Did you benefit from my article on How to Quickly Triple your Click-Thru-Rate (CTR)? Have you seen increased sales as a direct result of trying out your own tests with different coloured buttons? If so, I want to know!

1. Tell me your success story

If you’ve seen increased sales and click-throughs as a direct result of using my research, I’d love to publish that information. Please put some numbers on it, e.g. 43% increase in CTR, and 22% increase in sales.

I’m looking for about 50 to 150 words on what benefits you’ve seen. I’ll publish your story on this blog with a link to your website and a link to your twitter profile if you wish. Please send your story via my contact form.

2. Write me a testimonial

This is optional, but it would be great if you could write me a short testimonial based on your results. This is to help illustrate that the advice I give achieves great results, and the testimonials will be used for the website.

Glassy Buttons

I’ve been asked a couple of times how I created my buttons. I did so using the Glassy Button generator tool. It’s so simple to use and I highly recommend it.

When I review people’s websites as part of my website mentoring service, I seem to come across certain problems time and time again. So I’ve compiled all of the commonly made mistakes into a single article. I bet that most of you are making at least 1 mistake on this list!

Initial Impact

These are issues relating to a website when you visit a website for the first time.

1. Purpose of website not obvious

When you first see a webpage, you want visitors to know what the website is about in the first 10 seconds or so. If the website appears irrelevant (even though it is actually relevant) to the visitor, then they will leave. Give the user cues such as related images or short introductory paragraphs of text.

2. Website appears unfinished

If a website looks as if it’s incomplete, you’re giving your visitors a negative impression, particularly if you run a service or business. An incomplete website can imply a lazy or poor service, as if you can’t look after your website, how can you be expected to look after your customers?

3. Websites that take too long to load (if at all)

You should aim to have your website loading within 6 seconds. The faster the better. However, if your website doesn’t load at all, or it takes far too long, you’ll probably lose visitors and they are unlikely to return.

4. Shockwave Flash intro pages

Flash intro pages are very old-fashioned now, where most users will click on the skip link or leave straight away. From a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) perspective, you want your home page to have your most important information, not a flash intro which has little benefit when it comes to search engines.

5. Website breaks in major web browsers

Make sure your website works in the major browsers, including IE (6, 7, 8), Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome. Significant issues due to using one of those web browsers will typically not be tolerated by visitors (such as broken layouts, no navigation functionality, etc).

6. Lack of a domain name

Don’t rely on free web hosting for your website address. e.g. mysite.freehosting.com looks very unprofessional. Buy a domain name, they start at around £7 for 2 years for a .co.uk domain.

7. Audio that plays when you visit a website

Any kind of audio that plays when you visit a website I feel is tacky. I don’t like surprises, and that counts as a surprise. It’s annoying at any rate.

Bad design

What constitutes a good or bad design is highly subjective, however, there are a few things that will definitely annoy users. Here are some of the worst offenders.

8. Poor choice of colours

Eye-bleeding bright colours or unreadable text makes using your website particularly difficult to read. Make life easy for your readers by giving your colour scheme a contrasting, yet pleasant feel.

9. Poor site navigation

If a visitor cannot find what they are looking for, they will leave. Make it as simple as possible to find different pages on the website, using a sensible menu and navigation layout.

10. Using Frames

Using HTML frames is an old-fashioned and troublesome website technique. They can damage a user’s experience, and additionally can cause havoc with a web browser’s next/previous navigation buttons.

11. Images that are too small

If you have images that contain vital information or that demonstrate your product (or services), then users should be able to zoom in or view a larger version of an image. I’ve seen far too many online shops where the product image is 125px x 125px where you can’t even see the product. How can you convince your customers to buy something if they can’t even see what they are buying?

12. Popup Adverts

Just say no! Popup adverts annoy users and are associated with spyware. Avoid at all costs.

13. No about page

Visitors these days often like to read about a company or a website to get an idea of what the website is all about. The about page is a great way to explain the origins of a business or a website. You can go a little further by having photos of people involve with a company or website. This helps remind visitors that there are real people behind a website, which also helps with trust.

14. No contact page

You want visitors to get in touch, so add a postal address, email contact form, email address, telephone number, etc. Make it as easy as possible for people to contact you. Adding a registered business address adds a degree of trust for online shops too.

15. No calls to action

You want visitors to do something, such as register for an account, buy something, sign up to a newsletter, call you, etc. Therefore tell them! Have strong calls to action to encourage your visitors to do what you want.

16. Over-reliance on Javascript or Flash

Javascript and Flash should only be used on a website to improve the user experience, not to replace basic functionality such as links or site navigation. Additionally, some users disable Javascript or block Flash, so your website should gracefully degrade so that those visitors can still use your website.

17. Visible script errors

Script errors do occur on occasion, however script error messages that are visible to the user do give your visitors a negative impression.

Website content

The information and ‘stuff’ on a website is what you want your visitors to see and engage with. So here are a few common issues relating to the content on websites.

18. Broken links and images

Checking images is pretty quick for a website, as it’s pretty obvious if something is missing. Therefore there is no excuse. Broken links are harder to find, but there are plenty of free tools to help you. The last thing any visitor wants to see is a 404 – Page Not Found message. Check your most important links manually, e.g. Twitter, Newsletter Signups and RSS feed links.

19. Lack of text on the website

Whatever you offer, you need to have some text on your website that describes your product/service/club, etc. Lots of relevant and useful textual content on your website will also help with search engine rankings. This is because potential visitors will type a range of generic and long-tail keyword phrases into search engines to find websites like yours. Lots of useful text-based content increases the chance that potential visitors will find you via the search engines.

20. Sign up before you can read anything

I’ve noticed a few websites now that require you to register before you read anything. Getting a visitor to create an account is a significant request compared to just reading your website. I would never sign up to a website unless I knew what I was going to get, so you should have at least some content on your website that doesn’t require users to create an account first.

21. Advertising – too much or unrelated

Advertising on a website is absolutely fine if done correctly. Beware of having irrelevant adverts on your website, particularly adverts that are known to be annoying or have a bad reputation. Also, don’t plaster your website with adverts, keep it balanced.

22. Avoid animated GIFS

Animated GIFs are so 1990s. Avoid them where possible. They do look tacky, and they can distract your users from looking at the good parts of your website.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is a very large topic, however, here are a few obvious mistakes that I frequently see on websites I review.

23. Not using the <title> tags correctly

Make sure you use the HTML <title> tags on every page to describe what’s on that page. Don’t keyword stuff, but the title should describe what that page is about. What’s in the <title> tags is very important from an SEO perspective because they have a strong weighting in the rankings. Additionally, if someone bookmarks one of your web pages, it reminds them of what is in that web page.

24. No search engine friendly URLs

Important keywords in your URL structure can help benefit your search engine rankings. Additionally, page titles that appear in URLs give prospective visitors a hint to what the article contains just from the URL alone. e.g. www.mywebsite.com/?p=344 is not descriptive, however, www.mywebsite.com/how-to-grow-your-business is much more descriptive and gives users an idea what to expect if they click on that link.

25. Click HERE links

The text that is used for text links is a small but still an important ranking factor for search engines. Therefore avoid having links that look like “Click here for the download”. Try using something like “Please sign up to download the free business worksheet“. (Please note, those links just go to my home page and are for illustration only).

Your pet hates?

I hope that you found those tips useful. Please let me know what your pet hates are in the comments below!

Thank You

The following people helped me write this article by giving me a few more ideas, so I’d like to say thank you to them all.

• http://www.twitter.com/wonder_lander (Jon Cook)
• http://www.twitter.com/Tintop (John Edwards)
• http://www.twitter.com/Noidontdrinktea (Fee Fee)
• http://www.twitter.com/The_Landlord (The Landlord)
• http://www.twitter.com/chimpdonk (Crispin Read)

If you’re thinking of starting any kind of website, or you’re working with a client to create a new website, here are some questions to ask to help discover the goals of the new site. These questions are intentionally probing, teasing out how the website should look, and how the website should focus on the visitors.

You are free to use these questions anywhere you like. If you do re-use them, please let me know, as I’m interested to know what they get used for.

Website Goals

• What do you want to say on your website?
• What do you perceive is the value of having a website?

Target Audience

• Who is your target market?
• Is your business or website targeted at a specific geographic area? If so, what areas?
• What do you want your visitors to do once they get to your website?
• Should your visitors be able to purchase something directly from your website?
• Why should your visitors come back to your website?

Competitors

• Why should visitors visit your website rather than a competitors?
• Who are your competitors?
• What do your competitors do better than you?
• What do you do better than your competitors?

Design and Usability Ideas

• List up to 5 websites that you like and what you like about them.
• List up to 5 websites that you really dislike and what it is about them that you dislike.

Content

• What information do people always ask you for?
• Who will provide the content for the website?
• What information do you think people will visit your website for?

Domain Name

• Do you have a domain name?
• Do you need a domain name that represents your company name?

Promotion

• How will you promote the website?
• What do you know about social media?

Any more?

If you have any more ideas of questions to ask when creating a new website, please add them via the comments below!

If you’ve got a website that you rely on for your business, having reliable uptime is pretty important. The vast majority of hosting companies are not proactive about ensuring their servers are in tip-top condition. That’s understandable as being proactive is expensive. If a hosting company’s costs are higher, they need to charge the customer more.

Given that many customers choose hosting based on price, you can understand why a hosting company would decide not to invest in being proactive. The hosting company might therefore just react to problems instead. However, just because your hosting company is more reactive than proactive, it doesn’t mean you need to go elsewhere.

100% uptime, but your website still doesn’t load

So many web hosting companies claim they have 99.9% uptime, but that just refers to the server being online (i.e. powered on). That metric does not consider if the server is performing badly (i.e. slowly) or if just the database or web server daemons are dead.

For example, a hosting company could theoretically say they have 100% uptime every month, but have 5 days when the server is taking 10 times as long to serve up a page, or there could be an issue where Apache or MySQL aspect of the web server crashes but the machine itself is up and running. So the machine itself is up 100%, but the server is not doing what it’s supposed to do 100% of the time.

How to work with your web host

Regardless of what problems you experience with your hosting company, here are some tips to get the best from your hosting company.

• Read their support documentation – Some commonly asked questions are usually answered in the Frequently Asked Questions or KnowledgeBase type areas of the hosting companies website. See if that information helps you before you raise a ticket.
• Monitor notifications of scheduled downtime – There will be times when your hosting company will need to upgrade hardware or software. There will be somewhere on their site where they announce such scheduled downtime, such as on a blog or forum.
• Don’t abuse the hosting staff – When you’re frustrated with something, it’s all too easy to take it out on the web hosting staff. Try not to lose your cool. Typically hosting staff will get lots of angry messages from users, regardless if those angry messages are deserved. When raising help tickets, try to be objective, explain the problem, and then explain your desired solution. The staff are human-beings too!
• Be grateful for the help you get – If someone helps you, thank the staff member who helped you. It will make their job more pleasant. You might even get better service from them in the future as a result.
• Research the problem – for more technical and complex problems, i.e. something other than a dead server, do as much research on the web as you can. Any additional information you can find will greatly help the support staff when they resolve your problem. The staff know a lot, but they don’t know everything. Providing them with detail will save them time too, meaning a quicker resolution for you.
• Don’t threaten to leave – You’ll get nowhere threatening the hosting company to fix the problem otherwise you’ll leave. Chances are, your money makes very little difference to their bottom line, so the threat has no weight. If you’re not happy with the service, then just move hosting companies.

Conclusion

Switching hosting companies is hard work, particularly if you have more than just a few websites. Rather than switch hosts, it’s well worth establishing a rapport with hosting company, as it benefits both you and them. And in case you wondered, I strongly recommend United Hosting, which is who I use for hosting my 30+ websites. I typically get a response from help staff within an hour or two! That’s fast.

When you launch a website or business, having a bold and representative logo can be a huge advantage. For example, can you imaging the logo for Pepsi, Virgin, MacDonalds, Apple, etc? Having such a strong logo helps people to remember your brand. If you have a logo that’s quirky, funny, or clever, then you’ve made it even easier to remember your logo.

Getting a professional logo designed can be expensive. Design agencies could charge you hundreds, if not thousands for a your logo. For medium or large companies, that’s great! However, for the rest of us with a small business, or even smaller website, premium prices for a logo are just not practical.

However, there’s a great way to get fresh and unique logos from just £30 to 50. I’ve used this technique to have logos such as the Big Eco Directory logo (above), and my consulting business logo Streamlined Thinking (below).

The technique is based on something called a logo contest. What you do is specify your requirements on a design contest forum, specify a prize amount (usually in US Dollars and paid via Paypal) and wait for the designs. To get the best results, you provide constructive feedback on each design that’s made. After a fixed time (around 3 to 5 days) you close the content, choose the winner, and then pay the artist for the best design.

The forum I currently use for logo contests is Digital Point, where I ran a $30 contest for The Big Eco Directory and a $50 contest for Streamlined Thinking. However, in order to run a contest, you do need to be an active contributor to the Digital Point forums, of which I am.

If you have a bit more money ($200 to $500), you can run a contest on 99 Designs which is a spinoff from another forum. However, you don’t need to be a regular contributor to start a contest at 99 Designs. The designs on 99 Designs are of a higher calibre (and more expensive), but the quality of logos from the Digital Point Contents Forum are perfectly good enough if your budget starts at $50.

If you do run your own logo contest at Digital Point, here are some tips:

• Limit the contest to just 4 days
• Offer feedback on every single design. Try to say what you do and don’t like on each design.
• Offer around $50 to $100, as this attracts the better designers. Offer less than $50, and the better designers just don’t enter the contest.

If you want a professional logo designed, but you don’t want to become a member of Digital Point, then please contact me. For a fee of £40 GBP (plus the fee for the design), I’ll handle the running of the contest for you, including getting lots of feedback from you about the designs.

Just a short article with a couple of tips today. Do you backup your websites regularly, if so, how often? And when developing a new website, do you use any kind of version management tool? If you rely on any website to make you money, you should be doing both!

Backups

The justification for backups is pretty obvious and substantial. How would you fix a situation where…

• Your web host gets hacked?
• Your web host goes bust, and the hosting services are revoked immediately?
• You accidentally do something that corrupts your site’s database?
• Your site gets hacked, destroying all or part of your file system and/or databases?

You get the idea. Having both backups of files and databases is very important. I’ve needed my backups about 5 times in the last 2 years, each time saving me several days and weeks of effort to fix a problem.

How often should you backup? Well, how long is a piece of string? My guidance is to backup files daily, and backup databases at a rate that roughly represents how frequently your site is updated. Perhaps 3 times a day, perhaps just once a day.

Regardless of how often you do backup, there will come a time when you are grateful for having those backups. There are so many different backup tools, it depends on your own personal setup. But, if you’re not very technical, it’s worth spending some money on a good backup tool.

Version Management

Version management is a little more debateable in terms of how important it is. How often have you developed a website, and thought, “actually, I prefer it the way it was 2 weeks ago”?

If you have multiple website developers, version management tools help you to control how code evolves during a project. If you’re the sole developer, it acts as a fine-grained backup tool, allowing you to access prior versions of code with ease.

I personally use Subversion, which integrates nicely with Windows Explorer and Eclipse PHP Developer Tools (Eclipse PDT) with Subclipse.

Something that some of my friends will know of me is that I absolutely hate bad customer service. There are a number of large companies in this world who put profits first, customers last. Thing is, if they put customers higher on their lists, they’d actually increase their profits! Happy customers mean more repeat business and more word-of-mouth referrals.

Here are some examples of bad customer service that I’ve received recently, as well as what I’ve learnt from each of them. It appears that most companies don’t even care that there’s a recession, as they seem to be doing everything they can to lose customers! To avoid legal issues, I’ve decided to remove the company names from this article.

Manage customer expectations

The Problem: I was buying a new laptop from a large computer company. Delivery time on the website was stated at 3 days. Great I thought. In reality? It was 3 days for the company to dispatch the laptop, it was an extra 7 days for actual delivery! Nowhere on the website was it clear about actual delivery time after ordering. I only got an update about expected delivery dates after it was dispatched from the company’s warehouse.

The Lesson: Ensure customers are fully aware of what service or product you provide. Also ensure they understand your commitments. If you allow customers to become misled, and customers get frustrated as a result, you will lose customers quickly.

Allow customers to give you feedback

The Problem: The above-mentioned computer company did not provide any means for making a complaint about their service! No phone number dedicated for complaints, and they completely ignored emails I sent them. (and no, I won’t be using them again).

The Lesson: Accept it, any company will make mistakes. However, if you don’t allow customers to complain, you can’t find out the areas in which you need to improve. Whilst running a company, it’s virtually impossible to see your business from the perspective of a customer. From a customer’s perspective, you might be doing a terrible job! However, unless you find out what you’re doing wrong, you’ll just lose customers without knowing why.

Do what you say you’re going to do

The Problem (1): I had a “While You Were Out” card left by a courier. No problem I was out, however, the note on the card said “we will not redeliver”. Right, ok, decided to talk to customer service. Customer service explained that it was a misunderstanding and that redelivery would be sorted for the next day.

The next day, I checked online, and the tracking details had no mention that the item was being delivered. Not happy. Called the courier again, “no, it’s not been sent out”. So I said I was told that it would definitely be delivered that day. To their credit, the customer service representative called up the depot, and requested it be put out for delivery for the same day.

The Problem (2): I had an issue with a broadband company charging the wrong amount for an internet package, which was based on a special deal. I also had an issue getting them to change the package in the first place (took 3 attempts!!). Several emails to customer service have yet to resolve the issue with incorrect billing, and that’s after 3 weeks. I will be leaving them when the contract is over.

The Lesson: If you’re going to arrange delivery, then do it. Don’t allow the customer to remind you to do what you said you’d do. Failure to do what you said you’d do means you can’t be trusted. Companies without trust will lose business.

Conclusion

It’s shocking how bad customer service is in this country, and nobody seems to care. I had all these issues in the space of just 2 weeks! So if you’re unhappy with a service, complain. If you receive a complaint, act on it! Complaints can be very useful, so don’t consider them to be purely hassle.

Remember a simple rule, a satisfied customer tells 1 person. A dissatisfied customer tells 10. Good customer service takes work, but in the long run, you’ll be more profitable.

Update Charles from PiggyBankPie made a point that customers who complain and then get their issues resolved, typically tend to be happier customers than those who experienced no problems at all. Something else worth bearing in mind!

Today I was on a HMRC Course on “Becoming Self Employed”. Now I’ve been self-employed for a number of years, but I was recommended to go on the course to learn about what expenses are tax-deductible. The advantages of going on one of these courses is that you can ask all the questions that are specific to your business. I found that I now truly understand what I can legitimately claim when I do a tax return.

I’ve now been on 2 courses, and I thoroughly recommend them both:

• Becoming Self Employed
• Self assessment for self-employed people

All courses that HMRC provide are free of charge because they want to encourage people to correctly complete their self-assessment tax returns. It saves hassle for both them and you.

Anyway, here are the highlights of what I learnt (in addition to what I already knew). Please don’t treat these words as gospel, I suggest you talk to HMRC on official guidelines.

• Meals – all of your own meals when you’re away from home on business are claimable as expenditure. As expected, alcohol is not claimable. Additionally, costs for entertaining clients are also not claimable.
• Car Travel – there is a simple way to claim for costs incurred by business-related driving. Rather than keep all receipts for servicing, tax, insurance and fuel for a car, you can claim a per-mile rate instead. For the current tax year, this works out as £0.42 a mile. You just need to keep a log of all business trips. All other business travel is claimable as expenditure (taxi, bus, train, plane, etc).
• Computers – You can claim some relief on them, even if you use them for personal and business use. Basically you claim them as a capital expense (as opposed to the easier-to-understand revenue expense). There’s a lot to know about capital expenditure, so I’ll leave you to find out more.

For anyone who has a business (online or otherwise), I strongly recommend the HMRC courses to ensure you only pay the tax you need to. I firmly believe that everyone should pay their way, that’s why I believe that tax is a good thing. However, I don’t want to pay more than my fair share.