Website Security Auditing
I purchased a security scan and audit for my main website this past week. The scan was done by a company called Acunetix.
Basically, a security scan is scan done by another server that attempts to exploit known and malicious vulnerabilities in a website’s code and programming.
If you run an ecommerce website, I highly recommend getting a scan like this, even if you already do a PCI / CISP scan on any regular basis. This was a complete eye opener for me.
Two great articles for business website owners.
I have been running, managing and setting up ecommerce an B2B websites for several years and every once in a while I come across an article or blog post that is exceptionally useful.
One of the best articles I have ever found for business websites is on the entrepreneur.com website and was written July 2006. The article Hit the Sweet Spot, is a simple guide covering seven areas your marketing must address to successfully sell to business owners. I printed this article out and it still sits on my desk six months after is was published. It is easily applicable to both websites and any other sales environment. Every point in the article is spot on, and it has statistically proven itself to help with the sites that I have applied it to. For people tasked to market a product to business owners, and entrepreneurs, this article is the foundation of what your marketing needs to contain. It’s more or less the seven commandments of business marketing.
The second article which was recently was recently written by Andy Beal is a great post, Five Secret Strategies to Add $1 Million in Revenue to your Interactive Marketing Agency in 2007. While the article is initially targeted at companies providing services mainly SEM / SEO services, they are very applicable to all businesses. Andy touches on using PR Firms and press releases, both are some of the more commonly overlooked areas that can really boost a business when used effectively.
Holiday rush or holiday meltdown
The holiday season is the busiest time of year for many retail businesses and ecommerce websites in the US and other countries.
Unfortunately for many B2B companies, the holiday season happens to be the dead zone for annual sales. My personal industry slows down about a week before thanksgiving, and with the exception of a few days in December, doesn’t pick back up until mid-January. Interestingly enough, I can spend the same on advertising during these dark hours and get a 70% less return on each dollar I burn.
Since there is little (Not Nothing) a business can do to maintain their level of sales, or sign-ups, the holiday offers a perfect time to make changes.
Here are 5 things you can do on your B2B website this holiday season when times are slow, to make your site even better when traffic picks back up.
Click to continue…
Why both natural and PPC traffic are important.
Pay per click advertising has become a completely integrated part of search engines, and many website owners fail to see the value in either natural traffic or PPC traffic.
A while back I found a table that compared the click through rates of Natural and PPC search traffic. I cant seem to find the original source any more, so my apologies for not citing the source of this information, although it was a reputable source.
I have placed the data from that table into an easy to follow graphic model of a common search engine result page.
Using Ajax with a Business Website
Taking a step away from my previous post critisizing the use of Ajax and other dynamic website features, Ajax does have uses in business and other website designs. Ajax has an ability to simplify a user’s experience on a website when used properly. It ‘can’ provide very user friendly interfaces that work smoothly, quickly, and better than traditional programming.
However, Ajax creates a usability gap when a measurable percentage of visitors don’t have javascript enabled on their web browser. Coincidentally, business and ecommerce websites are a group that often has that measurable percentage. Traditionally, business and ecommerce websites and their images in general rely on clean, simple, and static features. Their visitors know exactly what to expect, what to do, and how to so it, and that creates stability both in the minds of customers, and for the people running the website.
For business websites, care should always be taken to provide non-javascript friendly alternatives because the visitors without the ability to interact with the Ajax application, may be the best customers.
A savvy website owner asks the question, How can I integrate Ajax into my business website while still maintaining a usable website with a professional appearance?
Here is my list of usable Ajax for the business and ecommerce website.
Website Hosting (Data Backup, and Redundancy) – a few tips
I was looking over one of my websites a few weeks ago on a Sunday evening, and I started getting major errors on the site. I logged into my server, and after finding nothing obviously wrong, I gave the server the command to reboot.
About 5 minutes later, after the site didn’t return, I realized that there was a real problem. I called my host and asked them to check my server out. They proceeded to reboot the server, several times, and again nothing. After several minutes of diagnostics, the cause was traced the the primary hard drive, which had failed, mechanically.
Situations where Overture kills AdWords
I recently launched a service with my company and started a pay per click campaign for this particular campaign. I created my keywords and a similar ad for both AdWords and overture, set my cost per click, and added the new campaigns to each account.
Now, the Pay per click campaign so far has been the most successful that I have done in the last three years, so I am very happy with the results thus far. However, I am not happy with AdWords.
Overture has a running 12%+ conversion rate with this campaign, and has been getting well over 100 visitors per day. AdWords has a 0% conversion rate, and has only sent 20 visitors total. The ads are very similar in content, and I’m currently bidding over two times as much in AdWords than overture. So, what’s the problem?
SEO – a guide to the blogs
At some point during the search for knowledge regarding search engine optimization and online marketing, most website owners will start searching through the SEO blogs. This is a good idea to do right from the start.
SEO blogs often cover many more topics than just “SEO”. SEO blogs often reach into every aspect of online marketing, which is very fitting considering most SEO’s also play their hand on mediums of traffic on the internet other than organic search engine traffic.
What makes a good SEO blog?
The main ingredient is high quality, unique information. Interesting enough, these traits are also shared by good websites in general.
Do It Yourself Ecommerce
The ecommerce times wrapped up it’s do it yourself ecommerce guide today.
The guide cover some good information about getting into the business side of ecommerce. This guide is a good read for people that are already successful with their ecommerce ventures because several good services and resources are cited throughout the article.
The ecommerce guide is broken into three parts:
Part 1 – Now Bigger and Better (General introduction and ecommerce background)
Part 2 – Nuts and Bolts (Hosting, ecommerce platforms, SSL, general operation)
Part 3 – Taking Care of Business (Ecommerce future, success story, marketing, accounting, wrap-up)
This guide is by no means a complete resource. It is more a of an outline and should definitely be read more as an information primer. For a complete guide to ecommerce, I recommend the Mind Valley Ecommerce Guide. It’s not free, but mind valley offers 7 free tactics from their guide.
I recently reviewed the mindvalley guide, and I completely recommend it, especially for persons new to conducting business online. It is a small investment, but it is sure to pay for itself many times in the time that you will save compared to learning all of the information on your own.
Book Review – Prioritizing Web Usability
In the world of web usability, one name comes to mind above all others: Jakob Nielson. His recent book in conjunction with Hoa Loranger is titled Prioritizing Web Usability.
Jakob Nielson runs the website useit.com and holds a Ph.D. in user interface design/computer science from the Technical University of Denmark.
Amazon.com Description:
In 2000, Jakob Nielsen, the world’s leading expert on Web usability, published a book that changed how people think about the Web—Designing Web Usability (New Riders). Many applauded. A few jeered. But everyone listened. The best-selling usability guru is back and has revisited his classic guide, joined forces with Web usability consultant Hoa Loranger, and created an updated companion book that covers the essential changes to the Web and usability today. Prioritizing Web Usability is the guide for anyone who wants to take their Web site(s) to next level and make usability a priority! Through the authors’ wisdom, experience, and hundreds of real-world user tests and contemporary Web site critiques, you’ll learn about site design, user experience and usability testing, navigation and search capabilities, old guidelines and prioritizing usability issues, page design and layout, content design, and more!
Prioritizing Web Usability, is easy to follow and can help website owners to improve the usability of just about any site in existence. Although it is a book, it works as a guide giving specific examples of what works and what doesn’t. You never have to read from front to back to get useful information. It is interesting enough that it would be easy to read from front to back, but it is easy to use the book only on the specific areas of your website that you want to work on.
This book is an excellent compliment to Jakob’s earlier book, Designing Web Usability, which is also a must read for anyone involved in web design, SEO, online marketing and other related fields.
While this book is very thorough and detailed about usability on a site level, it goes beyond simple usability on a website. Topics such as optimizing and pricing pay per click ads, ad placement click rates, actual reasons to improve a website, writing content, detecting and using specific information such as user connection speed, and hundreds of other topics.
Everything topic in the book is thoroughly explained, and backed with specific examples and statistics where appropriate. Overall, this could be the only resource a savvy website owner needs to make their website very usable.
How to apply this book to your website:
Starting from the area that plays a top three role in importance on most websites, formatting submission forms on your website. The books explains exactly how your forms should look and be formatted, so that they are easy to use and well understood.
Next moving to the actual products that you sell, you can see specific examples of the best way to lay out categories and individual products on your site. You will learn how to write good product descriptions, and while you are writing content, Jakob tells you how to write good content for the rest of your site.
Now, you can clean up your global navigation, and optimize your search function on your website.
After standardizing your links, and making your text more readable, you can get rid of that extra flash that you really don’t need, as well as those pop-up windows that really don’t do anything for you.
Finally, after checking through the usability killers that Jakob outlines, you have a usable, cleanly formatted and professional website. You can now go out and focus on your marketing and driving traffic to your site, knowing that if you don’t have any sales, it’s not the fault of your website’s usability.
A Personal Note:
What I really like about Jakob’s beliefs and standards is that he bashes the heavy use of graphics and media that is commonly seen on websites. While I often take criticism from people by following his advice and not using a lot of images in the layout of my sites, the results truly speak for themselves.
Other Books I Highly Recommend:
Designing Web Usability
Don’t Make Me Think
The Big Red Fez
Bulletproof Web Design
Defensive Design For The Web