It’s all just words right so if it works in an email or a letter it’ll work on my web site?

No. Take time to read and rewrite the content of your website and if you have the budget, employ a proper copy editor. At least ensure that someone is given responsibility for “sense checking” all of the content that goes on your web site.

It’s great that as web site owners we can easily go back and correct typos or easily change the date of an event. That’s a luxury we don’t have in print. But try to catch sentences that clearly won’t make any sense once they are on the your web site.

It’s all about context. “Dear Sir, please find enclosed” may be fine in a letter or email, but it will look very odd on a web site and it’s likely that the enclosed item you are talking about won’t be there. Processes such as filling in registration forms must be dealt with differently on the web.

Another common culprit is the using phrase, “Please visit our web site for more information” on your web site. Again this probably derives from copy written for print materials, but just copying and pasting that into your web site will send your visitors into an endless loop of frustration.

Depending on the type of website you run, you may at some point have to include advertising on your site as part of your income stream.

In many cases, online advertising follows a formula that visitors have become very used to and therefore have adapted to effortlessly screening them out of their view.

If you are in the position to have a direct relationship with your advertisers, as is often the case with some small web site owners, see this as an opportunity to provide advertising that steps out of the mould and is interesting in its own right. Small adverts created specifically for your site or a small set of web sites are likely to be highly relevant and catch your visitor’s eye creating a win-win scenario for all parties.

People expect the experience that have on your web site to be as good as the last best online experience that they had elsewhere online. This means that the bar is continually being raised. New sites launch every day and new innovative techniques emerge to (hopefully!) make web sites easier to use.

To most people it’s all just the web. If site A has a really nice ticket booking procedure they don’t care that your site is older or built using a different technology. They just want it all to work well.

So how do you counter this continual pressure to have the best web site?

Start viewing the web through your web site owner’s eyes. As you use the web on a day to day basis, become aware of good practices and processes. Note down where you had a good experience, where something was easy to achieve a task or where your found something frustrating on someone else’s web site.

Have a policy of periodically assessing your own site and seeing things through a customers eyes. Make incremental changes. You don’t have to tear everything down and start all over again.

And remember, improving something doesn’t always have to mean the addition of a new feature. It could be the removal of some information or the streamlining of a process to make things more easy for your customers.

Dates are so important for context. Whenever you publish any content on your web site please make sure that you include the date that is was first published.

It’s also sometimes useful to included when the article was updated as well.

The title of this post probably seems really counter intuitive to many people and it’s not something that every web site owner wants to hear.

But it refers to the idea that you own web site may not be the best place to get your message across. Other people may well have much larger and much more relevant audiences that you. The key thing is that when you publish information, it should always refer back to you and your web site.

For example, let’s say you decide to interview your company director about a new product and you make a video of the interview. It makes sense to publish the video on a popular video portal like YouTube where it is most likely to be exposed to the largest audience. Then, you can embed the video in your own web site. Other people can also embed the video in their web sites as well.

Even if a web site has less visitors than your own, it may still be very productive to concentrate of getting coverage of your story on that web site rather than your own, especially if you are looking to reach new audiences and customers.

Consider another example. Imagine you run an membership association. A small part of your organisation’s remit may be to promote an annual professional development course to people in your industry. Rather than just announce the course on your web site, seek out blogs and web sites that deal specifically with professional development. They may well have much a smaller audience than your own web site but their readership is very focussed on the topic of professional development and you will likely get much more interest from their web site.

So don’t worry about having to publish everything on your own web site, just make sure that when another web site publishes information about one of your projects that the readers have all the information they need to complete the task you are interested in whether that’s a conference registration, a newsletter sign up or a product sale.

Good luck.

When we work closely with a project every working day, it becomes very easy to get too close to it and not see it in the way that others see it.

What seems obvious to you may not be obvious to someone being introduced to your project for the first time. So try and see your web site through the eyes of one of your own customers or new readers.

Have you delivered the information the were looking for? Have you provided context to help them get more information about your organisation if they need it? Have you explained acronyms and avoided using jargon?

Google Analytics is a great way to get insights into what’s happening on your web site and it’s free. It’s one of the most popular analytics packages around. But for some people all of the data can be overwhelming.

You don’t need to give everyone the same level of access to all of the data. Casual users in your organisation may only want to see the general trends in visitors numbers or the number of recent visits to a particular page.

If you have people in your organisation that want access to the analytics information, but just need an overview, I’d advise using Polaris from Desktop Reporting.

A screenshot from the polaris desktop reporting application

It’s a simple AIR application that anyone can install on their Windows, Mac or Linux machine and allows access to nearly all of the useful information in Google Analytics without overwhelming the user.

You can download it at Desktop Reporting

Before you invest any time or effort into Search Engine Optimisation for your web site, first make sure that your domain name is set up correctly.

Make sure that your website is available whether or not the visitor types the “www.” in front of your web sites address.

Different web browsers handle misconfigured domains differently.

• Internet Explorer will launch a search based on the domain name using your default search engine.
• Firefox will try both versions of the domain and eventually arrive at the available version
• Chrome and Opera report the misconfigured domain as an error.

So which ever browser your visitors are using, at best they will experience a delay and at worst they will interpret the error page presented to them as your site being unavailable.

In some cases your web hosting company may even have a holding page configured advertising their services on the badly configured version of the domain.

So what is an easy way to check if your domain?

Simply open your web browser (other that FireFox) and type the address of your web site into the address bar with the www. in front of it and then with out the www. in front. In both instances you should arrive at the home page of your web site.

For a more scientific approach you can do what is called pinging.

In Windows go to Start > Run > Cmd and then type ping www.YOURDOMAIN.com

You should see 4 lines of data appear similar to the ones in the picture below which start with the word reply.

Pinging a domain to check it is available

Then do the same for YOURDOMAIN.com (it’s not case sensitive).

If the domain is misconfigured then you will the a message telling you that the domain cannot be found.

And if you discover that your domain is incorrectly configured, contact your web designer or your hosting company to let them know about the error.

The minute you publish something on the web, the clock starts ticking and the information starts to go out of date. When we publish to print, there’s not much we can do about that. However, on the web, we can continually refine and correct our content.

When talking about dates there are a couple of best practices you should observe. It’s usually best to write actual dates rather that the period of time that has elapsed since an event.

For example, if you write in “January 2009″ rather than, “one year ago” then the information stays current.

This mistake is most commonly seen in staff biographies on web sites. So avoid saying things like “Jane joined the company 6 months ago and has 2 years experience …”

Instead, write  ”Jane joined the company in June 2009 and qualified as a doctor in 2007…”