Things are pretty hectic here.

We’re focusing on three areas:

1) Web Design - Great graphic design with funky layouts.

2) Web Programming - Anything that needs to happen in the background eg. enquiry form submissions, newsletter sign ups, questionnaire handling etc.

3) Search Engine Optimisation - Promoting websites in search engines etc.

All good fun - give us a call on freephone 0800 311 2135 - we’d be pleased to help you.

D.

The food retailer Sainsbury’s has experienced first hand the backlash of a failed website.

On Tuesday afternoon, a technical fault was spotted on the online ordering website. They immediately suspended the site pending getting the fault fixed.

You can read more here.

This site has been offline since then and is expected to be off until Friday. Nearly four days of lost orders … not a great week for Sainsbury’s.

It appears the crux of the problem is that they are unable to access customers’ orders. It will impact around 20,000 customers before it is fixed.

What’s the lesson?

If you rely on your website for a sizeable income then make sure you have back up methods in place to allow you to continue trading even when things go wrong.

It’s obvious, but often missed. Even on a very complex system (which this system clearly is), there should be simple methods of extracting the informaton.

D.

Here’s one of our latest client sites to be finished:

You can see the site in full here:

http://www.connecting4profit.com

The key features of this site are:

- Sales orientated web page text
- Fully installed blog
- Contact and enquiry forms protected by the Maxweb Safe Forms System
- Mini-course sign up managed by the Maxweb Marketing By Email System
- Downloadable ebook

D.

Sometimes it is the smallest things that squash customer confidence in your website.

I had a call yesterday from a friend of mine suggesting I try out a new service offered by their company. The service is a print and fulfillment service whereby they print, fold, envelope and stamp direct mail so you don’t have to do it yourself.

A great idea I thought - I was interested.

My friend sent me the website link and asked me to register at the site. I did this and then went ahead to add a ‘top up’ to my print account.

I paid via credit card and went back to the account screen. It showed a balance of £0 - not the £10 I had added to the top up.

I refreshed the screen again and it still showed £0. I checked my email and saw the receipt showing a payment of £10 had been taken from my card.

I waited a few minutes and refreshed the screen again. Still £0. Arrrrrrgggghhhh!!!

They have taken my money and not credited my top up.

I’ll have to email them and find out what is going on.

In the meantime, I’m losing confidence in them and their system.

Because I know how electronic payment systems work, I can pretty much guarantee that it is not a ‘one off’ problem that I have suffered.

It is a fundamental system problem whereby the credit card authorisation system is not correctly coupling back to their website to add the top up to my account.

This is such a critical piece of functionality it should have been checked and double checked. Clearly it hasn’t been.

Take a look at your website. Follow it - using ‘prospect eyes’ and see what works and what doesn’t. You’d be surprised how many things you’ll find and how much improvement could be made.

If you’d like a ’second opinion’, please give me a call on freephone 0800 311 2135.

D.

We take our job very seriously when it comes to web design and programming.

There is massive potential for error. One of the biggest areas for error is overwriting a file and losing the original copy.

This is so easy to do - you just hit Ctrl+S and bingo, the old file is gone forever.

Before we used the Maxweb Version Control System, we had many occasions when we would make some modifications to a page and then save it over the top of the old page. Then later, the client would want the old page back. In this situation, we would have to undo the modifications bit by bit and re-create the old page. A waste of time all round.

Now the Maxweb Version Control System manages all copies of every page we work on. This means that every change made to the page is tracked and stored in a database system so that the page can be ‘rolled back’ to any previous state in seconds.

Every web page is loaded in to the system and regular updates are done to ensure that the system has the very latest page in it. It’s a great back up and has saved us hours of work and our clients hundreds of pounds in cost.

D.

The importance of understanding your web site conversion rate

There are many web sites out there that don’t accurately track visitors.

I think there is an apathy about tracking visitors - perhaps it appears harder than it actually is.

The reality is simple. If you are not tracking the visitors to your web site you have no way of determining how successful your web site is.

This means that you could be spending money on web site enhancements without the justification of knowing you will get a return on the investment.

I liken it to a Yellow Pages advert. Alot of companies have adverts and virtually no one measures the success of the advert.

There is a perception that it works and this gives a false justification to continue spending year after year. If these companies actually measured the success, they may be in for a shock.

And that’s the other reason visitor tracking is pushed way down the list.

By tracking visitors, it will show you the success - or failure - of your web site. Sometimes this is a hard pill to swallow so companies avoid it.

Here’s the minimum you should be doing to track visitors:

1) Install a decent web statistics system. This MUST track unique/distinct visitors.

2) Use a ’sales trail’ to determine the expected response you require from your visitor.

3) Track the success of the ’sales trail’ and use this to calculate the conversion rate to expected response.

This conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that perform your expected response (eg. fill out an enquiry form, download a free report etc).

4) Calculate the conversion rate to sale.

This conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that go on to make a purchase from you.

The best way of tracking these numbers is to use a spreadsheet. Fill it in every day and make it part of your working day. That way, you’ll have all the information you need to justify future enhancements to your web site.

D.