eBusiness.Life.Passion

10 ways to help me really like your website

I have been away for the last week in Germany at an international trade convention. It has been an interesting time where you get to meet all sorts of interesting people from different cultures.

It is amazing how many people have referred me to their website at the show. It makes sense - suppliers from all over the world use a website when promoting to an international market.

But as I sit here in my hotel room and finally plucked up the courage to pay the high costs of internet access - I have used my final minutes of airtime to browse a few of these sites. Here are some tips for those website owners:

1. Never ever use just flash for your website! Add static and flash content, and then give me the choice on which one I want to view. Don't make it my only option.
2. Make information easy to find! Add a site map, make your menus and navigation obvious - please! I hate it when you have to hunt for information.
3. Ignore your designer and listen to your copywriter. What do I mean by this? Well, it is great that you site looks great - but please make the content interesting and compelling to read. I hate being bored by meaningless text on websites.
4. Make your text easy to read...please! Add headlines, break up the text. Add a few pictures, maybe even humour. But make it easy to find the bit of text I want - I don't have hours to read through everything.
5. Put your contact details on every page. Put your phone number and your email address in a place where I can easily find it without having to click through to the contact page unless of course, you don't want me to contact you - in which case hide them away and let me get frustrated!
6. I don't care about your company logo. You may care, but I don't. It doesn't need to take up a large part of your website page. It is irrelevant (unless your website is about creating logos).
7. Please remember the law of accessibility. It is now law. Don't be put off by the term accessibility - embrace it. You will benefit in the long run. My laptop has a high screen resolution which is great for DVDs but difficult to read small text - therefore make it easy for me to increase the size of the text! Simple really.
8. When I have to fill in your contact form - please test it with Autofill from the Google toolbar before making it live. I hate filling in forms so I love Google's AutoFill feature - so do 1000's of others. Let me use Google AutoFill!
9. Assume that I want to leave your site quickly and make your site grab my attention and give me what I want ASAP.
10. Be consistent. You have invested £'000s into the trade show. You have worked on your stand, your brochures. You have staff there and biscuits for me to eat. Well done! But when I come to your website it looks awful. It looks like you have thrown something together in a rush and is nothing like the rest of your marketing literature. Be consistent. Don't confuse me - I am, after all, a simple being.

Anger management therapist - don't make me laugh!

I heard this story on the news and it caused me to laugh. An anger management therapist lost his temper and drove a car into a club that wouldn't let him in. He is now in jail, and I couldn't help but laugh when I listened to the news in the car.

Whilst it is one of the funniest things I heard all day, it does lead me to point out the obvious here: you have to practice what you preach. Customers can spot a fraud. Perhaps in the short run they do OK but in the long run, they are always discovered.

Read this story. Laugh along at the irony. But learn the lesson here. Practice what you preach. Be a company of integrity.

Read the story at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/5371480.stm

What is success

A group of us the other day were discussing this question: What is success?

The problem for most people who want to be successful is NOT that they can’t achieve success. The main obstacle for them is that they misunderstand success.

Then I read Seth's blog the next day - where he asks the same question.

One thing that I am convinced of is that success is a journey, not a destination. I am also convinced that the picture of success is different for all of us.

At Lutroo, our mantra is "your success is our business". For me success comes when we help our customers gain success. For example, we took someone who didn't know anything about the internet, helped them developed an idea (doing what we do best), and he sells thousands of pounds worth of products on his site every day (after 4 weeks of trading).

But for another client, success is not selling beauty products online but rather gaining another lead or managing their accounts better.

So success for one might not be success for another.

That said - whilst the picture of success is different for each of us - the principles of success are still the same. John Maxwell tells us that

Success is…
Knowing your purpose in life,
Growing to reach your maximum potential, and
Sowing seeds that benefit others.

When Seth tells us that success is keeping our word - absolutely! It is a big part of it. You can't reach your potential with out. But for me - success is much more than that.

So let me ask a question - are you successful, right now? You should be! Can you be a success tomorrow? Absolutely. Success is a journey, not a destination.

links for 2006-09-21

• Using digg and Netscape to get traffic
  Following some recent questions about Digg - here is a great read for those looking to increase their traffic using this service
  (tags: digg marketing blog howto social blogging bookmarking traffic)

Advice for those starting a new business

I was talking to someone the other day about when we set up Lutroo and what made me decide to take the plunge. At the time, my wife and I had a new baby - our first born but not much else. Dan (the other half of Lutroo) didn't have kids then but he didn't have much else either.

Both of us left our jobs to work on our company. I had a new baby and a wife that wasn't working.

Some people think this is risky, but for me it seemed like the right thing to do. Sometimes playing it safe is the riskiest thing you can do. So we jumped right in.

Fear of faliure is one of the main reasons that we don't do thing in life or in business. People don't start their business because they are afraid to fail. We don't launch a new product, call the person we need to or confront someone.

Abraham Lincoln said, "My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure."

I guess we weren't afraid to fail when we started the business.

So my advice to anyone thinking about setting up their own business - get a good accountant, have a supportive wife and enjoy the journey.

links for 2006-09-19

• » Zappos.com Case Study: Why shoes are great for e-commerce
  I think that Zappos.com makes for an interesting case study because they found a winning formula for e-commerce in general: acquire customers cost effectively through search engine marketing (SEM) and make them happy enough with their experience to keep c
  (tags: ecommerce ebusiness zappos shoes)

Why you shouldn't use UPS

Today the UPS man arrived at my office with some software upgrades that I ordered from the States.

Now, when I was on the website ordering the upgrades (there was no download available), the only shipping option for me was UPS because I was outside the States - this already meant an increase in $30 in my shipping costs which I was annoyed about.

But the thing that really gets to me is UPS. The guy arrived and told me that this was cash-on-delivery parcel. I had to pay more money to them. Why? VAT (OK - no problem with that), but UPS charged me an £11 administration fee.

Not only did they charge me a fortune for the carriage - but I get an admin charge that I have to pay to take the delivery.

So my advice, forget UPS for your website, especially if you are shipping internationally. There is no way for your website to predict these charges that UPS make - but one thing is for sure - your customers will get annoyed.

You can have a great company with great customer service, but you have no control over what UPS guys does and what image that paints about your company. UPS are the link between you and your customer -- and for me, they cause a lot of frustration on my international orders.

Don't get me wrong, we use UPS a lot on orders in the UK. It is a great, fast and reliable service. But I would never use them when they would cause frustration to my customers.

For the software company, they should have offered a download alternative. That would have been quicker, cheaper and a lot less frustrating. It also means that I would be likely to come back.

Today confirmed something that I have been thinking for a while - I will stop buying stuff internationally from companies that use UPS whilst they continue to make these charges without my agreement.

Make sure your customers are not doing the same.

Desktop v Internet. Bespoke solutions v off the shelf.

For a while now I have thought that the smart companies will be developing the "all-in-one" solution, especially for small businesses owners. Software that manages the books, the website, sales, marketing and customer accounts from one place, one database. Eventually all of this will be accessible through a website.

Is this a prophecy? Partly maybe, but in reality it is starting to happen. Intuit - the software company responsible for Quickbooks accounting software for small businesses and Google have joined forces to enable small businesses to use Google services through Quickbooks according to the Intuit website.

In one simple move, a lot of services have joined forces. If Google had done this with Sage, ACT! (customer database system) could have also joined in.

More and more we are developing websites for customers that actually manage the day-to-day of their business. This is eBusiness, and eBusiness - at it's heart - should mean simplicity.

Technology should make life easier. For a long time it hasn't because I had to put 10 differnet pieces of software on each computer. Now, my staff have a computer with with Internet Explorer and access a website. That is easier, because I can log in and get the figures at any time.

As a business owner, the all-in-one solution works for me. It has (eventually) made life and business easier.

I have tried Quickbooks. We own a copy of it at the office. The bookkeeping arm of the business is not that impressed with it, and it is overly complicated if all you want to do is track your essential money numbers (bills owed, outstanding invoices etc). We only use a few features of the software. The great thing about our website - it was built specifically for our needs.

This is the problem with the all-in-one from Software companies, it has to have so many features and options to cater for all that it because huge and complicated to use.

Of course, bespoke means more money - at least in the short run. I could argue that the benefits of bespoke outweigh the general software solutions. But more and more the bespoke solution, the eBusiness solution, becomes possible. The internet gets faster and more powerful. More and more customers use it and want a good experience using your website. Design and development becomes quicker. Web applications are catching up with desktop applications.

My advice is simple, sure - look at the new Quickbooks for your business, but better still - look at what your business needs and build an application to suit.

links for 2006-09-14

• Mac IT Support
  Me and my office, we are PC fans. Always have been. There is a good chance that we always will be too. But, I appreciate that there is the MAC world out there and rather than start the whole PC/MAC argument...I thought that I would recomment the following
  (tags: mac, macs, mac it support)

Dyson v Miele. Remarkable v. Reliable

Today I had to replace my vacuum cleaner. We had a Dyson and have had it for a few years. The question is - did I get another Dyson?

Dyson is a great story of how the little guy with a great idea can, in an instant, change the way the world does things. In the words of Seth Godin, Dyson is a remarkable product. At least in theory.

I do think Dyson is a remarkable product - a great idea, maybe even a revolution. Yet, in my experience (and 1000's others) there was one thing that Dyson didn't crack: reliability.

Mazda have the same problem. I drive an RX-8 with the incredible Rotary engine in it. In theory this should be the most efficient engine in the world - but they just can't stop it leaking. So I and every other Mazda RX-8 driver know - fuel economy is not the reason that you buy that car.

I didn't buy another Dyson. I got a Miele. I got this because Which? told me to. They told me that Dyson would be truly great if it was reliable, but it isn't so it recommends Miele - a great, traditional cleaner that is incredibly reliable.

A product doesn't have to be totally reliable when it is launched if it is truly remarkable (take Windows for example). Dyson captured a massive chunk of his market. But he is now loosing what he once had because of reliability. So remarkable gets you your market, reliability helps you keep it.

So What has Dyson done? Given an unprecedented 5 year parts and labour warranty with each new vaccuum cleaner. In my mind - this is a little bit late for me. I have had to have an engineer out over 5 times and the problem could not be fixed. The service was excellent but the ability to solve the problem was not there.

I needed more than a warranty - I needed to believe that everything had changed. My wife and I didn't. So we went with Which?'s recommendation.

Ultimately, in business, you succeed because your customers buy from you again and that they feel confident to tell their friends about you.

In the early days, it was cool to have a Dyson. That passed and I noticed that over the last few years no one has ever bragged about their Dyson to me.

This is a shame because I really wanted the product to work. I bought into the original vision of Dyson but it wasn't compelling enough or strong enough to keep me there.

Sorry Mr.Dyson.