
It's pretty clear that spring has arrived with a bang – not only have
temperatures skyrocketed (much to my cats' delight), but after last week's doomby website makeover, our hyperactive team this week got stuck into developing some really great additions to our members' website builder tools. The team's efforts weren't limited to subscribers to our pro website development offers – if you're one of our members who enjoy the opportunity to make a free website with doomby, you haven't been left out either, and can already take advantage of the latest additions to your favorite free website builder.
This week's development efforts have concentrated on how to make a website better through social networking integration. Though we've long provided an access to social bookmarking services for your website content directly from the site manager, allowing you to publish your page links to your Facebook and Twitter accounts, this week we added a few menu gadgets to let your site visitors do the sharing for you. Though simple to set up, they really help improve your SERP ranking – or web presence – exponentially. All without you lifting a finger (almost).
I'm sure our millions of avid readers would have noticed my absence last week, and have probably been suffering in agony ever since. Sorry for that. But there was a very, very good reason, and as I am now back, you can all breathe a collective sigh of relief (and take down that Facebook vigil). For those of you who've dropped by your favorite free website builder in the last few days, you'll probably already have figured out why – for those who haven't, you soon will.
In any case, you'll probably all agree that after four months it was time for doomby to get a little dressed-up (inspired, no doubt, by this image from a few weeks back, to aim for bigger and better things) - both to encourage you to strive for webmastering excellence, and to create a website that rocks. So kudos to Pascal and Florian for some really fantastic work on getting the site up and looking great (I knew they had pretty genes in there somewhere ...).
Over the last couple of days, I've been surfing around trying to get an idea of exactly h
ow small businesses (those with 1 to 20 employees) have embraced e-commerce. I wound up spending a lot of that time focusing on Canada – partly to honor the Olympic spirit, and partly because their results just ranked better in Google. Though I wasn't that surprised by what I read, its implications for small businesses are truly startling.
To give you an idea why, let's go back a few years to 2007 – that being the latest year for which I have a full set of figures at hand. First, the facts: although some 85% of Canadian small businesses had access to the internet, only 36% deemed it necessary to make a business website of their own. Worse still: 45% made online purchases, yet a mere 6% fully embraced reciprocal e-commerce by building an online store1.
Partly inspired by the lasting image of last week's illustration (I swear that'll be engraved in my memory forever), and partly because my internet connection is going haywire, I thought I'd write a little about getting the most out of your online store. Specifically, how to ensure your e-commerce website attracts customers willing to stick around long enough to buy something. If you're making a business website, and your goal is to use it to sell stuff, then the last thing you want is for people to do a WIWO (walk-in, walk-out – and yes, I made that up) within the first few seconds of their arrival.
First impressions last, and getting your visitors to hand over their plastic means you really need to make sure you know how to make a website that inspires confidence – it's not enough just to have great stuff to sell.
No, a catchy title isn't the one I had in mind, but that was a pretty good one for starters, right? On the other hand, the picture on the right has a lot more in common with today's post than may first meet the eye ...
I've been doing a lot of surfing over the last week, going back to get a fresh perspective on some familiar things. Bossman (the elder) has been doing something similar, though his reflective retro trip has involved listening to such classic 80s musical greats as "Ghostbusters" and "Final Countdown" (not that I'm complaining – it makes me feel way younger than I have been of late).
One of the things I noticed during this week of “revisiting old things in a new way” was just how websites were marketed, and how I responded to that. So rather than talk about how to make a website this week, I thought I'd step back and talk about how to make a successful website, and what SEO has to do with making it a success.