I’m not suggesting that you should ever have an unfinished website, but what I am saying is you should never put a lid on it. Never think of it as finished. There’s always improvements that can be made; improvements which can make a difference to your profitability and efficiency.

Considering it to be a work in progress not only means that you can improve it, but it also means that by continually working on it, it doesn’t become stale and forgotten.

If we are constantly trying to ‘improve’ our website, how do we know if what we’re doing is working? How do we know the changes we make are not making things worse?

We need some sort of feedback to measure effectiveness, and we can get feedback in many ways.

Firstly, we can get feedback from STATISTICS.

Forget about the number of hits you get on your website. That really is the least significant number of all your stats. I’m not saying you shouldn’t take note of it, but there is more useful information to look at, such as:

Where is your traffic coming from? Your referrals could paint an interesting picture of where your users originate. A customer of mine was surprised to find that he was getting three times more traffic from a link he had not asked for than one on a popular tourist portal that he was paying for.

What are your main landing pages? If people are coming to your site through pages other than the home page, it’s important that they are still able to find their way around. Landing pages should be optimised to reflect their importance in the site.

What are your exit pages? Look to see which pages your users are leaving from. There could be opportunities to keep them on-site using microcopy and links.

Do you get a lot of bounces? Bounces are when someone arrives on your site and then leaves before going to any other page. These demonstrate a mistaken click or, worse a disappointment at what they find. Take a fresh look at bounce pages and ask yourself why they are not holding more interest.

One of the best ways of getting feedback from your stats is to set up goals in your analytics software. Goals are ‘defined’ paths through your site.

Say for example, your home page is an obvious landing page; you might want your users to follow a link to a special offer and then click a contact link to find out more information. In marketing terms, a goal on a website is a lead generated, and if your analytics software can be set up to measure your lead generation for you, that gives you an excellent metric to improve your website.

There are other goals you can set up too. An RSS feed, social media signup or newsletter signup could be a goal. If someone is interested enough in the information you publish, signing up to an RSS feed or a newsletter is one way of putting your brand in front of potential customers over and over again. And the best thing about it is they have chosen to receive your information.

On an ecommerce site, the payment page could be considered the ‘goal’ but that doesn’t give you much information, so set up goals for the products that are most profitable, or the ones that lead to more sales, or just special offers.

Pay particular attention to your stats when using print advertising or other marketing methods. You will almost certainly get increased hits following a marketing campaign, but if that doesn’t lead to a corresponding rise in goal conversions, something’s not working.

So these are all ways you can make improvements using feedback from your stats.

But you can get also feedback from your CUSTOMERS.

Customers are great tools to get feedback from, but you have to ask them the right questions.

One of the easiest questions to ask your customers is: do you like our website or what do you think of our website and this is a majorly flawed approach.

It is flawed because people don’t always say what they mean. Most people when asked do you like our website will just say yes because they haven’t had chance to give it any thought, and secondly because they might think they will offend you or may even be worried that you might want to more detail.

To get useful feedback from customers, you need to ask them relevant questions that you can act on. If you ask 100 people do you like our website and they all say yes, you can’t improve anything. And actually liking it has actually got little to do with whether it works.

So what we need to do is actually encourage negative feedback in order to find weak spots.

So we ask questions like:

Was our website easy to navigate? Someone might say yes, but it took me ages to find your phone number, or yes, but when I clicked the form to email you, nothing happened. Good feedback.

Did you find what you were looking for? They might say no, but it’s OK, I got one from somewhere else. Good feedback.

Was the checkout process simple? They might say yes, you are the only site that has this product for sale online. More good feedback.

Was there enough information? They could say all the products had a detailed description, but there was nothing to say how long delivery was going to be. Again, good feedback.

Did you go to another website after visiting ours? Yes, because I wanted product x, but you didn’t have it.

All these comments provide valuable feedback that you can use to improve your site.

How you get the feedback doesn’t matter, you can ask directly, use n online service like SurveyGizmo or Wufoo, or post the questions as an optional part of the checkout process, but the answers you get will all give you good information you can build on

And if you go down the survey route, save and analyse the information further.

And if feedback is useful to you as a website owner, then understand that feedback is useful to your customers too.

I’ve already mentioned an email form where nothing happened when it was clicked. Imagine how frustrating that must be to your users. Give them a thank you at least, better still an autoresponder message, or an estimate of how long it will take you to get back to them.

We use the web often enough in our daily lives now to know what service we like and expect. Think about the good things that other websites do and use similar techniques.

So, we’re onto our third way to get feedback and that’s through SOCIAL MEDIA

Most of your followers will be following you because they are actually interested in you, your products, and what you have to say.

Consider the benefits of each of the social networks and how they can help you. Remember your building brand and loyalty by being social. Build credibility by being open and helpful, so when you ask an honest question, you are likely to get an honest answer.

Let’s have a look at the networks individually:

On Twitter, messages are limited to 140 characters, but you can get a surprising amount of information into a short amount of space.

It’s not like email, it’s not like the telephone, just use it to generally communicate with your followers with short, succinct pieces of information and observations, using links, retweets and photos to illustrate your tweets.

Also use software like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite to monitor searches for your own keywords and your company name, and even your competitors. If you’re following your competitors’ customers, and your competitors aren’t, you could easily pick up new business by being ahead of the game. Twitter is an ideal platform for encouraging feedback.

Facebook is different, it allows you to generate a much more focussed discussion, and you can post pictures, links, and video into the conversation and get feedback directly. As each comment is linked to the original post, it helps build a more structured conversation.

Use the extended features of Facebook to get your customers more involved. By building a community of customers you will start to generate feedback without even asking for it. Facebook is perfect for generating feedback.

A company in Forres used Facebook to post pictures of two new layouts of its website. The owner invited comments and he went back to his web developer with the changes. A perfect example of not only asking the right people to comment, ie people following his company, but also a good way of using social media for feedback.

Linked In has a feature on its website called Answers and this is where you can ask questions and get responses from businesspeople who have an ‘expert’ rating depending on how many questions they have successfully answered.

There’s no reason why you can’t use this for feedback-related queries.

If you have a blog, encourage comments on your posts, and add links to make it easy for readers to share your posts with their own social networks.

YouTube is also an excellent feedback medium. Post a video that poses a question directly or indirectly, and you’re likely to get a good response. The danger with YouTube is that it can get quite spammy, but it has good moderation controls, so if you can put up with a bit of spam, feedback on a video can provide valuable information.

And not forgetting forums, such as the 4Networking Business Forums, an excellent social network of over 30,000 members talking about business-related topics of every type and description.
You will probably be able to find forums on the internet related to most business activities. Join up and make a few friends before jumping in and asking for feedback.

Forums provide an opportunity other networks don’t in that you can really go to town on the detail. The commenting system on Facebook for example is small, but on a forum, there is room for detailed responses. And generally forum posts stick around for longer and index better with search engines.

So there are different reasons for using different networks and it doesn’t make sense to choose one over the other. You choose each for its relevance for your business.

So that’s how you can use feedback to make improvements to your website.

Canary Dwarf and local cloud computing experts Cumulus IT are holding a fast-track workshop to help you learn how to make the most out of your website, and how a new wave of productivity tools on the web are making business easier.

Forres: Thursday, 2 September, 9.30am to 11.30am
Horizon Scotland, The Enterprise Park, Forres

Inverness: Thursday, 16 September, 2-4pm
Ness Horizons, Beechwood Park, Inverness Map

Cost: £15 inc VAT per session

Group size: 10-12

Target audience

This workshop is aimed at people responsible for either marketing or IT within their organisation. Whether you are a sole trader or work for a larger business or non-profit organisation, you will find that you can benefit from many of the same techniques and technologies.

Workshop objectives

At the end of this workshop you will have a basic understanding of the different types of web sites and tools available for your business. You will be able to identify techniques and technologies that can help your business and you will have many valuable and practical pointers for getting started with them.

Workshop outline

The web for marketing & promotion

• What do you want to achieve with your web presence?
• Different types of websites
• Characteristics of a great website (examples of do’s and don’ts)
• The importance of usability, copywriting and search optimisation
• Managing your website’s content
• Using your website for selling
• How to get your website noticed
• How to use a blog
• How to use social media
• How to use email for marketing
• What to look out for when choosing an agency to help you establish a web presence

The web for running your business

• What tools are available on the web?
• How the web can help to manage your customers, relationships and sales
• How to use the web to improve communication and collaboration with customers
• How to use the web to manage your finances and get paid for your services
• What are the benefits of using these tools on the web?
• Is it safe to use the web for my business?

We will have some demo’s/examples and interactive sessions throughout the workshop.

Web Surgery

We will hold mini consultationss after the official program were you will be able to bring forward any specific issues that you have and get personalised advice.

About the hosts

Marc Hindley
Marc is an award-winning web content consultant. He has worked for 20 years in media, communications and the Internet. He runs a web services agency, Canary Dwarf, in Forres which provides complete design, development and marketing solutions for small and medium-sized businesses with a focus on ROI.

Ben Stege
Ben has nearly 15 years of experience in the information technology sector. He founded Infoland in 1996, a successful Dutch company specialising in web based software solutions for health care and education. Ben runs Cumulus IT in Forres, delivering complete business IT solutions via the web instead of in-house servers, the motto being: “Keeping IT simple”.

Find out more, or reserve your seat today

Please note that spaces are limited, sign up today by sending an email to mail@canarydwarf.co.uk or benstege@cumulusit.co.uk

If you’ve ever set up ‘goals’ in your analytics software, you’ll understand how this works, but your website should have a scent. Or maybe several.

I’m not talking about the sweet smell of ylang ylang, or the aroma coming from a bed of roses. Your users should be able to pick up a scent from your landing pages, a scent that leads them through to fulfill your goals and calls to action.

Maintaining a ’scent’ keeps website users on track right through to completing the goal and leaving. It’s the invisible thread that pulls them from one page to the next, without making them stop and think.

Some of the techniques used in maintaining scent are:

Link integrity – links should link to what they say, so the link and the resulting page title should be reasonably similar. Losing this connection between the link and the page can break the scent.

Search – When users arrive at your website from a search engine, they have followed a link. This is where they first pick up the scent. Make sure your website is meeting their needs by providing the information they are searching for.

Design integrity – Changing the design or layout between pages is poor usability and will break the scent. Users will expect pages to have consistency, surprising them with something different will break the scent.

Security – On ecommerce sites, users will become increasingly aware of security during the checkout process. Unexpected behaviours here will knock your customers’ confidence, especially on first-time purchases. And remember, the first purchase, if completed, will boost confidence in your site’s ability to fulfill, leading to repeat sales.

Switching medium – Try to maintain scents across your website, email and social media. Any scent picked up on the website may be lost elsewhere if it is watered down. Establish a policy for handling messages by email and social media.

Microcopy – Never underestimate the power of single words and short phrases in influencing your customers. Sometimes we are tempted to say too much, destroying the lure of finding out more.

We’ve all seen a dog sniffing around after losing a scent, frantically confused. Don’t do this to your website users, they are your next customers.

At Canary Dwarf, we have been eagerly awaiting its release. We started playing with the first beta release last month, and we liked what we saw. So much so that we started using it on a couple of projects currently in development.

Key improvements are the new menu building feature, something which clearly promotes it to a serious content management system (CMS) rather than just a blogging tool; and its ability to run multiple sites.

And when they say multiple, they mean multiple. WordPress quotes up to 10,000,000 sites can be run of one installation. That’s nice to know!

The team at WordPress have named this release Thelonius, comparing it with the jazz giant Thelonius Monk whose “Improvisational wizardry inspired us to new heights of customisation”.

Canary Dwarf is working with WordPress on a daily basis and we use it as a CMS already for some of our clients and in-house projects, such as Moray Firth Live.

Because WordPress separates content and design so cleverly, we find it a great tool to use for customers who have varying budgets.

Now, with version three, less coding will be required to build custom menus, headers and backgrounds, and we can provide training for clients to manage more of their site themselves.

We call this the agency/client split and it means our clients can decide how much involvement they have in the management of their content and design in accordance with their budget. We can provide training for those with lower budgets, and management for those with more to spend.

WordPress is already the most downloaded website creation software and 20 million people are using it around the world. It is rapidly becoming a serious player for business websites, and it just got a whole lot better with version 3.0.

And of course its open source, which means its free to download, use and edit. And while Canary Dwarf does charge for customising it, being free to us is a major benefit to our clients’ bottom lines, and making it easier to use and customise helps a bit too.

Expect to see lots more of the Big W spreading across the internet soon.

Quick off the mark

We never look back on the day we chose to partner with StudioPress, a leading supplier of Premium WordPress themes. It was only hours after the release of WordPress 3.0, that StudioPress launched an upgrade to their brilliant Genesis WordPress theme framework, which integrated the new custom menu features. Nice work team.

No, we’ve invested in an iPad – the new sensation from Apple, now the biggest tech company in the world.

And it’s not a vanity purchase either. The wee ‘Mac’ has already established itself as a big productivity booster in the office here at web HQ.

One of the most important functions it will provide for is that of browser testing.

Although it uses Safari, the browser made by Apple for it’s desktops, laptops and mobile devices, it does render some layouts differently and its use on a large (ish) touch screen device will present many new problems for web designers.

On an iPhone and iPod Touch, there is a degree of tolerance to be expected when using a full-size website on a tiny screen.

But with the iPad being much bigger it is likely to be used more for web browsing and this is why we’re taking it seriously.

New ideas

Furthermore, we think the iPad has enormous potential as an intranet device and we are already working on some ideas which will help businesses to streamline their operations either through closed websites or apps.

Able hands

We also take accessibility very seriously and we were very interested to read the heart-warming tale of a woman with cerebral palsy. She bought an iPad for when they first came out in the US, but soon discovered that she was able to use it to communicate on a much higher level than she had been able to before. Could the iPad offer people with differing abilities creative ways to communicate? Reference: My iPad as an affordable communicator

Productivity

The iPad has already proved to be an effective tool in our day-to-day operations. We’re used to working with multiple screens to aid productivity and our iPhones have helped us keep on top of social media in and out of the office. But the iPad provides us with full-size computing power that we can carry around without leads and other plug-in bits. True, it has its limitations, but it’s also more flexible than a laptop or phone in many areas. It’s fast, the battery life is awesome, you can plug it into a projector AND you can take it home and play on it.

We love it.

Textology deals specifically with SMS text messaging as a business marketing and information distribution tool.

Marc Hindley of Canary Dwarf, said: “SMS is still a powerful medium. Despite the huge rise in popularity amongst social networks, we are still experiencing a rise in the use of text messaging.”

“It’s a handy, fast communication service. It doesn’t require software, expensive phones or technical knowhow. Everybody has a mobile phone, and everybody knows how to send a text message.”

The text messaging platform will supply information on demand, on subscription, on location and on schedule. It’s flexibility allows us to work with any requirement. We are able to build applications specific to business needs or use ready-made service for tight budgets.

Businesses can use it in high profile marketing campaigns, or just to fix problems in their workflow. For example a five-digit number can be advertised that will allow users to ’subscribe’ to updates. Or a business could use it privately amongst customers to have an automated appointment reminder service, “potentially saving them lost revenue from missed appointments, he added”

“We have partnered with a leading infrastructure provider with a robust connection to all UK mobile phone networks.”

So we set to building him a new one. And when it launched this week, Alan phoned me up to tell me how he had already been getting emails and phone calls. The site had appeared on the front page of Google, sometimes even at the number one spot!

Alan works in a very competitive industry, so it was important to make sure his company’s principles were clear. He goes straight to the point on price and meets his clients’ needs efficiently and economically, and delivers high quality products and workmanship. He doesn’t have a sales team. He’s a tradesman and he knows his stuff.

“Excellent in a word. Page 1 on Google in areas I aimed for from the day site went live and phone and enquires flowing.”
- Alan Duncan, Seaforth Windows

We highlighted this throughout his website. On the front, a satisfied customer sums it up nicely: ‘First class service, first class windows’ and a link to some very positive feedback provides more glowing reports. We built the site with search engine friendly code which has meant Alan has instantly benefited with new leads.

When the website launched, Alan left his own feedback for us on the business review site Free Index.

Alan was straight to the point: “Excellent in a word. Page 1 on Google in areas I aimed for from the day site went live and phone and enquires flowing,”

Free Index also gives reviewers the chance to rate companies out of five, and Alan gave us five out of five each for Customer Service, Quality, and Value for Money.

Link: Seaforth Windows – uPVC windows, doors, facias, soffits and guttering, from Inverness to Aberdeen.

ScrubVac Cleaning Equipment is based in Forres, Moray and is an approved supplier for brands such as Nilfisk, Numatic, Dyson etc. They came to us in late 2009 with a request to provide an ecommerce site for their expanding range of products.

With a customer base that spreads across the industrial, commercial and household sectors, ScrubVac’s ecommerce site needed to be user-friendly and adaptable. Customers needed to be able to locate products easily, and staff needed to be able to manage their online stock with ease.

Our affiliate ecommerce CMS (content management system) from VPASP proved to be an ideal solution with all aspects of ScrubVac’s needs catered for. Comfortably serving all 40,000+ products, the software also facilitates discount codes, gift vouchers, multiple payment options, European VAT rates, worldwide shipping calculation, secure SSL shopping cart and much more.

Behind the scenes, ScrubVac have the facility to control their catalogue through the comprehensive but easy-to-use control panel, which allows them to edit their stock and their content with ease.

“Canary Dwarf offer a one-to-one experience that big companies cannot match” – Jeff Bradford, ScrubVac

Asked why ScrubVac chose Canary Dwarf for their ecommerce project, managing director Jeff Bradford said: “I wanted to have a local company do the project, i did get prices over the web from other companies initially just for a guide, but in the end price was only a small factor in my decision.

“I told Marc what I wanted and how much control I wanted myself. We required an unlimited categories and products with a fresh clean look. Marc made my old site seem like a car boot sale, compared to the fresh new approach he has brought to the site now.”

Marc Hindley of Canary Dwarf, said: “We were delighted to have the opportunity of working with Jeff and his team at ScrubVac. Like us, they take great pride in customer service and that was clear from time spent in their office and depot.”

“Their website is testament to the strength of our ecommerce software. The VPASP system serves 40 or 40,000 products with the same ease. Managing a site of this size requires tools that are adaptable and robust. VPASP scores on both fronts.”

“Noting that B&Q sells just 12,000 products through its website quickly puts this project into perspective” - Marc Hindley, Canary Dwarf.

Canary Dwarf were able to bring programming expertise into the mix to deal with price list updates from their suppliers.

“We wrote an add-on for the site to analyse all the product codes in the new price list and match them to the existing database and change them if they were different,” said Marc. “That add-on will be used every time a new price list is published, and it demonstrates how we, as developers, are able to adapt our products to suit our clients’ needs.”

Jeff added: “Communication between Marc and ScrubVac has been very honest and straightforward. He soon sussed out what our own capabilities were and helped me grow them so i did not have to depend on him totally. He gave us a few hours training on how to upload content which has saved us loads of time.

“Marc’s experience has helped us iron out the mistakes we used to waste time on with the old site. He also helped us speed things up by creating link documents and adapting my own price lists so they could be uploaded to the database instantly. This saved us literally hundreds of manhours.”

UK Marine Services is the trading name of Ken Wood in Buckie. He is a marine consultant with an enviable CV listing most major oil companies, and a roll of certification longer than your proverbial arm.

“The expertise of Canary Dwarf would be a great asset to any business requiring this type of service to promote their business.” – Ken Wood, UK Marine Services

Ken’s website was launched in February to meet demand from the oil industry as he prepared new tenders for marine services. Ken told us the website was an ‘instant success’, and wrote this email to us following the launch of his new marketing tool:

“Many thanks for helping me to create my website which has been an instant success due to the professional manner in which you have set it up.

“Canary Dwarf was my first choice because i was impressed with their experienced response, flexibility and timescale along with competitive costings.

“The key points of success is to their excellent performance standards and established business experience which introduced a lot of business avenues and ideas.

“In my opinion, the expertise of Canary Dwarf would be a great asset to any business requiring this type of service to promote their business.

Marc Hindley of Canary Dwarf said: “Ken sent us a very professional brief, and it was a pleasure to work with him in setting up a website for his new consultancy. Ken is very highly regarded in his field and it was our job to ensure that his expertise was correctly marketed through his website.

“I met Ken in Buckie where we discussed various options and strategies which he is going to put in place as his website grows.

There is certainly room for specialists in some markets, but for small to medium-sized businesses needing web services, I maintain that a broad skillset is more valuable and that specialists should only be called in when there is a distinct specialist need, and I was very pleased to hear this backed up recently by someone whose opinion I respect.

“Our website owners are asking for advice on everything from design to Facebook and if we don’t give it to them then somebody else will. That is the reality of a consumer culture.”
Paul Boag, Boagworld

Paul Boag, in a recent blog post, Website owners need more than web designers, made the point that clients “…need generalists. They need people who can advise them on the breadth of challenges they face.”

And this is exactly where we at Canary Dwarf hang our hat. We continue to expand our skillset so that we can better serve our customers’ needs. Hiring specialists will increase costs for their clients and open up potential avenues for apportioning blame. While the result of hiring a highly-specialised team will be expected to be a high performing product, the project must also provide a sensible return on investment.

When the web designer (and that is what has largely become the generic term as far as clients are concerned) gets the call for a problem outside of his specialist area, will the client be referred to the relevant specialist. That’s not what clients want.

A ‘web designer’ will need to have a good understanding of the following disciplines:

• Design trends
• Development technologies
• Web business practices
• Ecommerce
• Site analytics
• Online and offline marketing
• Copywriting and SEO
• Social networks
• Web and email hosting

My argument is that the industry is marketing, and that we specialise in the web. If we specialised in development for example, would our clients appreciate us outsourcing the design, the hosting, the marketing, and the social media?

Absolutely not. They would go to someone else.

However, if a clients’ needs become so specific that a specialist is required, it is our option to employ a specialist under our ‘roof’, but we must retain responsibility as far as the client is concerned, and having the ability to choose them according to the needs of the client is better than referring it to the client. That won’t work.

Each of these can be considered a specialist skill in its own right, but website owners are largely unaware of where the divides are. We’ve all seen the jokes where web developers are asked to fix computers. And we need better terminology to define an overall scope of a web designer/developer/strategist/marketer etc.

Small web developers can’t afford to bring in specialists just so they can specialise themselves. We’ve spent years trying to educate clients that the web should be taken as part of the big picture. How can we turn around and tell them that they’ll need a team of six specialists for their project. And remember, specialists are usually more expensive by nature.

But website owners must also be sure that the generalists know what they are doing. The web is full of do-it-all web designers, and unfortunately, many are judged only by the bottom line of their quotation, not their performance, portfolio or understanding of the marketplace.

Paul goes on to say that “The web is one of the fastest moving industries on the planet and needs an incredibly broad set of skills. If you don’t have those skills or fail to keep them up to date then you will lose credibility.”

“At the end of the day it is simple. Our website owners are asking for advice on everything from design to facebook and if we don’t give it to them then somebody else will. That is the reality of a consumer culture.”

Paul Boag is a well-known UK web expert and runs the design agency Headscape and web design community Boagworld. He is a regular publisher of blogs, videos and podcasts and has recently written a book called the Website Owners Manual.