Web articles

You're happily browsing the web, speedily whizzing through websites when all of a sudden you click on something and a new window pops up. This window isn't a pop-up, it's just a new window. You stumble for a moment, before picking up the pace again and carrying on with your browsing.

Beware of Opening Links in a New Window.

Pretty much any web brief contains the phrase 'easy to use'.

If you're building a new website, setting up a new page, creating an HTML email, or working on any web project, one of the goals is invariably to ensure it's easy to use. But if you spend any time using websites you'll no doubt have encountered things that are actually rather hard to use. Inconsistent navigation, links that don't look like links, things that look like links but aren't, huge images that take forever to download, difficult to find phone numbers or addresses, no way home, layouts that look weird in your run-of-the-mill browser.... This isn't easy!

Well, they thought it was easy to use. Failing to look at their website like an outsider does means that they've forgotten all the things they already know about the website: they already know what it's about and how it works so using it is easy.

'Easy to use' has become a cliché and is no longer something web professionals take seriously enough. I think we should ditch that phrase and instead use 'obvious to use': how a website works should be obvious. You shouldn't need any previous knowledge or much web experience to figure out what will happen when you click on something. You should be able to quickly scan the page to figure out where to go to find what you're looking for.

Obvious isn't easy, but it's worth the effort. You want your visitors to like using your website don't you?

Imagine you're driving along the countryside in your car listening to the radio. Coverage is pretty good but every now and then the reception crackles, you get some interference, and your program drops out for a while. "That's fair enough: I've just lost reception," you say.

Now imagine you're at home on the Internet and you've visited an online retailer. You've clicked on a product and nothing happens. You click again, click 'back', refresh... and then give up and go back to Google to start your shopping from the very beginning. "Rubbish website: it doesn't even work," you say.

In all probability it was nothing to do with that online retailer's website, it was probably a bit of a slow down of their web servers, your ISP, or even the Internet itself. If it was TV or radio that started acting up we'd assume something was up with the transmission, but when it's websites we instantly blame the website.

What can you do?

Until the general public learns more about how the Internet works and starts to be a bit more forgiving (maybe never?), you have to accept that if someone experiences a service issue whilst on your website they're going to blame you.
• Remember that there are lots of elements to the web that you have no control over whatsoever and make sure that the things you do have control over are 100% dependable and easy to use.
• Make your pages as 'light' as possible because you don't know how quick your visitors'/customers' Internet connection is.
• Display your phone number somewhere obvious on every page: if they can't use your website they can at least call you.

You know what you do, you understand your product, you're familiar with your website and where everything is.

That's great, but what about your customer?

Chances are they're not an expert in your industry, they've never heard of you, don't understand what you do and have no idea how you've organised your website. How do you look to them?

There was a great article in Grok.com enewsletter that everyone who has a website and wants to make it the best it can be should read - See Like An Outsider In 3 Not-So-Easy (But Worth It) Steps.

I've written, designed, built and broadcast hundreds of HTML emails in my time - it's great and I'm a big fan. If you're not doing it, you really should! Why? Compared to traditional mail-outs, emails are quicker, easier and cheaper to send, and each individual one can be tracked so you know exactly how effective your campaign is.

Email marketing is very powerful and probably the most cost-effective web marketing tool out there, but get it wrong and you risk alienating your mailing list and damaging your brand, whilst wasting time and money.

If you've got a mailing list of opted-in email addresses, something genuinely interesting to say to your customers, and you say it sensibly without using words like FREE and VIAGRA, limiting your use of exclamation marks, you'll probably be ok. Here are some tips on how to get the best out of your email campaigns.

1. Use a proper email broadcasting system.
Don't bodge it yourself by setting up groups in Outlook. You need a proper email broadcasting system that's on ISP white lists and offers good delivery rates, that provides full email tracking (delivery rates, open rates, clicks, unsubscribes etc), and that's cheap and easy to use. I've used CheetahMail (excellent, ideal for big mailing lists) and dotMailer (also excellent and perfect for small mailing lists). Per email costs have been as low as 0.2p and as much as 3p - it depends on the volumes. Either way, it's cheaper than a 2nd class stamp!

2. Make it look like you've got something interesting to say.
Assuming your email arrives at your recipient's inbox, your subject line's all that's standing between you and your potential customer. Don't write something spammy like 'Open now for your special money off discount!' - we all get hundreds of emails like this every day, and we're in the habit of ignoring stuff like that. Try to tap into the mind of your recipient and write a subject line that they'll find interesting. If you got their email address via a signup on your web page that promises 'the latest hot water bottle news' for example, how about a subject line like 'Hot water bottle news'?

3. Make sure you've got something interesting to say.
Assuming your email arrives at your recipient's inbox and they open it, they've got to find something worthwhile in there - that's the whole point from their point of view. If it's pointless, they'll just bin it and never open another email from you again. Be interesting and informative, and offer them something genuinely beneficial.

4. Test different ideas.
Split your mailing list into 4. Send group 1 out on Tuesday at 10am with subject line 1. Send group 2 out on Tuesday at 10am with subject line 2. Send group 3 out on Tuesday at 2pm with subject line 1. Send group 4 out on Tuesday at 2pm with subject line 2. By testing both the broadcast time and subject line, you'll see what works best. Do this with the broadcast day, the email content etc and keep doing it each time until you've got a good feel for what works, and keep testing every now and then to make sure.

5. Hire an expert.
I'm good at email marketing and I've been through all of this before, so if you want results now, <a href="http://www.uncomplicate.co.uk/getintouch.html">drop me a line</a> ;-)

Take a photo on your digital camera and, depending on the megapixels and settings, you'll probably get a picture large enough to print to A3 that's got a file size of perhaps 3MB. Awesome!

Stick that on the web and you've instantly slowed your website down: whatever page your picture is on will take ages to load, even on broadband. So just grab the corner of your picture and resize it to fit neatly in a little box on your page, like you do in Word, right? Wrong!

There are two vital elements to web images. The first is the physical size: it's got to fit on your page so that your visitor doesn't have to scroll up and down - or even worse sideways - to view it. The second, so often overlooked, is the file size: it's got to be small enough to download quickly. A computer screen only displays images at a resolution of 72dpi - nothing compared with print resolution of 300dpi - which means that you can get rid of a lot of the 'quality' of the picture without actually sacrificing anything to reduce that all-important file size.

I came across a web designer's website yesterday that looked very smart. He detailed all the services he offered and how his websites were well-built and effective marketing tools. However, all his images were huge - not in physical size but in file size. This meant that each page took ages to load and I eventually gave up. Tut tut - and he claimed to be a web designer!

Unless you have Photoshop or a purpose-built image uploader for your website, you won't have the ability to optimise your images properly for the web. You may be able to resize them physically, but reducing the resolution/quality isn't straightforward. Which is unfortunate because it's a very important part of building slick websites, and something that is so easy to get right... but most get wrong.

Online marketing isn't really any different from normal offline marketing, it's just that the medium involves technology. Perhaps because of this, web marketing is often seen as a 'young man's game', and something that nobody else in the business can comprehend. This is a problem.

Ask any member of any web team across the globe whether anybody understands what they do and I'm confident that they'll all confirm that theirs is seen as a mysterious and technically advanced role that even their bosses find baffling. But it shouldn't be like this as what we do is basically very simple: we promote our business in an effort to get as many customers as possible. There, that's not complicated is it?

Obviously building websites and databases, interpreting web stats, setting up email campaigns and so on all have their own complexities, but then so do bricklaying, ballet dancing, policing the streets... but people don't have any trouble understanding what they do. All the complicated online marketing stuff we do is there to promote our business and get as many customers as possible, so it's fundamentally quite straightforward and there's no need for everyone to understand the details.

The problem with online marketing being thought of as a mysterious art is that those who don't understand it stay away altogether. The bookings department of your holiday company don't get involved with online booking, the buying department of your shop don't get involved with online merchandising, the lecturers at your university don't get involved with the course database.... Without good content provided by the right people, online marketeers haven't got anything to work with. And if they don't have anything to work with, they have to find something. And since they're not experts in 'the thing', what gets presented online is invariably a bit weak, and gets criticised by the very people who have stayed away as wrong or rubbish.

The solution? Get people involved, hold training sessions to demonstrate what you're there for and how you can help, set up easy-to-use ways for those people who know about 'the thing' to feed into your online activities, be friendly and approachable and never bamboozle anyone with jargon! With the cooperation of everyone, web marketing becomes powerful, useful and effective.

Before PPC appeared, everything was so much simpler: build your website, write your copy, stuff it full of keywords and search engines would love you.

Some people did well during these lawless times, dominating the top of SERPs (search engine result page). Others wanted to get a look in, and search engines spotted an opportunity - charge people to appear at the top!

PPC was great in those early days, and the results were instantaneous. With little or no competition on keywords and a general ignorance of the difference between paid for and natural search results by the Internet-using public, PPC was exciting and effective.

Fast forward 6 or so years and it's no longer quite like this. PPC has become big business, bidding on keywords is expensive and complicated, and the Internet-using public has grown wary of paid for search results. PPC is floundering.

SEO is where it's at now, again. Optimise your website for a set of keywords and phrases so that it's high up in the SERPs and you're laughing, laughing much harder and longer than if you were to spend a fortune buying the same keywords on PPC.

Trouble is, SEO is becoming big business too, and the competition is fierce. We need something else, something new and better and democratic and 'free' like it all used to be. I wonder what it'll be?

I've worked with lots of marketing managers and web techies who, for whatever reason, wrote their own copy. They'd produce awful, cheesy, meaningless waffle - with random capitals and rogue apostrophes - to fill the spaces in the brochures or websites they just spent a big chunk of their budget producing. Every time this happened you could guarantee it would be terrible. Why wouldn't it be, they're not writers!

Little things make a big difference. Take "Forgot your password?" for example. Even though we know what this link that sits beneath the password box on a log in screen means, it's bad English. Obviously it should be "Forgotten your password?"

Here's an example of meaningless waffle from The Cavendish Arms in Cumbria. "We will promise you only one thing. We will never let you down in saying that our aim is, any customer who walks through our doors will never leave us not as a customer but as our friend." It doesn't take a genius to spot that they'd have benefited from some objective criticism there!

Just for fun, here's one more example of peculiar copy, this time from The Falls, a converted farmhouse in Ulverston. "At the southern rim of the Lakes, just far enough off the well-trodden and obvious tracks to be left in peace, is Furness facing the Leven Estuary with the mountains at its back. It is a working community of farms and market towns. Of course there are pockets of the 20th Century. But what we would call Old Furness moves to a different rhythm; where the visitor is welcomed more for the common interest in the place and his friendly conversation than any other thing."

So how come so many websites make mistakes like this? Why are the words added on at the end of a project as if they're not important? After all, words are what people will actually read, so surely they're as important as the design of a brochure or the functionality of a website. I'm afraid I don't know the answer, but I do know the solution: hire a professional writer.

Here's an interesting 'Future Now' article about this very topic.

I've spent quite a lot of time recently assessing a variety of ecommerce websites. Or to put it another way, I've done all of my Christmas shopping online! On the whole it's been quick and easy, but there are still so many weird things happening out there, so many strange ways of implementing the most simple tasks.

I bet most web users behave in the same way when faced with one of these 'functionality peculiarities': they scream "what moron decided to do it this way?!" and then either persist and get cross or go somewhere else where they do things properly. From the web owner's point of view, neither is really that desirable - it would be much better for your customers to just find using your website easy and straightforward.

One of the most frustrating of these annoying ways of doing things is the magical mystery tour that results from clicking the 'add to basket' button and then getting whisked away from the page you were on. It's usually pretty obvious what's going to happen when you click a button before you actually click - the label tells you. So a button labeled 'add to basket' is obviously going to add something to your basket when you click on it. But what actually happens a lot of the time is that something gets added to your basket and you get taken to your basket as well. On these websites the button should really have been labeled 'add to basket and go there as well'. But that would be a big and ugly button.

Once you've dumped your customer on the basket page, there's the whole dilemma of where they go next. Should they hit their browser's 'back' button? Is there a 'continue shopping' button and where does it take you - back to the product page, to the category page, to the homepage? It's all a bit too confusing... and unnecessary. The answer, as is often the case, is to keep things simple. Leave the button as 'add to basket' and make it simply add to the basket. Don't take the customer to their basket, just leave them where they are, where they know where they are. Where they go next is up to them - they're in control.

We've all read skipped it, the 'Welcome to our website. In it you'll find information about what we do and...' copy usually found on the homepage.

These introductory words are what Jakob Nielsen, usability guru, calls blah-blah text: it serves no purpose other than filling a space, and is usually ignored in favour of the actual content of the page.

Don't do away with introductions altogether though, they're still useful. Ask yourself these 2 questions and you'll be heading in the right direction:
• What? (What will users find on this page — i.e., what's its function?)
• Why? (Why should they care — i.e., what's in it for them?)

Whilst all this might seem glaringly obvious to you, it's very, very hard to avoid the 'blah-blah text' trap. But web page real-estate is valuable and you can't afford to waste the most important space!

I attended a WOMMA (Word Of Mouth Marketing Association) conference in Florida while back, and business blogging was the hot topic of the week (along with all the other hot topics of the week - WOMMA are in it for money after all). Whilst blogs are commonplace and easy to set up nowadays, the online business community hasn't really jumped on the bandwagon yet... which is a shame as blogs can be pretty powerful marketing tools.

There are currently 4.6 billion blogs on the Internet, with 750,000 set up every single day*. Many of these new blogs die within 2 posts: the owners realise that they haven't got anything to say and struggle to come up with something to say and very quickly don't bother. It's frustrating to stumble across one of these whilst searching for something, but it just goes to show how well liked blogs are by search engines. It's this visibility that's so useful for businesses.

If you sell tyres and run a tyre website, set up a blog about tyres and post regularly about the tyres you like, new ones you've seen, classic tyres from the 60s etc. Don't think about business or search engines, just run a useful and interesting blog. Over time - say a couple of months - your regularly updated blog will become a useful resource for people interested in tyres, and it will be filled with tyre keywords that search engines will pick up. Pretty soon you'll attract lots of visitors who searched for tyres... which is uncanny because you sell tyres!

How could a blog like this be any use to a business? For 2 reasons:
1. People arrive at your blog for a reason: they're interested in what you're saying. If you're writing an interesting blog that people regularly read, invite them over to your ecommerce website - perhaps you've got something they'd like to buy from you, the author of the blog they like reading.
2. Blog readers like to let you know what they think. Alow comments on your blog and find out what people out there want, what they think. It's standard blogging practice, and it's free feedback that you can use to make your business better!

Running a business blog isn't easy - the tone has to be just right, the author has to be genuine, the content has to be interesting and useful, and it should be updated at least once a week - but get it right, and it can be a real bonus.

*These figures are made up, but essentially the numbers are big!

This is a great little article that sums up the whole 'nobody reads web pages' issue.

Links are (obviously) a key part of any website: they essentially allow us to move from page to page. Hypertext (which is what links are) has been around since before the start of the Internet and is one of the things that evolved plain old text into interactive web pages.

So they've been around a while and they're fundamental... but there are still lots of bad uses of them! Which is a real shame as there are many simple ways of using links, their titles and their URLs to improve the user experience.

Most of us know that linking to something and calling your link 'click here' is bad:
• it makes it hard for those who just scan your web pages to quickly find the link they want to click
• it doesn't suggest where they'll go when they click
• it's patronising - do we really need instructions on how links work?

So what should you do? Here are my top five points to keep in mind when adding links to your web copy...

'Linkify' meaningful words.
For example, "Whilst on holiday I discovered a wonderful <u>beetroot restaurant called Beet That</u>". You could just 'linkify' the name of the restaurant in this example, but that's almost as meaningless as 'click here', so I think it's helpful to include a little bit extra to help my visitors make that decision to click.

it's a link, make sure it looks like a link
CSS can do cool stuff with links, which is fun. Whatever you do though, make sure it still looks like a link. Ideally it'll be a slightly different colour from your text and be underlined, and it'll change colour when you hover your mouse over it. Anything too different from this and your visitors won't know it's a link - which defeats the purpose!

Link titles sometimes help
Link titles - added to the code - pop up when a visitor hovers their mouse over a link, and can be helpful in explaining that link in a little more detail. Don't rely on them though: they're a bit slow and require your visitor to be patient and conscientious.

Links to the same URL should have the same link text, and links to different URLs shouldn't have the same link text
If you have more than one link to the same URL on a page, then the link text should be the same: it's going to the same place, so it makes sense that the link text should be the same.
The opposite is also true: if two or more links point to different URLs, it's misleading to label them identically. '<u>Read more</u>' (or something similar) is often where we fall foul of this trap. The same link words, but different destination URLs? It's too confusing.

Don't hide your filesizes
If your link is actually a downloadable file, give the size of that file in the link - your visitor can then make an informed decision about whether to bother clicking. For example, a 2MB Word document - <u>Download the Word document (2MB)</u>

Links can easily go wrong, but with a little attention, proper use of links, their titles and their URLs can make things a lot easier for your visitors.

One of the Internet's nicest features is that you can easily do your shopping from home, researching products, browsing through ranges and finding the cheapest place to order from. With this convenience, however, comes the frustration of checking out. Why does it have to be so complicated to give them your money!?

I came across this acronym today: GTC. This stands for Get The Cash and is absolutely the most important thing to have in mind when (re)designing your checkout. Whatever else you do, make it easy for people to give you their money/make their purchase - otherwise, what's the point?

One of the accepted frustrations of checking out is having to register first. In real-world terms, this is equivalent to having to fill in a form before you can pay for your CD: "er, why"? Don't put more obstacles in their way - god knows they'll have navigated their way past enough already.

The solution's simple: get the cash first then give them the option to register.

The great SEO (search engine optimisation) con*

In a world virtually dominated by Google, the greatest prize is to be on page one of the search results: how else will your customers find you?

There's a lot of excitement these days in the wonderful world of web marketing about search engine optimisation (SEO). A quick search on Google for SEO reveals all sorts of SEO companies promoting their services. A similar search for SEO on Guardian Jobs today brings back 50 SEO jobs. Hire an SEO expert and all your problems are solved, right? If only that were true.

Let's start from the beginning - what is SEO? It's 'the art of optimising your website for search engines'. Hmm, this already sounds like it's going to be complicated. Surely the job of a search engine is to find your website - why do we have to do anything? Well, search engines do most of the work, using fancy maths and big computers to trawl every website they can find, collating all the information they see ready for when you ask them something. You do need to help them out a little though...
• you need to have something worth finding
• your website has to be findable
• your information needs to be seeable.

SEO companies sound very impressive with their in-depth understanding of search algorithms, teams of IT professionals, relationships with major search engines... and they'll charge you accordingly. Don't call them without trying some SEO yourself first! SEO is really quite straightforward and not very technical at all - it's fundamentally all about words and is an integral part of the web design process and site's day-to-day management. Forget the maths and all that complicated stuff for now, here's an example of how SEO works (I like examples)...

You've written a book about dogs and Waterstones have agreed to stock it. They put it out on their shelves and you wait for the royalties to come rolling in. But nothing happens. You visit the book shop and scan the book shelves but you can't find your own book. You redesign the book sleeve, changing it to a fluorescent orange - they'll not miss that! Still nothing. Then it dawns on you: you didn't give your book a title, no wonder they haven't sold any! You go away and come up with the snappy title 'Man's Best Friend' and send Waterstones the updated version. Still no royalties. You try an experiment: you take a friend to the book shop and tell them to look for a book on dogs and watch what they do. They glance around the shop, find the animals section, then run their fingers over the spines of the books: A... B... C... D. They spend a few minutes in the D section but still can't find your book. No wonder; it's in the M section, under 'Man's Best Friend'! You go away again and rename it 'Dogs' and, as if by magic, they start selling! You've just optimised your book for search - easy!

To optimise your website about dogs, simply approach it in the same way. Call it 'dogs', make sure the word 'dogs' is mentioned a few times in the copy, label your pictures of dogs 'dogs', get some other dog websites to link to yours... and then be patient. When the search engines do a trawl of the Internet, they'll find your website and see all its content, and next time someone searches for 'dogs', guess what? Your website will appear in the search results! Do all this really well and you might even appear on the first page.

See, it's not too complicated.

*When I say 'con', I'm just being a little provocative: SEO companies do provide a valuable service. My point is really that you should try some SEO techniques yourself first, and if after a couple of months you're still not happy, give them a call. But be careful: there are some unscrupulous SEO companies out there who'll bamboozle you with tech-speak, take your cash and not deliver much at all.

According to the Center for Media Research ( a US market and media intelligence company), content has replaced communications as primary web use. "Internet users are spending nearly half their online time visiting content, a 37% increase in share of time from four years ago. [...]communications accounted for 46% of consumers' time online in 2003. A dramatic shift has taken place since then, with consumers now spending 47% of their time with content and only 33% with communication."

Share of time spent online:
Commerce: 13.8%
Communications: 32.0%
Content: 49.6%
Search: 4.5%
It seems as if it's all about the content nowadays

This is referred to in this week's Search Engine Guide newsletter, where Stoney deGeyter announced that Content is Dead. Community is King Now. He doesn't really mean it when he says content is dead, rather that, whilst content used to be the most important element of your online presence, it's now nowhere near as valuable to a brand as creating a bit of an online buzz around it. Of course, community is still made up of content, but the crucial evolvement is that this content isn't written by the brand owners - it's written by the brand users.

And this is where it gets exciting for me. I'm not a fan of agressive marketing, and I hate it when companies lie about the virtues of their product. I don't even like it when they bend the truth: if your product is good, tell it how it is and we'll buy it. If it is good, we'll like it. But if we buy it and find out you lied to us, it's never been easier to tell everyone about it! Companies can still write their marketing copy, but they can't write user reviews and comments across the Internet's online communities. That means the only way they can influence online communities is be the best they can be, and to listen to their customers.

Companies: be good or the web will reveal your lies!