Optimisation takes time

We recently launched a website for a new client - on the Tuesday it went live, on the Wednesday I got a call asking why he couldn't find it on Google!

Now, we have had client sites indexed within 2 days, but that's not the usual experience. Getting into the search engines is also only the starting point. It takes time & patience to search engine optimise a website correctly.

So, please, a little patience!

New UK Website Regulations

Since Jan 1st, 2007, all UK company websites must have the following information:

• company number
• registered company address
  
• VAT number if VAT registered
• in the case of an investment company, the fact that it is such a company

For more details go.

The Holy Grail - Google #1

The most common question that a web design client asks me is, "How do we get on the first page of Google?"

Well, here's a few tips. They're not exhaustive nor are they guaranteed to get you to the top, but they are some of the things that we do during a web design project and we've had some excellent search engine optimisation results. Before we dive in though, a little explanation first; when we talk of keywords we're really talking of singular words or phrases. So your keyword maybe websites or website design, its just that we make no distinction between singular words or phrases when talking about keywords.

• Know your audience, know their keywords. Before your designer starts with layout, colour schemes, etc, you should do your homework on what your customers are looking for, what terms they use when searching for your service and then tailor your content accordingly. We use WordTracker to analyse what terms people are using & find niche keywords. So, while in your trade you use the term 'site services' to describe your industrial cleaning service, you might find out the following:

• Optimising for 'site services' means you'll be competing overwhelmingly with people selling website or computer maintenance services. Its also a very popular term, so very competitive.
  
• That using 'industrial cleaning' is both a less competitive and a more accurate descriptive term for what you are offering - and its what people are more likely to use when searching for your type of service.
• Local vs national terms. Is your service a local one? If so, its often far easier to get top billing for a term like 'leicester copy writing' than it is for 'vibratory bowl feeders' or 'organic tampons'. Don't forget to target your local market if its at all possible.
  
• One page, one target. Try not to target too many keywords on one page. For example, suppose your company provides web design and ecommerce solutions. Split these into two separate pages. Target and optimise each page accordingly. So one page is devoted to marketing your 'web design leicester' service, while the other one focuses on 'ecommerce' and 'shopping carts in leicestershire'.
• Avoid keyword stuffing. Related to the above point, avoid putting too many keywords in the title of your page. Too many dilutes your scoring, so less is more.
• Links. Try to get good quality links to your site from other 'quality' sites, and try to ensure that they use one of your keywords in their link text. Perhaps this needs a little more explanation:
• Quality site is a website that is popular and well respected. So, if you are a member of a respected trade association (say the Federation of Small Businesses in the UK), make sure that your website is included in your company details in their online directory.The same goes for your Yellow Pages advert on Yell.com.
• Link text: Imagine you sell estate agent property listing software. If possible, rather than using your company name in a link from another site, get them to use that keyword text instead.
• Quality website build. If your website is well constructed underneath the hood, then a search engine will have an easier time indexing your content. Too many graphics or too much Flash is wasted on the search engines - they can't read images.
  
• Dont forget the aesthetics. A cheap and nasty website will always be a cheap and nasty website, even if it is well ranked.

Well, that's not everything but its a few useful pointers to begin with. Perhaps I'll add more tips later.

Google Mail & Your Google Account

I've had a Google account for some time. With it I manage my company Adwords account, check up on client sites using Analytics, publish my calendar, etc, etc. Running an web design business, its an invaluable tool.

Recently a friend sent me an invitation to open a gmail account, which I duly did. Everything went tickety boo. Then I was locked out of my Google account - Analytics, Aswords, Blogger, etc, were all inaccessible using my normal login. So, I whizzed off an email to Analytics support. Back came the response that I'd changed my account email address - which is also my login.

No I hadn't, not least to my knowledge. No, I had - least my gmail login is now my Google account login! This is done automatically for you it seems. That was the first I'd heard of it & I can't remember reading in the Gmail info anything that said this would happen. Perhaps I'd ticked some box without realising the 'global' implications of so doing.

Whatever, just be careful. Signing up for Gmail may have ramifications for your existing Google account!

Star Office Support Bugs Me

Yesterday I had to apply a patch to Star Office 8 - saw a story on The Register
telling of a vulnerability. Even though I'm a paying customer of Star Office (or Sun), no product notification was received. No mention was made of this issue on the Star Office official site either. Not good customer support!

And then the Sun support site is horrendous. The actual patch is delivered to Windows users as a .jar (Java Archive) file, which means didly squat to most Windows users. How user unfriendly is that? Only after you've unzipped the jar file do you realise its got a .exe file within it. How many average users would even know what to do - the readme file is pretty oblique too.

It's often the little things like this that kill off a really good product. Star Office (& its free counter part Open Office) are really good products - they're more than adequate for at least 90% of the Microsoft Office user base. Yet, poor support will cripple it.

It's time that Star Office came with some form of auto update facility, so that users don't have to search the Sun/Star Office support site to apply patches.

The 4 second window

Research by Akamai revealed users' dwindling patience with websites that take time to show up.

It found 75% of the 1,058 people asked would not return to websites that took longer than four seconds to load.

The time it took a site to appear on screen came second to high prices and shipping costs in the list of shoppers' pet-hates, the research revealed.

It found that one-third of those questioned abandon sites that take time to load, are hard to navigate or take too long to handle the checkout process.

The four-second threshold is half the time previous research, conducted during the early days of the web-shopping boom, suggested that shoppers would wait for a site to finish loading.

To make matters worse, the research found that the experience shoppers have on a retail site colours their entire view of the company behind it.

About 30% of those responding said they formed a "negative perception" of a company with a badly put-together site or would tell their family and friends about their experiences.

Further research by Akamai found that almost half of the online stores in the list of the top 500 US shopping sites take longer than the four-second threshold to finish loading.

This is a sobering piece of research and should be a caution to website owners wanting sites that are graphically heavy or use a lot of Flash. We've always suggested that 'less is more' when it comes to web design, and this research tends to support this view.

Distance Selling Regs - New Guidance

The Office of Fair Trading & the DTI have released new guidance on the Distance Selling Regulations 2000. These are relevant to any UK based online retailers & consumers. See at the guidelines here.

Back again

Am I the only one to have had problems logging in? All attempts to sign in, have my password emailed, etc, all failed. However, now I can get in. Hmmm.

EPCS Services

Fresh Web Services recently launched EPC Services website. Electrification and Plant Consultancy (EPC) Services, based in Kent, specialise in providing railway electrification and plant engineering services to the underground and over ground railway companies.

The EPC Services website was built using the Joomla content management system. Joomla is ideal for large and small websites and comes with a wealth of features for making your website a top notch marketing tool. There is a member registration module, a newsletter module, an 'Email this page', 'print this page', and 'convert to pdf' link on every page if you want. There is also a contact form with validation built in. All these features mean that you can use your website as a marketing channel from the off. All these come 'out of the box' with the standard installation.

For the larger site there is user management functionality (so that many people can edit your site if you want), and a large number of add-ons to really push the boat out. Indeed, it's learning what & how to turn things on and off that's sometimes a problem.

If this sounds interesting, and something that you would like to consider, then please get in touch so that we can make the web work for you.

Sitemaps Part 2

I've mentioned earlier that Google Sitemaps are recommended by Google as the way to submit your new website to their index. Well, using sitemaps can mean that your website is indexed within days.

Fresh Web Services recently designed a website for Gist Consulting of Leicester. Gist Consulting provide professional writing and researching services - proofreading, copywriting, press releases, website copy, report writing and summarising, etc. Well, we submitted their sitemap to Google last Friday & Gist's new website was in Google's index on the following Monday - essentially indexed in about 2 days. Pretty impressive.

However, that's not the end of the story, as far as getting Gist's website well placed in the search engines. The Gist Consulting website has been developed using the Joomla content management system. This means it uses dynamic urls, which can be a problem for search engines. However, we've used a 'url re-writing' package (OpenSEF) to turn these urls into search engine friendly (SEF) urls - meaning they have keywords in the url & appear as static urls to the search engines
Also, there's all the other SEO (search engine optimisation) thingies that we have to do to ensure top rankings.

However, getting indexed in Google within 2 days is still pretty impressive. If only MSN, etc, could also provide such a quickfire indexing method.

Google Sitemaps

At a recent e-biz expo event in Nottingham, someone from Google recommended their own Sitemaps as a way of getting a new site listed quicker in Google.
Essentially Sitemaps is an xml version of the standard site map html file (of all the internal links on your site) that your website should really have. Traditionally you submitted this html file to the search engines to make it a little easier for the robots to find & follow your site.
Briefly, in this Sitemap xml file, there are the links to each page & also the date of publication plus instructions to google's robot re: when to recrawl your site.
For most people creating and maintaining this xml file would be too much trouble or frankly beyond them. However, CoffeeCup have taken the pain out of this. Their Google Sitemapper costs a mere $29 & does everything you need to crawl your site, create the sitemap (& an html version) & then upload it to your server.
We now use it for every site we produce. What once took a considerable amount of time is now done in seconds. Well worth taking it for a test drive.

2006 - year of online shopping

In my last post I foolishly attempted to predict trends for 2006. One was that online shopping would come of age in the coming year. Well, stats from the UK Xmas period show this to be the case already.
Basically we're spending more online than ever before, & the increase in online spend has taken the experts by surprise. As I said, this is the feeling we've been getting at http://www.freshwebservices.com - more shop enquiries leading to more actual online shop orders. Very soon our first adult site will go live, while we have a couple more consumer shopping sites in the pipeline.

Happy New Year

All the best,
Eddie

Out on a limb - web predictions for 2006

No New Year's resolutions, just my thoughts on what's coming up on the web in the forthcoming year.

2006 will be the year for accessbility. I've been quietly saying that companies had better watch this space for nearly two years. In all that time, not one company took up our offer of a free accessibility audit of their website. Very soon, companies will have to start paying big time for such audits & the inevitable costly redesigns. Ignore this one at the peril of your profits.

2006 will also see online shopping go mainline for SMEs. My company is seeing increasing interest in online shops, even from one-man outfits who previously thought that their products we too specialist for such a venture. Critical mass has been reached to such an extent, that online shopping is no longer a news item. We hope we're well placed to service this trend with our implementation of the open source zen-cart shopping cart/store.

E-procurement (or online procurement) is another development that SMEs can no longer ignore. The pressure on local government, for example, to implement the Gershon cost cutting agenda means that councils and the like are keen to reduce back office costs. Processing purchases and sales can often cost more than the product itself - it can often cost about c.£45 to process a complete transaction. E-procurement promises to slash these costs to next to nothing, so all in local government are implementing e-procurement. This means only those suppliers geared up to handle e-transactions will be able to take a slice of local government action in the near future. Is your company e-enabled or can we help?

Ajax day out

I had the pleasure of attending the Carson Workshops 'Get Started with Ajax' beano led by Thomas Fuchs, a contributor to the Prototype Javascript framework, Ruby on Rails, & many other good things.

The event was well worth attending. The venue was good, easy to find, with nice nosh & a pleasant, not too pretentious, ambiance.

Thomas himself has an excellent grasp of English, altho he seemed to sound more germanic after my lunch time beer, as he warmed to his theme of the superior qualities of Ruby as a development framework. It was also particularly nice to see one of his Ruby examples refusing to work (been there before), despite repeated suggestions from the floor. It was sort of extreme programming gone mad as one after another, delegates shouted unsuccessful modifications. In the end Thomas thought it was a problem of an incompatible upgrade & I was left thanking Java for backwards compatibility. Nothing like this to put you off taking the next great leap forward.

What was particularly useful were the 'tales from the coalface'. The where/when not to use Ajax & some of the browser quirks. Thomas's insights might save your project weeks of head scratching and even possible failure. One tip was to return html fragments rather than xml because browser rendering tended to be quicker.

The real world examples were thought provoking & some were just plain cool. Others demonstrated Thomas's own stricture that just because you could use Ajax, it doesn't mean you should - at least one example had this in mind I think.

My only real gripe was that this wasn't really what I understand by a workshop. Sure, Thomas explained the code, & even wrote some there & then, however, no one else got to make the kind of mistakes that really teach you something. With 50 delegates, & a large topic, this was inevitable. Economics are economics. Yet, I'd have preferred the morning to be the overview & the lesssons learned, & the afternoon to have been given over to small group work building something that put Ajax to the test. Learning by doing is an established paradigm and it is ultimately more beneficial than listening to a speaker.

All in all, a worthwhile event & a good day out. Thomas is impressive in his way, & I think I've probably short cut my learning curve considerably. I'll take that as a result.

Statement of Intent

Hi,
Web Design Musings is not geared towards the experts. It's aimed at those who have or need a website and need a little more info on what to do and what not to do. It will cover things like how to get good search engine rankings, what to look for in a good design or design company, and what extras might be useful. I suppose its about making the web work for you.

Who am I? My name's (Dr) Eddie May. I've been creating stuff for the web since the last millenium. I was involved during the first dot com boom, writing Java software for banks, etc. Online credit card applications, etc. Since then I've been running my own small web design and development company - Fresh Web Services Ltd - in Leicester, in the East Midlands of the UK. We've developed everything from small brochure web sites through to financial and GIS systems for local governement.

Along the way, I've been asked almost every question there possibly is (slight exaggeration!) about the web and how to make it work. I've not always had the answer to every question, but mostly I've been able to help a client get what they want from the web.

However, the web changes incredibly fast, and knowledge doesn't stand still. I'm still learning, & I hope I can pass on some useful knowledge along the way.

So, check back frequently - I plan to publish something new about once a week - and let's see if we can't learn something new and useful from each other.