for my clients
Wed, Mar 24, 2010 @ 11:51am | by Cindy
There are many ways to measure the success of your website, and they don't all involve the "hits" mentioned in the previous post. Some relate almost one-to-one with your standard brick-and-mortar store success:
- Word of mouth
- How many contacts you receive via the website (email form)
- How many website-only coupons are redeemed
- Use your imagination. Place a call-to-action on your site that isn't anywhere else.
However, you may want to measure more than this, ater all, you probably spend quite a bit of money on your site, and it's the most difficult to measure success. Analyzing your website logs can provide a lot of detail about your visitors' online experience, as well as about your visitors themselves. An easy and useful tool for analyzing traffic for any site is Google Analytics. This is a free service provided by Google, requiring only a free Google Account to get started.
By placing a hidden JavaScript at the end of each web page on your site, each time the page is viewed by a visitor, all information available about that visit is collected by Google. Based on this data collected, they provide your site statistics for your study. Information includes the basics such as how many times a page is viewed, allowing you to see which pages are your most popular, but also information such as profiling your customers (location from country and state and even city, languages, browser and operating system used, speed of Internet connection, and more), visitor loyalty (how many returned to your site vs, how many were first time visitors), length of time on your site and how many pages viewed, and more. Traffic Sources analysis offers such information as how many came directly to your site and which search engines provide the most referrals, and search terms used to find your site. Content information includes top "landing" pages - the first page viewed by a visitor, as well as top "exit" pages - the last page viewed on your site. Google Analytics offers a lot more advanced information as well, but we'll get into details about all of this later.
For now, if you're not using it yet, contact your webmaster and ask them to add Google Analytics to your website. For more information about it, go here: http://www.google.com/analytics
Tue, Mar 23, 2010 @ 12:20pm | by Cindy
You've had your website for awhile, but do you know if it's being used? What do you know about your site visitors? It's known by a lot of different terms, hits, statistics, analytics, traffic analysis, visitors, but what is it really? For now we'll call it "website traffic", to define those people zooming along the Internet highway who stop by to visit your website. Let's learn a little more about these people, who they are and who we want them to be.
You know your business, you know your customers, if pressed you could probably even identify your primary target audience: perhaps it's middle-aged women on a spiritual quest; perhaps it's people headed to the beach during the summer; perhaps it's families looking for a quality education locally. While typical websites don't track gender or age, there is a lot you can learn about your visitors looking at your website traffic.
Every time a person views a page on your site, "hits" are logged to a webserver. If you know what you're looking at (or have the right tools) you can analyze these hits. You can learn things such as where your customers are, what they're looking at, what they're looking for, how long they spent on your site, even which ones used a mobile phone to view your site. Don't worry, it's not an invasion of privacy; although this information is being recorded about your surfing habits every time you visit a website, your identity is not associated with it. By looking at the volume of visits, you can learn a lot about your customers by the trends you see in your traffic logs.
Coming up next: a good (and free!) tool to use for measuring your website traffic.
Tue, Mar 9, 2010 @ 11:13am | by Cindy
While many small business owners have that nagging voice in the back of their heads telling them to build a website so they'll get more customers, it takes a little more effort than just building it. One of my clients had a book he had authored, with a couple thousand copies sitting in his garage waiting to be sold. He wanted a website to sell his book. The site turned out well, promoting the book appropriately, with excerpts and videos of how to use the book in an educational setting. The domain name was perfectly suited, matching the title of the book and also the subject matter. Google ranked it number one for a variety of searches. But the books didn't sell. Oh, he had a few sales from the Internet, but he refused to put in any more effort. He would go into schools and demonstrate his book, but wouldn't remember to tell them the web address. He had flyers and business cards, but he didn't want to spend the money to get the URL on it, not even hand-writing it on them. Despite all our conversations about it, not once did he ever make any effort to tell his customers his website existed. How are they to know they can buy his books online if he doesn't tell them? He eventually gave up on the website entirely, frustrated because although it looked good, functioned properly, advertised it appropriately and even ranked #1 in Google, it didn't succeed.
It is a common misconception to rely on search engines alone. Search engines are fabulous, they have their place, and they are necessary to the success of a website. But in reality, it's generally not what is going to drive your customers to your website. YOU need to do that. But it doesn't take much effort to make it a success; your customers want to see your website, you just need to let them know where it is. Put your website address (domain name) on:
- Business cards
- Invoices and receipts
- Printed materials (flyers, brochures, pamphlets)
- Free bookmarks or other give-aways
- A sign by your cash register
- A sign or banner on your wall
- Your store window
- The yellow pages
- Newspaper ads
- Shopping bags
- Press releases, magazine articles
- Use your imagination: t-shirts, mugs, dog leashes, Christmas cards...
Any time you mention your business name you should always have your web address listed. Every time a potential customer sees your name, you need to give them the opportunity to find your business online. To counter the above story, here's a success story from a very small effort. Winter months can be slow months for any business, so I decided to create a Facebook Fan Page for one of my retail clients. I even included it as a Facebook Fan Box Widget right on his website so people could see it. For the first two weeks he had four "fans" that were strictly friends and family (the only ones we had told). Last Friday afternoon he put a sign by his cash register that mentioned you could find him on Facebook, and by Monday morning he had 15 additional fans, and that number is steadily increasing. One little sign by the cash register is all it took to get people looking at his website. Do this yourselves!
Mon, Mar 8, 2010 @ 11:26am | by Cindy
 DPI. A common question among many small business owners is how to tell if their picture is the right size for reproducing on a flyer, business card or brochure. The term "dpi" stands for "dots per inch", and is a term that has been around for a long time for printers. It refers to the number of ink dots a printer puts on a piece of paper. Unfortunately due to its legacy, it's often mis-used in communications, for instance when your printer or designer asks for an image that will print at 200 dpi. Your image is a digital image, so you don't have a printer's "dpi" to measure.
PPI. The term you're really looking for is "ppi," which stands for "pixels per inch." If you look at an image on a website, you can typically right-click on the image and it will tell you the dimensions in pixels. For instance, the image to the right is 200 pixels wide by 240 pixels tall. So what's the ppi? Well, that depends on where you'll be using it. A typical monitor displays 72 ppi, so this image has been re-sampled down from a big image to the size (200x240) and a ppi of 72 pixels per inch. This gives you the best quality at the lowest file size, making it load quickly on the page. But let's say you copy that image and try to print it on your local color printer. What appears to be about 2 x 2.5 inches and sharp detail on the screen will print differently on your printer.
If you print the image at 72 pixels per inch on your printer, it will be about the same size. However, it will have a pretty poor quality, very pixelated (jagged edges). If you print it at the recommended resolution for your printer, let's say 200ppi, it will have a better quality producing a sharper image, but it's going to drop down to less than half the size you see it on the screen. That's because you still have the same total number of pixels in your image (200x240), but you're cramming them into a smaller space to produce a sharper image.
How to tell if your image is big enough to produce a sharp image with the quality you want: First check with your printer or designer, find out what size it's going to be on the printed document, and at what resolution they want it. Most printers will want a minimum of 200 ppi, but 300 ppi will produce a sharper image. So let's say your image will be 3x4 inches on the brochure, printed at a sharp 300 ppi. That means you need 300 pixels per each inch: 3 inches times 300 pixels per inch means your image needs to be at least 900 pixels wide; 4 inches in height times 300 pixels per inch equals 1200 pixels tall. Next, verify the size of your image (right click on it to see the properties). Is your image at least 900x1200 pixels? If yes, it's large enough. If it's less in either dimension, it will either be printed with poor quality, smaller size, or both.
Thu, Mar 4, 2010 @ 9:34am | by Cindy
What is a website host, and why do you have to pay hosting fees for your website? Website hosting is essentially renting a home on the Internet Freeway. The files used to build your website need a place to live on the Internet, so we rent lodging from a website "host." Just as some people prefer a one-bedroom apartment to a 4 bedroom house, depending on what functionality your site may need (streaming media files, shopping carts, etc.), we select a host and service package that offers the technologies to meet your site needs.
Your actual Internet Freeway address provided by the host is a long series of numbers called your IP address. It comes in a form similar to "123.4.56.789". Since that series of numbers and dots is difficult to remember, we use domain names, e.g. www.yourname.com. When you purchase your domain name and your web hosting, your webmaster will configure the nameservers. Those nameservers are big databases that associate your domain name to your IP address, allowing you to advertise your website address as www.yourname.com instead of 123.4.56.789.
You can read more about domain names here.
Wed, Mar 3, 2010 @ 11:22am | by Cindy
Your domain name is your presence on the Internet. My domain name is "ReevesDigital.com". No, the capitalization doesn't make a difference, but it does make it easier to read when it's written. Your domain name can be used for both your web address (www.reevesdigital.com) and your email address (info@reevesdigital.com).
Your domain name needs to be registered, and registration terms are annual. Domain names cost $10-$20 per year depending on where they are registered. If your website and your email both suddenly stop working, it's likely your domain name has expired. Never fear, most registrars will hold your domain name for an extended period of time, giving you a grace period to renew it before they offer it up for sale. Once it goes up for sale, it will most likely be purchased by someone else immediately, so you really don't want to let your registration lag. If someone else buys your domain name because you didn't keep it renewed, they become the new legal owners of it.
You can purchase your domain name for multiple years at a time. In addition to the cost savings (the cost of domain names will begin increasing this July and will continue to gradually increase for the forseeable future), there is another significant advantage to longer term registrations: The longer you have your domain name registered, the higher your rankings in search engines appear.
Curious about your domain name? You can view what information is publicly available about your domain name, including its expiration date, using the Internic WhoIs tool: http://www.internic.net/whois.html Contact your webmaster if you have any questions about it.
If I have registered or renewed your domain name for you, I will continue to manage this for you until you ask me to stop, so you don't need to worry about it. As I wrote in an earlier post, there are many companies that will contact you to register your domain name for you. It's a lucrative business for them with minimal investment, preying on the ill-informed. Please contact me if anyone wants to renew your domain name for you, as not all of them are legitimate.
Thu, Feb 25, 2010 @ 1:59pm | by Cindy
One question I'm asked frequently is about renewing domain names. This is a service I provide my clients, but it doesn't keep malicious companies from trying to get their business. A popular one sent by snail mail (postal mail) is from Domain Registry of America. I hesitate to call it a scam because I've never tried to use them and they may very well be a legitimate business, but their letters are very deceptive and I warn everyone to stay away from them. There have been numerous complaints to ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), but unfortunately the DRoA is still in business.
Domain Registry of America sends out letters to people stating their domain name is due to expire, sometimes as far in advance as 5-6 months of the actual expiration date. They state you need to renew your domain name right away, with a "reply requested by" date far in advance of when you actually need to renew. They're renewal prices are outrageously high, 2-3 times the standard renewal rates from more legitimate registrars. For example, the latest request they sent me arrived yesterday, quoting $30/year to renew my .com name, when checking out GoDaddy.com's .com registration rates today are $10.69/year. Domain Registry of America can quote considerably higher rates, I've heard some people writing a check for $300 or more. Don't be fooled.
The letters from Domain Registry of America often imply urgency is required, to keep your website alive you have to send them money now. That's not typically true. Read carefully, and then check with your webmaster to verify when your domain name needs to be renewed, and which registrar they recommend using. I'm willing to bet your webmaster will not recommend Domain Registry of America.
It looks like the same people who run DRoA also run Domain Registry of Canada, of Europe and of Australia. To read more about the DRoA, you can check out this blog post: http://blog.forret.com/2004/12/domain-registry-of-america-scam/
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