Personality Makes All The Difference

For most businesses the content on your website needs to be clear, concise language and sound professional. However, a more conversational tone is acceptable in a blog. By combining the two you can display personality without sacrificing professionalism. Blog posts can be authored by different employees to expose their individual areas of expertise. Again this exposes personality and builds customers affinity to your staff.

Start A Conversation

If you build an active readership on your blog you can also learn from your readers. Most blogs allows comments to be added after an article. This feedback from your peers and customers can be invaluable. Even without allowing comments analytics can show which articles garners lots interest and which your customers largely ignore.

Keeping Currency

Having regularly updated content shows your business is current. Currency helps build trust with potential customers and increases how professional you look as an organisation. Additionally, search engines love fresh content. By placing a news feed from your blog onto your homepage (like we at eSlice and some of our customers do) your website can see a lift in search rankings.

Be The Early Bird

Most blogging software is simple to use. Your blog empowers you to create updates to your website yourself. The cost and time of engaging a web-designer to create updates is negated. Your web presence becomes agile allowing you to capitalise on events and oppertunities as they occur. Whatever the health scare, freak weather, celebrity obcession or latest craze in the news is, you can link your existing products and services to them. Your customers will find more relevance in your web content potentially increasing engagement, time spent on your website and ultimately sales.

Depth of Information

A website that covers everything that your company does in great detail will quickly become unwieldy. Conversely, a blog can sit outside the structure of your website. You can dip into topics in as much depth as you feel appropraite without damaging the usablility of your website. From testimonials, to technological advancements, to new offerings, to spot-lighting particular strengths of your company. All these things can help you make a case for your business.

Archive of advice

If a question crops up often, make it a blog post. If you come up with a great piece of work, make it a blog post. If the same advice is regularly used to overcome objections to sales, make it a blog post. You can save time by having a central resource of model answers to link to rather than constantly re-writing them. That advice will also carry more weight as your published result than it will sent as an email to a single customer.

Summary

Done correctly a business blog can be a useful tool to connect with customers. By understanding who your audience is and creating blog articles they find intersting or useful you can build stronger connection to potential customers. If you would like help setting up a business blog then please contact eSlice today.

Change Is The Only Constant

The business models and functionality of internet services constantly evolve. Sometimes that evolution will be transparent to what you’re doing with a service. Other times changes will require that you make updates too. Services that were previously free can start charging. Services can change the functionality they offer or how they offer it. The user agreement between service provider and consumer can change. Worse still, if you back the wrong horse your service may disappear completely.

Even ostensibly free services cost in terms of time and effort to set up so it’s important to know what you’re getting into. Understand the stability (both in terms of financial liquidity and technology) of the services to evaluate the likelihood of issues arising and stay updated. Services rarely disappear without warning but having a plan in place will mean you can use the notice period to ensure a smooth transition.

The Customer Only Sees You

If your in-flight meal is inedible, if your baggage gets lost or if a fault on the plane delays your flight you blame your airline not their subcontractors. The same is true of your customers. If the services you utilise are unreliable, unhelpful or inaccessible it reflects on you. Understand the quality and service levels for services you use. Paying for a service doesn’t guarantee you have any recourse if it fails. No refund may be a small expense if you inherit a reputation for unreliability.

You need to be particularly careful when sharing personal information. If you pass a service personal information you need to be sure it’s held securely. If that information has a potential value then you must understand who is liable in the event of a security breach. Even when there isn’t a legal or financial aspect the reputational damage is likely to hurt so tread very carefully when sharing data.

Don’t Paint Yourself Into A Corner

Even if you could guarantee the third party services you use won’t change, your business and your customers almost certainly will. For any number of reasons you may wish to stop using a service and it’s important to understand the ramifications of getting out before you get in.

If you’re putting data in make sure you understand the effort involved in getting it out again. You don’t want to re-key your 20,000 subscribers’ email addresses by hand. If the information has value to you don’t just trust that ‘export’ button – test the portability carefully.

Think from a customers perspective what the disappearance of a service will mean. If customers are used to a certain functionality, changing it may make them look elsewhere. In particular, people expect content to always be available. Just because those blog posts or videos aren’t current, doesn’t mean your customers won’t be annoyed if you delete them. Conversely, simply moth-balling a blog or online channel and not maintaining it doesn’t look professional. This is especially true if visitors can still comment. The more useful content you create without an exit strategy, the bigger that millstone might be.

Summary

Third party services offer some great functionality at often very little cost. Used wisely they can be cost effective, secure and resilient way of giving customers what they want and keeping costs down. However, understanding the potential pitfalls and formulating a ‘plan B’ before you need it is a vital first step. If you need help or advice in ensuring your services work long term then contact eSlice today.

Firstly, be really clear what the website is trying to achieve. That sounds simple but may not be as intuitive as you think. Some initial questions you should cover to start the discussion:

• Who will visit the website?
• What will they want and expect from it?
• How will those people become aware of the website?
• What do you want people to do when they visit?

Once you’ve answered these questions they will influence what your website should be. Every decision you make should be supporting what you want to achieve with the website. Be clear about the demographic your website is targeting. The more you can tell your web designer, the more appropriate your website will be.

Style

Do you want to look professional, to look fun, to be bright and colourful or use elegant muted tones? Your websites style is not about personal preference. It is about presenting the right image to website visitors. You can be as specific or as vague as you like about this. Some clients have a very fixed idea about what they want; others give just use a couple of adjectives and then leave it to the rest to their web designer. If you have existing imagery or logos make that clear upfront. Finding the best of the competition for you web designer will help them too.

Most importantly it should be conversation. You know your business. Your web designer knows how produce websites. The best websites are created when both sides understand one another.

Content

What text do you want on the website? How will it be structured and how will it be broken across different pages. Think about a structure that will make sense to visitors. Your web designer will advise on structure and tone. They are a fresh pair of eyes who can give the all important outside opinion. Ultimately though, you know your business better than anyone else so the content should be created by you.

Functionality

Functionality is the ways your website can automatically react to visitors. For instance: calculating custom quotations, feedback forms, a full ecommerce shop or just an enquiry box.

Complex functionality has the potential to be expensive to produce. It is generally more costly change than style or content decisions. Be really sure that any functionality on your website adds value. The wrong functionality for your customers will do more harm than good.

Summary

Deciding what you’re your website should be can be a little daunting at first. Breaking a specification down into Style, Content and Functionality will make it easy to think about and agree. By documenting all of the above with your web designer you should everyone involved knows what you’re working towards. Clear specification is essential to a successful outcome. If you would like to discuss the design or refresh of your website contact eSlice today.

Setting the Target Rate

A respectable Bounce Rate will vary wildly based on the type of website and where your visitors are coming from. Have a look at Bounce Rates of different pages within your website. If some are significantly higher than others ask yourself why. Aiming to bring all your pages up to the level of the best performing one isn’t the most scientific approach but should give you a manageable and measureable target.

Try to classify visits by the type of referral. Users visiting from referral sites like Digg and StumbleUpon are likely to be casual browsers and not looking specifically for your offering. A high Bounce Rate is to be expected. However, users who have sought you out through search engines are looking for your products. A high Bounce Rate from search engine traffic is likely indicative of a problem.

Give Visitors What They Expect

Whatever route visitors take to your website they will have come for a particular piece of content. If they can’t see what they want straight away they’re likely leave. Look at the traffic that bounces and the links or search terms it’s come from. Try to understand the what your bounces are looking for and put it front and centre on the page. You might want to hook people by showing other products or special offers but make sure you don’t obscure what visitors have come for.

Present The Webpage in a Meaningful Way

Increasingly, people don’t enter websites via the homepage. Search results and external links can direct visitors to any part of your website. Webpages must make sense in isolation to visitors. Make it clear who you are and what you do on every page. Indicate where in the site the page sits to give context to its content. If you have a unique selling point that drives your business make it clear on every webpage a user could land on. Giving context should support the content users are looking for and direct them to the next click on your website.

Offer the Next Step

Show users where they are and offer them a next step or related alternative. Amazon offers visitors ‘Add to Cart’ in a prominent position. If you don’t like the product they also offer alternatives. Make it as clear and simple as possible for visitors to give you that second click. Keep the options to a minimum to avoid any confusion. The clearer and simpler the steps from visitors to customer are the better your conversion rate will be.

Summary

Monitoring your Bounce Rate is by no means a long term strategy for web analytics on its own but it can be a useful first measure of engagement for a website. For large, complex websites it can help target where more detailed analytics are required or can set a meaningful target for the most valuable segments of a website. If you would like to discuss how your business could benefit from working with eSlice on improving your website then please contact us today.

Summarise First

Web-readers skim. If they aren’t hooked at the top of the page they probably won’t read on. Summarise what the page is about in the opening paragraph to let web-readers know it’s worth continuing. Make your key points at the top of the page. Many people simply won’t scroll down if they don’t see what they want straight away. Getting this right can make a big difference to your bounce rate.

Use Hierarchical Headings

Use headings and sub-headings to break up your content. Wikipedia pages are great examples of how to do this well. Headings allow readers to skim the page and find the content they are most interested in. It also gives you an opportunity to outline everything the page is about. Short, clear headings will make it easy for web-readers to find what they want quickly.

Use Links for Key Points

Making keywords into links highlights them to web-readers. As web-readers notice that ‘organic toffee’ link they can skip to that paragraph if it’s what they’re looking for. Better still if the link leads to your organic toffee page the next step to them becoming customers is laid out for them. Alternatively, using links to cite your sources or provide additional information is helpful and adds credence to your message. Use links creatively but only legitimately to highlight keywords for web-readers.

Bullet Lists

Bullet lists can make a series of simple points more readable and memorable for web-readers. Web-readers find bullet lists easier to read than the same content in a paragraph. Think carefully about the order of items in your list. Items at the bottom of the list will be recalled better while web-readers are still on the webpage (recency). Items at the top of the list will be recalled better the next day (primacy). As with all web content don’t let your lists get too long. If a list has more than 20 you should think about subdividing it if you can do so in a logical manner.

Short Sentences in Short Paragraphs

Keep sentences simple. Try to make just one point per sentence. Each full stop should be a pause for web-readers to remember just one thing. Clear language and short sentences will increase web-readers’ understanding and retention of your content.

Short Paragraphs are more likely to get read. Try to sum up the paragraph in the first sentence. As web-readers skim the tops of paragraphs this helps them to go straight to the information they want. Additionally, web-readers generally don’t like screen reading. Breaking your content into smaller chunks makes reading it more palatable.

Summary

Amending existing content with a little thought for web-readers can pay dividends online. Simply taking content from your printed materials and copying it to your website rarely gives the best results. The above simple rules about how to structure text should give you a basic idea of how to adapt your text for the web. If you would like specific advice on improving your online presence or you would like to know more about our other services then please contact eSlice today.

What do you want to achieve?

Just looking at data doesn’t improve anything but it does soak up time. Be clear about why you want to look at analytics figures before you start. What are the business goals you want to reach. How will you increase your website’s contribution to those goals. It is legitimate to specify an analytics project to guide where development focus should be but there should always be a question with a business goal behind it. Be clear what your website (and your business) is about then decide what to focus on.

What are the measures that matter?

Ask what you need to know to guide and measure your improvement efforts. Focus on business goals and choose metrics that directly measure the delivery of them. If you can not say what action you will take to improve your bottom line based on a metric then you don’t need that metric. Metrics that you will act on are important, metrics that don’t lead to action are chaff – discard them. This is especially important for the things you can’t change. There is no value measuring problems that you’re not going to fix. Less is definitely more.

What’s the long term plan?

Web-analytics isn’t a one off exercise. The changes you make may not deliver the results you expected. The changes may take time to bed in (particularly if you’re trying to improve you search engine ranking). Whatever you do to get to where you want to be probably won’t keep you there. If you want maintain successes then you need to ensure there’s a long term plan of monitoring and improvement. Maintaining position may require less effort than getting there but that’s all the more reason to ensure that maintenance is properly planned. Schedule regular reviews of the output of web-analytics and each time question whether you still have the right metrics.

In Summary

It’s true that what doesn’t get measured doesn’t get done, but too much measurement can cause a data-paralysis where nothing is achieved. With the vast array of data, tools and service providers available a web-analytics exercise can easily fail to translate into improvement. Having a clear strategy and goals, defining a manageable number of valuable metrics and creating a long term approach to web-analytics are essential for success. If you’d like advice on how web-analytics could be used to help you improve your web-presence contact eSlice today.

Link Whenever You Can…

Make sure that the communications you already make direct people to your blog. This is about more than just linking to your blog from your website. Put it on your business cards and in your email signature too. Every contact with a prospective or existing customer is an opportunity to start an ongoing dialogue via your blog. If you’re asked a question and the answer is in a blog post direct people to it. When you post a new article mention it and link to it from status updates. Directing people to articles you know they will find useful will encourage them to use your blog as an information source again in the future.

…And Get Links From Others

If you know other bloggers try to get them to mention you in one of their posts. When people have found the information you post useful ask them to reference it. If bloggers comment on your competition, ask them to review your products or services too. Find trusted bloggers and reviewers for you area of business and engage with them. Ask their opinion on your posts. They may comment on your thread or they may create an article that references yours. Be creative about how you approach this and try to find other bloggers you can find mutual benefit in cross referencing to share readerships.

Use Descriptive But Intriguing Titles

Often people will just be presented with a link and the title of your article. If it sounds interesting and relevant to them they will click and then read your post. If it sounds dull or off topic they probably won’t. Many blogging communities create automatic links to your articles from other blogs when they think the themes are related. To make the most of them you must capture peoples attention and interest with clear, concise, compelling titles. Get it right and you’ll convert more links into clicks and visits.

Be Active on Others’ Blogs

Get out and comment on the blogs of others. Most blogging communities will automatically link your comments back to your own blog. If your comments are insightful, helpful and interesting then people will want to hear what else you have to say. Try to focus your commenting to popular blogs on related topics. This will ensure your comments are seen by people potentially interested in what you are writing about. If you have written an article related to the one you’re commenting on then reference it and include a link.

People may even be talking about you or your product. Search regularly for blog posts that are. If you join the conversation you can give your side of the story and direct potential customers to your blog or even directly to your products. But be aware if you are being talked about then it may not all be positive. Think carefully about how you engage with critics.

Use Tags, Labels and Categories

Tags, labels, categories: different blogging software uses different terms but they all have something to fulfil the same the role. (We’ll use tags as a shorthand for all the terms.) Essentially, tags are the list of subjects that a particular post deals with. Search engines use tags to determine what your posts are about. People use tags to find posts about the topics they’re interested in. Blogging software uses tags to inter-link posts that are on related topics. Obviously only include tags that are relevant to your post but include as many relevant tags as you can. Using tags properly can get you more visitors who are actually interested in your articles.

Update Regularly

Blogs are about keeping an ongoing dialogue. Keep your blog fresh by regularly adding new content. Blogs that update regularly will get visited regularly. Blogs that update infrequently will get visited infrequently or be forgotten altogether. As you build the volume of blog posts that you have you increase the potential for interlinking. Some posts will be ephemeral but written properly most will be useful for along time. The more material you have the more tickets you have to the lottery of related post links. Plus search engines love to index fresh copy. Every new post is a little more value in your blog to you and your customers.

Further Steps

This is by no means an exhaustive list. It covers some simple things that you can do yourself that will help build a following irrelevant of what you blog is about. Depending on your industry, content, who you want reading your blog and a host of other factors there will be other possibly much more valuable actions you can take. If you would like a discussion about how eSlice could help you promote your blog and your business online contact us today.

There are still lots of little improvements we will be looking to make as time is available in the mean time we would love to hear your views of what we have up now. If you have a point of view you would like to share please comment below or contact us.

When you are designing marketing materials it helps to think about all the stages a potential customer goes through when they react to promotional materials and how you can encourage them to take the next step towards becoming a customer. Obviously, getting something like this right is an art and not a science but the key tenet of understanding the stages a customer goes through will apply to creating most printed materials.

Skimming Over

Given the high proportion of promotional leaflets its vital to have that will attract the attention of your potential customers.  You need a good graphic that’s going to connect with them and tell them what you are selling and why they should buy it straight away. Quitting smoking is a fairly straight-forward example as the social connotations of that cigarette butt are already made in people’s minds. The job of picking the right image is lot more complicated when your audience doesn’t  have pre-existing ideas about the concept you are portraying but get it right and it will make all the difference.

The First Glance

So now you have the customer’s attention – but not for long unless you back it up with some short, specific language about why the customer should care about your message. Iver Therapy’s selling point here is that their hypnotherapy helps people to quit permanently, not just temporarily. The four word slogan ‘Quit Smoking for Good’ uses tone and language to emphasise both the permanence and positive nature of giving up with them. Their selling point is made in four words and will resonate with anyone who has struggled to give up before.

The Skim Down

So now that your customer is intrigued enough to read a little more you need to give them just enough information. Too much copy and none of it will get read but you need enough to make your case. However little you text you include, what is there may only get skimmed by readers. Try to put your key points first where they are most memorable. Keep to one point per sentence so that points are distinct in the reader’s mind. Bullet points lists are a great way delivering key points because:

As an additional aid we have printed the key words from each bullet point in green to highlight the key to each point. It took some rewriting to get this to work but it ensures that even a cursory glance of the text will show up the key words.

Call To Action!

Ultimately every piece of promotional material should be looking for a customer to do something. Whether it be calling, quitting, voting, buying or thinking about a viewpoint there should be some action you’re asking the person reading to perform. A clear statement of action should give them the next step. This will usually be to direct them to contact you via your telephone number and website.

If you would like more information on how your business could benefit from working with eSlice on printed, web-based or other marketing materials or you would like to know more about our other services then please contact us today.

The Law

In the UK, the Disability Discrimination Act makes it a legal requirement to make to goods, facilities, services and premises accessible to everyone. As well as physical premises the act covers websites and website owners are required ensure that their websites are accessible to all. All websites are covered by the Act.

• Both commercial and non-commercial websites are covered by the Act
• Online shops and informational websites are covered by the Act
• Public sector, private sector and third sectors websites are covered by the Act.

The Act also allows for legal action to be taken based on personal injury. There is no need for any loss of earnings to be incurred by a claimant in order for them to raise a case. Much of the detail of the Act will be driven by case law but at present there is no maximum amount that a claimant can sue for.

The Disabled Dollar

Websites that aren’t accessible are missing out on business from upwards of 10 million people in the UK that have some form of physical or sensory disability. Furthermore, that number is rising steadily with the country’s aging population. In 2008, for the first time ever, the majority of people in the UK were over 50 years old, the age at which disability begins to increase rapidly. The Institute of Employment Studies estimates that disabled people represent a market worth of some £80 billion per year. Even a basic level of accessibilty will ensure that the vast majority of this population will be able to use a website. Accessible websites empower disabled users building brand loyalty as well as capturing business that competitors may miss.

Mobile Users

Accessible websites are open to the increasing numbers of mobile web users as well as disabled users. The last five years has seen an explosion in the number of people accessing the web from mobile devices like mobile phones, PDAs and Apple’s eponymous iPhone. The smaller screen sizes and reduced functionality of these mobile browsers can’t deliver all of the content that a PC based web browser can. However, websites designed with accessibility in mind will not require this additional content in order make them legible and usable. An accessible website might not display all its bells and whistles to mobile devices but crucially the website will still be usable. This may not be the case for some or all mobile devices when if the website has not been designed to be accessible.

Accessible Websites are Structured Websites

The basics of creating accessible pages are also the basics of creating websites that are easier to maintain. Two of the basic tenets for creating an accessible website are:

• Structure your content in an organised fashion
• Separate the content of the site from the design elements

Accessibility aside, this is good practice. Separating content and design will generally make your website look clearer, be cheaper and easier to maintain. The two together will make ensure that search engines index and list your site better – improving your position on search engines and getting you more relevant traffic.

Get Accessibility from Day One

Good web designers should have no trouble delivering an accessible website. It shouldn’t be an optional extra and it certainly shouldn’t substantially add to the cost of developing the majority of new websites. Trying to retrofit accessibility into an existing website can be expensive though. Getting accessibility built into your site is going to have to happen at some point, so do it up front when its cheaper and you can reap the benefits from day one.