Where Should My Website Live?

Understanding where your website should live, or your various hosting options, will allow you to make the right decision for your unique business situation and help you save time, money and energy.

If you pay a monthly fee to have your site hosted by another company, there can be considerable savings with the right choice. Internet Service Provider’s (ISP’s) provide people with access to the Internet. With this access, one can use the Web, which sits on top of the Internet infrastructure. Host companies are organizations that rent out space on their servers for individuals or organizations to keep their websites on. Sometimes host companies are ISP’s as well.

What’s important for a business owner or executive to know is that there are a number of choices when deciding where to physically locate the business website. Every website sits (or physically exits) on a server. Each server physically lives in one of two places. It is either located at its website owner’s company, which is called in-house, internal, or self-hosting. For example, if a company has an active website and owns the server the website is on, and the server is physically located at their company, then it is self-hosting.

The other place a website server can physically live is at an ISP or Host Company, which is often called virtual hosting. This allows a company to avoid having to maintain its own Web server and connections to the Internet. There are a number of configurations the server can fall under in this category, dedicated server, co-location, or a shared server. Each of these has advantages and disadvantages that need to be considered by decision makers.

The following information illustrates some of the main differences among your hosting options:

In-House Server

• Company-owned, physically lives on site (on the company’s premises)
• You are in charge of all your support
• Buying and maintaining the machine is inexpensive, but time-consuming

Dedicated Server

• ISP/Host-owned computer that is used by only one company
• Support can be either the customer’s or ISP/Host’s responsibility
• You don’t share the space, but you pay monthly fee for both the computer and service, pay a setup fee, and pay for support

Co-location Server

• Customer/organization-owned computer
• Support is the customer’s responsibility, in some instances the hardware will be supported by the ISP/Host
• You don’t share the space, but you have to buy the computer, pay monthly fee, not pay for setup or support (must do it yourself)

Shared Server

• ISP/Host-owned computer that is used by only more than one company at the same time
• Support is the ISP/Host’s responsibility
• You share the space, rent the computer, pay monthly service fee. Usually the least expensive

Cost and support can vary considerably. One of the first things a company needs to understand is its resources. If the company has two employees only and neither person has any technical ability, then a co-located server may not be the best choice because they will be responsible for the technical setup, maintenance and troubleshooting of their website server. They may well consider a shared server that provides all the setup and support for them and costs a lot less. In contrast, a multi-million dollar company may benefit most by a dedicated or co-located server where they have control over the machine but share some of the responsibility with the Host Company.

It may even be more advantageous for a large company to forgo outsourcing their hosting needs altogether and decide to host their websites in-house. This is only practical if there are employees skilled and available however. If a business internally hosts their Web presence, then they will need technicians to handle both the software and hardware of the server, networking people to deal with the connections to the Internet and security issues, and Web people (programmers, designers, and marketers) or people who have all these skills who create and maintain all the Web pages and services.

There are quite a few things to be considered when choosing a place to locate a company server. There are more hosting options than mentioned here, and more will emerge as time goes on, but understanding the basics of this will help a business save time, money and effort in the long run. If you decide to go with a shared server at a Hosting Company, be sure to research numerous potential companies. Services vary widely. Here are a few things you need to ask before you make any decision:

• Are there setup fees on top of monthly costs?
• Do you provide both software (operating system) and hardware support?
• Does your support service allow phone call inquiries or just email inquiries?
• If just email inquiries are allowed, how much does it cost to buy phone support?
• What kinds of programming languages (besides html) do you allow on your shared servers? For example, Java, CGI, Perl, ASP, etc.
• Is it a UNIX or Microsoft server that my site will be on?
• Do you provide website server log file statistics? If so, do you offer a Web interface that I can use to view my website statistics or do I have to download the log files myself and run them in Webtrends or similar software?

Choosing the right place to for your website to live is a very important decision. Making the right one will definitely save you a large amount of time, energy and money.

Article by Jason O'Connor, President, Oak Web Works, Websites for Boston Small Business - Web Coding & Programming - E-Marketing - E-Strategy
© 2004

21st Century Business – Hand Your Tasks Over to the Web with Web Services

Want to know how to put more of your revenue in your pocket AND free up time to do the important things for your business? All business owners can save time and money if they properly leverage the Web through Web services. What I am referring to is replacing recurring tasks that take employee time to accomplish with web-based services that do it automatically.

If you are a small business owner, you probably do many day-to-day tasks that take up a lot of your valuable time. Your time is better spent doing the things you’re in business for than regularly completing every little business administration chore. A common complaint I hear among small business owners is that they spend too much of their time on “business” issues like accounting or mailings instead of the “fun stuff” that their expertise is in.

Now you can have it both ways, thanks to the Web and the strength of Web services. The idea is that if you shift your time or employee time away from tasks that can be accomplished via the Web, the newly saved time can be spent in more productive and lucrative ways.

I can give numerous examples of Web services for any industry, but for the sake of brevity, I will offer a few that will hopefully stimulate your own creativity.

1) Pricing

Do you have prices on your Web site that need to get updated regularly? If you have many products, and a price list that changes sometimes, it may save employee time by putting all the prices in a database (if they aren’t already) and making your Web site dynamically database driven to pull the pricing out of the database in real-time so the pricing on your site is always current.

This saves time in a number of ways. First, if a particular price is listed in a number of areas on your site, than you have to pay someone to make the update in each place every time the price is changed, or spend your time doing this. Maybe your pricing stays the same most of the time, but what about when you run specials and discounts?

Another way this helps is that your entire company can now refer to the Web to get the most updated pricing. Let’s say you run a special and decrease the price of a product. Do you contact all your sales people and tell them about the discount? Do you print out a copy of the updated price list and send it to everyone who deals with customers? By making this a Web service, you would simply change one entry in your database and refer everyone to the Web to get the current price. Any company information that regularly changes and you spend time disseminating ought to be automated using the Web.

2) Sales & Marketing Web Services

Let’s say a typical sale, whether it’s done by you or your salespeople, takes fifteen minutes to close (when speaking to an interested or ‘hot’ lead). Let’s also say that half of the fifteen minutes is spent explaining what your product or service is or how it can help improve their lives. You find that you repeat the same basic selling points over and over again. What if you could create a Flash presentation that does this for you? The presentation could be loaded on your Web site and linked on your home page. You could refer people to this presentation and cut your sales pitch in half.

You don’t even necessarily need to be so sophisticated. Simple html, images, and good writing could do this job as well. Software companies can really benefit from this tactic. Screen shots of their software, with descriptions of how their product benefits the customer, put together in an attractive presentation can act like a sales person who never sleeps or takes a break.

3) Required Customer Information

Do you or your employees spend time asking each new client their particular specifications for a job? Is there a set of questions you ask every customer in order to fulfill their request and complete the project? Consider creating an html form that asks these questions, have the answers emailed directly to your inbox, and place the form on your Web site. A catering company may have a standard set of questions they ask a bride and groom that could be automated and put on the caterer’s Web site. This could save the caterers valuable time, freeing them up to party plan and cook, which is probably why they got in the business in the first place.

4) Partnering

Do you have business partners? Do you waste a lot of time sending out mail to each partner when you have something to communicate? Do you want to entice other businesses to partner with you but don’t have a good incentive? Creating a simple password protected area of your Web site that only current partners can access may be the answer.

If you share information with partners on a regular basis, this is particularly useful. It is much easier for an advertising or creative agency to post work they’re doing for their client to review than it is to snail mail it or actually meet with the client for each new draft. A more sophisticated application of this concept involves hooking your inventory system up to the partner Web site section where every partner can see what is in stock in real-time.

5) Web Services for Product or Service Information / Catalogs

If you spend an inordinate amount of time, money and energy snail mailing catalogs out to potential customers, you may want to consider recreating your traditional print catalog online and making it easily accessible on your Web site. This may sound like a simple idea, and it is, but there are still many companies that haven’t done this yet. However, taking this mindset a step further could truly allow you to break away from the pack and free up a lot of you and your employees’ time.

This is actually a lot simpler than it sounds. One of the hardest parts is coming up with possible web service opportunities. Often we are so entrenched in the old way of doing things that we don’t even see the possibilities. It is important that you stretch your creativity when thinking of possible solutions. If you think something could be done automatically but aren’t sure if it’s possible, ask around or speak to an expert.

The possibilities are endless. In the future, many of the tasks of today will be done by the computer, (this could have been a line in an article written in the 80’s, and it certainly came true), but now it will be the networked computer that accomplishes the tasks, in other words, the Web. I challenge you to get creative and think of ways to save you and your employees’ time and money by utilizing the power of the Web and Web services.

Article by Jason O'Connor, President, Oak Web Works, Websites for Boston Small Business - Web Coding & Programming - E-Marketing - E-Strategy
© 2003

Revenue-Producing Principles for the Web

By consistently employing the right principles, a business owner or
business decision maker can leverage the web to increase profits.
There are basic principles affecting a web presence that are not
industry or business specific, and by understanding and applying
them, a business can greatly increase the amount of money saved or
generated.

Sometimes business owners or executives don't view the Internet
in the most appropriate way, and therefore miss vast opportunities
for success. The people who make the decisions for their sites
sometimes act like the Wizard of Oz, pulling and pushing levers
behind a curtain that provide an illusion, but not necessarily
reality. They forget to apply, or choose to ignore, fundamental
principles.

Often, while looking for information on the Net, I'll happen upon
a web site that misses the boat completely. I'll leave that site
in a flash, never to go there again, and never to spend my money
there. Don't let that be your site. I am not only referring to
retail sites. The principles I am referring to apply to any kind of
web site, regardless of whether a user can buy directly from the site
or not.

Let me provide some examples of these cross-industry, fundamental
principles that will help any business. The user's experience,
wants, needs, and preferences all need to be paramount when creating
or maintaining a web site, a part of a site or a web service. This is
a concept missed by myriad companies, but is a principle that will
offer great benefits if practiced consistently. Always look at your
site from the point of view of your visitors.

The web is often a place where a company puts its best foot forward
and neglects to be forthcoming. Many corporate sites are just
sophisticated advertisements. Another term for this is `brochure-
ware'. A user who is engaged in the site and views it as an
experience will be more receptive to the company and what it has to
sell. Receptivity is directly related to their experience.

Notice how I use the word `experience'? Offering an
experience to a visitor is a basic principle of the web. There is a
difference between providing a user with an experience when visiting
a site and simply offering brochure-ware. The latter is non-engaging,
static, one dimensional and boring, causing visitors to leave more
quickly and often not return. The web is a medium that is supposed to
be interactive. This means that the more chances a site gives the
user to interact with it, the better. This makes a site
`sticky', meaning it results in visitors staying on the site
longer and returning later. What are examples of interactivity?
Clicking, pushing buttons, answering surveys, joining a community,
expressing themselves in an open forum, and anything else that can be
devised that will allow a user to take some kind of action.

Many businesses also make the mistake of assuming they know what
their users want to experience. Why assume when one can ask? It's
very easy to survey existing and prospective customers now. In fact,
a company's web site is a perfect place and can facilitate an
ongoing dialogue between a user and company. This is a great example
of interactivity.

Setting up a survey on a web site is simple. Let's say a business
is trying to determine what they could offer on their next web site
version that would truly satisfy their customers. This company could
create an html form that links off their homepage. There could be
only a few key questions; it doesn't necessarily need to be a
long questionnaire. In fact, the briefer, the better chance a user
will fill it out.

A very important, arguably the most important, key to the success of
an online survey, would be to offer an incentive for filling it out.
You will get a far better response rate if there is something in it
for the person filling it out. This demonstrates the principle of
reciprocity. It's hard to get something for nothing. If you want
to get a visitor to fill out a form on your site (thus giving you
their information), you have to offer them something in return. It
doesn't have to be much, but something. It could be a discount on
a purchase, a coupon, or a free downloadable tutorial pertaining to
the business you're in.

Another neglected principle is accessibility. I regularly see
organizations consciously erect web sites that act as gigantic
barriers between them and their customers. They use these digital
ramparts to hide behind. It is very frustrating to go to a
company's site and not be able to find a phone number. It is
equally annoying to send an email to a company, using an address they
provided on their site, and not get a reply for a many days, weeks,
or not at all. If a visitor takes the time to write an email, it is
best to treat that message exactly like a phone call, and with the
same urgency.

The principles of looking through the eyes of your visitor, open
communication and representation, reciprocity, and accessibility are
important to follow to streamline your web presence. We all want to
make more profit and get a better return on our investment of a web
site, so thinking in terms of what the user wants and needs is an
excellent first step.

Article by Jason O'Connor, President, Oak Web Works, Websites for Boston Small Business - Web Coding & Programming - E-Marketing - E-Strategy
© 2003

Top 5 Must-Haves on Every Web Page

There are 5 elements that every page of every Web site must have. They are standard, and expected by Web users. When one of them is missing, it screams to a viewer that it’s an amateur site. If a few or all of them are missing, don’t expect anyone to linger for very long.

These 5 elements make site visitors’ life easier and saves them time, two extremely important characteristics of an effective Web site.

1) Consistent colors, fonts, and look & feel.

This is a basic tenant of Web design. If you ran a traditional ad campaign that used three different creative ads, would each one look totally different? The answer is ‘no’. Using the same fonts, the same colors and keeping the general look & feel consistent is fundamental to presenting a unified, dependable, and congruent image. If your look & feel is all over the place, your potential customers may think you are all over the place.

Try for one main font throughout and maybe a secondary font. Two primary colors are best with a third as a secondary color. A shade of one of the two primary colors works well for the secondary color.

2) Consistent navigation and a ‘Home’ link.

If you present a navigational scheme on your homepage, then your users immediately start to learn where to find all the ways to locate elements of your site the minute they arrive. If you then place the same links in different spots on other pages you are making it unnecessarily difficult for your viewers. It is unconsciously annoying to users, and gives the impression once again that you and your company are inconsistent and undependable. Don’t make users work harder than they have to get information from your site.

Also, provide a way for a user to get back to your home page on every page of your site. Often this is the page a user is most familiar with so they may want to go back. If someone emails an associate a link to an inner page in your site and they click on it, it is a good idea to provide a way for that new user to get to your home page.

3) A search function.

This is another one of those standard features that most people expect now. If there is a specific bit of information that a person wants to find, don’t make them wade through every page of your site. Implementing a search function is easy and free. You can get one at http://www.atomz.com/search/trial_account.htm. This truly makes a site user’s life a lot easier.

4) Text, not just images, and text links, not just buttons.

Advertising agencies who also make Web sites have a tendency to use too many graphics, often at the expense of text. A good rule of thumb is that if you have words in an image, take it out and replace it with html text. This is good for a number of reasons; including making the site more search engine friendly and loading faster. Search engines can only key off text, not words found in images. Also, graphic-intensive site take longer to load.

If you don’t include text versions of your links, and only use buttons (which are images) then a number of popular search engines can’t index your site because they can’t read links embedded in images. So it’s important always to include text links as well as buttons.

5) Phone number, logo, tag line.

Don’t make your Web site an obstacle or wall for your prospects and customers by leaving off your phone number. Every page should have your phone number listed. It is very frustrating to go to a company’s site and have no way to reach them except through a form or email.

Always include your logo and tag line on every page as well. If you don’t have a tag line, start thinking about creating one, your site is a great place to repeatedly get your message out.

All of the above mentioned elements can be included on an html template that is used for every page in your site. Templates make it easy to include all of these and quickly update or change them too. Templates are for another discussion, but keep in mind they are very useful.

Most importantly, make sure every page of your site incorporates these top five elements; they are a very necessary foundation for any effective Web site.

Article by Jason O'Connor, President, Oak Web Works, Websites for Boston Small Business - Web Coding & Programming - E-Marketing - E-Strategy
© 2003

Web Analytics - Murder by Numbers - Part 1

Want to know a methodology to learn the exact effectiveness of every e-marketing initiative you conduct? It’s a method that every company online should implement. It’s a must-have if you’re actively trying to leverage your web presence to increase your bottom line.

One of the great aspects of the Internet and e-marketing is its ability to give immediate results and feedback regarding all kinds of online activities. This of course requires tracking.

Let us delve into the world of tracking. Part 1 of this two-part series will explain the basics of e-marketing tracking. Part 2 will provide a fool-proof method for website statistical acquisition.

If you rent some banner ad space at a website whose audience is your target market, you can learn exactly how many people saw your banner ad and how many clicked through to your site. You can also determine how many people actually became a lead from the banner ad and even see how many were converted into a sale.

If the numbers were low the first time around, you can create a new banner ad and submit it again, then track those results. You can keep tweaking ad infinitum until you discover the perfect combination of design, copy and presentation that yields the best results. This is one of the wonders of the Net. But you’ll need a way to make sense of all the numbers. And there will be a lot of numbers. Enter Web Analytics.

Here are the most important data points for an e-marketer:

1. Cost for campaign
2. Reach or total visits (in Netspeak, ‘eyeballs’)
3. Unique visits
4. Click-thru number
5. Click-thru percentage
6. Number of leads generated
7. Cost per lead
8. Lead conversion rate
9. Lead to sales ratio
10. Number of sales generated

In the banner ad example above, let’s say the statistics for a day are:

1. The banner ad’s cost for the day = $500
2. Total visits = 1000
3. Unique visits = 800
4. Click-thru number = 50
5. Click-thru percentage = 5%
6. Leads generated = 20
7. Cost per lead = $25
8. Lead conversion rate = 40%
9. Lead to sales ratio = 10%
10. Sales generated = 2

The daily, weekly or monthly visits to the site that houses your banner ad will be the reach or visits to the site. This number can be broken down to both total and unique visits. If there were a 1000 visits to that web page in a day but 200 of those visits were from the same people visiting twice in that day (and all the rest came only once), then total visits is 1000 and unique visits is 800. This is because if 200 people came to the site twice that day, then 200 of the total visits for the day were repeats which leaves 800 unique visitors (1000 – 200 = 800).

Continuing with the example, the number of people who view the banner ad and actually click on it over to your site is the click-thru number. The click-thru percentage is ascertained by dividing the number of click-thrus by the number of page visits. For example, if 50 people clicked-thru to your site from the banner, and there were a total of 1000 banner views (because there were 1000 views to that page that had the banner ad on it), then the equation would be 50 divided by 1000, or 5%. (You could also use the unique visits to calculate this percentage: 50/800 = 6.25%.)

Leads acquired is how many people actually filled out a form on your site or called as a result of the banner ad. In other words, the user saw the banner ad on another site, clicked the banner thru to your site, and then actually gave you their information via a web form or phone call.

Cost per lead is very important. The lower this is the better. You calculate this by dividing the total cost by the number of leads, in this case $500 divided by 20 leads, or $25 per lead.

The lead conversion rate is the percentage of new leads you obtained from the visitors driven to your web page as a direct result of the banner ad. Of course this page needs a call to action in order to convert a visitor to a lead. A call to action is a statement on the page that says “Call today” and gives a phone number or is a link that points someone to a web form.

If your banner ad cost $500 and you got 20 leads (leads acquired), then your cost per lead for this banner ad campaign was $25.

If 2 people out of the 20 new leads actually bought your product or service, then your lead to sales ratio is 1/10 or 10%.

Obviously, the whole point of all this is to increase the last number, our final sales. By monitoring all these numbers continuously and systematically, we can gain an almost omnipotent view of our various e-marketing campaigns. We can then leverage that knowledge to improve each initiative to yield the best results.

Look for Part 2 of this two-part series. It will explain how to get all the initial web statistics to plug into these formulas. It will also describe a great method for obtaining accurate click-thru numbers.

Good luck number crunching! The better you get at it, the more sales you’ll create.

Article by Jason O'Connor, President, Oak Web Works, Websites for Boston Small Business - Web Coding & Programming - E-Marketing - E-Strategy

Web Analytics - Murder by Numbers - Part 2

Not accessing and reviewing your vital website statistics is like never looking at your checking account activity and never knowing how much money you have in it.

In Part 1 of this two-part series I explained how to crunch relevant website statistical data to facilitate constant e-marketing initiative improvements. I explained what types of data are important, such as unique visits, click-thru numbers and percentages, lead conversion rates, and how to process all these numbers. Here in Part 2 I’ll explain how you obtain the data in the first place and then provide a fool-proof method for website click-thru statistical acquisition.

The first thing you need to know is where your website lives. Every website sits on a server, a computer with the purpose of waiting for requests from clients (people’s personal computers by way of a browser). Each server physically lives in one of two places. It is either located at its website owner’s company, which is called in-house, internal, or self hosting. If company A has an active website and owns the server the website is on, and the server is physically located at their company, then it falls in this first category.

The other place a website server can physically live is at an Internet Service Provider (ISP) or host company. There are a number of configurations the server can fall under in this category which is beyond the scope of this article. The main thing to keep in mind is you first need to know where your website’s server is.

Once you know this, you can begin to assemble all the relevant site statistics. All servers automatically generate all the data you’ll ever need on an ongoing basis. They are relentless in their stats recording. They record all the data in what’s called server log files. Manually parsing through these log files is a horrible job that should only be wished on your worst enemy. They are huge laundry lists of everything from every site visitor’s IP address, browser type, site referral, time and date visited, and much more.

Fortunately, there are software programs that can do this for you. One of the most popular is WebTrends (http://www.netiq.com/webtrends/default.asp). You feed your server log files to the WebTrends software, and it produces for you an excellent presentation of all your relevant (and some superfluous) website statistics.

If your website sits on a server that your company has in-house, than you need to purchase WebTrends or some similar software and locate your server log files. The files often end in .log. In other words, it’s up to you to get your website’s statistics, and you do this by locating your server log files and running them through software such as WebTrends.

If your website sits on a server in an ISP then you can either request the server log files from them and run them through your own software, or you can ask them if they provide an interface for you to review your site statistics online. Most do provide this service. It’s often web based and all you have to do is log onto their site to view them.

Now you’re armed with a lot of good data. But if all your e-marketing initiatives drive traffic to your homepage, how will you know which ones are working and which ones aren’t? If you send out emails to rented lists and the call to action are all links that point to your homepage, then you’ll never know which emails are doing better than others. You may get an idea by seeing if your overall traffic increased the day you sent out the email or posted the banner (even to determine this you’ll need your website stats), but to do it right, you need exact data, and the web will provide it for you.

Some sites that you place banners on will offer you click-thru counting services to you. Most email brokers also offer similar services, at a price. But what if they don’t offer tracking information for you? Or worse, what if you don’t trust their reporting?

The solution: Create, implement, utilize and manage your own unique tracking pages.

It’s relatively simple. In every e-marketing campaign you conduct you create and assign a unique html page to it. Then the initiative’s call to action (hyperlink) points to its unique page. After the campaign is done, you can then go to your website statistics obtained through your website’s server log files, and see how many visits were logged for each unique tracking page.

For example, let’s say you send out an email to a list of 1000 email addresses. In the body of the email there is a call to action link that says, “Click Here to Buy Now”. This link points to a page on your website. But not just any page. It points to a unique tracking page you created earlier to track how many of the 1000 people clicked-thru from the email. It’s important that no users can get to this new page in any other way than through the email. Let’s say you named the page email-campaign1.htm. After the email campaign is done (I like to wait about 2-4 days), you go to your website statistics (the result of parsing the server log files through WebTrends or its equivalent) and search for the page called email-campaign1.htm. Finally, you view the page visits number. Let’s say the visits to this unique page totaled 200. That number is your click-thru number.

Now you can really start to fill in all the relevant data discussed in Part 1. This will enable you to determine how well each campaign is doing and whether you need to make adjustments.

To help manage all these unique pages, keep them all in one sub directory of your site. If you don’t do the technical work for your site, you ought to consider giving Part 1 and Part 2 of this series to your technical web person so they can get a better handle on your website vitals.

Until you know how well your website and e-marketing campaigns are doing, measured in visits, leads and sales, you can’t possibly maximize your operation and increase your bottom line. Now you have the information to make this happen.

Article by Jason O'Connor, President, Oak Web Works, Websites for Boston Small Business - Web Coding & Programming - E-Marketing - E-Strategy
© 2004

Six Ways to Save Your Site and the Internet

You are not only a Web Consultant, Internet Entrepreneur, or Web Business Owner; you’re also an Internet user. Since you are reading this article, you have already achieved a certain level of Web sophistication.

It is vitally important that when you make decisions regarding a website, an Internet program, an e-marketing campaign or a Web service, you take advantage of the fact that you are a Web user also.

What this means is that practicing the Golden Rule will guide you more than any article, book, tape, class or seminar out there. Let’s slightly alter this Rule to fit the 21st Century Web world:

“Always create an experience on the Web for others exactly how you would like the experience to be for yourself in a similar situation.”

Here are the top four biggest concerns, negative aspects, and downfalls of the Internet today:

1. Spam
2. Viruses
3. Privacy
4. Identity theft

Here are the top 6 ways you can alleviate these concerns for your customers or website visitors:

1) Don’t practice Spamming
Sounds simple, but spamming is painfully ubiquitous today. However, there are people out there who conduct email marketing with integrity. They have excellent success while avoiding everything that even hints of spam. They get much better returns than spammers. Why ever consider spamming again?

2) Offer an opt-out option – and make it prominent.
Again, this is simple, and we’ve heard it a million times, but it can’t be repeated enough. Generally speaking, make the opt-out checkbox next to the email form field.

3) Have a Privacy statement/page – and make it obvious and easily accessible
In England, this is a law, and it’s policed. I wish it was this way everywhere. Place you’re Privacy link somewhere that a person filling out info on your site can easily see it. Make the statement comprehensive. And stick to what you state in the statement, to the letter, or you are inviting legal action.

4) Take a highlight out of the Privacy statement and place it right on the web form
For example, directly above your web form, have a statement similar to this: “[Your Company Name] does not share, sell or give away email addresses or personal information to any other organization or company. You can be assured that your email address will never leave [Your Company Name] and you will never receive spam as a result of giving us your email address.” Make this in regular sized font, maybe even bold. The point is to make the user feel comfortable.

5) Only ask for the information you need
Why are some forms so torturously long and involved? Do you really need my nickname, homepage url, age, weight, blood type and sexual orientation? If your business does not utilize street addresses, in other words, if you do everything via the Internet, than don’t ask for people’s street address in a web form. The less you ask, the less intrusive you are, and the more likely your site visitors are comfortable. Maybe you take credit cards online, then of course you’ll need to ask for street addresses, but if you are conducting a marketing campaign where you plan to simply email respondents back in the future, just ask for their email address, name and country/state. More people will fill the form out and you will alleviate some of the concerns people have with the Internet today.

6) Offer tips for maintaining privacy, avoiding identity theft and stopping viruses
Here are a few tips: 1) Get the latest anti-virus software and make a link to one of them on your site. 2) Get a credit card with a low limit that you use exclusively for the web, and only use that one. 3) Check your credit report twice a year to check for identity theft and offer a link to an online credit report service. 4) Don’t open emails from sources you are not familiar with. 5) Turn off the preview pain in your email application. 6) Pay attention to Microsoft’s updates, download them, and update your operating system regularly with these updates. You can provide a link to Microsoft’s updates page as well.

And here is the crux of this discussion: to truly succeed in any Internet business or endeavor, like in any other undertaking, applying age old, tried and true behaviors, traits, and values, is the only answer. The primary one to apply is the above modified Golden Rule for the 21st Century Web.

By constantly striving to alleviate the major concerns of Internet users, we can create a better virtual world that is lasting and that ultimately improves the quality of our lives. It will greatly decrease the chance that the Internet will altogether fail and allow it to continue to grow to its full potential instead.

Article by Jason O'Connor, President, Oak Web Works, Websites for Boston Small Business - Web Coding & Programming - E-Marketing - E-Strategy
© 2004

Website Manifestation - 7 Steps to a Successful Site

If you are in business for yourself, an executive with decision making power, or the head of your company, you are probably bombarded with advice, opinions and information about how to build or re-vamp your website and how to use it to your advantage in business.

To be as successful as possible in your e-business, you’ll need to plan ahead and you’ll need to properly fuse the disciplines of design, technology and marketing. From conception to reality, the process of manifesting a website draws upon a multidisciplinary approach.

The more time and effort you put into planning and building your website, or revamping an existing one, the more successful you’ll be. Your new site will have more potential in accomplishing your business goals, your business will look more credible to all the people visiting your site, and you’ll increase your bottom line.

The following is a guide for building a new website. It shows how a corporate webmaster or Web department creates a world-class website, and it is the same step by step process that every organization, no matter how small, should follow.

Step 1 – Discovery:
The first phase involves determining the scope of the project, the timeline and scheduling parameters, everyone’s expectations, and your current human and technical resources.

Step 2 - Concept and Planning:
The next step is to determine site requirements, business goals, types of functionality, site features, and a timeline and due date. You’ll need to determine who your site audience is, the demographics and psychographics of your visitors.

In this phase the architecture or organization of the information that will be included on the site needs to be planned as well. The most important part of this step is determining your goals for the site. You need to ask yourself and any other stake holders exactly what the new site ought to yield when completed. What do you expect the site to do? What do you want to get out of it? What messages do you want to convey to all the people who will eventually view it? What are the priorities of the site in terms of your business and making money? What types of people will be using the site and what will they want to accomplish while there?

Step 3 - Design Specifications:
This is when the look & feel and a visual design specification are created. Here you’ll determine the fonts, colors and size and layouts, always trying to keep consistency paramount. You’ll want to write specifications for the images you’ll be using on the site as well. It’s also the time to decide upon and design the technical infrastructure and architecture of the site, server, environment and platform. You’ll determine what programming languages and databases will be used, if any, and any other technical features your site will need.

One of the secondary benefits of following Step 3 is that you’ll have a document to refer back to later on when adding to the site. If you hire a new Web person of company, you can give them this design specification document for them to follow whenever they work on your site

Step 4 – Production:
Before this phase begins, everyone who is involved in this project, including people who give the final ‘ok’, need to know that there will be a technical and look and feel design freeze at this point. If any changes are needed during this point, then those changes will be done in the next redesign.

The production phase can be broken down into three areas and will include:

Step 4a - The design production:
The artistic look and feel design production, usability designing, the navigation production, and image and button creation. The homepage of the site and the inner page template both need the new design applied to them. The homepage design may use the same template the rest of the site uses, or it may be unique. If it differs from the rest of the site, then make sure its look and feel is very similar to the look and feel of the inner page template(s). Also, if it differs, consider applying this entire step-by-step guide to the homepage as well, treating it as a separate, but related entity.

Step 4b - The technical production:
This entails the html coding, any other coding to contribute to the functionality and the configuration of the server’s environment. The technical aspects could also include any server side coding in a major programming language, database design and development, and site security measures.

Step 4c - The marketing production:
This area includes creating the homepage and pre-determined inner pages to be search engine and index friendly. It also includes the copy writing for every page. Any mechanisms for interacting with the visitors will be produced here. For example, forms on your site that asks users to give information are ways for a user to interact with your site. Although the look & feel of the form falls under ‘design’, and the actual mechanisms that make the form work falls under ‘technology’, the purpose of the forms will be very marketing-centric. What you ask, how you store the data, and how you retrieve it and use it later are all marketing issues that should be addressed in this step.

Step 5 – Testing:
The produced site now must be loaded onto a staging area that is exactly like the production environment, or made accessible to testers only. During this phase, various people will test all aspects of site, including functionality, spelling and grammar, hyperlinks, and all other elements. This is often called the Quality Assurance phase.

Step 6 – Publishing:
This phase is the push of the new site from staging to production. Here the site is made live and is now on the World Wide Web.

Step 7 - E-marketing and maintenance:
Unless the site is marketed, it won’t matter how well-designed or technically robust it is, no one will ever visit or use it. Therefore, the final and ongoing phase entails implementing e-marketing techniques, keeping the site’s content fresh, and making continual adjustments based on site specific and customer research.

Whether you decide to tackle building a new website yourself, or you choose to hire someone else to do it, the steps outlined above ought to be followed. If you decide to do it yourself, you’ll need to read up on graphic design and usability, Web technologies and e-marketing.

If you hire an outside company to build a site for you, ask them how they plan to accomplish it. Ask them if they have a set method for building a new site or re-vamping an old one. If they have a good system, it ought to look a lot like the steps above. They ought to be proficient in all aspects of website development and be able to communicate to you everything they are doing and why. Remember, the better your site is initially and the better you manage your new site going forward, the better your business will be.

Article by Jason O'Connor, President, Oak Web Works, Websites for Boston Small Business - Web Coding & Programming - E-Marketing - E-Strategy
© 2004

Developing an Online Marketing Campaign

As Internet marketers, we are bombarded with all kinds of techniques to drive traffic. A marketing budget could be spent in any number of ways, and it often becomes difficult to decide which approach will provide the best ROI (return on investment). However, there is a solution, and we can borrow it from the offline advertising world. It's using a combination of the top approaches. This is simple but powerful. Developing an online marketing campaign using numerous techniques can often be the most successful way to increase traffic.

In the world of traditional marketing and advertising, agencies often develop campaigns that involve various methods and media. Let's say a new car dealership has come to town. Their goal is to build awareness to ultimately get people to come into the store. They employ an advertising agency that begins work immediately on writing copy for a local radio station spot. They also create a number of display ads for the local newspapers. Furthermore, they invent a coupon offer that can go in the circular of the Sunday paper. Finally, they may buy a list of names and addresses of people in the region. They would use this list to send out a direct marketing mailer announcing the car dealership's grand opening.

The virtual marketing world is no different. To use some guerrilla marketing imagery, it is often beneficial to attack the objective of building traffic on a number of fronts by choreographing a campaign. Let's take the car dealership again as an example. Say the dealership has a web site, and it is e-commerce enabled. The only difference is that they would be marketing nationally instead of just locally. Now the goal is to get as many people as possible to visit their site, and since they can deliver anywhere, they can target the entire national Internet audience.

First, their site needs to be optimized so they can achieve good rankings in the top search engines. Their home page needs to have all the META tags, a good description tag, and verbiage developed with excellent keyword phrase placement in mind. Then the site needs to be submitted to all the engines and directories and tracked over a period of time. Necessary adjustments would need to be done to maintain the excellent keyword phrase placement.

Second, they may consider doing some strategic link development. Research would need to be done to determine where their Web site link could be placed to build traffic. There are always opportunities for link development specific to each industry. Another benefit of this is that the more links to the site, the higher the site ranks in most search engines.

Third, a company called PostmasterDirect.com offers opt-in email lists. These lists consist of people who choose to be e-mailed about the subjects they sign up for. It is not spam. The dealership could purchase an automotive list and write a compelling e-mail message to bring traffic to their site. The response rate is actually higher than in the offline direct marketing world.

Finally, the dealership could sponsor an industry e-zine or online forum and get its link placed in it. There are all kinds of periodic newsletters that offer rented space to place a company link and description.

There are many other methods the dealership could use as well. By developing an online marketing campaign that utilizes a number of different techniques, you have a better chance for success. It is important to note that all of these methods focus on a very targeted audience, an audience that is already interested in the specific industry or product. But the key is using numerous approaches to reach this target audience. Instead of relying on one or two methods to generate traffic, let's learn from traditional marketing and start developing online marketing campaigns. This approach will help ensure an increase in your traffic and your ROI.

Article by Jason O'Connor, President, Oak Web Works, Websites for Boston Small Business - Web Coding & Programming - E-Marketing - E-Strategy
© 1999