Website Maintenance: Does Your Business Website Really Need A Support Plan?

Website maintenance can be a vexing issue, subject to a great deal of confusion and abuse by unscrupulous suppliers. I'm prompted to write this by some amazingly arrogant posts I've seen by website providers lately.  In one thread, one lady was bad-mouthing a customer for cancelling a support contract and bragging that the customer had asked for some additional pages on his site (which he would pay for) but that he could 'go to hell'.

Additionally, she had requested that same customer to sign a statement that in the event of his website crashing, she was in no way responsible. She gave the impression that without a website maintenance contract, the customer's website would fall to pieces in short order. As we will see, this is a half-truth used  as a scare tactic.

 So I decided to write an article about the nature of website maintenance that will help you to decide what, if anything, your business website needs .  I will be referring specifically to websites built with WordPress combined with other bespoke specialized code that business often needs.

Does Your Business Website Need a Website Maintenance Contract?

First, let's consider two types of support for websites:

1. Technical Support
2. Update support

Technical support basically covers keeping your website going. Most websites need updates every few weeks. These are not generally urgent (although some are, where security is concerned), but they do need to be done, or in time,  problems can be expected. They are however simple and just take a few minutes.

Let's have a closer look at what technical support you need to keep your site running smoothly and safely.

Website Maintenance (Technical) for a Simple WordPress Website with No Shop

These websites, usually having a few pages with galleries and blogs, with no special features,  only require around thirty minutes per month to update plugins and check performance.

 As long as you can log into your own WordPress website, you can update the plugins and keep your website running. It's a simple 'click and carry' on operation.

Yes, things can go wrong and that's when you need your website support engineer to sort things out, but this is a rare occurrence, because WordPress plugins are subject to rigorous compliance testing and specification before they are issued. 

Other issues that may occur relate to hosting. Sometimes, as WordPress is updated and plugins are updated, new versions of the software used on the hosting platform are required. You need to be technically proficient to get these changes made, but such cases are quite rare because almost all changes in the plugins are backwards compatible. 

Sydney Business Web handles this by including all technical  website maintenance in our hosting fee. The website owner never even becomes aware of changes as they are taken care of.

Website Maintenance for Complex Business Websites

There is a great deal more that can go wrong with a complex business website or eCommerce Website that a simple WordPress website. Typically a business website will have a mix of the following:

Each of these facilities works with all the others very well >99.9% of the time.  The problem is though that when things do go wrong with an update, it takes a fair degree of technical knowledge and patience to pin the problem down quickly and fix it. The average user will simply have no idea. But sadly, neither will a great many website designers!

Many website designers have a business model that's quite simply 'churn and burn'. They use advanced drag & drop design tools to create a site but do not have the knowledge to cope when things go wrong. There are host of forums on Facebook that attest to this truth. 

Typically you will see posts such as "I've won this job - can someone tell me how to do it?" or, "my customer wants this but I don't know how" or "Help - my customer's site is down".

They usually get away with this until something goes wrong. A website support contract with such an agency has less  value that a circus ticket the day after the show left town and all that's left to do is to clean up the elephant poo. 

if you are running a competently designed, complex WordPress business website, then the possibility of problems arising are still low. However, you simply cannot afford down-time, so having a professional company update software as required and keeping an eye on performance is essential - and it's also peace of mind.  This will be one of the best investments you have made in your online business. But make sure your designer is technically competent before you invest in a business website. 

Contracts for Non Technical Website Maintenance

This is different to website technical support contracts. Commercial websites - Business Websites - often require frequent updates for products, prices and images. Although you can do these changes yourself, they do take time and a little patience. So I always ask business owners - do you have the time? Do you want to spend time on your website or on your business?  if you are happy to do that, we'll provide the training.

If you prefer us to do it, we usually start our customers on a four hour per month contract. As we have designed the sites, we can be quick and efficient and do the work in a fraction of the time it would take our customers.  If the hours are too long, we can reduce the commitment.

For simple websites, we do not suggest these contracts because the content is very rarely updated and it's quite efficient to quote for the work that needs doing as it arises.

Conclusions

Website Maintenance for Small Simple Websites 

These websites very rarely give trouble, but it's good to always be prepared.

If you have a small simple WordPress website, your technical website maintenance comprises very little work in most months - maybe thirty minutes. Security means that it is important to update plugins and WordPress when updates are available. Your designer can teach you to do this in fifteen minutes flat. (Most of our clients host with us so we do it for them and also conduct performance checks.)

However, when things go wrong, if you don't have any support agreement, it could cost you a lot of money, as some agencies are not competent or worse and may spend hours trying to fix something trivial. So do make sure you have an honest, technically competent supplier who will take care of you.

Also, make sure you have full access to your website just in case your website designer cannot help or has 'gone away'. 

If you want to regularly update website content, you should consider a monthly agreement which will generally be more cost-effective and efficient than getting  a quotation every time. For small websites, we have never seen this need arise.

Complex Business Website Maintenance

These websites don't often give trouble but when they do it can be technically demanding

The more plugins and bespoke code a website has, the trickier it can be to track the problem down. You should have a technical support program with a competent supplier. As far as you can, make sure they are qualified to do this and that they are not purely 'designers'. 

With respect to website changes, if you have a shop online, then you will probably want to change prices, add products, remove products etc quite regularly. A support contract with your supplier, just for such changes, will be well worthwhile and save you valuable time that is best spent on your business.

If you have questions about this subject, please call or message me personally - I'm here to help.

I was recently asked by a good friend to evaluate a website. I will not reveal the identity of that website because I have no desire to embarrass anyone. That means that my 'subjective' observations won't mean much (but they are brief), but my objective observations are very easy to understand, The website turned out not to be merely a poor website, but one of the worst aspects of bad website design I have ever had the misfortune to encounter,

When you read this, bear in mind that someone has paid hundreds and maybe thousands of dollars for a website design doesn't work on any level. 

Evaluation Setup

• Primary Desktop Browser: Chrome
• Secondary Desktop Browser: Opera
• Internet Speed: NBN Broadband 32Mbps Download
• Mobile: iPhone 6 Safari Browser
• PC Displays: BenqGL2460 24-inch display (big screen) and HP Laptop 16-inch display

Subjective Viewpoints

This is purely a ‘how it looks to me’ viewpoint.

Desktop

The site looks old fashioned and amateurish; there is nothing in the layout to suggest professional design skills have been applied. Colors clash and the most valuable real-estate on the landing page, the upper part, is essentially useless and guaranteed to get people to just scroll past it – it says nothing of value.

Mobile

It seems a bit quicker than desktop to load, but again, the layout is dysfunctional and wastes   space. The text on the slides is unreadable which makes it even worse than the desktop version That’s the subjective viewpoint – let’s move onto objective measurements.

Objective Observations on the Bad Website Design

Speed

On the laptop and desktop, first load into the browser took in excess of 20s. That will simply kill visitors’ interest. The page is very bloated indeed, at 15.8Mbyte. Normal professional practice is around 1MB to 2MB (preferably not near the 2MB mark!).

A site can have a measured long load time of even 6s without upsetting visitors as long as it’s mostly populated inside 2s. This site presents two rotating red dots while loading – not good practice.

The server response time is also poor at 3.8 s – almost 20 times slower than recommended. This may be due to the hosting  facility and/or poor site structure. We don’t recommend (Bad Hosting Company) hosting anyway as we have found support to be poor in general.

Bad Website Design - On Site SEO

There is none. This is very, very important as this is required so that search engines can recognize what the site is about. Here are the key deficiencies:

• There is no meta description on the page, which is a strong sign of bad website design. This is the ‘snippet’ that search engines pickup to describe your page. Without it, Google just picks a bit of text and uses that.  This is very detrimental to ranking.
• No highest-level heading tag <h1>. Again, this tells search engines what your site is about at the highest level and it’s simply missing.
• No Open Graph tags. This means that when your page is shown on sites like LinkedIn, images and text are not what you want them to be.
• Keywords: There is no particular keyword to tell search engines what your site is focused on. Again, not good for ranking.
• Images: Apart from the incorrect (very large) size of the images, they have no ‘alt text’ which search engines read to determine what they are about. Again, bad for ranking.

At this point we stopped looking for more html issues.

Site Structure and Usability - More Bad Website Design

Site visitors want to identify what they are looking for and get there with one click.  Take a visitor going to xxxxxx.com who is looking for ‘xxxxxx Refill Services’.

First, he/she sees it on the landing page with an icon, but there is no link except to ‘all our services’.

Further reinforcing the bad website design, under the collection of services icons there is a section of three images with links to other services – this is truly confusing.

Next on the page we see a section with the company’s mission. This is another confusing placement, and an inversion of normal content hierarchy. It sends the visitor scanning the page with uncertainty as to what’s next.

So, let’s assume the somewhat confused visitor is very patient, (which is very unlikely) and now clicks onto the ‘All Our Services’ button – what’s next? – Nothing on the subject matter. Your visitor now definitely leaves.

If the visitor had been looking for ‘xxxxxx Services’, then after clicking the ‘All Our services’ button, he/she does indeed see a description of that service – and another clickable link to another page for the information.

On a score of 1 to 10 on usability we would score this site a 3 at best.

Recommendations to Correct the Bad Website Design

The site needs to be completely redesigned with rationalized and organized content, product/service categorization, proper menus and calls to action, proper keyword selection, and on SEO. Never design a site without on-site SEO - it's just not worth it.

We also suggest changing the host to a more helpful entity which can provide. We have a design process available for the customer to engage with if he/she works with us.

A Bit of Fun - Some REALLY REALLY Bad Website Design

Offer: Evaluation of Website Design

Would you like an honest evaluation of your business website free?  We'll do it free for the first five applicants each month.  Call us!

We are honored and delighted to be finalists in the Bx Annual Business Awards - Marketing.

Thanks for the votes and consideration to everyone concerned. We are absolutely over the Moon with this. Congratulations to all the other entrants and finalists.

The awards will be made at a ceremony  in December.

Cold Calling - Most of us hate Cold Calls - Should We?

Last week, I decided to place my finger on the pulse of small business by doing some cold calling. I'm an engineer and manager by profession and inclination, so I always find cold calling hard on my psyche. I always get through it though by using the following rules:

Rules for Cold Calling

My Cold Calling Preparation for Hairdressers

Choosing the niche for cold calls

I decided that instead of my usual customer base of professionals (builders, architects, tech companies etc), I would focus on one type of local business. To that end I chose hairdressers because they are often passionate about their business,  have a very localised operation and competition can be tough.

Choosing the Offer

Choosing the subniche for cold calls

Getting the Business Information before cold calling

Before making each call, we extracted information from GMB - the address, the owner's name if possible, the number of reviews and star review rating, and how long ago the last review was made. Here's a typical display I work from (click for full size):

Warning for Wannabe Reluctant Cold Callers

Set yourself a time frame to make your calls. Like you, I find it daunting and my brain is enormously creative in the ways it gets me to delay starting - there's always yet another technical task to complete or some aspect of preparation not ready nand suddenly - 'I'll do it tomorrow'! remember - procrastination is the thief of opportunity.

Why We Hate Receiving Cold Calls

The fact is, we hate cold calls because the majority of them are concerned with something we never wanted, don't want and will never want. For instance, we are a reputable and experienced SEO provider and yet we get at least 6 calls and two dozen emails every week selling us services we sell ourselves- irritating.  That's why we do research before calling anyone!

The Cold Calling Scam Alert Radar

We remain receptive to calls offering things that might really be useful for our business - but because our scam-radars are always on high alert, whoever calls needs to be crisp, professional and fast to get back our automated response 'go away' (politely). The fate of a call to us or a call we make to someone else is decided inside two seconds.

Our Findings on a Sample set of  25 Cold Calls to Hairdressing Businesses

So - we weren't able to find any business on that round of cold calling, but having said that:

This quotation really says it all: 

So Why did I make Those Cold Calls?

That's easy to answer. I wanted to get a feel for some local businesses that have definitely suffered through Covid, to see what their awareness of online business was. I did not expect much but  did convey my excitement at the offer I was making and how much they might benefit. The calls kept me in touch.

Will I be Making More Cold Calls?

Yes, but only about ten per day or 200 per month in various industries. That should give me two convertible leads per month from cold calling. It take a little time to prepare for each call, so as a main method of marketing, in the sector we are in, it's not the best investment in time.

Why Should I Tolerate Cold Calls at All?

Because a small percentage of those calls might be really useful for you and the people making the calls are also just trying, like you, to make a living.  Believe me, for some unknown reason that defies logic, it takes a deep breath and some courage for most people to pick up that phone and start calling. At least show a little kindness- and I am pleased to say that most people do.

I sincerely believe that the fact that 25% of the businesses we called were no longer operating had no website or SEO - they could have been helped at a very modest cost. This applies to many businesses.

Putting Cold Calling in Context

Cold calling is said to be 'dead' by many, but that really depends how you look on it. In many of our marketing activities, we use email and monitor the link clicks, which are often a good indication of interest - and only then do we cold call, so the lead may be said to be warm rather than cold.

The amount if time it takes to prepare properly for cold calling can be restrictive, and the more effort it takes, the bigger the psychological toll is taken when the methods fail. However, cold calling instills a sense of reality in the marketer, an experience that cannot be obtained from the detached process of emailing. As such, it's a very important training tool when it comes to understanding customers and the market.

The Toxic marketplace for Cold Calling

If you are going to try cold calling for your business (and we recommend you do for the reasons given above), then do see if you can construct a narrative avoiding toxic words and modes of expression. 

Final Words

All we can say is - good luck and God Bless!

A Typical Business Moving Online

We have built online properties of various types, including eCommerce Business Websites for a range of companies. But we can't write an article about them all, so in this article, we'll focus on one type of company , and refer to others as helpfully as we can. We'll doubtless write full articles on other types of business soon.

Welcome To Julie's Home Jewelry

Julie lives in Sydney. She's been  retailing and making beautiful home-crafted jewelry for a few years and selling through local stores and a network of friends.  In particular, her moonstone bracelets are selling well. She wants to grow her business without the expense of opening her own store and to take a greater profit than she does from local stores. She has a reliable supplier  and wants to increase sales - the capacity exists but the sales channels are not sufficient.

The latter point is important -

First Considerations for an eCommerce Business Website

Current Business Summary

Let's say that July is selling 50 of these moonstone bracelets per month, and has the capacity to supply another 150/month. This seems like a good opportunity. But is it? At those prices, she stands to gross an additional $5,250/month (Gross Profit before advertising costs) if she can sell all of them. Let's take a closer look at this.

What Julia wants to Sell Online

Julia is selling a Moonstone Bracelet as shown here:

Goals for Julia's eCommerce Business Website

Getting Business Started Online : The First Mistakes

"Do NOT Assume You Need an eCommerce Business Website - Do the Numbers First" - Keith Rowley

Things to Consider before an eCommerce Business Website

The only objective of a eCommerce Business Website is to get your product in front of customers. No matter which method you choose, you will face competition. Here are some methods of presenting your products online along with the main methods you can use to promote them. As you will see, we do NOT recommend all the options in the table, but they are there so that we can explain.

Online Sales Platforms and Promotion Methods

The Facebook Store

Here are the key points for selling products on Facebook:

So it's clear that you need an eCommerce platform (eCommerce Business Website or other options as noted below) to enable setting up a Facebook shop. We therefore consider that a Facebook shop is a great place to expand your shopping efforts to, but is not your first point of call to establish online sales. However, unless you live in the USA, you cannot accept payments on a Facebook shop, so even with a Facebook  shop, you need another platform. 

A Shopify Store Platform

This is a popular way to set up a eCommerce Business Website. We won't go into the technicalities here as our focus is on cost, save to say that we think that most people who are comfortable with computers should be able to set up a basic store without help.

The basic costs US$30 per month (AU$43/month). However, that is basic and as soon as you learn about other features needed to make your store more attractive and improve conversion, you start paying for plugins' that charge a monthly fee. We found that our monthly bill easily increased to around AU$75/month which is A$900 per annum.

Of course, there are other eCommerce  Business Websites stores like Shopify you can use, but for cost illustration purposes, we'll stop at that and move on. The key point is that Shopify will cost you around A$900 per annum - forever!

Selling on Amazon FBA and Self-Fulfillment

Selling on Amazon is a journey and requires considerable time to learn how to get products into the store, price them properly and advertise. A professional Amazon account costs US$40 or A$57 monthly - but that's just an admin fee so we need to take a closer look and at the FBA program and seller-fulfillment in particular.

The Amazon FBA Program means 'Fulfilled by Amazon' which means that once your items have been received into Amazon's warehouses, Amazon takes it from there and takes orders, delivers and so on. With 'Your Fulfillment' you sell on Amazon but ship yourself. 

However, Amazon also provides refunds to customers at the drop of a hat, and you have to factor in such losses. Here is a Amazon FBA and 'Your Fulfillment' calculation. The cost of the product to Julie is shown as $10 - the rest is self explanatory.

On the surface this looks great, either with or without FBA but here are the problems we found when selling on Amazon instead of of selling on our own eCommerce Business Website.:

Amazon Ad Costs

The key point to note in this example is that net profit is now around $23 - $26 per item depending on FBS or non FBA sales. The profit target that Julie has is $20 per item, and before advertising, she meets this. But she will certainly NOT meet this target when Amazon advertising costs are added.

Those figures are critical. A click does not mean a sale. Let's say you get 10% conversion from clicks to sales (which is very good), then each sale will be costing you $13.80. Julies's net profit has now dropped to $6.20. If the conversion rate is 5% (which we think is normal for most products) then Julie is running at a loss.

We've been through this with a $10k branded product investment and despite working the numbers quite assiduously, we lost money.

The Upside of Amazon vs an eCommerce Business Website

The Downside of Amazon

On our first attempt at selling a branded product from China, we invested around $10k and lost about 25%. We were novices and we could have done better. We also entered the most competitive niche on the whole site - Essential Oils and Diffusers.  Try it with a slow start if you go this route! We suggest an initial investment no greater than $500 for newbies - and write that off as school fees just in case!

Your Own eCommerce Business Website

This is often, and quite naturally, the first port of call for those starting off their eCommerce adventure.  We're going to start by referring you to our article on what an eCommerce Business Website is so that we don't repeat ourselves here. Just click on the image to catch up if you need to:

eCommerce Business Website Cost

So you have your website up, and the running costs are known. What are the other expenses and how do you make a profit? These tables will help and should be  self-explanatory. First though, some typical data if we advertise on Facebook:

This gives us 2.0 sales for our $50 daily budget. At a pre-advertising GP   of $35 per product we have a profit of $70-$50 = $20. 

The important thing about this result is that you have an ad that is at least profitable and as such it can be scaled up. A good Ad with lots of comments and likes will drop the CPM a lot - maybe down as low as $8 when it really gets going. 

Free Ads Profit Calculator (Use for Facebook or Similar CPM Ad Platform)

This should be useful for you. Just enter data as you would for any calculator - it's live and it works.

So let's see where we are with Julie now and enter the following numbers into the calculator above:

Done it? What the numbers show is that at these performance levels, Julie is selling one product a day at a cost of $20 in advertising.  So her net profit is now $15 reduced from $35 and she's only selling one per day.

Reducing the Ad CPM and Increasing the Budget

Now let's assume the ad gets better and better over a few days and the algorithm learns, and keep the budget the same but drop the CPM cost to $15.

What we now see is that sales are two per day, with a net profit each of $26.75 or $53 per day.

Your eCommerce Business Website profitability is hugely dependent on the quality of your ads and the resultant CPM on Facebook!

But Julie needs to sell 5 per day, so we need to increase the advertising budget - now that we know the ad is profitable - not before!  Using the calculator with the  daily budget set to $50/day.

We now see the following:

NOTE: IF YOU USE FACEBOK ADS ONLY INCREASE THE DAILY AD BUDGET ON AN AD THAT PEFFROMS WELL BY ABOUT 10% - 15% PER DAY. IF YOU INCREASE TOO MUCH TOO SOON, THE AD WILL START IT LEARNING PHASE ALL OVER AGAIN AND SALES WILL DROP - ANFD MAYBE NOT RECOVER.

That's enough on Facebook!

Using SEO Profitably on an eCommerce Business Website

SEO profitability calculations are a bit more involved but still essentially simple. We use arithmetic not mathematics! Here is the starting sequence of activities before Julie or you should spend anything at all. bear in mind that SEO campaigns take 2 to 3 months to show results - just the first movements in your ranking.

Let's look at some examples.

Example SEO Calculations for Profitability on an eCommerce Business Website

What we have here is a very competitive, very low volume keyword. It's competitive because it's a definite product that people search for and it has no geographical anchor for the seller, so the competition is nation-wide. Furthermore, the search results page are an absolute nightmare for a seller using normal SEO. look at this:

The whole top of the page is dominated by ADS. After that, the top ranking site is etsy -  a major player that's very, very hard to beat - and simply not worth the effort with this product. 

In a nutshell, this product will simply not make money from SEO investment and it's hard to see how the advertised products do either! Remember - those search numbers are monthly nationwide for Australia!

What Should Julia Invest her SEO Spend in then?

Unless she has a highly profitable product with high search volumes, Julia needs to go both local and generic. She should not be spending money on SEO for this product, but rather using advertising to profit from impulse buyers. If she wants to benefit from SEO she needs to define:

Having done these things, Julie should plan an initial six month SEO exercise, using the methods shown above, planning costs and profit every month. 

Conclusions

Never 'jump' into an eCommerce adventure without a full-on business plan that includes investigation into the sales channels available. It's that simple - and that hard. Have fun.

Email Marketing: In one guise or another, we've been in business a long time, and we're pretty damn sensitive to how people feel when they receive unsolicited calls and emails. In our current business, the problem is acute. Just about every business owner in Australia, including us of course, receives a torrent of unsolicited, time-wasting, low quality offers of websites and SEO' every single day.

We really do know how you feel about this. We try hard - really hard - to be polite to the people who call us as we're having dinner and ask us yet again '...am I talking to the owner of "Sydney Business Web ?" Would you like to be on first page of Google?" (sic). 

We try hard because we know that the poor sod on the other end of the line is just trying to make a living, as we are ourselves. However, as a justified exception, when we receive scam calls, we have endless fun asking "where's my free toaster?" and "do you realize you are speaking to a police officer?"! But that's a different although very funny story (we love winding up scammers!).

Why do People Use Email Marketing?

Like me, you probably go through your email pile every morning and delete everything you don't recognize, unless it has a really striking headline relevant to you and your industry  (and even  then it almost always disappoints you anyway). You also delete everything with a heading like 'SEO proposal', 'Pay for results only', page 1 of Google', and 'free webinar will make you millions'! I can't even write these things without laughing.

So why do people do it? Why oh why oh why? Well here's the thing:

The Upside of e Email Marketing

The image above of a Email Marketing  Stats Panel at Sendinblue (click for full size) shows:

You will no doubt have noticed the SMS facility in that image, but as we haven't used SMS for marketing (yet?) we offer no comment. 

The Downside of eMail Marketing

If you get your email provider's IP (web address) blacklisted with your low quality emails they will often shut down your account after a couple of warnings. But they can see it coming - they count the number of rejected emails, bounced emails, complaints and unsubscribes and their tolerance levels are very, very low and they all keep a constant measure of your 'reputation' that you must act on.

Which Businesses Should Use eMail Marketing?

The answer to this is any and every company. As proof of this, 

Conclusions and Remarks

if your business is not using eMail marketing, you are almost certainly losing out. However, you will need to identify your customers and not blindly spam every address you can find. You need an ethical code of conduct, genuinely good offers and a tight control over the whole process.

Your spam complaints need to be kept to less than 0.5% and you must never contact those customers again, or the ones who unsubscribe. Your follow-through must be immaculate and your website must have a well designed sales funnel.

Flat Design or Skeuomorphic Design for Business Websites - The Choice is Yours

What is Flat Design?

Flat Design is the technique used to design  websites and their image artifacts without trying to make them look as though they come from the real world.  You can see in the image above that the Flat Design on the right hand side literally does look flat. The original design (on the left)  is a beautiful 3D skeuomorphic construct with color gradients that looks like a porcelain ball. Which do you prefer? Which ones will impress your customers more? What would the adoption of this technique mean for your business website?

What are the features of a Flat Website Design?

What are the benefits of Flat Website Design?

Speed

The biggest single benefit of Flat Website Design has to be speed. The simplified construction contains a lot less information than complex pages, but of course there is a price to pay (see below).

Simplicity

A Flat website design website is much easier to maintain and change than a normal/complex/realistic skeuomorphic design.  It has strong appeal to people who enjoy minimalism.

What is the Downside of Flat or Minimalistic Website Design?

These designs, if not precisely crafted with attention to detail, color choices and User Interface (UI) can look amateurish, old-fashioned and cheap. they have limited applications in websites that sell products, but can still be used to good effect with a balanced approach.

Taking a Balanced Design Approach to Business Websites

When our customer decides to use this specifically minimalist website design approach, we do the following:

The Role of Color in Website Design

Color is always important in web design, but in flat design, it's downright critical! That's because the low complexity of flat design focuses the mind on color as a key factor:

"One benefit of using complementary colors is that the opposing color naturally draws the viewer's eye. So, if you want to really make a CTA (Call to Action) pop and capture the reader's attention, you should use the opposite color on the color wheel for the CTA. " - Brand Dignity

Complementary colors are opposite each other on the color wheel. You can learn more about the use of colors on this cool site.

What Happens on Your Business Website Moment to Moment? - Does  Website Chatbot Help?

The first thing we are going to say here is that...

There is no substitute for website speed and organization - which provide a great user experience. 

if  visitors can find what they need on your website within a few seconds and with minimal clicks, then you probably don't need a website chatbot. But how many business websites satisfy those criteria?  When visitors don't find what they need - fast - they simply leave.

Fix Your Business website Speed and before even thinking about a Business Website Chatbot

If your website takes longer than a handful of seconds to visibly load, then don't even think about fancy enhancements like website chatbots - fix your business website first. if it takes your visitor more than two clicks to find what he/she is looking for on your website - again, forget the enhancements - fix your business website first.

What Do Customers Need on Business Websites?

So Why Use a Business Website Chatbot?

Because many people who visit a website don't even want to click once - they want to talk to someone or even something NOW! A business website chatbot can fulfill that need if designed well. Furthermore, a good business website chatbot will be based on AI (artificial intelligence) and will learn and develop more natural dialogue as it is trained by the data generated by customer interaction.

Consumers undoubtedly prefer talking to real people, but when you are not available, a business website  chatbot is a pretty good substitute and it will improve your conversion of visitor to buyer. In other words, it fills a niche on your business website and as such it can be very useful indeed.

Business Website Specification: This brief post should bring vast amusement to experienced website developers and business owners and managers. We've all been there - right? Well, almost all. A customer wants a website. As he discusses it with his/her developer, a wealth of hitherto unknown requirements and capabilities are exchanged, and notes are made.

More importantly though, an even bigger volume of business needs are simply not raised because the customer has not yet formulated and expressed his/her ideas. 

At this point, the website developer thinks he understands the customer and proceeds with the design. he/she may even include a couple of prototypes for the customer to choose from, and that helps a bit but not a lot for a complex business website -there's more to online business than looking good.

What is a Business Website Specification?

A Business Website Specification is a document agreed and signed off by the developer and the customer as the description of:

a) How the business website will look

•  Colors: Corporate colors should complement logo
• Layout: An example website may be used as an approximate guide
• Images: quantity per page, supplier, customer supplied
• Menus
• Header content 
• Footer content
• Product images, price presentation, shipping methods and interfaces
• Social media links
• Blog options
• Sidebar content
• Galleries and sliders
• Mobile specific changes e.g. omit some large items
• Additional customer requirements
• Special content sections - concertinas, sliders, delayed content and whatever the developer may offer or the customer requests.
• Fonts

b) Business Website Pages

•  Topic specific pages 
• Page content (user content or commissioned content)
• Page images
• Page internal links to other pages and posts for SEO purposes
• Page external links for SEO purposes
• Additional customer requirements
• Blog requirement - categories and display

c) Business Website Functions (User Business Website Specifications)

• Shop functions - payments, similar products display
• Contact forms and contact methods
• Clickable links to other pages and other sites
• Popups for email capture 
• Popups for brochure and data sheet downloads - where and when these popups happen and how they look
• Clickable contact links
• Voice search options
• Document download functions
• Event Calendars
• Appointments systems
• Document uploads
• Competitions

d) Hidden Website Functions (Technical Business Website Specifications)

• Fast Caching options 
• Image optimization
• Security Options including SSL certificate
• Google Pixel
• Facebook Pixel
• Other pixels

e) Onsite SEO

• Meta data options for posts and pages  (snippets) and products
• keyword optimization for content
• Local or national business structure
• Name Address Phone options for business structure

f) Training and Documentation and Support

• User manual contents
• Training hours
• Warranties
• Support contract.

f) Off Site Services and  Products that every website needs in some measure

• Hosting - the host is where your website exists
• Domain - your website domain is where it all begins
• SEO - if you need your business website to rank on Google - you need SEO - links, guest posts, press releases and much more. Caveat Emptor! This is a field replete with scams so be really careful.
• High quality Images
• Social media pages and servicing
• Social media advertising
• YouTube Channel
• Google my business page

At first, this looks like a lot to some customers who 'just want a website'!  But that's the problem, even a relatively simple business website is ultimately complex beneath its surface. Color is important, correctly placed buttons are important, content is important,  good servers are important, website speed is important, meta data is important - and so on. 

Clearly, a simple two page website is nothing like as complicated, but a business website can be very complex and without a business website specification the job will sometimes be half done to the client and completed in the eyes of the developer - "another 45 products? -  a popup to capture emails? - a maintenance manual? -  an email reminder for abandoned carts? - GST? Shipping system? logo? - the list of what can be overlooked is endless. 

Designer Reticence 

One of the problems in this field is designer reticence to specify a website properly. Many want to use cookie-cutters to keep costs down and others just assume they know what the customer wants. these are avoidable problems.

Customer Reticence

The owners owners and managers of medium to large sized businesses are most often the most informed and easiest to negotiate with. They understand that more functions cost more money and will pay for competent business website specifications, competent project management and a high quality end product.

Start-ups and solopreneurs often need a good deal of convincing that the website they need will cost a lot more than they imagined. Then, a small, hungry agency that needs the business sometimes makes a dreadful error and promises a website that cannot be delivered for the money available - and spends weeks developing and losing heart, developing and losing heart, killing his/her own business in the process. 

Over-Promising

This is a serious problem when it occurs.  On occasion,  due to a lack of a business website development specification, the developer promises to deliver something which  he / she (and sometimes no one else) cannot deliver! The descriptions are vague and and the implementation is difficult or not realizable.

One example of this might be an interface to a diamond supplier. There is software available to implement this, but it is complex and beyond the scope of what many designers feel comfortable with. A business website specification is essential.

How do I Simplify a Business Website Specification?

If you are a customer, you simply make a detailed list of all your requirements, get some example websites and then discuss it with the developer. It is up to the developer to offer you more options and write the specification which you both sign off at the agreed price. 

To Help You to Prepare

We prepared a downloadable document, '16 Questions to Ask a Web Designer'. You are free to download and use.