Aaron Gerdes: Tag web

Web metrics are a small business problem, too (Part 1)

aarongerdes@gmail.com (Aaron Gerdes) — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 11:20:00 -0700

An article in BusinessWeek titled “Web Numbers: What’s Real?” (Found via Emergence Marketing) describes the difficulties of measuring website traffic. And there are many.

Anyone who’s tried to decipher the stats for a website, even when presented via a reasonable visual model, know that there’s lots of confusion. Often lay-people use the word “hits” to describe a visit to the site: in fact a hit occurs each time a file is downloaded as a user views an entire page (your page has several files, including the page itself and images). “Page views” is the technical term for the grouping of files that makes up a page — but then hopefully your users look at more than one page.. how do we determine that?

There are methods and tools to determine the above, but beyond that, it gets messy. The problem becomes huge when you have a website that uses heavy Flash content, or deliver content via an RSS feed, or AJAX (similar to what Gmail uses, where the page doesn’t always reload when there is a “state change”).

The article shows the impact of these shortcomings on Silicon Valley:

The dirty little secret of Silicon Valley is that no one knows exactly who is going where on the Web. That flies in the face of the impression that online advertising is the most dependably trackable ad medium of all time, a big reason spending on Web ads is expected to grow 33% this year, to $16 billion. But confusion over traffic measurement could cast a chill over the Web 2.0 craze. Valuations for startups such as Facebook Inc. and YouTube Inc. appear to be doubling every few months, but those numbers are based on traffic figures that could be misleading.

That’s an excellent point, but it matters for small businesses too: working on a more limited budget mandates you keep the performance of your website (and other marketing) accountable.

What tools work, and how can you interpret their data? I’m working on an intro to managing your website metrics and getting valuable information to improve bottom-line results. Stay tuned.

8 Quick Tips for Writing Copy

aarongerdes@gmail.com (Aaron Gerdes) — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 13:13:00 -0700

Maybe you’re in a Do-It-Yourself mood, or maybe you owe your copywriter a draft and want to kick things off right. Here are some basic practices, best applied after the “brain-dump” initial draft.

Start with the prospect’s problem. Common-sense when writing your service explanations, but also applies to things like your company and process descriptions. Start each section from the problem your prospects are looking to overcome (that’s what they’re most concerned about, after all).

Appeal to both the consequences of inaction and the benefits of solving the problem. Some people are motivated by negatives, some by positives. Make sure you don’t just focus on your own inclination.

Talk about benefits, not just features. A feature is a line item on a technical spec sheet. It requires some level of technical expertise to determine its value (if not expertise, at least thought — assume we’re lazy!). A benefit is what the product does for me or saves me from. I’m more interested in benefits.

Write as informally as suits your business. Think of a spectrum of obtuseness: Poetry – Prose – Persuasion.

Stories tell it best. Provide real-life examples of results your services delivered. Name names. Link to your case-studies and pepper service descriptions with mini-stories.

Include testimonials. Some people love ‘em, some people hate ‘em. The percentage of folks that love them may contain your biggest customer, so don’t write to yourself. Remember to tie them to a project and a person – anonymous testimonials have little impact for almost anyone.

Be concise.

Close with a call to action. If you’ve done a good job, people will be ready to know more. A good write up on your services will end with a call to learn more. Several of my team members are excellent copywriters. If you’re getting too busy to write or would like to reap the results of a high response rate, let’s discuss your project. Contact me!

This list isn’t exhaustive. Have more to add? Comments are welcome!

Is your building up to code?

aarongerdes@gmail.com (Aaron Gerdes) — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 00:31:00 -0800

In the article quoted before on anti-marketing design, Scoble has tangent:

It’s amazing how few corporate types get that the quality and engineering thought behind your HTML matters more than whether your site is pretty or not.

Another way to put it: if your building is beautiful but not up to code, you’re going to have problems.

Three reasons XHTML/CSS (business translation: recent) standards-compliant code is good for your business:

Ease maintenance/updating/redesign costs. Good code will separate the design/layout code from the formatted content. Doing so means that if you’d like to change part of a page layout, you edit one CSS file instead of ten or hundreds of HTML files.
Lower costs for deploying content in other forms. Related to the above. Create multiple stylesheets for a single body of content is easy. Now your website works on mobile phones and prints cleanly (yes, people still do that). Some will disagree, but I think standards-compliant code deploys better across multiple browsers and platforms. And it degrades gracefully (meaning old browsers will still see a readable version).
Accessibility: Better search engine ranking, wider audience. Standards-compliant code is more organized and clean, therefore easily parsed for computers and people. This means screen readers and other assistive devices can process the information on your site for the sight-impaired, for example. It also (I’ve heard this but cannot verify, so take with salt) can improve your search engine ranking by removing clutter and increasing your keywords-to-file-weight ratio.

Find out more about web standards.

Ugly Design Wins?

aarongerdes@gmail.com (Aaron Gerdes) — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 11:20:00 -0800

Robert Scoble posted some thoughts on what he calls “anti-marketing design.” Scoble contends that ugly designs make better websites: more sticky, better brands, more fun, and more revenue. He cites Google, Craig’s List, and MySpace as ugly successes.

I disagree with Scoble that ugliness drives the success of these sites (which is an idea he reinforces more in the comments).

Two factors attribute heavily to the success of these sites. This clearer if you divide the sites into two categories: functional and community.

The Functional

The functional sites are Google/Gmail and Flickr (but Flickr is also a community!, you say. I know, but its a task-oriented community). These sites improve on a function. Searching. Emailing. Organizing and sharing photos.

It’s true that these sites have low ornamentation. Is that absence of ornamentation due to a lack of design, or evidence of it?

The design, as I see it, is in the simplicity and ease/speed they let me get things done.

The Community

The community sites are MySpace and Craig’s List.

Criag’s List is clean and easy (once you get past the over-stuffed homepage).

MySpace is “ornamented” with ads, and I think it only overcomes this through communal opportunities for vanity (in web lingo, we call that stickiness).

No, really. What holds these sites together isn’t necessarily their usability. And that’s okay, it’s an important factor but they’re not failing miserably. These two sites are successful because they build communities. You can overcome lots with that (see Metcalfe’s Law).

To argue that these sites are just created for the love of whatever is pushing it. Their goal is stakeholder value, and that’s okay.

To say that these sites succeed just because we perceive them as being “authentic” (in the sense that their built by only one person), and that appeals to us because nobody is real with us in our committee-design driven world, is pushing it. That’s not the only, or even primary reason we use these sites. It’s appreciated, but in the postmodern state, we don’t expect that.

To say they succeed because they make something a little faster, simpler, and easier, or because they connect us to people – that makes more sense.

And in doing so, they’ve acheived good design.