The Internet Honey Do List for Business - Part 1

Improve Your Businesses Internet Presence:

Are you feeling overwhelmed? Do you have a nagging feeling you could do more to improve your company's internet presence. This next set of articles will give you a list of tasks you can use to get started.

Small business owners can feel overwhelmed by all the different jobs they need to do.
There are tasks related to their web site:

• Setting up a website
• Managing its content
• Making sure Google, Yahoo and Bing find it
• And doing  more ...
  

Social media has another list of to do's:

• Setting up Facebook accounts
• Maintaining Facebook pages
• Creating a Blog (and everything associated with blogging).
  
• And doing more ...
  

Branding and internet presence ideas:

• Creating a Google Local Business Listing
• Updating Local Search listings such as Yelp and CitySearch
• Registering a YouTube channel.
• And doing much more....
  

Getting Started

Assuming that you have a website and nothing else I'd begin with these tasks. If you don't have a website then that is where you should start - build one. (Shameless plug) Contact Zajon, we design and build websites.

1. Review your website.
2. Prepare to blog.
3. Set up a Google Business Listing.

Step 1 - Reviewing your website.

Since people searching the web will glance at your website for a brief period of time to see if will help them, your site needs to convey some basic information very fast. It should tell the user what your site is about and who it belongs to. If you sell garden supplies people should be able to tell after glancing at your home page a couple of seconds. They should also be able to identify your company name just as fast.

Quick Usability Testing
We are going to do a quick usability test on your site. To do this you will need to find people  (two - four) not familiar with your site but who could potentially be a customer - your target audience. Once you know who you are going to test your site on do the following.

1. Print the site's home page and an interior page (ex: Services, Products, Portfolio). >
2. Tell your test subject that you are going to show them two pages from a web site for a few seconds and want them to answer a few questions.
3. Show them your home page for about 5 seconds.
4. Ask them what was the site about? Listen to their answers.
   
5. Ask them what company owned the site? Listen to their answers.
6. Show them the interior page for 5 seconds or so. 
7. Ask them what section of the site are they in. Listen to their answers.
8. Ask them what they thought about the site. 

Write down or record their answers. Did they answer what you expected? How fast did they answer? Did they make any interesting comments? If your testers will let you record them with a video camera that's great, but jotting down notes about what they said is fine.

Congratulations - You have just done a very basic usability test. If your potential customers could not identify your service or product, and had a hard time saying what company owned the web site then you might want to think about some changes to your site.

If you are feeling adventurous and want to try one more test pick a task that you want users to do on your web site.  Show the tester he home page and ask them what they think they should do to accomplish that task. Ex: If you wanted to look up information about a product ask them, "If you came to this site looking for information about __________ where would you start?"

There is a lot more to usability testing but this is a basic test that I like to do with client sites. If you want to read more about design and usability, check out Steve Krug's book Don't Make Me Think.

Web Design Mistakes:

Next you can look at your site for some basic design problems. There are millions of pages devoted to web design mistakes. Try Googling "web design mistakes" - there were over 70 million results when I wrote this post. Everyone has their top 8, 10 and 50 list. I'm going to give you my list of 10 common issues that I see with new client sites. Five are design issues and five are Search Engine Optimization mistakes.

• Displaying Too Much Text - When text is not broken up into small paragraphs it is hard for readers to scan. A wall of text can discourage users.
• Making Links Difficult To Identify - Not underlining links or having them match the text of a site, or not differentiating visited links from fresh links.
• Having Confusing Navigation - Site navigation should be easy to understand and identify in a site. It should also consistent through out the site.
• Starting With Flash Splash Screens - I skip them or get tired of waiting for them to load and hit the back button, if there is no obvious skip button.
• Using Images Instead of Text - Sites made entirely with images instead of text can be hard for users to read.
  

SEO Design Mistakes:

• Reusing Page Titles  - If page titles are the same one every page of a website you have missed a great chance to tell search engines what your page is about.
• Using Images or incorrect tags for Headers - You should use header tags (h1, h2, h3) for your headlines, not images or tags with large point sizes.
  
• Using Images Instead of Text for Content - Search engines can't read images and like text much more than image alt tags.
• Building Internal Link Poorly. - Many sites have links with "click here" as the name of the link. Search engines give more weight to pages with descriptive links.
• Picking Wrong Keywords - Choosing to concentrate on keywords that your audience is not using.

Since some of these issues involve HTML code, next week we will take a look at how to identify some of these mistakes. And what you can do about them.