When you’re adding an image into your website it isn’t mandatory to specify the width and height of the image. You could write the image code so that it looks like this:

<img src="logo.jpg" alt="logo">

Leaving these out will still allow the image to be shown in your web browser, and you might think that this is absolutely fine – but it’s not.

When your web browser is displaying the page it will see that you want to display and image, and start to download this image. Images usually take some time to download. Most web browsers  display the page as it is loading, filling in the images as they load later. The problem is, if you haven’t specified a width and height for the image in your HTML, the web browser won’t know how much of a gap to leave for the image, and so when it does finally load, it might have to shift all the items on the page around a bit. This is what is called a “repaint” as the web browser has to paint the screen again, this time with the image in place.

However if we do specify a width and height, like so:

<img src="logo.jpg" width="340" height="200" alt="logo">

The web browser knows exactly how big the image is, so can continue to display the rest of the page knowing how big the image will be, so that it can slot it in later when it has loaded. This is much more efficient, the page will load faster, and you won’t notice the elements on the page jumping around when the image loads.

Make sure the width and height are correct

When you’re adding the image HTML to a page, it’s possible to change the values for the width and height of the image to make the image appear larger or smaller than the file you’re linking to. It’s common that websites do this when they want to show a thumbnail of an image, and you can click to view the full sized image.

This is bad for two reasons:

1. It means you’re forcing the user to download a much larger image when they don’t need to. You might be using a whopping 800kb image as a tiny thumbnail, where actually a separate image of 20kb might actually be all that’s needed. It will take longer for the larger file to download on your users computer, and will use up more of their bandwidth for no reason.
2.  Stretching the file means that your web browser has to do some extra work. It has to download the full image, and then work out what it looks like at the size you’ve specified. This means that it needs to “repaint” the screen again, this time displaying the reprocessed image at the width and height you’ve set.

Always set the width and height of the image in the HTML to be the actual width and height of the image file.

What does Nibbler look for?

In our site checking tool Nibbler we look for all images on the webpage you’re testing, and check to see if the width and height have been set. If there’s no width or height, Nibbler will mark you down.

If a width and height have been set, Nibbler will download the image and check that you’ve specified the correct width and height of the image. If it finds that the width and height are inaccurate it will mark you down.

Conclusion

Including accurate information about an images width and height will make sure that web browsers have all the information they need to accurately display the image. Providing incorrect or no information will make your webpage slower to load, and might require your users to use more bandwidth than necessary.

In this article I’ll explain what meta tags are, focussing on meta description and keywords. I’ll explain why it’s important to add these to every page, but why we shouldn’t rely on them as a magical solution for getting to the top of Google.

What are meta tags?

Meta tags are information inserted into the “head” area of your web pages. This is information which is hidden to human visitors, instead it communicates information to search engines about the contents of the page.

Meta tags are usually written out in the code for the page like this:

<meta name="keywords" content="SiteRay, web testing, website testing, accessibility, SEO" />

<meta name="description" content="SiteRay is a tool for testing and reporting on websites." />

If you’re not used to putting code directly into your website then don’t worry about the code above. If you’re using a CMS, blog or forum, most of these have ways for you to enter meta tags without having to directly edit the code.

There are many more types of meta tags than written above, but in this article we’ll just discuss meta description and keywords. Both of these tags will describe the page in some way. I’ll describe each of these in this article.

Using a meta description

When a user searches for your site (or product) in a search engine, they will see a list of resulting matches. Here’s an example of a result on Google for the term “SiteRay”:

The first line is the page’s name (taken from the <title> tag on the page), this is also a link to the page. After that comes a description of the page, this is most likely the description that you set in your “description” meta tag (but not always, see below). This is the information that users will read before they even get to your page, which is why it’s so important. Make sure this text tells the user everything they need to know about the page, and be concise as possible because search engines may clip it down. But if you don’t put enough words in, they may pad it out by taking wording from elsewhere on your page. Generally 200 – 250 characters is about right.

Google doesn’t always show what you want it to

Unfortunately whenever you use a meta description on a page, it’s not guaranteed that this is what search engines will display when presenting their results. The entry for your page might contain the full text you specified in your meta description, or it might contain part of it, or it might contain none of it.

Google will try and show you a description which is related to the search term that you used. So lets see the example that we used above again this time searching for “SiteRay enhance any website”:

In the search term I’d added some words which were in the page content, but not in the meta description. So what has happened is Google have displayed the first part of the meta description, then cut it off with “…” and then finished the description by taking some of the page content, and showing where my search terms appear in the content of the page.

So Google won’t always show your meta description exactly, as it will depend on what the user searches for and the content on your page. But it’s still very important to use a meta description as default text.

What happens if we don’t use a meta description?

If you don’t use a meta description on your page, search engines will have to make up the description that they show in their results. To do this they will take some page content, which might not be relevant to what a user wants to see. The content might be overly verbose, and be cut short before it gets to the interesting bit, or it might just be totally irrelevant. The thing is, you aren’t in control.

Why do we need a unique meta description on every page?

It’s important to put meta description on each page of your website, because each of your pages are important (if they aren’t important, why do you need that page?). When a user comes to your site from a search engine, they’re not always going to come straight to the homepage. Search engines can display any of your pages in their search results, and will try and show the page that best matches what you searched for.

Let me give an example, say you’re a company selling multiple products. Each of your products has a separate page on your website. When a user searches, they’re often more likely to be looking for your product rather than searching for your company name. Which means search engines will try and take them directly to the product on your site, bypassing your website homepage which might not contain any information they want to see right now.

So it’s important to set a unique meta description for each page. This way, users will see it in the search results, and read a small description of that exact page, and they can decide if it’s what they want to look at.

So lets give an example of how this could be done badly. If you’re a company selling products, lets say cakes. All of your product pages might have the exact same meta description as the homepage, which says:

“A company based in Derbyshire, UK, we have been making cakes since 1895 and have a wide variety.”

A user might be specifically looking for wedding cakes and has searched Google for “wedding cakes”. Your page on wedding cakes has come up (not the homepage), but the description of your “wedding cake” page is the same as your homepage. At this stage the user doesn’t need to know you’ve been around since 1895, and they’re not interested in your variety, they just want to know about wedding cakes.

So instead of visiting your site, they visit the one below where the description is:

“We make lovely wedding cakes. Here are some photos and prices of our best examples.”

A useful summary of each page can be very important when users are coming from to your site from a search engine.

Using meta keywords

The meta keywords tag allows you to provide additional words for search engines to use to better display their results… in theory. A few years ago this was true, and the keywords were very important in helping search engines when ranking sites.

Unfortunately major search engines now ignore the keywords tag. This includes Google and Bing. There’s a great article here about meta keywords and how they haven’t been used by search engines for quite a long time. So it’s surprising to me as a web developer that we still get calls from clients or third party SEO companies who still put a lot of importance on adding meta keywords to pages, thinking that it will improve their ranking in Google. Unfortunately adding meta keywords just won’t improve your Google ranking at all.

Some search engines do still use meta keywords to affect their rankings. As of June 2010, Yahoo! is still using keywords to affect its rankings.

If you still want to add keywords, then consider the most important words to that page. These should be words that you expect people will be typing into search engines to find this page. If this page relates to a product, the name of the product is probably the most important keyword, followed by its important qualities or features.

Meta tags are not a magic solution

As we’ve seen, meta tags aren’t the magical solution to getting you higher on search engines. Meta keywords are mostly ignored, and description is sometimes overwritten depending on what the user is searching for.
If you’re really interested in search engine optimisation, it’s more worthwhile these days to look at the content of your page rather than the meta tags.

But getting people to your site from Google’s search results page is still very important, which is why it’s still very important to set a descriptive and helpful meta description tag.

If you use any automated tools to test your website (Nibbler,  SiteRay, W3C validator etc), many of them will pick up errors if you haven’t specified any “ALT text” on your images. “ALT text” is an attribute which should be added to any visual item on your web page. It’s mainly used on images to provide a text alternative to the graphical image, as not everyone can view an image. Providing an alternative allows all users to access the same information, whether they can see an image or not.

Here’s an example of some image HTML including some ALT text:

<img src="logo.jpg" width="300" height="200" alt="Silktide Logo" />

If you’re using a Content Management System then you probably won’t have to write the HTML like above when adding images, but you should still be able to insert ALT text into a field provided.

You might think that now you know how to add ALT text into a page that it’s simple, but it’s not just as simple as typing text into a field. To write the best ALT text, you have to consider you audience, and what is the purpose of that image on the page.

Providing alternative image text to people with disabilities

Some of the people using your website might be blind, colour blind, or partially-sighted. Providing an alternative text version of the image allows you to describe the image to these users so that they’re not missing out any important information. In many countries it’s actually law to provide these users access to the same content, and if you don’t account for this you could be discriminating against them.

Blind users will navigate the internet using a screen reader, this will speak out the text on the page. The screen reader will read out the ALT text of the image on your page, so you should make sure it describes the purpose of the image as best as possible.

For text-only web browsers and search engines

A text-only web browser is exactly what it sounds like, it’s a web browser which only views text. All images and styling will be removed, displaying the web page as a list of words and paragraphs of text. People who view websites using these browsers might be doing it for accessibility reasons, viewing it on an older machine or mobile device, or through personal choice.

Using a text-only browser also allows you to see how a search engine will view your website. Search engines like Google will view your website’s text and care very little about the images you use. Instead of viewing the images they will read the ALT text instead, and use this text to rank the pages in its search engine.

Hover-over

Some browsers will display the ALT text when you move your mouse cursor over the image. Remember this is another place where the ALT text might be shown, so make sure it’s concise and related to the image.

Should you use ALT text for decorative images?

Some images might exist only on your page for decorative purposes. Their function on the page might be purely for decoration, and don’t need to communicate anything. If this is the case, you don’t need to provide any alternative text for that image.

You do still need to provide an ALT tag however, but make sure it’s empty, for example alt=”". Doing this will mean that screen readers will completely ignore this image, and they won’t even announce its presence on the page.

It’s definitely better to include an empty ALT tag than to leave the tag out altogether. If you don’t specify an ALT text (even a blank one) most screen readers will instead read out the filename, which isn’t important information.

Should you use ALT text for bullets?

You might use images on your page to look like bullet points. These should be treated the same as decorative images, and have an empty ALT tag, e.g. alt=”". If you have a list of bullets which each have the ALT text “square red bullet”, people using screen readers or text-only browsers will see the words “square red bullet” preceding every line of text in the list. This is unnecessary, so just leave the ALT text blank.

Ideally if you want to use a graphical bullet, this should be applied in your stylesheet, and shouldn’t be an image in the page.

Images containing text

Sometimes you will want to use an image to display some text. Possible reasons for this might be that you want to include a header in a font which isn’t a web font. In this case make sure your ALT text repeats the text in the image word-for-word.

For example the following is an image that contains text:

<img src="tagline.gif" width="300" height="20" alt="Putting your websites to the test" />

Don’t embellish the ALT text or try to add any additional description, as this is confusing and pointless for end users. For example don’t ever write into your ALT text: “Putting your websites to the test, written in blue in a serif font”.

Make sure the text in your ALT text matches the text in the image exactly. Otherwise this additional unnecessary information will be given to people using screen readers or text-only browsers.

Charts, graphs, and other images which contain text

Where possible, you should have all your text present on the webpage, and not in an image. However there might be times when you need to use a chart or graph which is difficult to convert into paragraphs of text. You need to write all of the text contained in the images into the ALT text.

There might be times when you want to display an image on your website which contains far more text than you can reasonably display in the ALT tag. If so, use the “LONGDESC” tag, which was created for this reason. LONGDESC is a link to another page that contains the text of the image. The page doesn’t need to be styled, as it’s only text-browsers and screen readers that will access it.

Using images for navigation

Sometimes you might want to use an image for navigation, so clicking the image will take your users to another page. Like I mentioned above, if the image has any text on, the ALT text should match that text exactly. But if the image doesn’t contain text, the ALT text should describe where the link will take you. For example:

<a href="/downloads/help.pdf">

<img src="download_icon.gif" width="100" height="80" alt="Download help document" />

</a>

Conclusion – Don’t just write anything into the ALT text

There is a skill to writing the correct alternative to an image. Online automated website testers (Nibbler, SiteRay, W3C validator etc) can only detect if you’ve specified an ALT text or not, but they can’t tell if the wording you’ve used in appropriate. Keep your wording concise, and think about the purpose of that image on the page rather than just a description of the image.

If you visit a page of a website that has been moved, deleted or renamed, you’ll see an error telling you that there’s no page at that address. The technical name for this is a ‘404’ error, and they’re very important to handle correctly.

If your website doesn’t have a custom 404 error page, users will see a default error screen like this:

The default 404 error message

What can cause a 404 error page to show?

These are the most common reasons why a visitor will see a 404 error page:

• The URL of the page has been changed –This could be caused by the name of the page being changed, and the URL is updated to match. For example www.silktide.com/latest-news might change to www.silktide.com/news. If there are many websites linking to the old page, it might be some time before they update the URL, meaning that visitors might follow the link which now takes them to a 404 error page.
• The link you’re following is misspelt – A link on your website might have been misspelled when it was created, meaning that it’s taking you to a page which doesn’t actually exist.
• The page has been deleted – Pages can be deleted, but sometimes a site might still have lots of links to that page which haven’t yet been deleted.
• The website is offline – The website is currently down so the page can’t be displayed.
• The website has been deleted – The website isn’t around anymore. The link you’ve followed might be from a site which still thinks the website exists. If the visitor sees a 404 error message, they might also assume this is the case for all of the reasons above, so it’s likely that they’ll never try to visit this website ever again.

Why is the default error bad?

If the user sees the error above, it’s bad in many ways.

• Too much technical jargon – It doesn’t really mean anything to the average internet user. There’s a lot of wording which uses technical jargon, and it’s not very helpful for non-technical users.
• It’s not branded – If you’re familiar with the lovely colours and design of the site you’re viewing, and then suddenly you’re faced with a nasty looking plain white page with black text, you might think that you’ve gone to another site. This makes your visitor feel uncomfortable and unsure where they are.
• There is nowhere else to go – After your visitor clicks the link that takes them to this 404 page, there are no links for them to follow other than click “back” in their browser.

The last two are especially bad when you consider that someone might be following a link from another website, and they get this error. This is the first page they see of your site and it’s an error page. They might assume the entire site is down, where actually the only problem is that a page has been renamed.

Customise your 404 error pages

It’s possible to customise the 404 error pages that people will see on your website. This allows you to make the page look exactly like any other page of your site, but display a clear message to your visitors telling them that the page they were looking for has not been found.

Give people what they expect to see

With a custom 404 error page you can make the page look exactly like your website, so that there’s definitely no confusion that they might have gone to the wrong website, or that your site might be down when it isn’t.

Keeping the layout of your page the same as other pages on your site will also give users the ability to see your menu and link through to other pages on your site. They might even be able to find what they were originally looking for. Or they could link straight to your homepage and start navigating your site from there.

Explaining the problem

A 404 error page allows you to communicate to your user that the page they wanted can’t be found. Don’t be embarrassed or try to hide that fact.

Some websites don’t have a 404 error page at all, instead they redirect the visitor straight to the homepage if the website can’t find the page that the visitor wants to see. This is bad practice because the visitor might not have noticed a redirect happening, and assume that the homepage is their intended destination.

For example a visitor is following a link from an external site which takes them to a really interesting article on our website, e.g. www.silktide.com/news/really-interesting-article. This page has been renamed lately so the link they’re using is incorrect. Instead of seeing a 404 error page, they are redirected to the homepage www.silktide.com. The visitor was expecting to see a really interesting news article, but instead sees the homepage, which doesn’t contain the information they want to see right now. They immediately leave the site.

Whereas if they see a 404 error page explaining that the article might have been renamed or moved, they might stick around on the site and try to figure out where it is.

It’s best to clearly explain to people who arrive to a 404 error page that they’re on the wrong page, (be polite and apologise too!) just so that there is definitely no confusion. A simple example is: “Sorry, it looks like we couldn’t find the page you were looking for”.

Help people find the information they want

If a visitor has come to a 404 error page on your site, it means they were trying to find something on your site but weren’t able to find the page they were looking for.

You might be able to help people find the correct page they were looking for by listing the common sections, or showing them your most popular pages. Some websites even use the 404 page as another place to push their products onto visitors. “We couldn’t find the page you were looking for… so why not have a look at these other items instead…”

Best examples

Here is a page with some great examples of custom 404 Error Pages. You will notice that some of them look like the full website, while some of them are a very simplified design. All of them continue the look and feel of the website they represent, so that the visitor won’t be too surprised or confused when they see this page.

A collection of anonymously contributed client horror stories from web designers (none of these are ours, we promise!)

“That other website is stealing our business. Can you make it so that when someone types in their address they come to our site?”

Client: “Well we are well known amongst all the Russian billionaires so there is great potential for you to get your name out there by doing this project for free. Also I am a direct descendant of Genghis Khan.”

“I’m not paying you anything extra to do the website because it is simply a matter of pushing the right buttons. I know how to push buttons.”

Me: Yes.

Client: Can you change it to a comma?

Me: Er, well I can, but you should put a full stop at the end of a sentence.

Client: Oh, that grammar stuff is very old fashioned.

“Our web application support team doesn’t know HTML or JavaScript, can you redo the project so you aren’t using those?”

Client: “Can you click the picture?”

Me: “No. What do you want it to do? Enlarge?”

Client: “No, I just want to click it.”

Me: “But when you click it, what do you want to happen?”

Client: “I just want to be able to click it.”

“We’d like you to illustrate this (diagram of traffic tunnel and four-lane highway), but we’d like you to make it look like this (watercolour of budgie doing aerobics).”

“I really like the gradient – going from red to yellow – but I don’t like orange. Can you make it go through another colour?”

Me: “Because that is illegal.”

“I want you to make it so people have to give us their email before they can look at the site. If they’re gonna look at our stuff, I want to be able to spam them afterwards.”

Me: That all sounds reasonable, your original request terms this “Cheaply” what is your budget and I’ll advise as to what can be done realistically.

Client: £20

“I really like it. The thing is, I showed it to my uncle, and he didn’t like it at all – he though the ‘1’ looked like an ‘i’. He was a bit drunk at the time. Do you think you could you change it?”

In Part I we looked at how the Internet changes everything. This is how you can take advantage of it.

You probably underestimate what you can automate

The Internet empowers you to reduce your marginal costs close to zero. This doesn’t happen by itself however.

Automate everything you can. Relentlessly. Ideally, you don’t want to need people at all to make and complete a sale. From order to fulfilment should use as close to zero people as possible. You still need staff of course, but they’ll be focused on making that process as effective as possible, strategy and marketing.

A common objection is “but we need staff to do …”. A smart Internet business will find a way to circumvent that problem:

• We need staff to quote
  Are you sure? How much business do you lose by not quoting fast enough? How much more would you make if quotes were 100% automated? What if you offered fixed price standard offerings, and sold them in volume? What if you had a questionnaire which asked your sales questions online, and emailed the customer a PDF quote – to a far higher standard than your manual ones – instantly?
• We need to call our supplier/customers
  Could you email them instead? What if they could login and view your requests online, accept or decline them, query all the relevant details themselves? What if you automatically proxied between your customers and suppliers?
• We need a physical presence
  Sometimes this is true, for example with clothing or cars. How much of the remainder of your operation could be automated? Is the Internet getting people excited enough about what you do that they are coming to your physical locations to buy?

Things that you can probably automate most include: accounts receivable, pre sales, order taking and after sales support. If you’re in the right industry: fulfilment.

You probably have no idea what this costs

The truth is some things you think are hard are ridiculously easy. A lot of things you probably don’t even know exist are very hard.

A college dropout could write code which sends you a text message in about 5 minutes.

Automatically sending an email? 2 minutes.

Automatically sending a graphical email that doesn’t get spam filtered, and works consistently for lots of different email software? Potentially a week, and several people. And your maintenance is way higher, as email changes all the time.

The danger with this is that if you don’t understand what makes things difficult, or what is important, you’ll pursue high cost paths without considering vastly lower cost alternatives. Startups have an advantage: they don’t have much money, so they optimise better. It’s no coincidence that most of them don’t use graphical emails, but that big lumbering corporations tend to insist on them.

You need smart people who understand the technology to guide you, and they need to be empowered enough to make decisions. The person least qualified is usually the technophobe at the top.

What Internet businesses look like

Internet companies are usually much smaller, spend less and earn higher margins. Many are profitable with only a handful of staff.

Because the technology is so important, a large portion of resources go into developing that technology. If you’re Google you need to write that search engine before you have a business. Amazon is nothing without a great website.

Conversely your traditional workers are likely far thinner on the ground. There’s much less need to have people answer the phone, handle accounts etc., as these processes should be automated.

Generally there will be more highly skilled workers, and their skills will be leveraged far greater than before. Improving a part of your process can result in huge gains for minimal manpower, but it takes real skill to know what to change.

Most successful Internet companies are lead by people with a technical understanding. People without these skills will struggle to compete against those with them. Just ask your granddad to race an 8 year old: find me something on the Internet.

Because highly skilled people are harder to find, they are usually treated well. Great offices are a smart move to help keep them. Culture becomes far more important than ever. This is not indulgence. With information workers, flexible hours and other perks pay back more than they cost.

What can you do right now?

There are three options.

1. Look at what you can change with your business
2. Fund a new spin-off business
3. Await extinction

Sometimes small incremental changes to your own business are enough. If you’re an established bank, supporting online banking was a no brainer – essential for your survival. In these cases, the easiest strategy is to outsource to external talent.

Founding a spin-off is another approach. When British Airways realised they couldn’t compete with ‘no frills’ airlines like Ryanair without destroying their own business, they founded Go (now part of EasyJet). This allows you to circumvent what is probably your biggest liability – internal politics. For a lumbering giant to change their website can take 12 months and 500 stakeholders. A five man team can dance circles around them. They’ll take a fresh look at everything, and probably find a far better way than you will.

The best people tend to be highly entrepreneurial, and they thrive in an environment where they have high autonomy. A spin off gives you the chance to create that culture afresh. Right now, it’s likely they won’t even apply to work for you.

Done correctly, you can leverage your own strengths to this new company (experience, capital, brand recognition) and take full advantage of the Internet revolution.

Just don’t do nothing.

We meet a lot of big, established companies who don’t ‘get’ the Internet.

“We’ve got a guy looking at that.”

“Most of our customers don’t use the Internet anyway.”

“We’ve already got a website. I haven’t really used it, but it looks really nice.”

Many businesspeople dismiss the Internet as a place for their website and email. That’s equivalent to seeing the PC as a nicer looking typewriter, and about as dangerous. History is littered with the carcasses of once great companies that failed to embrace revolutions: from the combustion engine to the microchip. Just like these, the Internet changes the whole game.

Why you’re not worried enough

The most common mistake is to assume your customers don’t like or use the Internet, or that what you do isn’t affected by it.

Put ten random people in a room. Ask them:

• When was the last time they bought a holiday without using a website?
• What about car insurance?
• Who’s bought something from Amazon.com?
• Have they used online banking? Would they switch to a bank that didn’t have it?
• Who doesn’t read a newspaper anymore because of the Internet?
• Do they own an iPod? Have they bought music for it?

All of these are established multi-billion dollar industries (insurance, travel, finance, books, news, music) that have been utterly transformed within 10 years. Almost all have seen new industry leaders start and take over within that same period. Apple and Amazon are now the largest distributors of music worldwide. Google is the largest supplier of advertising, almost equal in revenue to the entire newspaper industry. Right now, the entire newspaper industry is fighting for its life, largely because of a company that was founded in 1998 by two fresh graduates in a garage.

How the world has changed

Marginal costs approach zero

Marginal cost is what you have to spend to sell one additional unit.

To sell a holiday offline, you need a person to answer the phone, accept enquiries, prepare responses and process orders. To sell more holidays, you need more people, so your costs increase alongside your income. Because demand fluctuates, you’re always inefficient – there is either too much or too little capacity at any time.

On the Internet, your marginal costs approach zero. Once you’ve built your online holiday store, the cost of serving 10 customers or 100,000 is almost the same. For more orders, you just need a bit more electricity and computing power, and the odd person to handle issues that occur. Demand can fluctuate and you’re much more flexible.

This enables business models that couldn’t exist before. Ryanair can sell you a flight for £10 online and make a profit. Apple can sell songs for 79p each, earn a higher margin and employ a fraction of the staff of a traditional music retailer.

If you’re stuck with higher marginal costs than your competitors, you’re doomed to cost more, make less or go bust.

Barriers to entry drop

Increasingly it becomes easier to build a new online businesses:

• Technology is ubiquitous and cheap.
• An online presence is affordable by individuals, nevermind companies.
• Smart individuals can outdesign large companies.
• Technology is getting better all the time.
• Demand is increasing all the time.
• Physical offices are not required.
• Marginal costs are extremely low.
• A 24/7 global presence is possible from a back-yard.

Virtually every household Internet company started as a couple of people programming on their own computers, often without offices or staff. From these foundations, giants such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and Facebook have risen. Typically these companies will secure modest funding around $100,000 early in their life to sustain themselves. Increasingly many are entirely self funded.

Right now there’s probably a guy in a bedroom working on how to do what you do better online, and what’s scariest is he has a chance of succeeding.

Scalability approach infinity

Internet business can scale very, very quickly. Internet companies have demonstrated the fastest growth rates ever seen by business. Google became “the most powerful brand in the world” with a market cap around $150 billion within 10 years.

Growth costs less as marginal costs are so low. Expanding into new territories doesn’t have to mean new offices or staff. The automated, electronic systems which power your business (such as your website) don’t sleep and can expand almost at will.

Note that is only applies if the technology and the design is right. If they’re not – say you didn’t plan for internationalising your product – then you’re stuck. But your competitors might not be.

Globalisation becomes the norm

As scalability increases, it becomes far easier to serve a global audience than before.

With the enormous opportunities this presents – of drastically increasing revenue at relatively low cost – the most successful companies almost invariably expand in this way. This means that unless you’re the best in the world at something, there’s a good chance someone better will expand into your turf eventually.

This creates incredible opportunities for the world’s best companies, but serious threats for the worst.

Protectionism fails

Traditional legal protections are relatively ineffective on the Internet. Regardless of the law, people will copy content you write, comment freely on your products and services and relentlessly duplicate anything you do which appears to be successful. On a global stage, combating this is an exercise in futility.

Some of the most powerful corporations in the world are either thriving in this environment, or being decimated by it. Most of the music and film industry has bemoaned how the Internet is destroying their livelihood through piracy and the ‘expectation of not paying’, and have spent a great deal of that time chasing criminals, instead of delivering a legal alternative. Meanwhile Apple spotted a new opportunity – people wanted their music over the Internet – developed iTunes and now is the largest music seller in the US with around 5 million songs sold a day.

More transparency, less loyalty

Your customers don’t care about you, or your website.

They probably have many alternatives. They are empowered like never before to research you, compare you and reject you at their whim. Consider how you buy car insurance or a holiday online, how much choice you have, and how long you’ll stick around if you get frustrated trying to use one provider.

If your business is based on hoodwinking, you probably won’t survive in the Internet marketplace. But if you offer genuine value, you’ll likely do better than ever.

Awareness

If you can grow very quickly – and so can your competitors – then your game changes.

You need awareness to succeed. Many insurance companies are at the mercy of brokers with more popular websites, like www.confused.com, simply because they attract more business. Barnes & Noble have their own website – launched just two years after Amazon’s – but it attracts only a fraction of the traffic Amazon gets, and even less business.

Whoever holds the majority of attention wins.

This has lead many Internet companies to go to incredible and ingenious lengths to make their presence known. Many Internet startups secure funding solely for this purpose. Internet Marketing may appear very alien to traditional marketers. In most cases, it no longer means getting people to type in your web address directly, instead you want them to find you via a Search Engine (like Google), social network or other sites.

If you don’t know your YouTube from a Tweet, you need someone who does. It’s not forgiving territory to the uninitiated. Know this: it doesn’t reward large spend like traditional interruption marketing.

Technology is a workforce

Increasingly your website is what people see first, and possibly the only thing they see. As automation increases, think of your technology as much of your sales force, marketing material, fulfilment and after sales support. Just as in the real world, the quality of these is hugely important.

Many people struggle to evaluate how ‘good’ a website is, or they’re not sure how to make them better. It’s a lot more intuitive to say all your sales guys need to wear suits than to make an intelligent comment on drop-down menus. Hire at least one expert. Test your site endless on real people. At a minimum, read this book.

Continued in Part II: Taking advantage of that Internet thing

Year founded: 1995

Website launched: 1995
Revenue (2008): $19.9 billion
Number of employees: 20,500

NASDAQ: AMZN

Year founded: 1917

Website launched: 1997
Revenue (2008): $5.06 billion
Number of employees: 37,000

NYSE: BKS

Which pretty much says it all.

For the full story, read this interview of Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder.

99.9% of writing on the Internet is utter crap.

We’ve known £100 million companies with content that looks like it was excreted from the rear end of an illiterate baboon.

The problem is common with websites, because usually the owner has to supply their own text. All too often, this role falls to the least literate, most overworked person in the company – someone whose peak in their writing career consists of a particularly awesome Facebook post.

Here are ten all-too commons signs of poor writing for the web:

1. Multiple exclamation marks!!!!!
   You looks like an attention deficit teen writing a text message. Exclamation marks are only used one at a time, and judiciously. Two sentences in a row! Is not cool!
2. I’m getting there
   Imagine your audience is an angry mob about to set you on fire. Talk fast. Edit out anything you don’t need, like this.
3. Clichés
   Their real meaning has long since given way to laziness. “No problem too big or small?” Please. That’s a euphemism for “we’ll take any work, we’re desperate!”
4. Wall of text
   Headings, paragraphs, bulleted lists: if you don’t have any, your content will scare people away before they’ve read it, and with good reason.
5. Spelling mistakes
   FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.
6. Over-protective
   Stop qualifying everything. “Almost”. “I guess”. “Probably”. Not every statement you write has to be undisputed fact, and your readers can handle this. Otherwise you’re just boring.
7. Marketese
   Don’t tell me you’re a “leading provider of synergistic vertical solutions”. No-one knows what that means, nor do they give a rat’s bottom. Write clearly, in a language we understand.
8. Forgetting your poor reader
   They’re a real person too, and – suckered as they might be – they’re reading your text for a reason. Every sentence should be useful, entertaining, or both.
9. Why use 5 words when I could use 50?
   ‘Nuff said.
10. I don’t know how to use an apostrophe
    Stop. Walk away from the keyboard. If you’re a grown adult and you haven’t learnt basic grammar and punctuation by now, you never will. Writing just isn’t for you.

Why you should care

We live in an age where people get bored reading a lengthy text message. People are quick to comment on what they can judge in a blink – like the images on a page – but rarely criticise writing. Text isn’t sexy. Any doofus with a keyboard can type.

Sadly true.

Of course, any doofus can draw too. Fire that stupid graphic designer, buy yourself a pack of wax crayons – you’ll save a fortune!

Good writing is invaluable. Think of your copy as filling the role of your spokesperson, talking to anyone who stops at your website. Does your website sound like a master orator, an over enthusiastic snake-oil salesman, or a delinquent teenager?

If your organisation isn’t blessed with the time and expertise to write well, do yourself a favour and hire a professional. Good writing is good communication, and it pays for itself.

It’s the opening night of your dream nightclub. You’ve spent months picking out the right shade of pink for the carpet, the perfect umbrellas for your cocktails, the best bulldog statues for the toilets. It cost you every penny you have, but it’s perfect.

You invited everyone you know – of course – and it’s going pretty well. Word of mouth is sure to spread, and in a few weeks you’ll be packed.

If only.

A week passes and your go-go girls outnumber the punters. The few unfortunate deadbeats who do show up leave soon after. In desperation, you gamble what little you have left on a carpet bombing of indiscriminate ads and slash your prices. Having spent your money on the fitting, this is your last, best hope to attract customers.

It doesn’t work.

Turning on the lights, you decide to take one final stroll round, before the bailiff arrives for his keys. With a pained smile, you reflect on what remains of your creation. Looking at it now, was pink a good idea? Maybe the bulldog statues clashed with the neon cherubs? How could I have known?

This is the story of most websites, and the mistakes they make.

Firstly, their new owners spend most or all of their budget on the first build. They should hold as much – or more – back, to allow for promotion and development.

Secondly, they expect to be overnight successes. The expression “if you build it, they will come” is about as truthful as “if you bake it, it will taste good”. It takes time, and hard work to attract people, and your work here is never done.

Thirdly, they assume their original design is set in stone, and are slow to adapt – or don’t adapt at all. The best websites are always improving, measuring everything and refining every slight detail constantly. For your nightclub, you might watch the queues around the bar, and adjust your staffing to match. Are you paying equivalent attention to where your visitors go on your site? Do you know the most and least effective pages, and what have you done to improve them?

Perhaps because a website isn’t a physical ‘thing’, people struggle to see how they work. So if it helps, think of your site like your dream nightclub.

Just avoid the bulldog statues.