Unfortunately, when you have something sent out to thousands of people, you can’t just “Get it back” to fix it.  Check out what Sean Mahoney wrote on his blog about bad links.

Email Marketing Failures

The thing is, it can be easily fixed after you realize there’s a problem by adding a 301 redirect!  A quick 301 redirect in your .htaccess will move the link from where it says it is to where it’s supposed to be.  Alternatively, you can actually post your content correctly!

This is a fantastic idea.  AOL and Yahoo! pay engineers to optimize their sites.  This is their only job!  The best part about the internet is that almost everything is open!  So, we can study what the larger corporations are doing and mimic them.

The problem: Google and others think your website has too many images, and makes too many requests to your webserver when you have visitors.  The solution: Have one image that has many smaller parts to it, and move the image around using CSS in the viewing port of the div so that the same image will show multiple different icons.

This is a fantastic principle and we are using it currently in our websites.  Sometimes you can save 20 requests from your webserver and put it into 1.  This makes your website more efficient, more streamlined, and better suited for a larger subset of browsers.  If you can minimize requests, you are more effiently serving your visitors, and efficiency is always welcome in the business world.

Websites are created by creating HTML code.  This proper HTML code tells browsers what your website is supposed to look like.  If it is not valid code, how can you expect browsers to show your website correctly to the world?  Sure, it may look ok on your computer’s firefox, or internet explorer, but are your customers seeing the same thing you are?

Further, Google returns results for relevant webpages. If you are attending a seminar for a new technology or a salesman comes to sell you on using a particular service, and the person presenting speaks very ill-formed English, or even sounds ignorant, how likely are you to believe or take what that person said for relevancy? Google says the same thing about websites, but the language ends up being HTML.

This is why it is important that any web company that you hire needs to validate your website across the 4 major web browsers.  These 4 include Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera.  So, what does this all mean?  It means that no matter how you do your site, there’s always going to be someone who doesn’t see the site like you see it.  This is particularly true due to mobile browsing so widespread these days!

This is exactly why AndPlus Design always validates all websites that we create.  If a website is properly structured, its output can be predicted much easier than if there are unclosed tags or improper or outdated HTML code.

We use the w3c Validator.  Try out your website today.  Enter your website’s URL in the form below and see what the result is.  If you see red, contact AndPlus Design today.

Enter your website in the form below!

Putting milestones on the page could be enough for your customers, if you want to keep people updated.  It’s better to have a full product offering on your website than to announce every move your company makes.

The biggest point i’m trying to make with this post is that you should not put the expectation that you are doing a ton of business all the time, nor do you want to put out the expectation that you are doing no business.  You, as a business owner, know that there are certain times when there are streaks of business, and other times when there are lulls in business.  Your customers should always be oblivious to this fact.

Understanding what your customers expect is the one of the most important things you can understand.  If you set the expectation, you better be ready to live up to it.

Ever hear “First impressions are everything?”  Well, that is as true as it gets, in my opinion.  Think back to when you got something in the mail that looked like it was done by a middle schooler.  Just recently I got a pamphlet in the mail for a local accountant.  I, for one reason or another, think of accountants as being pretty professional, people who are usually well-off, and dont make mistakes.

All of these stereotypes, combined with the fact that they are trying to convince me to buy their services, make me feel like any correspondence and advertising should be as professional as it gets.  Actually, anyone trying to convince me that I should purchase their services better have the appearance that they are going to make my company more professional.

What this post is getting at is, well, this pamphlet looked like he literally printed a couple of words out on a peice of paper and mailed it to me.  This does not make me feel like working with him would make my company more professional or even save me any money in the process.  All it did was add height to landfills.  I would be surprised if that person saw one response from that marketing campaign.

So, that being said, if you are an expert at accounting, hire a designer to design a marketing pamphlet for your company.  You can still quarterback the process, but if you are not a designer, don’t design!  If you run a store, you most likely have figured out different tricks and ways of marketing to your most common type of customer.  Well, the website business is no different.  Web design firms have techniques, technologies, and optimization algorithms that they use to ensure that your website is performing at the maximum possible levels.

Bottom line, stick with what you know.  Run your business, be particular about what you want, but, the second you think you can save a few bucks by doing a website yourself, is the instant you are giving up revenue for your business on one of the best channels to reaching potential customers the world has ever seen.  Contact AndPlus Design today to see how we can fulfill these requirements for you and your company.

Reason #1 - Why not?

Why *wouldn’t* anyone put their website address on their business card?  It is an extra line on your business card and allows you to give that little bit of extra information that could lead the user to looking into your services further.

Reason #2 - Marketing Help

Giving out your business card is a way of networking.  That is the purpose of business cards, right?  It is a seemingly insignificant small piece of paper that, when passing it along, does not have the same feel of a marketing pamphlet.  Incidentally, that’s exactly what this can become, a marketing pamphlet.  By putting your website on your business card, you give your potential clients another way of contacting you, if they wish.  And, if you follow this blog at all, you know that I am a *huge* proponent of “Giving your customers the ability to contact you!”

Reason #3 - Feedback

The more people that visit your site, the more you will be able to analyze how they use it.  Understanding how people use your website allows you to tailor your website to be easily accessible to all sorts of people.  You have your website online so that people will visit!  There is no good reason to not put your website on your business card.

So, in this short post, I hope I have made some good points as to why you should have your website on your business card.  Please share personal experiences of happenings to your business (good or bad) that you attribute to adding or removing your website from your business cards.  I look forward to your comments!

Meta tags used to be a huge buzz-word with search engine optimization. Businesses were obsessed with ensuring that their pages had these elaborate listings of keywords and paragraphs of descriptions on each of their web pages. Search engines then became more powerful and no longer had to rely on these types of Meta Tags to understand what the page was about. It was at this time that Meta tags “no longer mattered.”

Soon after, though, Meta tags did become more valuable, and are now serving a purpose that they really were not intended to serve, in my opinion. These Meta tags now offer search engines, like google, the opportunity to “check” to see if the page is conveying what the author thinks it is conveying. Now, dont expect google to come to your business and say

“Listen, uh, these keywords that you *think* your page is telling me about really isn’t, and your content is incomplete, go ahead and change it around and i’ll let you know if your changes helped.”

Google doesn’t need to do that because there is usually enough information on the internet that your site does not need to be online.

What Google does, is it uses these meta tags to add relevancy to your page. That is to say, If it did a keyword analysis of your page, and found that the top 3 words were “Small,” “Business,” and “Websites,” it would expect to see your keywords read “Small Business, Websites, Business Websites” or some other permutation of these words.

If the keywords were “Animal Hospital Websites, Websites for City Councils, Recipe Websites” Then google would deduce that your web page is not properly conveying the information that you are intending to convey, and the page would become less relevant to searches for these keywords.

If you would like our company to do a keyword analysis of your website, please contact us directly. Thanks for reading this posting and please feel free to comment on the contents!

When you deal with your business finances, do you “hope” you have money in your account to pay for regular business expenses?  The chances are you understand exactly what your business costs to run, what you have in inventory, and you update your records when those bills or inventory changes.

Well, why would your website be any different?  It would seem, especially for websites that drive customers to your business (ALL websites should do this for their parent companies!), that you would have a solid inventory of the pages your site includes and the information contained on them.

The inventory that Google cares most about is called a Sitemap.  Sitemaps can have many forms, XML, URL Text lists, and RSS feeds.  Google accepts them all.  XML Sitemaps include information that tells google multiple pieces of information.

1. Page URL
2. Priority
3. Frequency
4. Last Change

Google uses each of the above pieces of information to help it generate relevant content for its users.  Google reads the first information, Page URL, to know the page that your site includes.  It now adds this page to its index list.  This allows Google to figure out what pages your site includes, so its spiders can go out and index the page for future visitors.

The second part, Priority, is a number from 0 to 1 (decimal) that tells google how important the page is in relation to the rest of your website.  This, at first, may seem strange, and hard to grasp, but is a great way of ensuring that Google spends the most time and effort indexing your most important pages.  Further, if Google knows which page you think is more important to your overall user’s experience, it can decipher between two pages that it thinks are equally relevant to a user’s search.  For example, if you run a site selling dog treats, and you have two pages that look to Google to be equally relevant to a user’s search, Google can use the information in your sitemap to show the page you identified as being more important.

Google uses the frequency option a little more lightly, since it is a term that can be set by the website owner.  This XML key allows a website owner to declare how often a particular page will change.  It will help google know how often it has to re-index the page.

Last Change tells Google when the last time the page has changed.  This is a simple key that keeps Google’s index up to date.  If it downloads a sitemap that says a page has changed since the last time Google indexed that particular page, then it knows it must go to re-index that page.

As you can see, Sitemaps are necessary for business websites to get properly indexed.  The problems it may fix include, but are not limited to:

1. Pages that are un-reachable through your current link structure
2. Pages that change frequently, and announce that they have changed through a date
3. Inventory control for your website pages

Understanding what you have exactly is a common theme in the world of business.  Treat your website just as you would treat your business inventory and finances, because your website directly affects both of those things, if you let it.

While you may think that linking to sites which are not your own may be counter-productive. I was always of the opinion that I never wanted people leaving my site no matter what information they were looking for! I found out that, while this may be true, you can link to external sites without losing your visitors. I have found that using a link that opens a new browser window to any site which is not yours works best.

Opening a new browser window allows people browse the other site while not losing the attachment they have to yours (because yours is just a browser closing away!) So, as counter-intuitive as it may seem, giving your customers the ability to read about the topic on your website actually builds credibility and helps to better inform your customers.

“Separating Style from Content.” Interesting concept, huh? There are two main “visitors” that you should be worried about when having your website designed. First, search engines (!). Search engines send out spiders that read the site’s content and caches it for indexing at a later time. In the real world, Spiders have a lot of eyes, but in the internet world, they have none! That’s why it is so important to have the “alt” tag identified for all images on your pages, and none of the images for your background on your site. Let me explain.

With CSS, we can separate the content (the text and wording that you want your potential customers to read) from the layout of the site. This gives three main benefits:

1. If a search engine goes to your website, the content is formatted in a “most important first” setup
2. If a browser can’t handle the advanced CSS you’ve set up, your content is not lost
3. People who visit your site, and visit many pages on your site, see an increased browsing time improvement over sites which do not use CSS.

Search Engines Can’t See Layout

This is actually a little bit of a lie. There are some search engine spiders out there that do do some image analysis of your website, and index in different ways that involve imaging. The bottom line though, is that search engine spiders are mostly interested in your content. Now, an HTML document can have a structure and layout in a text-only setting that will look nothing like a CSS formatted site with the same content. CSS allows the movement of data and elements to wherever the designer would like to put them, regardless of where the data and elements are in the page.

This ties to your revenue because now, a webpage can be laid out in such a way that search engines read the most important parts of a page first, instead of the search engine rendering table-based layouts, sifting through menu links, and reading through 30 background images. Now, the images can be set up as background images to div’s, which are ID’d in an external style sheet.

Keeping your customers on your website is the #1 rule in owning a website. It’s worth the time invested to keep these customers with your company.

Browsers Can’t Handle Your Layout

Let’s face it. Nobody can make a website that will look the same on every browser ever made. It is impossible. In today’s world, there are mobile web users (iPhone, Treo, Blackberry), Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE6, IE7, IE8, and the upcoming IE9, and Netscape, to name a few. All of these browsers render a little bit differently and some dramatically different (IE6 and prior is a pain to work with!).

Even if a browser does not lay out your site how you want it to, it should comfort you to know that your content is getting to the user, and it is getting there in the order-dependent way that was intended. This means the text-only version goes to the user and he or she reads the content in the format you wanted them to read.

This directly ties to your revenue, because it will give the image that your company understands the consumer’s needs and knows what to do to get the job done. Keeping people on your site is an immediate concern, and delivering meaningful data to them is a high priority as well.

Improved Browsing Experience

A website designer could put every piece of CSS code in a web page and have it look the exact same. So, why is it worth it to move the CSS to an external style sheet? Improved browsing experience is transferred to the potential customers when external style sheets are used, because of the size of the document being transmitted. In our studies, we found that the removal of “font” tags, in-line “style” directives, and the table based layout removal, combined with the saved “img” tag removal, gave an average of 40% decrease in file size.

What’s better, is that this decrease in file size had an added benefit of a cached CSS file on the client’s computer. So, once the CSS file was downloaded, it no longer needed to be brought down with every new page. To explain it a bit better, the user would come to our site, download the CSS file, see an improved load time. The user would click on a new page, and that 40% transfer size would be transferred to the next page, and we would not have to retransmit the CSS file. If a customer sees 20 pages in a particular visit, that is a 800% improvement in the size of the data we are sending across the internet.

If you are paying for transfer, you know what a difference 800% can make.

There you have it. CSS, believe it or not, directly relates to how you do business on the internet and needs to be part of your website when you have one. AndPlus Design uses CSS, and is always looking for new ways to optimize CSS code, contact us if you are convinced you need our services!