First of all, why is this so important? What’s so wrong with click here and see more?

Effective website links draw the eye and spark interest. They encourage clicking because people want more. Click here is an oft overused link term which is nondescript and uninteresting. No one will click anywhere without a good reason. Get a $10 discount for commenting on this blog would entice more clicking ; )  If you want a “sticky” website that offers findable information, you need to write effective links.

Jakob Nielsen recently conducted a study (First 2 Words: A Signal for the Scanning Eye) based on their findings that web users typically scan a web page in an F-pattern. They tested 80 users understandings of the first 11 characters of 20 different website links. The most effective links followed these guidelines (excerpt):

• Use plain language
• Use specific terminology
• Follow conventions for naming common features
• Front-load user- and action-oriented terms

(Read the study summary here. You can also learn more by signing up for their Writing for the Web course at the Web Usability Conference. If you do any writing for the web for your small business, this is a must-do.)

Notice the F-pattern? People generally read the first few lines in a list and read less as they go down.

I did a quick little test on my own website. Here’s a truncated list of a few of my links:

• Learn more
• See example
• View Resume
• Contact Min
• contact us
• Web Design
• Web Design
• SEO/SEM & I
• Dynamic, In
• Web Analyti
• E-mail Mark

Not  too bad. Areas to work on: (1) Learn More and See Example are too generic. (2) And the two links starting with Web Design are two different links, but you can’t tell because they’re truncated. Other than that most links use plain language, are specific, or use action words at the beginning. So I’ll go back a tweak a few of my links.

HOMEWORK: Scan your website‘s links (especially ones that are in list format). Without reading the context, can you predict where they’ll take you? Let me know how you make out!

Many small businesses are using social media (like Facebook, Twitter, and blogs) to drive sales. One firm has their sales targeted to reach $1 million this year.

Here are a few excerpts:

Two-thirds of all online users visit social networks and blogs, according to data from Nielsen Online.

There’s no better reference than your friends telling you about something. It’s that exact interaction that happens on Facebook

Read the entire article here.

Mindspring Design can help you to establish and design your blog, and link your website to Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Why Beef Up Your Content?

Many small-business owners believe their websites already contain all the content they need. They’ve got contact information, company profile, and a list of products or services. Great right? … Great start. But everyone else has the same information on their site!

Increasing content can make your company more attractive, more unique, and easier to find through search engines. It will help keep visitors coming back to your website. More quality content can help you to position yourself as an authority, or expert in your industry. And boosting the variety of web content will give you more angles from which to direct people to buy-in to your products and services, making this decision easier for them.

25 Ways to Boost Your Website Content

1. Create a blog. Use this as a platform to regularly post new information to your website. It can be news, opinions, whatever. Keep each post centered around one specific topic. Keep them informative and useful. And keep them coming!
2. Write a series of articles. You may want to do some keyword research and look at your web analytics to see which keywords are the most active and perform successfully for your website. Then write a few articles, letting all web visitors know where to get them.
3. Post your email newsletters. Don’t let all that great info go to waste! Offer it to people after those on your mailing list receive it, and soon others may be prompted to subscribe too.
4. Offer instructions on how to use your products. If you currently offer these to your customers in print, by all means become the official source for up-to-date instructions or manuals.
5. Write a free e-book. Choose a hot topic, a niche topic, or anything extremely valuable, like an industry report you’ve completed.
6. Describe your services. Yeah, I know you already have a list rght? Well don’t stop there. Be more descriptive. If you have simple bullet points for each service, describe what the customer can expect…how they should prepare…what they should get out of it. Even create service packages or product bundles.
7. Review a product or service. You could choose one that is or isn’t a direct competitor, and discuss the pros, cons, etc.
8. Install a forum to invite visitor participation. This is a great way to increase your website content because visitors do the work for you! It creates a sense of anticipation and excitement. I’ve used PHPBB forum software in the past — it has good support and is widely used.
9. Post company bios. Letting customers see a more personal side of the major company players is a great way to convey your office atmosphere and a start to building a business relationship.
10. Post company news. Let people know about your successes, staff changes, and what you’re working on.
11. Offer tutorials. Informative tutorials offer a step-by-step approach toward reaching a goal. These make you a valuable source of guidance and can entice newer visitors.
12. Invite guest writers or bloggers. Include a fresh perspective on topics by inviting other writers to contribute to your website. You can get backlinks from their sites and add weight to your site by including other professional voices.
13. Include customer testimonials. Everyone loves to read testimonials from other happy customers before and after committing to a purchase. Make customers feel confident and satisfied in their decisions with real testimonials
14. Post customer reviews. Online shoppers like to read realistic reviews of products before purchasing them. According to a 2008 report from The Nielsen Company, 81% of online holiday shoppers read customer reviews, with 71% feeling more comfortable they were buying the right product, and 63% feeling it was important to have multiple reviews of a product. Go ahead, beef up your content with reviews!
15. Run contests. This tactic could be monthly, seasonally, sporadically — it works because it generates a buzz around your brand name, creates awareness, and increases content.
16. Interview an industry professional or celebrity. Interviewing a well-known person in your industry will add valuable content. You could meet someone like this through a professional networking organization, at a trade show, heck it could be your best friend. Make sure to ask questions people want answered. Let the interview progress organically and you might encounter some unexpected gems.
17. Conduct a survey and report the results. Gather up some interns to survey your target market, trusted customers or professional associates.Then publish the results to your online community.
18. Include RSS feeds from related, non-competing sites. Keep your content pertinent with a stream of fresh content flowing on your website or blog.
19. Post press releases. Any company changes or news merit a press release. Archive press releases on your site.
20. Post magazine and newspaper articles featuring your company. Good press legitimizes you in some customers’ eyes. Flaunt this publicity online with pictures, excerpts, and full articles if allowed.
21. Run weekly or monthly specials. Offer coupons or specials on a regular basis. It keeps ‘em coming back.
22. Run a weekly or monthly feature. Develop a unique feature you can highlight on a regular basis. Reflect your company culture be it creative, fun, elite, environmentally conscious, serious, etc.
23. Post videos. YouTube has proven how much people enjoy videos. Produce short clips and post them on your website. Allow people to send them to friends.
24. Insert a photo gallery. Showcase your accomplishments with professional looking photos. Or, allow users to upload home photos showing how they proudly use your product.
25. Create a glossary. Write a glossary or “dictionary” of industry terms which would be helpful to new visitors or those unfamiliar with your subject.

Enter to win a FREE website review!

Do you have more ways to boost your website content? Tell me how you’ve done it, and you’ll be entered to win a FREE website review.

Contest ends and drawing held on: Thursday, April 30, 2010.

Take a good look at your website copy. Does it drive sales? Or is it just filling space? Kudos to you if you’ve contracted a marketing professional or web copywriter to write your web content for you. Interesting, engaging, well-optimized web content is a must-have in today’s competitive online marketplace.

However, it’s not enough to just have good content. It needs to emerge from invisibility, slow the scroll bar, escape the back button and speak to your visitors. Here are five mistakes you should avoid when writing web copy:

1. Hard to read.

Let’s get the most obvious (and most common) out of the way first. Your body copy isn’t speaking — it is whispering if it is too small or too faint to read. In addition, extremely long lines of text (before a line break) are exhausting to read. I see this often on flexible-width websites that span across gaping, wide-screen monitors. Many readers tire of this and will quickly give up. Instead, opt for a comfortably large typeface with sufficient contrast. And keep the width of your paragraphs limited or fixed — do test on multiple screen resolutions.

2. Not compelling.

What good is an interesting read if you are not inspired to take action? Tell readers where they should go next, what steps they should take, how and when. Don’t leave anything to the imagination or expect people to read between the lines. Web users are travelling at the speed of light, so make it very clear and easy to answer your call to action.

3. Doesn’t give ‘em what they want.

People normally land on a webpage expecting to find specific information — to solve a problem, to answer a question, etc. Carefully choose very specific headlines, informative subheadings, meaty bullet points, and pointed paragraphs which fill users’ needs and meet their requests. Skip all the glib marketing fluff and usher readers right to the content they are looking for.

4. Too wordy.

Long rambling paragraphs are intimidating. Do you want to invest precious time reading walls of text only to find at the end that your question hasn’t been answered? Think back to grammar school — start paragraphs with a ‘subject sentence.’ Then support that ‘subject’ with the next few sentences. Then conclude it and move on! Give people what they need in appealing, bite-sized chunks.

5. Not organized.

Last but not least — I can’t stress the importance of reflecting information hierarchy in your web content enough. Pages that have a gazillion text sizes and text treatments lack focus. Web visitors who can’t focus find it challenging to make online decisions. In general, the more important things should be larger, less important things smaller. And keep healthy white space around organizational elements to facilitate eye movement around the information!

These were just 5 of the most common mistakes business make when writing web content. Contact Mindspring Design to get a website analysis report for your company.

Read how a very small change in a company’s online form saved them millions of dollars in annual revenues. And see why it’s so important to test your website on real users.

Read The $300 Million Button by Jared M. Spool.

Share your thoughts on this with us.

Website Grader claims to measure the marketing effectiveness of your website based on search engine optimization, social popularity, inbound links, Google page rank, page source code, and other factors. Simply enter your website URL, wait a few seconds, and get your website score along with a full report emailed to you.

Why should I use this tool?

Website Grader is a good tool to let you know how you rank compared to your competition in selected online marketing efforts. It also alerts you to areas in which you could increase the scope and effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

But don’t sweat the small stuff…

This tool doesn’t score you on everything you are doing with social or viral marketing, or show every directory you are listed in. In addition, it didn’t pick up all my inbound links, although other search engines picked them up.  Some alerts that it reports are not to be overly concerned about. I’m not sure I agree with the readability level scoring either. It seems that more technical sites might come up with a “Graduate” level readability score simply because they include some technical terms.

Overall, I believe this is a useful tool. Grade your website and use the report card to lay out specific steps to improve your online marketing strategies.

So you’ve spent lots of time and money designing your small business website, and you’ve just launched it for the public to see. But wait! Do you know you could be ignoring a large percentage of the population and thus reducing the market audience you are targeting?

You might take for granted that some users cannot use a mouse.

When designing your website, you should design web content in an accessible format (not as an afterthought), keeping in mind people who have:

• Visual impairments (Blind, Color blind, Senior citizens)
• Hearing impairments
• Physically disabilities
• Learning disabilities
• English as a second language
• Slower internet connections
• Access to Internet content on multiple platforms (mobile phones, etc)

You will reap several business benefits by following web site accessibility standards:

• Improve the searchability of your website.
• Increase usability and help to improve web conversions.
• Increase information access to more people using assistive technologies and adaptive technologies.
• Accessibile web design is required by law in some places, so your business brand will benefit by complying with accessibility standards.

9 Accessibility Mistakes to Avoid When Designing a Website:

1. All your links read: “Click Here.” This could be confusing to visitors using screen readers and other assistive technologies. Instead, use a descriptive link that gives useful clues about where you’ll take them once they click.
2. You use tables to layout your web pages. Instead, use tables for organizing ‘tabular data’ (for charts and such) to eliminate confusing and repetitive table tags. Opt for CSS to layout and style your web content.
3. Your pages use extremely small type (because “it looks cool”) that can’t be resized in the browser. People with sight disabilities may need larger text in their browser. If your design breaks or doesn’t allow that, they will have to leave your website.
4. Color is used as an integral design or navigation element. That would confuse those who are color blind (take the color blind test). And remember some monitors don’t display colors accurately.
5. You’ve got light grey text on a white background or dark grey type on a black background (because it’s “so Web 2.0″). This makes reading a difficult and painstaking process. You need to use a bit more contrast for users with challenged vision. You don’t have to completely sacrifice design for functionality, but do keep this in mind. And do allow users to make their own decisions about how they browse your page.
6. All description, title and alt tags have been left blank so people must guess what your page and images are all about. Make sure your web designer goes that extra step, labeling and describing the contents of your page. This may mean that you, the business owner, must provide content for the designer to input.
7. There are no captions on any video or audio recordings, and no transcripts are provided for the deaf. Physically challenged users might miss out on this quality web content. So don’t leave anyone out, and make sure to offer alternative versions of your audio/visual content.
8. There are no descriptive tags in web forms explaining how to fill them out. Close your eyes and imagine filling out an online form. Where do you start, what should you type, in what format? To ensure that you recieve high quality form submissions (or recieve submissions at all), try including descriptive form tags. You web designer should also insert any instructions (like “enter year with four digits: 2010″) before the form fields, not after.
9. You used an online validator, but didn’t do any web content accessibility testing on actual users with disabilities. An online validator is a good place to start. But it is not a good substitute for a person. Testing your page on a group of people who have disabilities will give you most invaluable feedback about your site.

Recommended Reading:

• Website Accessibility Under Title II of the ADA
• Understanding Disabilities When Designing a Website
• Beyond ALT Text: Making the Web Easy to Use for Users With Disabilities: 75 Best Practices for Design of Websites and Intranets, Based on Usability Studies with People Who Use Assistive Technology
• Web Usability Accessibility and Usability Resources

Resources:

• Web Site Accessibility Tools, Checklist & Guidelines
• Test URL in Online Checker
• List of Screen Readers

These days it seems everybody and their mom has a blog. Rock stars, politicians, and 13 year old millionaires have blogs. Does your company need one? We’ll discuss what blogs can do, the benefits, and the risks.

What on earth is a blog anyway?

For those who don’t know, “blog” is a term that combines the words “Web” and “log.” So it logs (or lists) entries (often called “posts”) containing text, graphics, or video content created by somebody. Learn about blog types and history here.

You are reading Mindspring Design’s Blog right now. Take a minute and look around! Many blogs follow this format. You are reading a post. You can read other posts by searching the categories and other links in the sidebar. At the end of each post, or entry, you can view or add your own comments.

Why would somebody blog?

• It helps you get found by search engines.
• Posting regularly adds valuable, searchable information to your website.
• A blog helps you to reach a wider audience.
• It’s beneficial as a marketing tool for brand awareness and education.
• You can use a blog to open up a dialogue with your readers/consumers and get valuable feedback.
• Using a blog to design your whole website gives you an easy content management system.
• Think of some more benefits? Let me know!

How do I get a blog?

There are many free online tools you can use to start your own blog. Blogger and WordPress are both free and popular. Blogger can be hosted on their website, WordPress is hosted on your own server. I am using WordPress for this website, for example. I downloaded their free blogging software and easily installed it onto my own server. (You will need access to a database to do this yourself.  The WordPress website offers lots of help though. And several hosting providers, like Superb.net, offer a blog for free with set-up already done for you.)

Are there risks involved in a company blog?

• Offensive content
• Legal issues — giving out sensitive company information
• Copyright infringement
• Angry, dissatisfied posts by customers (you do have control over this through an admin panel; you could potentially turn this into a positive by addressing the issue and improving your product or service)
• Any I missed? Let me know.

My personal experience with blogging has been positive. I appreciate any and all comments. I find that I must keep up with what small-businesses are interested in, and the graphics industry. And the added website content helps to attract more people to my site.

Some of the latest WordPress Templates:

OK, I admit it — I’m lazy. I drink hot water because I don’t feel like getting a tea bag and sugar. In the same vein — I recently started recording my web tutorials and didn’t feel like opening up software to compress and convert the files. So instead I went to Zamzar.

Zamzar offers free file conversion for an impressive list of file types for your files up to 100 MB. Zamzar emails you once they’ve converted your file (which is usually pretty fast) and you have a day to download your converted file.

This is a good time-saving tool for busy small-business owners, or for those who don’t want to search for, purchase or download file conversion software. Try it out and let me know about your experience.

Volusion Live Chat Software offers live web chats for businesses who have an online presence and need to offer live support to their customers.

Live Chat is a great web feature to include if your product is complex and needs explanation, or if people need help during the buying process. Written FAQs and forums are excellent resources, but sometimes you just need to talk to somebody. And Live Chat is a great alternative to the telephone. It’s a convenience for customers that can give you an edge over your competition and increase conversions.

The free Volusion Live Chat version offers a free chat application for your computer. You download and install it in a few minutes. When you sign into the application, customers know automatically that you are online and available to chat.

You have the ability to chat with 5 people at once, from one department. And you can customize the online and offline messages that people see. You can upload your own logo and your own “LiveChat” buttons or use the free ones provided. Just copy and paste the code into your website‘s HTML code and you’re done.

I installed this on my website for testing purposes. Volusion Live Chat was simple to install and use, and I liked it so much that I kept it on my website. I look forward to chatting with potential and current clients about web and graphic design.