larger company. The inverse is also true. I've seen many big company websites that were so badly designed and hard to navigate that they completely lacked professionalism and credibility. Good for you, too bad for them.
You may have a small operation, but when it comes to benefiting from a website, size does not matter. I don't care if you're a one-man show or a 10,000-employee corporate giant; if you don't have a website, you're losing business to other companies that do.
Here's the exception to my rule: It's actually better to have no website at all than to have one that makes your business look bad. Your site speaks volumes about your business. It either says, "Hey, look, we take our business so seriously that we have created this wonderful site for our customers!" or it screams, "Hey, look, I let my 10-year-old nephew design my site. Good luck finding anything!"
Your website is an important part of your business. Make sure you treat it as such.
A: That's a good question. In fact, it's one of the most important and most frequently asked questions of the digital business age.
So should your business have a website, even if your business is small and sells products or services you don't think can be sold online? My answer in 1998 is the same as my answer today: Yes, if you have a business, you should have a website. Period. No question. Without a doubt.
Also, don't be so quick to dismiss your product as one that can't be sold online. Nowadays, there's very little that can't be sold over the internet. More than 20 million shoppers are now online, purchasing everything from books to computers to cars to real estate to jet airplanes to natural gas to you name it. If you can imagine it, someone will figure out how to sell it online.
Let me clarify one point: I'm not saying you should put all your efforts into selling your wares over the internet, though if your product lends itself to easy online sales, you should certainly be considering it. The point to be made here is that you should at the very least have a presence on the web so that customers, potential employees, business partners and perhaps even investors can quickly and easily find out more about your business and the products or services you have to offer.
That said, it's not enough that you just have a website. You must have a professional-looking site if you want to be taken seriously. Since many consumers now search for information online prior to making a purchase at a brick-and-mortar store, your site may be the first chance you have at making a good impression on a potential buyer. If your site looks like it was designed by a barrel of colorblind monkeys, your chance at making a good first impression will be lost.
One of the great things about the internet is that it has leveled the playing field when it comes to competing with the big boys. As mentioned, you have one shot at making a good first impression. With a well-designed site, your little operation can project the image and professionalism of a much larger company. The inverse is also true. I've seen many big company websites that were so badly designed and hard to navigate that they completely lacked professionalism and credibility. Good for you, too bad for them.
You may have a small operation, but when it comes to benefiting from a website, size does not matter. I don't care if you're a one-man show or a 10,000-employee corporate giant; if you don't have a website, you're losing business to other companies that do.
Here's the exception to my rule: It's actually better to have no website at all than to have one that makes your business look bad. Your site speaks volumes about your business. It either says, "Hey, look, we take our business so seriously that we have created this wonderful site for our customers!" or it screams, "Hey, look, I let my 10-year-old nephew design my site. Good luck finding anything!"
Your website is an important part of your business. Make sure you treat it as such.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Adopting a Web 2.0 Mindset: Walk Before You Wiki
Since Tim O'Reilly coined the phrase "Web 2.0" back in 2004 at a new media conference, companies have been scrambling to figure out how to deploy Web. 2.0 applications... but for all the wrong reasons.
I've observed CEOs pointing to competitors' sites, insisting, "They've got user-generated content so we need to do it," or, "A blog will help with our PR efforts during this downturn."
But where is the customer in the equation?
For all the buzz about blogs, wikis, widgets, and other forms of user-driven Web interactions, the question that's rarely asked is, "Is this what our customers want?"
Recently, when I helped a client pose that question to its Web site users, only 1 out of 10 users asked for social applications. The majority wanted the company to improve its site's core navigation and search functionality.
Essentially, they were asking my client to "walk before you wiki" by enhancing core functionality they use every time they visit the site.
Given the exposure of social applications in the media and in the boardroom, now's the time for Web business owners to make the case for building engaging online interactions with customers.
First, you need to recognize that customers will engage with site features they need and want. Simply put, you can design the most useful, elegant application, but if your customers don't need it—it will eventually languish on your site as another "distraction."
By listening to your customers, you'll understand what they value and need on your site and be able to prioritize new projects based on this information along with business and technical considerations.
Learn to Listen
How can you learn what customers and prospects need from your site? Based on your budget and target audience, there are several ways to effectively glean information. Ideally, you should use a mix of tools and information to get a holistic view of your users to understand what they want from your site, their preferences, behavior, and Web savviness.
Third-party research
To get started and obtain broad insights into your target audience's online needs, consider leveraging third-party research. Research conducted via a consumer panel should provide you with statistically significant data that, when coupled with primary research (see below), can help you make a business case.
If you have a well-defined and narrow target audience (e.g., male, married, age 35-54, high education and income levels, etc.), you can leverage third-party research from firms like Forrester Research (www.forrester.com) that survey consumers and report out on specific online activities they engage in, like banking, shopping, participation on social sites, etc.
Primary research
If your user base straddles age brackets, income levels, geographies, etc., or your online offering doesn't fit neatly into a typical retail or services category, then you should conduct your own research. There are some very effective—and inexpensive—methods you can use depending on your objectives:
* Web analytics: Tap into your analytics data to understand how your site's visitors behave. Are they exiting certain pages at a high rate? Do they tend to search for the same products while ignoring or missing others? Analytics will surface those trends but won't reveal user intent. So while you might not be able to pinpoint what is causing visitors to leave certain pages at a high rate, or search for certain products, you can tee up those issues as scenarios to test in a usability setting.
* Surveys: There are a variety of inexpensive survey tools, including Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com), Survey Monkey (www.surveymonkey.com), and Zoomerang (www.zoomerang.com) that you can use to quickly build and launch customer surveys either on-site or via email. Surveys generate quantitative data about why users visit your site and how they perceived their experience, but, again, they won't reveal user intent.
* Usability testing: Once you've identified a list of user needs and potential issues—based on your analytics and survey data—you can run any problem scenarios through a usability test. Are users telling you they primarily come to your site to find product information but give your site a low rating on its search and browse functionality? Run these kinds of scenarios through usability testing to uncover specific problem areas that you can then work to fix.
Walk Before You Wiki
Before you launch a blog, or enable user-generated content on your site, make sure you can answer the basic question, "Do I know what my visitors need and am I delivering it to them?"
I've observed CEOs pointing to competitors' sites, insisting, "They've got user-generated content so we need to do it," or, "A blog will help with our PR efforts during this downturn."
But where is the customer in the equation?
For all the buzz about blogs, wikis, widgets, and other forms of user-driven Web interactions, the question that's rarely asked is, "Is this what our customers want?"
Recently, when I helped a client pose that question to its Web site users, only 1 out of 10 users asked for social applications. The majority wanted the company to improve its site's core navigation and search functionality.
Essentially, they were asking my client to "walk before you wiki" by enhancing core functionality they use every time they visit the site.
Given the exposure of social applications in the media and in the boardroom, now's the time for Web business owners to make the case for building engaging online interactions with customers.
First, you need to recognize that customers will engage with site features they need and want. Simply put, you can design the most useful, elegant application, but if your customers don't need it—it will eventually languish on your site as another "distraction."
By listening to your customers, you'll understand what they value and need on your site and be able to prioritize new projects based on this information along with business and technical considerations.
Learn to Listen
How can you learn what customers and prospects need from your site? Based on your budget and target audience, there are several ways to effectively glean information. Ideally, you should use a mix of tools and information to get a holistic view of your users to understand what they want from your site, their preferences, behavior, and Web savviness.
Third-party research
To get started and obtain broad insights into your target audience's online needs, consider leveraging third-party research. Research conducted via a consumer panel should provide you with statistically significant data that, when coupled with primary research (see below), can help you make a business case.
If you have a well-defined and narrow target audience (e.g., male, married, age 35-54, high education and income levels, etc.), you can leverage third-party research from firms like Forrester Research (www.forrester.com) that survey consumers and report out on specific online activities they engage in, like banking, shopping, participation on social sites, etc.
Primary research
If your user base straddles age brackets, income levels, geographies, etc., or your online offering doesn't fit neatly into a typical retail or services category, then you should conduct your own research. There are some very effective—and inexpensive—methods you can use depending on your objectives:
* Web analytics: Tap into your analytics data to understand how your site's visitors behave. Are they exiting certain pages at a high rate? Do they tend to search for the same products while ignoring or missing others? Analytics will surface those trends but won't reveal user intent. So while you might not be able to pinpoint what is causing visitors to leave certain pages at a high rate, or search for certain products, you can tee up those issues as scenarios to test in a usability setting.
* Surveys: There are a variety of inexpensive survey tools, including Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com), Survey Monkey (www.surveymonkey.com), and Zoomerang (www.zoomerang.com) that you can use to quickly build and launch customer surveys either on-site or via email. Surveys generate quantitative data about why users visit your site and how they perceived their experience, but, again, they won't reveal user intent.
* Usability testing: Once you've identified a list of user needs and potential issues—based on your analytics and survey data—you can run any problem scenarios through a usability test. Are users telling you they primarily come to your site to find product information but give your site a low rating on its search and browse functionality? Run these kinds of scenarios through usability testing to uncover specific problem areas that you can then work to fix.
Walk Before You Wiki
Before you launch a blog, or enable user-generated content on your site, make sure you can answer the basic question, "Do I know what my visitors need and am I delivering it to them?"
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