Archive for December 2009

Last month we talked about the 10 essentials that every business website should have.

No.1 on this list was contact details – its probably the most important element to any website.

You should give your website visitors the option of interacting with you in as many ways as possible: Telephone, email address, physical address, contact form, forum, Twittter, Facebook.

Today we had a great tip from Phil Evans who runs Fractal Design. Its all about how to add a Skype button to your website, so that people can contact you by Skype.

1. Go to this page on Skype: http://www.skype.com/intl/en/share/buttons/

It looks like this:

2. Enter Your Skype Name

3. Choose a Style of button (and here are the choices):

3. Press ‘Preview your Button’

4. Copy the HTML that is generated in the box beside the ‘Preview’ button

5. Go to your WebEden control panel and place the WebEden HTML Snippet in the place on the page that you would like your Skype button to appear.

The HTML snippet can be found by going:

File Manager –> Library –> HTML Snippet

This is what it looks like:

6. Paste the code from Skype into the Snippet, and press ‘save’.

Hey presto! A Skype button on your Website! People can now contact you via Skype.

Many thanks to Phil for this tip.

Any comments about this tip, or if you have any of your own, please leave them below

Its been a busy year on the WebEden blog!

I’ve just been looking through some of the blog statistics and I thought you’d be interested in a few of them.

To start with, there have been 239 posts in all, comprising of 121,233 words. We’ve added 647 links and 4,787 images.

You’ve participated quite a bit too! The blog has received 841 comments. Perhaps the most incredible statistic is the number of ‘spam’ comments we’ve had: a whopping 12,268.

We’ve also had some great guest blogs which have been some of the most popular posts.

Its been a strong year for visitors too. The blog has been visited by 18,562 people, who spent an average of 1 minute 58 seconds reading. They looked at 53,679 pages.

Here’s the graph of page views from Google Analytics:

Those spikes that you can see are from when we send a newsletter out.

The most popular categories have been video tutorials and search engine advertising.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed, either though writing, commenting, tweeting or reading.

Have a great Christmas!

We’ve always maintained that Google is a great innovator. At a Google run technology event a couple of weeks ago they again demonstrated their forward thinking. The Internet is now awash with excitement about what the worlds’ biggest Internet company is going to bring us next.

First up its Google Goggles. This is a tool that lets you search using pictures rather than words.

How does that work?

Basically you take a picture of something, and Google attempts to recognise it. Google then searches for information about it just as if you had typed the name of the object into the search field. It can also distinguish text too.

At the moment it only works for mobile phones that run the Google (Android) operating system. Users can download Goggles as an app.

Vic Gundotra, Google’s VP of engineering said that Google Goggles was made possible because Google had captured and stored and labeled images of more than a billion things. He also said that he expected this type of technology to become much more popular.

“Today marks the beginning of this journey,” he said. “It’s our goal to be able to visually identify any image.”

Shailesh Nalawadi, a product manager for Google Goggles said: “Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words. For many search queries, using an image to search is easier and more useful than text alone, especially on a mobile,”

Google Translate

Google also showcased a new translation product which would translate your spoken word into a number of common languages. To make it work, users speak a phrase into their handset, and press translate. The system then analyses the words, translates them and then speaks the newly translated word back through the phone’s speaker.

It is hoped that this will be available in the first part of 2010.

Exciting stuff from Google. But the question we’re all asking here is: when will they finally invent personal jet packs?

Leave us a comment below.

Online Sales Christmas Boom

There’s been plenty of news in the press about how online sales are booming this Christmas.

Research from GSI Commerce out last week showed that despite the credit crunch online shopping was set to have another bumper year.

More specifically the research showed that, compared to last year, twice as many consumers are prepared to spend more than £1,000 when visiting an ecommerce website.

So people who run websites are rubbing their hands with glee at the moment are they?

Well it’s not quite as simple as that. At the moment the UK is focused on Christmas, on turkey, on holidays, and on presents. So if you sell turkeys, Christmas trees, or great Christmas gifts, then your sales should be booming.

But at the end of the day people only have so much time in their day, and so much money in their pocket. And if they’re spending that time and money shopping for Christmas, then they’re not doing other more ‘normal’ activity.

So whilst many online retailers have their cash tills ringing, other online businesses are getting squeezed.

Christmas for WebEden

I can show you what I mean by sharing some traffic stats for WebEden. Our website building tool is neither wholly business focused nor wholly consumer focused. Some businesses use WebEden to build a website. And many individuals build personal websites too.

But one thing that we are not is Christmas present material. We’re yet to see a WebEden website stuffed into anyone’s stocking!

So as people’s minds turn to Christmas, they turn away from building websites. Here’s a screen grab from our Google analytics.

As you can see we’ve seen a steady decline since the start of December.

This trend will continue until Christmas day, there will be a short rise in traffic the following week, and then another slump for new year.

So if like us your business has nothing to do with Christmas, you’re probably seeing a similar picture.

What happens in the New Year?

The silver lining here is that January is usually the biggest month of the year for website traffic.

Online retailers launch their sales. And business focused websites see a steep rise in traffic as people return to work in order to ‘get to grips’ with the new year.

Have you had a look at what’s happening with your website traffic? Are you seeing a pre-christmas peak or are you bumping along the bottom? Leave us a comment below.

Here’s an inspiring story from the world of ecommerce. It just shows you what the Internet can do for YOU (imagine poster with pointing finger etc.)

Last week some people set themselves a challenge to create an online business in 24 hours.

A group of young designers had a brainstorming session, sifted through the ideas they came up with, picked a winner and at 1 minute past midnight started working on their project.

The concept they had decided on was an online shop where you could shop by colour. Runner up ideas included DeathVolt – a website that stored usernames and passwords to be passed onto next of kin in the event of death; and ‘Lists’ – a site where you could create and share your top 10 lists of anything.

Developers grabbed some open source software and modified it to recognise colours in pictures. Others organised a feed from Tradedoubler.com that would aggregate products from a list of clothing retailers.

And did they manage to finish the job? You bet: They tested it by carrying out a colour search at 1 minute before midnight. The website went live just after.

The icing on the cake? The resultant website – DRHue.com, was then sold on Ebay for £3,100. Not bad for a days work!

A spokesman for design agency ‘Nonsense’ – who had been involved in the project – said that the idea behind the ’24-hour start up’ was to demonstrate to entrepreneurs how quickly ideas can be turned into reality online.

In actual fact, the founders were disappointed with the final sale price – they had hoped they’d get as much as £20k.

It does show what can be achieved when you have a clear idea of direction. WebEden allows you to build a website in a matter of minutes if not hours, meaning that you too take turn your ideas into virtual reality.

Have you managed to make your web project in a short timescale? Or have you laboured for months before your idea went live? Let us know about your experiences below.

A few months ago we brought you news of a free online tool that gives you feedback on your website design. 5-second test shows your site to volunteers for 5 seconds, and then asks them to write down what they think your website is all about.

You can use those comments to improve your website, and make it easier for users to understand and navigate.

That post has been so popular that we’ve pulled together three more free online tools to help you in your website building.

Paint.net

Paint.net is free tool that lets you create or edit images, and then save them for use on your website. It’s like a ‘photoshop lite’ for those of us with out the cash (or the patience) for the full blown software.

With Paint.net you can build up your images in layers, adding complexity and texture. You can manipulate each individual layer at any time. Once you’re happy with your image you can flatten it, and then save it many different files types.

Zamzar.com

On Zamzar.com you can convert almost any file type to any other file type. Have you got an excel file that you want to turn into a PDF? Or what about a PDF that you want to turn into Word so that you can edit it? Zamzar can do the lot.

Zamzar can also convert a wide rang of music, video, image and compressed files.

Here’s just a few of the extensions that Zamzar can deal with: .ods; .odt; .ppt; .pptx; .ps; .pub; .rtf; .docx; .doc; .xls; .xlsx; .cvs; .odp;  .wpd; .wps… the list goes on.

Zamzar can also convert iTunes files to mp3.

The other cool thing about Zamzar is that you can add a button to your browser toolbar that lets you click on Youtube videos, convert and save them.

Imagemerger.net

One side effect in the digital-camera-megapixel-race is that the files that modern digital cameras produce are now pretty massive. Do you ever have large photos that take an age to download? Ones that you could blow up to the size of a poster? Would be useful to cut them down to size, possibly for use on your website?

With Imagemerger.net/resize.php you can do just that. You can specify the % reduction you want to apply to your image.

Imagemerer.net also has some other cool image manipulation tools – one which blends two photos together.

ColorZilla

Colorzilla is a free extension for the Firefox browser that can help you to choose the right colour for all the elements of your website.

You can download Colorzilla from the Firefox website. It has a colour picker that sits in the bottom left hand corner of your browser window. If you want to know what the RGB colour of anything on the web, simply click the colour picker and then click on the website that you want to know the colour of.

Colorzilla then displays the RGB and Hex values of that colour.

Check these free tools out and let us know what you think.

Do you know any free online tools that you can share?

For the last few years, December has marked the time when search engines put out some PR about what we’ve all been searching for in the last 12 months.

Thanks to our love of lists these are a hit with news organisations and dinner parties alike.

And this year is no exception. First up, as reported over on TechCrunch, it’s the search engine newcomer Bing. Launched earlier this year, Bing has moved to take a significant chunk of the US search market, although probably not from Google.

Whilst search engine users appear to love new technology, they don’t love it as much as they love faded pop stars. That’s my long winded way of saying the Michael Jackson beat Twitter to the no.1 spot.

Here’s the entire top ten (with all the porn and salubrious search terms removed).

1.    Michael Jackson
2.    Twitter
3.    Swine Flu
4.    Stock Market
5.    Farrah Fawcett
6.    Patrick Swayze
7.    Cash for Clunkers
8.    Jon and Kate Gosselin
9.    Billy Mays
10.    Jaycee Dugard

AskJeeves has been compiling a top 10 too. They reckon they’re a bit different from other search engines. They say that people use their search engines to ask real language questions. To make this point, their 2009 top 10 are all question based.

And the question that is asked more frequently than any other – one that WebEden has been trying to answer all year – is: ‘What is Twitter’.

2nd up (a legitimate concern given all the airtime and column inches): ‘Do I have swine flu?’

And third, something a bit more unusual: ‘Is Lady Gaga a man’.

This question was asked following the star’s appearance at Glastonbury festival, which apparently put her gender under suspicion. You know how rumours spread amongst the Twitterati.

Others in the top 10 were the more serious: ‘What is the Lisbon Treaty?’ and ‘when will the recession end?’.

Any of these make it into your top 10? Leave us a comment below.

Here at WebEden we often get asked to have a look at customer websites and give our feedback on how they’re looking. We usually make comments on images, menus, fonts and layouts.

But often we find that business websites are lacking some of the essentials that every single one needs.

There are some basic questions that every business owner needs to ask themselves when putting their website together. These are questions like:

Why do I need a website?
What information do visitors need to know?
What will website visitors look for?
How can my website make a good impression, and make it easy for people to buy from me?

Here’s our checklist of essentials that we reckon every business website should include.

1. Contact details
The most important essential, but so often overlooked. Website visitors will often try to find your website so they can find your phone number or your physical address.

At a minimum you need address, phone number and email address. Make these details easy to find – think about making the ‘contact us’ page one of the most obvious. Put your phone number big and bold on every page – top right hand corner is most common.

2. Map
Having a map of where you are:
*adds a reassurance to your website visitors that you actually exist.
*makes it easy for them to find you.

Here’s a tutorial on how to add a Google map to your website.

3. A ‘contact us’ lead capture form
Many website visitors want to know more about your products and services, but won’t feel like giving you a call. This might be because it’s out of hours, they’re busy doing something else, or they don’t want direct contact. This means that you need a lead capture form.

Having a lead capture form also allows you to give them more information when it’s convenient for you,

4. Photos of you
This is great way to add reassurance about who your website visitors are dealing with. Having a photo jump-starts a personal relationship between you and your website visitors, and boosts the likelihood that the visitor will want to get in touch.

5. Newsletter Sign up
Many website visitors are in a ‘research’ phase of the buying cycle. They’re not ready to phone you or start buying just yet, but still want more information.

A newsletter allows you to start warming up your relationship before they’re ready to buy. Website visitors get the chance to ‘taste’ your service before they actually commit to buying.

As a consequence, a weekly or monthly newsletter can be the biggest source of new leads for your website.

6. Blog
A blog is a half way house between your website and a newsletter. It lets you add personality to your website, and starts an open conversation with your visitors. You can use it to showcase your knowledge & products.

Another real advantage of a blog is that it lets you add fresh content to your website, something that Google really likes to see.  This can help boost you up the search engine results pages for searches that are relevant to you. For further advice with SEO read our Search Engine Optimisation Guide.

7. Customer reviews and testimonials
One of the most convincing ways to sell your products is by having other customers recommend them. As we’ve mentioned in our Social Media Strategy posts, good customer reviews are an important way to boost sales.

I know that you’re hardly likely to publish reviews and testimonials that show you in a poor light. But if you can get some genuine comments from a real people, and they don’t mind you publishing their contact details, then those comments go a long way to reassure others that it’s a good idea to buy from you.

8. Email to a friend
One of the very first ‘social media’ applications, ‘email to a friend’ is now often overlooked

The best way to convince someone to buy from you is by having someone else recommend your products. An ‘email to a friend’ links on your website does just this.

Here’s a video tutorial on how to add the ‘email to a friend’ application.

9. Social book marking buttons
A more modern social media service, bookmarking buttons often run on the bottom or side of web pages accompanied with a message like ‘share this’, or ‘add this’.

Social bookmarks are public web pages where you list all the links to all your favourite websites. They are a way of saying ‘I like these websites’ to anyone who is interested. They are a great way for customers to endorse you. Popular social book marking services are called Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious, and Furl.

Here’s a video tutorial on how to add social bookmarking buttons.

10. Twitter & Twitter feed
Twitter lets you have a public conversation with your customers or website visitors. It helps to add a human element to your website, and gives your website personality. Here’s a video tutorial on how to integrate your WebEden website with Facebook and Twitter.

Summary
Whilst is important to be concerned with design, colours, fonts, menus and layout, when building a website make sure you include these 10 essentials too.

Anything else you think is a ‘essential’ for your website? Leave us a comment below.

One of the primary reasons people build a website is to make money from it. And a popular way to make money from your website is to sell advertising on it.

You can choose to sell advertising space on your website to specific companies. Or you can let Google AdSense do the hardwork and sell it for you.

Google Adsense scans the text on your website and automatically serves relevant advertising around it. You get paid when someone clicks on those adverts.

Any WebEden customer can run ‘Ads by Google’ on their website, and make money from the the impressions and traffic that your website delivers.

Find out how to place Google Adsense ads on your website by watching the tutorial below.

Any questions or comments? Please leave them below.

Design a new Twitter background for WebEden and win a £20 voucher!

The big news this week is that Google has started indexing Twitter profiles.

This means that your Twitter feed is in many cases at the top of the Search Engine Results Page for your Brand searches. This is certainly the case for WebEden – read yesterday’s post for more details.

This means that when people search for you, there is a raised likelihood that they will click on your Twitter profile rather than your actual Website.

As @evans_above pointed out today, this means that its very important “to use twitter well to promote links and your website address”.

Which has got me thinking. I’m not sure that our Twitter background showcases WebEden to best effect. Have a look for yourself:

Its a bit small. Its not clearly defined. And its a bit fuzzy.

So we’re throwing the doors open to you creative lot: How do you want to have a go at designing a new Twitter background for WebEden?

We’re after something:

• big, clear, bold;
• uses our colours
• conveys the message that anyone can build a website with WebEden
• Displays a link to our website and our blog URL
• Includes our phone number

Anyone want to have a go at designing one?

I can’t promise you riches but I can promise that we’ll pick the best and use it – so you get to see your work up and on display. And we’ll also make sure you get plenty of credit, a blog post about you, and some Tweets promoting your work. Oh go on then: a £20 high street voucher too. Why not?

Please send all entries to ken@webeden.net by the 30th of December. And if you’re interested why not leave a comment below or reply @webeden on Twitter.

Update: 14.12. 09: Here’s the entries so far – let us know which you like best by voting!

http://tweetphoto.com/6214313

http://tweetphoto.com/6223635

http://tweetphoto.com/6223587

http://tweetphoto.com/6422563

http://tweetphoto.com/6466308

http://tweetphoto.com/6471507

http://tweetphoto.com/6665091

http://tweetphoto.com/6670015

http://tweetphoto.com/6669524

http://tweetphoto.com/7023196

http://tweetphoto.com/7511796