I’ve been so hard at work on other peoples’ websites that mine has become a little neglected again. However, it’s also been neglected because I’ve been working on a nice little informative video for you all.

It’s called the Web Business Blunder and will discuss some of the common problems small businesses face with websites. And I’ll even throw in a framework for avoiding them. I plan to do a series of videos in the very near future that will help get your website up to speed.

So stay tuned! I’ve got the webcam, I’ve got the presentation made. All I have to do is put it all together. Talk soon.

A little divergence today to talk about the future…

We now have this thing called Web 2.0 where everyone is putting masses of personal information on the web through social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Flickr.

Currently in the US, every tiny bit of personal information is dug up about a political candidate and put under the media spotlight.

So what happens when we have so much more available now.

It’ll no longer be reported that Bill Clinton smoked pot. There’ll now a video on YouTube of him doing it. How do you say you never inhaled to that?

There’ll be photos and comments and every communication over Facebook that could be dug up and put in the public arena. Well, really, it’ll already be in the public arena.

So how do future political candidates cope? Do there parents decide they want them to run for president and then lock them away in their room at the age of 5?

For my business, I wanted to let people join my Facebook page. This brought me to a dilemma as my friends have posted pictures from parties and general mucking around that isn’t exactly business-like. So do I create a new business account and try to act all professional?

In the end, I decided I’d rather let people get to know the real me. Sometimes I get drunk. Sometimes I grow my hair very long and fluffy just for the hell of it. But I’m a real person, not some faceless company. I hope to show that in some upcoming videos and I hope everyone likes them.

Anyway, just wanted to share something I’d been thinking about. You can join my facebook if you want to see the drunken bad hair pictures…or just stay in touch.

Hi All,

I hope you’re enjoying the holiday season and taking a bit of a break from work. I just wanted to wish everyone all the best and apologise for the lack of posts recently…and the 5 biggest secrets of web designers series being interrupted! It’ll be finished off shortly, I promise.

Over the break I’ve been focusing on getting the new website up and running. I’ve made some changes to try and make it more valuable for you and it’s ready for some new features I plan to start adding early next year. Mainly…content!

It’ll be up soon so I hope you all find it useful.

So once again, Happy Holidays or Felices Fiestas as we say in Spain. I’ll talk to you all again very soon.

Best Regards,

Craig

 

 A strong website foundation: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Today I was asked about some of my marketing strategies for websites. To be honest, at first, I was a little stumped on how to answer it. Not because I don’t have lots of strategies to market a website, but I simply don’t have the results to back myself up right now.

I know I have great ideas, and I know what will work and won’t work for my clients. So what’s the problem? We simply haven’t been able to implement any marketing strategies yet!

Everyone potential client I talk to generally has a bad website. I know you think you’re different and your website is great…but let me review it and I’ll let you see what you’re missing. In order to get a website functioning correctly, we first need to build a strong foundation. There’s no point driving traffic to a website that will have visitors leaving after a few minutes. And trust me, that’s what your website is doing now unless you’re one of the very lucky ones.

So I always build a strong foundation. I’m still not happy with my own website and will be rewriting it again in the next week or so. I’m also still waiting on my graphic designer to finish it off. Not because she’s lazy, she’s just had to focus on our clients first.

That is frustratingly apparent in our own marketing too. I’m actually not marketing myself at all in the old fashioned sense and still have a steady stream of customers. Part of that is the social marketing approach I’m using, the other part is the impression we make on all our current clients. Trust me, when I get some new people trained, you’ll be seeing some great marketing (and free information for you) coming out of this website!

The moral of the story is, if you’re looking for a way to market your website, how about first looking at your current websites performance. You’re a lot better off to be impressing every single visitor than having millions and only capturing a few. Increase your conversion rates through better website design and content first. That’s the way to build a great website that grows your business.

If you’ve been checking in you may have been wondering why there hasn’t been a post in a week or so. Well, I humbly apologise, but I’ve been a busy boy.

The major reason I’ve been AWOL has been the design and launch of a new website, www.madridmas.com. I’ve been working hard with my designer for the past two months to create a new website for these guys that provide services like trips and parties for students and young people in Madrid. It’s been both a lot of fun, and a lot of stress, and marks the first full website we’ve completed.

Most of my clients come to me with substandard, but bearable websites, and I can work with what they’ve got on hand. But these poor guys got duped by a shoddy website designer that basically just ripped them off. Shitty frontend, shitty backend, and then he became very hard to get a hold of. Like most website designers, he promised the works, but under delivered in a big way!

So now Mark and Arturo are the proud and happy owners of a sparkling new website, so happy with our work they link to the second piece of news.

Connexted now has it’s own official offices! Madridmas found some a great location but needed to share the costs, so they called me. We moved in today, and then moved out again since the internet wasn’t connected like promised. But we’ll be back soon with some lovely sunny views out the window. The advantages of Spain, it’s December yet you can still see the sun and occasionally even feel it’s warmth!

So that’s where I’ve been, including some other projects, but I’ll be back into full posting and podcasting swing again on Wednesday, delivering those valuable website tips to put money in your bank account. I’m also working on some website review videos that I’m quite proud of. I’m sure you’re going to find them very useful when I get the finishing touches done.

This is Craig from connexted, finally getting his Action Plan down to a measly 10 pages…talk soon.

Ok, so I thought some of you might like to listen to my lovely voice so I’ve decided to start podcasting along with my blog. It’s a little rough to start out with as I prefer to do them on the fly but bear with me and I’m sure they’ll get better!

The music is Unnatural high by George Wood, found at PodsafeAudio.

Let me know your thoughts.

 

 connexted introduction: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

One of the most important marketing activities for your small business can be it’s web site design and the content you fill it with. A well designed web site with great content can make or break your business on the internet. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to get right, but if you do, the benefits will be amazing.

All over the internet you can see substandard small business web sites. As part of the small business person’s ‘do-it-yourself’ mindset, we tend to find a lot of homemade web sites that don’t sell their business. The money they save by doing it themselves can be costing them a 1000 times that in sales. A good web site can seem expensive when you first start out, but it really it’s worth its weight in sales.

Think of it as the sales brochure you have to use with every customer for the next two years! So when you shudder at paying a few thousand euros on a web site, think about how much you spend on a print run.

Now another major stumbling block of small business owners is hiring the right web designer. It’s a minefield out there but with some careful research the right person for the job can be found. However, once you have a web designer to make your web site look pretty, the next step is content. Content makes or breaks your web site and needs to be perfectly written to sell to your visitors.

If small business owners didn’t like paying for the web site design, paying for the content didn’t even cross their mind. The content and flow of your web site is just as important, if not more, than having a professional design. The attention span of your average internet user is about 2 seconds at this point. So get their attention and hold on to it for dear life!

So when it comes to your small business web site, get the design and content right if you want to have sales. A few simple changes can make all the difference to your web site’s performance. I do a free web site analysis and so do a lot of other people, so you really have no excuse not to start on the path of web site success.

There is a lot more than development and maintenance for your online web site to be successful. If you’re currently looking for a web site designer, you need to consider some very important aspects right from the outset. A web site needs careful planning and strategy to succeed so you need to start off on the right foot. That’s the big questions, what aspects does your web site need?

Great design
There are many talented web designers ready to make your web site successful. As long as you’ve spent some time on the internet and know what looks good and what doesn’t, you’d think it’d be hard to go wrong on this aspect. Though it’s surprisingly easy to get wrong. I know some very smart people that have stumbled on this first step and wasted a lot of money. However, the biggest mistake is trying to do it yourself and creating an amateurish looking web site that no one looks at.

Usability
Making your web site usable is not always as easy as it seems. It involves the correct positioning of items on a web page so the user can follow a logical flow to the result you want. If you want a sale, you need to lead the customer there. If you want them to contact you, you need to lead them there. But most importantly, you don’t want customers to get frustrated and leave your web site.

Findability
So now you have a professional looking web site that’s usable and all you have to do is attract some visitors. What’s the best way to get traffic? Search engines of course. We call this Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and it involves making your pages just right for the search engines. Your customers type in keywords to find your web site. The trick is to rank well on the keywords they are typing in. And yes it can be a trick, a weaving of art and magic to do well in the search engines. But those in the know can do it consistently to ensure your web site gets exposure.

Combined with this are the many other marketing techniques that go along with your web site development. A web site is nothing if no one sees it, so you need an online marketing plan to make sure your web site is getting the attention it deserves. This should be the most important aspect of your web site maintenance contract. Your web site development company needs to keep marketing your company once the web site is up and running.

Functionality
You are developing your web site for a purpose and it is important to keep that purpose in mind throughout the entire development process. You’d be surprised how many people set out to design an online shop or ecommerce web site and end up forgetting to check if their web site actually sells products. With a web site, you have very little time to attract a visitors attention, wow them with your proposition, and collect their money. You need compelling sales writing to do this and like all of the above, you need to leave it in the hands of a professional.

The internet is the most competitive marketplace in the world. It’s not like a physical store where a customer has to travel to find your competition, a competitor is literally seconds away. You need to make sure all aspects of your web site work together to achieve your goal or you will find yourself another unsuccessful internet entrepreneur.

A final word of advice, it’s difficult to find a company that can handle the full spectrum of these skills and offer you the web site development abilities and online marketing you require. When I work with my clients, I take care of the search engine and functionality aspects and team up with a web site graphic designer to combine all our knowledge in to making the web site a success. And we’re always getting other input to make sure the web site we deliver is of excellent quality.

So be careful out there, the web site development industry is littered with false promises and propaganda. People that say the can do it all and fail miserably. Be smart with your money and your business’ future.

I love the Way Back Machine! From a business perspective it’s a useful tool for making sure no naughty spammers have owned your domain name in the past. Thus causing it penalties in Google, etc.

But it also lets you reminisce. It has some snapshots of my old ecommerce business in New Zealand that brings back fond memories. You can see it when it just launched in November 2003 and then again just before we closed it down in December 2004.

Unfortunately my old business partner received an offer to start another business that actually had a salary and capital behind it. It would be interesting to see where it would be today. Thanks to what started off as his blog, he’s created quite a nice geek community of our target customers.

Despite the images missing, I’m still quite proud of it. Remember, this was running three years ago now! I think it’s design and sophistication could still beat a lot of sites out there today.

Anyway, that was a nice trip down memory lane for Friday. And here I am back in the business game. I love my life!

Welcome to the home of conneXted. Connecting your business is the next step.

Our passion is doing business online. Well, doing business anywhere really. But we’re here to focus on your website and how it is completely failing your business right now. Our job is to connect customers with your products. We do this is two main ways:

First, we get customers to your website via search engines.
Then, we make sure your website is set up to sell to these customers.

There’s nothing worse than having a website that your customers can’t find. Or is there? What about a website your customers find, but then don’t want to purchase from.

End of the day, same result: No money for your business.

We believe one of these services shouldn’t exist without the other. We’re experts in both with over 5 years experience in the industry. Read on for loads of free information on making your website perform, or have a look at our packages if your business can’t afford to wait.