Voodoochilli Design

First there was Irie who have been trading since 1991, a stable company to say the least. They used to be based just down the road from us when we were based in Broad street, Hereford. It came as quite a shock when I first heard about this, considering how close (literally) they were as competition. Only recently I have noticed that WyEd has also ceased trading.  It saddens me to see web designers go out of business, even through they are competition.  I know how hard small companies like this work for a living. I know exactly the sort of work they have to do, and the hours they have to put in to pay the bills.

It is a reflection of the overall economy, and although in a previous post I pointed out how many designers should not be affected by this so called credit crunch, of course there will be some casualties.

How have you been through the recession? It seems to me that being small, efficient and most importantly smart helps during times like this.

It’s been really hard lately keeping up with all these blogs I run lately let alone do much personal work. This is a shame as I have quite a lot I want to get done! The reason for this, believe it or not is that we have been inundated with work. A client of mine believes this is because smaller companies like ours are very attractive during times of financial crisis as our overall costs are lower than bigger companies with larger overheads.

Although it is true that by being competitive a company is likely to survive where more bloated companies cannot, I do not believe this is the only reason smaller companies are doing well right now. I think it all has to do with people being smarter with their money. Companies need to make money – this we all know, and when there is a downturn in the economy it becomes harder and harder for the majority of businesses to keep going as at the end of the day they are all affected in some way by the the demand and disposable income of the general public. When times are hard it affects the average family quicker than anyone and this has a knock-on affects to nearly all business. People just don’t spend as much when they are feeling the pinch.

So with shrinking advertising budgets due to lower turnovers what should a business do to survive? Keep pumping more money into the same methods of selling? Or try something smarter? It really does amaze me that some clients approach me with successful businesses that have only recently considered getting an online presence. A website can not only act as a non paid salesman for a company, it can also be used as a tool to increase efficiency and do many of the tasks that normally take a lot of time, money and effort. Why post or fax documentation that is needed before a sale when your website can email it straight to your customer, for free and within minuets? That’s just one example, and I am sure you can think of loads yourself, you get the point, I think this kind of thinking will benefit companies prepared to adapt to a changing financial climate. It’s survival of the smartest.

Facebook fascinates me, not because of the countless annoying messages I get on it about quizzes and vampire fights, but because of its exponential growth. This exponential growth pattern occurs because the more members it has, the more people are referred, and the cycle continues. However I believe this may be about to change.

Having signed up myself a few months ago, I am now totally bored with the site. I’m not the only one either, many people I have spoken to have said the same thing. Facebook was very fun at first but is now a bit tedious.

There is a possible downturn in traffic too. Please see below.

It is widely known that Alexa is not very accurate at measuring the traffic levels for smaller sites, but for one of the major contenders such as Facebook, we can assume these statics are fairly reflective of the overall traffic trends.

It could be a seasonal trend, maybe every December sites such as Facebook received lower traffic, possibly because people are preparing for Christmas, who knows. It is interesting to note that MySpace.com does not have the same downturn. Personally I think Facebook could be in trouble.

I recently wrote a piece about off-line promotion for the Creative Coding website.

Here’s a small section:

Having a fantastic website is all very well and good, but if no one knows that it exists then it is a complete waste of time and money. As one forum member’s signature used to say “If no one knows about your site, the launch will be as successful as a lemonade stand smack dab in the middle of the Sahara Desert.” It is all too easy to think that a few meta tags is going to get your site to the top of Google. There have been numerous discussions on the forum about the use of meta keywords and the general consensus is that meta keywords carry little, if any, weight any more. The debate is on-going so to be on the safe side I still use them, but I don’t rely on them.

The process of search engine optimisation is a big one, and something that will not be discussed here. In fact, one of the main points I am going to try and get across is that you shouldn’t rely solely on search engines for traffic. Here I am going to tell you some ways of promoting your website without even thinking about Google.

Read the rest here.

What is link bait and where can I get some?

As I am sure you already know, having lots of relevant inbound links to your site can greatly increase the amount of traffic your site receives. Not only do you receive more traffic from the link source itself, but you will also gain a better position in search engines which will in turn increase your organic results. Simply put, link popularity increases Google page rank and other search engines’ ranking factors.

Link baiting is the SEO technique used to encourage other websites to link to you. Below I have listed some of the best ways of doing this:

• Write useful and informative content that people want to link to
• Write a custom web application that people can place on their own website
• Design an WordPress theme or plug-in
• Encourage members of your websites to link back to your site when they join

All of the above named methods have one thing in common – there is incentive for people to link to you: they get something out of it. If you write a truly original article, people are going to use it as a reference or source of information. If you offer a useful online tool it goes without saying people will link to it.

Another important consideration at this point is to make it easy for people to link to you. You could provide easy to use copy and paste code which has your logo or graphic, along with the link and any anchor text. A great place to get links from are online communities and social bookmarking sites such as digg, reddit, furl and del.icio.us.

The very nature of online communities allows for the exponential growth of the sharing of information, resources and tools.

An easy way to let people bookmark you.

Have a look at the little widget below.

Pretty cool hey?

I have started using this on most of my sites now and have found it very effective. Simply go to addthis.com to download your copy for free. By the way, you might notice that what addthis.com have done is create link bait in the form of a useful little tool. Clever idea, now why didn’t I think of that? It is in the interest of people to use the tool, it encourages traffic for the site owner and the developers have received a ton of traffic in return from such a simple idea.

Be careful who links to you.

Having loads of inbound links is great, but some of them can damage your SEO efforts. Links from disreputable link farms, warez and porn sites can be damaging because search engines such as Google penalise these results. Also sites that copy your content while linking to you can damage results. A good thing to do is use the major search engines to see who is linking to you, and if you don’t like the look of what you see, send them an email and hopefully they will remove it.

Recently, one of my sites had a sudden drop in visitors. I know no reason why this has happened and I am pretty sure its only temporary (lets hope!). It has happened before and has always recovered. Anyway instead of sulking about it I decided to do a bit of research into why this could be, and ways to improve conversions on the current traffic levels just in case it can’t be fixed.

I after a couple of hours of reading through other blogs and development websites I felt I was getting nowhere. I checked my statistics and looked for clues to what could be causing it. Nothing.

Later on I decided to log into my Google Adwords account. To my surprise I find a new tool called Google Website Optimizer. After watching the tutorial I was very impressed.

To put it simply, the new software (which is currently in beta version) enables web masters to make subtle design and content variations and monitor their impact on goals. For example, you could change the strap line on your page and a graphic which may have an impact on sales.

I have only just started my first experiment using this software, but I am very hopeful that it will help me learn more about the visitors to my sites. Typical Goggle Genius, such a simple idea!

I have been reading a great usability book titled “Don’t make me think” which has changed my views on web user behaviour. Instead of reading though a page content, most users are simply looking for something plausible to click: people don’t have time to read though pages of sales pitch before making a purchase or registering with a site.

Apparently they want to know what the site is, what’s in it for them and where to click.

Hopefully I will be able to test out this theory by using this new tool. I will post the results when I have them. In the meantime, give the software a look yourself. I would be interested to know how you get on!

What is it? Well apparently search engine companies are focusing more on trust these days than on other quantifying methods such as page rank (PR). Will we one day have a little green Trust Rank bar on our browsers telling us how much people trust a certain website? I hope not, as just with Google Page Rank there are clever seo people who know how to manipulate such figures. Also how do we vote a confidence or trust on a website? Surely people are going to down vote their competitors

I don’t know too much about all this TR stuff, I don’t know if anyone does. But if you do, I would like to hear your views on this issue.

As well as all of the other websites that we are commissioned to make (currently about 30 or so, some of which can be viewed here) Voodoochilli Design has four company sites. This little blog site, our new art blog site, the company site itself and Voodoochilli.net. We also have a few other blog sites, but the subject matter isn’t related to art or design in anyway. Voodoochilli.net gets more traffic daily than the others get in a month so it’s nice to share a bit of that traffic with the other sites.

The combined traffic is quite substantial so as a way of easily allowing this sharing, I have created this simple portal page. In time I will add more sites as we create them. The little icon (which probably needs improving) that links to the portal is stored in one place only, so that when it needs to be changed it will be updated across all sites.

Another little trick we do, as do many other web design companies is to place a link at the bottom of sites that we create for a client. If someone views one of our clients sites and likes it, they may be interested in commissioning us. Sadly we can’t do this on every site as some of them are private or we have been sub-commissioned through another design company to develop the site.

Another idea would be to use a 404 page and redirect to the portal, so that if someone mistypes a URL they will get directed. I am not too keen on that idea as I believe it could easily confuse people.

I think it’s very important to have your own projects running on the backburner. This helps you to keep busy and improves your personal self development. The other advantage is that these projects can work for you by generating traffic and showcasing your work.

I would be very interested in other people’s ideas on sharing traffic between sites.

One on our websites, www.voodoochilli.net I have noticed that sometimes the Google Adsense adverts change to a new format I haven’t seen before. This seem quite random and there doesn’t appear to be any pattern or relation to content of the site affecting the ad format.

Compare the following two images. The first one is the average sort of ad we get, and the second one is the new type. It’s bigger and bolder and I think it could be quite effective.

I have had to shrink the images of the ads down a bit so they fit on this blog properly, but you get the idea. I should also point out these are the 480×60 ads.

I have been doing a lot of research about this lately, there are loads of sites telling you how to make thousands from the google adsense affiliate program. They all make it sound so easy. In reality you have to put in a lot of hard work. From my research there are three main factors which will enable a high payout from google:

1. Lots of traffic
2. A good click through rate (CTR)
3. High paying keywords

Lots of traffic
There are untold strategies to boost traffic to a site, including well optimised pages and keywords (meta data), inbound links, paid advertising etc. in my opinion the best way to drive visitors to a site is to have decent content. If you offer something to your visitors, be it information or advice or the free use of a service you will undoubtedly get a certain level of traffic

A good click through rate (CTR)
Positioning of ads can help increase this, either by blending in your ads or making them stand out from your content. Some people place images next to the ads, which apparently increases CTR by attracting more attention to the advert.

High paying keywords
Now this is tricky. Making a site only to generate high paying key-worded ads is a bad idea, and not allowed by google. This doesn’t stop people doing it though! I personally think if you don’t know what you are talking about, then don’t bother writing about it. Pick a subject you are interested in, your visitors will have a far more informed and enjoyable visit and will keep coming back.

One way of increasing the keyword price is by using section targeting. This allows you to emphasise or ignore certain content from the site. Results aren’t immediate as you have to wait for google to re-crawl your site before there is any noticeable difference.