The site
http://www.forbesaccountants.co.uk/

The design
We wanted a really nice wide open design.  The company logo was the starting point.  We know that in the future content will be added and the site will grow, so the design needed to incorporate the future needs of the business.  We heavily modified a widely available template to produce a really nice, clean, crisp look and feel.  We opted for a simple typography that is easy on the eye, but conveys the message well

The build
This was a very straightforward build for us.  Once the design stage was complete we worked with Mike Smith on the content

Collaboration with Mike Smith – Marketing expert
We worked in conjunction with Mike Smith Consulting on this site, as part of a new exciting business collaboration.  Mike wrote the content, whilst we delivered the framework and site.  Mike is available on a consultancy basis to all of our customers who need help with sales and marketing copy

The Platform
Essentially this is a WordPress site that has been modified to the business need

SEO
SEO is a very important element of the sites design.  Over the next months we will be working quite hard on both the on page and off page SEO

Feature list
- Easily updatable by the client
- Firewall, and other security features
- User data capture on registration and user forms
- Site automatically pushes new content to search engines
- SEO by design

CSS
The typography for the site is pretty simple and easy on the eye.  It was designed for readability, and to keep the users interest

Technologies
This site uses PHP, SQL, XML, CSS, HTML and JavaScript

Security
As per our normal policy, we have secured the site, using a variety of methods.  We won’t discuss security details here, but would be happy to discuss the issue as a topic on the phone with prospective clients

Hosting
We are providing our unlimited commercial hosting package for this site
Working with the clients
This was a three way process, between Mike Smith Consulting, the client and ourselves.  This collaboration made the build very easy for us

Images and graphics
We sourced all of the licensed photographs for the client, and created all the graphics in house

URL
http://www.cash4scrapcars.co.uk/

The brief
Produce a site to generate leads and interest in the business.  The design needed to incorporate the green nature recycling aspects of the business.  Competition in this business sector is strong, and the site needed to equal and better competitor’s sites, in terms of building client confidence, company image and SEO

The design
We opted for a powerful simple clean design.  This reflects the “We do what it says on the tin” nature of the company.  We unusually opted for a top and tails menu, but this does not distract from the simplicity of the site, and navigation is easy

Feature list

• HTML Brochure site
• Validating, secure information collection form, with cleanly formatted e-mails, ready to print for a collection job
• SEO by design

The e-mail form
We put a lot of effort in the front and back end of the booking form.  In the backend, the client is sent a clearly formatted e-mail, ready to print for a driver or telephone operator to work with directly.  The last thing we wanted was to create extra work for the clients, chopping and changing data form the form before they can begin working on an enquiry

CSS & Typography
We opted for a very clean crisp typography.  There is a clear visual split between the titles (serif) and body (non-serif).  We carefully massaged the text for readability

Cross browser support
By design the site is coded to support and display correctly in Safari (on a Mac + PC) IE5 upwards, Firefox 2, 3 and Opera

Technologies
This site uses HTML, PHP, CSS and Javascript

SEO
The scrap car business is fierce, and competition is pretty stiff.  Because of this, as a bonus to our customer, we have opted to make this site a SEO showcase site.  We have carefully crafted the text, descriptions, title tags etc. We are fully expecting the site to perform excellently on search engines, once the site has had time to mature and be spidered by the search engines. We will update this page in a few months to report on how the site is doing for our targeted keywords and phrases

*** update  ***
The site was launched on 14th August.  It was entered onto google local on 14th August.  It generated it’s first sale on 15th August.  The site was spidered by Google on 23rd August, and is now enjoying page 1 Google results for the customers target phrases!

Google result for Cash for scrap cars

The site is achieveing even better results for GEO targeted searches, which is exactly what the customer specified

Hosting
This site is hosted on our commercial hosting package, which costs just £100 pa

Ethical SEO or “White Hat” SEO
What’s the difference? Black Hat, White Hat, Ethical Un-ethical… Well, in the SEO industry there are a range of practices employed to promote websites.  Some are honest, while others just outright deceive users and search engines, filling cyberspace up with useless links and recycled spammy articles that no one wants to read

What is our approach to SEO?

• Content is King. Unique professional effective content is the starting place. We sometimes re-write your content, or suggest additional content. We appreciate that whatever the search engine sees, it is a human that will be buying from your company, not a search engine
• Your website needs the right appeal to the right market. We will make suggestions and alterations improve the appeal of your website to the market
• We measure everything, and make qualitative decisions. We research your business sector to understand what is actually being searched for. This means optimisation will not normally be for a single keyword, but a broad spectrum of keywords which are chosen to represent their profitability and market placement
• Your website usually consists of more than the front page; this is why we optimise every page independently
• On your site we will include the usage of good well thought out metadata
• If needed we will freshen up the html coding and scripts, cleaning out errors and problems
• We will ensure your site has an excellent logical structure which is both easy for a human and search engine to navigate
• If we write and use press releases and articles, they will be unique, and relevant to your company, positioned with relevancy
• We create a sitemap to enable search engines to effectively find all the pages on your site
• Your site will be carefully added by hand to search engines. This process will include verifying your site
• If we acquire back links for your website, we will not spam irrelevant directories; we will position them intelligently, with relevance to your company

Why do we take this approach?

It works! It worked 5 years ago, and it will work in 5 years time. Search engines are constantly changing their algorithms, to beat the dubious practices employed by un-ethical SEO companies. The constant things search engines have respected and listed sites well for is high quality unique content, and relevance in links

Long term, you do not want to be in a position of constantly playing catch-up, and recovering from failures when one of the bad techniques other SEO companies employ trips up your website. We believe the internet is for humans first, and search engines are a tool to help humans find things relevant to their searches

What is the alternative?
Examples of un-ethical SEO include:

Spamming, by commenting on blogs
Often the un-ethical SEO companies leave a multitude of comments on blogs, all over the place, with no relevance, with the hope it leaves a back link to the target site. They use automatic “Bots” and scripts to do this.  Often tens and thousands of blogs are targeted at once. Not only does this fill the internet up with dross that people just don’t want to read, it causes the blog owners lots of work keeping on top of the spam.

Cloaking redirects
In plain English this means setting up lots of little secondary websites with the sole purpose of gaining page rank, but then having the secondary websites automatically redirect users to the primary, which benefits from a gain in page rank

Keyword spamming and stuffing
This is a bad technique that involves re-using keywords to the point the text is senseless to a real visitor

Hidden text and links
Often hidden text is employed, which is not visible to human, but is visible to search engines, this text is used to add content and keywords to a page that really has different content or no content.  People may do this for example to to widen the pages geographic appeal.  I am a “website designer in Nottingham”, I could hide text saying “website designer in Newark” and “website designer in Retford” etc.  Deceiving Google into thinking that I actually am a website designer in Newark and Retford

Another practice that is totally disapproved by search engines is hidden links.  Essentially hiding content from the user, but not from the search engine

Link farms
Some SEO companies use automated link farms which they place (often without your permission) on your site. The link farms basically are computer generated pages of links, to all of the sites the company wants to promote, along with hundreds of others. The value of the page to a human is zero, and Google disapproves of the method

What to do?

We believe in a straightforward approach. Our approach may seem conservative, and lack the instantaneous impact of the more underhand methods. However, our approach is not myopic, it is focused on the long term benefit you’re your business. If the way we work appeals to you, then simply contact us, and we can get things moving

Ethical SEO sounds like what I want, what next?

Call us today on Nottingham 0115 845 8953 for a free consultation. We will assess your site, discuss your business, and put together a plan for you

How much will this cost

For a 10 page web site, our SEO fees start at just £350.00

As you would imagine, some sites will require a lot more work than others. This is why we offer a free no-obligation consultation

We are going to have an in-depth look at the factors causing a low conversion. These may be blended – no real individual reason, but a blend of different reasons. It is worth both yourself auditing your own site, and having others audit your site for you against the following criteria. You need broad shoulders – be prepared to accept what others say, and understand that your view is possibly a little polarised

What is conversion?

Before we get going, like all things that need managing properly, conversion is easily measureable

Your sites conversion is simply:
(Visitors who performed the desired task / Number of visitors) x 100

Factors causing low conversion

1. Poor site design
2. Poor products
3. Hidden pricing
4. Poor quality photography and write-ups for the product
5. Site usability issues
6. Non-competitive pricing
7. Site sends out wrong messages
8. Attracting the wrong customers to your site in the first place
9. Communication issues
10. Organisation issues
11. Lack of reassurance
12. Dealing with objections
13. Localisation issues

Poor site design

Modern consumers demand crisp, easy to use, well designed sites that are pixel perfect

It is really interesting to ask a real shop owner what they think about their shop – they will always say it is clean, tidy, well fitted and decorated. It is a visual thing

A visitor however instantly sees the cracking paint, the faded POS, the dusty floor straight away – and this influences the sale. This has a lot to do with consumer confidence. The “shop looks shabby” translates to “the stock looks dated” having a knock on effect on the desire to spend. Exactly the same principles apply to online retailing. Untidy design, poor quality graphics, dated design, messy typography or broken pages all contribute to lowering conversion.

Just like in the high street shop, consumers translate “sloppy design” to: “I can not trust them to send me my product”, or “the product will be shabby”

The second element of poor design is more subtle. Is the design steering the customer the right way? Are the important elements of the design in the right places? Example – why have navigation which requires the user to scroll down? Where is the shopping cart? Where is the product search? Is it obvious how to buy something? Is the buy option too many clicks away? Does the design actually suit your offering?

The third major issue with design is usability, which we will look at later in the article. There are some obvious things that just drive visitors away. Reversed text (white text on a black background) usually is just unreadable. Menus that don’t work in certain browsers etc will also have visitors leaving as fast as they came.

The only certain way to know if your site has bad design is to ask someone to review the site for you impartially. We have a team of approx. 20 consumers we use for such a purpose. You may want to ask your staff to get their spouses or friends to use your site and evaluate it for you

Poor products

This is a no-brainer. If you are offering poor quality out of date products, then your image will suffer and so will sales. Whilst it is painful writing off products, or using them to sweeten the sale of the products your customers do want – something will need to be done. Consumers will just click away if you do not have the right products or indeed products of a high enough quality in your online store

Back to the high street… We have all seen shops grasping on to the five year old dress or cassette deck, which was over-ordered and now won’t shift. Displaying it only puts consumers off buying anything else. Dead stock needs dealing with, and ought not to be in any primary position in your store. Exactly the same thought process happens in the consumers mind in an e-commerce environment

Hidden pricing

We all hate hidden pricing, and we meet it far too often. One of the largest causes of abandoned carts is hidden pricing – postage or some service is normally the culprit

Do everything you can to avoid hidden pricing. Be upfront with your postage costs and do not spring surprises on the store visitor, especially at the last moment

Think how you would feel in the following scenario

I offer you 400 business cards for £1.00 – you fill in your name, address, you design the cards online, you fill in a long form with names and addresses, and then at the last moment, the “printing shipping and handling fees are £8.99

You feel: “cheated”, “it’s a con”, “I have wasted my time”

Conversely how would you feel if I said?
“400 business cards, you design them online, we print them, deliver them for free, within 3 working days for just £9.99”

You would think: Sounds like a great deal, I want to buy, and you would even recommend me

Poor quality photography and product write-ups

You go to a beautiful high class jeweller – what does their point of sale look like – PERFECT, in fact very perfect – perfect by design. Everything about the way they present the product, talk about the product is spot on. You go to a back street jeweller – and the prices are the same, but the point of sale is dented, the velvet dusty. You speak to the staff, they don’t really know the product that well – which shop will you buy your engagement ring in. The first one of course
Exactly the same applies to online stores, for point of sale, read photography, for sales assistant, read product write-up.

Fact
Too many stores have poor quality product photography; it stands out a mile, makes consumers cringe and drastically reduces sales. Paying a professional is not cheap, but if you want to sell products, this is exactly what you need to do. Paying for a professional is indeed not cheap; it offers very good value for money when looking at the big picture
Photography also needs to be uniform and fairly homogeneous. When its style or quality jumps from page to page – or worse still on the same page, the store visitor mentally notes untidiness, and the chance of a sale is reduced

Fact
People buy in different ways, and you need to accommodate different styles of buying. Some people are “educated buyers” they have already decided exactly what they want, they are looking for a specific product, and it will be price, and service that determine if your store will make a sale. Some people are fact seeking buyers – they want comparisons, datasheets, colour charts. They need to know all of these things before purchasing. Some people are visual – they need to see visual details about the products, others are emotional – they need to know how the product will make them feel, the benefits

All of these shoppers can be accommodated by “layering information” in a methodical way.

The e-commerce information layer stack

Layer 0: Front of the store – sets the tone and breaks down barriers, invites the browser in – same as the traditional shop window
Layer 1: The category page – orientates the customer, each product with an image, a brief description, a few benefits – the high street store equivalent is the departments in a store
Layer 2: The product page, explaining benefits, showing more images, testimonials, detailed description – Almost the traditional high street store equivalent of POS and the product itself
Layer 3: Data layer – technical specifications, datasheets, extended colour charts, dimensions, health and safety datasheets etc. In the real world, this is the manual, the data on the box, the paint chart, the leaflet with the wardrobe dimensions

If at each layer, the customer can buy, then the store presents more and more information about a product as the customer clicks deeper into the layers, all types of customer are catered for

Many stores ignore the quality of later 2, and layer 3, and often totally omit layer 3. This disenfranchise the undecided fact seeking customer whilst also reducing the content readable by a search engine

Other important issues about the product write-up

The quality of the words, the craft of the phrasing, the call to action, the usage of English and the conciseness of the text is very important.

Just as having a professionally produced product images is very important, having professionally written texts will make the world of difference to conversion. Using a professional copywriter can pay absolute dividends. The difference to changing one or two words can make to conversion is dramatic

Site assessability and usability issues

There are 2 areas to this – accessibility, and usability. If you get either of these issues slightly wrong, then your sites conversion will be much poorer than it can be

Some people are deaf, some people are blind, some have learning disabilities, others struggle to concentrate. Designing your site, giving options to people with disabilities, or making sure that by design they are innately catered for is a must

Blind and visually impaired users may use screen readers. Does your site cater for this?   Is your site optimised in any way for this? Visually impaired people struggle with small text, reversed text, low contrast text. There is no reason at all why you need to make it hard for such people

Giving verbal instructions, via audio is cool, but how about a text version – Great for deaf people and great for search engines too

Having an inclusive site is the aim; don’t drive away customers by being thoughtless with your design
The next area is usability. Do you know what browsers your customers use? Your website statistics will tell you. If your customers are on corporate networks, they may be locked to using IE6 and an old version of Flash. Some sites are totally non-viewable by the customers they want the most – people who are working, and earning money, whilst they surf at work on a break
Do all of the technologies in your store work in all the browsers, properly? How about on phones? Or micro PC’s? What about customers on a Mac?

You really do want to avoid:

• Dead links
• Cryptic processes
• Fancy clever menus, when a simple one will do
• Un-readable text (do look on many machines, reversed or white on black, or grey on black is the worst culprit)
• Too many things going on a page
• Inconsistent navigation, or menus that move from page to page
• Non-obvious / obscured / hidden links

The aim is to have really logical navigation, with consistency. If clicking on images opens the next page, make that a site wide feature. If the menu is on the left, keep it there. If the add to cart button is under the product image, keep it there on all pages

Important features like “add to cart” and “checkout” and “Search” must be very obvious and consistent on you site. Website designers, and site owners who know their own sites backwards, don’t believe people get lost in their websites. The only way to know is get new users to test it for you, and then listen to their honest comments

Can your customer add any product to the cart in fewer than 3 clicks? The less clicks, the higher your conversion will be

Any accessibility or usability issue WILL impact in the wrong way your sites conversion

Non competitive pricing

While it sounds very obvious, having your pricing set too high (or low) will have a fundamental effect on conversion

Online store owners have a much finer line to judge than traditional retailers. The process of buying in a bricks and mortar shop is physical. You drive to town, you park, you walk to the shop, you browse, try to remember the price, go to the next shop… Conversion in high street stores is easier, because shopping elsewhere requires effort

Shopping elsewhere for online customer is easy – you can even be in many shops at once. Comparisons are easy, and the effort to look elsewhere is minimal. This is why getting the price spot on is so much more an issue for online shops

Have you analysed your competition? If you haven’t, you ought to be, constantly in some sectors. Why not offer a “price match”, get people to e-mail you where they can get it lower. Don’t guarantee a price match, but offer to look at it

Site sends out wrong messages

We have all seen sites that we cringe at… Why did they say that? Simply, it is because the owner and designer think the site looks OK

For some people cheap, loud in your face window salesman type advertising is absolutely fine for a fine art book shop. For others, it just drives them away. Again the only way to know, is independent testing
It is very important to give several people from different viewpoints evaluate your whole site, its proposition, its texts and imagery

Attracting the wrong customers to your site in the first place

There is an obsession in some quarters that website traffic is good. Peruse forums, and people are desperate for traffic.

YOU ARE PAID IN CASH. YOU ARE NOT PAID IN HITS OR VISITORS

Getting the correct, demographically profiled traffic is exactly what you want. When you consider Adwords, PPC or SEO make sure you are driving traffic to your site, from the correct demographic group, that are actually searching for your products, that are actually form the right geographic location

Any other visitor potentially just increases your server load and slows your site down. You don’t want traffic, you want the right traffic

Communication issues

Failing to get the right message over properly will have an adverse effect on your web shops conversion. Pay particular attention to where a customer is seeing an image and text at the same time – Is the message consistent and on the same sheet?

Communication issues can be cultural. In the USA Pants are the British equivalent of trousers. In the UK, pants are underwear. Knowing and dealing with such issues will have a direct effect on conversion, and reduce refunds

Be very aware of your target demographic – what is acceptable for adults in terms of font usage, complexity of language – will be totally unacceptable on a children’s site. However, there will be times (in the checkout for example) where the language needs to become adult again

Some products lend themselves to technical descriptions, others to visual descriptions. Others require both. Have you fine tuned your site to maximise this distinction?

It is well known that some people see and describe things in the following groupings: Aural, visual, tactile, and in terms of numbers and facts. Failing to present your products in such terms will possibly disenfranchise some groups of users. Clearly some products can’t be all of these terms, but by understanding and trying to accommodate the four types of visitor, your conversion will rise

Organisation issues

How products are (or are not) organised will make a huge difference to conversion, and the up-sell. Some products naturally fall into a few categories, and have natural links to other products. To ignore this, will result in decreased conversion, and a lower average order value

Look at every product in your store – is it in the right category? Does it also belong in another? Can you sell something else with it

The next thing to consider is attributes. Consider an online ladies shoe shop. In stead of displaying the shoes in terms of: trainers, boots, court shoes – why not offer choices to aid selection
Filter by: colour, heel size, style and shoe size
By offering filtered searching, your store can be more effective at converting customers – because the consumer simply can find the product they require efficiently

Lack of reassurance

Many online consumers are rightfully sceptical. Are you reassuring them – example do you have real address, phone number, customer care line? Without these, some people think they are being conned, and wont buy

Leaving just a mobile number and a POBOX says – I want to take your money and run to some consumers
How about returning goods, refunds policies – are there clearly defined texts in place that are friendly and reassuring?

Does your copy try to mislead the customer, is your copy positive and helpful, or sowing a twisted convoluted deal? The fist scenario reassures the second just turns people away. We recommend you have a third party assess your site for this, because often site owners are too close to the text to notice the problems

How about honest consumer reviews? Reviews are usually on a product by product basis, where consumers can rate and leave reviews on your goods and services. Not only will you find out what people want, your consumers will know what other consumers think

Dealing with objections

In real high street retailing, salesmen deal with objections verbally, face to face. Objections can be very varied, and dealing with objections effectively is usually the defining difference between a well performing salesman and a porr performing salesman

Online the principle is the same, but you need to predict the objections. You ought to be doing SWOT analysis for each product, and deciding if and where the core group of objections lay. FAQ’s are an easy way to resolve objections, but also inviting people to call a free phone number to discuss their questions, will pop your site ahead of the crowd, and ultimately increase turnover

If you know your product well, and you have sold it face to face, you will know the top ten objections to a sale. Make sure your site is addressing them

Localisation issues

Really this refers to the fact that most stores are based on American English. By failing to properly localise all of the texts in your store, you are subliminally sending a mixed message – we are not a local company, we are an American company. The little differences zip code / post code etc. are really picked up by consumers, and can contribute to a lower conversion

If your store markets to multiple countries, you need accurate translations, and easy contact details for each country. If you market to USA and UK, then you will need two language templates

Conclusion

This article really covers the very basics which cause conversion to be lower than its natural level should be. Raising conversion even higher than its natural level is a fine art, that deserves discussion all on its own.

If you make sure you don’t get any of the basics wrong, you will be ready for the next step – Raising conversion above its natural level

About the Author

I have had more than 20 years experience of face to face selling and store management in a retail environment

I recognise that many in the online e-commerce environment have no experience of real face to face shop keeping. I aim to transfer my real retail skills into my client’s e-commerce environment

I have been developing websites for as long as websites have been developed, If you are looking for a designer that offers real experience where it matters call me

If this article has provoked you into action, or you want a new store done properly from the word go, call Richard King on 0115 845 8953 to get the ball rolling

A microsite or series of microsites can be used to differentiate products and services from a company’s global offering. A consumer or site visitor doesn’t have to wade through all of the products to find the specific product. The marketing for the microsite is very narrow, undiluted. Whereas the marketing for a companies main website may be multi-threaded, because the companies offerings are diverse

Benefits
The main site benefits because the microsite feeds totally relevant customers to it. The main site also benefits because it is gains page rank from the microsites, whose marketing is pinpoint

The next benefit of microsites is evaluative A/B comparisons. A marketing idea, concept, product can be lunched alongside another, and the results from the microsites compared

Usage
Microsites are not exclusive to e-commerce; the application in the service sector is just as striking. Take a photographer for example who shoots weddings, events, food stock photography and portraits. The demographic for his 4 groups of customer will be different, as will be what they expect when they come to a website. By creating a main site that deals with his online logistics (galleries, overall company profile etc), a series of microsites can market the distinctly different types of photography. Brides see weddings and pictures of brides etc. Magazine editors are marketed to separately, with a separate site for food stock photography etc.

Reflecting the real world
This is more than a online practice. Like all good online practices – Microsites mirror traditional advertising and bricks and mortar business. Example – if a well known retailer sells clothes and food in its main store, it makes complete sense to open a smaller “food only store”. This is exactly what happens on the high street. Furthermore, marketing just the food, is clever, because it is focused – the knock on effect is clothing sales in the main store, where the “must have clothing item” is carefully positioned near the food. The switch or swapping one customer into another is also a key part of microsites

Target the demographic market properly
It is important to understand your products demographic. A product that is equally useful to the older and younger generations is a good example. If you market this generically, both generations may feel disenfranchised. If you make a split, and have “Senior site” and a Junior site” where the branding, the imagery and wording is totally aimed at each generation separately, both feel the product is wholly applicable to themselves. The sales of the product can occur on the microsite, or on the main site

Marketing the site
In principle we treat a microsite just like any other website – it is marketed independently, the phraseology, the copy, the images ought to be independent. The promotion of the site / product – traditional or online is also independent

We do not promote underhand SEO practices. A microsite just needs the best SEO practices applied to its construction and marketing. the narrow focus of the content makes this relatively a simple process

It is important to allow users (and search engines) to access the main site. Simple navigation is key here. This can be a one way process or not, as required. See the main site as a hub with many small microsites radiating from it and sending on-topic relevant visitors to it

Evaluation and statistics
Because the microsites allow you to differentiate between campaigns, consider the usage of separate e-mail / phone / lead tracking to aid your decision making processes. This method will give you qualitative data to work with. Just as we use Google analytics, web statistics to understand the main site – ensure new accounts are set up for the microsites

Microsites are small, but each page within the microsite can function within its own rights. Make sure that each page is optimised in its own right. Optimised in terms of SEO, and in terms of what it is selling, and who it is selling it to

Conclusion
With so many “dubious” online marketing methods out there, this method is a breath of fresh air. It properly targets your different customer groups, It will increase your conversion, it is a fantastic tool for evaluating a new product or marketing idea, and it will promote your main site properly

Costs
We develop microsites from as little as £500 per site. Subsequent SEO and marketing for each site is something we would quote for separately. The more sites in a campaign, the lower the unit cost. Price may vary depending on the structure of your current e-commerce environment, and the level of step-through integration that is required.

Like all websites, small doesn’t always need to mean un-sophisticated – which will be reflected in the pricing. It is worth noting that in a series of sites, some work (systems integration for example) only needs to be done once

About the author

I am the principle at Place of design. I have a wealth of experience in managing and marketing real businesses, both on and off line. I bring the best offline practices from the real world of retail and services – and re-apply them online

Feel free to call me and discuss your business needs
Richard King
0115 845 853

Essentially Elizabeth is a wedding planner and event planner.  Seh organises weddings, and does on the day coordanation etc..  Elizabeth wanted a really small and easy to use brochure site that reflected her business and personality. The site is visually designed to “the boss’s” exact specification (you have to smile, I am under duress)

The brief
“Make me a site and we stay married…” I joke. Elizabeth wanted a site which explained her packages, and acted as a web based business card. Elizabeth wanted a site she could keep up to date herself, and add pages in a blog type format. More pages will arrive soon (so I have been told)

The design
The site is pretty close to the creative wedding planning stationary. Elizabeth wanted rich colours, and red roses etc.. The site is a simple WordPress blog. We used a fairly standard template and heavily modified it to suit

Feature list
- Customer updatable blog type site
- Contact form
- Comments stripped out of the design
- Security by design
- SEO by design

CSS & Typography
The typography for the site was tailored specifically to match the business house font. The only difference was the character spacing which was tweaked for readability

Cross browser support
By design the site is coded to support and display correctly in Safari (on a Mac + PC) IE,7 Firefox 2, 3 and Opera

Technologies
This site uses HTML, PHP, SQL, CSS and Javascript. The site is based on a heavily modified Worpress installation

SEO
As with all of our sites – the site has SEO built in. For new posts a system is included that allows custom meta information to be added on a post by post basis

Training
I’ve been under training… Whoops, I mean I have trained Elizabeth who is pretty technophobic to use the back end of the blog herself. She will be adding all of her own content as time goes by. This is a testament to how easy a user updatable site can be for the user. For small businesses, who want to add and organise information, the blog type site (with a few design tweaks) is a very powerful tool. This site (place of design) is based on the same platform

If you want to know how easy it is living with a site like this, just call Elizabeth on 0115 845 8953 and have a chat to her about her website

Get this one in your head, it is the mantra for e-commerce:
Turnover = (average order value x conversion x number of visitors) – refunds

Turnover: sales generated from the site. You will have a margin built in to this that you need to consider in the maths
Average order value: Just that – all your site sales divided by the number of site sale
Conversion: The  number of site visitors compared to number of sales expressed as a percentage
Number of visitors: The number of unique visitors or number of visits, depending on your point of view
Refunds: need little explaination, but are a good indicator of quality and customer service

Conversion

Before we deal with traffic into the site, we need to look at conversion. Why is this important? Well let’s look at the numbers for typical conversion. Forgetting the sector, usual figures are between 0.5 and 8% most are at the lower end of this scale

Example
If your conversion is a measly 1%, then increasing it by another 0.5% will increase your turnover by 1.5 times, which is what selling is about!

If you increased your visitor traffic by 1% then your turnover will increase 1.01 times, which is a small beer change. Proportionately, getting conversion right will increase your turnover compared to the effort of increasing visitors. In fact, there is a valid argument that says if you double your conversion, the cost of getting each customer is proportionately halved, which increases your profitability too

Factors causing low conversion

• Poor site design
• Poor products
• Hidden pricing
• Poor quality photography and write-ups for the product
• Site usability issues
• Non-competitive pricing
• Site sends out wrong messages
• Attracting the wrong customers to your site in the first place

Find out more here: Increasing the conversion of your website

AOV Average Order Value

Essentially, if you can increase the spend of a customer already committed to a sale. If you do this, you make more money. Sounds obvious, but many e-commerce sites don’t employ techniques to cross sell and up sell. I will discuss the methods to increase average order value in a later article

Number of visitors

Yes increasing the number of visitors will increase sales, SO LONG AS THE VISITORS HAVE RELEVANCE

Relevance
e.g. you sell golf shoes – no point at all sending a customer who isn’t a golfer to your site, not in the slightest

Ensuring visitor relevance is tricky. There are so many people who view things in terms of “hits” or “visitors” This thought process needs to be adjusted to “how many relevant visitors come to my site”

Measuring relevance is very hard; however when you choose a route that is designed to send you more visitors, if you can’t see how it is sending you relevant visitors don’t bother. The point I am making is that whatever route you choose to drive visitors to your site, make every effort to ensure you drive relevant visitors to your site, not random ones

You can drive visitors to your site in many ways
I will discuss this huge topic in another article on another day

Refunds
We all hate these, and there are some techniques in avoiding them. I will look at this area in another article

About the Author

I am a website designer; however my background is retail management. I apply the processes that I learnt in bricks and mortar retailing to the web. Having a real face to face retail background enables me to understand why customer service and system efficiency are very important. E-commerce is traditionally very weak at customer service, and web marketing is traditionally very blinkered to “web only techniques”

If you want to deal with someone who does understand the big picture, just drop me a line

The site
www.merlinswakefield.com

The design
We had a bit of fun with the design, and it encompased a few features that really spring life into the site. For the background we heavily styled one of our stock photographs. We wanted the header to be fun, but not get in the way, letting the user concentrate on the page.  We designed the header in house using FLASH.  We worked a dark moody style by using careful typography

The Platform
This was based on a really good open source CMS platform – Joomla, with a modified Virtuemart store.  More about that later

Dealing with users
The site does some quite clever things.  To begin if a user is just shopping, they can register, and they automatically have an account in the forum, the store etc.. or if they register for the forum, a shopping account is created automatically.  The site remembers abandoned shopping carts, and offers them back to users on a re-visit.  The site can also automatically recognise users that havent visited for a while and send “come back” emails

The forum
No need to re-invent the wheel, we used Fireboard, and re-wrote the templates to give a totally homogenous style with the rest of the site. Users are managed via the CMS system

The store
This is a specially modified Virtumart installation. The store presented us another challenge – the previous site was a 1-off database, with a 1-off structure.  To top this, the previous host, and designer wasn’t allowing Control Panel access.   Fortunatally, we managed to figure out how to mount the database, using just FTP access (dont ask), extract and convert the data and import it into the new installation.  That took a lot of work, but a lot less than typing in about a 1000 products!  The import included dealing with the 1000’s of iamges, which we had to bulk re-size using Lightroom.  The store presnted another chalenge – Postage.  We had to develop a specific postage module to allow a split postage method in-house

SEO
I can’t stress enough that Search Engine Optimisation is something that you need to keep re-visiting, and changing, but only when the data really is telling you something.  The site as we type is too young to report back on SEO, but we have put together the same superbly performing system as we used on the Lencarta site.  Titles and URLS are dynamically generated for optimum SEO.  Combined with a clever URL re-writing regime which creates pretty, readable URL’s we are sure we have another winner on our hands. Down the line we will be doing a SEO anaysis, looking at site stats, google analytics + commercial data, and we will tweak out the site as needed

Feature list
- E-commerce based on a heavily modified Virtuemart set up
- Forum
- Community based user management
- Automatic CRON based database backups
- Manual full site (with database) zip backups
- Multi user CMS
- PayPalX credit / debit card integration
- Security by design
- SEO by design

CSS
We spent a lot of time setting up the cascading style sheets for this site.  This has provided a uniform framework for user content.  At the templating stage we spent a lot of time and attention to ensuring cross browser compatibility, and ensuring the more interactive features gracefully depreciate for older or non compliant browsers.  Like all of our builds, the site was rolled out in phases – Template, store, content and backend features

Technologies
This site uses PHP, SQL, DHTML, XML, AXAX, CSS and Javascript

Security
Clearly a high profile, user oriented site needs some level of security.  We spent a long time closing doors, adjusting server settings and generally locking the site out from attack and spam.  We wont discuss security details here, but would be happy to discuss it in general on the phone with prospective clients

Hosting
We are providing our unlimited commercial hosting package for this site

The launch
We launched the site, and within minutes we had a sale!

Working with the clients
We worked really closely with the clients, providing 1-1 remote desktop training (we take over the clients machine) and telephone support.  We will continue to support the clients over the next months, providing training as needed

Client testimonial

We are delighted with the way Richard and Elizabeth from www.placeofdesign.com have produced our website. Richard is always there with help and guidance, and I would not hesitate in recommending their services to anyone thinking about a website – first class!

Phil
Merlins of Wakefield (UK)

Site history
Historically the Company used U-tube – to showcase the video’s.  This was a problem, as U-tube would then put competitors videos on the same page, which meant potential customers were going elsewhere. For this reason, to increase sales and customer retention we decided to stream video from the site, and not from U-tube

Site features
We produced a site to showcase each product. By request of the customer sales are dealt with via PayPal. The Photolearn site also incorporates a message board where users can discuss flash lighting, and a mailing list where the site owner can keep in touch with customers

Development
We begun by developing a template for the site. When the site owner was happy with the look and feel, we then populated the site with text and then added interactive features such as a mailing list, and a forum

Working with the videos
One part of the build was streaming preview videos. To achieve this we needed to convert  them from the .AVI format into short .SWF flash clips. The movies are approx 3 – 5 mins. The video on the front page is designed to just run, with no sound. The longer, larger video’s on the preview pages to have user control

Hosting
The videos immediately lead us to a problem… The customers hosting for the site was restrictive… The videos consumed all of the customers allowed bandwidth. This was resolved by us moving the videos onto our own servers – hosting the videos for the client, while the rest of the site remains in the clients existing webhost

And then a year later – Adobe steped in!
A year or so down the line, a second problem arose. Adobe in their infinite wisdom decided to change the rules and code required for the new Flash player 10, causing issues when customers using the brand new player viewed the videos. We informed the customer of this, and re-scripted the relevant codes free of charge

SEO
We also did extensive SEO – Search Engine Optimistaion on the site to increase relevant organic traffic.  The site owner is happy, long term sales are up, and the site is delivering what we both wanted
Customer testimonial – Written by company owner – Garry Edwards

Photolearn developed almost by accident, it was basically just an idea I had a few years ago which ended up growing into a business. So, in the early stages, I just produced a simple HTML site which I constantly updated in the hope that I’d get it looking professional one day.

But then I gave up that idea and looked around for a professional I could trust to do it properly. Unfortunately getting a web designer who was actually able to deliver what he promised proved difficult and I then placed the job with Richard, who delivered it on time, on budget and delivered a website that did exactly what he promised it would do.

Since then, Richard has provided outstanding customer support, updating my website as necessary.

Problems with your practices

Doorway pages and sites
These are now viewed as blatant SPAM, which will get you banned pronto

Keywords

Keywords are good, but there importance diminished in about 2003, when the SEO companies abused them so much the search engines demoted their input in the search. Nowadays search engines take into account the text “AS SEEN BY THE END USER” to establish rankings. As I mentioned before – the title tag is very important, as end users see this, as is the description tag

Duplicating your content
Duplication is now frowned upon by search engines – so unless you have a valid business reason for doing it don’t. An acceptable reason would be a high contrast version for visually impaired customers for example

Invisible text crammed with keywords
There are 2 variants of this – text that is the same or a close colour to the background colour, or text that is not on the visible page (say 8 pages down from a load of line breaks) for example. If you do either you will get yourself banned. Google has thousands of people in Asia that actually spend all day looking at stuff like this. If you get banned you are stuffed for ages

Miss-understanding page rank and linking
In the old days – it mattered who linked to you, nowadays it matters more who you link to. If you link to other relevant content, your page will be ranked higher

Link exchange
Link exchanges might have worked once, but now are a waste of time if exchanged without relevance – again 5 years ago it worked, now it doesn’t

Buying links
Now Google sell their own links and positioning to you, they will penalise you if you are paying for it. They look for words like sponsors or advertisers associated with the link or unrelated links (to each other) or links unrelated to the search page. Your competitors can report you for doing to this, and if they review your sire you can kiss your ranking goodbye

Cloaking
Cloaking is where your site has different for search engines, compared to what is actually on the site visible to the end browser – this is a good way of getting black listed

Problems with your design

Flash
Flash hides all text in a movie, so from a search engines point of view there isnt a site to rank, as it sees no visible text… If you insist on flash, write a HTML version of the same content too. Photographer’s sites are top heavy on the flash content

Session ID’s
If your site uses Session IDs you could be in trouble, as now the major search engines seem to be basing ranking on its view of your site over a long time frame. This is partially why a ranking takes so long to achieve. Basically a static page is good; a dynamic page is less good. The problem with session ID’s is they dynamically change the actual URL (the page name is in flux), so when the search engine comes back to look for www.sillysite.co.uk/page1.php?hl=en&q=23848489302, it will not be there. Instead use cookies to store the session state. What the search engine then sees are 2 differing pages, and neither gets ranked

Framesets
Framesets cause 2 problems, search engines cant follow them, and then when they do the browser comes in on the left margin, not the whole site

Scripting languages
Using too much scripting language: can confuse some search engines to the point of not being able to find your content on a page. If you use a scripting language – pop it in an include file

Pictures, no text
The photographer fave… no text just pictures… nothing for the search engine to see = no ranking. Search engines like 250-500 words minimum on a page