"Make Your Website Work" Google Ebook
Google’s new Ebook “Make Your Website Work” is out now.
It’s geared mainly towards increasing conversion rates for those who sell products online, but does give some helpful tips on how to present information to visitors and encourage them to pick up the phone or send an email.
Give it a read, you never know, there might be something new for you to learn in there which you can implement on your website.
We stumbled across this video about “thinking outside the box” and it made us chuckle. Thanks to Joseph Pelling for posting it up and brightening our day.
outside the box from joseph Pelling on Vimeo.
Remember guys, what you do with your clever little site is up to you and we’re working on including the huge wings, lasers and comfortable chairs!
I just found an article on the BBC News site about a builder in Colsterworth, UK, who expressed some careful optimism about the future, despite the recession.
Dave Ostler, who runs his own building firm, said “I’ve had to make a lot more effort to secure work,” but mentioned “no major concerns” about his family’s future. He also said that his wife Gail Ostler started her own business doing the books for local firms, after the prospects at the building firm she worked at looked to be taking a turn for the worse. “She felt with this credit crunch looming that she better not leave her destiny just in the hands of one firm so she started her own business and she has done very well in building up a client base.”
So it’s not all doom and gloom. Starting and running your own business can work, even now, and can bring in some extra cash to keep the scales balanced. This is the kind of thing we hope the Clever Little Site can really help people out with - giving start-ups a chance to hit the ground running. Check out the feature list to see what we can offer new businesses.
The Duke's new look
This month we’ve picked the Duke of Marlborough pub in St Albans for our Site of the Month. The Duke have had their clever little site for a while now, but recently decided to go for a whole new look. A new template and a new logo have really made a difference and really show how versatile a clever little site can be. If you’re ever in St Albans, stop by for a drink and don’t forget to congratulate them on their fantastic website!
Today we (that is myself, Ally and Alex) have been wasting our time writing haikus, and we’ve come up with some tech support haikus we’d like to share.
On hitting the panic button:
Haiku tech support:
If computer has frozen,
Press reset button
On Windows errors:
A mouse click creates
big bad error messages.
Haiku support plea.
On saving your life:
You have deleted
everything you just wrote.
Ctrl-Z may help.
On essay deadlines:
My printer won’t print,
I am bereft of toner.
Please print this for me.
On the best browser in the world (hur hur):
Nothing is working.
Oh, Internet Explorer,
You big pile of ****.
On where the blame really lies:
If you have Vista,
And your computer runs slow,
It’s your stupid fault.
If you’ve got any you’d like to share with the class, leave a comment!
Something crossed my mind as I was driving through St Albans today. I was sat behind a trader’s van at a roundabout, reading the stuff on the back of it. It had the guy’s name, what he did, and a phone number. Which would be an effective piece of advertising if it weren’t now a crime to pick up your mobile phone while driving.
Now here’s a quick test:
Have a look at that for a moment, then drive down to the shops, pick up some pop tarts and almonds, maybe drop in at your Mum’s house (Mums love it when you drop in) and then head home for a nice sit down.
Now, can you still remember that phone number?
Probably not, right? That’s because, at the end of the day, it’s just a bunch of numbers, and most people find long numbers pretty hard to remember. You tend to have to dress up like it’s the 70s and run around shouting if you really want people to remember.
Too much like hard work (unless you’re these guys, I guess).
Can you tell where this is going?
Domain names are easy to remember, guys! If you’ve got a website, put your website address on your van! If you don’t have a website, get a clever little site and then put your website address on your van!
Then people can get home, go to your website, have a good look at what you do and how well you do it, and then feel really confident about phoning you up for a quote, using the phone number you’ve also listed on your site. By the way, Clever Little Site makes it really quick to put your phone number on every single page of your website, all at once.
And remember, the more memorable the address is, the more likely people are to remember it - there’s no need to be boring about it. Why not try something like help-my-roof-is-leaking.co.uk (for a roofer) or lets-get-plastered.co.uk (for a plasterer).
Without putting a website address on your van, you’re missing out on a great advertising opportunity, and pretty much throwing away potential business. And if your website address makes someone laugh, they may even tell a friend about it!
Statistics software like Google Analytics make it easy enough to know how your visitors are finding you; but what about the ones who aren’t finding you?
All too often, website owners target their keywords to what they think their clients are looking for rather than what they’re actually searching for. A specialised product may have plenty of jargon surrounding it which most people may not be aware of, so perhaps it’s not the best idea to include it? Then again maybe people are using the buzz words… What about geographical searches? Should you include your town or county in your keywords for example?
Unfortunately there’s no hard and fast rule. There are billions of websites covering just as many subjects so it’d be naive to suggest that one size fits all. What’s the solution then, I hear you ask? Get your hands dirty with Google’s Keyword Tool!
It’s a free service that lets you search by keyword or keyphrase to find out how popular it is. Not only do you get relatively precise local and monthly statistics but also suggestions on related keywords. Just visit https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal and type some keywords into the box to get started. Find a popular keyword and start optimising your clever little site yourself, today, for free!
Editing your own website can be that easy. Our new movie shows you just what you can do with clever little site.
We have just added a new demo video to YouTube. This video guides you through how to embed a YouTube video into your clever little site. More videos coming soon!
August’s site of the month: www.comfortzonesalon.co.uk
This month’s ‘site of the month award’ goes to Beccy O’Conner for her business site, The Comfort Zone. She has used her own bold logo as well as lots of images to create a very attractive looking site. By formatting her text in a clear and easy to read way, Beccy’s ‘treatments’ page is a great example of how to display a vast quality of information without compromising the look and style of your website.
See it at www.comfortzonesalon.co.uk
