Add Polish With More Pictures and Diagrams

Go with more. Always take more pictures than you think you need. Many will be useless and only when you take several (25-50) will you get ones that are great. Pictures and diagrams catch the eye and make a site look polished. They also make pages look more readable when a page is full of text. Make sure your pictures and diagrams are high quality (at least medium resolution on most digital cameras - pictures should be 1,000 KB minimum when saved to a computer). The images should help tell your story and show off what you have. Try to use captions - they keep the potential customer on your site longer. The longer a potential customer is on the site the longer your brand is in front of them. The following are a few ideas for different industries.

Restaurants

Have a pro take the pictures of your food, or, if you don'’t want to hire a pro, take pictures of people in your establishment instead of the food. Take pictures when your establishment is full of people, potential customers love to see a lot of people inside a restaurant. People even love to wait, look at the Cheesecake Factory - people love to sit around for an hour to eat there. If you have multiple locations take pictures of all of the locations. People may walk by one of your locations everyday but not notice it. Someone emails them a link to your restaurant site and presto - a new customer.

Product Companies

Diagrams are great on a website, just like they are great in a presentation. For organizations with durable goods, potential customers need to see pictures. This is especially true if you a smaller company - how are you going to get someone to buy your product otherwise? Take shots from many angles. I just bought a house and so did many of my friends (who are not web developers). If they didn't have pictures of the houses or apartments most of us never bothered to check out those listings. I didn't even use my broker's website because their listings brought up pictures only on the details page. The extra click to go look at the pictures wasted too much time. Did you ever notice that companies that have really nice websites (Best Buy, CNET, Sprint) have a mass of pictures?

Service Companies

Why not put up some pictures of your staff? For other pictures around the site pick out pictures that match your type of business - buy some pictures from Getty Images or another of the major less expensive photo repositories (stockexpert or dreamstime). If you're trying to save money, hire a college photography major to take some pictures of your people in meetings or working in small teams. Give him or her a credit on your site and write a story about it that you can post - a little community involvement goes a long way too. Use diagrams too. Not really sure why, but everyone stops to figure out a diagram. Make sure it has a caption or a mouse over explanation. You probably already have a good diagram that would be a useful way to sell your company.

Just thought of this so I am adding it now (last second). If you're a carpenter, awning installer or landscaper the time is now to get a website up with lots of pictures of the designs you created and maintain. Not many of your peers have sites, so it would be very advantageous to be the first. Architects should put up as many pictures of your work as possible. If you have worked in different industries (homes, government & commercial) make sure you split your work up on your site so it is easy to understand and navigate.

Clubs and Professional Organizations

Take a digital camera to every event and program. Take shots of your colleagues and put them up on the site. The more pictures the better - they will help attract new members, especially if you look like you’re having a good time networking or learning something new. For big annual meetings or awards presentations hire a professional, but make sure they make the pictures available to your web developers.

Magazines

Clearly it depends on the type of magazine, but if it is a situation where you have a good amount of pictures in your magazine make more of them available online. Make some available for free and others in a subscribers only area to give the potential customer a reason to subscribe right now. If you're really ambitious think about creating a web only subscription base - it will save your periodical a good amount of money on print and mail costs.

Summary

With the advent of digital cameras it costs so little now to take great pictures. Well, good pictures anyway. So take more and put them up on your website. If you have a bunch it does't hurt to keep updating them too, but if you have some that really connect to your clientèle don't rotate those out. Change for the sake of change is not a good idea. Let your accountant or your website statistics tell you when its time to change your marketing.

Testing Is Not Fun but It's Necessary

Having broken links on your website or page layouts that look fine in Internet Explorer but make no sense when viewed in a different browser, such as Firefox, sends a red flag to your customers and any potential new customers.

For example, I am thinking of joining my local chamber of commerce. I checked out the website and nothing is happening this summer, so I decide to wait until fall. I figure that in the meantime, I'll sign up for the mailing list to keep informed. I click the link and nothing happens. I am working on an Apple computer using Firefox. I go to my Microsoft Windows XP machine, figuring the problem is a Firefox / Apple HTML code problem. I click on the link from my Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and again, nothing happens. So I try to click on some more links in the What's New section. None of them work. Hmm...let's go check out the Chamber of Commerce website in neighboring Cambridge instead. When this happens on your site the exact same thing happens - Company A has a broken link so let's go back to Google and check out the next company on the list.

Microsoft and Internet Explorer still control a high percentage of the browser software market. According to my research they continue to command between 70% and 85% market share in the United States. Meanwhile, Firefox is ranging between 13% and 30% depending on the source of the reports. Either way even at 10% of US web users, that is a huge number of potential clients. If your clientele is technology savvy, the percentage of Firefox users is probably somewhere closer to 30%. Know your audience and test your site accordingly.

Even if only 10% of your web site visitors use Firefox or another Mozilla offshoot it could pay to test your site and its updates against these lesser known browsers. You never know what kind of purchasing power lies behind that website visitor. If you are adding around ten pages of new content per month an extra hour of work with testing should be enough to make sure your site is viewable by 95% of the people using the Internet.

A tip - developing your site for Firefox browsers generally makes it take less time to ensure the site look good across browsers. After developing for Firefox, Internet Explorer-displayed website pages will generally look fine with minor tweaking. If you develop for Internet Explorer many things will look fine in Internet Explorer, but look really odd in Firefox and the other Mozilla Based Browsers.

Website's Gotta Represent

Among many other possible purposes, your website should first represent your organization. Everything you and your employees do represents your company. From the way they answer the phone to the way they interact at a trade show, employees are representing the company. Many companies train and re-train their employees to do their work more professionally.

Companies hire a vendor to create your work environment (office cubicles and offices), marketing materials (business cards, brochures and presentations), menus and so forth. Why do so many of these same organizations let someone with no training or experience create their website that represents their organization? Or have a good website created, but then do nothing with it for years?

A website is an extension of your organization like the brochure that everyone labors over for months before a big trade show. Hopefully you treat the website with the same attention to detail. The website should end up with perfect content too, but with more interactive elements to get your potential customers to act (much more actually, but that is not what this blog entry is about).

So moving on - when your website is not updated it tells the potential customer you are unorganized and don't care if your customers have up-to-date information. Now the potential customer, if they are still actually interested, needs to call to make sure they have the most recent information. Or you may have lost them altogether.

Remember, having a good website can make everything else cheaper. Your radio, newspaper, yellow pages and television spots can be shorter, which saves you money.

Your website is one of your marquee marketing and sales solutions. If a good website is working for you 24 hours a day, a sub par website is working against you 24 hours a day. A good one can even add to your bottom line.

Puff Out Your Chest

Just a quick note on some thoughts on web credibility and how to position your company today...

You should always aim for your online appearance to be one step beyond what you actually are. Puff out your chest. Look bigger, fancier, shinier. Appearance is everything. If I learned one thing from staying up too late in 1984 is that it's better to look good than to feel good.

What I mean is that if you're a neighborhood store and you have an online presence it should look like you're city wide. If you're city wide it should look like you service the whole region. If you're regional it should look like you're a national company. If you're national it should be international. If you're international you should look next level. Always look bigger and better than you think you are. Push for that next level. It's not even about growth really, though if you appear like you are you certainly won't see growth. In fact if you don't push for that next level you'll risk shrinking.

It's about the credibility this time around. If you're an accountant who wants to build a firm, what should your website look like? Should it look like a 40 year old starting fresh working from the spare room above their garage, or should it look like a professional firm that's been in business for 100 years? Should your new restaurant online look like a local dive bar, or like one of the coolest places to hang in the city? It's not misrepresentation, because maybe you really are just a 40 year old working from home, but that doesn't mean you're not a good bet. You're showing your credibility by having a high quality, non template, designed experience. A template site your cousin's son builds in Front Page just won't cut it, and you know it.

Think next level, and have your stuff look like you're bigger than you are, and you'll see more success online. Be bigger than you are. Puff out your chest.

Back To Marketing Basics

Last week I thought I knew something about marketing. I met with a client about their Google Adwords campaigns and we discussed making some changes since we needed to set their ads apart from the competition.

After I brought everyone up to speed on how Adwords work, one of the senior members of our meeting said "We should make two ads per campaign. After a couple of weeks, we check the click through results and tweak the under performing ad and repost it as the new second ad." I said "Wow that sounds like a good idea". He told me that it actually is a very common practice called an A / B split testing that they use with post cards and direct mail all the time. Why wouldn't it work in this case?

According to Marketing Experiments Journal
"A / B Testing yields the most valuable results only when you test repeatedly. A one-shot test will tell you very little. But when you make a consistent habit of testing, cumulative tests over time can have a dramatic impact on the success of your site."

After some further research I have come to the conclusion that this process should be used much more often than it is. Like my client above said, it should be used with post cards and direct mail to test offer language and it can also be used with telemarketing and voice mail marketing. I am also going to try it on my voice mail recording.

If you would like to try out A / B split testing give this a try: create two different email signatures with some kind of offer in them (i.e. To learn how to get business results using the internet sign-up for our newsletter at orcapack.com/newsletter.php and For timely internet marketing information sign-up for our newsletter at orcapack.com/imarketing.php). Create two different landing pages for your offer. After two to three weeks of sending out emails with the different signatures check which landing page gets the most clicks. You've found the type of offer you should use for your signature. Don't stop there.

If one of the lines greatly outperformed the other, tweak the better performing offer and run the test again.

If the gap between the two offers was not that great, tweak the lesser performing offer and run the test again.

The key to A / B testing success is to continually be testing and tweaking.

But I Want My Text Pretty!

So Microsoft and Apple have renewed their font licesnsing agreement. I guess it's a good thing. Fonts on Windows and OS X will continue to be relativily simliar for users on the web. We're still really limited to some fairly boring and common, if not downright bad fonts. It'd be nice if both platforms could expand their common font libraries, but I guess it's asking too much for these companies to make my job easier at no real sacrifice to themselves. So next time you want to use some fancy frilly text on your website, realize that if you want it to be text, which you should, and not an image, these are what you're limited to as far as fonts.

And yes, you can do things to 'get around this' like use images for your text (bad idea as it'll kill your search engine rankings and make it difficult to print/read/edit/copy text), or ask your users to download a new font to use the site (great way to make people hit the back button...works almost as good as basic web security to keep people off your page), and more. Those are the easy ones though. Basically if you want more than 90% of your users to see your site the way you intend, you better intend your text to use these fonts.

Ok here they are. The Windows font name, the Mac font name that we put in, if different, so that it looks close, and then the generic font family that it belongs to.

Windows Font, Mac Font, Generic Font

Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif
Arial Black, Gadget, sans-serif
Comic Sans MS, cursive
Courier New, Courier, monospace
Georgia, serif
Impact, Charcoal, sans-serif
Lucida Console, Monaco, monospace
Lucida Sans Unicode, Lucida Grande, sans-serif
Palatino Linotype, Book Antiqua, Palatino, serif
Tahoma, Geneva, sans-serif
Times New Roman, Times, serif
Trebuchet MS, Helvetica, sans-serif
Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif
Symbol
Webdings
Wingdings, Zapf Dingbats
MS Sans Serif, Geneva, sans-serif
MS Serif, New York, serif

That's it. That's all of em. If it's not on that list, you can't use it as text and expect to have it look the same way on your websites. Now, you might look at that list and say "Hey that's a good number of options" in which case you'll make my life easier. Just keep in mind though that when you're talking with Ad Agencies, and Print Designers, they might not know this. They see the minute differences in thousands of fonts, and know what specific font and typographic setting truly gets your brand across. They're great at it, because print designers can use pretty much any font they want. Just be ready to have some nice looking text on some print pages, be reduced to these font styles above and look noticiably different. At least until Microsoft and Apple decide to release a few hundred more common fonts.

stupiddomain.us

Go Daddy allies to take over America

Apparently someone, somewhere, thinks they can make money off the .us domain. Outside the U.S. many websites have the country code domain rather than a .com. For instance NELA's German branch is nela.de whereas the U.S. branch is nela-usa.com. Well there's a .us one as well, and Go Daddy thinks they can sell it better.

I don't doubt that they can sucker people into it, but right now, at least in this country if you don't have a .com address for your company you're in trouble. Even when people know that the address is .net or .tv they're frequently going to just automatically type in .com

I talked about it a little bit in my recent posting "What's in a Name?". While you don't need to have your specific name you're better off with a slight variant and a .com at the end, than your exact name and a .us ending it. Because if someone else owns megayachts.com and you're megayachts.us how often is your competeitor going to steal your business just by accident?

If you want to have the .us domain be your primary domain name because it sounds cute go for it, but just be sure to also have the exact same domain in .com and pointed at your site, otherwise you're in for headaches.