And I bring this up with respect to QR codes. You may have seen them already on flyers, on posters… they look like weird bar codes.

A QR code can be read by your smartphone using an app. You run the app, point the smartphone’s camera lens at the code and it can scan it and take you to a website.

The utility of QR codes is that they eliminate a lot of typing on tiny cell phone keypads. From a marketing perspective, using QR codes on your printed material shows that your business or organization is on the leading edge with a popular, useful trend.

You can receive the most benefit from QR codes by using them wisely and in contexts where they make sense. For instance, Lake Metroparks has started to use them on outdoor plaques. Their code conveniently links to maps and a lot more information about nature, helping the park district to make these outdoor signs much more interactive.

You can generate your own QR code here: http://qrcode.kaywa.com/.

This is a win-win situation because it doesn’t cost much (just a voluntary donation) to use QR codes.

There are many other win-win tools for engagement out there for organizations and businesses, such as Facebook, Google Places, Groupon and Foursquare.

So how does one sort through all this and decide what to do? When you evaluate whether to invest your organization’s time and/or money in technology, you might want to think about these factors:

Is the business providing or assisting with the technology local?

In today’s economy, it is a good idea for local businesses to do business with each other when possible, and there are distinct advantages to this. Local businesses can respond more to your needs and provide more personal relationships. The longevity of the local business is a good factor to consider as well.

Is the technology sound?

Does it work well on multiple platforms if this is a criterion for the application of the technology?

Is the technology reasonable for your business’s or organization’s application?

Place yourself in your potential customers’/web users’ shoes and think how they would use the technology. Is it difficult to use? Easy? Intuitive?  Does it make sense for your business or organization, or is it just gimmicky?

Is there a long-term commitment to supporting the technology?

Invest your efforts in a business that focuses on its core offering. Even if a business is huge, such as Facebook, this doesn’t necessarily translate into a long-term commitment toward a technology. For example, Facebook stopped its Facebook Deals program after running it for only four months.

Does the technology have a strong developer base? 

Some free tools (such as WordPress) are successful because they have a strong developer and user base, even though the offerings are free.  The more users and developers a particular technology has, the more likely it will be around for a long time. If you are not familiar with current web trends, it may be difficult for you to determine if there is a strong developer base. In this case, consult with a web professional before investing a lot of your time.

In conclusion, there are plenty of tools for engagement in the Web world. Evaluate them carefully, then go ahead and engage!

* With respect to QR codes, do keep in mind that there have been some concerns about cell phone use and radiation. It is probably beneficial to moderate use of cell phones especially around one’s ears and pockets, and children should probably not use them. Even some cell phone manufacturers have asked people to hold cell phones an inch or so away from one’s head when using them.

In the past, your web designer might have been the only one working on your website. But with today's technologies and expectations, you as business owner, content contributor, or marketer can have an expanded, active role in posting information on your website. 

The garden is an appropriate metaphor for websites. Websites can be seen as living and breathing things based on the interactivity they can foster. They are virtual gardens that you stake out and refer to by domain. And you, the owner of your site, can be the gardener.

Website gardens benefit from attracting beneficial organisms, i.e. customers, and giving them a spade to dig with, tools to see what's going on, tools for interacting with you and your site and your business. Customers and readers expect to be able to comment on blog entries, to follow up on issues, to really have the ability to gain useful information and engage with you online and not just via email.

Ergo, interactivity and being able to post information yourself is an important component in making your website an engine that can help you promote your products and services.

Benefits of website gardening:

1. The more information you post (as long as it is well organized), the larger the footprint of your garden on the web, which improves your chances for more website traffic driven by search engine indexing.

2. The more items you've planted (i.e. blog posts) the higher your credibility in social media avenues such as LinkedIn and Facebook (as long as posts are relevant and professional).

3. Regularly generating information for your website has indirect benefits in other ways; that of self-discipline, of policy development, etc.

Gardening tools and techniques:

- Blogging and other Social Media use
- Use of tools for engagement such as QR codes
- eNewsletters (like Constant Contact) and the ability to sign up on your site
- RSS subscriptions, Google Feedburner
- Commenting capability

To be continued…

Topics touched on during our presentation:

• The "garden" approach to website management 
• Usability – how easy is your website to use and does it lead your readers to where you want them to go and what you'd like them to do? 
• Professionalism – quality of text content and design 
• Technical considerations – good solutions for extensibility and within budgetary constraints

We welcome you to attend this presentation. It will be oriented towards non-web professionals, i.e., the business owner evaluating requirements for his or her own website who doesn't necessarily have much experience with website design.

Registration…

In my last post, I described how WordPress is a great tool that empowers small businesses and organizations to efficiently create a lot of content (information) that can be syndicated and shared. This is important. The volume of content on a website is one of the key factors in being able to find the site on the Internet because volume is an indicator of credibility to search engines. And the easier it is to share a site's content, the more likely it is that the content will be shared and help drive incoming traffic.

For a professional presence, WordPress works best in a collaborative relationship between business owner and professional web design firm with the design firm laying out the initial website infrastructure and assisting as needed throughout the lifespan of the site. WordPress gives the layman businessperson the ability to edit page content and add simple new pages, and it's an economical way to implement a robust website with a web design firm.

If you are a budget-oriented business person who has some technical skill, you be might be considering a DIY site. Assess your skills. Here are some factors to consider if you’d like to develop your own site without the aid of a professional web firm.

• Do you have graphic design skills, or can you use Photoshop or a similar program to edit your logo and process your photos to look good on your site?
• Do you know and understand the advantages of using one predeveloped WordPress theme over another?
• Do you know at least a little bit of html?
• Can you figure out how to navigate most websites and do what you need to do on them (like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)? Do you know how to upload photos or is it a frustrating process for you?
• Are you willing to spend a lot of time to learn about basic search engine optimization practices in WordPress? And are you at ease using Google to perform searches?
• Do you understand how to back up your website completely and can you figure out how to minimize comment spam and hackers in WordPress?
• Can you write well? Is your writing rife with spelling and grammatical errors?

If you are weak in any one of these areas, it is probably best to consult with a professional firm to fill in the gaps.

Part I: "The Perfect Website"
Part II: "A Great Budget Situation–WordPress"

Stay tuned for the next followup post in this series. You can subscribe to this blog via email.

Consider the following:

What is the ideal situation for managing a web presence?

• You are a very large corporation with a huge budget for websites and you can afford to pay a team to implement your social media, have a huge website with multiple articles posted daily, and your website looks really interesting and professional and is easy to navigate.
• If reduced to a single person: the best person implementing a complete website would be an artist who can write well and does website development for a living…

A business owner who is cramped for cash might consider some DIY web strategies…

What it comes down to:

• CASH and TIME
• Expertise on-hand

Followup posts:

• The Perfect Website
• A Great Budget Situation

Much to her dismay, she discovered the Web site did not belong to her business. There it was on the contract: “The developer maintains the rights to the Web site’s design.”

She wanted out. She wanted a divorce from her Web site hosting and design company—but unfortunately she was locked into this relationship. Redesigning the site would cost too much. The retailer had learned a costly lesson.

This is not your usual and customary way that Web site ownership is handled. Usually the site belongs to you, the client. But it happens often enough that I thought it was worth a column.

Locked into a bad relationship

In another instance, a local membership organization paid a rather large amount for a software service that handles similar Web sites for clubs and organizations. In addition, they are locked into paying a monthly maintenance fee for three years.

The organization created their own site using the software, but they were disappointed to find that it didn’t really match their needs. It couldn’t be customized, and it didn’t have all the bells and whistles they needed.

They are looking for us or another Web site developer to help them iron out their problems, probably an expensive proposition. Can this marriage be saved? We don’t know yet.

Furthermore, because the organization is using proprietary software developed by this company, if they ever get the kinks worked out they will still have to use that company. If they move, more than likely they will lose their Web site. And then they’ll have the headache-y task of creating a new one.

This is not to say that the Web site company is unethical. They probably spent considerable time and expense developing the software. But it does present a problem for their clients.

“Free” sites

What about the sites you can create for free on some of the major search engines, who will host the sites for a few cents a day? I’ve always wondered about that, and I finally took a look. The design is yours to keep—but when you leave, the functionality stays. In other words, you can have the “picture” of your Web site—but you won’t be able to make it function, which is a major part of the expense in creating and maintaining a Web site.

Here is some excellent information from pbrainmedia.com:

“You need to protect your company’s ability to make changes to the site down the road. You should always think about — and ask prospective developers about — what will happen if you end your relationship with the developer in the future. If the developer creates the site with proprietary technology, you may find it difficult or impossible to make changes without using the original developer. More than a few businesses have learned this lesson the hard way and have had to create a new Web site from scratch after ending their relationship with a previous developer who refused to grant permission to the business to make changes to the code the developer owned.”

The rest of the article is at http://www.pbrainmedia.com/library/articles/webowner.shtml.

Also, you can find out about the copyright issues at http://www.chicagolawyermagazine.com/2008/11/12/info-tech-law-Website-ownership/.

Talk to others

In the wild and woolly world of Web site development, it pays to talk to friends and associates who have needs similar to yours and are happy with their developer. Make sure to ask one essential question: Who owns your Web site?

By the way, most local Web site developers don’t have a problem with your leaving the relationship if it’s not a marriage made in heaven. It just hurts our pride a little.

Changing Web site companies requires willing cooperation between the new developer and the old developer, and all of us developers know that. There are domain names that need to be pointed in a new direction, sites and functionality moved to a new host, access granted, and so forth. It’s not the happiest of tasks, but we all—well, most of us—know that we need each other’s cooperation to get the transfer completed. We know that while we may lose a client today to another developer, the same developer may be losing a client to us next week.

So we help each other out. It’s not only the legal thing to do, it’s the smart thing.

Your domain name should mirror the image you want your company to project. The URL you choose can have an impact on brand identity and help with keyword ranking. Choose carefully.

One Lakenetwork client, Healing High Rise Inc., chose www.healinghighriseinc.com. But people couldn’t seem to remember the “inc” at the end, so they’d end up at the wrong site. We changed the URL to www.learnefttoday.com, EFT standing for Emotional Freedom Technique, an energy healing method taught by the company. The company still uses its business name in the header on the site. A bonus to using learnefttoday is that EFT is in the domain name, therefore helpful in getting search engines to pick it up.

Something else to consider when deciding on your domain name is to choose one that describes your company or its product or service. Lakenetwork designed a site for a pest control company called Green Pest Control. The owner came up with www.stopthecrawling.com, memorable with a humorous twist.

CamelotHomeInspections.com wasn’t available when Erick Miller, president of Camelot Home Inspections, Inc., was registering his domain name. Miller chose www.weinspectforyou.com for the Willoughby, Ohio company, leaving no doubt as to what service they offer.

“I tried to make it coincide with what the company does, something that was catchy and easy to remember,” said Miller.

Here are some does and don’ts:

Don’t use free e-mail accounts for business such as Yahoo!, AOL or Gmail. Instead use your business domain name for all business communications. For example, use JoeSSS@AcmeWidgets.com instead of AcmeWidgets@yahoo.com or JoeSSS@yahoo.com.

Do purchase multiple versions of your domain name, including .com, .org, .net, .biz, hyphenations between words, and common misspellings. You could also purchase alternate domain names such as product names, brand names and any other keywords that might be typed in randomly.

Remember, a name that makes perfect sense to you may be too hard for other people to remember. Is your domain easy to say? Is it hard to spell? Do you have to explain why you chose it? Keep it short and memorable, use keywords in your business name, and don’t use underscores. Register your domain name for five to 10 years at a time rather than renewing every year, because some search engines give more credence to a company that has confidence it’s going to stick around.

More ideas can be found at http://www.searchengineguide.com/stoney-degeyter/the-best-damn-web-marketing-checklist-fo.php.

Sometimes it is hard to figure out how to reach someone in a company, according to marketing manager Laura Freeman. Make sure your contact information is clearly visible. Put contact information on every page, traditionally in the footer (bottom of the page). Or, have a “Contact Us” page. Preferably do both.

Resize your photographs before you put them on the Internet rather than relying on your browser to resize them, says developer Corey Green. Large photos dramatically increase the time it takes for a site to load. Also, the photos look jagged.

Organization is important, especially for larger sites, according to developer Kathy Smith. “I’ve gotten totally lost on sites that don’t have links presented in logical ways. A site should be easy to navigate, and easily expandable without compromising the navigation.”

She added that making a Web site as informative as possible is the best thing one can do. “Put resources online. Give your customers a reason to visit, bookmark, and come back.“

It’s important to not overwhelm your visitors with needlessly long pages or over-elaborate navigation systems, says developer Alex Roys. The more concise you can be, the more effective in getting your point across–rather than burying the visitor under a mountain of information that they can’t use.

Keep these suggestions in mind, and half the battle is won in giving your company or organization an attractive and useful presence on the Internet.

Consider this when sprucing up your Web site for the season:

Make sure the style and design fits your company’s personality. Visitors should be able to recognize your Web site immediately by use of the same branding you use offline.

Organization and ease of navigation are key. If customers can’t find what they are looking for where they expect to find it, they’ll look elsewhere.

Be sure your site works well on all Web browsers. You should test this every time you change design and content.

Other things to check while spring cleaning your site include security/privacy, ease of online checkout, and contact info. Be sure to include all methods of communication such as e-mail, phone and an FAQ section. Make it easy to find out who is your company spokesperson along with their contact info.

Periodically check your search engine position report to see which keywords are working and which aren’t. Finally, monitor social media to see how your company and site are being talked about in blogs and forums.

Your customers and potential customers go to your Web site for information. The last thing you want is a frustrated customer—and that’s what you’ll get if your information is hard to find.

Here are some of the elements your home page may lack:

Contact information. Do you display your company name, address, and main telephone number clearly? Is there an obvious link to the contact page, which can provide more details?

Clear navigation. Are the pages listed in logical order? Can the reader figure out how to get from here to there without going down blind alleys? If pages go deep into your Web site, do you use drop-down menus so the reader can see where to go at-a-glance?

More complex sites may also need a customer log-in function, search button and help link on their home page.

These three functions—log-ins, search and help—were sorely lacking in U.S. telecom company home pages, according to Brulant Inc., an online solutions provider to the telecom industry. Their study of 13 leading telecom companies found:

• 69% of home pages did not provide customers the opportunity to log in to their account
• 46% of home pages did not have a site search functionality
• Only 39% of home pages offered a ‘help’ link

“Customers use the online channel because they expect it offers the best chance of getting their needs met in real time,” says Rich Drab, a partner with Brulant’s Telecom practice. “When customers fail to get their basic account needs met via the home page, it creates a sense of dissatisfaction that is difficult for the telecom provider to overcome later in the customer service relationship.”

Most companies count customer service as their #1 concern. Make sure your home page provides the best customer service possible.