Every visitor to your website is a potential customer, and whether a “conversion” on your site equals a filled out Contact Us form or a completed online purchase, more conversions equals more business.  So how can you increase conversions on your website? Here are 5 suggestions to try:

1. Make It Clear.
Is your call-to-action getting lost in the clutter of your website?  Make sure that the button or link that leads customers along the path to conversion is one of the most prominent elements on your pages. Try to eliminate distracting bright colors that should be reserved for your call-to-action. Avoid clutter – white space is your friend.  Make sure your call-to-action is the boldest and most attention-grabbing element of your page design.

2. Put It Above the Fold
“Above the Fold” is a phrase that is taken from the newspaper world referring to the valuable, headline news real estate found above the fold of the newspaper.  In web-speak, this refers to the space on a web page that is viewable without having to scroll.  Keeping your call-to-action above the fold helps to ensure that everyone will see it.

3. Red Doesn’t Always Mean Stop
Conventional design wisdom says that the color red sends the message “stop” to viewers.  But Performable.com decided to test that theory on their site by changing their green call-to-action button into a red one.  Conversions on the red button were 21% higher!  That kind of increase warrants at least a test on your own site.

4. If It Moves, It Grabs Attention
This one is a little trickier, since you want to avoid overdoing the spinning, blinking lights (see item #1). However, a subtle bit of movement or animation added to your call-to-action (or somewhere close-by) can help draw your customers’ eyes.

5. Add Human Interest – with Photos of Real People
Having more photos of faces (particularly smiling) is a consistently successful way of catching your visitors’ attention and increasing conversions.  Many different sites have tried adding images of people with measurable success.  For instance, MedaliaArt.com added photos of artists in place of photos of their paintings and made double the amount of sales. CalyxFlowers.com tested images of people with their flowers.  In their test, visitors who saw images with people were 14% more likely to add something to their shopping cart.

gif, jpg, png… You may have noticed these three little letters at the end of your image files. There are a lot of different types of file formats available for images, so how do you know which one to use?

Each file format has different advantages and disadvantages. Depending on what type of image you are creating, you can pick the file format that will give you the best quality and size for your project.

Here is a handy guide to some of the most common file formats for the web:

Graphics Interchange Format (.gif)

The GIF file format is common for icons and other graphics, because they can create small file sizes that will load quickly. Because the GIF format is limited to 256 colors, it’s best for images that have blocks of solid color – such as logos or icons. Photographs saved in a GIF format will look choppy, because photos often require much more than 256 colors.

Below is an example of a photo (left) and an illustration (right) saved in a GIF format. On the left, you can see how there are not enough colors to create a smooth transition between the dark purple and the lighter purple. However, on the right you can see how the solid colors of our illustrated flower look nice and clean — even when we take a close look at the detail.

Examples of images saved as a GIF

GIFs can also be used to create transparent images on websites, however the transparency features are limited. Each pixel must be either completely transparent or completely opaque, which means the edges of transparent GIFs will not have a smooth transition into the background. I’ll explain this more in a little bit.

Finally, GIFs are the original “animation” format on the web.  You might remember those small, quaint animations of flames or flashing lights… those were simple animated GIFs. Nowadays, much more sophisticated things can be done online with Flash, Javascript, and now even HTML 5, however animated GIFs still show up in unexpected and imaginative ways every now and then.

Joint Picture Experts Group (.jpg / .jpeg)

The JPG file format is capable of saving images with millions of colors, which makes it ideal for saving photos. To reduce the file size,  JPG will use a compression algorithm that will reduce the quality and details in the photo. This means the more an image is compressed, it will have a smaller file size and lower quality appearance.

JPG is not a good file format for images that need crisp edges – like for text and logos – because the loss of quality will add artifacts and make the text blurry.

Below you can see that the photograph of the purple flower (left) looks much better than the previous GIF example. On the right, the solid colors in the blue flower look a bit fuzzy. These “artifacts” are caused by the JPG compression algorithm. By reducing the file size, the photo has lost some of the details — making the image a lower quality.

Examples of images saved as a JPG

Portable Network Graphics (.png)

PNG files have two different versions: PNG-8 and PNG-24.

8-bit PNG

PNG-8 is similar to the GIF format. It is limited to 256 colors, and has limited transparency features. In some cases the PNG-8 format can save smaller files at a higher quality than the GIF format, so it is best to compare both of these options to choose the format that works best. You can see below, that the images look very similar from the examples in the GIF section.

Examples of images saved as a PNG-8

24-bit PNG

PNG-24 can save images with much more colors, similar to JPG files. However, PNG-24 doesn’t reduce quality the way a JPG does, making the file sizes much larger. In the examples below, the PNG-24 photo of the purple flower is more than 4 times the file size of the JPG version, and the PNG-24 image of the blue flower is more than 2.5 times the size of the PNG-8 version. Smaller file sizes are ideal for websites because they will load faster, so these large PNG-8 will slow your website’s loading time.

Examples of images saved as a PNG-24

So why would you ever want to use a PNG-24? Transparency?

PNG-24 will give you the best quality for transparent images, because it allows you to have several different levels of transparency. This means that your image will have a smooth transition into the background. Below, you can see the difference this makes on our blue flower image.

On the left, is an example of a GIF image with transparency (or a PNG-8 with transparency), and on the right is the same image as a PNG-24. The image on the right has a much smoother edge, because it uses transparent pixels to transition into the white background.

Please Note: Transparency for images is a bit more complicated than how I’m presenting it here — but for the purposes of this article I’m keeping it simple. If you are interested in saving images with transparency, I highly suggest learning more about browser support for PNG-24 transparency, and how to improve the quality of transparent GIF and PNG-8 images.

Choosing a File Format

Now that you know the differences between the most common file formats, you can make a better choice when saving your images for the web. So, just to recap:

• For photographs – save your photo as a JPG
• For logos, text, and images that use solid colors – save your image as a GIF or a PNG-8
• For images with transparency – save your image as a GIF, PNG-8, or a PNG-24

To help you navigate your way through your new SiteSource Content Management System from NetSource, here is a basic guide of the terms and elements you’ll need to know.

Content Management System (CMS) – A Content Management System (CMS) is a web-based development platform that allows a website’s owner to manage their website without any programming or web design knowledge.  Typically, a CMS will allow you to add, edit, and delete pages on your site, upload photos, and add downloadable documents.  Some systems might have additional functionality, like allowing you to create and manage Flash slideshows, Blogs, Calendars, and more.

Menu or Navigation – A website’s main method of presenting and organizing the pages available for browsing is through a menu or navigation.  The menu is typically a block of buttons that spans horizontally across the top of a website or is stacked vertically down the left- or right-hand side.  A menu can also include fly-out or drop-down navigation that presents secondary pages under a main tab or button.  For the most flexibility, and so you can add as many pages as you like to your new SiteSource website, we recommend a vertical (up and down) menu.

Main Level – In reference to a website’s menu, the main level menu buttons are those visible immediately when the  website loads.  The main level can host sub-menu items in the form of fly-out or drop-down menus that appear when the main level button is hovered over.

Sub-Menu – a sub-menu is a secondary menu or pages organized under a main level page. For instance, the About Us page might be the main level menu item, while Our History, Our Locations, and Our Staff might be sub-menu pages displayed in a fly-out or drop-down menu under About Us.

Types of Pages in SiteSource

Home Page – The Home page of your site is the main or “first” page of your site found at www.yourdomain.com.  In SiteSource, the Home page can contain several specialized and/or custom features including a Flash Slideshow of photos, featured news, calendar, or blog posts, and specialized Content Boxes.  See below for more info on each of these special features.

Content Page – Content pages will likely make up the bulk of your website’s pages.  They contain text and photos presented and edited by you in a system very similar to a word processor like Microsoft Word.  You can add text, images, links, downloadable documents, formatted tables, and more to your content pages.

Photo Gallery – A SiteSource photo gallery allows you to present collections of related photos in thumbnail format that visitors can click on for enlargements.  You can add as many photo galleries as you like to your site, limited only by your hosting disc space.  You can also add introductory text and images to the Photo Gallery page through an interface similar to content pages. Each photo gallery can have either a single photo album or multiple albums. For instance, you might have an Events photo gallery that has individual albums for Holiday Dinner, Summer Picnic, and Day of Service.

Photo Albums – A photo album is the actual collection within a photo gallery of related photos presented with captions. As with the parent photo gallery, you can choose to include an introduction to your album, and you can define an “album cover” photo.

Calendar – SiteSource’s Calendar is presented in a traditional tabular format that resembles the familiar, print-style calendar grid.  Website visitors can scroll forward and backward through the months.  You can choose to have a single calendar or multiple, themed calendars that work together (for instance, each department might have its own calendar). Each calendar event shows up as a text link on the specified day’s calendar block.

Calendar Events – Clicking on each calendar event listing (displayed on the calendar grid as a text link) will bring visitors to a detailed description of that event. You can add links, formatted text, and photos to your calendar event description page.

Blog – SiteSource’s blog component is a simplified blogging system that allows you to get up and running making regular posts without having to learn a complicated system.  You can use your blog to post articles, make announcements, solicit customer feedback, post news and media, and so much more. You can add as many blogs to your site as you like.

Blog Comments – Visitors to your blog can post comments.  You can decide if comments get automatically posted to your site, or if comments require approval before being displayed.  The blog also has a SPAM filtering system to help cut down on illegitimate comment posts.

Page Elements

As you edit the content on your page, you will find the following main buttons and tools in the page editor’s toolbars.

Links – Links are the most basic element of the internet.  Clicking on a link takes you to a webpage by directing your browser to that page’s address, or URL. Links can be added to text or to images, and they can link you to other pages on the same site (interior links) or to pages on a different website (exterior links).  Every page on the internet has a unique address.  To find a page’s link address so you can link to it, simply look at the Address Bar at the top of your browser.

Blockquote – A blockquote is a section of text that is indented both on the left and the right.

Numbered List – A numbered list (also known in the web world as an ordered list) is an indented list of numbered items. SEO Tip: for better search engine ranking for your most important keywords, be sure to have the keyword you are trying to optimize for in a numbered or bulleted list.

Bulleted List – A bulleted list (also known as an unordered list) in an indented bullet point list. SEO Tip: for better search engine ranking for your most important keywords, be sure to have the keyword you are trying to optimize for in a numbered or bulleted list.

Headings – Headings are the bold headlines on your web pages that help you organize and present your content.  Headings are usually available for use from Heading 1 through Heading 6 (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6), with Heading 1 as the main headline for your page and the smaller headings used for sub-categories on the page.  SEO Tip: You can rank better for your most important keywords if they can be found in your headings, in particular your H1.

Images – Images on a web page can refer to both photos or other graphic elements like logos, promotional graphics, product diagrams, banners and more.  You can add images to Content Pages quickly and easily.  You can also upload photos to your photo albums.

Tables – Tables are a useful element for presenting data sets in a tabular format.  SiteSource has an easy tool that helps you add tables and format them (borders, shading, padding, etc.).

Horizontal Lines – Horizontal lines can be used to separate two areas of a page.  They are lines that stretch from the left to the right side of the page, and you can control the color, size, and shading.

Page Properties

Each of these items can be updated and managed by you under the “Page Properties” tab of each page.

Page URL – The term URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator and refers to the “address” of a web page. For example, the URL for the Our History page on this blog is: http://www.netsourceblog.com/index.php/company/our-history/.  You can find the URL of any page by looking at the address bar located at the top center of your browser window.

Page Target – When someone clicks on a link on your site, you can decide to open a new window or tab instead of opening the new page in the same browser window.  This is a good idea when you are sending someone off of your website or linking to a PDF.  In order to acheive this effect, you would set the page target of your new link to _blank.

Menu Title – This is the text displayed on the menu button for your page.  For instance, in the interest of brevity and space use you might make the menu title “About Us” while your page title is “About XYZ Widgets in California”. Please note that your menu title will also be used as the H1 heading for your page as well.

Page Title -Your page title is usually displayed at the very top of your browser or on your browser tab.  Page titles are used for SEO purposes, and they will be displayed as your bolded link on search engine results pages. SEO Tip: Be sure the main keyword or phrase you are trying to optimize for on your page is present in your page title, at or very near the beginning. Page titles should be between 66 characters (Google limit) and 120 characters (Yahoo! limit). Finally, make sure each of your pages has a unique page title.

Meta Keywords – Meta keywords are invisible code only seen by search engines.  When you enter keywords, simply enter comma separated words and phrases.  Capitalization is not necessary.  SEO Tip: Meta keywords are ignored by Google, while Bing and Yahoo! still take them into account (sometimes).  However in all cases, your meta keywords will be useless if the words or phrases you list are not present in the actual, readable text of your page.  You should limit your meta keywords to the 6 – 10 words or phrases that are most relevant to the page you are placing them on.

Meta Description – The meta description is another invisible code on your page primarily used for search engine ranking.  However, some search engines might display your meta description as the intro paragraph for your link on search engine results pages.  Your description should be a short summary of your page’s contents.  SEO Tip: The most effective meta descriptions are 150 characters or 25 words, and they contain all or most of the keywords you are trying to optimize your page for. Your meta description should not simply be a comma separated list.

Actions

Add Page -  When you are ready to add a page to your website, click on the “Add Page” button found in the upper left-hand side of the management screen.  This will bring you to the Add Page screen.  First you’ll need to choose your Page Type from the drop-down: Content Page, Photo Gallery, Blog or Calendar. Then choose your Parent Page – if you want your new page to be on the Main Level of your menu, choose “No Parent,” if you want your new page to be part of a sub-menu, click on the radio button beside the parent page you want it to reside beneath. Then choose your Page Target (in most cases you’ll choose “Open in Same Window”). Decide if you want the new page to be shown on your menu – keep the checkbox next to Show on Menu unchecked if you want to keep the new page out of the menu. Finally, type in the Menu Title you want for you new page and click “Save Changes”.

Show on Menu – Sometimes you might not want to have a page displayed on the Main Level or even the Sub-Menus of your Navigation – perhaps you want to send a private link to a client or board members, or maybe you want to create a graphic on an existing page that links directly to the new page in order to control the flow of traffic to the page. Whatever your reason, you can click the checkbox next to “Show on Menu” during the creation of the new page. Or, you can update this setting by clicking on the “Page Properties” tab and checking or unchecking as needed.

Publish Page – New pages are not automatically published to your website, so you can have time to add, edit, and finalize your new page’s content before the rest of the world sees it.  When you are ready to make your new page available to your website visitors, click on the page’s menu title in the page tree on the left, then click on the “Publish Page” button at the bottom of the page editor window.

Unpublish Page – If you wish to remove a page from your website temporarily, you can click on the “Unpublish Page” button at the bottom of the page editor window. This action removes the page from website visitors’ view without deleting it permanently. You can choose to “Publish” the page again at a later date (handy for seasonal pages like Holiday Sales), or you can simply save the content for historical purposes.

Delete Page – If you are sure you will no longer need a page that you wish to remove from your website, you can click the “Delete Page” button found at the bottom of the page editor window.  Please note that in order to retrieve date from a deleted page, a programmer would have to manually restore your database from a previous back-up.  This is time consuming and costly, so be sure to use this button with care!

Save Changes – This is the most important button on your page editor window.  Whenever you make a change to the “Page Content” or “Page Properties” of your website’s pages, be sure to click on the “Save Changes” button near the bottom of the page screen, otherwise you will lose your changes!

Advanced Features

Photo Slideshow – SiteSource sites come with a Flash slideshow on the Home Page that displays an unlimited number of photos or graphics with stylized transitions, optional captions, and optional links.  Your lead designer will help you develop the best strategy for the size, placement, content and presentation of this element.  In order to add slides, edit captions and links, reorder slides, and delete slides entirely, simply click on the “Home” link in the Page Tree on the left-hand side of your management console.  Next, click on the “Photo Slideshow” tab at the top of the page editor window.

Site Map – A site map will be automatically generated and updated for you and will include links in a bulleted list to all of the pages on your website that are Published and are set to “Show on Menu”. Any changes you make to your menu are immediately reflected on the Site Map as soon as you “Save Changes”.

Content Box – Sometimes the display of your Home Page will be highly specialized, and instead of a single text area, you might have several block elements where text and photos can be added and edited.  In this case, you “Page Content” tab for the Home Page will have 2 or more editor boxes (one for each of the defined areas on the page).

Video – Video is an optional addition to SiteSource websites that can be customized to your needs and vision.  One popular option includes a single “Featured Video” on your Home Page.  Another option is the ability to add a video to every Content Page of your site. Yet another option creates a Video Gallery on your website, similar to the Photo Gallery page type. These additional features can be added on during website development or at any time after launch.

Site Search – Every new SiteSource site comes with the ability to add a site-wide search element. The site search will index all of your pages and files (like PDFs) on a daily basis so that site visitors can type in a keyword or phrase and get relevant page and file results.

Every website communicates information to users through text. Headlines grab our attention while cluing us into what the following paragraph is about. Supporting text tells us a story about a good or service being offered, and why we can’t live without it. Given the weighty job that text performs on a website, it makes sense to take care in sculpting its appearance. The following is a quick walkthrough of the different tweaks that web designers (and do-it-yourself website updaters) can use to add readability and impact to website text.

Use an Appropriate Line Length

Paperback books, magazines and newspapers all have distinct column sizes for text to live in. On the outside of those columns is negative white space called a margin that gives your eyes a place to rest while reading from line to line. Having an overly wide text column can create fatigue on the reader as there is not ample space to rest. Conversely, having very narrow text columns also makes sentences seem confusing as the reader has to jump from line to line constantly. Determining an optimal line length for text is more of an art form than a science, and usually is a trial and error process. However, keep in mind that in general the larger the typeface (or font), the smaller you want your number of characters per line to be.

Choose the Right Font Family

Different typefaces (fonts) carry meaning, and should be picked with care. While sans-serif fonts are easier to read on screen, they may not be the best choice for your company’s message. Font choice should try to match your already established branding look and feel, along with effectively displaying your headlines, sub headlines, body text and call outs effectively. Learn more about font choice.

Use a Readable Font Size

The standard font size for print is 16 pixels (1em) which seems large when compared to most websites where 12px text seems to be the norm. It is important to embrace your audience and make sure that your website text is easily legible for them. An older audience (age 40+) will require and expect a larger font size than a younger demographic.  Do a little research into our visitors to make sure you are accommodating their needs. For general body copy guidelines, 10px is too small for most users to read,while 24px seems more like a headline.

Control Line Height

Line height is the vertical space in between lines of words. Line height is usually referred to as leading, a term from actual printing presses where slabs of lead were inserted in between sentences to set the height. Line height aids in readability by having paragraphs, headlines, and sub headlines grouped together with space.

Use Contrasting Colors

Contrast is key to having text stand out and be easy to read. Traditionally, black text on a white background has been seen as the highest, and thus best level of contrast. However, screens are different from printed paper, as they create light and thus seem much brighter and more contrasted. A newer trend is to use a dark grey color on a white background to lessen the stark contrast. Whatever color palette your work from, it is important to have contrasting colors so that all users can see and read your text, including users with old, low-contrast monitors, or visitors with vision impairments like color-blindness.

So you’ve got yourself a brand-new website for your business. It looks great, delivers your business message quickly, and visitors are raving about how easy it is to find the information they need. The website even has a content management system (CMS) that lets you make changes to information and images on the site without so much as a phone call to your developer.

Depending on the type of content management tools your site uses and how they’ve been programmed to work, you can add, delete, modify and move around almost any piece of information on your website. Content management can be an extremely powerful tool — you might even say that it’s “dynamite”.

Just make sure you don’t use the dynamite to blow yourself up.

Over our 15-year history of building websites for businesses of all stripes, the developers here at NetSource Technologies have seen (and developed) a lot of websites with content management systems. Most such sites are well-maintained and informative, but from time to time we’ll encounter a true clunker where the content management system — for whatever reason — has been used not to enhance the website, but to seriously damage its value as an informational resource and marketing tool.

Of course, you want your new website to work in favor of your business’ bottom line, right? So here are a few of the most common content management mistakes and some tips on how to avoid them.

1. Don’t neglect your content management. Aside from the use of the horrendous little <blink> tag (which ought to be a second-degree felony), the most serious content management error is not to use your website’s CMS at all. There are way too many content-managed websites sitting out there with out-of-date information and dead content.

Once you’ve invested time and money into the development of a website for your business marketing, please don’t forget that it should always be something of a Work In Progress. That’s one of the principal advantages of the Internet as a medium — websites are dynamic and easy to modify. They are not stone tablets.

As your business needs change and as new information for your customers becomes available, take advantage of that CMS and update your website. If you and your staff don’t have the time to make the updates, then contact your developer and pay them for a little time to update the site for you. Otherwise, you’re letting a valuable investment go to waste.

2. Don’t cut and paste anything directly from MS Word. Microsoft Word can be a great tool for writing and creating business documents. One thing it is NOT, however, is an editing tool for website content. Every page of every MS Word document ever produced is a veritable minefield of hidden formats and coding that can destroy a well-crafted web page in seconds.

When you copy text from an MS Word document onto your computer system’s “clipboard”, the hidden formats and codes are sucked up right along with the text. When you paste all of that directly from the clipboard into a text window of a content management system, the hidden codes almost always go along for the ride. Click the “save” button and you’ve probably just swung a big wrecking ball into your website. From odd formatting that you can’t fix or get rid of no matter what, to pages of hidden code that make search engines give up indexing your page long before they hit the real text… the pitfalls are many.

Fortunately, the solution is pretty simple. Once you’ve copied your text from an MS Word document, paste it into a plain-text editing application like NotePad. This removes all of the hidden formats and codes. Then copy the text from your new NotePad document and paste that into the text window of your website’s CMS.

Note that this tip doesn’t just apply to MS Word. Other popular word-processing applications may also send hidden code along with their text, including messages sent in Microsoft Outlook — so if you’re creating ‘copy’ for your website in anything except a plain-text editor, always follow this little tip before you paste the text into your website’s CMS.

3. Be careful about image shapes and sizes. Images — photos and graphics — frequently baffle even the best content management systems. Why is that? Well, mostly because a website CMS is essentially a computer program and, despite some current conspiracy theories, computers are not yet able to read minds. They don’t automatically know what you want to do with an image. The best they can figure out is how to take the image you give them and stick it into the specifications allowed by the programming.

This is the part of content management that takes a little bit of work. You’ll need to know a little bit about your CMS in order to handle images properly. Does your system re-sample and re-size images into proper ‘web’ images, or just take your original image and squeeze it into a certain dimension — possibly “morphing” the image in the process? Or perhaps it just crops the image to fit a pre-determined size.

You’ll have the most success uploading images through your CMS if you use some sort of image editing software first to correctly crop and size your photo. Unless your site makes use of some really top-end (and usually expensive) content management, there’s no way around this step. Regardless, photos always work best on a website when they’ve been properly sized and edited before being submitted to the rigors of a CMS.

It doesn’t matter much what imaging editing application you use. From professional programs like Photoshop to free, web-based editors like Pixlr.com, most of them will get the job done for you.  The importance of this step goes beyond making sure your website looks as polished and professional as possible with high-end image rendering. If you inadvertently upload a massive picture that simply gets “squished” into a constrained spot, your actually doing damage to your web page’s loading speed, which has recently begun effecting Google rankings.

In closing

Keep in mind that your content management system is a tool, while a web designer or consultant is a resource.  Even if you’ve decided to maintain your website on your own with CMS tool, remember to refer back to your designer as a useful resource for tips and advice as you learn.  At NetSource we’re just a phone call away when that pesky image looks all wrong or you can’t get that red, bullet point text to disappear.

In this installment of our “Improve Your Website” series, I’d like to focus on one of the invisible elements of your website that can have an impact on your site’s success. I’m talking of course about the creation of an XML Sitemap, which is one of several SEO best-practices employed by web developers in the know to help your site get fully indexed by the search engines, ultimately helping your ranking and traffic numbers.  First I’ll give you a brief overview of what the heck they are, and then we’ll talk about some of the benefits and how to add one to your own site.

What Is an XML Sitemap?

Let’s take a look at the official Wikipedia definition first:

The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. Sitemaps are a URL inclusion protocol and complement robots.txt, a URL exclusion protocol.

The webmaster can generate a Sitemap containing all accessible URLs on the site and submit it to search engines. Since Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and Ask use the same protocol now, having a Sitemap would let the biggest search engines have the updated pages information.

As you can see, an XML Sitemap is geared solely toward search engines. Your site visitors will never see your XML Sitemap; it is invisible to your traditional customers and is viewed only by search engine spiders or bots. It greatly improves the ability of the major search engines to index your site, basically hand-delivering pages to get indexed.

What Are the Main Benefits?

If you have an older site that was built before creating XML Sitemaps was standard operating procedure for web developers, you might be saying, “My site is already indexed, why do I need a Sitemap?” Indeed, search engines can and will index your web site without the benefit of an XML Sitemap. However, having an XML Sitemap is like hand-delivering your pages to a search engine tied up with a bow.  It includes additional information that search engines typically “guess” at, like page importance and how often each page gets updated.  Plus, the fact that you are taking the time to generate an up-to-date XML Sitemap signals to search engines that you are serious about your website and getting accurately indexed, which in turn motivates them to rank you higher than someone who doesn’t adhere to best practices.

Most of all though, keep in mind that search engines don’t index your site once and that’s it.  They will return periodically to re-index your site and contents. They look for new content and meta data, interior and in-bound links, and more. Then re-rank you against competitive sites.  If your site has changed, they’ll return quicker to re-index you next time, to make sure their search results are as accurate as possible.  However, there’s no set formula or schedule, and if you have recently re-designed your site or made a major content update after a long period of no activity, submitting an XML Sitemap to the search engines is like a prompt for new indexing that typically takes less 1-3 business days. If you don’t submit an XML Sitemap for indexing, your guess is as good as anyone’s on when the search engines will re-index your content.

So How Do I Add an XML Sitemap?

This is something you can do yourself with a little tech savvy and time.  Or you can engage one of our designers to take care of the task for you. Typically, the whole process will take a web designer around 30 minutes, but it may take you longer the first time around since it potentially requires setting up three new accounts.

Do-it-yourself Instructions:

1. Use a free program to generate your XML Sitemap (like, http://www.xml-sitemaps.com), then save the file. If your website has more than 500 pages (which can happen on sites with inventory or other dynamic content), you’ll probably need to buy a program.
2. Upload the new file to your website using FTP access. If you do not already have a username and password, contact your web host’s technical support. The file should be copied to the root directory.
3. To submit your XML Sitemap to Google, you’ll need a Google Account.  (You can create a free account if you don’t already have one.) Using Google’s Webmaster Tools, you’ll first need to verify that you are the owner of the site by adding a second file generated by Google to the root directory of your site. Once they verify that you’ve uploaded that verification file, then you can submit the URL of your XML Sitemap for indexing. For more info see: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/
4. To submit the file to Yahoo!, you’ll need to follow a similar procedure. For more info and to get started with Yahoo! see: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites
5. To submit to Bing, you’ll have to prove you are owner of the site once again.  You can get started here: http://www.bing.com/webmaster

Starting a new design project can sometimes be a little intimidating.  Here are some tips to help take the mystery out of one of the most important team members on your project and make sure you get the most out of their experience and expertise.

Who’s In Charge?

Before the initial design meeting, your company should appoint one person in charge of all communications with the designer.  Having one gatekeeper to funnel all the opinions of your company’s decision makers saves a lot of time and production hours.

One danger: make sure  you don’t have too many final decision makers! You’re familiar with the term “too many cooks in the kitchen”? The same applies when it comes to websites.  Get everyone’s input during the proposal phase on the major functional components and goals of the website, then assign the handful of people who will approve the design and content.

Be Prepared

While this may seem obvious to you, make sure that your designer has a clear understanding of your business, and what exactly you want the website to accomplish.  The more a designer knows about your business and goals, the better results they can deliver. The following is a list of very common questions that are asked at initial design meetings, and are important to focus a website’s direction:

Business Info

• What are your main products or services?
• Are you national or international? Or do you focus locally?
• How is your company perceived? Is this accurate? Do we need to correct an inaccurate customer perception?
• How many employees are in your company?
• What words or phrases best represent your company?

Target Market

• Who is your target market?
• What state / country / city is your target market?
• What is your brand image with your target market?
• Are you targeting different customers with your website than you traditionally serve offline?

Competition

• Who are you major competitors?
• What sets you apart (competitive advantage / unique selling proposition)?
• Are your offline competitors different than the major online competition?

Marketing Materials

If you have any marketing materials like business cards, brochures or pamphlets, make sure your designer sees them. Having an established visual identity is a great starting place if you want to continue with the same look, or change it completely.

Additionally, does your company have an established brand style sheet with defined colors and usage rules for your logo, tagline and trademarked images?

Designs You Like

Look around at other websites that you feel are well designed or express a company image similar to your own. Having a common visual to discuss and dissect will help the designer understand your thoughts and style. Think of words like clean, minimalist, edgy, grungy, regal, serious, etc… that describe your company or how you want your company to be portrayed online.

Designs You Hate

Is there a color that you cannot stand and should never appear on your website? Are glossy buttons too gimmicky for your company? Let your designer know of anything that should absolutely not be on your website along with websites that you find awful. Having an idea of what you do not like also gives a window into directions that should be avoided. But always remember, your website is not for you, but for your target market.

While this article is not exhaustive in what will be covered in an initial design meeting, it should prepare you to discuss the basics that are needed to effectively brand your company online.

Depending on the sources you read or the people you listen to, the humble PCs that help power your business are either the handiest tools invented since the crescent wrench or a sinister cluster of ticking time bombs waiting for just the right moment to blast all of your important business data to smithereens.

While the “smithereens” proponents may have gotten a boost from McAfee’s recent flub of an anti-virus update, the truth of the matter lies closer to the “handiest tools” end of the spectrum. For many businesses, computers are indispensible. Period. So the trick becomes figuring out how to integrate computers into your business without putting your most important information at risk of getting blown to Kingdom Come.

The first line of defense for any business has to be a reliable suite of anti-virus software. A recent report from Symantec suggests that hi-tech criminals and hackers launch more than 100 attacks per second on computers around the world. As a result, the report estimates, the amount of malware in circulation in 2009 was 71 percent higher than in 2008.

This means, according to Symantec, that 51% of all the viruses, trojans and other malicious programs the company has ever seen were logged during 2009. In total, Symantec identified almost 2.9 million items of malicious code during that 12 month period.

Now as an anti-virus vendor, Symantec may tend toward a grim regard for all things security-related. But even taking that into consideration, those are some pretty alarming statistics. Any way you look at it, with each passing month more and more bits of malware are entering circulation in an attempt to open up your valuable data and suck it down like a can of creamed corn.

So here’s a question: Your computers play a crucial role in helping your business make money. How much sense does it make, then, if you depend on a piece of free software to protect them from viruses and other malware?

Check out the recent anti-virus software reviews from publications like PC World and Maximum PC. What you’ll find is that a lot of free anti-virus packages are not half-bad. But do you really want to stake the profitability of your business on “not half bad” — especially when you consider that top-rated malware protection can be as inexpensive as $35 per year, per computer?

The security consultants at DataOne Networks can work with you to come up with an anti-malware solution customized to the needs of your business. Remember: “Free” usually doesn’t mean “safe”.

If you haven’t yet considered upgrading your business’ computers to the Windows 7 operating system,  this just might be a good time to give it some thought. Windows 7 offers some significant improvements over both Windows XP and Windows Vista that will make the change worth the effort for most business users – and home users, for that matter.

A few of Windows 7’s finer points:

• It’s optimized to run on the most modern hardware.
• Windows 7’s boot sequence is faster than either XP or Vista.
• In benchmarking tests, Windows 7 performed both large file and small file transfer/copy processes more quickly than either XP or Vista.
• Higher-end versions of Windows 7 feature an “XP Mode” that allows for the use of older software.
• Better network performance than Vista.

And probably the most important difference: Windows 7’s security is a huge improvement over XP, and the User Account Control (UAC) is much more user-friendly than it was in Vista.

Nobody really likes Vista's UAC popups...

If you’re still using Windows XP, there are plenty of reasons to like that operating system — but let’s face it: Security isn’t one of them. XP will continue to receive security support from Microsoft through the middle of April, 2014, but it’s missing Windows Vista’s significantly improved security scheme. As malware and virus threats continue to increase, opting to continue using an operating system with considerably fewer security features is a lot like rolling the dice in a parlor game where the odds are stacked against you.

True enough, Vista’s UAC (you know, those annoying security popups…) is a real pain to deal with. But the idea behind it — limiting what the system can do on its own – is a good one that makes the Internet a much safer place. The UAC is also the foundation for other useful Windows features, including Internet Explorer’s Protected mode. This places strict limits on what Internet Explorer can do, preventing it from writing to most of your hard drive or the Registry without your permission.

... but nobody wants to see this, either.

Windows 7 features a customizable User Account Control that is much less aggravating. Multiple security levels mean that you can choose how many alerts you see – so easily annoyed users can pretend that UAC doesn’t exist while resting safe in the knowledge that their system is protected from third-party meddling.

The real value of Windows 7 security comes in its low-level changes, though. System services are more isolated and run with fewer privileges, reducing the damage that malicious code can do. A new TCP/IP stack offers improved encryption and authentication options, and Address Space Layout Randomization loads system files as random memory addresses, making it far harder for basic malware to exploit key system functions.

There’s no question that Windows Vista is more secure than XP. And Windows 7 keeps the best Vista features, while adding more controls to reduce the aggravation of UAC and Security Center alerts.

The upgrade from Vista is a straightforward process — there is a direct software upgrade available from Vista to Windows 7 that will install “over” your existing Vista operating system.

Many businesses have held off on implementing Vista for any of a variety of reasons and are still using XP as their PC operating system. Unfortunately, the “upgrade” to Windows 7 for XP users isn’t really so much an upgrade as it is a new installation. It’s complicated enough that you’ll want some professional help with the move. If you don’t have a properly-trained  internal IT staff, you’ll need to acquire the services of an experienced tech support company — like DataOne Networks.

One of the most important parts of creating a website is designing it to be user-friendly and easy to navigate. With the billions of websites on the internet, users have plenty of choices when it comes to online shopping, entertainment, or anything else they are looking for. If they don’t like something about your website, they can easily find an alternative with only a few clicks of the mouse.

Here are a few tips on what you should avoid on your website, so your visitors don’t look elsewhere:

1. Spelling and Grammar Mistakes

This might sound like a no-brainer, but the internet is filled with misspellings and bad grammar. It may not be as important in a personal email or in an online forum, but it’s important for a business to represent itself professionally. Take a few minutes to reread your text or use a spell checker before updating your website.

2. SHOUTING

In addition to using correct spelling and grammar, be sure to use uppercase and lowercase letters properly.

It is very difficult to read large portions of text that are written entirely in capital letters. The shape of lowercase letters are designed for instant recognition to make reading easier. By typing in all caps, the reader has to put in more effort to read your website. Typing in all capital letters is also commonly seen as yelling.

3. Underlined Text

It has become an internet standard to style links as underlined text (most commonly as blue underlined text). Because of this convention, website visitors can instantly recognize which words on your website are links, like this text here.

Did you try to click on that last bit of text? It looks like a link, but you don’t realize that it’s not until you hover your mouse over it. When words that aren’t links are underlined, your website visitors become frustrated.

To avoid confusion, links should be the only underlined words in a website. There are many other ways to emphasize words without underlining them. Try using one or more of the following ideas to make important text more prominent:

• Make the text larger
• Change the color of the text
• Make your text bold
• Use italics for emphasis

4. Splash Pages

A splash page is a simple, introductory page that appears before a visitor can reach the actual website content. Often this page requires the visitor to perform some type of action, such as clicking “enter” or choosing whether to view the website in HTML or Flash.

Although there are a few instances where a splash page is needed — such as choosing your language for an international website, or confirming your age for an adult or alcohol-related website — adding a splash page will irritate your visitors. Internet users have very little patience, and making them wait through an animated intro or making them click through unnecessary pages only hinders the user from finding the information they are looking for.

5. Music & Sound

Do not force your website visitors to listen to music. Many website visitors find sounds and music on a website annoying, and will immediately go elsewhere. (Don’t believe me? Check out the thousands of Google results for the phrase “I Hate Websites With Music”.)

Here are some other considerations as to why you should not use sound on your website:

• The user is already listening to their own music
• The user is in a library or office where sound is discouraged
• The user likes to open multiple tabs when browsing the internet, and has to search through all the tabs to find where the noise is coming from
• The user simply does not like the song that is playing

If you do choose to have sound on your website, at least make sure there is an obvious way for the user to turn it off so they can continue to browse your website noise-free.

Your Turn!

As internet users, we all have come across websites that we find annoying or difficult to use. Share your website pet peeves in the comments below!