WebRev Blog

Make Use Of has an excellent post this week on the 9 Types of Facebook Status updates that your friends will like, explaining how to generate conversation. We covered several of these topics in detail a couple of years ago in our series, Types of Blog Posts.  This is very good information for promoting a blog for your website, a Facebook page, or Twitter feed - particularly for your business.

But all of this got me thinking. About 2 1/2 years ago, Miley Cyrus took a break from Twitter, partially because she felt she had stopped living for moments and started living for people.  She got over that at some point, apparently because she's back on Twitter, but I've seen comments from friends on both Facebook and Twitter from people who have confessed that instead of really experiencing some incident in their lives, they found th few themselves distracted by how to explain the moment in a 140-character Tweet, or a short Facebook update. 

If you've ever found yourself in the position of being the family photographer, you might be able to appreciate those rare family gatherings when you leave the camera in the case, and just sit around and have a conversation.  I've found recently that I have benefitted greatly from not really posting updates to my own social networking profiles for a few days at a time, and just enjoying reading, liking, and occasionally commenting on other people's updates and photos.  It has helped me on my offline (sometimes known as my "real life"), too.  I'm rediscovering the joy of just enjoying, as Miley said, the "moments," instead of focusing on trying to capture everything I find funny or interesting in a photo or one-liner to post somewhere.

Taking these brief social-media breaks has helped me rediscover my own voice, and remember what is most important - actually LIVING my life, not just logging it. 

How do you maintain that important balance of staying involved with your online friends while still enjoying personal contact with your family and friends off line?

Here's a little trip down memory lane, when Miley Cyrus was younger...and wiser?

I've been doing some "online shopping," lately, but not with the intention of buying online.  I've been shopping local businesses - those businesses within about 10 miles of my home.  We've had a construction boom in this area recently, and I'm finding that a lot of the services I used to drive into Tulsa to buy are now available in my home town - Broken Arrow.  

Rather than driving all over town, exploring nearly-completed strip malls, I've made a new habit of checking online (usually on my mobile) to see if I can get what I'm looking for is open yet.  I've been pleasantly surprised at what I'm finding.  So, let's talk about some of the things I've been looking for online - and what your local potential customers may be looking for they're trying to find your product or service online.

1) A website.  I'm still amazed at how many businesses are only available in online directories and unreliable referral services - without their own web page.  Remember, customers tend to be motivated to go online and "review" a business when they're angry, so if your entire online presence consists of a listing Google's crawlers pulled from the yellow pages and a Yelp listing - you're putting your business' online reputation in the hands of a software program and your angriest customers.  Don't do that.  You really need to take charge of your own online reputation by setting up your own web presence (web page, social networking sites, etc..) and making sure that your customers can easily find your business in a search engine - both by the name of your business, and by searching for your product in your city (e.g. "steak, broken arrow").

2) Mobile.  Increasingly, people are searching for local business information on-the-go.  They may get a hankering for sushi while they're out shopping, or for fish tacos while they're watching a movie. They might be at the auto-repair shop, and realize they have an extra hour to kill, and start looking for one of those nice pedicure shops that has the massage chairs within walking distance.  Make sure your customers can find you on their mobile devices.  Even if your full website is not mobile friendly, they should be able to access a listing of your basic services, a map to your front door, and access to any specials you might be running, and a phone number they can call to ask you if you have what they need in stock.

3) Tags. Actually, most of your customers don't know they're looking for your tags, but they're important. Your customers simply enter what they're searching for (i.e. "keywords," or "search words") into their search engine, such as "day spa Bixby," or "wine tasting Edmond, OK," into their search bar.  If they have a coupon or they've heard about or read about a special deal offered by your establishment, they may also search by the name of your business and the name of your town.  Make sure you have your posts, articles, and entries properly categorized, tagged, and titled.  If you have your menu posted as an image, make sure you also tag that image with the most popular items on that menu (the search engines can't crawl text in an image, so they won't know if your menu has steak or burritos or both). If you offer delivery or curbside pickup, or some other popular service or item, make sure this is tagged prominently on your site.

What else do you look for when you're shopping local businesses online, and do you have suggestions for incorporating these features into a website?

I've been looking for a better system of compiling the research I do for blog posts and other projects.

Storing my links, photos, text and citations for these projects on a hard drive long ago ceased to be practical, as I do much of my reading on my mobile phone, but most of my writing on my laptop.  I needed portable storage that I can access from anywhere.  Thumb drives are just one more thing to carry, store, and try not to damage, (and they don't work on my mobile phone, so web-based storage is a must.  I've tried several systems, but haven't really been happy with any of them.  I finally gave up a while back, and just started storing this information in a web-based e-mail account set up for this purpose. 

Finally,  today I found an application called Evernote, and I really like it.  It functions like e-mail storage and threading, but is much easier to categorize and tag.  Photos, web clips, links, audio messages, and text.  The files are called "notes," and these notes can be for shared or individual use.  I also downloaded the "web clipper" for my browsers and I can just right-click on any web page and store the link and/or the page in my notes for quoting later. 

It's very user-friendly to download and use - from the website or from the wireless provider's app market.  The app works as a plug-in, rather than a tool-bar, so it doesn't take up any valuable space on smaller screens.  So far, there isn't anything that I DON'T like about this program. 

All notes can be tagged, so that when it's time to begin writing on a topic, I need only to pull from the notes on that tag.  It's great.  If you would like give it a try, visit Evernote.com.  There is a premium version available, but the free version is great.

Mashable published a report this week in conjunction with Eye Track Shop, a company that monitors the eye movements of readers on various websites.  This particular study tracked what reader's eyes were naturally drawn to on all of the top social networks. 

The graphs were dispayed in Dopplar maps, opacity maps and numbered illustrations.  I found the opacity maps the most helpful, as they blacked out the parts of each screen that were viewed the least, and showed clearly what areas were viewed the most.  Above is an example of the opacity map for a typical Facebook page.  As you can see, the profile picture, name, most recent posts, and friends lists got the most attention.   On Linked-IN, which is a site for professional networking, the job title got the most attention.

What surprised me on several of the sites was that the actual site's logo (Flickr, YouTube) got more attention than the content.  This is good for branding for the website, but not so good for the people posting their content on the site. 

On nearly all of the sites, photos and posts near the top of the page got more attention than the content futher down.  On Twitter, the content further down on the page did get a little more attention than on the other sites. Twitter's format is a little different from most sites, in that its content is in "micro-blogging" format, and posts tend to be about a sentence long, building on one another, which might normally cause people to reactively look "down the stream" to see what current posts are referencing.

There are some general principles we can learn from this study about content placement on our own websites. 

1. Your logo matters.  A high-contrast dual color logo is likely to get the attention of readers, and contribute to brand recogntion.  Just realize this may be the ONLY  thing they remember about your site.
2. Your credentials and network are important. Unless your brand name is a household name (or the online equivalent thereof), people are going to instinctively want to know what you do and who endorses you, so make sure this information is easily visible near the top of your page.  They may not take time to scroll all over your site to find the link.
3. Your first post is going to get the most attention. If your content is time-sensitive, you'll want your most recent content to display first.  If not, you'll want your most popular content to display first.

This is the virtual equivalent of putting your best foot forward. You only have one chance to make a first impression, so make sure its an impresion you WANT your customers to remember.

Have you ever noticed that you can spot some amateur blogs as soon as the site loads (if it ever loads)? They're the ones with a thousand widgets in the sidebar, every other word in bold, italics or some funky color, and animations.  Oh, the animations.  Yes, well, it's also easy to spot a professional looking blog, so let's talk about some things I've had to learn the hard way over the years to quickly make your website more aesthetically pleasing.

Choose a color pallete, and stick to it.  If you don't happen to have been born with a gift for decorating, there are plenty of color pallete generators online.  Please note that this does not mean you need to stick to a color "theme" like we did in high school with all of those wonderful two-color pom-poms, uniforms, and spirit paraphernalia.  If you have a color theme for your business logo, you can incorporate those colors into your color pallete, but you don't have to limit yourself to just those two colors.  You can use a full range of colors, just so they complement each other in intensity, brightness, and hue, etc.  It's easier than it sounds, just use that link above to Google a color pallete generator, and find one you like.

Choose a font and grammar style guide and stick to it. As a WebRev customer, this will be handled for you, and a lot of blogging templates have these style-guides embedded for headers and post titles.  Within your posts and articles, however, you'll want to keep the "flourish" to your content, rather than the font presentation.  Keep in mind that browsers read special characters differently, and if you try to get too fancy, some of your readers may just see gibberish in their browser.  Also, colored text is usually reserved for the hyperlinks, so it's best not to color your font unless you have a really good reason.  Your readers will become distracted if they keep trying to click on your colored text, only to find out there is no link.  Unlike in academic writng, there is no industry standard for what is "correct" in the way of section headings within a post  - just be sure to be as consistent as possible if you're going to use larger font or a different type-font.

Using professionally prepared graphics and images is best.  If you need to do your own, keep in mind that if your content is going to be content heavy, you have a little more freed to get "fancy" with the graphics in your website theme.  If your content is going to include a lot of photos or videos, you will want to keep your theme as sleek as possible so as not to distract from the images you want people to focus on.

Any animations should focus the reader on your most important content.  If you have animated .gifs all over your site, drawing the reader's attention to your adspace, to your blog roll (oh, please tell me you aren't still using one of those), your header, your footer...and pretty much every thing except the content you want them to focus on, your content may not be read.  Also, if all of your animations and scripts make the site take more than a couple of seconds to download, your reader may just decide to go read something else (they have thousands of other options).

Focus on function over form.  Yes, I know this is a post about aesthetics, but the truth is that most readers would much rather prefer for you to have a very basic, "boring" website that they can easily navigate than a beautiful, fancy one that won't load and on which they can't find anything if it ever does.  Aesthetics are important, but they are like the icing and your content is the cake.  Make sure you readers aren't just enjoying the icing, and throwing away the cake.

They say rules are made to be broken, and as soon as I post this list, someone will be able to point out a website that does not have one or more of these features on the easily accessible wildly successful, anyway.  But GENERALLY, there are some things that visitors and readers expect to be easy to find. 

Incorporating these elements into your design may seem obvious, but it's amazing how many sites I visit that have not remembered to include them.  Nothing irritates me more than to read a great post, and want to find out more about the author's credentials, only to have to search all over the website until I lose interest, trying to find an "about" page.  Also, I as I'm reading, I often think of a resource I would like to share with the author - but end up not being able to it, because I can't find the "contact" information. 

Planning is important.  Even if you incorporate these elements, but move them around every other week, your regular readers might become annoyed.  I have one credit card company that I pay online. Every single month I have to search for the "pay your credit card" link, which is moved around and re-named - every month.  It's quite exasperating.  I think they may be doing this on purpose, to try to keep people on the site longer, hoping we'll be distracted by all of the good deals, but it doesn't work for me.  I just find it irritating.  Moving things around is sometimes necessary, but it's usually a good idea to maintain a relatively consistent "look" and "feel," to your site, and to make your most important features as easy to locate as possible.

Also, it is important to include these most important features in the header, sidebar, or footer of your site.  If you have them only on the front page, or on a splash page, visitors who enter the site through a link to a post will have a hard time locating them.  So, what do you absolutely need to have on every page of your website or blog?

An "About" page.  It should be called that, because people will use their browser search bar to look for that term if the link isn't easy to find.  In a world where anyone can write anything on the web, your readers will want to know who you are, and what your authority is on the topic you're writing about.  If you have a local business, they'll want to be able to read a little bit about the history and philosophy of your business.  This is an excellent opportunity to make a personal connection with your readers and/or potential clients.

A "Contact" page.  Again, it needs to be called exactly that. Whether you get all fancy, and include a contact form (WebRev's Tim Short knows how to do that for Web Revelation customers), or just simply want to put a simple page up with your name, e-mail address, ph#, and business address (never use your home address) - you need to have a way for people to contact you about your site.  In some cases, they may want to alert you to problems with the site, or ask you questions.  They may want to share resources with you.  Yes, some will spam you, but that's the price you pay for being online, unfortunately.  Tim Short does have a way to configure that contact form of his to require people to use a verified e-mail address, so if you're getting a lot of spam or other unpleasant mail through the contact page of your site, be sure to talk to him about that.  If you are a local business, you will also want to include directions (preferably a map) to your establishment.  This can be done through any online mapping service like Mapquest, or Google Maps.

A "Home" Link.  Not only is this really good for search engine page rank and site mapping, it is important for visitors who entered your site through a link they found on a social network or that they got from a friend or press release.  Once again, this link really needs to be called "home."

A List of your Most Important Pages and Links.  Now this list can have various names, depending on what is appropriate for your business, your industry, your site, and your personality.  It might be your menu if you're running a restaurant.  It might be a list of your pillar posts (most linked-to) if your site is writing-intensive. It might be a list of industry-specific health resources if you're a doctor's office.  You get the idea.  Whatever people are going to visit your site to see - make sure they can easily find it from every page of your site. 

A "Payment" Link.  Again, this link might have different names, depending on your business.  It may be a "checkout" link, if you have incorporated shopping-care technology on your site.  It may be a "donation" page if you are a non-profit.  Whatever you call it, make sure it's easy to find.

Can you think of any other must-have resources for a website?  Please share!