Looking at two of our sites in Google Analytics we see a different picture emerging. For RefineryCMS.com, a site geared towards Ruby on Rails web developers, over 50% of the visitors are on a Mac. Windows accounts for less than 1/3 of all visits.

The Resolve Digital site attracts a more general business audience. Over 50% of visitors are using Windows, but Mac is a pretty close 2nd with just under 39%.

What’s really shocking are the browser stats.

Net Market Share stats put Internet Explorer on top with 60%, Firefox at 23%, Chrome under 8% and Safari just over 5%. Google Analytics reveals very different usage patterns on our sites.

Resolve Digital: Firefox 41%, Chrome 28%, Safari 18%, and IE a distant 4th with only 12%.

RefineryCMS: Chrome and Firefox just about tied for first with 33% and 32% respectively, Safari a close 3rd with 28%, IE at a paltry 3.28%!

What does this mean in terms of design/development/marketing? The most obvious point is make sure your site is tested using the right combination of operating system and platform. Web designers and developer need to know if, for example, a significant percentage of visitors are looking at your site using Chrome on a Mac.

Their choise operating system and browser impacts your visitors experience your website. This data also informs your understanding of and ability to define accurate web visitor personas in the design phase.

Building trust online is essential if your web marketing efforts are going to pay off. Attracting visitors is great, but to convert them to customers you must establish credibility before you can gain their trust.

According to a study by Stanford University, almost half of web users assess a site’s credibility based on the appeal of the overall design, including layout, typography, and color scheme. The “look and feel” is the first and most important test of your site’s credibility. But if they decide to stick around beyond a couple seconds, more factors come into play.

Take the quiz below to determine if your website is building (or undermining) your credibility. Score each question 1 (nope), 2 (so-so) or 3 (yes, very much). Add up the total, then see our recommendations at the end.

1. Is the visual design appropriate for your type of business?
   Within a few seconds of coming to your site, visitors will form an impression. People respond positively to sites with a polished, professional look. But the connection between design and credibility isn’t simple. In the study, overly “slick-looking” sites frequently received negative comments.
2. Is the content up-to-date?
   Visitors assign more credibility to sites that have been recently updated or reviewed (and no, just putting the current date and time isn’t going to help).
3. Is contact information easy to find?
   If visitors can’t find your contact info (including your real-world address and a phone number) they aren’t going to feel comfortable doing business with you.
4. Are all the links working?
   Broken links and “files not found” on your site present a big credibility problem. Even worse– hosting that’s not reliable. If your hosting company doesn’t guarantee 99.9% uptime, find another host.
5. Do you include testimonials or other 3^rd party endorsements.
   You can and should highlight your expertise. But no matter how impressive your credentials or experience, people pay attention to what others have to say about you. Membership in the Chamber of Commerce, BBB, local organizations and professional associations also help build trust.
6. Do you provide photos of yourself and key staff?
   People do business with people. Help your prospects get to know you. Good quality photos (please– no mug shots or high school year book photos) communicate your level of professionalism. Stock photos of happy smiling models posing as business people never fool anybody.
7. Is your copy appropriate to your audience?
   Always remember that your website is about your visitors. Your web copy should set the right tone and offer useful information. Kill the jargon and happy talk. Eliminate the typos. And don’t stuff it with keywords in a futile attempt to trick the Search Engines.
8. Do you offer free trials or downloads?
   What about case-studies, white papers, or samples? When you give something to visitors, regardless of the cost, they’re more likely to trust you.

Recommendations

Score less than 12
Your site is undermining the credibility of your company. Get help– immediately!

Score 12 to 18
Your site is doing OK, but it’s not converting as many visitors as it could. Identify areas that are weak and make improvements.

Score greater than 18
Your website is helping to build trust in your company. Consider ways to increase your credibility even further and be sure to measure your success. Set up and track your conversion goals in Google Analytics.

I recently came across the outspoken media blog which shocked me into consciousness. Instead of the usual marketing drivel, these folks really are outspoken! They say what they think and take a stand, even if it ruffles some feathers.

Thanks to content management tools it’s easy to write for your blog or website. You don’t have to know how to spell, and grammar, what’s that? Hey, you can always “borrow” some copy from another site (but that’s a different blog post).

In every tool there’s the potential for good or evil.  There’s a difference between adding effective, engaging, inspiring content and adding meaningless word combinations to a page nobody will ever read.

What makes effective content?
Take this simple test. Read the copy on your web page. Out loud. If you can get through it without getting confused (what is this about?) or bored (oh brother!) you’re on the right track.

The biggest problem on the web
Too many words. It’s not that people aren’t willing to read online. It’s that we don’t want to waste time reading boring, irrelevant nonsense, or being forced to read (rather than scan) to find what we’re looking for.

Some tips for effective web copywriting

• Write less
• Write from your visitor’s point of view (what do they need to/want to know?)
• Focus on the benefits of your product or service
• Use short sentences, brief paragraphs
• Make it easy to scan with sub-headers, lists, and bold text for emphasis
• Use “you” and “your” rather than “we”
• Include a “call-to-action” that tells visitors what you’d like them to do

That’s not going to solve the biggest problem on the web, but it’s a start. What tips do you have?

The quality of your meta descriptions can have a direct impact on the number of people who click through to your site. That’s why it’s worth taking the time to create them.

Relevant snippets accurately represent your web pages and provide a clear idea of their content. You should have a different meta description for every page on your site. If you have a large site you’ll need to prioritize this task by addressing the most important pages first.

Meta descriptions can– but don’t have to be– in sentence format. Here’s an example of a succinct and informative meta description.

Here’s a really bad snippet. It is uninformative, difficult to read, and even has a typo!

Tips for writing a good meta description

• Avoid duplicating information already in the page title
• Make sure it accurately describes the page content
• Make it clear and easy to read
• Don’t exceed 160 characters (or it will get truncated in the Search results)
• Think of it as the first step in the visitor experience of your site

While accurate meta descriptions can improve click-through rates, they do not affect your ranking within the search results.

The web is a fluid, changing environment that lends itself to rapid change and iteration. When building a website, this means starting the content you must have, not the content you’d like to have, and then responding to visitor behavior and feedback.

But this isn’t how many (or even most) sites are built. The temptation is to attempt to predict what a site’s visitor will want, and then build everything and anything into the site to address that visitor’s predicted needs. This happens before a single visitor has ever looked at the site. There’s a word for that, and it’s called guessing.

All sites are built to accomplish goals – information delivery, selling products, enabling communication. Some sites are built to accomplish several goals, but most (particularly small business sites) only need to accomplish one. Often, for a small business, it’s to encourage users to submit a contact form or pick up the phone. But, boy, it’s usually pretty hard to accomplish that goal. If you can make it through the bios and the mission statements and the info about the company picnic, you might make it to the contact form.

So if the goal of your site is to get visitors to contact you, why not build a site that contains a contact form, and not much else? If visitors decide they do in fact want to know about your company picnic, they’ll tell you. But if they don’t, you’ve done them (and yourself) a favor and eliminated all points of friction that might prevent them from contacting you.

Building a site doesn’t have to be a complex or expensive exercise. Start simple, iterate, and eliminate the guesswork.

Some great examples of simplicity in web design:

Good Works Foundation

Adam Hoganson

Kyle Sollenberg Design

madewithlove

Speak Creative

• With grace. A negative response may still be turned into a positive response later. Ask for and accept feedback, It could be the difference between making or not making a sale with another customer.
• In most cases a No Response means that you were trying to sell to someone who was not a decision-maker, or you didn’t verify that they have budget before getting to the proposal stage. We’ve all done it, and still do on occasion.
• Never take “No” personally and “No” means no today. Leave the process on a high note with the door open for future contact. Many times I’ve had a “No” turn into a yes down the line.
• If after a certain amount of days (based on when a decision would be made) the prospect has discontinued communication, I send a “proposal withdrawal letter”.  This does one of two things. 1. The prospect calls! or 2. They don’t and I can now consider it dead.
• Try to get specific feedback, offer alternatives if appropriate, and follow-up again to see if anything has changed.
• No point in flogging a dead horse.
• Many companies need 3 proposals to demonstrate some sort of selection process even when the preference is clear. So, in addition to the favorite, they ask a few companies for proposals.  These proposals had zero chance of winning from the start. Your proposal may be one of these “fillers,” hence the lack of response.
• Establish a thorough screening and qualifying process for companies who send you RFPs to make sure you’re not wasting your precious time.
• Move on. There is no scarcity in this world and scarcity mentality does not improve your performance.
• When voicemails and emails go unanswered I remain persistent without being obnoxious until I get them on the phone and simply ask why my proposal didn’t met their needs and how could I have improved it.

How do you handle a negative response?

We thought this was a good question and mined the answers to extract the 25 best tips. If you want to slog through it yourself, refer to the original page.

1. The telephone is the number one way to grab high value B2B sales
2. Our website is a lead generation machine
3. Onsite or online symposiums
4. Webinars can be very effective
5. Having something your “leads” might want
6. Search Engine optimization
7. Trade shows and events
8. Free report, mini audit, etc to qualify and educate the prospect
9. Workshops and seminars
10. Speaking engagements to clubs groups and organizations
11. Article writing
12. A multi-touch approach combining calling, direct mail, email, search engine marketing, web landing pages, events and surveys
13. Web Marketing strategy which includes Social Media
14. Tools you to highlight contact information and add it to Salesforce, Outlook, iPhone and more (Copy2Contact)
15. Tools to capture entire BBB, Yellow Page, etc. listings into excel spreadsheets (eGrabber)
16. Tools to do bulk “whois” lookups (Whois Extractor)
17. Blogging
18. Integrating website, blog and social profiles
19. Email marketing and phone call combination
20. An ongoing, fully-integrated approach
21. Skype toolbar for FireFox that allows you to call with one click
22. LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter
23. Follow up on networking and referrals with the next 4 working hours
24. Live chat
25. Jigsaw.com

Note: Interestingly, nobody mentioned Pay-per-click advertising.

So… what lead generation tools and strategies work best for your business?

The school’s website, on the other hand, is not great. There’s too much text and not enough pictures. I’m fairly sure a lot of the information on it is out of date, but the site’s so uninspiring that I’m not compelled to actually read any of it to find out. It doesn’t communicate to any particular audience effectively – parents, educators, donors. There doesn’t seem to be much reason for its existence.

There is one part of the site that I visit every day. Religiously.

And that’s the private forum for parents. It’s a window into the school-world of my son that I would otherwise have no access to. Every day the teachers post stories and photos of the day’s activities, and every day, like all the other parents, I come back  to see what our kids have been up to.

I’m positive that the private forum is the part of the school’s online presence that gets the most traffic. By far. From the school’s perspective, that’s not necessarily a good thing. They went to the effort of building an entire website, and it mostly fails as a communication tool, except for one part, which is not publicly accessible. But for me, that’s irrelevant. I’m a single user, and I get a lot of value out of that one part of the site. For me, it works, because that one part of the site is relevant.

A website should be relevant to the single user.

That’s the point. A website should not address a large audience, it should address a single person. This is almost universally true, and definitely true for this school’s site.

Nope.

A good proportion of their home page was given over to a Hawaii promotion, and I found it visually arresting. It made me think about a Hawaii vacation (and a Twitter background).

Problem is, this isn’t a travel agency site, it’s a news site. These are tough times and this approach smacks of desperation. Like those cable TV channels with their logos that consume the bottom right corner– and then rotating ads on top of it, all while you’re trying to watch a movie. It seems so insulting and disrespectful (I always wonder what the filmmakers think). Your movie is nothing more than a place for us to hang our logo.

This SFGate home page feels the same. All that news stuff, it’s really gets in the way of the advertisement. I applaud them for the experiment. I hope they don’t repeat it.

I’ve never been accused of being a fashion plate but the other day visiting the nytimes.com homepage I was inspired to click on photos from the Paris 2010 Fall Collections.

I was shocked by what I saw. It wasn’t just the emaciated stick figure wearing what looked to my cretinous eye like thrift shop finds. It was the advertisement showing a young boy with a cleft palette.

The sad pair of big brown eyes stare out from the right side of the page in silent protest. A click of a mouse can save his life, but the cost of the handbag alone would pay for his corrective surgery. Yet it’s the model whose life force seems precarious if she doesn’t eat something soon.

This bizarre juxtaposition of images and the resulting mixed messages would never happen in the print publication. Unless The Times is suggesting that cleft palette is a fashion trend maybe somebody (other than me) needs to start paying attention to the rotating ads.