We do our best not to use technical terms or industry jargon when communicating with clients and their stakeholders.

That said, we do regularly use the terms alpha, beta and official release. These terms are extremely useful because they help everyone understand where we are at with a project and what they should expect to see and experience at that stage of technical development.

The difference between an alpha, beta and official release is very subjective but here is our take on the difference between these three terms.

What’s an alpha release?

An alpha release usually means a website or application is working but some functionality is likely to be missing and a number of known and unknown bugs are likely to surface.

The main purpose of an alpha release is to allow users to test a website or application so that they can pass on feedback to the technical team in terms of:

• bugs found
• desired changes to existing functionality
• additional functionality that should be developed.

This feedback is generally logged using bug tracking software such as Trac, Redmine or OpenAtrium.

Generally each issue is assigned a type (e.g. bug or enhancement), owner, priority and severity. This means the technical team can work through the bugs and enhancements in a logical manner.

What’s a beta release?

A beta release usually means that a website or application has had all of the major known issues fixed but has not been tested enough for an official release.

The main purpose of a beta release is to provide a fully functioning demo of a website or application. This second-round of feedback means the technical team can:

• make user-led modifications to existing functionality
• capture any ideas for additional functionality (that can be implemented at a later date)
• resolve any other bugs or performance issues that would prevent a fully signed-off official release.

What’s an official release?

An official or open release usually means that a website or application has gone through a rigorous quality assurance process and that all major technical issues have been identified and resolved. This means that the website or application is now fully functional, debugged and ready to be released to the general public.

Even though the differences between these terms may seem minor this three-step approach is integral to ensuring a stable release which works as intended.

For example, Gmail’s alpha release was only accessible to Google staff as an internal product. A public invitation-only beta release was rolled out in April 2004, before it was made available (as a beta) to the general public in February 2007.

Despite Google’s resources Gmail wasn’t upgraded from beta status to an official release until July 2009!

Why the delay?

It’s really quite simple.

One of the worst things a website or application can do is attract users before the software is truly ready for them to use.

Mainstream users can be unforgiving and a reputation for instability or poor quality of service is incredibly difficult to shake.

It’s aways preferable for a website or application to be more stable and offer a better quality of service than a user expects.

By taking a conservative approach to releasing (whether it be an alpha, beta or official release) you will ensure that you do not disappoint those that really matter – the end-users of your website or application.

Photo Credit: Bill Ohl

It’s easy to use, maintains the separation of business and presentation logic, and supports extensions through the use of plug-ins.

We’re aware that many similar PHP frameworks already exist and there are some truly great ones such as Symfony, Zend, Kohana and CodeIgniter. However, whenever we’ve gone past our preliminary testing we’d always come across a blocker in terms of our specific requirements:

• some were too slow or bloated
• some were very promising but underdeveloped and lacking in features
• some were not being actively developed or did not receive enough updates
• most did not have a CMS within the core which was one of our key requirements

So after much frustration and with a little deliberation we put together requirements for our “ultimate” tool for building websites and applications.

We included all of the best qualities we’d found in modern frameworks and content management systems we’ve worked with in the past. We also reviewed case studies of projects we had worked on and came up with a nice list of features we’d like our “ideal” content management framework (CMF) to have.

Here’s a quick run-down on some of the features (it’s pretty technical so feel free to scroll past this if this sort of information isn’t your thing):

• Model-View-Controller organisation of code
• Very quick database abstraction layer
• Templating system that supports regions and snippets (reusable blocks of code to avoid duplication and allow greater flexibility)
• Plug-in support
• Quick installation
• Multi-layered configuration module that has system-wide and application-wide configuration repositories
• Database scaffolding features
• Automatic generation of ORM layer objects
• Customisable clean URLs
• Upgradeable system core that allows for easy upgrades of already deployed projects without affecting the custom code that each project may have required

When undertaking a MVC approach to coding there is a clear set of programming rules for a developer to adhere to. This means that any developer working on a project who is aware, understands and follows these rules should have no problem getting used to our framework.

This is particularly beneficial when one considers that we developed a built-in CMS module for our framework that is integrated within the core. You don’t have to use it (as it can easily be disabled) but it is there to use should you need it.

The benefits of implementing a MVC approach for a CMS include:

• a logical structure in place reduces the learning curve for developers unfamiliar with our framework
• the eradication of a clients lock-in to us as a technical supplier
• simplifying the modification of existing functionality and integration of new functionality

Here’s a quick overview of the process we would use for a client that requires a website or application:

1. We do a clean install and initial configuration of our CMF under a development domain name – this gives you an ability to add/edit/delete content on your website to be (that currently has a generic look – we have not implemented your design yet). This also gives you an ability to track progress whilst your website/application is developed.
2. Developers can now start working on the design-independent features of the website or application.
3. Designers can now start implementing a signed-off design for the website or application.
4. Once the design has been implemented, developers can start working on the design-dependent features.
5. Should you require a change made to the signed off plan (providing it’s been approved by BCM) that won’t be a problem since our CMF was built to accommodate changes without having to re-do large chunks of previously completed work.
6. If you require a feature in the administration module of our CMF that we don’t have it is highly possible to add it – you just need to discuss the impact on the timing and cost of delivering your project.

What can I say, we are really happy with the CMF so far (version 0.2) it has been powering our website for the past 6 months and has held up well.

Needless to say though, we are not locking ourselves (and more importantly our clients) in to using our CMF, as it’s just another tool in our arsenal. We’re proud of our technology agnostic approach and just because we’ve developed an in-house tool this certainly isn’t going to change.

We’ve got plenty of experience with numerous different content management systems and frameworks and will always undertake the necessary research to see which tools are most suited to the needs of a project. Put simply we will always use the right tools for the job.

By the way if you are a developer and interested in taking a peak at what we’vc developed feel free to get in touch. We plan on open-sourcing the code but to be honest we want to do this properly and it isn’t a priority so it could well take a while.

Till we do, anyone wanting to learn more, take a nosey or get involved with taking this further just give us a shout!

Image Credit: Danard Vincente

As you will have read in yesterday’s blog post I am currently signed up to the HubSpot Inbound Marketing University.  Today’s lecture was given by Lee Odden from TopRank Online Marketing and was a SEO Crash Course to Get Found (GF102).  My assignment today is not to cover off SEO best practices or neat ways to increase your Google ranking – it is to explain why a marketer would want to include SEO in his/her web marketing.  So here goes……..

To sum it up in a sentence: Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is a great way to help people find you online for free.

That is basically all there is to it.

If people can’t find you online they won’t visit your website and won’t purchase any products or services.  Whilst SEO is not the only way to help people find you recent studies show that it is the most cost effective method of online marketing.  A study carried out by Forbes in 2009 showed that nearly half of all their respondents confirmed that SEO has been the most effective tool for generating conversions online.  That is a statistic that can not be ignored by any responsible marketer and must be included into any rigorous marketing plan.

Should you need another reason to start implementing SEO on your website then I can give you one: It is free to do!

Now I know that there are many companies who offer a service to optimize your website and I am not going to enter into a debate on white-hat or black-hat SEO or whether they are scamming you.  I am not hear to judge and as I have never used a company like this I can’t really comment.  The point is that if you have the time you can optimize your site yourself and save yourself the money of employing an external or additional party to undertake the work.  If you haven’t got the time to carry out the work yourself then there is nothing wrong with employing a reputable firm to take on the job – just make sure that they tell you what they have done so you can continue their good work.

I would highly recommend that you watch the SEO Crash Course to Get Found (GF102) if you want to find out more about what you can do.

Finally what if you are a start up and haven’t got a website what can you do?  Well we firmly believe that if a website is built correctly then the Search Engine Optimisation is truly organic.  When you are designing the architecture of the site and the content you should be focusing it to make sure that it is optimized by:

1. Structuring the website so that it is easy for the search engine spiders or bots to crawl easily.
2. Use suitable URLs that make sense and are as short as possible.
3. Have plenty of content to upload immediately and make sure that you update the content regularly post launch.
4. All your content must be key word focused based on you initial market research findings.
5. You have plenty of other websites that you are able to link to either as partners or clients or references.

Once you have built your website ensuring that you take into account all these factors then you should be quickly and easily found and indexed by search engines.

Finally, the most important thing, no matter what stage your company or website is at, is that you continuously track, monitor and measure how well you are performing in terms of SEO.  We personally love Google Analytics as a tool for this but there are plenty of alternative free and paid for tools you can use.  You will then be able to clearly see which techniques have made a real difference to both your search engine rankings but most importantly your bottom line making sure that all your SEO initiatives are based on real world usage of your website rather than an educated guess.

Picture by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Here at Border Crossing Media we always try something before we recommend it.  This month I have signed myself up for the HubSpot Inbound Marketing University. I hope that after my 16 hours of lectures and homework assignments I’ll get a nice shiney badge and will have picked up some useful information along the way.

My first lecture has been ‘How to Blog Effectively for Business’ and my homework is to write a blog piece about 3 best practices for blogging.  So I have watched the video, listened to the questions and even printed out and scrawled all over the slides.  Was it interesting?  Some of it was and whilst the rest of it was fairly obvious it is always good to get a gentle reminder as to what you should be doing.  I have picked out three of their recommendations that I fully agree with and that we recommend to our Clients who are going to commence blogging:

1. Be a content creator.

This seems obvious but is often missed.  You are creating content that your Customers or users will want to read IN ADDITION to the information that is already available on your site.  Your blog is a smart way to create organic SEO and interact with your Customers outside of your usual activities.   Most blog readers are very internet savvy.  They won’t be fooled by a blog post that is trying to upsell a product or service as a post of any value.  That is not to say that you can’t talk about your services or products at all in blogs, just make sure that you are giving added value to your reader and that the reason for the post is for additional information and not a marketing ploy.

2. Its a way of life

This is probably the hardest bit in many ways.  If you start a blog, you have to keep going.  There is nothing worse than coming across a blog that started in Jan 2009 and only has post upto March 2009.  Even if the company  has gone from strength to strength the blog leaves the reader with a negative perception of the company.  Therefore before you commence your company blog you have to make sure that you will commit to it in the long term.

One piece of advice that we have recently given our clients is to trial how much blog content you can produce in a week and see how many people are interested in reading it.  The Client in question wanted a bespoke blog to be built and released before they had even tested the waters or tried to write a piece.  Now I know that the Client has time constraints as it is and so was not sure that they would have additional hours in their week to write blog content and administrate their own site.  Rather than sell them a site that they don’t need and then upsell administrating it for them we recommended that they use their Facebook Page and if it takes off after a couple of months we’ll build them a  blog. If it doesn’t they have not lost any money nor will they see a negative impact on their perception as an organization.

3. Be open about your commenting policy

One of the main advantages of writing a blog piece is that the reader is able to leave a comment to express their opinion. This is a great way to start a two-way conversation and engage with your Customers or users. However nothing will put off a reader more than leaving a comment and then it disappearing or maybe never appearing. The solution to this is to be upfront and open about your commenting policy.

We personally have all comments modified. This is because we receive a lot of spam comments on our blog.  If you leave a comment I will get an email to tell me and then I can decide whether it goes up or not.  You may think this is just censorship but please let me confirm that we only refuse comments that are blantant spam or offensive.  Any other comment would make it up.

Before you start your blog you should decide on how you want to moderate comments.   Be open on your blog and let people know so that if they leave you a comment they do not feel that either your blog doens’t work or their comment is not important enough to go up or that you are ignoring them.

So those are 3 best pratices for blogging but what would you recommend as a blogging best practice?  Leave me a comment and I promise we won’t ignore you!

Vs

 

When I joined Border Crossing Media last year Frank and I discussed setting up a personal website/blogging platform. There were several reasons for creating one such as building a nice portfolio piece for the company, creating additional link juice for our site, improving my online profile and giving me an additional channel to share my views on dolphins.

However a whole website seemed a tad over the top as in addition to this blog and website I have plenty of accounts for these purposes:

• Twitter for business updates
• LinkedIn for my working profile
• Facebook for social networking
• LastFM for music
• even MySpace, Getglue etc

Surely if people wanted to have information from me they would look here…..but then how would they find these?

This is when we came across this excellent little website from Shaun Inman and I realised that was all I wanted – a single page which simply tells people who I am and how to contact me. Seeing as we are a UX design firm specialising in researching and building beautiful websites we started looking into whether there were services like this out there and if anyone was really using them.

The answer to those questions is yes there are definitely services out there and as to whether people use them – well they are certainly catching on. When we started to look into it there were two services that caught my eye: OnePage and Card.ly

First I checked out Card.ly – a service that you can sign up for and create a mini profile hub that contains some personal bio, links to your websites and networks and contact routes. It seems that Card.ly was born out of a similar circumstance that I found myself in and they devised stock themes to address the problem. They offer a free service where you can get basic themes or skins and a premium service with additional themes, your own domain.com, removal of ads and Card.ly banners.

I signed up (for the free service) and found the process nice and simple to execute in terms of signing-up and creating the links to my profiles etc. Then I had to choose my skin to present the information. Now I should preface this by saying that I have just logged back into Card.ly and they have appeared to have changed the way you choose your skin.  There were quite a few available and each was represented by a tiny thumbnail which you then had to preview with your details just to see what it looked like. From a UX design point of view I got really frustrated and to be honest nearly gave up! I decided to persevere and choice the starry theme and that was that. I showed Frank what it looked like and we had a little giggle and decided to move on.

What I moved on to was OnePage – who market themselves as providers of online business cards. To be honest they offer a very similar service to Card.ly without the paid for additions. I had some issues signing in for the service, there seemed to be a bug that kept me in an eternal loop of entering my password and going back to the home page. I decided to have a little tweet about it and got a tweet from @Joelg87, the founder of OnePage who helped me through the process and fixed the bug that was affecting me. Once I was signed in I was impressed at how easy it was to create a very professional looking online business card. There are limitations to OnePage such as a lack of choice in terms of design, custom URLs and no paid for services. However the product is in beta and so these things may be coming in the near future.

So which did I prefer? Well whilst OnePage is limited and I had a few issues signing in I much preferred the end-result. I was also incredibly impressed with the Customer Service from Joel Gascoigne and can see that OnePage could catch on. I’d like to know which you prefer so check out my card.ly and MyOnePage let me know which you prefer or if you know of an alternative product that you use.

I’ve recently completed testing more efficient ways to share our bookmarks.

Previously we shared links internally and with clients by writing a weekly round-up post on our blog.

Not only was this time consuming it wasn’t user-friendly.

So why persist for so long?

Habit.

Even though we knew we should have transitioned to something like Reddit, StumbleUpon or Delicious we never did.

Why? Because it was such a simple thing to do it kept on being put off. Not good I know, hence this post to absolve my guilt!

The options:

After playing around with Reddit, StumbleUpon and Delicious and looking into the usage stats of each we’ve settled on using Delicious. You can check out our account here.

Getting Started:

With Delicious importing your bookmarks is a breeze:

First off, you will need to save your browser bookmarks.

If you are not sure how to do this, create a Delicious account and follow the detailed instructions for Firefox, IE 6 & 7, Opera. Please note you must be signed-in to access this page.

In addition to the supported browsers this works fine in Safari too (go to “File” and select “Export Bookmarks”). Although Chrome on OSX is still lacking a bookmark exporter there are work-arounds available.

Once you’ve done this pop over to Delicious and create your account if you haven’t already:

1. Click on Settings
2. Click on Import/Upload Bookmarks
3. Choose the File to Upload
4. Click on the Import Now button

The import process is surprisingly quick and there is an email notification option that tells you when it’s completed.

Once the import is complete you can start sorting through your tags and the Bulk Edit feature is very useful for this.

Other features you should check out:

• Export/Backup bookmarks feature makes it simple to download a copy of your bookmarks for safe-keeping. We would recommend doing this regularly.
• Link Rolls/Tag Rolls is an easily enabled feature that allows you to display your latest Delicious bookmarks/tags on your website or blog.
• Blog Posting is an experimental feature that can automatically post entries  containing your latest links to your blog every day. This isn’t something we are currently using but it is something we would be interested in using in the future.

Conclusion:

Delicious is a great solution for sharing and storing your bookmarks online.

It is easy-to-use and its import/export features work well. The extra settings available means you can also customise the way Delicious works.

All in all we are really happy with Delicious but as with any hosted solution we’d always suggest you continue to maintain a regular backup procedure.

WordPress 3.0 has been released and is available to download.

We’ve been eagerly anticipating this since playing with the beta.

Tip: sign-up for the mailing list to receive notifications whenever a new stable release is made available.

We’re big fans of WordPress as a blogging platform (it powers this blog) and have used it as a CMS for a number of jobs in the past.

Given this release it’s safe to say we’re likely to be using it a whole lot more.

Over the coming weeks we’ll continue testing WP3.0 and will do a follow-up post with a detailed assessment of our findings.

BCM's Initial Client Contact Process Map

Here are 3 things that I have introduced at Border Crossing Media.   You would most likely see them in a large organisation but they have helped us grow as a company:

A process map is a diagram that clearly defines each step of a process or task, who is responsible for that step and preferably the time and cost of each step.  It allows you to see a project, process or task, on a granular level and work out the most efficient, cost effective method for producing deliverables independent of who undertakes the work.

You do have to invest time to map out each individual task or process, I had to sit with my partner for a day and draw out each process for each of our service areas, but the benefits of having a good set of process maps mean that you get numerous benefits.

The best thing we have found is to map them out initially and then test them over time and improve them. Your maps are a working document, not the fixed solution, that you can adapt over time as your business changes and grows.

The benefits of investing in process maps are:

• Consistency: By having a clearly defined process map for people to follow they will be able to deliver the same quality of result every time, independent of who undertakes the task.
• Efficiency: Mapping out each step you undertake for a process means that you can assess whether you are taking extra, unnecessary steps that are not adding value to the outcome.
• Understanding: If your standard processes are mapped then anyone can quickly review them and understand how and why your business works.  It helps with training new staff as they can understand your method from start to finish without necessarily undergoing them and they are great for Clients who are querying why tasks take the length of time or cost of a process.
• Faster, accurate quotes: We quickly assess the length of time a project will take and therefore cost it quickly by taking our standard process map, adding any additional elements that are required and any external costs that will be occurred.  It takes us a lot less time to quote for Clients and it gives us an accurate, realistic quote.

2. Action Plans

It is very easy not to be able to see the woods from the trees sometimes and so even though you may have your finger on the pulse of the business do you take the time out to review where you are in terms of your goals, objectives and performance.

When I joined Border Crossing Media there were clear objectives that we wanted to achieve.  Most of the time we knew how we going to do it and went about getting them done.

We wanted to be able to measure our companies performance, and therefore our success, and make sure that the actions and decisions that we took would be of value to us.  So we took some time out at the end of Q1 to review our company objectives.  I asked everyone to come up with at least 5 objectives for 2010 and we all got together and compiled a list of objectives that we agreed as a team we wanted to achieve.  We then split them into high and low level objectives and built them into an action plan.  We give each action a RAG (Red = Not on schedule, Amber = On schedule, Green = On target) Status to show where we are with each one.

We now update each other weekly as to the progress on the actions that we have assigned to ourselves which means that we are all kept in the loop and there is more accountability within the company.  I am also happy to report that to date there are no red actions on the plan!

I produce a lengthy report on a quarterly basis that covers:

1. Company Objectives and progress

2. Finance

3. Marketing

4. Technical

5. Project Progress

6. Client Update

7. HR

8. Any Other Business (AOB)

It is amazing how you can know how your company is performing but when you put it in black and white it gives you focus.  Plus it is a great document to have to hand if you need any financing or other external support and makes a good addition to your business plan.

So those are three things that I have implemented at Border Crossing Media that have made a tangible difference to both the Company’s bottom-line but also to how we all work together.  Why don’t you give some a try if you are not already.  They may not work for your particular organisation but if you don’t give things a go how will you know if they could have helped?

Good luck and let me know what works and what doesn’t work for you.

More often than not this entails providing documented guidelines (new website or application) or recommendations (optimisation of an existing website or application). These similar sounding documents have a different purpose.

The aim of our design guidelines is to provide a framework for final screen designs that focus on balancing business and user needs/goals. The aesthetics of the final design is not a driving factor when compiling this document.

The aim of our design recommendations is to target low hanging fruit, or rather low-cost changes to an existing design that make a substantial difference to conversion or completion rates. Again the aesthetics of the design is not the primary focus, usability is.

Industry outsiders are often surprised and somewhat underwhelmed when I’ve shown them previous design (or rather UX) guidelines or recommendations that I’ve supplied in the past.

They always ask, “is that it? That’s so plain!”

I feel a bit sheepish at this point and go on to explain that the final look of the interface isn’t actually where we add value.

I then go on to explain that in actual fact bare-bone wireframes and any supporting text are only a framework or rather creative parameters for the production of the final design.

“So what’s your job then?” is the usual follow-up question.

To which I answer, well we actually focus on helping businesses (direct clients) and agencies (contractors to whom we are a sub-contractor) understand who they are really designing for.

By this I mean we identify what and how people actually interact with an interface before we even consider the final elements of a design.

This is key to everything that follows, as without this we can not measure the efficiency of an interface.

Bottom line people don’t come to your website or use your software to gawp, they’re there to complete a task.

Of course we try to measure satisfaction by asking people how they feel about the design but what really matters is how efficient it is.

So the documents we deliver try to identify what it is your end-users want to do, as well as detailing what they’ve said.

This approach allows us to identify key performance indicators (KPI’s) so that you can measure the effect (through continuous testing) of these changes as well as any future changes you may wish to make.

So to finnish up there are plenty of amazing graphic designers out there (feel free to email me for recommendations) but we aren’t one of them.

Instead we collaborate with a number of talented partners to deliver compelling final designs but each and every one of those goes through this in-house process.

The reason for this is that the end deliverable will:

• be focussed on who is going to use it
• facilitate what the people using it wish to achieve

And hopefully:

• be pleasing on the eye.

In truth though I’d always sacrifice a bit of the latter if it means better performance in terms of completion and conversion rates.

Photo Credit: Valerie Everett

I am going to start this post with a simple assumption – that you have  a business plan.

As part of your business plan you have noted that you need an online presence.  In essence you need a website – you may not be sure why but everyone else has one so its likely you do too.  You might also need to have a social media strategy but I’ll pick up on this in a later post (if you can’t wait then check out Hubspot for some easily accessible information and pointers).

There is so much information out there and your competitors are everywhere online so what do you do and where do you start?

Well the first thing to do is to think about what you want to get out of your online business presence.  What is your main objective for having a website?

It seems like a simple question but there are huge implications depending on the route that you choose to take.

When the World Wide Web (sometimes referred to as Web 1.0) was created by Sir Tim Berbers-Lee the intention was for people to be able to share and link information documents easily. It wasn’t long before everywhere you looked online there were business brochure websites popping up. It made sense and started to attract people to their companies but just like their paper counterparts these static websites had no real way to increase the conversion rate of ‘browsers’ to ‘consumers’.

Enter Web 2.0 in 2004.

You may be asking: ‘What is Web 2.0 exactly?  Was there an update on everyone’s computer that I missed?’.

Don’t panic there wasn’t!

In fact it was merely a change in attitude to the way in which the Internet was to be used. Instead of a collection of information that was static and difficult to find there were new programs and platforms coming out that were designed around the way we use the Internet. Andrew McAfee defined Web 2.0 with an acronym:

Search:   Find information through keyword searches using Google, Yahoo, Bing etc
Links:   Connect information together through hyperlinks
Authoring: Everyone has the ability to create and update content on the Internet
Tags: Categorise information by assigning tags or keywords
Extensions: Using software to make the Internet become an application platform as well as a document server
Signals: Using syndication technology – allowing you to get feeds of updated work such as blogs etc. e.g. RSS

This was not a new World Wide Web, as Sir Tim Berbers-Lee pointed out, it was simply the way it was always supposed to work!  People began to adopt this attitude and created new, exciting products and websites online allowing us to see the real power that the Internet gives a business to interact with it’s Consumers.

So now lets go back to your online strategy. If you really are investing in an online presence and want a good return on your investment (ROI) then take the ‘Web 2.0′ approach to your website:

Search: Make sure that your website is easy for Search Engines to read.  A search engine works by sending out ’spiders’ or ‘bots’ to crawl your website for keywords on your web pages and hyperlinks. Once every page on your website has been crawled it then indexes it to a massive database that collates all the information online and uses an algorithm to determine the most relevant results to any query.  The more relevant your information is to the subject, the higher your ranking will be.

Links: Are really important to any website.  Firstly from the point of view of the user it is easier to find the information by clicking on a link to the next page or another website then typing in the full address or URL.  People will spend more time online and will ’surf’ through more pages simply because it is easy.  Links are also good because if you can link your website to other popular, established, trusted websites then search engine spiders will read these and think that your website is popular and trusted too.  This is referred to as building ‘link juice’. Be careful though, you should only ever link your company to websites you trust. Search engine spiders are clever enough to know when they are being gamed and this can seriously effect your ranking.  Also if you have more than 100 unique links on a web page then the spiders stop reading them, I like to think they get tired or a bit bored, and therefore only offer value to your Consumers not search engines.

Authoring: The more interesting the information is on your website the more people will read it. If you update it regularly then people will come back to see what you have changed.  It is also good to get your Customers or Consumers involved in creating this information. This is why blogs, wikis and social networking are becoming so popular – people like to be part of the content creation process and therefore ‘buy in’ to the overall business concept.

Tags: If you assign tags to the content that you create both your Consumers and search engines will find it easier to find exactly what they are looking for by category.  It makes your website work in a similar fashion as a human brain by putting each bit into a special compartment with a relevant label on it.

Extensions: Think about how you can enhance your business online through different applications and software. Instead of just showing them what your business can offer, let them buy things or try them online.  I recently came across hairdressers who are now allowing you to not only book your appointment online but also upload your photo to try out different hairstyles by superimposing them on your picture.  A simple but effective enhancement to the traditional hairdresser’s brochure/booking website.

Signals: Why wait for people to check your website for your new blog piece or product update?  Make it easier for your consumers to access the latest information by telling them about it.  Syndication tools allows you to do this easily and in a way in which the consumer wants.  Your consumers may want a daily update as to what is happening in your business or they may only want it monthly.  Syndication technology allows you to share this information with them in the way that they want making them more likely to actually consume and react to it.

So whilst you are determining your online strategy you need to bare these pointed in mind. Before you go and build your new website think about why you want it, who is going to use it, and how. I’d also suggest using the SLATES approach to consider how you can enhance what you are offering your Consumers.

Photo credit: CogDog Blog