Archive for the ‘Articles’ Category
How to Pick an Online ECommerce Shopping Cart: 6 Carts Reviewed
A more recent version of this article has been posted at SitePoint, which also has links to related articles that might be of interest. The SitePoint article also has a review of Google Checkout. Selling online can be a great way to expand an existing business or start a new one. Sites like eBay and etsy let you sell within their sites and use their shopping carts. You benefit from their traffic and marketing but they control the look and functionality of their site. The other option is to sell through... Read the complete article
How To Do Basic Search Engine Optimization for Web Pages
When a prospect or customer uses Google to find a product or service you offer, ideally you want your web pages to appear in the top 10 search results. There are many excellent articles online that describe different ways to improve the search engine rankings of your web pages. My goal is not to write yet another how-to article about search engine optimization. Today I want to describe basic steps that businesses can take before they explore more refined optimization strategies. I encounter many... Read the complete article
How to Make New Year’s Resolutions You Can Keep
New Year’s resolutions are cliched. Many people make them. Few people remember them months later. However, clear resolutions can be a powerful way to boost your business. And January, after the hectic chaos of the holidays, is the perfect month to develop simple measurable goals you can remember and keep throughout the new year. Goals are problematic. Some people love constraints; they eagerly make, refine, and achieve their goals. Other people, like myself, grudgingly acknowledge the value... Read the complete article
How To Build a Basic Email Marketing Capability
Please note that I’ve written a companion article to this one, How To Code HTML Email Newsletters, that describes the subtleties of coding html email to work beautifully across almost all email reading software. This summer past my wife and I drove our kids cross country as part of a move from Connecticut to Arizona. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, my wife dragged me into a sculpture gallery off the main plaza. After I agreed with my wife the sculpture she had picked out would look fine in our new... Read the complete article
How To Code HTML Email Newsletters (All New Version)
Please note this article has been completely rewritten, tightened up, and re-organized on April 12, 2006. It provides lots of information about coding emails to display well in Google Mail and Lotus Notes. A much earlier version of this article was published on SitePoint, a site for web developers and designers, and the reader comments there include additional coding ideas. Finally, note that I’ve written a companion article to this one, How To Build a Basic Email Marketing Capability, that... Read the complete article
Use Online Surveys To Support Business Decisions: An Interview With Vivek Bhaskaran
Run your business without customer feedback and you might as well burn your money. How do you dig out customer ideas that make a huge difference to all your customers? Lately online surveys appear to be an inexpensive way for businesses to easily gain customer feedback. To learn more about online surveys, I asked Vivek Bhaskaran, founding member of online survey service QuestionPro.com, to talk about the pitfalls and opportunities that online surveys offer businesses. Vivek is a brainy guy who knows... Read the complete article
How To Evaluate Programmers, Without Being A Programmer
Updates to this article are noted at the bottom of this page. You are a business person. You know customers, products, competitors, pricing, and how to make them make money. You do not have time to learn software programming. It takes years to learn, for one thing. But you do need to hire someone who can build a software application. Where do you start? How do you evaluate a skill set that appears to be very different from your business skills? First, you do not have to know how to code software... Read the complete article
How To Create An Editorial Process To Publish Web Content
Recently I read an article online that complained about the poor quality of content on internet and intranet websites. The upshot: too many web authors think getting their authoring technology right will take care of the publishing part. Without a publishing plan, deadlines slip and content is published haphazardly. While there is some truth to this argument, I found it simplistic. There are many reasons for weak content on the web and not all of them are bad. In some cases, weblogs for example,... Read the complete article
How To Easily Edit DNS Zone Files To Configure Email Servers
Earlier this year, and again this week, I had to configure a client’s email once they moved to a new web hosting vendor. In both cases, they had old webhosting contracts that cost too much, around $30 USD a month when $10 or $20 a month provides much more bandwidth, disk space, and other features. In both cases, I had to cobble together information to get the email configuration done. This article is a summary of what I found works. While this topic can be highly technical, I only want to describe... Read the complete article
One Hit Wonders: How To Manage Your Search Engine Traffic
This website was recently relaunched in part to make all 600 plus pages searchable by the Google search engine. If you do not know, Google will not crawl and index pages that have id= in their URL, for example, www.bozotheclown.com/ index.asp?id=rednose&action=bonk would never be indexed. The original software I used to maintain this website generated URLs with id= and so Google only crawled the first five or ten pages of this website. Even worse, regardless of what technology used on this website,... Read the complete article
Visitors and Conversions and Page Views, Oh My: Website Activity Reporting Tools
“Dirt bag soap” surely is an odd phrase. So is “My dog Mundi.” What do they both have in common? They showed up in my website log files recently. At least six visitors have used “dirt bag soap” to find this site. It turns out that a Google search on both terms results in this site being listed high in the results page. This column describes how that happens, what no-cost and low-cost tools exist to extract this data, and what it means. The mystery of dirt bag soap... Read the complete article
Web Page Layout 101
With millions of websites on the internet, you might think that there are almost as many ways to design and layout content on a website. In fact, so far there are no more than four styles of web pages and a dozen or so ways to lay them out. This column explores some common design elements of web pages to help when you have to ask for a website design or create one. Each style of web page layout has been dictated by the current state of web technology. Less freedom with technology resulted in less... Read the complete article
Are Websites Over-rated? A $500 website and email strategy (Part 2)
Last time, I wrote about a website and email strategy that would allow almost any business, especially small businesses like florists, heating oil companies, law firms, and hardware stores, use the internet for a modest $500 start up price. My first column explained how to build a one page website. This column describes how to use email newsletters to find and support customers. While there are reasons to have a multi-page website, many businesses on a budget would be better off if they spent on... Read the complete article
Are Websites Over-rated? A $500 website and email strategy (Part 1)
Three years after the internet boom, many businesses have not ventured past the brochure website phase. Even fewer use email to reach their customers and prospects. The question these companies face is whether to spend more on their websites. Many of them paid high rates for their static online real estate. Even more companies never went online because of the high cost of a static site. What are these priced-out businesses to do about the internet? Are they shut out? How should they sort the flood... Read the complete article
Penny Ha’ Penny: Too Foolish To Fail?
Last time, I wrote about my goals for this twice a month column. This week I want to write about a business whose internet experiences provide a terrific example of how a business can use the internet to support their customers. They started small, proved value, then evolved as needed. As a result, they did not overreach. Nor did fear of the unknown stop their efforts. Imagine an American website in the Connecticut countryside that sells dozens of British grocery and gift shop items without a single... Read the complete article
Crossing The Internet Chasm
Today, on my wife’s birthday, I took our daughter to shop for a gift. We wound up at Cannondale Crossing, a local shopping area of sleepy Civil War era buildings. As we drove out of Cannondale Crossing, I noticed a cute shop buried in leafy vegetation, Annabel Green Flowers & Finery. Besides flowers, they sell silk flower arrangements and jewelry my wife would love. We bought her a nice silver bracelet. When I got home, I tried the website address for Annabel Green (http://www.annabelgreen.com)... Read the complete article
Do-It-Yourself Email Newsletters For Businesses
Please note this article is a general interest piece that describes how a few small businesses have used no and low-cost email newsletter software to reach their customers. I’ve written how-to articles elsewhere, specifically, How to Build a Basic Email Marketing Capability. Potawatomie Indians, the Jesuit missionary Marquette, the explorers LaSalle and Cadillac, and more recently tourists in tank tops, spandex shorts, and RVs, they have all trekked north to remote Sister Bay, Wisconsin, current... Read the complete article
How to tell if your website is broken (and how to fix it)
See how many of these questions you can answer about your website: Where is your website hosted? What do you pay per month for webhosting? Can you change content on your website easily (within minutes)? Or do you need designers and/or programmers? Do you have a written plan that defines audience(s), goals, budget(s), and resources for your internet projects? If so, when was the last time you read this document? When was the last time you saw a report on activity for your website and other internet... Read the complete article
How I eat my own dog food: Behind the scenes of this website.
If you don’t know, “eat your own dog food” is American slang for using a product you sell. In this case, if I tell you that businesses can use internet tools for no or low cost to find and support your customers, then I should do the same for this website. So, woof, woof, woof. I think that is dog for “Hello, now let’s get started.” I should mention that none of the resources on this list have paid me any money for a mention. While I have lots of experience with... Read the complete article
I host my own email newsletter. How do I avoid being labelled as spam?
Please note that I have written additional articles on the topic of email newsletters: How To Code HTML Newsletters, Do-It-Yourself Email Newsletters For Businesses, and Are Websites Over-rated? A $500 website and email strategy. Thanks for visiting! Start first with your newsletter publication. Make sure that all of your email addresses have been acquired through double opt-in (your visitor signs up on your website, receives an email confirmation, then clicks on a link or visits your site to confirm... Read the complete article
Popular Articles
- How to Pick an Online ECommerce Shopping Cart: 6 Carts Reviewed
- How to Code HTML Email Newsletters
- How To Create An Editorial Process To Publish Web Content
- How To Do Basic Search Engine Optimization for Web Pages
- How To Easily Edit DNS Zone Files To Configure Email Servers
- How To Evaluate Programmers, Without Being A Programmer
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