econoweb

Eleven Reasons a Small Business Needs a Web Site

August 26, 2011 By carl Leave a Comment

Websites are Essential for a Business, Organization, or Even a Personal Vision Today

In the emerging paradigm today, the flow of information for making decisions is very fast and very dense. We are becoming more and more dependent upon social networks, blogs, and websites. Yet when I look at the market statistics, I see small businesses very often fail to take advantage of this.

One source says 46% of the small businesses today don’t even have a website(1).
Another source says more than 50 percent of small U.S. businesses (those with fewer than 200 employees) do not have web sites (2).
Chris Brogan, Human Works Works President, says his research shows 60% of U.S. businesses are not online in any fashion(3).

Most small businesses still live in the Dark Ages and expect to survive. They won’t. The speed of change has become so fast that the electronic and immediate flow for information for decisions is a necessity. That’s the paradigm today – and it’s moving fast. The web site is essential not only just for selling stuff – it is essential for branding and selling your company, or organization as an authority, for support, and marketing.

So the bottom line today is that even if you have only a small business, an organization, or even a personal vision you should have a website. An effective website. Period. No question about it. Without a doubt. The website should also be professionally done if you wish people to take your message seriously.

Also (citing Chris Brogan) the website not only must be professional in appearance and content, but also optimized for the search engines. A page on Facebook or a commodity blog won’t do it. A page on Facebook is like calling a hotel room home. In addition, you have little control over that Facebook page. Sure, you need the social networks; but you also need that website to send ‘em to when they get serious.

Reasons Why You Need That Website

Sell Your Products 24/7/365. When you are relaxing at the beach, sleeping, or busy with a client your website is still working and selling for you.
People will search for you online. When I am planning to purchase a product or service, the first place I go is to a search engine. If you aren’t there, you won’t be found. (All of the major search engines skew search queries to local users when a modifier is not included. )
Save time. Ever get those same questions over and over again from potential clients? Why not put all that information in a website and then hand those potential clients a business card that points them to your website.
Websites offer extremely cost-effective advertising. You can niche, or target, your audience. The results returned can be qualified results if you do it right.
You can really sell your audience. Using classifieds, newspaper ads, and magazine ads, you only have a small space for your message. With a website, you can really sell with text, pictures, and video. You can still use these other advertisements if you wish, but why not use them to drive people to your website for the real sell? One of my clients had a large garage sale. She use classifieds to drive people to the website for the sale. Made over $25,000.
You have a large audience with a website. Reach an international audience if you wish. Go for a global market. Expand your business.
Test new products, services, and sales strategies. Change your message, products, services, and sales strategies dynamically and get instant feedback on the results.
Keep up with your competition. If your competitor is using a website, that means you need one. If news is on television that relates to your product tonight, you can leverage that news instantly in you website.
Brand you business. Websites are great for branding your business and keeping what you do and your name before your audience.
The website can give your business a professional image. People expect you to have a website, and the website is the image of your company or organization. It establishes your authority.

And the #1 Reason:

The public now expects business and organizations to have a website.

Check Out This Solution

Last year, with a recession killing small businesses, most small businesses found the professional website was out of there budget. We were doing websites for small businesses starting at $4000 – $5000 for a professional website – too much for the small business. Carl went to work to find a solution.

With our new Econoweb program, Carl found a way to create affordable and professional websites for clients for less than $2000. That includes hosting (one year, renewable), domain name, and the development. Development time can be as little as 1-2 weeks, depending on our work load. What’s more, the website is dynamic. That means you can update the content or layout yourself without knowing anything about programming. We set up the initial content and layout for you based on the material you give us. You take it from there. If you don’t have the two grand and a little web experience, we can show you how to do it yourself for much less.

Econoweb gives you a website with a very professional look, a beautiful layout that is easy to read, and high-quality search engine optimization. You can focus on creating your content and layout, not the programming. You have a dynamic website that changes with your needs. Why not contact us today?

1. http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007431
2. Gary Schneider, Electronic Commerce, 9th edition, 2011. p.14
3. http://smartblogs.com/leadership/2011/05/16/chris-brogan-on-why-every-business-needs-a-website

Filed Under: affordable, econoweb, facebook, inexpensive, web design, website development

Developing Your Web Presence Strategy

April 18, 2011 By carl Leave a Comment

The strategy for your website is a part of your large business strategy, which, in turn, is built on a business model. Moreover, most companies realze that copying or adapting someone else’s business model is neither an easy or smart path to success. This is also true of non-profits and churches. Rather, the business should identify who they are trying to reach and see what elements they can enhance or replace with Internet technologies and improve your reach of your current audience. Also, how can you use Internet technologies to reach a larger audience?

The website is one component of that. Social networking can take you beyond that and extend the power of your website. As a general rule today, the website has both a static and dynamic component.

The static component of the website defines something about your mission, who you are, has answers to typical questions, and tells people how to contact you. The static component contains multiple pages such as Home, About, FAQs, and Contact Us.
The dynamic part tells the story of what is going on and gives movement to your website. This dynamic part is often called a blog. The search engines like life and movement, and at least in our case most of our traffic comes into the website through the blog. The pages in the blog are stored as posts.

The Econoweb sites we develop can contain both a static part and a blog. Both are content managed; that is, you can update your Econoweb site easily using a simple internal editor with password access.

Take a look, for example, at the layout of our business website page. At the top (even on this page, which is a post in the blog) are two menu bars. The top menu is for the static part of the website and the menu options access different pages. The lower menu bar is for the blog, and the options here access categories of the blog. There are actually far more categories than shown on the menu bar. If you go into any of the categories, a sidebar there will give the access to other categories. The pages in the blog component are called posts, and the blog is interactive – you can comment on any of the posts, including this one.

The Bigger Picture

Your website is actually part of a bigger picture of even your web presence. This is how you might see your web presence at this point:

You can put that website out on the web, but it is much like a theme park in the desert. Unless you have roads to it AND people know how to get there, they won’t find your site and won’t go there. You have to create this larger picture. How you define this larger picture is up to you. Let’s look at one approach.

This is the concept that I use for my own websites. The social networks are used to build the roads to the website and blog. The inbound links are indexed quickly by the search engines. For this reason, you can start early using the social networks; but you shouldn’t add pointers to your website until your website is ready. If you are building an Econoweb site, we will show you later how to build those links.

Twitter – this is a good place to start, as it is easy to use. Your object here is to put something in your tweets that can tease them into your web site – normally to specific blog posts on your website. Twitter indexes your tweet immediately; that is, anyone search on Twitter on your keyword will find your tweet immediately. Google will take a little longer to find your tweet.

Facebook – This is popular because there is such a large user base on Facebook. You can also put a pointer to your website in your profile. Be careful, as commercial pushing here is frowned on in Facebook and you can get banned doing too much of it. You can, however, set up your own business on a “fan page”. Read the rules for using this. You can also joint groups on your topic of interest or start your own group. Again, the name of the game here is to tease users into your website or blog.

Linkedin – This is a professional social networking site that draws its user base from corporate executives and other business leaders. You can put your profile here and, as in Facebook. You can also join (or create new) groups of specific interest.
There are many other players in these social networks (such as Foursquare, YouTube, and many more). What works for you depends on your goals.

Using the Search Engines

Our ministry site is more dependent on the social networks and the people we know. This business site, however, is primarily dependent on vistitors arriving from searches on the search engines. This means strategic keyword phrases that a search might use to solve their problem are used with the search engines to direct them my to resources, services, and tools. The keyword phrases become very important, as they are the link. The process of making this work is called search engine optimization, or SEO. Our website designs contain basic internal SEO enhancements; but we also teach you how to do a lot of this yourself.

Putting the Pieces Together

Sue has a store in Memphis that sells wedding gowns. She doesn’t have many repeat customers. All she needs is a good static website – no blog. It would help, however, if she could market herself as a full-service store for wedding services by providing links on her website and networking with other wedding services for her clients, such as a service to print wedding invitations and another that bakes wedding cakes.

Susan owns an organic food restaurant in North Carolina. Her business really picked up when she added a blog to her website that published recipes for many of her menu items. She also uses the blog to announce special discounts and new entrees. She’s just starting to use the social networking sites.

Take some time in planning your site to see the concept you wish to use for your web presence. Social networking is cheap in direct costs, but is very time consuming. If you plan to use those sites, start with a single site and get familiar with it. Don’t use the networks and other sites to point to your website and/or blog until these are working. Spend some time learning how they work while you build your site.

Filed Under: Blogging, econoweb, linkkedin, social media, social networking, Twitter, web design

E-Commerce and Shopping Cart Plugins for Econowebs: Part 2-Tips

April 13, 2011 By carl Leave a Comment

Tips for Your eCommerce Site

The purchase is the final step for the customer; it is the call to action, the conversion.

In some cases this step is on a separate landing page – as with a shopping cart. The decision has already been made, and the purchase process should be a simple as possible, such as a single mouse click on a landing page.
In other cases you have to get their attention, speak to their need, show how your product solves that, and then ask the action. Putting the purchase button at the very beginning of the process is worthless.

Here are some great tips for building an eCommerce site:

Speak to the customer’s needs – not yours. Your job is to identify their need and speak and act into that.
Tell them the benefits of your product.
Identify why they should purchase from you. Why is your product unique for that need?
Provide multiple paths to the action step. For social networking using Facebook (including groups and fan pages). Twitter, Linkedin including groups), website (with paths in the sidebar for multiple pages). I also use blogs (using the sidebar again), other people’s blogs, email signatures, and speaking engagements. (I sold one of my books in an airport with a new copy I had in my briefcase.) There are also multiple paths to my book purchases; not only from me, but from Amazon, Barnes & Nobel, and more.
Provide multiple purchase options and multiple shipping options.
Provide multiple payment options.
Avoid surprising the customer. What guarantees or warranties are there? What are shipping costs? What is your return policy?
Make sure your website shows a real geographic address so they can contact you.
Be sure your order process is secure. When the customer any information they wish to keep secure, your address in their address bar should start with https:, NOT http:,
Study high-ranking eCommerce sites. Here are a few:
http://disneystore.com/
http://www.amazon.com/
http://www,goincase.com/
Forms should use common names for their customer name, address, etc. so the customer can use the auto-fill.
Group products by category.
If you only ship to the U.S, say so on early pages and often.
Check spelling and grammar. Check it again.
Have friends who are much like your customers test the site.
Answer all emails in 8 hours or less.
Use professional photography.
Link your thumbnail images to larger images.
Set up a referral or affiliate program. Let others help you sell. If an affiliate applies with a free email account, that’s a red flag. Avoid those.
Be sure your product name, price, and purchase button (the 3 p’s) are above the fold on your pages. This not quite as important today as it use to be, but the purchase button should be above the fold at least – except for catalog pages.
Don’t force your customers to sign in or set up an account. Amazon can do that. Your job is to make things easy and fast.
Remember that pages that require an id and password will not be indexed by the search engines.
If at all possible, keep your cart on your domain.
Ship fast – the same day if possible.
Use any reassurance ratings you have, such as the PayPal image for a verified account. I don’t count BBB as an reassurance, as the most corrupt business I have dealt with was Vonage, and they are BBB and yet BBB does nothing to stop their practices. I guess Vonage pays BBB enough to continue their corruption. BBB has lost my trust.
Keep your website fast. Check with http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/.
Remember any of your site pages are potential landing pages.
For holiday shopping days, let customers know your cutoff dates.
Ask for customer reviews. Use them as testimonies on your site with their permission.
Allow customers to copy their shipping address to their billing address if they are the same.
Use analytics and track important stats.
Design your site so that users with disabilities can use it. What happens, for example, when someone with poor eyesight is visiting your site with the font size increased? Does the word-wrap adjust automatically or do they have to do a horizontal scroll on every line?
Maintain a database of your customers. Don’t spam with it, however.
Consider purchasing a mobile phone interface for your site.
Tell them the customer support options (chat, phone, email, etc.).
Use short paragraphs in product descriptions. No more than five vertical lines, and use bullets and number lists frequently.
Use Google Alerts to track your brand mentions: http://www.google.com/alerts.
Monitor any black-listing of your website at http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx/.
People don’t notice banners any more, particularly those animated banners. And those banners that explode on hovering and cover your text are a big turn-off for any product and website.
Larger cart buttons work better.
Don’t use a “Cancel” button for a checkout. You don’t want to give the customer that idea.
Avoid the “Submit” button label. That’s a negative message. Use “Continue” or “Next Step” instead.
If the CVV number is needed for the order from the back of the credit card, tell the customer how to find it.
Let customers see the final order and have them verify it.
Avoid using all-capital text. It’s hard to read.
Never email to customers with a no-reply account. Always give a reply option.
Be sure your logo is hyper-linked to your home page.
Use contests and other promotions, particularly time-sensitive offers.
For links out of your site, be sure to the destination opens in another window. You don’t want to take them out of your website
Be sure your site has great SEO

Have any ideas you’d like to add to this?

Filed Under: ecommerce, econoweb, Internet Marketing, shopping carts, web design, wordpress

E-Commerce and Shopping Cart Plugins for Econowebs: Part 1

April 11, 2011 By carl 4 Comments

We plan to add an e-commerce option to the Econoweb product as an available option. We have been reviewing what is available and, as you would expect, the quality of the product depends on what you wish to spend. Since our product market for the Econoweb is primarily individuals and small businesses, we needed something inexpensive and good. Here’s an overview of the reviews:

The master list of all WordPress plugins with ratings is at:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/
You can enter shopping carts to the search box and see the list.

List of Shopping Cart Plugins: (Select Shopping Carts from top menu)
http://tomuse.com/premium-wp-plugins-review/
Here’s another list:
http://www.websitetemplatereviews.com/my-list-of-the-best-e-commerce-website-templates-a-big-chart

A real popular shopping cart plugin that shows up often is WP e-commerce. It’s free, but unfortunately is only worth that. We tried an installation here to test it, but there is no documentation, forum, or support. Not the best option if you want a serious e-commerce website.

Although the free WP e-commerce is popular, I found a lot of negative reviews on it. I tried an install to verify the reviews. I agree with the reviewers. Here is one review:
http://speckyboy.com/2008/10/23/10-powerful-shoppingecommerce-plugin-solutions-for-wordpress/

One real sleeper plug-in is the Tribulant Checkout Shopping Cart:
http://tribulant.com/plugins/view/10/wordpress-shopping-cart-plugin
Reviews at:
http://winkpress.com/ecommerce/shopping-cart/tribulant-checkout/
http://hubpages.com/hub/wordpress-shopping-cart-plugin

This one cost $49.95 for a single domain, with a developer license available at a higher cost. It supports PayPal and a variety of other services that can handle the final purchasing. An update service is available at $5/3 months. Shipping costs for your purchases are calculated for USPS and FedEx for U.S. shipments. Some foreign shipping plans are supported. UPS is NOT supported. Tribulant is based in South Africa; but their support is excellent. Just remember their time eight or so hours later that our PDT; so if I send in a query during my work day they’ve already gone home for the day. I get my answer the next morning.

The website has plenty of showcase sites and testimonials. The code is open source and not encrypted, and as a result they have no trial period available.

One that is top-of-the-line is the Volusion, which starts at about $29 a month to support up to 100 items. The cart itself is run on a separate host. Your website would link into this site for the actual shopping experience. You can do a free trial one with this one to try out the experience.

The bottom line is that all the carts offer pluses and minuses. This should give you a good guide to matching the needs to the cart.

Filed Under: ecommerce, econoweb, shopping carts, Uncategorized, web design

Creating Social Change with Networking

March 23, 2011 By carltown 2 Comments

We recently launched a website for a political PAC for a city (http://www.protecttualatinparks.org/) as part of a larger agenda to add an amendment to the city’s constitution. We used the Econoweb model, which gave us a very dynamic website in a week that cost very little. The content and news on the website could quickly follow the evolving events. The opposition could not. Newspaper reporters were watching, and soon there was plenty of media coverage (three newspapers). To quote one reporter, our own website was better than the website the city had. The work, however, was really a community effort – what Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith in their book called “the dragonfly effect”.

What makes a website work? YOU do. The website is only a tool. Look how we used this concept with a project.

The Problem

The problem in our city is the same problem that can occur in other cities and often does. Business interests are pitted against residential interests and the parks become a land bank for businesses to get the land at near zero cost for their roads.

To resolve this, as industry expands in a community, transportation must be planned as an integral part of this expansion. That wasn’t done in our city, and industrial traffic now became a massive congestion problem as trucks and related traffic moved through on our main street. The city leaders then decided to first build up the industry, enjoy the tax income, and solve the transportation issue later. Doesn’t work. To solve it now, the businesses wanted to build a major east-west transportation bridge across the local park. At the same time, plans were started for another north-south extension of a road that would split the park (with the bridge) into quadrants. The whole plan, of course, was kept secret until some people got word about it. Then the local council meetings exploded, with the citizens planning to take the issue to the voters.

Definng the Goal

In our case, the goal was to force a voter-approved amendment to the city charter that would mean any non-park addition to a park had to be approved by the voters. We didn’t say they couldn’t have a bridge, only that the local voters would have to approve it. The amendment wording was done by a lawyer and approved by several other lawyers in independent organizations. An intermediate step was to get approximately 2200 signatures on a petition to force the vote (we got 40% more than that.). In addition, whether we won or lost the vote, to force the city council to listen and respond to the needs of the residents.

The leader leads from a macro and micro goal. Leading from the macro goal can overwhelm followers and can create discouragement. In our case the macro goal was to change the process in which city decisions were made. The micro goal was the park vote. The leader focuses on the micro goal. And there should always be some way of objectively measuring progress. On the website component of our plan, we could see stats on visitor traffic as well as buy-in from the residents on the larger program.

Getting Attention

We drove everything with facts. We had a small group with leadership that had been following the issue for years. The secrets became public as we collected the petition signatures and shared what we had discovered with others. We also started our website at this point, using Twitter and Facebook to draw traffic to our own website and its blog. Both the website and blog were content management systems that were quickly developed, cost very little, and could be updated quickly as the opposition began their work. Soon the noise level got so high that three newspapers were interviewing and following us. In addition to the website, we had yard signs, car signs, fliers and mailers for the voters. We stayed with the facts, driving everything with facts.

Engaging Others

Networking for Change

Our web site included videos from other cities where the problem existed. We networked with other local organizations that had similar goals that were close to our own. We threw a party for our supporters as they began to work with us. We encouraged people to comment on our blog posts, and when they did we engaged in dialog with them. Our three newspapers continually ran articles and tracked the letters that came in to the newspapers. The articles were posted on our website. We engaged people to distribute fliers, help with the mailing, and put up yard signs.

We Took Action

The whole process was an active process – nothing passive about it. Our research team had to constantly monitor secret meetings and emails that were a part of the opposition. Some of our members were hitting a hundred houses a day with fliers and related information. When reporters wanted more information, we referred them to our website and then met with them, answering their questions and giving them stories and facts. We used Facebook, Twitter, blogs, the web site, and email,

You want a website that can help you change things? Contact us. Our strategy was based on the book The The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to use Social Media to Drive Social Change, and the website is here. The vote was March 8, 2011 – WE WON! The process, though,is still broken The issue is still there. At least for now. There is more work ahead. To quote the late Robert Theobald – “Think Global, act Local”.

What do you think of this strategy? Do you have a story of using a similar strategy in your city? What happened? What did you learn?

Filed Under: econoweb, social networking, web design

Primary Website Development Tools and Layouts Available

March 6, 2011 By carl 1 Comment

If you are a website developer and wish to use the same tools we do in developing websites, you can purchase these tools here. Thesis has a lot of flexibility, and was used for the Protect Tualatin Parks Site. The layouts of the Genesis product from StudioPress are less flexible, but extremely professional and reliable with good SEO. We used a Genesis theme for this site.

Click either icon below to get more information on either the Thesis or Genesis products. You can purchase these from these links.