Stuff

I was looking at this article in the paper the other day about two people who are travelling all over North America to set a world record for the longest journey by car using alternative fuel (in their case, used vegetable oil from local restaurants). They want to look at alternative energy ideas, the tar sands and give talks to schools about their awareness project. Their trip has a title of Driven to Sustain
So what does this have to do with websites and all things computer? Well, on their site I found this little 20 minute movie called Stuff. Check out The Story of Stuff. It was fascinating and made me think of all the technology that we have and how quickly it is useless. But it doesn't always have to be.
Let me illustrate. I have a pda (personal digital assistant to be fancy, or an electronic diary/address book) that I bought way, way back before the year 2000. Its a bit big and clunky now compared to the new fancy sleek phones, but I've looked after it and it still works. However, it started to show it's age in it's synchronising with Microsoft Outlook, and like an elderly person's memory, my appointments started occasionally disappearing. And that doesn't look good when you were supposed to be somewhere and you don't show up! But, rather than get the newest model and consign my pda to the growing pile of garbage, I did some research and found two programs that would still work with my old pda, and refreshed its usefulness. It turns out it wasn't anything to do with the pda's brain, but the new operating systems don't really want you to use an old version of Outlook and the version of Outlook my pda would work with couldn't be updated and the pda company wasn't doing any further updates, and so on. To make a long story shorter, I was able to use a different Contact program, Time and Chaos, and synchronise with a different synchronising program called Companion Link.
In that video Annie Leonard talks about planned obsolescence and this is what the computer companies want. They don't support a product that is over ten years old because, let's face it, they want you to buy a new one. But if you work at it, and don't mind not having the newest, shiniest toy, you can keep some of your "stuff" for a lot longer, and not contribute to the mess we are in.

The art of Keywords

Having your website show up in search engines is hard. There are millions of other sites competing, some of them good, some of them great and some dismal. But without promoting your business and website yourself in your every day work, your site won't often be seen.

The search engines don't rely on meta tags or keywords embedded in your html the way they used to, but you can still add them. The thing is to be smart about them. You want to make sure that the words to add as keywords are also in your site. It is better to create your text in your site to include the main ideas for your business than rely on keywords to have people find your site.

A client recently has been struggling to come up with a list of keywords for me. I suggested he narrow it down to 25. He finally said "I can't get just 25" so I said that it was okay if there were a few more. When I got the page of keywords, there were 260 on the page. I was thinking that he couldn't narrow it down to under 30!

And there was a lot of duplication on there. A smarter way to include keywords is to do the following.

1. Make the Titles in your page work for you. Don't just name your contact page "Conact us" Put something like "for the best in Tractor parts and Accessories call Company X" That gets in a few great keywords, ie tractor, parts, accessories and your company's name. And it is relevant.
2. Make sure all your images have captions. It is good for the blind who can't see the image to know what it was, and is another opportunity to relate it to the page.
3. Go to GoogleAdWords: Keyword Tool, and put in some of the words that you think your potential customers would use to find you and see how popular they are in searches. Google not only ranks them for the past month, but gives you suggestions on other related words or phrases. It may help you if you are stuck. If none of these popular words are in your site at all, and they do relate to your product or service (and why aren't they?) then consider re-writing the text to include them.

The search engines search all these things as well as your meta tags, and you want to take advantage of all of this.

National Do Not Call Register

I wrote a while ago about a list you could put your telephone number on to reduce the number of annoying telemarketing calls you receive. The Canadian Government started an official "Do Not Call" register on September 30th, 2008, so you can register with them as well.

The web address is www.lnnte-dncl.gc.ca

You can put your telephone, cell phone, fax number etc all on this registry. For some reason it has an expiry date. I'm not sure why that is, are you going to be more interested in hearing from people about new windows at 8:30 at night in three years from now? Doubt it somehow.

It doesn't promise that the calls will stop right away, nor will all the people that call you now have to stop either. Banks you deal with, charities etc are exempt, but it is a start and you can tell each one you receive a call from to please take you off their list as you don't want any further calls. I've done this will Bell Canada for the simple fact that every time they call with an "offer" my bill is changed whether I've agreed to anything or not.

Opt out lists

Michael Geist is a writer for the Toronto Star who holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce law at the University of Ottawa. He has set up a website called IOptOut.ca that enables people to opt out of many organization's marketing lists. What you do is go to his website and fill in an on-line sheet. He asks you for a user name and password (this is so you can go back in and add more companies as they are added) as well as any email addresses you have and your various phone numbers as well. You submit this information and then immediately sign in again with your new user name and password and you are taken to a page that has a list of categories of companies that you can opt out of. It's as easy as putting a check mark for whole categories or only opting out of a few in a list.

What his team then does is to send out opt-out requests on your behalf to all of these companies all at once. He has so far sent out millions of requests for people just like you and I who are tired of getting calls (and emails)from companies every day (or late at night) wanting you to buy something.

He is backed by a ruling by CRTC (Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission)in that it will endorse the national do-not-call registry (DNC). Apparently, the Canadian Marketing Association and the Canadian Banker's Association were upset about this list and told their members that they didn't have to honour the registry. The CRTC's response was "these requests would be in compliance with the Act and the current Unsolicited Telecommunications rules. In short, on the basis of the facts as I understand them, I consider that do-not-call requests made through iOptOut are valid and should be honoured".

So, the CRTC is saying that if you are registered on a do-not-call list, they can't call you without subjecting themselves to fines. About time.

Microsoft strikes again

I've been getting files lately (as have my clients) with the extension of .docx

I can't open these files, and at first I didn't know what they were. (I looked it up to make sure that the file wasn't a virus or corrupt file)

Apparently they are Microsoft's new file extensions for their newest version of Word, Word 2007. I don't have the newest version of Word, so I can't say for sure, but if someone sends you a document with this version of Word, you can ask them to re-save it in an earlier version (if Word 2007 has that option, older versions did). Or if there is no images or it isn't a complicated document with tables or so forth, you could have them just save it as a text file.

However if you can't ask, there is a website called DOCX Converter that you can upload your file to, give them your email address and in my tests, within an hour you get your file converted and you can copy the text to your own version of Word.

Open Office can't open these files yet, but I'm sure that they eventually will work out a converter as well, so you have a Microsoft free alternative.

Surveys

Occasionally your company may want to conduct a survey of a client's satisfaction with a job that has been completed, or feedback on some proposed changes. You could just create a form on your website, or you could email those people a professionally made survey from an on-line company. I found a company called Survey Monkey. You choose a template on how you'd like your survey to look, you can add your logo and then create your questions and choices of answers or a space for a more detailed answer.
There is the basic free version, which allows for ten questions and only 100 people to get the survey, or other plans where you pay.
There are lots of free things on the web to help you run your business better. I hope that this was one that may come in handy!

Songza

This isn't particularly new, but with all the news of Canada catching up with copyright laws of other countries, the downloading of music etc is coming to an end, or will do eventually. There is a neat site called songza that you can use to hear new music and listen to music that you already know, but perhaps haven't heard for a while. You can't download it, but it is a great way to find an old favourite that you haven't heard before. They then give you the opportunity of finding a place you can purchase it, should you wish to.

I found a song I haven't heard for years called Toast. If you type in Toast and Paul Young it comes up. It's by a band he was in called Streetband. It's just a bit of British whimsy, but it's the only place to hear it.

Publish your own books

I have been on a road trip out West recently, and am now catching up with what's new.
I went for tea to a friend's house last week and he showed me this really professionally printed book he had made on-line. He downloaded a program (he has a iMac, but it was available to either PC or mac) and then with their desktop program, lots of help and templates, he created a 24 page book. He chose a soft cover, but you can choose a hard cover book, and one with a dust cover jacket as well! I was so excited about the possibilities.

I immediately had lots of ideas for books I could create but thought that I would put together a book (for my two travelling companions and the friend we visited) with a selection of the best photographs that we took of the Rockies, Yellowstone etc. It might mean we would actually look at it from time to time!

Check it out at Blurb.

I could write a kid's story for my niece and nephew, a cookbook for friends.... And you can print up just one if that's all you want! Or a book about computers!

Calendars

Have you ever been sitting on your computer and wanted to know what day of the week next June 6th is? I've actually gone to my clock on my computer and fiddled with it to see what day a certain date falls on because I don't have a calendar for next year yet.

Here is a site I found at Time and Date.com

You can put in your own country, and it tells you what holidays occur there, and you can use these calendars to print out for your own use. There is a lot of other information on this site, time zone calculators, countdowns to a particular date. Could be useful.

Email Etiquette

Millions of emails are sent every day, and sometimes it feels like we are getting all of them! If you want to annoy your friends less, here are a few ways to make sending emails to your friends a less stressful event for both them and yourself!

1.File sizes. If you are sending images to people of your dog, cat or your latest artwork, don’t forget that some people are still on dial up and it takes a long time to download each attachment they receive. Photos or other files shouldn’t be any larger than 500kb if you can help it, and if you reduce an image to 72dpi (dots per inch) and 6 x 8” in size, it will often be under 100KB. Most camera programs will allow you to resize your images. If they are only for your friends to look at and not print, then 72dpi is fine to look at on your screen. And if you are in the position that one email seems to be blocking the rest from coming through, you can go to www.mail2web.com and type in your email address and password and see all of your emails that are still on your ISP’s server and look at and delete the offending email. Nothing worse than spending half an hour downloading something only to find out it was a silly movie that you didn’t want anyway! See Photoxels for more details.

2.Sending to groups of people. Do you get emails from your friends that include 300 email addresses that you have to scroll through to get to the point of the message? Isn’t it annoying? It can also be dangerous if you or your friends get a virus, it can spread to all those people as well, not to mention that your email address is now broadcast to all and sundry. It is always best when sending an email to lots of people to put your own email address in the To: section, and all of the other emails in the BCC (Blind carbon copy) section. You can get to the BCC by clicking on the CC in your emails if you use Outlook Express. In a lot of mail programs you can also organize your friends and families into groups so you can click on a group and it sends to all in the group at once. But still send them as a blind carbon copy.

3.Dire warnings! I have to say that the Neiman Marcus store never billed any woman $500 for a cookie recipe, the police won’t come if you put your pin number in backwards (you’ll just get shot for your trouble) and Bill Gates is definitely not going to give any of us money by sending on a message. If you get an email about some virus warning or other, the best thing to do is to google the main idea of it. For example put in pin number + reverse and you will get up pages with the helpful names like urbandegends.com and snopes.com. All pages that debunk all of these emails that seem to last for years! It’s an easy way to see if the email warning is for real and save thousands of emails being sent out as a result of you blindly sending it to all of your friends. Plus, some of those sites are pretty funny reading!

4.Finally, the jokes, and those emails that are the equivalent of the chain letter. You know, the one that if you don’t send it on to six more people you will have bad luck/you won’t get good luck/you may die etc. They are just annoying. If you get one just delete it. I’m pretty sure your friends will thank you for not sending it on to them, I know I will!

Common Website Mistakes

There are a lot of websites out there, some really fancy, some very basic. But there are a lot that have some basic problems that can hurt business and cause people not to be able to find out what your business does!

Poor Navigation
Have you ever visited a website and clicked on a few pages only to have trouble getting back to the page you started with? There are no consistent links and no single navigation bar. This isn't good site practise. A website is like a house with many doors. Through search engines, a visitor may enter your site through many different pages, depending on what they were looking for. You want them to be able to find your home page or "front door" easily, should they need to.

• a single menu bar should be on every page of your site, in the same place so it is easy to find
• links to all your pages should be listed on that menu bar, not inside certain pages, visitors may never find it again!
• call your link what it is, so it is easily understood
  

Too many fancy features
Flash, blinking lights, music that blares out at you may make you laugh, but will be annoying to your visitors. Also, you want your visitor to be able to find what they are looking for easily and quickly, and not be confused by a jumble of confusing information.
Don't forget as well, that these things take time to download onto your visitor's computer and not everyone has a high speed connection. You don't want people to skip your site because it is too confusing, too loud or just too much trouble.

Poor Writing
The quality of your website reflects your business, but it will be a poor reflection if there are spelling or grammar mistakes. Make sure your writing reflects what you want to project to your clients.

Not enough information
Why have a website if you are going to give little away? You need to tell people exactly what your business is about in clear descriptive words. Not only does this help people find out what you can do for them, it also helps your website come up in search engines as well. Search engines use the first few sentences in your site to determine where your site will rank, so you need to be specific.

Legible
It makes sense that it should be very easy to read the text on your site. However, there are many sites out there in wild colours that are difficult to read. Text that is too small, too fancy, too faint or with too little contract from the background will be hard to read.

Out of Date Information
I create websites for clients and offer the service of updates. I am not trying to make a lot of money for myself when I say that updating your site on a regular basis is important. Your viewers and search engines will stop visiting/listing your sites after a few months with no changes. This is especially true of information that is obviously out of date by years! It should be a constantly evolving "brochure" of what you offer and should be changed and checked regularly to make sure what it says is still relevant.

Different colours and styles on different pages
If you have a site where you have tried out a new "theme" for each page, you will confuse people and they will wonder if they are still at the same site. A site should have similar styles on each page (and the navigation we mentioned early will help tie it in together) to help create a professional look.

Search Engine Optimization
There are a lot of myths about search engines and how they work. Now adays, search engines are more interested in the content of a site, than it's meta tags (keywords) because they soon learned that people put in meta tags that had little to do with their business, but were words that they thought would draw the search engines and customers to their site. They also put in the same word over and over again.

It is important through your text to have words that reflect your business, page names that reflect what is on that page (and don't say "page1") and descriptive tags (or Alt tags) on every image. It is also important to have links to related businesses and any associations that you belong to listed within your site. This helps with optimization as well as giving potential clients a feeling that your business is more legitimate.

More Free Stuff

Here are a couple of fun add-ons you can use for your website, but remember less is always more! The days of dogs dancing across your page on a business website is definitely over. It isn't professional, and no one does it any more unless it is to show how NOT to create a website.

My Slider is a random photo slider you can use to show images, banners, logos. Check out myslider.com.

The same sort of program, again for free, is on slide.com. Not necessarily classy, but it depends what you do with these programs.

Making your website more visible

What most web clients want is to make sure people see their sites. Now the designer's job is to create a site first of all that will be seen easily by the spiders (programs that search through the internet) and to submit the site to search engines, but there are things that the client can do to help themselves.

1. Put your website address on every piece of paper that leaves your office. On your business cards, flyers, emails as well as any advertising that you may do in other places.
2. Consider putting your business (if it is a service) or items you sell onto sites like eBay or free sites like Kijiji or Craig's List. One client sells purebred dogs and every time she has puppies available, she posts an ad on kijiji in her city and cities close by and her website traffic shoots up by 200%. And she sells half of her puppies to people who saw her ad on this site.
3. Make sure you on on all affiliated companies sites, as well as putting their sites on your pages. For example, put all association such as local chamber, or professional memberships on your website. If they have a website, link to them. Ask them if they will link to you. This all creates popularity, which in turn helps your site move up the search engine ladder.
4. Use google maps to show where your company is. You can list your business for free with Google and it helps to boost your ranking.
5. Consider a youtube video. If you have a tourism resort, you could make a video about your resort, or you could be more creative like the fellow from Blendex. They've posted these movies on youtube that are very popular called "Will it blend?" In this one, he blends a iphone. Very humourous, but did you know his sales have gone through the roof?
6. Create a blog. If you don't do the updating to your website yourself, and I don't suggest you do as it would put me out of a job, you may want to use a blog to update day to day sales you may have, or if you had a farm or garden centre, talk about what is fresh or upcoming. It is cheaper to update this every day or once a week and do major changes to your website every couple of months to keep it fresh.

The idea is to keep your site fresh, have people coming back to see what else you are selling, have to tell them about your products. And you want prospective clients to find you easily if they do a search. All of the above things will help your business be found when people do a search.