Archive for July 2010

A couple of weeks ago we let you know about our new Facebook ‘like’ button on the WebEden homepage [link]. And thanks to some genius coding from in house pro Raybo, we’ve made it possible for all of you to add a Facebook ‘like’ button to your website too.

If you click the ‘like’ button, it adds a status update in Facebook that says that you like that page.

Socialising the Web

It’s called the Facebook ‘Open Graph’ program, and it is Facebook’s attempt to ‘socialise’ the web by publishing information about the websites and products that Facebook’s 500m users like to visit.

Promoting your Website

There’s a huge benefit if you’re a website builder. By letting your users ‘like’ your website, it is automatically promoted to all their friends. It also allows you to broadcast how popular you are to all visitors to your website, and give the impression that you are part of a larger community

Another significant upside for website builders is that you can also add a tracking code that lets you see how many people have viewed this status update -  a measure of how ‘viral’ your campaign is.

Taking over the Web?

It’s by no means all good news. Comment on ReadWriteWeb says that “Facebook’s ambition is to kill off its competition and use 500 million users to take over entire Web”.

By default all Facebook users and website builders are being used to distribute Facebook functionality across the Internet. In effect, this makes Facebook the default platform to express likes, dislikes and preferences. All that info will be tracked by Facebook, and then used by advertisers in order to reach users with targeted messages.

From Private to Public

So Facebook will have made the transition from a platform where you can privately share information, images and videos, to a place where your interests and online life can be bought, sold, and accessed by 3rd parties.

What do you think of the Facebook Open Graph? A good tool for website builders, or an erosion of your privacy? Leave us a comment below.

The fanfare and commotion may have faded, but not the buzz. The new WebEden control panel has been live for nearly two weeks now, so we thought it was about time we shared our favourite features!

Image Resizing

This is a ‘behind the scenes’ change, but one which makes a big difference to everyone using our website builder. All images are now automatically resized when they are uploaded. This means that you can add a lot more images to your website without having to upgrade to the next package. And all your visitors get a website that loads much faster.

Customising Shortcuts

Here’s a nice one to kick off with! The new control panel has a series of shortcuts that you can choose to display. Add the right ones for your personal website building experience – and get rid of the ones you don’t use or need.

Link Editor

The new link editor lets you add much longer URLs to link to. You also get the option to open links in the same or a new window.

Colour Picker

This is the best one, and a must have for those who are into design! The colour picker allows you to copy any colour you find on the page, and use it on another element of your website. No more digging round trying to make things look exactly the same colour – the picker’ll do that for you.

Sidebar Scroll Function

This is a nice little development which makes it much easier to scroll to the feature you want to use when you’ve got lots of panels open. It really speeds up the website building experience.

Line Spacing

The new line spacing editor gives you complete control over blocks of text. You can now spread it out or keep it tight. So many people have asked for this feature, we’re glad to have finally delivered!

What’s your fave?

Let us know what you like best by leaving a comment below.

It’s Thursday, I’m excited, and its time for Website of the Week!

This week is the turn of RockingVicar.com. I promise you I don’t know these guys, but I seriously think its one of the strongest sites I’ve seen. There’s great continuity and consistency in the design, and the content is engaging, interesting and fresh. It’s feature rich too – the site makes use of lots of interactive widgets. Here’s a bit more:

Website Address:

www.rockingvicar.com

When did you build your website?

August 2006

Why did you build your website?

We built it for a client who eventually handed it over to us and we haven’t looked back.

What do you like best about your website?

It’s the best way to bang on about the music we love without friends and family telling us to shut up! Users tell us they enjoy it too.

What is your best website building tip?

Less is more – don’t add anything that isn’t necessary. Space is your friend, clutter is your enemy. Make the navigation foolproof and try to look at your site as a visitor not a webmaster. Oh – and content is still king.

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If you want to be featured as our Website of the week, and get exposure to thousands of readers of the WebEden blog, visit the forum now!

Data from UK online monitoring firm Hitwise has revealed that for the first time we are visiting social networking websites more than search engines. In May 2010, visits to social networks made up 11.88% of the total, compared to 11.33% to search engines.

Here’s the graph, reproduced from Hitwise:

Of the social networking sites, Facebook makes up 55% of visits, the biggest by a long way.

YouTube takes up 2nd place, followed by Twitter in 3rd. Again, here’s the info direct from Hitwise:

Facebook still lags well behind Google as the most popular website. but whilst Google market share is broadly static, Facebook in on the rise.

Here’s another graph from Hitwise:

You know what I’m going to say don’t you?!

This highlights the increasing importance of using Social Networking websites to find new visitors for your site. Make sure you Integrate your website with Facebook and Twitter. Add a Twitter feed to your website. And of course you can now add a Facebook ‘like’ button to your website too.

Have you had good success reaching out to new visitors from social networks? Has this been on the rise? Leave us a comment below.

Yes – my favourite day – it’s Website of the Week! I think you’re going to like this one, here comes TheKnowList.com.

TheKnowList.com is ‘a fresh new source for Legal Technology resources’. They help senior bods in legal organisations find good technology to improve their business.

When it comes to design, this website is very tight. There’s great use of the HTML snippet to bring data in from other sites. They’ve used drop shadow on images and logos with great effect. And the site has plenty of features, including social bookmarking, forms, and there’s even documents for download.

Website Address:

www.TheKnowList.com

When did you build your website?
Last month. May 2010. I spent a day sat in Green Park in London planning it out on my notepad and then a full day in Starbucks by Savile Row on wi-fi designing it. Entire site only took 10 hours from beginning to end. 4 lattes. 2 innocent smoothies. 1 marmite pannini and 3 packets of biscuits.

Why did you build a website?
We started a new company and saw a gap in the market for a modern looking high content site.

What do you like best about your website?
I built it myself, without any web design skills and I think it looks good.

What is your best website building tip?
White space, clear text and graphics – and keep the content fresh
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If you want to be featured as our Website of the week, and get exposure to thousands of readers of the WebEden blog, visit the forum now!

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a huge, tragic environmental disaster.

10,000 barrels of oil a day are pouring into the sea, killing sea and bird life and wrecking a beautiful coastline for a generation.

There is a war of blame being played out on our TVs nightly. Obama and the American people blame BP. BP blame the company they leased the equipment from. Reputations are hanging in tatters.

Huge events drive people to seek more information online, and they often turn to Google for that information. In this case there has been a huge growth in the number of searches related to the oil spill.

BP have been quite to pick up on this fact, and are using Google AdWords to defend their reputation. They’re currently bidding on oil spill related keywords with this advert.

They’re keen to communicate all the ways in which they are helping to fight and clean up the spill.

Wherever there’s blame, there’s a court case. And some wily law firms have wised up to this by using Google AdWords themselves, this time to gather weight behind legal action against BP.

These law firms know that any payout by BP will be huge, and they want to start the ball rolling now.

The oil spill has also had an influence on domain names, with hundreds of oil spill related domains such as bigoilspills.com being registered. Again, it’s the law firms hoping to represent claimants in their battle to win damages from BP.

The whole episode is a sad one, but which also has a huge economic influence on anyone connected.

Have you tried using Google AdWords to take advantage of any events & interests? Leave us a comment below.

The World Cup may be over but there is a palpable sense of excitement in the WebEden office. Why is that, you may ask? Because this week we’re going to wow y’all with a new release of our website builder…

Giving you the Flex(ibility)

Our new release is all about Flex, aka ‘Flash Application Frameword’. This is background coding stuff that means that future developments (of which we have lots planned) will be much easier and quicker to roll out to you.

Right now, this means that the new version will give you:
•    Scrolling Sidebar Panels (woo-hooo. Ahem.)
•    Customised Toolbar Shortcuts
•    Updated Services area for Google Analytics, Webmaster tools and Adsense

We’ve also got a few other changes, including:
•    An eye dropper which lets you copy a colour you’re already using on the page
•    Line spacing control, which lets you vary the line spacing on a paragraph by paragraph basis.
•    Page load times have been cut thanks to image auto-resizing and asynchronous calls to Facebook

For the new control panel you’re going to make sure you have the latest stable version of the Flash Player – 10.1. You can get it here. Don’t worry, your visitors won’t have to upgrade – all they need is version 8.

What’s next?

With Flex, we’re shortly going to release these exiting new features

Blog: A long time in the coming, but our new blog tool will let you add blog articles, give them tags, accept & reject comments. Believe me, this will be a cool tool.

Ecommerce: I know, we’ve mentioned it before, but ecommerce for WebEden really is coming. We’ve got a product catalogue that will allow you to add thousands of products. It’ll be really powerful – but very easy to use

HTML: We’re working hard to improve our HTML rendering for mobile, particularly those handsets that don’t currently support Flash. This is a medium term project due in the next few months

That’s all for now – but watch this space

As soon as the new control panel is release you will be the first to know. Stay in touch with us here on the blog, on Twitter (twitter.com/webeden) and Facebook (facebook.com/webeden).

Time for another Website of the Week. This time we’ve got PembrokeshireBeyond.co.uk.

I don’t think that this website design is going to be everyone’s cup of tea. But what PembrokeshireBeyond.co.uk get so right is the two way interactivity between themselves and you, the visitor.

They’ve got video, polls, a Facebook Faces unit, a newsletter form, a Twitterfeed (follow @Pembsbeyond), full membership, a forum, and the donate buttons. The site gives visitors a real sense of community.

Website Address:
www.pembrokeshirebeyond.co.uk

When did you build your website?
Started in December 2009, and still tweaking and adding now.

Why did you build a website?
We needed to get the word out on our investigations and findings, a website is the most cost effective option :)

What do you like best about your website?
The community aspect, having all the members in one easy place :) I also like how easy it is to interlink it with social media sites :)

What is your best website building tip?
Take your time, experiment and have fun. Always remember the end users experience is what counts :)

We talk lots on this blog about search engines. As a website builder, search engines will probably be the single biggest source of traffic to your website.

Search engines can deliver traffic to your site from two separate sections of the results page.

Here’s an image that shows the sections I mean.

The lower left hand side (highlighted in green) is called the ‘organic’ or ‘natural’ listings. To boost your site higher up this section of the page you need to carry out Search Engine Optimisation. Take a look at our SEO Guide on how to do that.

The upper and right hand side (highlighted in red) is called the ‘sponsored or ‘paid-for’ or ‘AdWords’ listings, To boost your site higher up the top and right hand side of the page, you need to carry out Search Engine Marketing or Pay Per Click (PPC). We’re shortly going to be launching a full guide to PPC, and offering our own PPC help service.

The big question for every website owner is: Is a visitor from the organic or paid listings worth more?

The only real answer for your website can be found by analysing your Google Analytics data, and working out which visitors led to sales. Here’s a video tutorial on how to set up Google Analytics.

But from a ‘top down’ perspective, Google themselves have recently released an economic study suggesting that clicks on the sponsored listings are worth more than those on the organic listings. In fact, Google say that clicks from the natural listings are worth just 70% of those from the sponsored listings.

Google don’t give any background on why they have made this assumption. So here are a few thoughts of our own:

1.The Ads are more controlled than the organic listings. Organic listings are Google’s best judgment about what you’re looking for. But an advert is specifically targeted at your search, judged by both the advertiser and AdWords as being relevant.

2. Ads are deep linked. Ads should take you straight to the page on the website that is most relevant to your search. Organic listings often send traffic to home or category pages.

3. Once you click on an ad, you have identified yourself as someone with specific intent. You’re not turned off by the ad, and you click it with the intent to complete an action.

4. Users clicking on an advert know they’re entering into an open commercial relationship with that advertiser, and are therefore more likely to carry out a transaction.

5. There’s less competition in the Ads. At most there are a few thousand advertisers on a keyword. The organic listings by contrast have 10,000, 100,000 or even a million results.

6. By a process of analysis, the only advertising that survives is the stuff that’s working. Advertisers only put money into keywords and ads that work, and pause it if it stops working. The organic listing, by contrast, deliver visitors even beyond the point where the website deems its interested in having them.

Are you using PPC or SEO to drive traffic to your website? Which option is giving you the best results? Leave us a comment below.

Did you know, the average visitor spends just 5 seconds on your website before deciding whether to stay or leave?

This make it so important to grab their attention, and get them to do something, using a ‘call to action’. This ‘action’ could be reading an article, clicking a link, leaving their details or buying a product.

Here’s my top 7 ways to improve your web pages so that visitors respond to your call to action. You can do ‘em all with the WebEden Website Builder!

1. Make sure your buttons are BIG!

Seems a bit Alice in Wonderland, but if you want someone to do something, give them a great big button to press. Make sure the big button is:

*above the fold
*a contrasting, bold colour
*Includes some action text like ‘buy’, ‘order’, ‘sign up’.

Don’t be worried about repeating your call to action elsewhere on the page. Keep it the same size, and in the same vertical line if possible.

2. Give your visitors a reason to act

If you’re selling a product, or want your visitors to do something else, make sure you let them know why they should! A picture of a product won’t sell it alone, you need to list the benefits.

*Sell it with a headline
*Use a supporting image
*Add benefits in bullet points
*consider adding customer testimonials
*Make good use of white space
*Avoid blocks of text – 50 words max

But make sure these benefits don’t compete with the call to action for your visitors’ attention

3. Don’t give your visitors a choice

If you give your visitors a choice between two or more calls to action, many will dither, and some would sooner leave your site than make that choice.

Simplify your pages so that you funnel visitors towards your desired action, and don’t let them consider alternatives.

4. Create a unique page for every product

Not only does this give you a chance of grabbing more traffic from the search engines, it also lets you showcase each product in the best way, and without choice.

5.    Have to have more than 1 product per page?

If you can’t get away from offering more than 1 product per page, help your website visitors decide by highlight 1 product with extra benefits. This might be ‘most popular choice’ or ‘best value’ or it might be the product with the biggest discount.

6.    Let your users buy from every page

If you list your products on the homepage, a category page and an individual page, make sure visitors have the option of buying them from every one. Make it easy to buy – not hard.

7.    Test your theories

If you’re not sure which layout works best, try them all and then:

*Ask a friend what they think
*Submit your alternatives to our forum to get feedback
*Submit your website to 5 second test to get feedback
*try to test which version sells more products

That’s it

If you want your website visitors to do something on your site, then make it clear what that is, give them no choice, and make it easy for them to do.

Got an experience of changing design and improving (or ruining!) results? Leave us a comment below.