The ten most alienating mistakes you can make on your web site.

Are you driving users away—and losing business—because of any of these ten, easily fixable goofs?

The "global handshake" is now a global business cliche.

1. Cliches

Use language and images with originality, precision and skill. If you write in cliches, I know you’re either (1) talking down to me, and/or (b) not offering me anything unique or original. And please, don’t give me boring visual cliches either. I’m not apt to buy, sign up for anything, or even stick around to check out your site.

2. Jargon

Plain talk works best. “I offer my web 2.0 clients techniques for listening to users, establishing full transparency, and  SMO.” If you don’t know what this means, are you going to buy from, listen to, or recommend me? Or even stay on my site? Doubt it. (Jargon decoder here.)

3. Squinting and peering

Can I read it? Avoid text/background contrast that is too low (or too high), and text that is very tiny or in a strange, decorative but unreadable font. If I have to squint, peer, or put on/take off glasses to read your site, I’m probably going to forget it.

4. Nobody home

I want to know there’s a real person or people standing behind your site. If there is no name, no bio, no picture, no address, no phone number, nothing but an email contact form, I’m not going to contact you. Period.

5. Circularity

Give me a simple, logical structure. Can I find, and get back to, information I want on your site without  having to think about it, and without feeling like I’m going in circles? If I can’t find things… or can’t get away from them…. buh-bye!

6. Flash

Steve Jobs isn’t the only one who hates Flash. If you must have a Flash intro, make the “skip intro” link big, front, and center. Otherwise I might not see it before I leave—because I probably won’t wait around for the Flash to load. And if I have to download a plugin just to see your site? Fuggedaboudit.

7. Expired third-party services and content

Check your site regularly. Do you use a third-party service like Wufoo for your contact form? Third-party search? Any kind of third-party-provided content… news crawls, RSS feeds, affiliate banners? If your contact form is non-functional because a service like Wufoo changed its link structure… or because you forgot to pay your bill… it shouldn’t be on your site.

8. Not enough information

Give me information I can sink my teeth into. Yes, hyper-designed, text-minimal sites can be gorgeous. But in order to sign up for your mailing list, I have to be interested, not just dazzled. And to buy something, I have to trust you. Where’s the beef?

9. PDFs

Use html for “perishable” information. I’ll gladly download a PDF if it’s a report, a list, an article, an itinerary … something that I’ll want to print, read later or in installments, study, or carry along. But I really hate having to wait for a download that I know I’m going to have to trash the moment I’ve glanced at it. Put non-download info into browsable html, please, or I won’t bother.

10. Repetition.

Let me choose whether to read repetitive copy. Do I need to read the same intro text word for word on every page, or every similar item you sell? Yes? Then put it on its own page, linked with a “more info” link so I don’t have to skim it over every single time I click on an item. Or use a “hide content” widget like WordPress’ Collapsible Elements plugin (currently due to be discontinued in August 2010) so that I can read it if I want, or skip it easily.

User-friendliness means better business

It’s all too easy to get lazy or rushed and miss something super-obvious on your site. We’ve all done it. But it’s a lot better for your business to give people an interesting, well-conceived, efficient site that lets visitors know that you have their needs in mind.

These days, a good many of the new sites I create use the Thesis theme for WordPress. It’s so easy to install and use that even WordPress newbies swiftly learn to manage their own sites. But there are a few simple, free, essential plugins that make Thesis (affiliate link) work even better. Here they are.

Help Google Crawl Your Site

Google XML Sitemaps. This plugin automatically creates a continuously updated XML sitemap that helps searchbots crawl your site and gives you better search results. Every time you add a page to your blog or site, it’s automatically added to the XML sitemap. If you want, you can also register the sitemap’s URL with Google at Google’s Webmaster Central and with Yahoo to get tons of helpful information about how your site is crawled.

Keep the Hits from Your Old URLs

Redirection. Unless you’re starting a brand-new site totally from scratch, you had an old site before your WordPress Thesis site. That old site was probably around for awhile and garnered at least a little bit of SEO mojo. But now all your URLs are different because you’ve deleted all your old pages in favor of your brand-new spiffy Thesis pages. Ever wonder what happens to all the old links—including search engine links—that went to those old pages? Without some kind of redirection, they’re all lost. And anyone who finds a link and clicks through gets nothing but a “page not found” error. Which is not exactly the ideal welcome.

With Redirection, you don’t have to lose all the clicks and search results that your old pages may still be generating. Just paste all your old URLs into the windows the plugin provides. Then, for each URL, paste in the new URL that you want to send your visitor to instead. Now, visitors are seamlessly and invisibly directed from your old URLs to your new ones, without your losing any rankings. It’s quick, simple, easy, and solves a real problem without any hassle.

Choose What Pages Sidebar Content Shows Up On

Widget Logic. My fave. With old html sites, it could be a challenge to get every page to look uniformly the same. Some table or div tag would always act up just when you least wanted it to. With WordPress and other CMS sites, the challenge is the opposite: how to get pages to look different from each other; how to relieve the terrible monotony of a site-wide template and put relevant content just where it needs to be, rather than all over.

Here’s the answer. With Widget Logic, you can control which pages any given widget will appear on. Want your article list on your blog post pages, but not on your “Services” page? Simple. Want an ad to appear on certain posts or pages, and not on others? Simple. In the interests of full disclosure, I do have to say that you need to look up, and paste in, the appropriate WordPress conditional tag. But the intimidation factor is way bigger than the reality of doing it. In about 20 seconds you can impress yourself by using PHP tags… and you don’t have to actually know any PHP. Awesome! (There’s also a YouTube video tutorial.)

WordPress Database Backup

WordPress Database Backup. Would you like a daily or weekly backup of your WordPress database (that’s where all your content is stored) delivered automatically to your email inbox? Trust me, you would. Well, you should. This plugin does it.

Best of luck, and happy Thesis-ing!

It’s amazing how many self-employed people hit the wall with their web sites.

Procrastination, delay, and stall become words of the day. Or week, or month(s).

It’s not the difficulty of setting up a shopping cart, or trouble deciding between two typefaces, or a hang-up with javascript  that’s putting the brakes on the site.

It really comes down to that deep inward cringe that so many of us who have a hard time with marketing and promotion feel, when we’re promoting ourselves.

If we’re artists, or in a service business, so often the thing we’re trying to sell to the world is the product of our own unique gifts, our innermost, most sacred self.

And often, although we may have studied and cultivated skills and techniques for years, that gift at its core is something that just “happens.” It’s our magic. Our own secret mojo, gifted at birth.

People in this predicament, including myself, seem to get hung up on three things. One is, how to put our magic into words. Just saying “I’m a web designer” or “I’m a business coach” doesn’t nearly cover it. But how in the heck do you articulate your own gift, the thing that makes what you do special—something that you don’t quite understand to begin with?

The second is, how do you convey it in “buyer-centered” terms?  Once you’re figured out the “who,” “what” and “how” of what you do; once you list the problems you solve and the results you provide—you’ve got to write about it. With marketing syntax. Persuasively.

And then there’s packaging and pricing. Do you break your services out into packages? Charge by the hour? By the project? How do you price it?

All of this is not only incredibly difficult, particularly when doing it for yourself, but it can also feel very risky. You’re putting a very intimate and often vulnerable part of yourself out there, in public, for anyone with a web browser to see. And, you’re asking people to connect with you, to want what you have to offer, and to buy it.

What if they think you’re stupid? What if no one wants it? What if no one comes? What if your old college roomie, now CEO of a megabucks corporation, reads your personal, sincere, non-business-speak little web site and thinks it’s the most ridiculous thing ever?

So many of my clients—and myself—get hung up somewhere along this path. “Oh, I don’t like writing,” so many clients have remarked. But it’s not really writing that they hate. It’s writing marketing copy about themselves that drives them half mad.

What can you do to get out of the swamp?

First, admit that it’s not the javascript, the font, or the shopping cart that’s hanging you up, but your own confusion and—yes—pain.

Then, ask for a little help.

Call a friend. Or two or three. As them to tell you what your magic is. Take notes.

Then, turn to a professional to help shape your notes into finished copy. Marketing guru Robert Middleton has an amazing array of marketing knowledge in his Marketing Club (first month free, with complete access to workbooks, articles, audio programs and coaching calls). If you need a detailed, step-by-step roadmap that covers everything from formulating what you do in buyer-centric terms to writing articles, promotional copy and emails, Robert is your man. I’ve been following and using his info for years, and I am an affiliate.

Mark Silver is an amazing business coach with a spirit-centered practice. He offers freebies, workbooks and classes that can put you in touch with your own inner “big picture” and ease the pain of trying to communicate it.

Work with your designer. Many web designers and web coaches, whether they know it or not, have become experts at helping clients over this hurdle. Give yours a call.

And finally, don’t get hung up on perfection. The web is a very fluid medium. What you write today, you can change tomorrow. So get something up now, even if it’s not perfect. Your clients will be glad you did. Really.

The Heart of Business blog had a great post by Judy Murdoch recently called “How Is a Mailing List Like a Pizza Delivery Truck?”

Judy said that a list is like a pizza truck because they’re both marketing assets. This made me think about web sites. And I realized that for me, a web site is like a house. They’re both highly integrated systems for making your life easier and more comfortable.

We don’t usually think of homes as systems, until we have to fix, renovate, or build one. Then suddenly the “systems” aspect is clear. Not just in what needs to be done first—electrical, then drywall, then floors—but in how it all works together once it’s finished.

A house has systems: water coming in, waste going out, fresh air and light coming in, heat pumping in, a mailbox. Pretty basic? Yes, but let’s say you don’t have all these things, or don’t have some of them.

For example. No plumbing, just an outhouse. I’ve lived in pretty primitive conditions and an outhouse can work just fine. In fact you can be darned happy to have one. But would it be an inconvenience to have to dig and use an outhouse in my little urban backyard? Absolutely.

Running water. When I lived in a small village in Mexico, most people didn’t have running water inside, just outside. And it wasn’t hot, it was only cold. This was a warm climate, and taking everything—dishes, clothes, babies, selves—outside to wash didn’t seem like a big deal to anyone. But if I had to do it here? I’d freeze. And when would I be working on my business?

Or a washing machine. For many years I took my clothes to the laundromat. And compared to having to wash by hand on an outdoor washboard, a laundromat is pretty efficient. But going to the laundromat was an imposition, an interruption, and a hassle which, between packing, loading, driving, washing, drying, folding, and schlepping back home, took several hours every couple of weeks. I am SO glad not to have to do that anymore.

So. For me to live reasonably well and work at maximum efficiency, I need certain things. Indoor plumbing, hot water, heating, ventilation, a washer-dryer, waste pickup.

A house is a system of integrated components that makes life easier. Our web-based businesses are the same. Judy uses the example of a mailing list, and how, when she started, she sent out all her emails by hand. So did I. And I know people who are still doing it that way, even though their list numbers in the hundreds.

It’s like having to take all the dishes outside to wash. Very time-consuming, and unnecessary. With list management software, sending a mass email is the work of ten minutes, not several hours.

Your web site supports your business. For many of us, it’s about as physical as our business gets. It’s where our business “lives.” And it needs systems too. It has an outside, that people strolling by can see, and an inside, where you do your living and working.

From the “outside,” or visitor’s point of view, your site needs to

• be findable
• respond to a need or problem
• be cohesive, coherent, make sense
• communicate clearly
• offer actions visitors can take to engage with you & your business (and increasingly, to interact with each other via sharing on other social networks)
• everything has to work smoothly and transparently

From the “inside,” from your vantage point as the business owner and manager, your site needs to:

• attract traffic
• have a way of creating a pool of people with whom you can connect at will via email or other means
• give you a way of sending out email or some other kind of periodic update and announcement to them
• have a stats package that you can use to test and monitor changes to your site, as well as number of visitors and their search habits
• often, it needs to enable you to collect money—better yet, in a way that links with your bookkeeping systems
• often, to deliver digital goods
• be quickly updatable
• be able to grow with you and your business, not lock you into a technological box
• be cost-effective to maintain

As with a house, you can do without certain things, if you’re willing to live with the inconvenience. No mailing list manager? OK, so you spend several hours entering email addresses into your list, then sending your emails out by hand. Is that an efficient choice for you now?

No stats package? Or one that just shows number of visitors? Fine. But that means you don’t know how people are searching for your site, where they’re finding you, where they enter, where they leave, how long they stay, which pages they spend most time on, how many buy or sign up versus how many visit. Any alterations you make to your site will be based on guesswork, and you’ll have no way to test their effectiveness. Does that make sense for you now?

And just like building a house, when you’re building a site it’s far less expensive to put things in at the right time. Are you going to sell merchandise? Then great, let’s set up for that now instead of having to spend more money to rebuild the site to accommodate a shopping cart down the road. Write a blog? Great, let’s build that into the site design, rather than tack it on later.

The point: to live and work at the level modern life requires, you need a house with all its systems working. Same with a web site. All the site’s systems—email gathering, social networking, selling, download-handling, order processing, bookkeeping, traffic monitoring—need to work together as efficiently as possible, or it will be very difficult to work at the level you need to to make a living from your business.

Do you want an up-to-date web site with the latest super-cool techie bell or whistle? Don’t we all?  And WordPress: it’s so contemporary, versatile and inexpensive. So, pick a theme already, and get to it! (A WordPress “theme” is the design template that determines layout, type, color, etc. for your content.)

But wait a sec. I’ve found that there are huge differences among themes, differences that are invisible until you start working with them. Choosing a sloppily constructed one, or one that isn’t updated, can be an expensive mistake. Here’s how to pick the right one.

Premium (Paid), or Free Theme?

There are thousands of free WordPress themes. For a long time, all themes were free. And some of the free ones have problems. Issues I’ve encountered include:

• Themes that “broke” when I upgraded WordPress
• Coding so sloppy that basic customization was a humongous job
• Standard features that didn’t work

This being said, if you have simply a plain-vanilla blog, or simple blog plus a few static pages, and you don’t need a custom look, many free themes will work just fine. A good place to start looking for good free themes is the WordPress site:

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/

But if you’re planning a more complex site—for example, you need a content management system (CMS), a magazine- or newspaper-style front page featuring many items, an e-store, a digital portfolio, a real estate site, or a photoblog, selecting a theme is much tougher. You need a specialty theme which has the appropriate features already built into it from the start. For these more specialized and complex sites, as well as for any site that will require extensive customization, I would tend to look at a premium theme first.

Premium Themes

It took me a long time to warm up to the idea of paid premium themes. Now I’m a convert. Most premium themes are cleanly coded, work well, and are regularly updated. Prices generally run from $20 to $80 or so for single-site use. Some wonderful themes I’ve worked with come from:

Ithemes: specialized premium themes including magazine, real estate, ecommerce and online gallery/portfolio (I have used several of these themes and am an iThemes affiliate)

Themeforest: many well-designed specialty themes, updated at the discretion of their authors.

Woothemes: many magazine- and news-style themes, with support. (I have worked with several of these am an affiliate.)

The Market Theme: one of the top paid premium theme specially designed for ecommerce (I am an affiliate). (For more on ecommerce and WordPress, see my article “Ecommerce: How to Choose the Best Shopping Cart for Your Site.”)

Theme Frameworks

Recently, “theme frameworks” have come on the scene. These are basic themes which offer the ability to customize the design using more mouseclicks than actual code. (Here’s a somewhat technical intro with a discussion of the pros and cons of each major framework:  including some that are not mentioned here.) So, they’re highly adaptable to your particular purpose, and suffer few update problems. Three of the most popular theme frameworks are

Carrington (free)
Thematic (free)
Thesis (paid premium)
ThemeHybrid (free)

Thesis, for example, allows you to have either a magazine-style home page, a conventional blog page with either 2 or 3 columns, or a simple static home page, with a few mouse clicks and no programming at all.

End Theme Overwhelm!

There are thousands of gorgeous themes out there, and it’s easy to fall into overwhelm unless you have a plan. Here’s how.

• First, know what features you need in your theme and cannot compromise on.
• Then, troll for templates that already have all or most of those features, designed by reputable sources with a good track record in providing working themes.

You’ll end up with a handful—or maybe just one or two—themes which offer the features you’re looking for. At this point, cost might be a deciding factor. Or you may want to experiment among the themes on your short list to find the one that works best for you. Don’t sweat the final decision. If you’ve done your homework, any of the themes on your list will make you happy and serve you well for a long time.

Have you ever chosen a theme that broke? That you love? I’d love to hear your experiences.

There’s just been some big news for bloggers and other Internet writers this month. The FTC has decided that “bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service,” or face a fine of up to $11,000. That’s a sizeable incentive to come clean about paid product endorsements, paid reviews, free products, and affiliate marketing. (For those who don’t know, an “affiliate” receives a percentage of the sale price when someone buys a product or service online using one of their special tracking links. For example, as an Amazon affiliate, I receive a small percentage if you go directly to Amazon from one of my links and purchase something. )

I think it’s wonderful. Affiliate and other paid relationships have long been a gray area on the Internet. As a reader, I want to know someone’s relationship with a product they’re touting. As a writer, I feel scuzzy and sleazy if I don’t disclose my own relationships.

This has always felt a little weird for me, since most of my colleagues and peers have never disclosed. For years, I ducked whole the issue by refusing to affiliate at all. Particularly since the amount of money that an affiliate gains from any one sale is often minuscule.

But then two things happened. First, I noticed that I was recommending the same products over and over to my clients. They were products I had rigorously researched, tested, compared, and used. So I wasn’t being fully dispassionate, anyway. Some products are simply better than others.

Second, a couple of clients actually asked me to send them my affiliate link before they purchased products I’d recommended—because they out-and-out wanted me to get my “cut.” It was a revelation to me that, far from diminishing my credibility, being an affiliate sometimes enhanced it.

Now, I’ve got a special page on my site on which I list all of my affiliate relationships. They also happen to be all of my favorite, most used and trusted Internet tools and services. Full disclosure… it feels so good.

What do you think about this issue, whether as a blogger, consumer, or product rep? I’d love to hear from you.

Does your site feel boring, outdated, and passé… because you’re sick of its colors? Do you want to revamp it, but don’t know how to go about choosing new ones, or even whether to try?

It’s worth the effort. Your web site has ten seconds to make an impression. Color is a plays a critical role in that decisive moment. And color is not only how people get drawn into your site, it’s how they recognize and remember it to come back.

Color Provides the Visual Cues that Are Key to Having a Memorable Site

Do you need a designer’s help to get started picking a great color palette? No! Here’s a simple worksheet for choosing a complete color palette for your site.

1. What feeling(s) do you want your business to convey? Express this in a minimum of three, and a maximum of six, words.

2. Does your business currently use distinctive colors—in its logo, business card, storefront, etc.—that “must” be used in your web site? Add it, or them, to your potential palette now.

3. Think about warm colors (yellow-orange-red-brown) as opposed to cool colors (green -blue-indigo-violet-gray). For example, blue is a frequently used in business because it creates a sense of calm, trustworthiness, solidity and confidence. However, it is “cool” rather than warm. If one of your chosen adjectives was “warmth,” or if you have a “people” business, blue might be better used as an accent rather than a major component of your site.

Red, the quintessential “warm” color, conveys vitality, health and playfulness. But it also can imply a sense of urgency and alarm. Many colors are ambiguous in this way, with meanings and associations which vary from culture to culture. Keep in mind any strong color associations of your potential audience(s). An excellent short article by Rob Mills on how color communicates meaning is here.

4. Right now, choose a “draft” palette of 5 or 6 colors (a palette is a collection of 3 to eight colors that work well together). You can use swatches from the local paint store, colored pens, a scanned image which contains the colors you want, Photoshop—whatever you feel comfortable with. There are some very helpful online tools as well. I like Adobe’s Kuler, and Color Scheme Designer, both free. (And yes, this should be fun!)

5. Consider contrast. Bright, strong, and dark colors work well for headlines. Very light colors make lousy headlines, but can make wonderful backgrounds. You can lighten or darken some colors on your palette for the sake of contrast. Getting stuck? Browse sites you admire, and observe how they have used warm and cool, light and dark, bright and dull.

6. Check for readability. Is your color vision normal? Approximately 15% of the general population have some kind of distortion in the way they perceive color. There’s a good visual simulator of various kinds of color blindness here. Your site needs to be legible for these folks. Modify accordingly!

7. Will people be printing out your web pages? If so, use dark type on a light or white background for the printable versions.

8. Now, let’s get down to business. It’s time to finalize at least two strong colors which can predominate on the site. Designate another one or two that can be used as accent or background colors. It’s better to have too few than too many colors—designer Roger Black, for example, gained international fame for his distinctive magazine designs using just black, white, and red, period.

Once you’ve done the right-brain choosing, and the left-brain tweaking, you’ll have a color palette that you can use on any site or template. Still aren’t satisfied? Try one of the online palette-creation sites mentioned above. Or, look at photos (travel photos are especially good), paintings, or design books for more ideas. The book Living Colors: The Definitive Guide to Color Palettes Through the Ages, is a particularly good source—authors Hope and Walch have extracted gorgeous color palettes from the art and décor of many ages and places, which can all be adapted for the web.

But above all, have fun. Color appeals to a primal part of us, and its meaning and impact can’t be fully explained. So savor the inexplicable. If you’re enjoying it, chances are your site visitors will too.

Have you experimented with color palettes, or found a really helpful color-picking tool? I’d love to hear from you.

If you’re a sole proprietor just starting a new venture, you may not want to pay a designer for a custom web site—especially when you can test your market, concept, and business model with little or no investment of time and money. Here are some web site options that can get your site up and running fast, with no stress about time or cost.

Some require that you already have a domain name ($10) and a web hosting account ($4 to $5 per month); some are self-hosted and totally free.

Free Downloadable Web Site Templates

Do a quick search on any major search engine and you’ll find thousands of free site templates, many of them quite good looking and well constructed. Caveats? Read the terms of service—some require a link back to the site or template author. You’ll need some basic html knowledge in order to input your content and upload the finished files to your web host.

Use Your Web Host’s Free Site Templates

Many web hosts, including Godaddy.com and Yahoo, offer free web templates. You purchase a low-cost hosting plan, then pick a pre-designed template that most closely matches your business. Customize it using built-in or downloadable tools, and voila, there’s your web site. You don’t need to know anything about coding or html. True, you don’t have total and absolute control over the appearance of your site. But it’s quick, and it’s cheap.

Free Google Sites & Blogs

Google offers a totally free online site-building tool and hosting service. You don’t need any expertise whatsoever, you don’t need to pay one dime, and you can use these sites for business and commercial purposes. You can have your own site up in half an hour, no technical knowledge required. Check them out at sites.google.com. Remember to read the terms of service, privacy, and policies pages.

Planning a blog? Google also offers a free blogging service, blogger.com. Your own very attractively customized blog can be online in five minutes.

More Totally Free Site Services

Check out the free services out there, like GoGoPin, or blogging guru Seth Godin’s Squidoo (single-page sites called “lenses,” that gather information on a particular topic, product, project, or business), or the free start-your-own-social-network site, Ning. (Again, always read the terms of service and privacy policies. Be aware that a free, hosted site service offered by a brand-new company may or may not be a long-lived endeavor.)

WordPress for Web Sites, Blogs, Ecommerce and Membership Sites

WordPress was originally developed as a free, open-source blogging platform. It has evolved into a powerful site tool that’s used by major newspapers, universities and businesses—and it’s still free.

WordPress is not the simplest option out there, but it is the most scalable. Starting with a simple one-click template, you can later evolve your site into an extremely sophisticated and powerful system. WordPress allows you to start small and end up big, without ever having to change platforms or portage your content from one interface to another.

WordPress.org offers free downloads to install on your own domain. Many web hosts (including my favorite, Westhost) also offer free, one-click installation.

WordPress.com offers free, hosted blog sites on their domain.

It Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect

The web is not a permanent medium. It encourages flexibility and experimentation. Yes, you can get started now, on a shoestring! A very short shoestring. Or even no string at all. Your site isn’t perfect? That really doesn’t matter, because it will continue to change as you learn and grow. Sometimes it just makes sense to begin simply, even when you’re aiming high.

Do you have your own free site source, comment, or experience to share? Please join the discussion.

At least half my clients have come to me because something wasn’t working with their previous web designer. Generally, what’s bugging them is the communication process. And because they’re not comfortable communicating, their sites have gone stagnant. I’ve heard things like “He only communicates by email; I can’t ever just phone him.” Or, “I was shocked when I got my bill, he never said it would cost that much.” Or “He said he can’t fix [fill in the blank problem] without buying [fill in the blank expensive new technology]—do I really need it?”

Usually, these businesspeople suffered in silence over a period of some time before their paths crossed mine. They’ve had to shrug their shoulders about work that never got done, plans that stayed in limbo, money not made, money spent unwisely, and precious time wasted.

Do you want the site of your dreams, and depend on your designer to get you there? Here are eight ways to have a more comfortable, productive, and ultimately, profitable relationship with your designer.

• Use your designer as a consultant. If you discuss your thoughts and plans for changes with your designer while your thoughts are still in gestational stages, she or he can often give you feedback, ideas, and suggestions for cheaper/better/easier ways to accomplish your goals. They’ll also have time to research new technologies they may have heard or read about that might help you achieve what you’re looking for—before the last-minute crunch.

• Batch your changes. If you batch your web revisions together rather than sending 15 individual emails, it saves your designer time, and saves you money.

• Don’t pretend to understand what your designer is talking about. Keep asking questions. “How will that help me?” “How will that save me time/money?” “How will that (technology, process, proposal) help me achieve my goals for the site?”

• If your designer asks you to sign a contract, read it carefully! One client, Erica, came to me for web site changes which required the original Photoshop files used to create her site. Her former designer responded with a snippy note instructing her to read her contract. Yes, he owned the Photoshop files… and charged her over a thousand dollars to ransom them.

• Which brings me to the next point: clarify up front whether you own your site design and artwork.

• Communicate proactively and clearly about money, pricing, and what you’re willing to spend. Never be afraid to ask “Is there a less expensive way to accomplish the same goal?” And the follow-up question to that one, “What are the trade-offs of doing it that way?” When you ask—and you must—your designer should be able to state clearly what can be accomplished given the funds you have. That said, all technical projects occasionally run into unexpected glitches that aren’t anyone’s fault. Which leads me to the next item.

• Be accessible and easy to communicate with, without being a micromanager. You may cut yourself off from crucial information by being either inaccessible, or overly invested in details. Give your designer room to work while letting them know you’re available when needed.

• Choose a collaborator, not a web site Nazi. Your designer is there to give you their most skilled support and advice to help you achieve your goals, not to impose a vision, style, or business model upon your site. If you can’t communicate with your designer, look for another. Immediately!

If you have a designer already, these are proactive ways to get a lot more out of the relationship. If you don’t, they’re selection criteria. Whether you need a designer once a year, or once a week, you and your business deserve the best.

What’s involved in a web site redesign? A little, or a lot. It depends upon two things:

(1) what your goals are, and

(2) how the site was created in the first place.

Your Goals

I’ve helped people redesign their sites for a lot of reasons:

• Adding features to an existing design. 
• Wanting a more flexible system that allows them to change and update the site themselves. 
• The site feels totally outdated and limiting; they want to redo the whole thing. 

The first step in a redesign is figuring out what your real needs are. Are you looking for higher sales, better data collection, easier purchase process, more clients, more memberships or subscriptions, fewer customer service calls, no more emails asking the same questions over and over, etc. Do you need your site to express who you and your business are now, not who you were five years ago?

Make a list, and prioritize what you want from a revamped site before you start.

The First Secret: Design

There are three parts to any web site redesign: the design, marketing, and technical aspects. All of them tie into and effect each other.

First, is the actual design portion. This includes:

• Adapting new content or technical options without compromising an existing design, or
• Creating a completely new site, including layout, navigation, colors, typography and imagery.

The Second Secret: Marketing

Second is marketing. By “marketing,” I mean the entire user experience created by the combination of content and visual interface. Questions to ask yourself here are,

• What actions do you want people to take on each one of your pages?
• How are you persuading them to do this?

“Marketing” is tied into every aspect of your site, from the visual look and feel, to what kind of payment system and shopping cart you choose. A redesign is the best opportunity you can have to think about how your users’ experience can be enhanced—added to, simplified, clarified—in ways that grow your business. You want every page on your site to steer the user to a single action, whether it’s to sign up for your mailing list, purchase a product, or simply click to the next page in a sequence.

“Marketing” also encompasses the selection of keywords and keyphrases that you use to get organic and/or paid search results. If you need professional help to determine your keywords, by all means, get it.

The Third Secret: The Technical Portion of a Redesign

The technical area is the most difficult one for many non-technical people to assess, and yet it too can determine the success of failure of the site. It can also be the source of large unexpected costs. We’re talking here about:

• What scripting language(s) your site is constructed with—HTML, PHP, CSS, Javascript, etc.
• Where your site is hosted,
• Whether your site is tied to a particular template system, like Shopify or Yahoo Stores,
• What software or platform is used to build the site—Dreamweaver, Cold Fusion, WordPress, etc.,
• How much flexibility is built into the site, 
• Whether you or your staff can alter and update it yourselves, and
• How search-engine friendly your site is (actual keyword and keyphrase deployment in the site, see Is Your Site’s “Invisible Sloppy Web Design” Sending Visitors Away?)

There may be cost (or other) advantages to making changes in one or all of these areas during a redesign. Web technology changes very fast, and what was effective five years ago may no longer be the way to go now—or tomorrow. Some designers know nothing about business needs; some programmer-types know nothing about creating a visually pleasing site. You need to work with someone who is aware of the benefits to you and your business of planning ahead for maximum flexibility.

Bottom Line

A redesign is an opportunity, a moment when careful planning and analysis now can save you hours of effort and a bundle of money down the road. Sometimes, the word “redesign” is a misnomer, because you’re really creating a whole new site. In other cases, a redesign is exactly what’s called for to fix or add to a working site.

Whichever route you take to revamp your small business web site, your designer—or your design team, even if that’s just you and your designer (or just you!)—needs to understand the trade-offs among the three key areas: esthetic, marketing, and technical. Handling these three areas well will give you a site that can be phenomenally successful.

More Web Redesign Resources

Two of the best marketing-type guides I know to putting together a successful small business web site are Sufi master business coach Mark Silver’s Heart Centered Web Sites, and marketing coach Robert Middleton’s Web Site Toolkit. Both will tell you what kinds of pages you need and what kinds of language or “calls to action” to use in order to create a site that improves your business.

If you’re just starting out in business, I also recommend that you pick up a copy of Middleton’s Infoguru Marketing Manual. It covers the basics—how to talk and write interestingly about your business, and exactly what tasks to do to market your business. Yes, I am an affiliate! I’ve been using and recommending Middleton’s products for nearly ten years because he’s made such a huge positive difference in my own business.

Writing recently about how to choose a shopping cart, I realized that you can’t really talk about carts without talking about payment collection. How do you actually collect your customers’ money? To get your online store to work the way you want, you’ve got to to hack through the whole confusing mish-mash of shopping carts, payment gateways, merchant accounts, and third-party processors. It tends to make people’s heads spin. So, in the interests of sanity, here’s the quick-and-dirty on what’s what with payment processing.

When you buy something in the grocery store, you choose your items, put them in a cart, then check out by getting your stuff run through the scanner and paying the total. The transaction path, the mechanics of transferring the money from your pocket to the store owner’s, is something like this:

In an online store the process is similar. You put your items in a shopping cart, which is actually a bit of software that remembers your items and computes their cost when you’re done. When you check out, instead of a cash register where you fork over your money, there is a “payment gateway.” The gateway sends your money along to the bank, where it goes into an “Internet enabled merchant account,” a business account which is specially configured to receive money from the gateway. With an online store, the transaction path looks like this:

Here, the payment gateway is the conduit between the online shopping cart, and the bank.

Each of these three components is essential in order to process transactions. They’re independent of each other, yet must all work together… or, in Internet parlance, they must be compatible. Sometimes a particular bank sets up their accounts to work with one gateway; sometimes your bank gives you a choice of gateways. So, for example, you could mix and match by selecting one item from each of the three columns below:

This kind of setup works great. You have control over the entire purchase process. There are good fraud protections in place. No one else’s brand goes anywhere on your site, unless you want it to be. So what’s the catch? For many start-up web retailers, the hangup is price.

Sample fees for each component:

If your credit history is poor, or you’re running a business considered “fringe” by banks (astrology readings, energy healing, etc.), or you don’t have much in the way of tangible assets, you’ll rates at the high end of the range. Banks scrutinize this kind of account much as they would a loan. In fact, because of the delay between the computerized transaction and the money actually moving from one place to another, they consider it to be a loan. For a sole proprietor or microbusiness who wants a web store to pay for itself, it’s hard to pony up this kind of bucks before the site has made even a cent.

Third Party Payment Processors

But all is not lost. This is where “third-party payment processors” come into the picture. There are two basic types of payment processors. First, there are the kind who take a percentage of your sales, hold the money and distribute it on a weekly or monthly schedule, sans their percentage. 2checkout.com and ccnow.com are two well-known ones.

The second type of third-party payment processor is what I call the “pseudo-banks,” services like Paypal and Google checkout, which process your transactions, take a smaller percentage of your sales, and hold the money in your account until you withdraw or transfer it. Percentages taken are generally less with this type of account. They can supply a free shopping cart, too.

In either case, the transaction process looks like this:

Both types of processor can supply shopping carts too, so that your entire transaction process is handled, start to finish. Most can handle multiple languages and currencies, and can accept all major credit cards. Additionally, most third-party processors can be used like gateways, that is, you can select your own shopping cart, and you use your own bank account. They simply process the money for you.

Here are comparable costs:

So what’s the catch here? Control. You pay little or nothing in setup costs, and the percentage fees are reasonable. But, your 3^rd-party processor hosts the checkout page, and controls its entire appearance except, perhaps, for the placement of one logo image by you. It may not allow you to process certain types of transactions, like subscriptions, or memberships.

Additionally, there is a 3^rd party interposed between you and your customers. If there’s a transaction issue, people can be aggravated and confused by having more than one party to deal with, whereas with a merchant account, your business is responsible for the entire transaction, so a customer only has to deal with one business entity.

Finally, In the “pseudo-bank” kind of account, However, they tend to require users to already have an account with them, or to sign up for one during the transaction process. This can make for a confusing checkout process, and one that many people will simply skip. And, they are “pseudo-banks,” so generally your money is not insured.

What Should You Do?

If you want to give your customers a seamless purchasing experience from start to finish, a merchant account plus gateway plus cart is the way to go. If you’re on a tight budget, take a look at the reputable third-party processors who have a good track record, a long history of successful payouts, and few online complaints. Make that whatever combination you choose can handle the kind of transaction, and the types of payments, that you need for your business model. And happy selling!

If you’re setting up an online store, read my post on how to choose the best shopping cart for your site.

Do you wonder how to start a web site—whether you should hire an expensive designer, or use one of the off-the-shelf template systems that promise an “overnight site”? It’s a decision that can paralyze people before they even begin their business. And many clients have come to me some ways down the road, realizing they made the wrong choice and their business is suffering for it. When you’re just starting out, how do you know what kind of web platform to choose?

Is your vision modest, or ambitious?

One business owner I work with, Jim, runs a huge web site selling workshops, e-books, audio downloads, hard copy books and DVD packages. This site is the source of most of Jim’s income. But three years in, Jim found his template too restrictive, even though he spent a lot of money to customize its look at the beginning. Updating the store was very tricky (one expert Jim hired accidentally brought the whole site down for a week), and expensive. Jim felt frustrated that he couldn’t easily create custom landing and sales pages for co-branded products and events he was developing with colleagues. He couldn’t “escape” his template. What could Jim do to make his site work better for him?

Another client, Deborah, is a bodyworker with a large long-time clientele. Deborah, unlike Jim, simply wanted a place to display her office info, briefly explain her techniques and philosophy, and announce special workshops from time to time. She has no merchandise to sell, nor is she interested in developing any. Ever! Deborah sought a very simple web presence with zero maintenance. Does she need to pay a designer for a totally custom site?

Do you have the budget for major changes?

Jim’s livelihood depends upon developing products based on his expertise, and selling them online. After I started working with Jim, we decided to migrate his entire site to a custom Dreamweaver-based design which, along with 1shoppingcart, allows for a unique look, and relatively easy updating and alteration.

The ubiquity of the platform means that anyone who knows html and CSS can easily modify his site. As his needs evolve, he’s not stuck forever with one design, or one designer. In the long run, this new setup saves Jim money and gives him the flexibility his business needs in order to grow. However, the time and expense of porting the whole site over could have been avoided, had Jim known the restrictions of his original choice.

Deborah, on the other hand, knows herself, her clients and her business—and she knows she’s not going to going to need more than a “brochure” web site. We set Deborah up with a simple WordPress template whose blogging platform offers a quick and easy way for her to announce special events and workshops without knowing anything about web technology. She isn’t likely to outgrow this site for many years… but if she ever does, the WordPress platform offers enough flexibility for her very small site that a complete “redesign” will be neither time-consuming, nor expensive. This is a good decision for her.

Are you particular about color, layout, look, branding?

Another client, Terry, wanted a masculine, professional look for his business consulting site. Terry is a do-it-yourselfer who’s often in a hurry. To create his first site, he purchased a template package which included a number of design and color selections, one of which matched the look he wanted. However, after spending six hours one afternoon trying to figure out how to position an image in precise alignment with the text on a page, Terry called me in frustration. It took me another hour to determine that the package Terry purchased didn’t allow the fine level of control that Terry was after.

Terry had made an impulsive decision, which, luckily, didn’t cost much money. However, it cost him a good deal of time before determining that he needed a more customizable platform. For many of us small business owners, time is the most precious commodity of all.

Which brings me to the last question.

Do you have the desire or expertise to modify and update your own site?

If not, is the expertise required to help you change your site widely available, or is your platform so unique or “techie” that you’ll have to either find a super-specialist, or pay someone for their learning curve? This happened to a client, Thomas, who bought an expensive blogging system which did everything he needed, and offered lots of flexibility. But, you had to be a programmer to run it!

Thomas is not a programmer, and he discovered too late that unfortunately, experts on his platform are few and far between. Thomas couldn’t make simple changes himself, so he procrastinated on his updates and got way behind what his active mind was able to dream up. His income was suffering from the limitations of his web platform.

After Thomas and I began working together, we migrated Thomas’ site to a WordPress platform, with a custom design. Thomas now happily does all his own modifications and updates, and is quick to take advantage of the latest plugins to add cutting-edge functionality to his site.

The best of both worlds

For many years, a custom Dreamweaver site was the gold standard of small business web design. However with the explosion of database-driven content management software, this is no longer the case.

Open-source blogging and content management software such as WordPress and Joomla have matured to the point where they offer the best of both worlds: flexible design platforms, plus the ease of ready-made templates (which exist by the thousands).

You don’t need to be a blogger to take advantage of these systems. These days, more designers are working largely, if not exclusively, in CMS systems like WordPress to create ordinary business and ecommerce sites as well as blogs. And if you’re a do-it-yourselfer, these systems let you handle a lot of your own updates without needing to know any code at all.

So what should you do?

If you need a small, quick, inexpensive site which you don’t expect to grow—and you aren’t fussy, or really like a ready-made template design—go with an inexpensive template system. There are very simple WordPress templates for small business sites, as well as many available from reliable providers like Yahoo Stores and GoDaddy.

If you’ve got, or plan to have, a large, unique, and constantly changing site which makes money from merchandise, and you have no interest in doing any updates or maintenance yourself, a fully customized site, whether using a CMS/blogging system or not, will give you the flexibility you need in order to grow. Hire a designer and get to it!

Finally, if you’re a do-it-yourselfer with big ambitions but starting on a shoestring, a WordPress site is the perfect choice.

The question I am asked more than any other is how to choose a shopping cart. It can be an intimidating decision, because there are such differences in price, capabilities, and setup. And, the wrong cart can seriously cut into your sales. So, after working on hundreds of sites, here are my simple guidelines to help you find a cart that will do everything you need, as easily, flexibly and affordably as possible.

There are five types of carts I’ll mention: template-based carts, all-in-one services, free carts used with Paypal or Google Checkout, WordPress carts, and last but not least, my favorite and most recommended carts.

1. Template-based carts

Yahoo Stores, Miva Merchant, Shopify and Zen Cart are some of the most popular, although there are dozens, if not hundreds out there. To actually collect money, these carts usually require you to have an Internet-enabled merchant account, and a payment gateway such as Authorize.Net, Payflow or CyberSource. For the merchant account and gateway, you’ll pay a small percentage of sales (1.5% or so to upwards of 5% depending on your credit rating), plus a fixed per-item sales charge (usually $0.25 to $0.35), plus a gateway fee—in addition to the purchase price of the cart.

Many people are very happy using these template systems. However, I tend to feel they’re not worth the time and trouble. First, being template-based, designing the appearance of a store using these carts can be a real pain. If you’re particular about the look, feel, and layout of your store, you’ll tear your hair out in frustration again and again… and still not have it looking ‘right.’ Second, because your store is tied to a template, you’re pretty much wedded to this cart for the foreseeable future. Locking yourself in can feel like a costly mistake once a cheaper, better technology comes along. And finally the killer: I find the entire system to be too costly for low-volume or novice sellers.

2. All-in-one carts-plus-payment-collection

For example, 2checkout.com and ccnow.com. These carts advertise themselves as “merchant account alternatives” because they handle the entire transaction from start to finish, collect and hold all sales proceeds, deduct their own fees, and send you the remainder by check or direct deposit on a monthly or weekly schedule. You don’t need a separate merchant account, gateway, or payment collection service of any kind.

They generally offer a web-based interface through which you can create purchase links for products on your site. They handle multiple currencies, offer a clean, easy interface for your clients, don’t require much up-front investment, allow you to accept a variety of credit and debit cards, and are easy to administer.

Pitfalls? First, expense. With 2checkout, for example, you’ll pay a $49 setup fee in addition to a per-sale fee of $0.50 or so, plus roughly 5% of each sale.

Second, what if the company you’ve selected goes under? A client of mine lost a month’s sales, over $4,000, when her all-in-one company (located in another state) went belly up without warning, and without paying out the money it had already collected for products already sold. State agencies were useless in attempting to recover the funds. She lost all her Christmas sales that year.

Third, the payment page tends to prominently display their brand, and offer limited customization.

And finally, these carts don’t usually support affiliate programs.

This kind of cart can be a good choice when you’re not too concerned with pinching pennies, want to easily and quickly “test the waters” with marketing a product or two, don’t have a track record selling online, or want to provide a multi-currency option for your customers. But, caveat emptor.

3. Simple, free carts that require both the merchant and the buyer to have an account with an online “pseudo bank”

E.g., Google Checkout and Paypal Web Payments Standard. This is also a cart-plus-payment solution. For payment processing, Google and Paypal charge a per-fee transaction of $ 0.20 to $0.30, plus a tiny percentage of each sale. Both services “hold” your funds, acting as a clearinghouse until you choose to transfer them to the bank account of your choice.

The carts tend to be simple, bare-bones carts with elementary shipping calculations. Using them is quick, cheap, and easy. They have the benefit of brand recognition and financial credibility.

The drawbacks? First, some buyers simply won’t buy if they have to sign up for a Google or Paypal account. And Paypal buries the “no Paypal required” option, so many potential buyers won’t spot it. Second, the payment pages are not beautiful, and are customizable only to a limited extent. Third, and often most imporotant, these services do not provide hosting for secure digital downloads.

These services are a good choice if you’re on a budget and can work around the digital issue.

Very importantly, the payment processing portion of both Paypal and Google Checkout can be used with many other free-standing carts.

Also note that Paypal offers another payment processing option for an additional $30 per month, called Web Payments Pro. It must be used with a third-party cart, but it makes credit card payment sans Paypal account a much more visible and easy option.

4. Carts that work exclusively with the WordPress blogging platform

There are ecommerce WordPress themes which have the cart integrated into them, like the specially designed Market Theme and the Ecommerce Theme. There are also free plugins which can be incorporated into any existing WordPress site or blog, such as the Ecommerce, the eShop, and Shopp plugins. The themes tend to cost from $50 to $100; the plugins are usually free.

These can be a great alternative to standalone carts, although in my experience, the plugins can be slow and slightly glitchy. Both themes and plugins require a payment processing service (either a merchant account, a “merchant account alternative,” or Paypal/Google).

I don’t recommend any of these carts (yet!) for high-volume sites.

5. In a class by themselves

There are two carts I most often recommend, based on their ease of use, features and flexibility: 1shoppingcart.com and e-junkie.com.

The luxury model. 1shoppingcart is used by so many high-volume Internet retailers and marketers for good reason. It’s a web-based cart (nothing to install) which generates product links to be added to your existing site. You can handle thousands of products, and generate discounts, cross-sells, upsells, and specially priced bundles. You can use automatic recurring billing to sell subscriptions or create installment payment plans. You can automatically put buyers on product-specific email lists, and send them as many automated emails as you wish. You can also manage your newsletter or mailing list in the same interface. Both hard products and digital downloads are well supported. The interface is generally straightforward, both for you and your customers. Technical help is available via phone and email, and the technical staff is responsive and helpful. The cart works with most payment services and gateways, including Authorize.net, Cybersource, Paypal, and 2checkout.com.

This cart is expensive. It will do everything but slice your bread. But if you’re serious about selling on your site, this is THE top-of-the-line cart and helps you do everything possible to maximize your revenues.

The economy car. E-junkie is the up-and-coming low-budget alternative to 1shoppingcart. It’ll get you where you need to go, with quick, inexpensive, and no-frills secure sales of digital or tangible products.

It’s got most, but not all, of the features of 1shoppingcart: secure download links, somewhat-customizable cart, some shipping options, product bundles and gift coupons. It works with about half a dozen of the most popular payment processors, including Paypal, Google Checkout, 2Checkout, and Authorize.Net. It also offers the ability to manage your own affiliate program.

Downsides: It does not offer programmable autoresponders or recurring billing. Its interface is sometimes convoluted and slightly confusing. Limited number of payment gatweays accepted. Simple but ugly checkout/download pages.

Bottom line

My final answer:

• If you want to sell very cheaply, don’t mind appearances, and don’t need secure download links, use Paypal Web Payments Standard or Pro and/or Google Checkout to process your payments. As your shopping cart, use a WordPress ecommerce theme/free plugin, or use the free Paypal/Google carts.
• If you need secure download links for digital products—ebooks, mp3s, video, etc.—then your quickest, cheapest, easiest option is to use Google or Paypal to process your payments, and pay a small monthly fee to use the E-junkie cart.
• If you want a top-of-the-line experience for you and your customers, with maximum flexibility and ease of use, use 1shoppingcart, along with a merchant account and gateway like Authorize.net or Cybersource.

And th-th-th-that’s all, folks! Happy selling to you.

Now more than ever, business IS change. Your focus, your processes, your technology, your products, your services, your interests, your employees—which of these isn’t continuously evolving, shifting, changing and growing?

To cite an extreme, one of my clients was called crazy for moving his retail location four times, to three different cities, in his first ten years in business. But during that time he built a thriving business and a loyal clientele. Recently, he’s had such great success with his latest move—putting his business online—that he doesn’t have to maintain any brick-and-mortar retail location at all.

Those who risk nothing, gain nothing. How can you create a web presence that changes and grows with your business… and continues to enhance your image, effectiveness, and profitability?

Old, Inflexible Web Technologies

Some web technologies create web sites that are much more difficult to alter later. In earlier web days, there wasn’t much choice among site technologies. You’ll often find these in legacy sites, and in poorly designed sites as well.

1. Nested tables. Altering the structure of a site with tables can be time-consuming (read: costly) beyond belief. Until recently, most sites used nested tables, so don’t be alarmed if your site does too. Just make sure any new site uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for layout, rather than tables.

 2. Graphic sites. Even recently, I’ve worked on sites that were nothing but Photoshop files exported as jpgs. To change the tiniest comma on one of these pages means opening a Photoshop file, making the change, re-exporting the file as a jpg, piecing the page back together, and loading it in the browser to verify. And doing that whole process over if for some reason the page didn’t look as it should. If you’re trying to update the site and don’t have the original Photoshop files, you’re out of luck… you’ll need to re-create the entire page from scratch. If you have one of these sites, replace it!

3. Flash. Flash is a way of creating animations that look very slick and gorgeous on the right site. But can be difficult to find a developer who knows how to work well with Flash, and a site that is built entirely from Flash is not search-engine friendly and is tough to update. Unless  you’re an architect, videographer, filmmaker or game designer who really needs cool animations on a site, use Flash sparingly.

Building a Web Site That Can Change and Grow with Your Business

On the other hand, there are technologies that lend themselves to allowing easier alterations down the line. I’m talking about common, ubiquitous site-building tools; nothing that requires custom programming or is beyond the budget of most small businesses and creative entrepreneurs. 

Some of these tools, like CSS and include files, can often be grafted on to an older site to extend its lifespan. Others, like Dreamweaver templates and WordPress or other blogging/CMS platforms, are best implemented as part of initial site construction.

Here’s a quick list of common technologies that can bring more flexibility to your web presence:

1. Dreamweaver templates & libraries. Dreamweaver has been the web site workhorse for the past ten years. Even with a table-based site, Dreamweaver templates can make site-wide alterations much easier. Using Dreamweaver templates to set up your site, you can:

• Instantly make site-wide changes in things like background color, headline styles, or minor layout adjustments.
• Add or subtract menu items, sidebar, header, or footer include files.

CONS: Dreamweaver templates tend to be error-prone and temperamental to create and maintain for large sites. Implementation and updating requires Dreamweaver. And they’re very difficult to apply to a preexisting site, so they’re best included from the beginning of the design process.

2. Include files. This is a way of including a smaller file within an html or php page, such as a menu that appears on every page of the site, a header, a footer, etc. The main benefits of include files are that:

• Updating these site-wide “include” files requires only one file change, and one upload. In some ways they’re easier to manage than Dreamweaver templates because, for a large site, you only need to upload one file per change, rather than reloading every single page in the site.

CONS: sometimes require special URLs & host setup, so best to be added as part of the initial site (.shtml vs. .html) Because include files can become unwieldy if there are a lot of them in a site, they’re best used for clearly demarcated functions, like a navigation block, or an ad block, rather than for general layout.

3. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS has tremendous versatility. With a site that’s been set up in CSS, you can:

• Alter the entire layout, color scheme, type size and spacing by changing one CSS files alone. Check out Zen Garden for examples of how changing CSS code (and artwork) can create completely different “looks” for the same material.
• Create visually rich and varied designs that would have been impossible using old-style web pages.

CONS: CSS can get very complex. Trouble-shooting can be quite tricky.

4. WordPress or other content management system (CMS). With most of these, you can:

• Easily migrate your site to other blogging or CMS platforms
• Change the theme (look) of your site in minutes
• Quickly add and configure plugins and new technologies
• Automate your site with auto-archive and auto-RSS capabilities
• Add content with no html knowledge
• Post to your site via email

CONS: WordPress or another database-driven site can be costly and labor-intensive to customize. If something goes wrong, you may need a programmer to troubleshoot.

If you’re planning a revamp, or creating a new site, it’s important to think about the issue of flexibility up front, and talk about it with your designer. You’ll save time and money down the road with a site that’s easier to update… and, your bottom line will benefit from a site that stays current with what you’re actually doing in your business.

While  we can’t predict all the changes and adaptations we’ll be called to make in the coming years—who knows, the next generation of web sites might be 3-D spaces accessed with virtual reality goggles instead of monitors!—at least for the foreseeable future, your business will be more likely to prosper in changing times with a site that has the ability to grow and change built into it from the start.

So what’s the big deal about RSS… it’s just another intimidating ingredient of Internet Alphabet Soup, right?

Not quite. RSS is a way of putting a message into an envelope. The message can be anything digital: an article, an mp3, a video, whatever. The envelope is a few lines of code (XML, to add another ingredient to the soup). With it, you can send your messages to anyone who can read the code—anyone who has a newer browser, or an RSS or “feed” reader. Once a person sets their browser or reader to “tune in” to the URL of your RSS feed, they can receive all of the messages you broadcast, in sequential order. Why is this a great thing, and how will it make your life easier?

You Don’t Have to Know Any Code

To read RSS, you need a newer browser, or an online reader like Google Reader or My Yahoo. Or, to read an audio RSS message (a “podcast,”) you can also use an audio RSS reader like iTunes.

To create RSS, you can use a simple program like Feeder or Feed for All. Or, you can use almost any blogging platform—Blogger, WordPress, Moveable Type, etc., to create RSS feeds automatically, without lifting a finger.

Why Bother Using RSS? Time Savings.

Well, first, let’s start with the reader’s point of view. Is there a subject that you’re really interested in, or follow, by regularly checking certain web sites? Suppose, for instance, you have a Macintosh computer, you write on and about Macs for a living, and you need to keep up with everything Mac. Does this mean you click on a list of bookmarks to log into 40 or 50 web sites several times a day to check breaking Mac news and rumors?

Absolutely not! You use your RSS reader (I personally favor Google Reader) to cut the time you’d spend checking sites in half, or even less. 

Speed Through Updates and News Using RSS

 How? Simple. First, subscribe to a site’s RSS feed by entering its URL into your feed reader. Often this can be done with one click of your mouse. 

 Once you’ve subscribed, a list of articles, audio files, etc. will appear in your feed reader or browser. In Google Reader, for example, the list of sites you’ve subscribed to shows up like this:

On the left is the topic, “mac,” and below it, a list of sites with RSS feeds you’ve subscribed to. The numbers in parentheses indicate the number of unread messages. (The sites that are not bolded contain no unread messages). 

Say we want to check the site “9 to 5 Mac.” We highlight it with our cursor. On the right, appears a list of recent updates from 9 to 5 Mac, by title and date. The white background means they’re unread; the blue means you’ve seen them already. 

Click on any one of these titles, and you can read the entire article… without ever having to leave your feed reader.

See what I mean? You can scan all the latest headlines and news—or simply see whether or not there is any news—on dozens of blogs or web sites. You can do this just by opening your reader and clicking down your list—and you can do it in five minutes.

RSS, An Easy Way to Communicate

Now, from the site-owner’s point of view, why publish an RSS feed? Well, so people who are interested can keep up with your site quickly and easily. If you have a static site which rarely changes, this will be less useful. But if you own a blog, or frequently post newsletters, software updates, talks, music, etc., RSS is a fantastic and simple tool for keeping in touch with your fans, clients and customers. And, with the current blog explosion, it will be used more and more.

Blogs and RSS

One of the really great things about using a blogging platform to create your web site is that the software is automatically set up to publish RSS. You don’t have to do a thing! All your updates are being automatically streamed to readers who “sign up” by bookmarking your feed’s URL in their feed reader.  This is one of the great benefits of creating sites using WordPress or another blogging platform rather than creating a static site.

But no matter what kind of site you have, RSS can help you keep up with news and new developments more quickly and easily. Try setting up your own feed reader, and when you’re reading a blog you like, and see a (usually orange) graphic like this one… you’ll know exactly what to do… and you’ll have one more little way to make your life easier.

Two clients came to me recently, wondering why their sites didn’t come up at all in search engines. Both sites were created by the same web designer, and both clients were very pleased with their site’s appearance. But where was their traffic? Why couldn’t they find their own sites on Google, or any other search engine?

If You Build It, They Will Come… NOT!

When I took a look behind the scenes at the actual coding of both sites, I found the culprit. There were no title tags, metatags, alt tags, or keywords. The designer built attractive sites… but by these omissions, guaranteed their invisibility.

I don’t think he meant to cause problems. But he didn’t take the extra step and add in these small things that in today’s competitive environment make such a huge difference to the success or failure of a site to attract business. But who knew? His work was sloppy, yet invisible to anyone who doesn’t know how to read the source code on a web page. It’s as if these web sites had an undetected saboteur who secretly, quietly, and invisibly, sent all their visitors away before they’d even knocked at the door.

Search Engines Look for Text

How do search engines find your site? They look for text. If there’s no text, your site has a hard time being “seen.” Does this mean that sites with images, video, and animations are always invisible? No. But it does mean that you need to use text to describe the contents of your site. And for the text to be effective, you must use it in certain ways, in certain places. Here’s how to do it.

A Simple Search Engine Optimization and Visibility Checklist for You and Your Web Designer

Whether you’re building your own site, or hiring a designer, here’s a list of simple things to check before your site goes live.

1. Domain names count. Try to use your keyword(s) in your domain name (“bluewidgets.com”). If you’ve already got your domain name, don’t worry about this one, just focus on the others.

2. File and image names are even more important. Don’t just name your page files and images “products.html” and “image1.jpg.” Use your keywords! (“bluewidgetstore.html”, “bluewidget1.jpg”.)

3. Do not leave spaces in the name of any file that is used on your site (“bluewidget.html,” or “blue-widget.html” but not “blue widget.html”).

4. Fill in ALL the “image alt” tags with text that uses key words to describe the image (alt=”blue widget 1, frontal photo”). Do this for EVERY image on your site.

5. Super-important: fill in the “Title” tag on all pages! Use descriptive terms that use both the site keywords, and the contents of the page (“Blue Widgets Store – fine-tune your rotilators and improve your flipsacalcs with precision-engineered carbon steel blue widgets”).

6. Fill in the “Description” metatag with a client-centered description of each page. A few search engines will still use this tag on their results page (“Fine-tune your rotilators! Precision blue widgets, list of all sizes in stock”).

7. Fill in the “Keywords” metatag with a list, from most important to least important, of your page’s keywords. Although these are not so important anymore, it won’t hurt, and it may help, to have them. Important tip: don’t bother putting any keyword in this tag that doesn’t actually already appear on the page. So, if you don’t have a widget named “Famous Blue Widget” on this page, don’t put the word “famous” in the metatags just because you think it might help. It won’t!

8. Internal navigation—is it done with images, or with text? If your navigation links are actually images, be sure to put a redundant set of text-based navigation links on the page as well. Often, the footer is a good place for these.

9. Use link titles, and put page keywords in them!

10. Very important: instead just using bold text, or a larger font size, for headings, use the “h1″ and “h2″ tags. Try to put keywords in these headings.

11. Avoid Flash navigation! (Ask your designer.)

You and your designer don’t have to be rocket scientists or search engine pros to do this simple search engine optimization. Does it sound like extra work? Yes, a little. But it makes a huge difference in how many people actually find you. And it takes much less time to add these touches when you’re building the site than it does to go back and add them later.

Don’t sabotage your own traffic! Be visible! Make sure the invisible, behind-the-scenes code in your site is ready, and welcoming, to those search bots.

Has a site you’ve owned suffered from ISWD (Invisible Sloppy Web Design)? Have you fixed one yourself, or had to hire someone to do it for you? Join the discussion.