This post brought back some memories for me. Her advice is to have someone who is not familiar with your web site try to use it. Ask them to perform some simple tasks. Have them speak their thoughts as they try to accomplish some simple goals.
One of the most effective ways to get a wake-up call on the problems in your website is to watch someone actually use it. I can promise you’ll be surprised at where they go and the conclusions that they jump to. Make sure to take off your defensive armor because I have to tell you, this can be an uncomfortable exercise!
I used to work for a large video game company, building their marketing web sites. Some of their games were for kids. They had a test lab where they brought in subjects to test the video games, to make sure they worked and that people understood them.
It had a one way mirror along one wall, just like in the movies. They had trained professionals that did the testing. They knew not to lead or to help or make faces or call the test subjects idiots. They would ask them to accomplish simple tasks.
We built a site for teachers, so they brought in some teachers to use it. The teachers came one at a time and sat at a table next to the one way mirror. We could see them, the screen, and hear what they were saying. They were asked to speak as they tried to do the tasks.
Our entire web development team sat in awe as these people had trouble doing the simplest things! We were all seriously shocked. We wanted to scream, from behind the mirror “Just click that button! It’s right there!!!”.
I thought I understood user interfaces and web design until that experience. I was humbled. The whole web dev team approached design a different way after that.
You may think that your site makes sense and everything is easy to find. You won’t know anything until you watch someone else use it.
HubSpot recently published a study about marketing. One of the things they found was that companies who blog more often are more likely to acquire customers.
Read that again slowly. “Blog more often” correlates with “more customers”.
An underutilized blog means customers are being left on the table. The survey this year shows a direct correlation between blog post frequency and the chance that a company has acquired a customer through that channel.
This is described as “A sweet, tart black cherry soda. Sweetened with Sucralose.”
I like black cherries. I want to like diet soda pops. I want to like this soda pop, but I have my doubts.
I pop it open and the smell if like black cherry soda. It’s that familiar smell of, I don’t know, jelly? candy? something. Something smells very familiar. It’s sweet and fruity. It smells of childhood.
I have hope.
I take a sip. I wait. My taste buds explode with the flavor of black cherry ice cream that I had as a kid. This is sweet, but not too sweet, and very fruity. Very, very black cherry. Very, very good.
I smile wide.
I take another sip and I’m 9 years old, eating a black cherry ice cream cone from the drug store. This takes me back.
I smile some more. This is great soda. I love this stuff. I could buy more of this stuff.
Great aftertaste. Just the right amount of everything. There is nothing wrong with soda.
Wait! Did I say this is a diet soda? This tastes like real cane sugar in there. I need to check the label. Yes, it’s diet. Unbelievable, but true.
This is an amazing diet soda. This is an amazing black cherry soda. The fact that it’s both, means that there will be more of this in our house soon. I can not recommend this enough.
INGREDIENTS: Carbonated Water, Natural Black Cherry Flavors, Citric Acid, Caramel Color, Red 40, Sodium Benzoate (Preserves Freshness), Sucralose, Acesulfame Potassium.
How good is boysenberry soda going to be? Wow. I love boysenberry pie and ice cream. This is going to be great. I’ve been waiting for this one.
The first smell after you pop off the lid is faint. It’s sort of like boysenberrys, I guess, but it’s not very strong. Is this going to live up to my expectations?
I take a sip. As I’m sipping, I think that it’s not bad, but there’s not a lot of flavor here at all. It seems watered down. I was expecting the strong sweet of pie filling, but it’s just a nice, fruity flavor, but even the fruit isn’t strong.
Oh well. Maybe next time.
At the end of the sip, it hits me. The full flavor of boysenberry, like you picked them right off the vine and shoved a fist full in your mouth. Wow! Big flavor.
This was at the end of the sip, not during. The flavor was unmistakably boysenberry. It was full and strong, not too sweet, not like pie filling, but like fresh berries, right off the vine.
I take another sip and again, there’s not a lot of flavor at the beginning. I stop and it hits me again. Very different.
It seems like it’s watered down, then it slams you with the full force of flavor. Very nice.
I’m liking this as I drink the whole bottle. I’m almost done when I get another surprise. Boysenberry pulp! It’s got real boysenberry pulp in it. This is nice, very nice.
I read the contents again:
INGREDIENTS: Carbonated Water, Boysenberries Grown in the Pacific Northwest, Cane Sugar, Organic Lemon Juice, Contains Boysenberry Pulp!
Yup. That sounds right. Nothing artificial about this. Strange experience drinking it, but the aftertaste flavor is amazing. I do like it. Maybe not a favorite, but it’s definitely good. I like it.
Green River – Diet; The original lime soda from Illinois, now available as a diet soda.
This one looked green, very very green. The name is Green River, so that makes sense, but it’s still a little off putting. It’s not what I’d call a natural color.
It’s also a diet cola, so this could go either way. I pop open the bottle and take a whiff.
Not great. I get the lime smell, but there’s some other chemical smell. It’s not as sweet as I expected. Maybe it will be OK.
The first taste is fizzy. The bubbles are really strong. That’s nice.
The flavor is definitely lime. While you’re drinking it, there’s the lime. It’s not very sweet. It’s not bad.
But then you stop drinking and the aftertaste hits. It’s…um…nasty. It’s chemical and bitter. Sodium benzoate potassium acesulfame or something. I have no idea, but it’s not good.
I take another drink and now I can taste that nasty aftertaste while I’m drinking. If you drink it fast, you don’t notice it as much, but the aftertaste always hits hard.
I finish the bottle. I get used to the taste. It’s still not great. I can still taste it after the bottle is empty.
This isn’t the most horrible drink I’ve had, but it’s close. I give it a 2 out of 10. I will not be buying any more of this stuff.
A few months ago, I attended WordCamp LA with a friend. I sat through a bunch of great sessions and this was among the best. I expected this talk to be funny, and it was, but I also learned some valuable business lessons from it. Worth the watch if you have the time and want to find out how to approach developing your business.
I ran into an old friend the other day at the supermarket. We caught up on each other’s lives, children, jobs, wives, churches, etc.
He proudly told me that they finally “got on the Internet”. Their son, in his early teens, has always told them that it’s too hard and they wouldn’t understand it, so the dad had stayed away from it for years. Someone had given them an old computer a long time ago and that’s all they’ve had for years. They just recently got a new computer.
Do You Know Who Sees Your Site?
I guess the soccer coach wouldn’t give them a schedule, but told them to look it up on the web, so he finally figured out how to do that.
He was so proud when he told me that he knew how to click on “Internet”, type in where he wanted to go into Google, then click the mouse twice.
I had to work really hard to not laugh out loud. I’ve been BUILDING web sites since 1994 and he just now learned how to “click twice” to get there.
I told him that I build web sites and he looked at me with the look in his eye that said “I hear the words coming out of your mouth but I have no idea what you are talking about.”
“Websites! You know, the places you go on the Internet.” I told him. More blank stares. He didn’t know what a web site was. I tried to explain, but after a few more sentences, he said “Well, it was good to see you again!” and walked off.
I forget sometimes that not every one knows what I know. If you are reading this right now, most people probably don’t know what you know.
On one hand, that makes me feel smart, but on the other, it reminds me that we need to make our web sites, these places that you go on the Internet, as simple as possible, as obvious as possible.
I don’t want to insult anyone, but simple and direct will always work better. Think of how to use a TV or how you order at MacDonalds.
State what your site is about in big, bold letters. Tell user what you want them to do. I almost want to put a big red button at the top of the screen that says “Order Here Now!”.
What would your site say to the least knowledgeable among us?
We got a new Wacom tablet last night. I’ve had the old one for years and it was starting to miss things somehow. It just wasn’t feeling right, like some of the areas weren’t as sensitive as they used to be.
It took a little bit to get used to the new tablet. It’s a size bigger, which gives more freedom, but the proportions are off from what I’m used to. I played for an hour before I got comfortable.
My wife played with it after I did. She apparently got comfortable with it right away, because I came out to my computer this morning to see this image on the screen.
We updated the music intro to all of the videos and re-posted them. I’m still learning the nuances of video and audio editing, which is one reason that I even started this project, to learn new techniques.
This is the entire play list of all 8 videos, in a row, one right after another. If you want to learn the basics of how to get around in WordPress, take a few minutes and watch these.
If you want to watch each one individually on a little bit bigger screen, you can see them all by clikcing here: WordPress Video Tutorials.
Are these videos helpful? Is there anything I could do to make them better?
Interesting history of a very cool place to sell your stuff.
In June 2005, Etsy, still based in Mr. Kalin’s Fort Greene apartment, went live. It caught on almost immediately. Today the company boasts a quarter of a million crafters selling 3.8 million listed items to 2.3 million registered members. On an average day, the firm’s 65 employees process nearly 25,000 orders and collect a fee of 3.5% of the selling price. Last year, Etsy had $87.5 million in gross merchandise sales—more than triple 2007’s $26 million.
“Rob’s empowered people to sell the things they make and to earn a living by cutting out the middleman,” says Brooklyn–based clothing designer Chanel Kennebrew, who has been selling on etsy.com for two years.
Etsy today is a place where the public can buy directly from artisans, and where sellers can purchase materials from crafts suppliers. In addition, Etsy users can communicate through forums and live chats, as well as via Etsy’s offline crafts events and workshops.
We knocked out a quick and dirty web site for a friend of my wife’s yesterday. She gathers sea glass from our local beaches and make jewelry out of it. There’s some really beautiful stuff that she’s got for sale.
This was a fast design and build. It is typical of what a small business needs. There’s not a lot of content, but the basics, the important parts are there.
We did a basic installation of WordPress on her web host. We threw a basic template together, grabbing some images that we had. There’s not a lot of polish on it, but it still looks really nice, (I think, anyway.)
We haven’t even done any SEO on it yet. She needed it up by this morning because she’s selling at a fair today and was handing out information sheets with the URL on it. I quit working on it and went to bed when it was done enough for people to look at. We’ll polish it up a bit later.
This build would be less than the $900 per my Web Design and Development page. We still have a bit of work to do, so this would have been cheaper.
I hope you’ll find my products to be a welcome addition of adornment that will inspire the mystical and historical. Sea glass jewelry has been around for as long as we have been making glass. Cleopatra wore glass as jewelry. Often when I’m making a piece I imagine if this would be favored by the famous Egyptian Queen.
I’m reminded again about how much people DON’T know about this whole Interweb thing.
My wife was talking with a friend who said they spent 8 hours trying to get a web site up and running and it still wasn’t working. I was shocked. I can have a site up in 20 minutes, including registering the new domain name. Slap a little WordPress on the old web host, make a few changes to the configuration, and blammo! instant web site. Child’s play.
Child's play.
At least it is for me, but then I’ve been doing this since 1994.
The basics of a web site are about the domain name, the web host, and the files to create the site.
A user types in a web address into their browser (IE, FireFox, Safari) and hits go. The browser tried to find out where the web host with that domain name lives. Once it figures out which server to ask for the web page, it goes and asks that server. The server thinks about it for a minute, then returns the correct web page that is then displayed in the browser.
This means that the domain name needs to be registered. It needs to point at the right web host server. There’s some configuration that needs to happen to make that work.
Next step is that the web host needs to point that domain name at the right directory on the web server. It’s possible to have www.domain.com point at one directory and blog.domain.com point at another directory which then creates two totally separate web sites.
The files in the directory need to be written in a way that make sense. They can be in plain old HTML, which is a fancy way of writing text. They are nothing but text put into a certain formate. If don’t want to learn HTML (and why would you these days?), then you can use an out of the box content management system. I use WordPress for almost everything these days. That takes a bit of an install and there is one or two critical things that need to be set correctly, but most web hosts can set this up for you with a click of a button. Really. Click, bang, done.
There seems to be a few critical steps along the way to getting a web site up and running. Easy for me, hard for you. I once heard that brain surgery is easy if you know how to do it.
If you are having trouble trying to get a web site up and running, but are just having that one bit of trouble where something is just not working right, send me an email. I’ll totally help you out. I hate to see someone struggle with something that I can quickly and easily fix. I won’t design and develop a new WordPress theme for you for free, but I’ll be happy to help you through the little problems along the way to getting your site up and running.
I ran into a situation again where a client has owned a domain name for years, but now they are not happy with their hosting company, so they want to move their site to my servers and let me host them.
This is usually a simple, quick, easy process, but it turns out that their current host registered the domain name to them, the hosting company, and not to her, the owner of the company. Now that she wants to transfer the registration to herself, they suddenly are not answering her email or phone calls. Since they are legally the owners, they could tell her to pound sand and hold on to her domain name.
It’s not moral, but it’s legal.
This is a good time to do a “whois” look up on your domain name and see who is listed as the administrative contact. They are legally the owners of the name. If you are not listed there, ask to be listed. Find out who the name is registered through. The best solution is to register the name yourself and list the hosting company as the technical contact. Let them make configuration changes to the DNS or whatever they have to do, but you need to own the name by having it registered in your name.
We went for a drive on Saturday. I knew there was a car show at the Orange County Fair Grounds, but I didn’t want to spend the money or the time walking around in the hot sun. We ended up close to it anyway, so we drove around the area. We found where the exit to the car show was and since it was later in the afternoon, cars were streaming out. We parked right across the street and watched our own private parade of cool cars.
I saw my first Corvette ZR-1, too many deuce coupes, 55 Nomads, and outrageous cars. I saw a 65 Chevelle that looked identical to the one I street raced in the summer of 1974. That brought back a flood of memories of growing up in the 60′s and 70′s, working on cars. I wondered how I got from there to where I am today, building web sites and doing Internet Marketing.
Those “high boys” got to be so common because the guys that built them were trying to take a stock car and make it better. They took what they had, a cheap, plentiful, easy to get car, and make it drive faster, handle better, and look cooler.
That’s essentially the definition of a hacker. Some one who can take what is easily available and make it better. It’s the mind set of the DIY movement. Take what you have and make it better. Don’t wait for someone to do it for you. Don’t wait for next year’s model. Take last year’s model and make it better than anything that any company will ever sell.
Early hot rodders were outside the law. Some hackers are outside the law. It doesn’t matter. They both do whatever they want to make whatever they have better, according to their own rules, their own goals.
Building a web site is like building a hot rod. Have an idea of what you want. Take the tools and materials at hand, and just build it.
Some people have the ideas, but not the skills. There are hot rod shops that can build you the hot rod that you want. There are development shops that can build you the web site you want.
Take control. Do it yourself. Don’t take what they give you. Make it your own. Make it what you want. Be a control freak. I am.
“Though 63% of consumers and small business owners turn to the internet first for information about local companies and 82% use search engines to do so, only 44% of small businesses have a website and half spend less than 10% of their marketing budget online.”
Less than half of all small businesses have a web site. Nothing. Even a car repair place or a plumber can have a web site for FREE these days. It takes a little time and effort, I can help, and you can have a FREE small business web site.
It WILL help your business. If it brings one more customer, how much is that worth? I’m not even talking about a lot of SEO or content or anything. It’s basically a free phone book listing. This, what you are reading right now, is the new Yellow Pages.
I need to think about how to address this better. I can’t wrap my head around it (and I have a huge head).
Find out how my site beat Wikipedia in Google. Even if you don't know anything about any of this web stuff, you can learn how to improve the ranking of your web site in the search engines.
This book is targeted at the very beginner, people who are not savvy about the web or the Internet. It explains it all, from the very basic, so you won't feel like you're in over your head.
The world has changed. The Internet is becoming a normal part of everyday life for a majority of people. With every new change in technology, comes the rise and fall of businesses as they try to adapt, from railroads to airplanes, from buggies to cars, from radio to TV, from vinyl records to CDs to MP3s.
If you need a web site that is attractive, easy to use, and it's easy to maintain, we can build that for you. Multiple features can be built in, including a shopping basket if you want to sell your products on the web. Read about our design services.
If you want Google to list your site as close to the top of the first page as possible, we can show methods to make that happen. These methods are called "SEO", Search Engine Optimization. Higher page rank means more customers. Do you want more customers? Read about our SEO services.
Rhonda commented on How To Use Email To Make Money, Without Being A Jerk:
Great idea! I have a lot of digital products I can give away. My question is, if I have a product that I wanted feedback on, is it appropriate to email it for free and ask people to give feedback? Not sure I would get many who would bother to write back.
nancy monsebroten commented on How To Use Email To Make Money, Without Being A Jerk:
Nancy the potter here. In answer to your request for what things we want to hear from you...I just want to have you keep doing what you do! Your posts spark me to forge on! You bring up things that are in the back of my head but I had forgotten!
I
Conrad Walton commented on How To Use Email To Make Money, Without Being A Jerk:
The easiest, most obvious is a digital document of some sort.
It has to be useful, something that tempts me to want it.
I would suggest a PDF file that's a special report of some sort.
Maybe "10 things to look for when buying handmade jewelry". "Buyers Guide to Handmade Jewelry". "8 reasons Handmade Jewelry
Mike Korner commented on I’m a unicorn!:
You are definitely a unicorn Conrad!
I like "my homies" but "Freedom Partners" might be better. What I mean is, by partnering, all parties get closer to freedom.
This is usually a simple, quick, easy process, but it turns out that their current host registered the domain name to them, the hosting company, and not to her, the owner of the company. Now that she wants to transfer the registration to herself, they suddenly are not answering her email or phone calls. Since they are legally the owners, they could tell her to pound sand and hold on to her domain name. 
