This is the presentation I gave at  The Brew Small Business Expos around Sydney last month and Perth next month. It also contains a case study of ArteryStore.com, an Australian small business. Completely run by one woman and an assistant, ArteryStore.com has incorporated social media into a strategy that has turned her online store into one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s top fifty places in cyberspace.

That’s right – the social web is not about the tools – Twitter, Facebook etc. It is about customer engagement. Once you have determined how you want your brand to engage with an audience and what personality you should present, the right tools will become obvious. And don’t forget, this also impacts on your email marketing, web design and your entire communications strategy.

Still think you don’t have the time, the staff or the need to create a true customer engagement strategy in the social web? That’s okay. Every race has to have losers as well as winners…

By following these concise tips, you too can drive your online business into the ground quickly and get back to watching Simpsons reruns. D’oh!

Success is overrated.

1. Be impossible to find

That’s right. Make it so frustratingly hard for potential customers to find you that they’ll go to the competition instead. There are a number of ways you can achieve this, but my all-time favourite is to misspell your own domain name.

If that isn’t possible, ensure that links you’ve managed to get on other websites lead to the wrong places or to 404 error pages. Also, you must avoid appearing prominently in Google. This is pretty easy for the first few weeks as it takes the search engines months to locate and index new websites. Don’t make it easy for them. At all costs, avoid using words people actually use when trying to find your products. For example, instead of bargain furniture, write about economical wooden sitting utensils. Far fewer people will type those words into Google when looking for a chair.

2. Overcharge on postage

This one is a classic method for losing customers. Some previous champions at business failure have turned thousands of customers away with inappropriate postage charges. The easiest way is to only offer overnight courier service on all purchases – regardless of what they are. Suddenly, that t-shirt is an expensive buy when you add in $30 worth of courier costs!

But even without going to such extremes, it is possible to scare people away. Avoid postage discounts on multiple items. Yes, of course you’ll send the products in the same package but by insisting on charging as if you are sending them separately, you can be sure to create some angry customers who won’t come back.

3. Hide your best deals

You know that your special offer on ornamental teaspoons could be a great money-maker but relying on the psychic powers of the average consumer to find the page within your website may be taking things to extremes. On arriving at the website, don’t make it too easy for a person to find your best products and prices. Bury them deep in your product pages, preferably at the bottom of overlong pages of unattractive offers that are not linked from the home page.

If possible, have conflicting offers on different pages of your site. What is offered at 25% off on one page is full price on another and removed from sale on a third. Ensure the customer doesn’t know what to do to get the best deal – and even if they do make a purchase, seed them with enough doubt about whether they paid more than they should.

4. Loop pages around

Ever been to a website FAQ section where answers that don’t answer the questions loop around each other taking you in circles? One answer suggests you click to another page for the information you need, but the new page refers you back to where you were.

You know that answering consumer questions accurately may force you to reveal how bad your business really is. Baffle them with pages of vague and useless waffle that fails to address the issues while linking meaninglessly to each other in a perpetual loop of confusion.

And then refuse to take queries from customers who have not used the FAQ to solve their problems.

5. Don’t provide any contact details

Taking this one step further, prevent any personal contact at all.

Jeez, so many people want to contact you these days! Anyone would think they want to make further enquiries or ask for information to help them make a better purchase. Timewasters! Don’t let them interrupt your daily routine with petty customer service issues. Just remove all possible forms of contact from your site – especially email – and force anyone with a question to attempt to find an answer on the looped and infuriating FAQ pages (see 4).

6. Avoid updating the site

If your website looked good once, why change it? Sure, that was back in 2001, the news items are out of date and the products you are pushing went out of fashion three years ago, but fresh content and accurate info only encourage more sales and that means more work for you!

If you haven’t updated your postage rates for years, it will really get up customer noses if you email them after a purchase to demand more money to correct the difference. But nothing loses customers faster than failing to update which stock is in or out of stock. That really pushes their buttons of disappointment – especially if your site forces them to confirm the purchase and pay for the item before you email them to say it is out of stock. Don’t repay the money, of course, just tell them it’s on backorder and should be available within six months – maybe – if you remember to call the suppliers.

So there you have it – some foolproof ways to turn away all those pesky customers. All of these techniques are tried and proven to work. In fact, examples can be found every day across the web, leading the way in customer dissatisfaction. Don’t get left behind! Join the fight against business success today!

This constant rapid change in consumer behaviour may be a recent development – but it does have its roots in an observation from forty-five years ago. Moore’s Law, coined by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore back in 1965, put forward the suggestion that the amount of transistors that could be fitted onto an integrated circuit was increasing exponentially – doubling approximately every twenty months. Moore’s Law has continued to hold true, applying to processing speed, memory capacity and even pixels in a digital camera. This means smaller, more powerful devices arriving approximately every two years.

A few years ago, a 250MB hard drive was ample for home PC use. Now more and more people are plugging terabyte drives in to store their music, video and other large files, while 250MB is becoming pretty standard in the tiny mobile phone in your pocket! Moore’s Law at work.

This means massive innovations steamrolling through old business models every few years. Who can predict what gadgets will be possible with faster broadband speeds, greater processing power and massive memory storage? This rapid evolution is why many IT businesses are not designing products and services for the world we have today, but are already planning for the technical marvels of tomorrow, assuming that by the time they get to market Moore’s Law would have prepared the ground.

And each of these new innovations changes the consumer, usually in completely unexpected ways. The arrival of the mobile phone dramatically changed how everyone interacts and our expectations of constant connectivity wherever we are. Search engines changed forever the way we find what we want – pretty much the death of the Yellow Pages. Social media has created a massive societal shift in how we communicate, play and build relationships and has even replaced email for many in the younger generation.

So how will things look in another ten years? Or five? Or two? Any business will need to remain extremely agile to stay relevant to a world that keeps turning in time with Moore’s Law.

The obsession with ROI means that such figures are now being demanded from things that have no business being analysed in this way.

Separating technology from strategy

When I discuss social media with business owners, I am often asked about the ROI. “Yes, but how does Twitter create sales?” I’m asked. “What does a blog do to increase clicks and conversions?” they challenge. Leaving aside the fact that some businesses have used Twitter and blogs to achieve exactly those outcomes – Dell selling over $3 million worth of computers on Twitter for example – ROI needs to be thought of differently when considering social media.

As Erik Qualman cleverly points out on his Socialnomics blog;

A big question out there these days is: What is the ROI of Social Media? Or the ever popular how do I measure the ROI of social media? Often when I get this question it’s appropriate for me to retort: “What’s the ROI of your phone?”

Exactly. Social media is a communication technology, just like the phone on your desk and the email on your screen. You don’t look for an ROI in these technologies – but you do look for an ROI in the strategies you use them for! You may use your email for a specific email marketing promotion and track the results from that, monitoring click throughs, open rates and conversions. But if it fails to make an impact, you wouldn’t say that email technology is a waste of time in business and begin removing Outlook from your staff computers. You’d criticise that specific email strategy and look to the design, copy or promotional concept behind the campaign for for possible improvements and changes.

Ditto the phone. Your handset isn’t to blame if you spend more time talking to the wife than chasing leads and has nothing to do with the marketing scripts your team uses to close a sale. If your sales are down one month, you’re not going to rip out the phone lines due to terrible ROI. You’ll rewrite the scripts, train the staff, analyse customer responses and make concrete strategic conclusions.

So why do people insist on arguing about the ROI of Twitter or Facebook? The only time to apply the ROI question is in response to a particular campaign or strategy you have run in these spaces.

But sales are only one part of ROI. The most obvious and the most discussed, but only one part of it, all the same.

Saving money is an ROI too!

A business has multiple lines on the balance sheet, not just sales revenue versus marketing costs. How much is spent running customer service? How much is spent on technical support? Brand awareness? Internal staff communications? Interstate meetings? Processing and packing orders? PR and publicity? Any number of business activities come with a cost. Therefore any number of strategies can have a monetary value to the business that has no relation to sales conversions at all.

Instead, a business may find powerful financial arguments for some of these new technologies in other cost-laden parts of their business. Some companies, including Telstra and Optus, have begun using social networks to create faster, more responsive customer service and technical support offerings for their customers. If trivial or simple enquiries can be dealt with in 140 characters in a tweet, there is most likely a cost saving in the resources that would otherwise have been put to the enquiry if it had come through the traditional channels. A tweet is less work and quicker than dealing with a phone call. In fact, this is exactly why some companies are adopting tactics like this to speed up customer support, provide greater efficiency and reduce costs in this department.

There are other cost savings quite often overlooked. Websites that invite user-generated content are not usually doing it to boost sales, but to boost content and page views of their site – for free. Users providing content for no payment to your site, helping to increase ranking in search engines and attract other visitors, can have a positive influence on the bottom line in other less direct ways. A higher search engine ranking may mean more traffic may mean more conversions may mean more money. But instead
of paying for the manpower and resources to produce that extra content, UGC makes those production costs negligible. Now that can lead to a powerful ROI.

Moonfruit’s massive ROI performance

Even more powerful is creating a mechanism for UGC off-site, as Moonfruit discovered in July last year. Creating a Twitter competition with a few Macbook Pros up for grabs, Moonfruit encouraged Twitter users to tag their tweets with #moonfruit to go into a draw. All those tweets tagged with the company brand meant that #moonfruit was one of the biggest trending topics on Twitter, even during the Iran uprisings. This led others to investigate what this Moonfruit business was about. People blogged about it. Newspapers wrote articles about it. All those links led back to Moonfruit, who eventually ended up with a 300% increase in website traffic and a 20% bump in sales! Plus, most importantly, Moonfruit is now number one in Google for their key phrase, dramatically increasing site traffic long after the campaign had finished.

But none of that Moonfruit activity can be tracked in the way most businesses seem to in this digital age. No one can pull out a spreadsheet that says that a particular link generated these specific sales which calculates this ROI. All they can say is that, for a $15K investment in prizes, brand awareness was massively increased (a marketing cost saving), the resultant PR in newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal and websites like the BBC netted them hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of free PR and all the extra
links boosted their Search engine rankings, a massive saving on SEO. Through all these indirect symptoms, traffic and sales understandably rose.

Many of those extra sales may have never come across the Twitter campaign or even read about it in any of the press reports. They may have simply discovered the more exposed presence in Google. Analytics are never going to draw that direct correlation between Twitter and an unrelated click in Google, even though common sense says one is a result of the other. The benefits Moonfruit received were external byproducts of a cause-and-effect, invisible to traditional click versus conversion metrics.

Many businesses are now realising the myriad ways of extracting genuine financial returns out of social media – often by avoiding the simplistic ROI approach still celebrated by so many. Erik Qualman’s latest video demonstrates a few of these examples.

Freeing up the analysis of ROI from simple click-to-conversion transactions to identifying beneficial long term company trends can show that campaigns or strategies that may look unsuccessful on one spreadsheet make huge financial sense on another. It comes down to asking the right questions and applying the right expectations.

Google’s new Sidewiki project, recently launched in Beta, has removed any last doubt (official Google post). Sidewiki is potentially the biggest development in word of mouth marketing since instant messaging started, and a failure to take it seriously could be very costly indeed for some businesses. Sidewiki gives everyone the ability to leave comments – positive or negative – against every single webpage.

Including yours.

Whether you want people to, or not.

And you can’t stop them, delete them or moderate them. Got a particularly unpopular product? Expect people to say so, right next to your page for everyone else with Sidewiki enabled to see. Of course, this can work for or against a business website. Some strong positive posts could represent your brand well and encourage others to take up your offer. However, criticisms will be more visible. Instead of these conversations taking place elsewhere on the web where only some of your audience may come across them, every visitor to your site with the Google toolbar installed will be able to see them.

Already, some websites are seeing how the Sidewiki can turn against them. In the following example, Apple – a brand notorious for avoiding direct conversation with customers – receives critical comments in the Sidewiki attacking the markup on their products and also raising the recent FCC controversy. The image is a detail from a screenshot of their homepage, with the Sidewiki open.

Closer to home, the Sydney Morning Herald website is now adorned with numerous Sidewiki posts criticising the site for the number of advertising popups and other distractions.

The website visitors have now been given a voice. What remains to be seen is whether brands will respond to engage with these comments.

There is plenty of evidence available that demonstrates how a failure to respond to negative comments in social media can result in terrible press, lost sales and brand damage. Recently, Cotton On had a very expensive day (Case study) after a failure to respond to an online outcry resulted in negative press in the mainstream media and the recall of an entire line of t-shirts. When this negative criticism happens right there on the brand website, some businesses are going to need to adopt new and rapid policies to manage an appropriate response if they wish to avoid a financial impact.

In these early stages, the most vulnerable websites are those with a technical or IT audience as they are most likely to use Google toolbar and Sidewiki. But if the Sidewiki moves beyond Beta testing and becomes a mainstream tool like other social commenting services, the ramifications are potentially huge. It would place the consumer conversation right at the heart of any online marketing strategy.

Exactly what some of us have been predicting for so long.

Word of mouth buzz would no longer be the fortunate side benefit to a campaign or an adjunct to the traditional broadcast advertising way of doing business. The word of mouth could become so loud that it requires constant monitoring and response – a necessary customer service activity in itself.

Of course, Sidewiki doesn’t have to be bad. If your customers like your brand or have little to complain about, Sidewiki may actually bring endorsements. But the arrival of Sidewiki does signal that businesses now, more than ever, have to place their customers right at the centre of their business model. And I mean genuinely so – not just saying it. No more making business decisions based on what is more convenient for you instead of the customer. No more dictating rigid terms and demanding respect. What consumers say about your business now has more power than it has ever held before. Even if Sidewiki fades away, there is no doubt that each new technology will continue to bring us closer to an open, transparent web where hypocrisy is exposed, poor service criticised and genuine comparisons drive competition.

Think social media is all about Twittering your FaceSpace to all the Diggers and sticking it on YouTube? Wonder why so many people say they tried to use social media for their business but didn’t see any real benefit? Want to get that lightbulb moment where the point becomes clear?

This is the presentation I gave at the series of The Brew Small Business Expos around Sydney this week. It also contains a case study of ArteryStore.com, an Australian small business. Completely run by one woman and an assistant, ArteryStore.com has incorporated social media into a strategy that has turned her online store into one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s top fifty places in cyberspace.

That’s right – the social web is not about the tools – Twitter, Facebook etc. It is about customer engagement. Once you have determined how you want your brand to engage with an audience and what personality you should present, the right tools will become obvious. And don’t forget, this also impacts on your email marketing, web design and your entire communications strategy.

Still think you don’t have the time, the staff or the need to create a true customer engagement strategy in the social web? That’s okay. Every race has to have losers as well as winners…

Consider your own website. How easy is it for a customer to get from A to B to C, from home page to desired product to credit card payment? Is it obvious to a new visitor how to find the product or information required with the least number of clicks? Do your visitors risk getting lost or frustrated as they attempt to find what they need?

Keeping it Simple

The reason Beck’s design for the London Underground map is considered genius, was his realisation that the map would be considerably more useful when divorced from the geography of London above. Prior to 1931, London Underground maps were overlaid on the geography of the London streets, creating a confusing spaghetti of twisting and turning lines, crisscrossing and tangling with each other (see right).

Where Beck’s genius lay was in realising that the geography was not important at all; once underground, the streets above were meaningless. He understood that the traveller only needed to see how the stations and lines related to each other to clearly identify the ideal route from origin to destination. By simplifying the various routes into coloured straight lines, with clearly marked intersections and neatly spaced stations, it immediately became easier for the underground traveller to determine the best journey between two points. Below is Beck’s original map, released to the public in 1933.

Over the decades, Beck’s map has expanded as new lines and stations have been added, but the same principles remained. In fact, Beck’s approach has been copied for transport systems across the globe, including Sydney’s rail system.

By designing a map based on the needs of the traveller, Beck demonstrated the basic principles of information architecture decades before the first website would be coded.

Mapping the Customer Journey

Information architecture refers to the layout of pages and items within a website and strives to provide the easiest and most logical path for the user, not the whims of the designer or the convenience of the business owner. The goal of information architecture is to make website navigation not only simple but instinctive. It should be obvious from each page how to navigate to the next most appropriate point, without having to decode complex layouts or continually double back to the home page. If one piece of information is reliant on another, the two should be linked to provide easy comparison or processing.

Sadly, information architecture and site mapping is not as common as it should be, even among large multinational websites. I recently spent hours becoming frustrated with virgintrains.co.uk – ironically – when trying to book a simple train journey from Manchester to London online. A search for fares would not present all the options available, instead separating different ticket types and special offers into unconnected sections of the site. I was forced to click away from one page to another, returning to the home screen and searching again down a different path and back again in order to find the best deal and most convenient journey. There was little explanation of how to find the best offers or how to combine different deals to produce a connecting journey. With ticket prices varying from nine pounds to over three hundred pounds for a single one-way ticket, a mistake could be extremely costly to a tourist unfamiliar with the privatised British rail system.

The designers of the website needed to apply Beck’s principles to their structure. If the designers drew up a site map of the Virgin Trains website, divorced from the site geography but focussed on customer pathways, the limitations would become glaringly apparent. The journey from home page to the best deal on a specific journey to a ticket sale could be mapped, understood and then simplified to provide the best user experience for the customer – and therefore more sales. After all, the biggest problem ecommerce websites face is customers who abandon the site without completing a transaction.

Station to Station

Reducing the number of stations (clicks) and line changes (switching between disconnected sections of the website) could dramatically improve sales and increase positive feedback.

Whether you include a site map within your website for customers to refer to or create one to help design and simplify your information architecture, understanding customer flow is essential in creating a website to which people will return.

We made it from Liverpool Street to Heathrow with just one change at Paddington and the minimum number of stopping stations, despite London being one of the biggest, busiest and most complex cities on the planet. We were confident that we had the best solution to our journey that saved us time and effort despite a number of variables. On the other hand, I’m still not convinced I got the best ticket deal out of the Virgin website.

Have you mapped your customer journey lately?

(This post originally appeared at Brainstorm)

What is vSlice?

Getting a vSlice is very much like having your own physical server. You can choose your operating system, run your own applications and you get full control over its operation. However, unlike a physical server you don’t have to worry about the hardware underneath. Using special software, we partition a powerful physical server into many smaller slices. Each slice runs inside a virtual environment (called a virtual machine, or as we like to call them, vSlice).

Since the resources are dedicated you don’t have to worry about fighting other users for CPU, RAM or Disk; this makes your site load a lot more quickly and increases reliability.

Sharing can be hard!

How vSlice differs from other providers

A lot of other providers offer similar services – “VPS”, “VDS”, and “virtual private servers” are some of the marketing terms. On face value these seem to be very similar to vSlice but there are major differences between the two technologies:

1. vSlice is a high uptime, always on service. Your vSlice can move between different servers while it is live and if a server breaks then it will escape to a spare server automatically and be back up in minutes. With other providers you would be stuck on the broken server and face hours of downtime.
2. vSlice guarantees CPU and RAM. During busy periods your vSlice will realize that the server is congested and will shift itself to a less busy server. Without vSlice you would be stuck on a server with many other VPS and your site would slow down dramatically.
3. vSlice can scale very quickly. As you grow you may need to add more performance to your server in the form of extra RAM, CPUs or disk. We can upgrade your vSlice with just one reboot – compare that to trying to upgrade a physical server and the downtime and hassle that would cause.

Real Life Examples

We have collected a few examples from actual customers so you can see how they have benefited from their own vSlice.  Names were changed to protect the innocent!

Sue – Art Products eStore

Sue has a busy eStore. She sells art supplies to the Australian public directly from her online store. With the amount of products the store sells it was  quickly outgrowing a shared hosting environment – product pages were taking a long time to display and during checkout the transaction would fail to process, causing Sue to lose sales.

MD migrated Sue’s eStore to a vSlice and the difference was dramatic. Pages now load almost instantly and customers get a smooth experience from selection through to payment.  Sue has seen a healthy increase in sales as a result.

Tony – Shared Office

Tony runs a professional agency. During the day up to a dozen staff will access accounting files, collaborate on documents and process work for clients. Tony needed a central, ‘always on’ environment that staff could access to efficiently go about their daily duties. Since Tony has no dedicated IT personnel he needed a managed solution where he did not have to worry about running a piece of hardware and making sure it was working properly.

Since purchasing vSlice Tony has put on more  staff.  We were able to upgrade his RAM and CPU to handle the additional work without a hiccup.

Geoffrey – Online Stock Trader

Geoffrey is big on share market trading. Every day he downloads up to the minute information on hundreds of different stocks.  Geoffrey needed something more powerful and reliable than his home PC and internet connection. We specced out a vSlice that was able to handle up to 10 simultaneous trading screens, allowing Geoffrey to collect data 24×7 and trade with confidence.

Favicon example

These are called favicons or shortcut icons. Having a favicon is a great idea since -

• It strengthens your brand and image.
• It acts as a visual cue. When someone bookmarks your site or looks back into their navigation history (perhaps after reviewing several suppliers of the same product) your favicon can help trigger a memory of your brand and prompt them to reopen your site, increasing the likelihood of a sales conversion
• It unifies all the various sections of your website

Installing a favicon is quite easy. Simple insert the following code between your head tags:

    <head>
      <link REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="http://example.com/favicon.ico">
    </head>

You will also need to make a .ico file. There are a few different methods of doing that:

1. If you have Photoshop, you can download this free plugin which gives Photoshop the ability to save files in the .ico format
2. There are various free websites where you can make an icon in your browser. Google “web icon maker” for links

When making .ico files try and remember these simple guidelines:

• The image should be 16 pixels by 16 pixels
• Try and keep the colour palette simple (no more than 4 colours) and vibrant
• You should try and incorporate your logo (or a stylized version or your logo). If your logo cannot fit in that small area then try using just the first letter. If your logo is a composite of icon and text then consider incorporating just the icon.

Once your favicon is uploaded you will need to clear your browser cache to see how it looks straight away.

1. Optimise

You must remember  that the average broadband speed in Australia is still quite low (256Kb or 512Kb). There is also a significant group of visitors that still use dial-up. If your front page takes longer  than 5 seconds to load for these people then they are probably going to give up and go somewhere else. Optimising your images (e.g., compressing the image without sacrificing quality) is a great way of bringing load speeds down. You can sometimes make a saving of 96% on the file size by optimising. Two tools that can help you with this are:

• Photoshop CS (commercial). Use the Save for Web feature.
• FastStone Photo Resizer (free for home use).

Analogy: This would be like a customer ringing the  shopfront doorbell, and the shop-keeper making them wait outside for a few minutes before letting them in.

2. Fresh Content

If you want customers to come back more than once then you need to add fresh content to your site all the time. E-newsletters, blogs, customer forums, articles, how-to guides all help you achieve that. If you have an e-commerce store then keeping up with new product ranges or trends will make sure your store is timely and relevant. Letting customers know about the new content is important too, so you might want to build up a promotional database to market to.

Analogy: This would be like a fashion store having the same tired old Winter range from 5 seasons ago displayed every year and hoping customers will keep coming back

3. Navigation

You need to make your site easy to navigate! If people can’t find your products how are they going to buy them?

• Always have a way of getting back home, so a customer can re-orient themselves if they become lost
• Use navigation bars where possible. Top horizontal bars are very popular, although sometimes you may have enough content to warrant a side-bar.  If you have a lot of content or categories you should consider drop down menus.
• (Optional) Include a footer with a summary of your most important links.
• If you use a splash or introduction screen, then remove it now! Many visitors never make it past the first page.
• Use HTML and CSS to create navigation elements. Avoid Flash except where absolutely required. Disabled users have a very hard time navigating through all Flash navigation.
• Add descriptive Alt tags to all images. Some people have text only browsers or rely on a text to speech program to view your site.
• Try using breadcrumbs on each page so that they know their position in relation to the homepage. For example, in the top right corner you can have:  Home > Product Category 1 > Sub Category 3 > Product XYZ

Analogy: This would be like a shopping centre removing all their aisle signs and making customers fumble around to find what they needed

4. Cross Browser Compatibility

You need to make sure your site works in all the browsers. The latest statistics  gives the following breakdown by market share:
Internet Explorer: 65.85%
Firefox: 22.39%
Safari: 8.46%
Chrome: 1.74%
Opera: 0.70%

Internet Explorer can also be broken down into traffic generated from IE6, IE7 and now IE8.  The point we are trying to make is that if you do not test your site for compatibility across these browsers then you may be alienating a large percentage of your total market share (some browser bugs might render your content as a blank page for example).

Many web developers now design their site in Firefox and then create special code to deal with all the layout and positioning bugs found in IE6 (and sometimes IE7).  You can use the following code snippet to create custom code for IE6 browsers.

<!--[if IE 6]>
Special instructions for IE 6 here
<![endif]-->

If you don’t have access to all those browsers then you can use a site like http://browsershots.org to see how your page will look like across a wide  spectrum of different browsers.

Analogy: This would be like a shop putting prices and descriptions in Swahili without realizing that most of their customers only read English

5. Layout

You have to assume that your visitors have both a short attention span and a broken scroll wheel.  This means that:

• You need to have your most important content, or the essence of your site, on the front page. This does not have to be text, and in fact we encourage you to break it up with a mixture of text and large, attention grabbing images (for example a current promotion) to keep the visitor entertained and intrigued. If the visitor does not know what you are about from a glance then they are probably not going to stick around
• You should assume that the visitor is not going to scroll down (at least on the first page).  Try this now – open your site and check where exactly the important content is. If you need to scroll to see it then it is in the wrong spot. Of course, other pages can have scrolling sections as required; by the time the person navigates to those pages you would have no doubt piqued their interest and they will be happy to read more.

Analogy: This would be like a shop putting their big 50% off Sale signs in a dusty corner at the back, instead of displayed prominently on the front window and sidewalk

6. Brand, polish and contact

Some other simple tips can help you along:

• Make sure your branding remains strong and prominent on every page. If you do not have a logo you might want to consider having one designed. Another trick is using consistent colour schemes across all pages.
• Spell check and grammar check everything. Get a friend to help proof-read your copy before you publish it.
• Have your Contact Us details easy to find and prominent. People get mighty suspicious of an online store if they do not have a way of contacting you.  Having a phone number is a must, as some do not wish to communicate over email. A postal address (it can be a PO Box) is also reassuring. If you have an ABN/ACN then make sure you display it! All these little things add an aura of legitimacy to your site and build trust with potential clients.