I feel that QR codes are a great way to bridge print with the digital world. This is why at YWD we are looking at ways to integrate them with your business website. QR codes are the best way to send people to your web site from printed materials without asking them to type in a URL on their phones.. The video below, by Kevin McKillop is a simple and well executed demonstration on how QR codes works.
Gustavo Jabbaz started his digital career as a designer and then became a developer and these days spends most of his time as a digital marketer. A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for day-to-day operations, marketing and development strategy. He is who you talk to when you need support with SEO and/or Social Media. Gustavo Jabbaz on Google+ | Twitter
Remember when we used the term 'Crackberry' to explain people's addition to the Blackberry? Well, it turns out, it wasn't the Blackberry they were addicted to it was communicating to each other. I read that recent studies have shown outlawing texting in cars has actually caused more accidents because people are now texting down at crotch level rather than up at their steering wheels. Apparently they figure the cops won't see this more surreptitious activity.
Let's get this straight people, you should not be texting in your cars, but people are so addicted to it that it seems impossible to prevent unless car manufacturers invent some kind of electronic blanket that prevents smartphones from receiving and sending texts or emails in their cars. Both hands on the steering wheel. Driving is a full-time job.
It drives me crazy watching people in traffic, obviously looking down, texting. At the very least, paint eyeballs on your foreheads to make people think you are looking forward!
As small businesses we're all saying, "How do we get me some O dat chit?" How can what we do be that addictive? How can we make our customers up-sell themselves? This last one I really like. I think it gets tiring for both the salesperson and the customers to have to go through the classic up-sell dance, "You know, that 60" screen is only $1000 more." "But I only need it for the kitchen."
Wouldn't it be way better to offer something at a great value and then get the customer to go, "You know, I would really want more…" service? features? strategy? And be willing to pay for it?
I think it can be done if you package your services. Make them less ambiguous. Be clear about what each package offers and who they are directed towards. Of course, it defeats the purpose if you have 30 of them. And it's also true that many will go for the cheapest solution, but so what, let them. Let them find out later they made the wrong choice. If your offerings are clearly set out you can always point out that they got what they paid for. Let them buy more services later. Don't assume just because you're in a creative business that ambiguity comes with the territory. It does not. You're just setting yourself up for abuse.
Customers like to know what they are getting. By being clear about the offerings and sticking to your guns, it is actually a good thing. Customers appreciate the fact that you look like you know what you are doing. The people who don't? Don't do business with them.
Paul Chato has been many things: a graphic designer, programmer, comedian, head of network TV comedy, game producer, 3D animator, playwright, event host, director and anything else that matches his fancy. Most of the time he is a managing partner at Your Web Department and is most excited about LiveBuild™. Check out LiveBuild
This past week: I did research on QR Codes (guess what feature we will implementing on YWD in the near future?) and I found very interesting information about them. I'm sure you have seen them and most people are not sure what they are. I also read a lot of opinions as to why they will go away, and the same amount of opinions as to why they are here to stay. I'm of the view that they are here to stay, though they need to mature and become more integrated with marketing strategy. More on that in my post which I tweeted below; for today's list of tweets I also touched on mobile, social media and SEO and included a great radio interview of Paul Chato talking about Tablets and RIM. Enjoy!
AM900 interviews Paul and @ScottTalkCHML asks him about Tablets. Listen! -> http://ow.ly/cr8rw
Paul Chato shares his views about RIM and Tablets in general, great listen!
There you go Twitter and SEO-> 10 Twitter SEO Tips
Concerned on how to apply SEO to your tweets? Search no more, great ideas on how to fully search optimize your tweets.
YWD has both Desktop and Mobile XML sitemaps-> How to submit a Google XML Sitemap file for your website
We all know now that mobile browsing is the future, for this Google wants to optimize your mobile search with mobile content only. Makes sense, does't it? This why we are now providing you with a XML site map for your mobile content only. So Google has an easier time indexing your mobile content.
What do you think?-> 7 Ways to Spice Up Your Email Marketing
Good ideas, and if your not using email lists for marketing purposes you should. It is not spam if your audience has opted in to your list, and most people appreciate receiving news and updates straight to their inboxes.
Fully explained-> What are QR Codes and how to use them
As I mentioned on the introduction above, What QR codes are, how to use them and who should use them.
You really need to check where are they going to be displayed-> 10 Funniest QR Code Fails
I know some experts recommend to get inventive to display your QR Code, but at the same time you need to think about practicality. QR Codes are scanned by smartphones only. Knowing this, you need to put yourself on the person shoes, who will be doing this. Therefore the QR Code needs to be close to their phone camera and it should deliver meaningful information available on their phone.
New kid in town @Jugnoome -> Become Social in Social Media With Jugnoo
Jugnoome is a new web based tool to manage your social media accounts, with a bit of CRM input in it. Your are able to track your posts and compare them with your website traffic analytics. It is in beta phase now and free! Worth taking it for a spin.
Next Friday I'll have another round up, in the meantime you can follow me and YWD on the networks below:
Don't have a Your Web Department website? Sign up now or try it for free at www.yourwebdepartment.com
Gustavo Jabbaz started his digital career as a designer and then became a developer and these days spends most of his time as a digital marketer. A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for day-to-day operations, marketing and development strategy. He is who you talk to when you need support with SEO and/or Social Media. Gustavo Jabbaz on Google+ | Twitter
What are QR Codes (abbreviated from Quick Response Code)?
We see them every where, advertising posters, real estate signs, magazines and many more places. QR codes started being used in the automobile industry and quickly become popular outside the industry due to its fast readability and large storage capacity compared to standard UPC barcodes. In most cases you see them as black and white, but they don't have to be like that. What it needs is high contrast so the scanner can read it, but any colour will work with it. No need to mess with the nice design work of an ad by plastering the ugly QR code on the corner.
How to use them?
Today the main purpose is to add more information or a call to action by directing the user to a website (and please let it be mobile formatted one), where more information is offered.
Best thing about sending the person to a website landing page is that you can track the scans for that particular QR Code. You can see if one QR code is working better than others.
Here is an article on how to do it: http://www.qrstuff.com/blog/2011/05/01/using-google-analytics-with-qr-codes
Here’s a list of features that QR-code readers are generally equipped with:
Displaying text
Setting up system alerts
Adding events to calendars
Opening URLs in a browser
Collecting contact information (including vCards)
Sending email
Sending text messages (SMS)
Geolocation
Calling other phones
Connecting to Wi-Fi hotspot
Do a like on a Facebook Page
Browser have been able to launch and load email clients by just clicking on a email link for years now. With smarphones there is a whole bunch of things you can do combining QR codes with URI Schemes (Uniform Resource Identifier).
Here’s a list of some cool things that are possible:
Launching native Apple apps (Mail, Phone, FaceTime, Text, Map, YouTube and iTunes)
Running JavaScript bookmarklets
Opening certain IM clients (Skype, AIM, MSN, GTalk, ICQ and Yahoo)
Opening special applications (IRC tools, feed readers, FTP clients and SVN repositories)
Opening any application that registers a URI scheme when it installs on a platform
What makes this particular technique so amazing is that it doesn’t rely on the QR-code reader being very advanced; all it needs is for the app creator (be it Skype, Evernote or Angry Birds) you want to launch and interface with to use the system development API to register a URI scheme.
Who should use them?
Any business having a print ad campaign can enhance the ads by providing more meaningful information on the product or service. For example real estate sign in front of the house for sale is an excellent case for a QR Code. Now by scanning the QR Code on the for sale sign the person is able to find more about the property by landing on the property detail page the agent prepared in advance. Retailers could add the code on the product display to instructional video of the product they are looking to purchase, and the list goes on.
Are they a Fad?
There are lot of people saying they are because:
They are ugly
True but they don't have to be. They only need high contrast on any colour.
You need a QR code app to read them
This is correct, but so does everything you want to do with your phone. It is not a big thing to ask a user to download the app to scan the QR code.
There are too many apps for sanding QR codes
When QR codes become more popular phones will come with QR code scanners in their OS. Just like Apple added the Twitter to iOS 5.
Loading the website takes too long.
It is just a matter of time when Web access for mobiles becomes faster; G4 anyone?
Summary
Just like with any other new technology there is a potential to reach out and give your audience more than just an ad. There are good cases for both B2C and B2B businesses for using QR Codes on their print material. Just make sure the experience is something the user expects, if it is a lading page on your website or blog make sure it is mobile optimized and track the scans, otherwise you cannot know if they are succesful.
Gustavo Jabbaz started his digital career as a designer and then became a developer and these days spends most of his time as a digital marketer. A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for day-to-day operations, marketing and development strategy. He is who you talk to when you need support with SEO and/or Social Media. Gustavo Jabbaz on Google+ | Twitter
The vast majority of people visit our public website using a computer or tablet, that’s true. But we’ve noticed that more are starting to come to us straight from their mobile. At Your Web Department we’re a small business ourselves, so we decided to make our mobile website work for us. How? Here’s what we just did:
We figured out the main objectives of our mobile website
Like in every website, when it comes to our mobile website the first thing we did was examine what we hope to achieve with it. Basically, we believe it is:
Get people to find us
No point in al this exercise if people can’t find us when they google us. So our Home page has some very concise copy describing what we do, which helps Google find us. And we’ve used YWD’s new feature that lets you submit a separate Google XML Sitemap for Mobile.
Show them our offering
We placed a useful YouTube video explaining how it works, which they can watch from their phones.
Help them get started
We included a form – which we easily customized for the mobile’s small viewport – so people can signup to get a website (for which they don’t pay anything until they go live) right from there.
Make it easy for them to reach us
Frequently, all people want is to be able to call us directly from the phone or reach us by email. So we’ve included a page with our contact info, tool-free number, etc.
Sounds like common sense, no?
We reduced the content on mobile to a minimum
Have you tried navigating through lots of pages of content on your iPhone or Android-based phone? Not fun. No matter how legible you can make text appear using the mobile-optimized version of your website that’s supplied for free with Your Web Department, it’s still kind of hard to read tons of material at small font sizes.
Although our “regular” website has dozens of pages, its handheld version has now literally just a handful (no pun intended). YWD makes it very easy to target content for different devices on the same domain – great for Search Engine Optimization – which gives you virtually two websites in one. All we had to do was set most pages for computer/tablet display only, and just a few for mobile. You can do that without the need to do any programming.
We adopted a minimalist design approach
Your mobile website design and navigation should be simple. By restricting content and images to a minimum, the pages download extremely fast. The buttons on the Home page are huge – you can’t really miss them now, can you? – and tapping on the banner (also enlarged) takes you back to Home.
We assume that the mobile website to change
A CMS like Your Web Department makes it extremely easy to try new things, gauge their success, adjust again, etc. A YWD website is not static brochureware. It's not set either in stone or bytes. We expect to add some (but not too much) content over the next few days and keep tweaking the design.
Flavio Mester is a graphic designer as well as a systems analyst (in a distant life he was an architect). A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for the design and development of all the YWD website management platform interfaces. Flavio Mester on Google+ | Twitter | LinkedIn
A Google XML Sitemap can be a very useful tool in your overall SEO strategy. It's a file listing all the pages in your website that you can submit to Google, helping it index your website faster and more efficiently, and ultimately bring in more traffic.
Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process.
You can now submit an XML Sitemap for Mobile too
Your Web Department's 'Google XML Sitemap' tool automatically generates the XML Sitemap file for you, so you can then submit it to Google. And if your website has a mobile-optimized version you can submit a Google XML Sitemap for Mobile as well.
YWD lets the same domain serve websites with distinct page structures, so submitting a separate XML for the mobile version of a website can be very helpful. It's a unique feature of the YWD platform, as Google has just recently implemented support for a separate Sitemap for Mobile.
The steps
Pasting the XML Sitemap into Google
Your website must be live and have at least one published page. YWD will only generate the XML Sitemap file about 24 hours after your website goes live.
In YWD, go to Tools / Google XML Sitemap and can copy the path(s) to the Sitemap file(s) and then submit it(them) to Google. Notice that YWD lets you submit a separate XML SItemap for Mobile. If you have a mobile-optimized website, you should use that option.
Login to your Google Webmaster Account (if your website has Google Analytics, Google Adsense or Google Search, you can use the same Google account). If you don't have one, you can create one for free on www.google.com/accounts.
Click the name of your website, navigate to Optimization / Sitemaps and click the ADD/TEST SITEMAP button. Paste the path to the XML file that you copied from YWD. Repeat the process for the XML Sitemap for Mobile file if you have a mobile-optimized website.
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Flavio Mester is a graphic designer as well as a systems analyst (in a distant life he was an architect). A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for the design and development of all the YWD website management platform interfaces. Flavio Mester on Google+ | Twitter | LinkedIn
Remember when we used the term 'Crackberry' to explain people's addition to the Blackberry? Well, it turns out, it wasn't the Blackberry they were addicted to it was communicating to each other. I read that recent studies have shown outlawing texting in cars has actually caused more accidents because people are now texting down at crotch level rather than up at their steering wheels. Apparently they figure the cops won't see this more surreptitious activity.
A Google XML Sitemap can be a very useful tool in your overall SEO strategy. It's a file listing all the pages in your website that you can submit to Google, helping it index your website faster and more efficiently, and ultimately bring in more traffic.
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