I originally wrote this blog post last year for Finisher Creative, a digital marketing agency in Bradford run by Haroon Rashid. Haroon has become a great online friend of ours and we like his no-nonsense take on the reality of digital marketing. He knows his stuff and isn’t scared to say what people don’t want to hear. He is now working at Khemeaia Consulting.

So here’s five reasons why I think YOUR business should be using WordPress:

1. Phenomenal scalability:

“A WordPress website is for life, not just for startups”

This is a phrase I use all the time to indicate to people that WordPress isn’t just a solution for now. It’s not a quick fix, a short-term solution, or a stop-gap.

It’s something that will suit most small businesses, whatever the size, and yet grow with it. The hosted version of WordPress is an excellent way to try out the software if you’ve never used it before. You can have a site up and running in under five minutes at wordpress.com and this will give you an introduction to the way WordPress works and the tools it has, and all at no cost.

But it’s the software download at wordpress.org that has the most benefit for businesses. This is also free but you need to pay for hosting. It  has the added benefit that you are free to modify it as much as you wish.

It’s phenomenally successful, with something like a quarter websites now built on WordPress, and over 145m downloads have been recorded at wordpress.org, a third of them in the last year. Moving from hosted to self-hosted is easy because you can simply export content seamlessly from wordpress.com because it uses the same structure.

As your business grows, or indeed, as your content grows, a well-made WordPress site will grow with you, allowing you to create new pages, new sections, even new sites and subsites within your installation. Managed properly, your installation will last you forever, and that’s why we say ‘a WordPress website is for life’

2. It’s good quality software

Just because it’s free doesn’t means it lacks in the quality department. It’s just as good, if not better, than many costly content management systems out there.

WordPress is constantly maintained by an avid team. The evolution process is such that it is a managed process that allows the wider community to suggest improvements, and even contribute, making WordPress a truly user-driven piece of software.

Each release goes through testing not only by the development team, but theme authors and plugin authors and even the people that use it on a day-to-day basis, can get involved in testing the beta releases. As soon as a version goes to launch, the team gets to work on the next version. (Actually, they have a week off first!)

3. WordPress is portable

WordPress is portable. Image credit: Gigi/Flickr (cc)

It’s sad but true that some small businesses have had to pay more than once for a website because they’ve either been locked out of their own site when a designer has ‘disappeared’ or they’ve built it using techniques that have gone out with the digital ark.

WordPress offers portability on two levels. Firstly, it allows the DIYer to go as far as they can and hold their hands up and say ‘I can’t do this, let’s go and find an expert’. Lots of business owners try ‘self-build’ to save costs, but few are able to build truly successful sites without some professional help.

If a business owner decides to learn how to code their own site, it will almost certainly require a rebuild when they seek that help. Developers don’t like working with someone else’s code.

If they use one of the many free drag and drop website builders out there, it’s the same story. No designer wants to build on a system they wouldn’t have used themselves. WordPress is used by end-users and pros alike, and because it is a content editor, not a code editor, the core remains untouched and the incoming developer knows he/she won’t be opening a can of worms.

Secondly, not every relationship lasts forever, and where a site has been built by a professional developer or designer on WordPress, it is easily transported, content and all, to another host or another designer or developer. WordPress makes this portability easy, because of its hook, plugin and theme infrastructure. Plugins and themes can be swapped out without disruption. Hooks can be used to save editing the core software, and WordPress becomes just a rig to hold it all together, ready for the next person to do their magic.

4. It’s open source

There are lots of free online website builders out there, some are ‘freemium’ models, where you get a free version to start and pay for added features. Others are free because they are tied to something else, like a hosting contract or mandatory advertising. Some are just free because they are very limited in features and flexibility.

WordPress is free because it is developed under the open source model, by a group of volunteers. Using the hooks, plugins and themes mentioned before, means it is completely customisable using easy-to-get, and mostly free, downloads.

But there are also some very good paid-for themes, plugins and modifications that take WordPress to another level. The principle that WordPress is free does however cause some confusion.

When developers use WordPress as their core CMS (content management system), it doesn’t mean that they’re cutting corners. They’re not using it because it saves them money. They’re using because it’s a portable, flexible and a robust platform. Yes it saves money too, but that saving is passed on to the client.

5. It makes you more productive

Eight out of ten cats who used WordPress have more naps in the sun. Image credit: Nina Linnarsson/Flickr (cc)

In a recent survey, WordPress users were asked what they liked most about the product, and the words ‘easy’ and ‘ease-of-use’ floated quickly the top of the pile.

Unless you’ve had a fair bit of experience with another CMS, WordPress does make content management incredibly simple. I’ve seen it for myself. Watching clients go from not updating their site, to adding new content regularly, because it’s suddenly ‘easier’, is a hearty vote for WordPress as a business CMS.

Having the ability to include a whole range of plugins for social media, email marketing, content editing, search engine optimisation takes much of the fear out of website ownership.

So that sums up why your business should be using WordPress. It’s a no-risk, future-proof content management system, that’s actually easy to use, and good for your business.

So what are you waiting for?

Canary Dwarf hosts a monthly WordPress meetup in Moray as part of WP Scotland and offer a range of support and training service for businesses.

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The web is littered with sites that have been ravaged by a single-minded bid to beat the search engines, and often have cast all sense and sensilbility aside.

Techniques used originally used to get sites to rank well in search engines are not only outdated, but sites are being actively penalised for not following the rules, some with negative adjustments to their position and others with a full-on smack in the face.

Google has always maintained that good content equals good search engine position, but people in the SEO business,  who became known simply as ‘SEOs’, have always been able to find ways to ‘optimise’ sites so that they are ranked above their natural position.

Google, and other search engines, don’t like this. They believe that a site’s merit should be based on its content and context. And that any given business has the power to rank naturally for the business activities it is being searched for.

So ‘optimisation’ in the past has consisted of editing content to include an unnatural amount of references to keywords.

Websites are also ranked by the number and quality of sites that link to it. And so that became another way in which optimisers could unnaturally advance the position of a website, by creating links into the site on behalf of their clients. In their day, these ‘techniques’ were not underhand, they were the accepted way of doing things for the SEO practitioner.

At the unscrupulous end of the spectrum, SEOs would find ways to trick search engines into believing a site was worthy of a high ranking when it couldn’t compete naturally.

Natural versus unnatural

Let your copy flow naturally – and your SEO will fall into place.

Now, either I’m repeating myself, or a there is a common concensus running through this post, because I’ve used the word  ’natural’ or ‘naturally’ four times already. That’s not keyword-stuffing, that’s a wake-up call.

That is the watchword for all modern search engines. Ignore it at your peril.

By creating natural content, you will not only be meeting search engine guidelines, but more importantly, you will be creating content that your readers find natural to read.

Now, I may be stating the obvious here, but good copy is better than bad copy. It’s easier to read, and put simply, it’s much more likely to make people buy from you. The following type of sentence is not uncommon where poor quality SEO has completely obscured the need to appeal to buyers.

“If you’re looking around shoe shops for shoes, Shona’s shoe shop is the best shoe shop from which to buy shoes.”

That’s pretty awful, but quite honestly, I’ve seen it hundreds of times and I’ve got loads of great examples.

I’ve avoided quoting a real one to avoid embarrassment, but this is contrived rubbish.

Why did this happen?

It happened because it worked. SEOs could measure their performance by where a client ranked in the search engines, and the increase in visits to a website.

Isn’t that a good thing?

Not on its own. It’s very unlikely that optimising a site like that would increase sales as a percentage.

In fact it is more likely to produce a lower conversion rate, because buyers are not being fed any good content vibes.

Sites need to be optimised for the buying experience, or for whatever they were designed to be converting, not solely for product searches.

Paying to be penalised?

The other, crucial, problem, is that as search engines work harder to penalise this type of optimisation, the business owner is paying a high price to be re-optimised every time the algorithm changes.

It’s a Catch 22  situation because he or she must continually pay for optimisation, but the nature of the SEO makes these changes more likely.

On the other hand, good content improves position naturally. Aiming to write good quality, natural content is the best solution for your website in the long term because it costs less to maintain, it will outperform badly optimised sites eventually, and be more attractive to your customers, and if search engines add more weight your site because of your legacy of writing relevant content, you’ll be way ahead of anyone that didn’t.

And so, as the title suggests, good SEO is not actually SEO at all, and while there will always be technical settings to get right and tweaks to do, a good position in the search engines lies in the hand of the content creator writing good copy… for humans.

The post Good SEO is not actually SEO at all appeared first on Canary Dwarf.

But have modern marketers grasped the term too glibly?

Are businesses being encouraged to ‘rebrand’ when all they need is a new logo and a trip to the printers.

Refreshing a logo and having new stationery are all part of ongoing image maintenance, but that’s not rebranding. Canary Dwarf got a new logo last year, but our brand values have never changed. We consistently provide an all-round service to support people who want to build a better business online. We don’t want to change that, or our customers’ perception of what we stand for.

From joke to desireable brand

Skoda is a great example of rebranding. A cheap car that was the butt of many jokes, totally turned around to become a desirable brand associated with award-winning engineering. And they didn’t even change their logo!

It could be that marketers have identified a trending term which they know businesses respond to, just like ‘web’, ‘mobile’ and ‘social media’ have in the past.

Rebranding is a serious business and is often the result of a decision that ‘everything must change’ within an organisation to address negative or unwanted associations.

It’s a reinvention of core values, sometimes targeted to a new demographic. But as the saying goes “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Last resort?

Why would you reinvent a winning brand? You wouldn’t. Time and trends will almost certainly dictate the need to refresh logos, colour schemes, design concepts, but rebranding is a gut-wrenching, deep-scraping process that, quite frankly, is often a last resort when there’s an insurmountable problem with the existing brand.

Wikipedia says of rebranding:

“Firms rebrand intentionally to shed negative images of the past. In a corporate sense, rebranding can be used as an effective marketing strategy to hide malpractices and avoid or shed negative connotations, and decreased profitability”

Businesses are often at the mercy of marketers who wield such buzzwords. A recommendation to rebrand may come with promises of new attention and a boost in sales. But whether it’s to make a fast buck or complete ignorance, pushing a successful business towards a rebrand is a costly bandwagon that’s going nowhere. What do you think? Do you think that rebranding has become a marketing ploy in itself or do you agree with us that it’s true purpose is misunderstood?

Let us know in the comments.

The post Rebranding? What does that tell your customers? appeared first on Canary Dwarf.

Social media has allowed us all to make connections with our fans and followers that weren’t possible before. The nature of these modern networks is that a business can mention anyone and for the world to see that connection.

Mentioning a user on, say Twitter or Facebook, not only becomes public, but also hyperlinks to their profile or account.

But are businesses casting morals aside by making mentions they shouldn’t?

My gut feeling has always been that, in general, it’s OK to mention a supplier, but not a client.

Why? Client confidentiality should be the first consideration when mentioning people you’re working with. There’s no such thing as ‘supplier confidentiality’ except that some might not want to give away who their suppliers are. Publicising work you’re doing for somebody could be embarrassing for them, and it should really be up to them to decide if the relationship be broadcast. Would you be happy for Tesco to tweet that they’ve helped you find the ‘Head and Shoulders’ in your local branch?

Of course there’s nothing wrong with communicating with a client, and engagement should be encouraged, but should you be announcing how you’re going to be working together before you even have? I don’t think so. That’s the client’s prerogative.

Let’s ask Twitter

I wanted to see what others thought, so I asked Twitter, and the responses said it all:

@susie_h Not if you hoping to keep them as a client.

— John Messingham (@johnmessingham) April 13, 2013

@susie_h Not without permission.Law Society regulations rightly protect client confidentiality.

— Peter Mason (@thehouseguy28) April 13, 2013

@susie_h I would have thought no.Sometimes even with permission.then discreetly avoiding naming client/project.Interest shown may be useful.

— Pearl Hamilton (@PEARLSPetCare) April 13, 2013

@susie_h No, I don’t think I would like that

— Mary Jean (@MaryJeanUK) April 13, 2013

@susie_h Even if doing so was legal it would damage your reputation and people would no longer trust you.

— POS(@PerthshireOS) April 13, 2013

Just as I thought.

Nobody responded that it was OK, yet I see it happening every day.

If a client is happy for you to mention them, or mentions your relationship first, then clearly that is OK, but imagine the client who has engaged you, particularly for a service that will increase your advantage over a competitor, you could be giving away too much information.

Some companies pay handsomely for ‘corporate espionage’ to help them find out what their competitors are doing and who they’re working with.

Well, there’s no need if they’re feeding you their client list through Twitter, particularly if they’re adding what services and products they’re using.

If that information is good publicity, they can broadcast their relationship with you as a supplier, or ask for permission.

Making connections

But isn’t social media all about making connections?

Of course it is, but businesses shouldn’t abandon their moral fibre for just for their own gain, and if you analyse such a connection, that’s exactly what it’s about.

Mentioning a client doesn’t give them any more credibility because their working with you. You’re more likely to be doing it because you think it will make you look busy, or annoy your competitors.

Both of those are well-known marketing techniques, but neither should be done at your client’s expense.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments below, or use the button to share this post with your own networks.

The post Do you respect client confidentiality on social networks? appeared first on Canary Dwarf.

If you practice good security, you won’t have anything to worry about. If you use ‘admin’ as your username, and a weak password, your site will always be a potential target.

This type of attack happens fairly regularly, but never before has there been one on such a scale and if your site fails to address common security measures, it will be displaying a green light for those who get pleasure out of hacking websites.

Having this type of attack in the news doesn’t mean WordPress is insecure, it just highlights insecure practices, and at Canary Dwarf, we are very aware of how these attacks happen and how they can be avoided. We have built over 80 websites on WordPress, and none have ever been compromised.

Security as standard

Some of our customers choose not to have administrative access into their WordPress system, and so they are protected by our own security measures as standard.

Once we pass administrative access to a customer, it is up to them to follow our guidance on security best practice, but we would normally only pass the site over with essential security measures already in place.

WordPress is installed on over 100 million websites around the world.

In the real world, houses with windows are similarly vulnerable to robbers. The inhabitants of such houses understand that to protect their possessions, they need to take steps to secure them with locks, alarms, etc. It’s no different with WordPress, but millions of people don’t think security is important, and those are the site owners who will wake up one morning with a problem.

How to protect your site from any brute force attack

Make sure you choose a strong password for your admin account

If your login name is ‘admin’, log in, and go straight to ‘Users’, and add a new user with administrator capabilities, you’ll need a different email address for this and WordPress will tell you the strength of your password as you enter it. If it’s not strong, change it until it is. Use a combination of upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols such as the dollar sign, the pound sign, exclamation mark, question mark etc. These all make guessing your password more difficult in a brute force attack. NEVER use a dictionary word, a portion of your username, your date of birth, postcode, or anything like that.

You don’t have to confirm the account, you can log out and log back in with your new username and password, then go straight to ‘Users’ again and delete the ‘admin’ user account.

These two measures are the very basic essentials of WordPress security, as advocated by the developers at WordPress themselves.

Please note though, that if your site has already been hacked, you will need to cleanse your site before doing the above.

Over the years, many people have come to us with hacked sites, and we offer a 25-point security audit and will fix any security holes we find.

We can help

No site we have ever secured has ever been comprised by a brute force attack or any other type of attack, and we are confident that the site we lock down have adequate protection against day-to-day threats.

If your site has been attacked, or you just want security advice, please email us at justask@canarydwarf.co.uk

You can also get security and other tips by signing up for our newsletter or following us on Twitter and Facebook

The post Watch out, there’s a hacker about appeared first on Canary Dwarf.

We are a small business, and we want to to stay small. But we have an increasing customer base and since our move to the high street late last year, we have been literally overwhelmed with enquiries for all our services: web design, marketing and training. We also have recently secured some exciting projects and are going to be very busy over the coming months.

Canary Dwarf has built a reputation for providing a complete service for small businesses, organisations and events. We help them with everything: planning, designing and building a website, to creating a marketing strategy,  supporting it through paid search, organic search, social media and email marketing.

Our favourite content management system (CMS) is WordPress and we have over 80 sites now on this flexible platform, although we also have many sites on Joomla, some on our old bespoke CMS, and some ecommerce systems on VPASP, ZenCart, osCart and Prestashop. We provide a range of web and email hosting services from simple shared servers, hybrid cloud servers and virtual dedicated servers as well as webmail, hosted Microsoft Exchange email and Google Apps for Business.

On the training side, we offer group sessions fortnightly, and regular one-to-one coaching for business owners who want to progressively improve their own digital marketing skills. We also host a monthly WordPress meeetup in Forres, which is part of WP Scotland.

What kind of skills are we looking for?

We are looking for someone with all-round ability, but specifically to help us with:

• WordPress content management
• WordPress front end design
• WordPress back end setup and development

Additionally, if you have any other web skills, we would like to hear from you, as we have occasional opportunities for work in other areas. The work will be part-time initially, and will be mostly on-site, so you will need to be able to work in our office in Forres and from your home. We regularly get asked by designers and developers outside the area if we have work to pass on, but we strongly believe in supporting the local economy.

To find out more, please email mail@canarydwarf.co.uk with details of your experience.

The post Do you know WordPress inside out? appeared first on Canary Dwarf.

I reckon most of you will be saying ‘very’ and some of you will be saying ‘absolutely essential’

Design IS important, but it’s far too easy to get carried away and spend the wrong amount of money on design when it could be better spent elsewhere. Like content.

You’re probably using the internet on a daily basis, and using search engines to find websites that meet your needs.

What are you searching for? Design, or content?

See what I mean? Search engines rank websites on their content value, not their design.

And they present their results in order of content relevancy.

It’s only when you click on the website link, that design starts to have any meaning.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking good graphic or user interface design. I recently had this discussion with a graphic designer who insisted that the design was the most important aspect of a website in that it attracted customers.

I argued that beautiful design will enhance a customer experience that has already proved an inherent efficiency.

Beauty overrated?

We tend to judge things on their appearance because it’s immediately noticeable. We know not to judge a book by its cover, but we so frequently do.

Apple’s first product was ugly, but it’s now the biggest company in the world. Picture: Flickr/kevinthoule

Apple is the perfect example of the design-content balancing act. Do you think Apple design their products visually, then fill them with electronics?

Have you seen what the first Apple computer looked like?

Absolutely not, their money is spent on research and development, in hardware and software. Only when the product is ready for market do the designers start to sharpen their pencils.

In fact, Steve Jobs is recorded as saying: “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Google, YouTube, Ebay are all great examples of websites which started life as ugly duckings. They developed their content first, then spent their profits on making things look a little nicer, when they could afford to. These are now iconic businesses that woud be nothing if they had focussed their energies into ‘aesthetics’ at the expense of content.

How many times would you go back to a gorgeous site if it’s devoid of good content?

When was the last time you used a search engine to root out good design?

Happy medium

A poorly-designed site will struggle to meet its customers needs, but I’m not talking about poor design here. I’m talking about spending your content budget on design niceties that doesn’t add anything to the experience. Sending back functional, effective designs, quite often just to ‘see what something would look like, ie, not based on any rational design concept.

Content works without design, design doesn’t work without content. But there does need to be a happy medium.

What you put in front of people will need to have a level of design that doesn’t make their toes curl. If you have the budget to blow their socks off, that’s great, but if you don’t, spend your money on content first.

The post Do you spend your money on design or content? appeared first on Canary Dwarf.

In our business there are many avenues to specialise in: search, social media, usability, analytics, apps, design, development, but none of these are much good on their own. Each ‘speciality’ has an intrinsic link with all the others. And it’s often seen to be the ‘right’ path to go down for digital freelancers.

But search is no good without usability, social media useless without analytics, so there is plenty of room for those like Canary Dwarf who choose to generalise and provide a one-stop shop for everything web. In fact, we even spread our wings (no pun intended!) a little further as we often integrate online marketing with offline media, such as PR and print design, both of which we have a background in.

Big projects with big budgets can justify bringing in a team of specialists, or an agency which can manage them, but what about small businesses with small budgets?

Apart from the economics of doing just that, many agencies won’t entertain low-budget projects.

Small businesses need someone who can understand the whole digital process, and provide a cost-effective solution.

As a percentage, a small business marketing budget may be identical to that of a large business. But in hard cash, it’s a lot smaller and there’s zero room for slack, and that’s where small agencies that generalise can bring more to the party, and by their very nature, are more likely to understand the needs and constraints of other small businesses.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein, science fiction author

Being a generalist does run the risk of being labelled the cliched ‘jack of all trades’, but a mechanic is not a jack of all trades, neither is a lawyer, a baker, a chemist. All these have to have a broad range of skills to meet their customers’ needs.

The benefits for the client are:

• They get one price for a complete job.
• The people that do the work, all work together, all the time
• There’s no politics to work around

For an agency like ours which doesn’t specialise:

• We get to understand the client better by handling everything
• We don’t have to budget for and pay specialists for ordinary jobs
• We can see the client’s ‘big picture’

Small business owners know what they want, they want more business from their website. They see statistics everywhere that say mobile’s booming, social media’s taking over the world, this trend and that trend are the ‘next big thing’.

How many specialists does it take?

But addressing a niche in isolation rarely fixes the problem. We’re back to the reasoning that not addressing the big picture is not addressing the wider problem.

At Canary Dwarf, we’ve staunchly maintained that generalising helps smaller businesses by being able to view their whole process. If we specialised in, say, social media, we couldn’t offer the insight into search, ecommerce, usability and analytics that we do by having an umbrella approach. We know that nearly 100% of the people who ask for search engine optimisation, almost certainly have more important issues to fix first.

Being able to see the big picture means we are in a position to appoint a specialist if one is required.

But customers are seeking out assistance from ‘gurus’ and ‘experts’ without addressing core problems with website functionality or marketing strategies.

Some of our customers have come to us after paying for costly specialist help and having got no results.

Ultimately, there is no right or wrong, there is work for specialists who make the effort to know their product or market inside out, and there is work for generalists who can provide an all-round service for smaller businesses.

What business owners need to know is that their money is being spent wisely, that an investment is being returned, and that the advise they are given is relevant and realistic.

The post What’s so special about specialists? appeared first on Canary Dwarf.

Last May, Facebook introduced a new restriction that meant only Pages with 400 ‘likes’ could run ‘Offers’ or ‘Promoted Posts’ (Facebook’s Promote button rolls out to pages with 400+ fans) in return for a fee.

But recently it has dropped the entry level to just 100 likes, making the feature much more useful for many small businesses, although they still will have to pay.

Facebook doesn’t apear to have made any official announcement, but its help centre has changed the number from 400 to 100, and of course the social network is free to switch it back, or indeed drop it completely. There’s also no guarantee it is currently available for everyone with between 100 and 400 likes. Facebook often rolls out these changes slowly.

Facebook did a similar reduction with its ‘friendly’ URLs. Once requiring 25 likes to get a memorable URL like facebook.com/mybusiness, it has removed and reinstated this restriction from time to time.

Two adjacent posts show the significant increase when ‘promoted’

The most difficult time for any new Facebook page is the lull between creating it and reaching a marketable number of likes. The critical difference between Offers and Promoted Posts is that they are like opposites. Offers, which can be redeemed online or instore, clearly work better with a larger following. Promoted Posts on the other hand are more likely to generate interest in the page itself, so are better for getting likes. In a strategy, the use of Offers and Promoted Posts should be carefully considered. The cost is reasonably low, but it must meet your goals for it to be worthwhile.

Page admins (with under 400 likes) previously wanting to use this feature had to resort to the ungainly measure of ‘pleading’ for likes amongst their followers and their networks, just to gain access.

This was counter-productive because only genuine likes are likely to keep their traction on a page. Anyone who follows for a ‘favour’ doesn’t usually end up interacting and potentially lowers the quality score that Facebook gives its pages.

Businesses which want to increase their likes organically can promote their posts by clicking the button under each post. Critics may say that Facebook have just found another way to charge its members, but we’ve seen good results from Facebook Pages with under 400 fans that have used the feature, with ‘reach’ rising many times higher than the level it did without promotion, and new likes rising by about 5%.

Facebook resources:
Promoted Page Posts
Offers

The post Facebook lowers ceiling for Offers and Promoted Posts appeared first on Canary Dwarf.

Renting is sometimes the only option for people, whether it’s the rules or the economics working against you, getting a roof over your head is the important thing, and you can aspire to buy.

But one thing is clear, people who CAN buy, don’t rent. It’s rarely a lifestyle choice.

In business, rentals are common. Whether it’s business premises, services, plant and machinery, renting makes a lot more sense.

But where digital assets are concerned, there is an increasing danger in renting online services, because of their uncertain future.

Nowhere is this more appropriate than social networks. You can build a full ecommerce site on Facebook using a variety of apps.

That’s great, and the shop may well enjoy some success. But every businesses that has a Facebook page also has a much more solid digital asset of its own, its website, on which it can build a shop. A long-term, fully-owned and controllable investment.

That’s got to be more complicated, I hear you say. Not really, the logistics involved in setting up an ecommerce site are more often than not related to storage, stock-keeping and fulfilment. Facebook can’t help you with those.

Perhaps they make it TOO easy, but then there’s an incentive for them to do that.

Why is this a bad idea?

The announcement on the home page of Payvment.

For one simple reason. YOU don’t own Facebook, but you DO own your website. Assuming you haven’t done the same thing with your website, and built it on a hosted service that could be gone tomorrow, then building your online business on a platform you control, suddenly makes sense.

What if Facebook, or indeed any hosted service, changes its terms and conditions? Sound familiar?

What if they charge or decide to show your shop only to a select audience? Does that sound familiar too?

What if it was taken over by another company?

That scenario will also start to sound familiar, as just today (28 January 2013), one of the most popular F-commerce apps, Payvment, announced it is to close, after another company bought its customer base. And if you’re one of Payvment’s 200,000 customers, you’ve got a month to up-sticks and move your whole kit and caboodle to the new company, before they delete the lot, and just two weeks before your shop becomes inactive. What’s more, if you’ve paid someone to help you set it all up, that just adds insult to injury.

In fact, that’s the very reason why Canary Dwarf advocates building on a platform you own, because it is the safest long-term solution. In America, they call this ‘digital sharecropping’, after the system of agriculture in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crop produced on the land. Facebook or Payvment isn’t taking a large share of the revenue, but is taking control.

What if the laws of the country it is governed by, suddenly change?

And the big one… what happens if (or when) Facebook loses favour with the general public?

You’ll have to start all over again. Is it worth it?

We don’t think so.

Use Facebook for distributing the links, promoting your website, and your ecommerce by all means, but don’t build on someone else’s rented land, when your own plot makes more sense.

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