five tips for effective business website design

1) Use an established web design company that knows what they are doing; 2) There’s no one solution for building an effective website; 3) Don’t let budgets determine quality; 4) Leave budget for ongoing development; 5) Build a site that grabs people’s attention. Find out more here.

web page make-over!

Expert and real-world advice here on how to make a landing page really work on your website.

The experts at the Copyblogger site take a sales web page of a struggling small business and give specific advice on how to improve it and attract purchases from it.

Tips on everything from the text and images on the page to shopping cart placement and getting the right emotional hook. You’ll learn a lot from these guys.

how to make your online and offline business gel

Barkers Men’s Clothing’s two-year-old e-commerce website has boosted business and also nicely complemented the business of its 26 ‘bricks and mortars’ stores. It’s a good little case study:  Get the full story here.

Highlights

• They try to ensure the homepage mirrors the look of the shops.
• They research similar online businesses to find good online business models.
• Google Analytics plays an important role in monitoring the site’s effectiveness.

who searched for what in NZ in Google in 2008

Not sure if these will be of any use for adjusting your website’s keywords (Ford beat Holden, Marmite beat Vegemite, Hayley Westenra beat Kiri Te Kanawa and art topped sport) but here’s a bit of a rundown on what Kiwis searched for on Google in 2008.

Have a successful online 2009 everyone.

make your website more useable to more people

Some tips here to make your website more useable to a wider range of people …

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced a new standard to make websites more accessible to older and disabled people.

Version 2.0 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG2) applies to text, images, audio and video. It also covers web applications and is said to give developers more flexibility than the old guidelines.

WCAG2 focuses on making websites:

• Perceivable: including descriptive text for images, audio captions, flexibility of layout and colour contrast
• Operable: making sites usable with keyboards and improving navigation
• Understandable: making content easier to read and input more logical
• Robust: ensuring content and applications are compatible with assistive technology such as screen readers and magnifiers

Find out more at the WCAG2 site or read this article from the BBC.

how to effectively market online using video

Here’s a knowledgeable article about how to effectively use video on your website to market your products and services.

marketing and product advice for online start-ups

Your online business needs marketing and product plans (and advice on what to focus on) right from the get-go.

Here are three free marketing training modules from NZ-based The Small Business Company. If you find these modules useful TSBC has a range of others available for subscription.

And this presentation comes from the United States but there is lots of good info that will be helpful to NZ online start-ups too.

11 tips to improve your search engine ranking

They say there are over 100 factors that affect a website’s search engine ranking.  Unfortunately, of those 100 items, there are only a few that webmasters can actually control.  This article looks at 11 of the most controllable search engine ranking tips.

free online file conversion

Now this really is useful: a free, online file conversion service. Simply load your file into the website, select the type of file you want to convert it to and back comes the new file. Converts .docx (Microsoft 2007) to .doc, .jpg to .tiff and .xls to .csv, along with many, many other conversions.