YWD Blog - YWD Blog

Going live with your new business website: not complicated anymore

Thu, 23 May 2013 12:35:00 +0000

So you've got your new website done and you're ready to go live it. Congratulations! Sometimes however people -- small business owners, for example -- may get a bit intimidated if they don't know anything about domain registration, name servers, etc. And why should they have to deal with those things, anyway? Here are the steps to get your new website live smoothly and painlessly.

Scenario A: You didn't have a website before

Let's say you're just starting a business, and you didn't even have a domain name for your website (like www.cakesbysandradean.com for instance). You may have built the website yourself using Your Web Department (or had someone that you like build it for you) and then converted it into a paid website. Or you asked us to build it for your for free through our LiveBuild program.

In any case, any Your Web Department package includes your new domain registration. All that's left is for you to do is press the 'Publish' button for any pages that are ready to go live. People will start seeing them.

Scenario B: You already had a website and are now transferring it to Your Web Department

Hey, we get that a lot. From disgruntled business owners who had one of their employees 'in charge' of the website and then leaving the company, to those who finally gave up on their 'free' WordPress website for which they had no support or had to pay a lot of money anytime they needed to change something or upload a file, the fact is that people switch to us.

In that case, once you're new website is ready it's time to point your domain to it, instead of the old website. If you're familiar with domain registration, you may simply follow the steps below. But if you're not, send them to your registrar, and they'll make the changes for you:

Confirm that the NameServices are set to the registrar's local nameservers
Delete the A Record pointing to an IP address (unless the @ A Record can be pointed to the local IP)
Add a C Name alias of your domain (www)
Point it to goto.yourwebdepartment.com?
NOTE: Some systems make this a two-step process whereby you need to create a 'www' C Name and point it to goto.yourwebdepartment.com and additionally create a '@' C Name and also point it to goto.yourwebdepartment.com
Finally, select the Forwarding option and forward 'nameofsite.com' to 'www.nameofsite.com'

If your domain registrar is hard to reach for some reason or you'd rather have us doing it for you, we can help. If you provide us with your login information, we can do the above on your behalf.

Now, remember: your domain name belongs to you/your business. It's neither the property of the person to built the website for you nor the company that was hosting it before. And it doesn't become our property when you switch to Your Web Department either; it remains yours.

301 Redirects

If your website was hosted somewhere else before, we can temporarily enable a feature called '301 Redirects'. It allows you to automatically redirect specific URLs (page addresses) from your old website to the new one in YWD. This way iold links can still 'work'. More information on 301 Redirects on this Help page.

How about email accounts?

Good point (no wonder, I made it). You can choose whether you'd like to keep your existing email acounts where they are (adequate in many cases) or transfer your email management to Your Web Department too. All YWD packages include a certain number of emal accounts.

If you're transferring an existing website to YWD, we recommend that you contact us a few days before going live to let us know how you'd like to deal with any existing email accounts.

Finally, keep in mind that our team can help you with any email-related issues as well.

Oh, and success on your new website!

Not all business websites are equal

Tue, 21 May 2013 10:47:00 +0000

There are a lot of free options for creating websites - and for some people, it could be the perfect solution. But for most, the old saying, 'you get what you pay for' also applies to free websites. In most cases free means, 'you are on your own'.

YWD promotes self service, they like when people use the system to build their own website. But, they also know that most of their clients are experts in their business and not necessarily experts in building websites or the latest digital marketing trends - and that is where they come in. They are always creating new content, be it blog posts or new training tools to help their client businesses stay on top of trends and be as successful as possible on-line.

Facebook - why not, it's Free!
More and more, people seem to be using Facebook instead of creating a website. Facebook is a great tool for keeping in touch with customers, but stats tell us people rarely come back to a Facebook page. That means users are interacting with you via their news stream - and if they follow lots of people, your update could get so buried in their news stream that they may never see it. And unfortunately unless optimized by an expert, which these self made Facebook pages never seem to be, finding your address, or phone number or hours of operation is really hard for your customers. In fact I have yet to see a Facebook page optimized for SEO - not saying it can't be done, I just haven't come across a small business owner who knows how to do it. Unless you are going to be satisfied with only maybe interacting with the 23 people who like your page - you should likely invest in a solution that can help you create a great website that your potential audience can find.

What about the free template websites?
Sure, but you know that template means 'could possibly look like someone else'. And in my experience, cause I like to sign up for these every now and then to see what they include, they eventually ask you to pay something to keep your website live. And I have never heard of one of these solutions that has people at the other end who will pick up the phone or respond to an email to provide help.

WordPress is one of the best web platforms out there - some incredibly fantastic websites are being created on this platform - check out the Rolling Stones new tour website - it is beautiful! But I challenge you the small to mid sized business owner to create that website on your own. That website was built by a designer with years of experience, partnering with a developer who also has years of experience. They probably created their own plug-ins to make the website function the way it functions. And I can also tell you that they are not using the free version - any website built on WordPress that doesn't have WordPress in its URL isn't using the free version.

I have worked on quite a few projects that use WordPress and the end product is always good, but it always involves a designer, a developer and a price tag above $50,000.00.

There are a lot more complexities that come with using WordPress, and Monica Yother's post does a good job of highlighting a few of them.

That is not to say that there aren't some good and affordable folks out there building websites using WordPress, because I know that there are. I hope we are at the point in the conversation where you are starting to think, 'I should pay to partner with an expert who can help me with all the things that I don't know about building websites or implementing digital marketing'.

This is the perfect time for me to encourage you to read Monica's post (if you haven't already) or to sign up for LiveBuild or Get Started - doesn't matter which one you pick a real person will reach out to you to help you get up an running in what ever way works best for you.

Once you get started with YWD, you will likely find yourself thinking, wow, I can't believe how much flexibility and support I get for such a small price - a situation where you actually get way more than what you pay for!

week 106 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 17 May 2013 11:48:00 +0000

This past week: Google's I/O conference ends today. They had a series of major announcements about their tools we like so much. Such as a new and improved Google Maps, new Google+ interface and added features and speed for Chrome on mobile. As expected Google efforts seem to focus on mobile and they are not alone Apple seems to be working on a new iOS with a new (trendy) flat look, but so far this is just a rumour. Windows phone reached number 3 (global shipments), surpassing BlackBerry for the first time, it is good to see that there is more solid choices in the mobile market. And finally the much talked about Facebook Home app is officially a bust, with AT&T pulling HTC Facebook's phone from their lineup. What does this means for the small business? For starters your own mobile experience is about to get better and as technology improves (at a very rapid pace it seems) more opportunities arises for businesses to connect with their audience. Without further ado, this week's tweet list; next week I'll be away but the roundup will come back on the 31st. Until then, enjoy the long weekend.

Still the best tool to reach the right audience-> Why E-Mail Newsletters Won't Die
Email is still the most popular form of internet communication. When regulation aiming to stop spam was introduced, it indirectly helped legitimate marketers create good quality email lists. Now that most email list have a clear opt in and opt out, you can be confident that the people joining the list want to hear from you.

Google drive got more useful-> From the Web to Google Drive with just the click of a button
Once you have a Google account (such us a gmail email address) you can have access to Google Drive (amongst other Google tools). Google drive is quite useful to share and store documents and files. Now you can save website 'files for download' directly into your Google Drive account. These files can be accessed from your desktop PC and your phone.

Defining your target market, thought of these?-> Do You Know Your Target Market? How to Find Out...
Good tips on how to go about finding who is right for your product/service.

Tips from the pros-> 10 Simple Steps Will Improve Your Business Blog
Great ideas from blogs such as: Huffington Post, MyWifeQuitHerJob and Chris Brogan to name a few.

A new opportunity in texting-> How Messaging Apps Are Disrupting The Mobile Ecosystem
Traditional SMS phone texting is being replaced by internet based texting apps, such as: WhatsApp and KeeK with both networks boasting million of users.

Unless your are willing to do it yourself-> Paul Chato: Small business web content costs money
Funny real story, unfortunately this happens more often than one would think.

Enticing that click-> Butter Up Your Social Media Calls-to-Action
When sharing content on our social networks we do it with the hope that people will click on the link to the full story on your website. Learn how to make the share more compelling for clicking.

Got this from a friend, great presentation-> The Small Business Guide To YouTube
Thinking about creating video for your business? Check this website first.

We asked and found the answers for you (at YWD that is)-> Asking the Right Questions About Mobile
At YWD we are committed to having the best mobile experience for our business websites. We are constantly looking and asking for the newest and most effective ways to deliver our clients website to the mobile visitor. This is why we offer the mobile version on every YWD package at no extra cost.

The jury is still out on this one but do it anyway just in case-> Does Google+ matter for small businesses?
There are contradicting thoughts on whether having a Google + business page helps your search results ranking. Even though there isn't a clear benefit for search, to setup a Google+ page is free and if a visitor does look your business on Google+ you will be ready for him/her.

Friday May 31st I'll have another round up, in the meantime you can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

Great photography from our clients websites - Part IX

Thu, 16 May 2013 13:43:00 +0000

Luxury Residence Club Resales (LRCR) is a professionally licensed real estate brokerage established specifically to serve Four Seasons Residence Club owners at Aviara and Scottsdale in Arizona. As a separate division, Luxury Residence Club Resales works exclusively with Four Seasons Residence Clubs, operating a highly-effective resale service for Residence Club owners.

The photographic material used on their website - which was recently transferred to the Your Web Department platform - conveys the sophisticated atmosphere associated with the Four Seasons brand. Here are a few examples taken directly from their website www.luxuryresidenceclubresales.com

Canada's Anti Spam Legislation is going to be brutal for small business owners

Mon, 13 May 2013 08:49:00 +0000

As a small business owner in Canada that sends emails to their customers you'd better get ready for CASL. No, that's not a sexual disorder, it's the government's proposed Canadian Anti Spam Legislation. It also stands for, The Clowns in Ottawa Have Gotten It Wrong Once More. Rather than implement similar legislation already hammered out by the EU and the USA, Canada is not only late to the game our government seems to want to control the Internet.

The EU and USA regs take a targeted approach to the problem of business spam. Whereas the CASL will make it illegal to send any commercial electronic message without the express consent of the recipient. It does not matter that they are your customer. It does not matter that when they signed on to your service that they checked a box indicating that they agreed to your service level agreement, which gave you permission to email them. It doesn't matter that every email you send has an opt-out link. From now on you must get EXPRESS permission to email them. You will need to go back to ALL your customers that you communicate with and get them to reaffirm their desire to be contacted by you. And if you don't the penalties are up to a million dollars per email transgression.

I'm sorry for being a sleep at switch here. When I heard about CASL back when it was published in 2010, I thought, 'Wow, more CRTC crap. Who cares? Where's my coffee?' But after seeing a recent presentation by James Minns of Shibley Righten, I became overwhelmingly concerned about the affect on our business and the amount of time necessary to make sure we're adhering to the legislation if it is passed under its present guise.

Did you know that it will be illegal for your salespeople to send a casual, 'How'r you doing John?' email to a customer if you have a link to a commercial enterprise in it? 'Cathy, you gotta see the new shoes at David's.' If you put a link to David's shoes, you will be toasted.

We are law abiding citizens here in Canada. What if we want to correct the situation? Well, you'll be barred from communicating to your customers on your email list because even sending an email to ask for permission will be illegal. What are we expected to do, go door-to-door? Send snail mail? Oh wait, Canada Post are not required to stop sending us garbage to our mail boxes. Why is that? Perhaps because they are a crown corporation and the government makes money off the practice? Stop Paul, please don't be so cynical.

If you're a small business with a mailing list or even if you email customers regularly, read the legislation. It is ridiculous in its present form. While the law has been passed, it's not in force yet. Contact your MP. They will know NOTHING about it, of course. They will be happy to send you a form letter thanking you for your support in the next election, but do it anyway. Even better? Contact your lawyer.

Here is a clear summary of the legislation as it stands now.

And here is a more legal discussion with excellent advice.

week 105 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 10 May 2013 12:14:00 +0000

This past week: There are encouraging sings that the US economy is on the recovery (no recession double dip). Good news for all businesses, and hopefully this will be an incentive to work their online presence and reverse the status quo for small business websites. Only 25% of small businesses in the US have a website and for Canada it is only 40%. Hard to believe these numbers in a time when accessing the Internet is becoming second nature to all of us; and clearly there are no businesses that cannot benefit from having a website. Without further ado; my list of tweets that will help your business do better online.

If your website isn't earning its keep, for sure-> Does your business website need a redesign?
This is true for every business, if your website is not helping your business, it is time to rethink the design and how it engages your audience (or potential customers). Your business needs to generate leads or sales, it has to be your marketing hub whether your marketing efforts are in print or online.

Listening is a good start-> 5 Questions to Ask Before Implementing a Social Media Strategy
Before you jump into the social media world for your business, you should look around at what others and your competition are doing. Luckily there are plenty of guides on social media on the web and most likely you will find plenty of posts on how to do social media in your business space.

Be on top of it-> 12 Ways to Get More Comments on Your Blog
Blogging does not end when you publish your latest post. There is plenty of work that follows.

This is how you do it-> 21 Quick Tips: How to Write a Blog for Your Business
Great list, and it is not too late to change even if you have started your blog.

Lots to learn> RT @profitpath4biz: Things all business owners can learn from successful family-owned businesses
It seems that family owned businesses become part of the family and the business is treated as a family member.

They all help, keep on sharing-> Twitter & Facebook links affect SEO on Google and Bing
It has being said before, the url shorteners do give the SEO juice to the full URL. So don't worry, every share of your website or blog helps on the search result page rank.

The art of marketing B2B businesses-> How B2B content can make you popular
This is a tough one to crack, and I'm talking from experience. It is very hard to promote an abstract product such as website management and service. But it can be done, you just need to be creative.

I like the case study idea-> Pinterest: 6 ways to Establish Credibility in Your Niche
Check this post out, I'm sure you never thought of doing this with Pinterest.

'Do good for our customers and they will do good for us'-> Customer Service Lessons from Amazon
This is something we try to do with YWD clients (and prospects). This philosophy seems lost with big brands but in today's social media, review and check-in world; sharing good will is a must.

It does!-> Why Facebook Buying Waze for $1 Billion Makes Complete Sense
Waze is a GPS app that helps you find the best route for your destination. Once again Facebook is betting heavily on mobile, expect them to come up with something innovative if the buyout is completed.

Next Friday I'll have another round up, in the meantime you can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

A Toronto communications firm and its smooth transition to the Web

Tue, 07 May 2013 15:50:00 +0000

It's extremely gratifying for us when our platform is able to help experienced communications professionals integrate website design and building services into their offering. Conrad Ferguson & Associates provided this great testimonial on how they were able to transition to the Web with the help of Your Web Department.

About us

Conrad Ferguson & Associates was created in 2006 to use the power of design to help companies create powerful and lasting first impressions through effective communications.

We focus on the strategic direction, conceptual development, and management of execution of the full range of marketing and communications projects including brand identity, promotional collateral, corporate publications, advertising, newsletters, long documents (white papers, reports and proposals) and web media.

Our passion is transformational design: we love taking an outdated visual identity or an arsenal of poorly performing marketing tool and redesigning them so they will attract new customers and lead to increased sales. It's not about making it pretty---it's about making it work.

We choose not to specialize---over the years we've worked for clients in every business sector and on a wide range of communication challenges. Our portfolio demonstrates our ability to find a solution that is just right for our client regardless of their sector. And we love the variety!

As a seasoned creative director and communications designer, Laurelea Conrad has over 20 years' experience working with Fortune 500 Companies as part of the leadership team at global PR companies, including Burson-Marsteller Canada and Hill & Knowlton Canada. It is this higher level thinking that separates us from so many other design firms who, while passionate about design, know far less about communication.

About working with YWD

Your Web Department has enabled us to enter the web design world by saving us from the myriad of frustrations and costs that occur when working with programmers who lack design sensibility.

YWD's platform is designer-friendly. YWD's support team is designer-friendly. And YWD's pricing makes it affordable and easy for our clients. It's been a win-win-win solution. I love the way YWD continuously works to improve the ease with which the program works and how much effort is put into developing online help tools, videos, blogs and updates.

Not only have we been able to expand our services to include website design and building, but it is wonderful to know we can always rely on YWD to help us when we get stuck. There is a lot to know with web design and building and I'm eternally grateful to have YWD and My WD!

We are especially proud of our newest website www.gombergmediation.com.

Laurelea Conrad
President, Conrad Ferguson & Associates Inc.

3 ways to add a Twitter feed to your website

Tue, 07 May 2013 14:30:00 +0000

Your Web Department now provides 3 easy methods for you to display your Twitter feed on any page of your website.

1. Using the Twitter Feed tool, 'Plain list' display style

Any YWD website comes with the Twitter Feed tool. You simply add it to a page, enter your Twitter account/username and specify the number of tweets that should be included. The new default display style is called 'Plain list' and will show your most recent tweets as a plain vanilla list. The text and links colours will inherit your website's by default, but you can override them if you want.

Also, the text will expand to the maximum width of its container (e.g. the Main column of your page) but you can limit it to a width. And you can also apply an autoformat to the content block if you'd like to have a border or padding around it, for instance.

This style is great if you'd like your Twitter feed to integrate seamlessly with the rest of your website.

2. Using the Twitter Feed tool, 'Stylized box' display style

This style will place your tweets inside a scrollable box, with a thumbnail of your profile photo, links to your Twitter page and more. You have a few options in terms of customizing its look and feel, like the shell background colour, the tweets area background colour, the shell text. You can also choose whether you'd like the box width to auto-expand or not.

This style is indicated if you'd like to show your Twitter feed very prominently, especially if your YWD website package doesn't include the Embed Code tool.

3. Embedding Twitter's own widgets

Twitter offers you the ability to create you own widgets. You go to https://twitter.com/settings/widgets and create them there.

If your YWD website package includes the Embed Code tool then it's just a matter of grabbing the code Twitter generates and pasting it into an Embed Code content block.

For more information on Your Web Department's Twitter Tool, visit this Help page.

Get your business website built for you at www.yourwebdepartment.com

Help your business by helping your competition

Mon, 06 May 2013 09:08:00 +0000

I love Google Now. It gives my iPhone 4 Siri-like capabilities that Apple chose to give only to 4s and 5 users. Was I a bit miffed at Apple? Sure. The same goes for the much maligned Apple maps app, but only for the reason that turn-by-turn with voice is available only for 4s and 5. Once again Google stepped into the breech and delivered turn-by-turn when Apple wouldn't. This proved that the iPhone 4 platform was fully capable of offering such amenities and that Apple were money-grubbing shit-heads.

Google could have kept their tech to themselves releasing it only on Android devices but they didn't. They have given us iPhone 4 users a better iPhone than Apple wanted to give us. Thank you Google. So, why did they do this? Was it because they are a company of geeks that they just wanted to show off their cool stuff to a wider audience? Was it because there are people at Google that love Apple products more than Microsoft's? Was it because Sergey Brin thinks Steve Jobs was a god and wishes there wasn't so much antagonism between Google and Apple? Was it to introduce Apple users to the world of Android and make switchers out of them? Was it a way to extend the Adwords platform?

I think the answer to the above questions is all of the above. What, as small business owners, can we learn from this? I'll call it, 'Help yourself by helping your competition.' Why would we do this? As you can see from the above example, what Google has done has made me feel good about Google. It makes me even more pissed off at Apple, which is also good for Google.

Let's contrast this with Microsoft's Apple strategy which has always felt grudging and half-hearted. Even though their latest version of the Office Suite is actually their best, I had abandoned Office for LibreOffice a while ago because of the dreck Microsoft was putting out for the Mac. Maybe they did this because there was little hope of getting a Mac user to switch to Windows, but I think that was short-sighted. Contrast this with the goodwill Google is generating even though Android and iPhone are fiercely competitive platforms. Just read the user posts. It's almost 'thermo nuclear' as someone famous once said.

Who are your competition? Can you do something for them and their customers in exchange for some name recognition? Be altruistic. Don't ask for anything in return. Make someone's life better. If you recall the movie, Miracle on 34th Street, one of the shocking scenes was Santa, while working at Macy's department store, told a child to go to Gimbels department store because the toy was cheaper there. The management was in an uproar, but then a customer came up and told them that they were so impressed that they would do such a thing that she would always shop at Macy's.

We've always followed this philosophy. We know Your Web Department is not for everyone and when people ask about using YWD, it only takes a few questions to realize whether we are a good fit. We'll not only turn down the business we'll tell them where to get the most appropriate solution. This happened fairly recently when a woman from a church in Texas wanted us to take over their site. I realized that the issues they had could be handled by their ISP, but they didn't know what questions to ask. I told her that they didn't need us and gave them them the ISP info. She said, in a wonderful Texas drawl, that she had never encountered a company like ours and that she would have the entire congregation pray for us.

Now I can't recall any new business coming from that, but having God on your side couldn't hurt. However, I can attest to new business coming from this strategy, but most importantly, retaining existing customers. And let's not call it a 'strategy'. It makes it coldhearted and remote. You should be doing this because it's the right thing to do. You must want to do this. It must be part of your corporate DNA. Every person in your company should be allowed to help the competition if it makes sense for the customer. It will also make your employees feel good about working for you. That sounds like a win-win situation to me.

week 104 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 03 May 2013 11:29:00 +0000

This past week: Major efforts still underway by all major internet companies to capture and monetized the mobile user; the race is on for coming up with the perfect advertising model for mobile. As I have mentioned in previous posts the rate of growth for smartphones is unprecedented. Even though I lived most of my life without a smart phone, today I can't see myself without my phone; it is my goto device for everything from emails, weather to flight tracking. Every question and fact checking is easily answered with my phone, and like most people I use my phone to do searches and check my social network feeds. As a matter of fact smartphones have helped to push social media popularity and social media has helped in the sale of mobile devices. For example, you can't do Instagram if you don't own either an Android or an Apple phone. Social media and mobile are here to stay and every business should plan and strategize their involvement on both.

Nice tip!-> How to insert photos from your Google account directly into a page of your website or blog
This comes very handy when you have a catalog of images that you need for different uses. Instead of uploading them on multiple services just keep them in one and publish or distribute them as you see fit.

You can make your iPhone smarter-> Google Now Comes to iOS
'Google announced on Monday it is bringing its intelligent assistant app Google Now to iOS.' The more you use it the more learns about you.

Be the authority of your business field-> Writing Engaging Blog Posts: It's All About Voice
The idea with blogging for businesses is to gain the trust of your followers (customers or future customers), buy trying to solve problems for your audience. While doing this you should make sure that you know what you are talking about and be knowledgeable on the subject at hand. Thus becoming an authority on the topic.

YWD has PickMonkey integrated-> 3 Free Photo Editing Tools That'll Give Your Pics Sham-Wow
In a time when Photoshop is too expensive or complicated to just crop or resize images these online tools can be a good alternative. If you are a YWD customer you know that our asset manager is integrated with PickMonkey, which 90% of the time is all what you need to format your images.

Very optimistic chart-> Just How Big Will The New Mobile Market For Wearable Devices Become?
There is a lot of talk about wearable computing devices and Google Glass is the source of all this speculative talk. We still need to see how practical and usable Google Glasses are going to be; and beside glasses what other wearable devises will come into the market? A watch? We used to have calculators on our watches a couple of decades ago, and that didn't really take off.

Good post! The tide is shifting-> How Marketers Are Using Paid Social Media: New Research
As social networks come up with better ways to target the right audience the dollars spent seems to move from traditional to search and banner advertising.

Get the advantage less than 10% have one-> Restaurants overlooking the importance of mobile phone web access
This one is a no brainier for a restaurant owner. Less than 10% of restaurants have a mobile version of their websites (if they have a website at all). Get yours now and you will have an advantage over your competition.

No it doesn't-> Web Design vs. SEO: It Doesn't Make Much Sense
SEO and web design should be part of the same goal; to help your business website to succeed. This is our philosophy at YWD. Web design should be applied with SEO in mind. There is no reason why you can't have a great design for your website, which can be properly search engine optimized.

Good case study-> Pinterest: How to Drive More Traffic to Your Site With Pinterest
It worked well for Melanie Duncan and her business, Luxury Monograms. She was surprised by a surge on referral traffic from Pinterest and she didn't even had a Pin button. Read about how she capitalized on this new source of interest in her website content.

Still the best marketing tool-> 18 Fresh Stats About the Current State of Social Media Marketing
By far the best value for your business marketing dollar.

Next Friday I'll have another round up, in the meantime you can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

A few tips for designers transitioning from print to the Web

Wed, 01 May 2013 16:59:00 +0000

Some of the most prolific people utilizing our website management platform are designers who previously had little or no experience creating websites. If you're print designer and in the past have avoided accepting Web work for whatever reason, I think you should reconsider.

Why the Web is for you

You're already in business
The mere fact that you have a business -- whether it's struggling or not -- gives you an edge over geeky programmers. I bet you have much better people skills, can understand a budget and adhere to deadlines. They often can't.

It's much easier now
You don't need to buy giant those think and confusing tomes on how to learn Flash, PHP, Joomla, etc. A website management system like Your Web Department lets you build a website yourself for free for your clients, no programming required.

You're better qualified than anyone
The same overall design principles that you're familiar with can and should be applied to the Web. It's just a matter of making some adaptations. After all you're a communications professional and can understand your client's needs in that respect better than anyone.

Your clients expect you to do it
Gone are the days of clients spending thousands of dollars on a simple website, unless it has some really specific functionality. Most expect that in addition to their branding or printed material, you'll also be doing their website and that they'll be able to update it on their own. In the past, you might have hired someone to 'program it' for you. That's not required anymore.

Simple tips

Design your websites and images at 72dpi
Work on your concepts at 72 dpi, not 300 dpi. High resolution images won't look any better on monitors and only make everything load much slower.
Use RGB
Monitors work in RGB, not CMYK.
Scrolling is fine!
The days of tiny Flash websites loading in fixed-height rectangles with tiny type are over. Flash itself is dead. While you should keep critical information and calls to action above the fold, it's perfectly OK for people to scroll down on long pages.
Web fonts
In the past you had to stick to the so called 'web safe' fonts like Verdana, Arial, etc. But Your Web Department platform loads fonts on the fly now. So in addition to a few dozen built-in fonts, you can also select from amongst thousands of fonts from Adobe Typekit or the Google Web Fonts (free) library. And by the way, don't use bitmapped/rasterized text for your headings and the like. Use live, editable (and searchable!) text.

So there you have it. Next week I'll be introducing you to a studio that has successfully incorporated website building into their practice. In the meantime, you may want to check out Gustavo's related post about why a designer switched to YWD.

Book a free online seminar and see how easy it is to build a website with Your Web Department.

10 Reasons why YWD is better than Wordpress or Joomla or Drupal

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:01:00 +0000

We like to think that Your Web Department is a better a solution than Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal, but it is even better when our clients think so too. This great Top 10 list was created by one of our long time clients and partners, Monica Yother.

Monica Yother has been designing since 1987, in that time she has been a Marking Director, a Creative Director, won local and national awards for her work and most importantly she has helped improve her customer's businesses through great design. Monica uses YWD for her website, www.my-designs.net and has used YWD to deliver about 15 websites for her customers.

Monica encourages her web customers to use YWD, this is why:

Learning curve is very small for anyone using the system, especially for clients once the site is built.
Forget about updating the software every week or so, YWD does it for you! Count the time you spend updating Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal, PLUS all the Plugins and Widgets...which brings me to the next point...
Plugins and Widgets...forget about them too! Not only can these cause conflict with each other (anyone building a site with freeware will know that at some point a plugin will conflict with something on your site and create another reason to update, deactivate, reactivate a plugin). When YWD updates or adds something to their software they also activate it in your site
Security. While nothing is 100% guaranteed in life, especially the security of a website, the chances of having your site hacked is hugely reduced with YWD for a couple of reasons. I've never had a site hacked or compromised in any way with YWD, while I've had several instances of hackers on Wordpress sites.
SEO is easier in YWD. Most of the time, when I pick up working on someone's Wordpress site, they have added some SEO packages along the way, and while some are good, some are not...and unless you spend time researching it you won't know.
Support, Support Support. I have been working with YWD for several years now, and I know that I can call them on the phone and talk to them. Yes, a live person. Wordpress does not have that option, and if you go with a theme builder (Woo, Headway, Genesis, Elegant Themes, Theme Forest, etc.) you will not get a phone call...and most times the questions you post in their crowded forums do not get answered. Though, to be fair, Woo has a pretty good team, but still, no phone call).
Support. I have to say it again. I feel confident that YWD has my back, so if I tell my client I'll check on something for them and get back soon, I can keep that promise because I know that I can email or call support at YWD and get an answer.
I teach Wordpress workshops to people because I have built quite a few sites with it, and without exception, the ONLY reason people want to use it is because they want to update it themselves. However, I run into the situation ALL the time where a site has been built with some obsolete theme, or one that is super restrictive, and my client cannot make any changes. Not only that but they have already paid a good amount of money (way too much to install a theme without customization) so they are stuck again. This is not an issue with YWD in any way....you can change the design of the site anytime.
E-commerce does not have to be complicated, while I have not built a large catalog sales type site yet, I do have paypal integrated with one site and am about to build another site selling items.
$49 a month gets you: backups, support, stability and an ever-improving system ...and most of all peace of mind. And that is priceless.

Check out some of the great websites that Monica has created for her customers:

Interested in working with Monica on your next design project? You can reach her at:

Connect with Monica

You can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

Is it better to be ahead, right on or behind the curve?

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 11:05:00 +0000

A new entertainment series is bypassing all traditional broadcast mediums. @SummerBreak is going to be delivered over Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube and Instagram. Why am I writing about this here? Well, I'm not just a web guy, business guy, owner guy I'm also video, writing and broadcast guy. I was head of TV Comedy at CBC for a few years. Back in 1992 I was trying to encourage the Corporation to digitize their video library for the emerging CD ROM (yes, I know it's dead) revolution. The powers that be thought it was a waste of time and nothing was going to come of this new-fangled digital thing. They were sort of right because I was, frankly, too far ahead of the curve. Is @SummerBreak too far ahead of the curve?

It's going to follow a bunch of high school seniors from Los Angeles for eight weeks before they go to college. The series is going to happen live 24/7 as tweets and Instagram photos and I assume YouTube videos, though you can also Tweet 6 seconds of videos. Hey, isn't this what everyone is doing and sharing now? How is this going to be more interesting? They say it's going to be unscripted. Is it too far ahead of the curve?

Part of the fun of social media is that it's spontaneous. How spontaneous is this really going to be? We're comfortable seeing scripted content on YouTube but on Twitter, Instagram, etc? I don't know. Those mediums are all about not being fake. Yes, they claim it's going to be unscripted. Really? Why would that be interesting?

This doesn't mean they shouldn't try. There is a real production company behind it with bags of cash and I'm sure they'll promote the hell out of it. That will bring traffic but will it guarantee success? There are many stories of great ideas that were just too far ahead of the curve. Time Warner spent millions trying to get video on demand working back in the '90s. Total failure. Now we have the Internet and Netflix. The confluence of the Internet, ubiquitous high speed access, video compression codecs and cloud computing has generally solved the video on demand puzzle. Plus we can view it all in HD, which the old Time Warner experiment could not handle even with a dedicated local network. But this evolved over many years. The original idea wasn't bad, just the timing of it.

Being an entertainment guy I'm fascinated by these experiments. And even if I don't think they're going to work, someone has to do it. And someone always will. There are many points of failure when doing an entertainment product. Perhaps they will hit on the perfect distribution medium, but the product sucks. If it fails, what are they going to blame? I hated YouTube webisodes because the early ones I had seen were awful so I just assumed the webisode distribution system was awful. Lately, I've seen some great webisode series that are hugely popular. It's clear that breaking the tyranny of the time slot is a good thing.

The take away in all of this is that your website is not an island. There are so many things going on between mobile, social media and video that it does not make sense any more to think that you can just build a website and leave it. At the very minimum you need to participate in the health of your site and see what else is going on out there so you'll be aware of anything that might be useful to you.

week 103 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 10:51:00 +0000

This past week: Feedback on Facebook Home is coming back from real users (500K downloads in the first week) and it is not very good. There are many bug issues reported including not being able to launch other apps beside Facebook's. I'm sure with time Facebook will be able to iron out the bugs and give the user a better experience, Facebook style. On other fronts LinkedIn and Tumblr are now displaying ads on their mobile app feeds, this is good news for the SMB. More competition for your advertising dollar. So far the best marketing value for any small business is on content marketing, SoLoMo (Social Local and Mobile). Due to the nature of mobile technology and the fact that people prefer to consume social media on their phones it is shaping up to be the place to spend your marketing efforts. This doesn't mean other more traditional means of marketing won't work, it just means that mobile is capturing more eyes as time goes on. Without further ado, my list of tweets for this week; mobile, social and local.

Business with blogs get 70% more leads than those without-> How to Get Eyeballs on Your Business with a Blog
I've often share posts and blog about the importance of blogging for a business, this infographic reinforces that view. It is a good diagram on how to distribute your original content and how to increase engagement with it.

And it is more accessible-> Why Social Media Marketing Is More Effective Than PR
Social Media and content sharing are game changers for many industries, including PR. In a way small businesses now can manage their own PR campaigns using the tools available in social media.

Not a bad idea-> Theft: 9 Ways to Protect Yourself From Losing Your Data
We depend so much on our PCs for work and personal life; just think for one second if you were to lose your PC with all your contact, emails and documents you keep in the hard drive. If you don't have a plan to quickly replace it, read this article, it will show you a few ideas on how to protect your PC and other electronic devices.

Want more clicks? check one of these-> The 10 Most Clickable Twitter Headlines
We all want people clicking on what we share, learn how to make your tweet irresistible.

Start small build with time-> Social Media Marketing: Get Out Now... You're Doomed to Fail
Great guide for starting from scratch. It takes time to build a relevant audience, follow the steps in this post and you might shorten the time required.

Another place to where to advertise-> Tumblr rolls out mobile ads, appearing alongside posts in user streams
All these free social networks need to make money to support their massive operations. Tumblr is no exception and it seems that they are going after people's eyes, on mobile.

Original own content is still the best-> I Hate Writing Articles What else can I do?
Good alternatives to writing them yourself, but keep in mind that original content is still the preferred alternative.

Comparing Ad networks-> AdGooRoo Report Pits Bing Ads against Google AdWords in Six U.S. Verticals
This post shows Google AdWords is still in first place; but Bing is not the only place where you can advertise and reach thousands beside Google. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and now Tumblr have their own ad networks. Sometimes these could work better for some businesses than Google or Bing.

It easy to setup, and Google places is the best yet-> Why Local Search Matters to Your Business
While competing for search result rankings with big businesses can be futile exercise (deeper pockets for bigger businesses),for small businesses using Local Search going can help to level the playing field.

Content and advertising all into one?-> Selling to Cyborgs: Marketing in the Age of Google Glass
Now that we have the first wearable computer in the market (well for select few for now), many questions arise about this new medium. One of them is, how are we going to advertise on glasses?

Next Friday I'll have another round up, in the meantime you can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

How to insert photos from your Google account directly into a page of your website or blog

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:10:00 +0000

Your Web Department includes a nifty Assets Manager so you can upload your images and place them anywhere on your website. But what if you'd like to insert images that reside elsewhere - on Google Photos, for instance? This way you can quickly add a picture without even having to download it to your computer and then upload to YWD.

It's quite easy to do it and you may already know it, but here it is just in case.

Uploading your photos to Google Photos

If you have a Gmail account, you can launch Photos simply by selecting the option under More. It's pretty easy to upload photos to it from your computer, you simply click the big red UPLOAD NEW PHOTOS button and select them. Google Photos lets you create albums and place the photos there to keep things organized.

You can also upload photos directly from your mobile into Google Photos, you just need to download their free app.

If you have lots of photos on your computer, you can also download the free Picasa software from http://picasa.google.ca which lets you organize and share your photos directly with your Google+ account.

Google Photos has useful editing features that allow you to crop, resize and apply effects to the images. It does a lot of the things small business owners need to do in terms of basic image manipulation for their websites. And unless you have a ton of images, it's completely free: no need to buy Adobe Photoshop.

Inserting a photo into your website page or blog

Easy. Locate the Google Photo image that you'd like to insert and click on it. Then right-click on the image and select Copy Image Location (that's in Firefox; other browsers may call that option something else, like Copy Image Address for instance).

Assuming your using Your Web Department as your website managing system -- then again, why wouldn't you ;^) -- edit any Word Processor content block, Content Slider slide, News Manager news item or Blog post - any type of content that uses our editor, really.

In the editor, click the Insert/Edit Image icon as usual, and in the URL field paste the image location that you've copied from Google Photos. The image can be right or left aligned, resized, etc. -- just like a 'local' image i.e. one that you've uploaded to YWD's Assets Manager.

That's it! Once you save your change, the image will be displayed on the page:

A couple of notes:

This won't work for the Image Gallery tool, because it can only use images stored in YWD's Assets Manager.
If the image is removed from Google, it'll also disappear from your page. That's because YWD is only using the image location, it didn't actually make a copy of the image file to your website.

Get your business website built for you at www.yourwebdepartment.com

WordPress and its zombie surrogates

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:03:00 +0000

Okay WordPress the gloves are off. Once again one of your pasty, zombie surrogates came after one of our customers. Your surrogate offered to 'host' our customer's site for 'only' $19/month instead of the $49/month we were charging them. So, is that the best you can do, offer a measly $360 a year savings? People spend more than that in one month at Starbucks.

There are any range of services out there if you want a website. Most domain hosting companies will let you drop your own html into their system for free. Many offer incredibly awful DIY web tools. There are services that charge several hundreds of dollars a month. The point is not cost, but value and frankly the difference between free and $588 a year is zero if your website is an important business tool. Hopefully you're planning on making more than $600 a year.

Our customer was nice enough to call us and ask why YWD is different from WordPress, which I'm happy to elucidate for you now:

When someone asks for WordPress it's usually code for, 'I want a cheap website'. Now, the truth is you can build really impressive websites with WP. No question about it. However, it's not a one-size-fits-all solution. If you pick a template and have no interest in altering it then it truly is a good, cheap solution. But, and there is always a but, if you want to change the template then you will have to do html programming and maybe even javascript if your changes go deeper, or the template requires jQuery tweaks. 'Wait a second,' you say, 'I'm not a programmer.' If you're not then you will have to hire a programmer to make these changes and suddenly WordPress is no longer free. Charges for these changes can vary from a few hundred dollars to thousands of dollars. Your Web Department is a 'no-code' system. That is why only YWD can offer the free LiveBuild website building service (fresh-not from templates).
Next. Maintaining the Your Web Department system and providing customers website support is all we do. It's what we do for a living. You can always reach us for technical questions, SEO questions, even questions on how to make your website do more for your business. As long as you are a YWD customer we will be there for you. When someone builds a WP site for you after you've paid them their done. They might entertain a few questions after the build is finished but any more and you become an annoyance. The company you are now paying $19 a month to is just hosting your WordPress site. They are not offering support for it. You can search the forums for help... wait, you're in business. You're trying to make a living. Do you have time to dive into geekland? And what if you want to make a design update four, six, nine months after? You will have to track down that programmer and if you're lucky enough to find them you will have to pay them for the changes. These changes are mostly free on YWD.
A cool new thing has arrived for websites. You want to add that cool new thing to your website. Once again, in the WP scenario, if you are not a programmer you will have to find someone to make these updates. At Your Web Department we are keeping up with the Internet so you won't have to. And all these feature updates are free to all our customers.
People who offer their WP services do so because that's all they know. Wait, you're thinking, isn't that what we do push YWD? In all honesty, if someone calls and they are a candidate for another system, or if all they are looking for is a few static pages then we will happily convey those alternative options and even where they can get it done. We are a service company. The Your Web Department platform is only the conduit through which we offer that service.
Your Web Department is easier to manage. We know because we have WP sites and we hear it from our customers. I won't get into the details here but trust me. YWD has much more powerful tools to manage the day-to-day updates without coding or having to upload specialized modules.

So, these are just a few things that make YWD different from WordPress. If the above are important to you then you are a great candidate for our system. And, by-the-way, the customer who called us, thought so too.

week 102 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 09:39:00 +0000

This past week: Both Facebook and Twitter have improved the targeting options for their ads. Now it is easier to target your audience if you chose to advertise on those two networks. The best feature I think is that with one ad you can target both desktop and mobile users; that's right, Facebook and now Twitter are the ones who are getting mobile ads right. They just add them to the feed and make them look like just another post from your following (although in both cases they are marked as sponsored posts). The race to get your eyes attention on the small screen is on, even Google is playing with enhanced features for their search ads. This is good news for everyone, the advertiser gets to display the ads to the audience they chose and the mobile user gets to see ads that would be of interest to them. Even though Mobile has grown very big in very little time it is still a very new medium and things are not all quite right yet. For example most businesses still don't have a mobile version of their website, with that in mind here is my list of collected tweets for the week that hopefully will help you get your mobile website going. If you don't have one yet that is.

The race for mobile bigger screen-> Apple's hazy, big-screen iPhone ambitions
I like my phone to fit in my pants front pocket comfortably. But I seem to be the exception, we are seeing bigger screens on all new phones blending the lines between smartphones and tablets (phablets).

Wearable computing the next frontier-> Wearable web access?
There will be a time (sooner than we think) when we will have to worry how our websites will display on Google glasses. Glass friendly?

Seeking Instafame?-> Instagram: How to Become Instafamous
Many brands have taken the jump into Instagram, and some are doing pretty interesting things with the pictures they post. Macy's and Coca-Cola are a couple I follow that share very good pictures. They both have a big following. This post shows you how to increase your following on Instagram; but keep in mind that quality still prevails just like in any other social network.

Popularity in tech comes with malware-> Mobile payments raise security concerns
Unfortunately just like marketeers and major brands, people that are up to no good follow the crowds. Right now the crowds are using mobile and malware is following.

More on Malware-> Malware On Mobile Grew 163% In 2012, Infecting Around 32.8M Android Devices, Report Says
Just like Windows based PC are the most popular in the computing world, Android powered phones are the ones with the biggest share in the mobile market. Therefore more malware is developed for that operating system; also Android open source nature doesn't really help.

Smartphone phone use is on the rise, #mobile SEO should be in mind-> The Expansion Of Mobile SEO In 2013
Soon mobile access to the web will surpass desktop access and just like you want your website to rank high on the search result the same needs to be done to the mobile version of your website.

Is this because more kids own Android phones?-> iPhones Trump Androids for Mobile Commerce App Usage
I keep reading this reports that there is more traffic generated by Apple mobile devices than Android ones. Even though there are a lot more Android powered devices. What does this say about the Android powered phone owners? They don't use it to surf the web?

Still a new industry by comparison-> The Biggest Challenge for Mobile Ads? Showing That They Work
Facebook and Twitter seem to be on the right track; but still Mobile and all the apps ecosystem is very new. A lot more data and studies need to be done before advertising in mobile will work as expected.

Don't feel left out iPhone users, its coming-> Facebook Putting 'Mobile First,' Bringing Home to iOS
It looks very cool, and for the Facebook power users it could be very useful. Expect this new app appearing not only on the iPhone but Windows and BlackBerry as well.

Facebook ranks as one of the top-three things people do on a smartphone-> Mobile Marketing on Facebook
Face book is one of the things people like to do on their phone, like checking emails. This one of the main reasons you need a mobile version of your website.

Next Friday I'll have another round up, in the meantime you can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

Anatomy of your mobile business website

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 09:52:00 +0000

The fact is that businesses today need a mobile version of their website. Yes, you too need the mobile version as well; Google predicts that by 2014 mobile searches will surpass desktop searches. Social media is consumed more on mobile than on desktop and that is where you will do your marketing.

Mobile is so big that it has impacted the sales of personal computers, which are down 14% from last year's sales in the same period. There is also the the behavioural change in mobile users, who like to do certain tasks on their phones instead of their computers. Mobile is also changing how businesses connect with their customers. Smartphone are selling by the bucket load - the smart thing for a business is to adapt to the new medium.

What does your business mobile website need?

It needs to be simple, with clear calls to action. Think of the one (or two things) you want your visitors to do. On the small screen it is easier to achieve this, less real estate to get distracted. For example on Apeteco.com mobile website the main goal is for users to make a reservation. Web stats (a great way to find out exactly what your users want) also show that users want event listings so those are easily found on the mobiles website.

Or look at Spun Fibre Arts mobile website, on the home page you easily find hours of operation as well as a big button (needed for finger tap) for calling and as well as an integrated Google map to help get you to the store.

Mobile is a different experience from desktop, the content needs to be shorter and to the point. Patina Antiques Vintage is another good example of a mobile website, home page copy is a simple and to the point message, images are optimized and the navigation, is paired down from the desk top version keeping key content like catalog and new arrivals accessible. They also take advantage of click to call as well as integration to Google maps. You have to place yourself in yours customer shoes, get them what they are looking for quickly.

Alive Outdoors is yet another great example of a mobile site. Copy is short and easy to read. Key content areas are created using large font that is east to tap with your finger. This website also has additional content categories 'hidden' behind the 'more' box on the top left of the logo, a navigation system many of us have seen on Facebook.

To summarize you need simplicity, bigger buttons and to-the-point calls to action. You should use single column layout and optimize your images for the medium to ensure they load quickly. Ensure navigation is large and properly spaced to ensure users can tap to select or consider unobtrusive navigation as used with Alive Outdoors.

All of these sites have been built using Your Web Department. At YWD, mobile is part of the standard package at no extra costs. We have extensive how to materials to show you how to set up your mobile version of your website, and as always a great support team to help you when you need it. And if you just want someone to set the whole thing up for you, we can set up a basic mobile site for only $500.00. Want more information, or a better idea of what you need to include in your mobile site? Give me a call or send me an email.

Request our Mobile setup package for $500.00 package

Not a YWD client? Try LiveBuild - We design & build your website for free and ready in 1hour
yourwebdepartment.com/LiveBuild

You can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

Great photography from our clients websites - Part VIII

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 12:05:00 +0000

www.sfysummercamps.org

The Samuel Field Y Day Camp offers a traditional outdoor camping experience that encompasses athletics, the arts, aquatics, while fostering Jewish values. For over 60 years they have provided a profound and memorable camp experience to thousands of children and young adults.

They recently adopted the Your Web Department platform and got a beautifully-designed website. It's easy to navigate, right on message and with lots of information. The photographic material helps to convey the kind of work they do and the atmosphere they provide. Image galleries and content sliders are being used elegantly and effectively.

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity?Ellen Parr

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 10:16:00 +0000

What a great quote. We are all curious. When you search for something on the Internet you are curious about that thing; how long to cook that roast, who was the lead actor in the movie The Blob? (Steve McQueen, btw.) What idiot did Justin Bieber lend his Ferrari to now?

We all want our websites to be found on the Internet, but what questions are people asking to find you? What kind of result should they expect when they do find you? When you search for how to cook a Beef Wellington you get an ANSWER. What answers do people find on your website, or are they getting just your blah, blah, blah? It's a subtle difference but I think a powerful one and something I don't think most small business owners put much thought into.

When a business invests in SEO, or search engine optimization, they are mostly concerned about Google rankings, getting found on that coveted first page and that people will find your site. And that it seems is where it ends. As long as they click on that link, paid or otherwise, you're fine, but think about someone searching for a car part or a mehndi design they are looking for an answer and not more questions.

If your business has a process, then maybe that is the answer they are looking for and not how many years your president has been, well, president. It doesn't matter what you do, they know that already. That's why their at your bloody site. (SIDE NOTE: Hopefully your home page confirms that they've come to the right place. That's an issue of confirmation, not question answering.) Customers want to know how you do what you do. Are you providing them this information on your website?

Pretend you're a customer, ask Google a question that pertains to your business. Ask it the form of a question. Let's say you have a mule clipping service. 'How can I get my mules groomed?' Hopefully your site comes up in the results. Click on the link. What did you get, marketing nonsense, or an answer to your question? In the case of the mule clipping service there could be a video on how you treat the animals, wash first and then lovingly groom them before giving them a pomade brushing. Or a flowchart of the process. I'm a big advocate of Show, don't Tell.

In conclusion, make sure you are answering your customers' questions and not satisfied with just answering your own.

week 101 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 12:53:00 +0000

This past week: I'm keeping with the mobile trend for the past two weeks, since the more I read about it, the more I find that businesses in general are not taking the mobile audience seriously enough. To be fair, everyone has been caught by surprise by the fast adoption of smartphones and tablets, but the surprise came last year. We are well into 2013 and I still hear complacency from some businesses regarding their mobile websites. The truth is it doesn't matter the kind of business you own or work for, your business needs a website and a mobile version of it. If this is not the case you are losing business; studies have showed that mobil traffic on the web is on the rise and so is the sales of smartphones. People's expectations have changed, if they land on your website and it is not optimized for the small screen they will move to the next search result. At YWD we want all our customer's websites to be successful this is why we added mobile optimization to all website packages at no extra cost. Having mobile in my mind here is this week's list.

My take on the subject-> Responsive Design the good and the bad
There a few design blogs that write the benefits of responsive design (one design for all screen sizes) and mobile first design strategy. While responsive design might be a good fit for certain kind of websites, for the vast majority (this include SMBs) it is not. Check my post to find out why.

Most posts on FB gets open on mobile devices-> 5 Tips to Make Facebook Marketing Mobile-Friendly
More then 50% (and this is still increasing) of Facebook traffic comes from mobile phones, through the Facebook app. Guess where those link are going to open when tapped by the mobile users?

Keep it to the point-> How Small Businesses Can Optimize Social Content For Mobile Customers
Mobile and Desktop audiences have different expectations even though they can be the same person. Having all of your website optimized is a good idea to ensure users coming from shared links (mostly on mobile devices) have a good experience.

And not only in the US-> Mobile web use rises among US teens
So this is where they went.

Very good data, might change you mind about mobile-> Vision Statement: How People Really Use Mobile
From the Harvard Business Review, easy to understand charts about mobile usage and what most marketers are doing wrong.

Pretty simple-> 3 Ways to Get Your Small Business Ready for Mobile
Really is not hard, and with YWD it is even easier.

Not convinced? look at the data-> Reality Check: Do You Really Need a Mobile Website?
The tale of a skepticic on mobile, did his own research and crunched his own data to come up with a big 'YES', you do need a mobile site.

40% will leave if not #mobile friendly-> Why Business Owners Should Pay Attention To Mobile [Infographic]
Another impressive stat from this infographic: 70% of searches lead to action on a website within 1 hour.

Video Mobile style-> The Booming Mobile Video Ecosystem Explained [infographic]
I guess all those teens are watching more videos on their phone. Mine are.

PCs and laptops to become work tools only-> Smartphones, tablets and Windows 8 hasten the PC's plunge
PCs sales are down across the world (with the exception of China, too many first time computer owners) and there is a lot of speculation as to why. Mobile and tablets are always part of the debate.

Next Friday I'll have another round up, in the meantime you can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

Navigation styles for your mobile website

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 15:55:00 +0000

On previous posts, we've mentioned that your navigation should be restricted to essential pages on mobile. However, you can still use navigation effectively. Here are a few examples from real YWD websites. Have a look at them on your mobile phone.

Horizontal in the topmost level

www.scicancanada.ca

Large buttons appear horizontally right beneath the page banner, and links to sub-pages (if any) on rows underneath. YWD lets you choose the colour of the buttons, the font size, etc. If you only have very few pages in the top level of your mobile website, that's a simple and effective option.

Vertical dropdown

When people tap on the little icon on top of the banner (alternatively, the word 'Menu' can be used)...

www.cloudninecreative.com

...a dropdown menu reveals the navigation. Tapping on the icon or the content collapses the menu again. It's a great way to save screen real estate.

Vertical sliding pane

If you want to get fancy, this one is for you. In this case, when people tap on the navigation icon...

www.yourwebdepartment.com

...the whole page slides to the right revealing the navigation underneath it.

No navigation

There are cases where you don't want any navigation at all, so your website looks more like an app. Here's an example:

www.thompsonsmobi.com

As you can see, a website management system like Your Web Department provides different options in terms of mobile navigation without programming. This way you can easily match it to your specific needs.

Get your business website built for you at www.yourwebdepartment.com

Small Businesses Mobilize!

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 17:38:00 +0000

Intuit put together this infographic, which is a great guide for your mobile website. Although we have no relationship with Intuit (we do use QuickBooks for accounting) we happen to agree with their points and have the same philosophical approach to mobile.

As it is mentioned on the graphic not caring about mobile equates to losing businesses. Just look at the stats in point number one:

55% of people who own a cell phone use their phone to go online
31% of mobile internet users say they mostly go online using their phone
57% of mobile web users wouldn't recommend a website they had trouble accessing on their phone
34% of mobile web users would visit a competitor's mobile website instead after a bad mobile experience

Point number two is dead on the money,YWD is just one of the many options available for creating a mobile version of your web site - 'no code experience necessary'.

Point three and four are great reminders of design basics you should always keep in mind, your customers needs should be your primary focus (this goes for the desktop website version as well) a website is not for you, it is for your audience. Keep it simple and make sure what your visitors are looking for is easy to find.

Points five and six are about testing the different phones and adapting to changes. Today's Android based phone and iPhones are the most popular, but this could change in the near future. Just think how fast we went from phones that did only text and email to what we have now. Who knows what the next medium would be, Google glasses?

A website and its mobile counterpart are a must for any business. There are no excuses for not having both, with YWD, you could have both a good desktop and a mobile website for less than what you spend on coffees.

View large version

Request our Mobile setup package for $500.00 package

Not a YWD client? Try LiveBuild - We design & build your website for free and ready in 1hour
yourwebdepartment.com/LiveBuild

You can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

If you treat your customers well, they'll actually treat you well

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 10:40:00 +0000

One of the reasons we developed Your Web Department was that we didn't like the fact that many people were being held hostage by web developers and that it should be easy to update and manage one's own website for gosh sakes. The other thing we really work hard to do is provide great support and not just technical support, if customers have questions on how to make their website better or how to make their business work better on the Internet, we're happy to tell them. If we have the answer you can ask the question.

A great reward for us is when one of our customers says something nice about us either in print or in video. It's especially nice when it's unsolicited.

Rona Birenbaum is a customer of ours. Her website, www.caringforclients.com has been on Your Web Department for several years and has gone through several iterations as her business evolved. So, have a listen to this interview about Rona's financial planning business. Great advice and a nice plug for YWD later in the video.

Thanks Rona. Click the picture or this link to see what Rona has to say.

When will my website appear on Google?

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 10:59:00 +0000

So you just went live with a new website for your business. Congratulations! Now you go to Google, search for it and... nothing. Oh, you must have typed something wrong, of course. You search for something more unique within the content and... nada. OK, this is starting to get on your nerves. You then search for the name of the website itself and... nothing again. What's going on?

Your website needs to be indexed first

How does Google know about all those gazillions of websites out there? It relies on a piece of software called a Web crawler (also known as a Web spider). Google and all other search engines like Bing have their own crawlers that are constantly browsing the Web, identifying websites and automatically going through all their links and then indexing them. Google's is called Googlebot.

Until your website has been indexed i.e. added to their giant database (which it uses to search and return the results) your website will not 'exist' for Google. Unfortunately, there is no set time for Google to initially index your website. It can take even a few weeks for that to occur. But there are a few things you can do that can help with that.

Have actual content

Sounds obvious, but sometimes people forget that. In order to index your website, Google needs to find content -- words, sentences, text! Make sure your pages have relevant copy, especially your Home page. Describe what you do and what you offer, and name your pages properly. That makes sense not only for Google of course. For instance, having a Home page with just a giant image and no text will not help you, because Google will not know what it's about. And since we're talking about images, add a descriptive text (also known as the 'Alt' attribute) to them.

Submit your website

If your website is completely new, you can manually submit it to Google. It will eventually be reviewed by a human (or an alien, who knows) and may be added to their index before Googlebots crawls it.

> Submit your website to Google

Verify your website

Site verification is a process that enables you to use certain site management tools provided by the search engine. This will enable you to use other tools such as Google Analytics, and will also serve as one more reminder for Google that your website exists. A website management system like Your Web Department makes it very easy to verify your website with Google, Yahoo, Bing and even Pinterest.

> How to verify your website

Submit an XML Sitemap

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.

> How to submit your sitemap

Set up Google Analytics

Whether you just got a website for your business or you're converting an existing one, it's highly recommended that you set up Google Analytics so it can start tracking its traffic for you. But in addition, it certainly may give Google a heads up that a new website is now live.

> How to set up Google Analytics

Get linked up

If you can, get other websites to link to yours. These links should come from real websites, not phony ones (in which case Google would actually penalize you). Clients, suppliers, partners and others may be interested in exchanging links with you.

Use social media

If you have profiles on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. add a link to your website from them. After all, Google gets to your website by crawling other websites, and social media websites count too. And make sure you share your website on social media as well.

Have other suggestions? Please let us know. And good luck with the new website!

week 100 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 10:14:00 +0000

This past week: The cell phone turned 40 and Facebook introduced Facebook Home for Android powered phones. It is quite fitting that Facebook announced their newest mobile foray on the anniversary of that first call by Marty Cooper, senior engineer for Motorola. I'm sure Marty Cooper had no idea how their invention was going to change our lives on that historic day in 1973. Cell phones, or the current smartphones are part of our everyday lives from the moment we wakeup until we go to sleep. Facebook is quite aware of this and has converted the Android phone into a Facebook first phone (by the way, only the latest hardware powered by Android would be able to run Facebook Home effectively). This is how important the mobile market is for Facebook, this is a great way to capture more eyes on the small screen. Yes there will be advertising; that's their revenue model. In fact it is the revenue model of all major FREE social networks and expect something similar from Google, Twitter and even Apple in the future. Continuing with our mobile push here is my tweet collection for this week.

The State of Mobile Content Marketing - infographic
This a great infographic, shows statistics for how effective different mobile targeted marketing campaigns can be. This could of good use when planing your next online campaign.

Don't forget to test!-> Avoid Sidewalk Catastrophes: Optimize Your Mobile Website
This is something most business websites owners forget to do, they see mobile as an after thought or they are in denial and think nobody is using their phone to reach their website. Well, they are doing just that. You only need to check the website traffic statistics and you will see some visitors did access your website using a smartphone. The number might be fraction of the overall traffic, but I can assure you this will increase.

Too many competing technologies-> Who Will Win As Mobile Payments Go Mainstream? [Slide Deck]
We were promised beginning of last year that 2012 would see major mobile payment adoption. It never materialized, there have been some successful attempts (like the case for Starbucks) but nothing that you might call major. The technology is here, but there are to many options to go about it and most businesses are confused as to which way to go forward with mobile payments.

In short depend on mobile-> 4 Ways to Maximize the Social Media Presence at Your Next Event
This is a good case when you can depend on your audience phone accessibility. Getting everyone to check the same hashtag on Twitter is a great way to distribute information and also to create a virtual forum to share ideas.

Cool productivity apps-> Mobile apps to smarten up your smartphone
We all know that the best part of a smartphone are the apps. Here is a list of very good apps to help your business and daily life.

Hey! Twitter just got better-> Mobile App Deep Linking
Now links you share on Twitter can open other apps on your phone, not just web pages. Another example of improving the mobile experience.

RT@epro : SkyDrive for iOS updated with new design, full resolution photos, iPhone 5 and iPad mini support, and more
Good news for Apple users, more choices to store your data in the cloud.

Learn to adapt-> RT @gwenm4: Small Business Is Missing The Digital/Mobile Revolution
How fast things change nowadays has caught many businesses by surprise; understandably big businesses take a while to change to the new way of doing things. Small business on the other hand have an advantage on adapting to the new trends, smaller operation are easier to steer to the new direction.

So true, on mobile get to the point-> 3 Essential Elements of a Mobile Website
When visitors come to your website they want to find the information they want quickly. When they are using a phone, their patience is even more limited.

Deeply integrated with Android-> Forget the 'Facebook phone', Facebook's #mobile ambitions are way bigger than that
This is the closest Facebook got at getting their own phone. They pulled a Borg move and assimilated Android.

Next Friday I'll have another round up, in the meantime you can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

Responsive Design the good and the bad

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 10:04:00 +0000

Responsive Design is becoming synonymous with mobile friendly websites. With the rapid growth of mobile devices and more so with tablets, there is a need for websites to fit the different screen sizes and screen orientation. Some people claim that responsive design is the solution to create one design that work in all mediums. I am in the other group that believes that the best user experience is achieved when sites are design for web and another version for mobile. But with all the buzz around responsive design, I think it is worth discussing it further.

What is responsive design
From Wkipedia:
'Responsive web design (RWD) is a web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience'easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling'across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones).[1][2][3]
Mashable called 2013 the Year of Responsive Web Design.[4]'

Full article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design. It is important to keep in mind that many supporters of responsive design advocate for designing for mobile first. This is done because content heavy and image heavy sites don't create great user experiences on mobile devises.

To see responsive design in action, look at this site http://www.acescholarships.org/Home?Lang=en-US on your desk top and then using your mouse minimize the size of your screen, you will see how the design adapts to the size of the screen.

Advantage of responsive design
The advantage of responsive design is that your entire website is mobile ready, it will conform to the visitors screen size and you only need to update content once (which with the right backend can be done without responsive design). Although the appearance of your site changes based on the screen you are viewing it on, because elements stack or spread out accordingly, the content, images and illustrations are all the same from one medium to the other.

Disadvantages of responsive design
The resizing and reorganizing of the different elements on a web page is achieved by using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and JavaScript, these are scripts that check the type of the device and size of screen the visitor is using. The more devices you want to accommodate there more code those scripts needs, increasing the weight of the page to be downloaded to the visitor's phone. You add this to the content of the page in question and it could be a painful experience for the mobile user, not to mention the data that will be used in their cellular plan.

As mentioned above good responsive design often leads with mobile first. This often means smaller images, less graphics and less content - even on your desktop site. When desktop leads responsive design, content heavy, image rich sites create a further drag on data and a less than ideal situation on a mobile device.

What you really need
You need a website that delivers the best user experience for the medium. I have learned that on mobile you need to get to the point. This mean that you need to think what your website needs to do for you or your business. Does your website need to collect registrations, sell products or get people to call you? Whatever it is, make sure the visitor gets to do that right on the home page or let them know they are one tap away to get there.

With content, on mobile devises users are not likely to read as much, you may want to create custom content that is shorter or give users a synopsis with the option to link to more.

As far as navigation, just concentrate on the pages your visitor want to look at when using their phones. This might change with time or what you thought would be useful for the visitor experience could get proven wrong. Check your website stats and see what gets viewed or not viewed on mobile, this will give you a good indication on what to add or remove from the navigation.

This doesn't mean that the rest of the website doesn't need to be mobile ready. We are in the era of sharing social media and email marketing campaigns (newsletters) are a major source of traffic for most business websites.
Both social media and checking emails are activities that people prefer doing on their mobile device, you can't predict which page of your website is your mobile visitor going to land.

In my experience sites designed for each medium often create the most successful user experience. At the end of the day, responsive design is just one of the latest design fads looking for ways to create better mobile experiences, I am sure we will see many more mobile focused design fads as mobile use continues to grow.

At Your Web Department you can manage the content of both Mobile and Desktop websites on a single interface, and kept different content for both. Check the link below to find out more.

Request our Mobile setup package for $500.00 package

Not a YWD client? Try LiveBuild - We design & build your website for free and ready in 1hour
yourwebdepartment.com/LiveBuild

You can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

Generate up to twice the traffic by having a mobile website

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 14:15:00 +0000

You want proof that mobile is big? Do a survey of your family at dinner time. How many of them have their faces in some portable screen or have their devices next to the desert fork poised for action? How many check their devices the moment they ping or rattle the table? I'll bet a lot of you live this dining scenario.

This isn't a parenting column, though I'm ashamed that you're not teaching your kids proper etiquette. No matter, we know that mobile browsing is on the rise, mobile usage is on the rise, mobile optimization boosts engagement and mobile optimization boosts sales.

Here is a cool info graphic from 2011. The stats are powerful and you can imagine what has transpired between then and now.

++ Click Image to Enlarge ++

Source: The Growing Importance of Mobile Website Optimization Infographic

The larger format phablets look like their are a hit. More and more apps are letting people do on their phones what they were doing on their computers, which really brings into focus how underused that hunk of iron has been on your desk.

Think about it. You were cowed into to getting the biggest, baddest box and then you bought office software to work your computing magic but all you're doing is pounding out text notes in Word, emailing and pushing the processor with your Netflix account. And that's it. These portable devices with a fraction of the power of your desktop are satisfying 98% (my unscientific stat) of your computing requirements. Pretty embarrassing but it highlights why phones and tablets are pretty much all we need and why we are so comfortable spending so much time with them. They deliver only what we need, speedily, efficiently and often in really cool touch-fingery ways. (Mint.com is awesome.)

So, there you go. Are you ready to finally embrace mobile? You should.

week 99 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 13:15:00 +0000

This past week: I looked at mobile a lot, there are too many businesses websites that are not mobile friendly; this is something that is not resonating with the business community (our customers included). So for the next couple of weeks we will be drumming the mobile beat, trying to inform and advice of the best ways to proceed with getting your business website into the mobile era. The mobile growth rate is unprecedented, and it has caught many businesses by surprise; us included. Although we knew mobile was coming (we've been talking about it since the first iPhone came out); but we never imagined it being adopted this quickly by the masses.

What we thought at first would be the right business logic of selecting which pages of a website needed to display on mobile or desktop was proven wrong by user feedback. The thing is you cannot predict how your visitors are going to land on your website, and don't think it is always going to be your homepage. It is clear that most people like to do their social media and check emails from their phones, all those links that get shared in news feeds and email newsletter are viewed and tapped on phones. This means that all your website pages need to display well on a smartphone, this doesn't mean that you need to copy the desktop user experience to your mobile version (there are still traffic that will land on your home page using a phone) but consider all pages of your website as mobile landing pages and guide the visitor to the experience you want them to have on your mobile business website.

Keeping on the mobile topic, this week list of tweets are all about that.

Would Apple lead the way on this as well?-> Apple's Rumored iPhone 5s Could Jump Start Mobile Payments
Although they did not invent the smartphone the introduction of the iPhone was definitely the game changer. All phone manufactured afterwards copy the iPhone in some way or another; and I believe once Apple introduces Mobile Payments it will create the tipping point for mass adoption.

Best value for your dollar-> Small Business is Missing the Digital/Mobile Revolution
Online marketing might not be the best medium for some businesses, but as things stand today it is a level playing field between major brands and small businesses. When it comes to value and reach, and this is proper demographic reach. Traditional marketing media cannot compete.

New blogging app!-> CheckThis: a simple mobile blogging tool for the iPhone (video)
CheckThis, looks pretty cool; it enables you format your post to your liking before posting and although it has its own network behind it you can also post to Facebook and Twitter. Soon other networks will come in.

Smartphones - the most widely spread electronic devices on the globe-> The Future Of Mobile Commerce Is Bright
Hard to deny this fact, far too many people are using their mobile devices to access the web.

Your successful mobile business website
My take on what your business website needs to have mobile success.

You need choices with all mobile devices-> Tailoring your mobile website content to fit your needs
Since screen size are smaller on mobile devices and we interact with them using touch, content needs to meet those needs. This post shows how YWD handle the choosing of the right content for the right platform.

Preparation is key-> 5 Easy Ways to Optimize Social Media Marketing for Mobile
Just like any other Marketing strategy, planning is the most important part; and thinking mobile first should be in all online marketers minds nowadays.

How big you like your phone to be?-> Larger smartphone screens lead to increased Web usage
Screen size is what lead the web/mobile revolution, once phones came with a screen big enough to display something recognizable, mobile devises finally became worth the users while.

Going all out for mobile-> What's A Mobile Ad Worth? Google Would Love To Show You
Google just like all the major Internet companies is pushing for the mobile market share, and their adwords mobile calculator is great incentive to use their ad network.

It is pretty easy [Video]-> YWD mobile integration: an example
Although the video was made a couple of years ago, the dynamics on how to setup your mobile website still the same.

Next Friday I'll have another round up, in the meantime you can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

Your Web Department redesigns its website

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:45:00 +0000

Last week we discussed a few symptoms that could indicate that your website is in need of a redesign. Well, we were actually in the process of redesigning our own website. Why? For the same reasons outlined in that post, mainly that we have expanded our business offering to include LiveBuild, and our website wasn't reflecting that properly. Our core message had to be tweaked in order to reach our audience, and the design also needed a little love to match our own unique branding and style more faithfully.

Hopefully the change has made the overall look and feel of our website cleaner and more approachable.

Did you like it? Visit www.yourwebdepartment.com and let us know.

The State of Mobile Content Marketing - infographic

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 16:42:00 +0000

As you know already, mobile devices usage is on the rise and having a mobile version of your website is now essential for any type of business, big or small. We have experienced the swift shift to mobile in the past year, not only are more people visiting our site on mobile devises, more people are opening our weekly email newsletter on mobile devices as well. This is understandable since checking emails seems more natural when doing it on one's smartphone. A great deal of the mobile traffic seems to be coming as a result of people clicking on links from social sharing. Facebook and all other major networks are now accessed via a mobile device rather than a desktop computer, therefore when pages of your website or blog get shared, most likely a new visitor will tap on that link from their smartphone.

While researching for current mobile information I came across this infographic from Yahoo! Advertising Solutions

It shows that by 2016 80% of the US population will use smartphones and 50% will own a tablet. Although more users are checking emails with their phones, the open and click-through rates are still higher on desktop. Perhaps it is time subject lines were optimized to take advantage of the growth of mobile.

Email on mobile also seems more effective for lead or conversion generation than Social and Search. Like I mentioned above, great statistical information in this infographic.

View full size infographic

Request our Mobile setup package for $500.00 package

Not a YWD client? Try LiveBuild - We design & build your website for free and ready in 1hour
yourwebdepartment.com/LiveBuild

You can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

Refer businesses to Your Web Department and have them love you even more

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 09:22:00 +0000

Come and be part of the Your Web Department referral program. What are you waiting for? Many of our customers are making $5, $10 and even $15 per month for every website they refer to us that becomes a real, live Your Web Department website.

It really adds up very quickly. Not only will you pay for your own monthly YWD fee but you could be earning hundreds of dollars every month (paid quarterly) by simply sharing your positive YWD experience with others.

Number of websites you bring in	by end of 1st Quarter	by end of 2nd Quarter	by end of 3rd Quarter	by end of 4th Quarter
1 site per month	$30	$60	$90	$120
2 sites per month	$60	$120	$180	$240
5 sites per month	$150	$300	$450	$600

And you'll be doing them a favour because people starting businesses just don't know who to turn to when it comes to building a website. And how many of your friends talk about their horrible website building experiences? This is not uncommon. Last week alone three customers came to us because they were being held hostage by unscrupulous web shops.

We know you appreciate our insanely dedicated service. We know you like the fact that we don't talk tech just to make ourselves sound über smart. You ask us for some online business advice, we give it without charging extra.

With LiveBuild we're providing a value added service that no other system can offer; not WordPress, not WIX, no one. If you haven't heard already, LiveBuild will build your website with using screen sharing over the Internet in one hour and it's FREE. With any other system if you wanted to do something custom you'd have to hire a programmer. Luckly, Your Web Department is a no-code system and that's why we can offer something like LiveBuild.

So, let's go over the benefits of our referral program:

1. You know your referree (is there such a word?) will be treated properly and not talked down to
2. They will get a custom site at template price
3. You will get some extra spending money

Link to YWD Referral program.

week 98 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 11:50:00 +0000

This past week: Google Reader is dead, by July 1st the service is no more. Probably one of the first RSS aggregators that build a large following over the years, but this is one of the many services Google is terminating in their effort to consolidate and focus on what matters for the future of the company; mainly Google+.On another front, Pinterest is offering analytics for brand accounts. This is the trend that had started a while back with many social media networks, creating analytics and tools to better service businesses while still trying to be the place for people to share and entertain themselves. For the small business this is good news, digital marketing is still the place where you get more bang for your buck. The more tools we can have at our disposal to target our demographic the easier it becomes for us to send our message to the right audience. Now, my tweet list for this week, full of good advice on how to do better business online.

If you want to be an influencer you need to blog-> 10 Insights on Social Media and Blogging Influence

Your blog is the center of your content marketing strategy, and the publishing house for your articles and stories. The more valuable your content is for your audience that better your influence will be.

Pinterest released analytics for your account and here is-> How to verify your website on Pinterest
As I mentioned in the introduction this is a sign that Pinterest is gravitating towards businesses, where the money is.

Ads on Social Networks? We have, mixed results-> Are the Social Media Advertising Changes Good for the SMB?
We have tried all major social networks for advertising and as I mentioned in my tweet we had mixed results. Overall I think they are a good platform for small businesses to advertise, but you need to try them out and see which one works better for your business.

75% of customers prefer a mobile-friendly site-> Infographic: The Importance of Mobile Web Design
Great statical information on the benefits of having a mobile website. If you need more convincing.

There are alternatives-> Why the Shuttering of Google Reader Might Be a Good Thing
This very true, and some of them are better than Google Reader in many ways.

I tend to agree-> Mobile Shoppers Prefer Retailer Web Sites To Apps
I never understood the argument of either having a mobile app or having a mobile website. Whether your business or brand have an app, this app is not going to serve your website, right? and if your website is mainly e-commerce do you think your visitors are going to download and app to access your products? First think how the visitor got to your website using their phone, most likely through a search or a shared link. Both will open the default browser and take them to the page of your website. Would you rather have a mobile friendly page waiting for them or ask them to download an app?

We like MailChimp which one is your fav?-> My Top 3 Recommended Email Marketing Services
The best way to spread the word about your business, having a list of people that opt in to receive your newsletter can be very useful; as I mention on my past post: Email Marketing for your Business Website

Be active in LinkedIn-> 7 Ways LinkedIn Can Drive More Traffic to Your Website
LinkedIn has come a long way by changing their focus from Jobs to Business connections. I can see that the news feed in LinkedIn is now more active and with more interesting content to read. I notice the more active I am by sharing and commenting in the different groups the more referral traffic we get to our website.

Finding it more useful every day-> 4 Reasons Why Google+ is a Killer B2B Social Media Platform
Just Hangout alone is a great incentive to get a Google+ account if you don't have one yet. And most Google services are being migrated to Google+, this combined with the social capabilities that it already has, makes it a very useful social marketing tool.

Everyone has a story and experience to share-> Becoming a Blogger: Do You Have What it Takes?
I was hesitant to start blogging at first, but by the fifth post I had more confidence and better idea of how to organize my thoughts. I don't conceder myself a writer but I can put a blog posts together that can be informative and easy to read. I believe everyone can do this, it just takes time to get used to it and experience to get better at it.

Next Friday I'll have another round up, in the meantime you can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

Anatomy of Content Marketing Infographic

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 09:20:00 +0000

While doing research for my last post on Content Marketing for your Business Website I came across this great infographic from Contnet+ (contentplus.co.uk). It has great statistical data for online user behaviour and the benefits of content marketing; some of the highlights:

Blogs on company sites result in 55% more visitors
Blogs give 97% more indexed links
70% of consumers prefer getting to know a company via articles rather than ads
Blogs are 63% more likely to influence purchase decisions than magazines

View full size infographic

You can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

Does your business website need a redesign?

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 15:50:00 +0000

OK, you already got a website for your business. It's a start, and in fact you're ahead of lots of people, as my partner Paul Chato reveals in this recent post of his. But is your website really working for you? Does it need a tune up, or even a major overhaul?

There are a few symptoms that could indicate that your website needs a redesign, and we'll go through them here.

1. Your business has changed but your website hasn't

If the business itself has changed significantly, the website should as well. Otherwise, it will not be supporting your organization's goals, and in fact it could be even hurting it and sending people away.
Make sure your content is up to date

2. The website isn't bringing in business

If it isn't, you're losing a great opportunity. At the very least, the website should be generating leads, as well as other intangible factors such as brand recognition. Both the copy and the design should be engaging and support your core message.
Ensure content is tailored for your audience

3. Traffic has stalled or decreased

By using tools such as Google Analytics, you can easily track the evolution of the website traffic over time. You can also compare the bouncing rate and get other insights. For instance, what are the exit pages?
Improve your Search Engine Optimization

4. The design looks 'dated'

If your website was designed years ago, it's inevitable that its look will reflect that. Browsers have changed, new features are available, others became deprecated. The 'Skip intro' Flash that was all the rage 5 years ago (well, not even then) just won't do it anymore. Not to mention more subliminal design elements like navigation, fonts, colour schemes, page widths, etc. have changed.
A good designer can help!

5. You don't have a mobile version

You'll probably be surprised by the number or people that are already accessing your website from their phone. That percentage will only grow over the months.
Time to get a mobile version of your website

A few recent examples from our clients

Here are a few of our client websites built either by or with Your Web Department that went through a redesign just over the past few weeks:

ALIVE Outdoors
www.aliveoutdoors.com

Before the redesign:

GP8 Sportwater
www.gp8.ca

Before the redesign:

Silvercreek Commercial Builders
www.silvercreekcommercial.com

Before the redesign:

Google Adwords profits from your failure

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 09:56:00 +0000

Someone from Google's Engage for Agencies contacted us recently. What is Google Engage for Agencies? Near as I can tell they want those of us building, designing or otherwise engaged in the web business, to become Pay Per Click (PPC) sales people. 'But we're not really a PPC expert,' I said. 'Not to worry,' says Google. 'We have PPC experts on staff waiting to analyze your customer's PPC needs and make you look great.'

Your Web Department has a lot of customers. It seemed like a natural fit to approach them to offer PPC services. They trust us. Why not? Then that little, 'Too good to be true,' voice started making that squeaking noise in my brain. What's the downside to all of this?

There are companies out there that do nothing but PPC. Wouldn't they know more about this than us? But Google counters by saying they have real Google staff who will be helping us. That must make you feel more comfortable, no? Yes, perhaps, but is Google going to guarantee the success of the campaigns? No, of course not. Will we be getting a piece of the PPC sales? No. How would we make money? We would make money on the service fee we would charge. How much should we charge? 'What ever you want,' says Google.

How could we lose? If you're a Your Web Department customer you might be thinking, 'Yeah, why aren't you offering this to us? We trust you. We've been looking for something like this it would be great to get it from YWD.'

We're not offering it because we want to keep you as a customer. The trick behind Adwords as a driver of business for Google is that most of you will spend buckets of cash before you figure it out if at all. What's important is the conversion rate, not the clicks. It's very easy to set up a bunch of keywords that will suddenly burn through your monthly adwords budget without nary of a sniff of business. I blew through more than $20k worth of adwords a few years ago with no business in return. This is a user problem, not Google's. Google does not set you up to fail, but most of us do. Are they counting on a percentage of their income coming from us idiots? I won't put words in their mouth but they would be making a lot less if there were fewer of us out there. There is also the issue that many businesses will just not benefit from a Google Adwords campaign, but we try it, lose cash, leave. The cash stays with the Googster.

How many of you have gotten $100 coupons to apply to an Adwords campaign? Now Google has a campaign where you pay $100 and get $300 worth of Adwords. You will burn through that $300 in no time and if you have little or no experience how to exploit it you will not get any conversions but the idea, I assume, is to hook you.

Now they are trying to get an even larger free salesforce to do their selling. A salesforce that has a built-in trusted network of customers, like Your Web Department, is ideal, but we're not PPC experts.

I asked the Google representative if they were going to supply the contract with all the appropriate caveats to the success or failure of the program? No, she said. 'But we've got experts waiting here who really know Adwords.' 'Yes, you said that already.'

There is so much planning required to mounting a proper Adwords campaign, creating landing pages, crafting several ads, measuring their success, refining the budget that I think it's a bit coy of Google to just say that their support will make it all work and if we fail our customers, that's okay by Google, that's what they need. More failure.

week 97 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 12:16:00 +0000

This past week: We have a new Pope, a Latin American this time and although this event is huge as a news item it has little or no influence on your business. Moving on; all major social networks have announced (and some released) big updates to functionality and interface design. It is clear that we are entering the age of mobile - Google and Facebook are taking display elements from their mobile versions to apply them to the desktop versions of their websites. This is what is being referred as 'Mobile First'. A design tactic which we will see more of this year, just take a look at the new look of mashable.com with big images and big type. With the tremendous rise of smart phones and tablets we have to start shifting to this new environment, the desktop computer won't go away but it won't be the dominant computing device anymore. Luckily for the small business there are alternatives to implement mobile versions of their websites, some easier than others (we think YWD option is the easiest - YWD Mobile) but they are there for you to take advantage and jump on the mobile bandwagon.
With further ado, my tweet list for this week.

Personalized feeds and emphasis on images-> Facebook - changes to news feed: What does it all mean?
Facebook is looking to stay current and trying to make it easier for us to consume the never ending posts on our news feed. More control for the user to segregate the different sources of post we follow and at the same time clearing the way for Brands to have a more enhanced presence in Facebook. After all they are the ones that provide the revenue for Facebook.

Running a ppc campaign? might want to check this out-> Learn About the 7 Factors of Bid Optimization
From my experience running a ppc campaign on Google can be frustrating, this article helps.

If you are an SMB mobile website will do-> How To Craft A Mobile Strategy For Your Business
I often read the argument between mobile app or mobile website. If you are familiar with mobile apps, you might have noticed they are nothing like a website. Apps serve a specific function, which can be valuable to a group of people. Your business website needs to display well on a tiny screen, maybe have a call to action on the mobile homepage. I think mobile website are the way to go for small businesses.

Most require a good financial commitment, chose wisely-> Social Media Dashboards: What to Look For
There are a few solutions out there, you need to sort out your needs, such as: managing a team, listening to alerts, or scheduling posts. I noticed that the more data that is processed, the bigger the price tag.

Jumping in with both feet-> Going Mobile Has To Be A Transformation, Not An Experiment
Take the plunge into mobile, it is here and very soon that is how the majority of internet users will be accessing your website.

SMBs that have website are not using it to the fullest-> Small Businesses Devote More Resources to Websites
Sadly this is the truth. Very few small businesses have a website and the ones that do have nothing more than a glorified brochure that hasn't been updated in years. Did you know your business website can actually generate leads?

It tells a lot more than you think-> Think before you click the 'Like' button on Facebook
That is the thing with big data, the more people use the like button the easier it is to predict and guess patterns. But I wouldn't worry too much, the worst that can happen is that you will get to see more ads that you are actually interested in.

That's what we say, can't have the same content for both-> Great Web Design for Mobile Devices
Desktop and tablets are closer in experience, but smartphones are different. On a smartphone you need to get to the point.

Yes all those things-> Hidden Benefits of Social Media: Why Your Strategy May Be Working Better Than You Think
Take a look, your social media efforts might have a bigger impact than you think.

Is Facebook losing its lustre?->The Problem With Facebook
This might be the case with the younger generation, losing the interest they once had in Facebook. Who knows, but I think once they get older they will comeback to the Facebook that will be then. I see a more magazine like Facebook in the future where we can organize the content from the people and brands we like and follow.

Next Friday I'll have another round up, in the meantime you can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

How to verify your website on Pinterest

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 10:05:00 +0000

Would you like to know which images people are pinning from your website? Pinterest has launched a new tool for site owners that lets you see how well your pages are performing on that popular social network. It's called Pinterest Web Analytics and it's available to companies with a verified website.

But how do you verify your business website on Pinterest? It's easy. First, go to your Pinterest page and select Settings from the pulldown menu on the top right.

Scroll down until you see the Website field. Enter your website name there and then click the Verify Website button.

Your Web Department uses the meta tag method for verification. So click the Verify with a meta tag link at the bottom.

Pinterest will then generate a key that's specific to your website, and display it on a field. Highlight just the key (the long sequence of numbers and letters, similar to the one below) and copy it.

Now go to the back-end of your website in Your Web Department and click Tools on the main toolbar. Select the Google, Yahoo, Bing, Pinterest Verify Ownership tool. Paste the key you just copied into the Pinterest field and click Save. There's just one more step after that.

Go back to Pinterest and finish the verification process. After a dew seconds, Pinterest should inform you that it has successfully verified your website.

After that, if you go to your Pinterest profile, you'll see a checkmark beside you website name indicating it has been verified:

When your website is verified, people will see a checkmark next to your domain in search results. They will also see the full website URL and checkmark on your profile. And you will be able to access the analytics information that's now being provided by Pinterest.

Don't have a website for your business? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

Content Marketing for your Business Website

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 13:15:00 +0000

I'm sure you have heard of 'Content Marketing' it is the new trend and terminology for online marketing. What it is? According to Wikipedia:

'Content marketing is any marketing format that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire customers. Content Marketing's basic premise is to 'provide some valuable information or entertainment - 'content' - that stops short of a direct sales pitch or call to action, but which seeks to positively influence a customer in some way.'[1] This information can be presented in a variety of media, including news, video, white papers, ebooks, infographics, case studies, how-to's, Q&A's, photos, etc.'

Basically, content marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling.

Full Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_marketing

If you business has a website and/or a blog you are already doing content marketing, maybe not as well as you could be but you are there already. The good thing is that getting better at it takes only: discipline, strategy and lots of tracking.

Discipline - Create consistent content

In order to create consistent and good quality content you need planning and discipline. Having an editorial calendar will help you achieve consistency, and it doesn't have to be just one person doing all this; your entire business staff can contribute to content creation. Although most of your content will end up as blog posts this is not the only channel you have for content marketing, as the Wikipedia entry describes there are many different avenues to distribute your helpful and valuable insights, shuch as: product descriptions, comparison tables, how to guides, etc. You also need discipline to stay focus on message and avoid the sale pitch, which could be very hard for a lot of marketeers.
Keep in mind that content marketing is a process that takes time, you need to build your audience before you start to see results. The results will come as long you constantly keep providing good quality content for your audience.

Strategy - Define what you will say, how you will say it and when you will say it

The content you create should be focused on what your audience wants and how you and your organization can add value and solve problems for that audience. Defining what you will talk about (content categories) how you will say it (tone and voice) and how often you will create it (you need to be consistent, if daily isn't realistic, but twice a week is, keep it to the same days each week) is very important. And as stated above, you need to stay focused on the strategy and related messages that you have defined. Get you team involved in the production of content. Tips, best practices and guides on the industry that your business operates in are always good topics for people that want to learn more about what you do. The more valuable your content is for your audience the more of an authority you become in your field and this could prove very beneficial in generating good leads.

Tracking - Review data and modify accordingly

There are many tools to help you track the impact your content has on your audience. Google analytics can track the referral traffic that shared content can produce. When sharing your own content in Social Media networks be sure to use a url shortener such as bitly.com or HootSuite's ow.ly, which then tracks the click throughs to your post. All email newsletter systems such as: MailChimp or ConstantContact have tracking for how many people open the emails and how many click on the links from the email body. As you can see there are many ways to measure who's reading, viewing, sharing and referring back to your website. This is great feedback to see what works and what doesn't and make changes accordingly.

Content Marketing is great for brand exposure through all the sharing you and your visitors can do. There is also an educational factor with all the good quality content you provide to your audience, which can positively influence them to share or become the next lead. Every new and original piece content you create provides great benefits for SEO (search engine optimization), Google and other search engines like fresh and up to date content to add to their index. Add cross links (explain) and make sure the content is original and your website search result page position will improve.

You can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

Great photography from our clients websites - Part VII

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 10:00:00 +0000

ALIVE Outdoors is an experiential and outdoor education company specializing in the creation and delivery of customized, meaningful programs for schools and organizations. They do school programs but also workshops, consulting/programs design, special programs like corporate retreats and more.

Their website recently went through a complete redesign with Your Web Department, and photography is playing a prominent role in conveying the kind of experiences they're able to provide. A mobile website is also currently under way and will be ready within the next few days.

Don't have a Your Web Department website? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

The "Headless Webpage" is not a new horror movie

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 12:36:00 +0000

My blog posts are primarily about helping you, the small business owner, to navigate the mysterious world of the Internet and more specifically those pesky websites everyone keeps telling you you need. I don't spend a lot of time tooting our own Your Web Department horn because that would be too pushy and unseemly. And when it comes to features discussions I leave Flavio Mester, a co-conspirator, to reveal YWD's inner workings. But recently I had an encounter that really showed off some unique capabilities of YWD, and how it just makes us different from the usual open source rabble.

One of these features I call The Headless Page. No, it's not the vampire version Your Web Department, it's a feature found in what we call Page Properties. Every page has it's own Page Properties that lets you manage banner, backgrounds, SEO. It also has a 'Special' tab. It's the Special tab that lets you manage what layout elements show on a page. It lets you easily turn off the banner, or the menus, side bars, etc. This feature has been a huge hit for several customers that wanted to make a 'headless' page for other people. That's a term I made up for a page that others can iFrame (insert with code) into their own site removing the banner or menuing. It's your page in someone else's site. When you update it, it will change on the other person's website.

Okay, so why am I so proud of this feature? One of our customers is providing this feature to their affiliates, but when it came time to get one of their suppliers to provide a headless page to them they said it would take 6 months of programming and cost $20,000. Really. A few clicks in YWD versus 6 months and $20k for another system managed by hundreds of IT specialists. To me this is a great example of how we've engineered YWD to just work better than other systems. It's also a feature that is hard to explain and not on the top of everyone's wish list, but it's there if and when you need it.

week 96 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 11:54:00 +0000

This past week: Facebook has been busy working on making their website better; and it seems the new changes will favour the end user, not that most will appreciate the changes. I expect the same amount of complaints and threats to quit Facebook that we saw in previous updates. Personalization of the news feed and more emphasis on branding and images are the main points for the new update. How will these changes affect businesses on Facebook? It is not very clear, but I'm sure Facebook has not forgotten their source of revenue, which is advertising. Facebook is not the only one upgrading their social network interface, Google+ has launched a redesign of their interface as well, making it way easier to navigate. Although, I don't expect the same amount of complaints that Facebook creates. For the small business this is great; competition from two internet giants leads to better opportunities to spread our word.
Without further due, my tweet collection for this week; full of tips to do better business online.

Listen and reach out-> 10 Ways to Use Social Media to Skyrocket Your Customer Loyalty
'Here are six strategies to keep in mind that will kick your word of mouth marketing to the next level.' This is true, social media marketing has become the online version of word of mouth. When visitors share your website pages or posts, when users make comments on your product or like your Facebook page all these are endorsements. Endorsements that are viewed by all the friends of the person making the share.

You wanted to find out, well here it is [Video]-> How Google Search Works, Explained By Google
This the first time Google explains how their search works. Although they don't mention how the algorithm works you get a good idea of the effort involved to return relevant results when you do a search on Google.

And only 48% of Canadian SMBs have a website-> Update- 75% of U.S. Businesses do not have a website
Very hard to believe, even when it is so easy to get a website (even a single page) going these days. It has to be a generational thing, most business owners are baby boomers and they feel intimidated by the internet. Do you agree?

There are more eyes on phones than desktop screens-> Why not being mobile friendly is costing you sales
It took 38 years to reach 50 million users, TV 13 years, the internet 4 years and mobile 2 years (after the launch of the iPhone). This unprecedented growth on mobile browsing has left most people awestruck and scrambling to react to the new medium. And this is just the beginning smartphone adoption is not even close to plateau.

Content Marketing as it is called nowadays-> How to Write Effective Website Copy
Google has repeatedly mention that they look for original, quality and relevant content to return on search results. If you want to be found in your space you need good content and the more it is shared the better it is for your search result rankings.

Your Biz needs to be online-> 2013 Social Media Predictions for Small Businesses
'if you don't have an online presence (or don't know what that means), you are in big trouble. As I've pointed out in my article about online reviews, 86% of consumers are searching for local businesses online and 85% research products or services online before they decide to make a purchase. In other words, if they can't find information about your business online, they will probably look for another business.' If your business doesn't have a website don't even bother with social media or any online marketing strategy.

Sharing your content helps-> SocialMedia and #SEO: How your pages can help you get to the top of search results
Yes, it does help your search results ranking, the more your content is shared the better.

Mobile influenced $159 B in sales 2012-> Inside The #Mobile Showrooming Threat That's Changing The Retail Industry
This is a consequence of this new technology; it is too easy to price compare while shopping nowadays. This one of the reasons why Best Buy moved to do price matching. Retailers need to adapt to consumers changing habits.

Interesting stats: Women of #socialmedia are more influential than women in general-> The Women Of Social Media
'The study of 2,000 respondents identifies women who are influential in social media and provides new and unique insights as communicators evolve their strategies in this new era of digital engagement.'

Most of them can live in your phone-> Top 10 Must Have Business Tools for Self-Employed Professionals
Your smartphone is becoming the remote control of your personal and business life.

Next Friday I'll have another round up, in the meantime you can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

Too much stuff to read online? Try Google Reader

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 17:20:00 +0000

The Web is obviously rich in information, coming from hundreds of millions of different sources. If you own a small business, you probably don't want to waste time every day searching for the same things that interest you. And visiting many separate web sites frequently to find out if the content there has been updated can take a long time.

The easiest way to do that is to use what's called an aggregator. It lets you subscribe to what's called a feed so that you don't need to look for the content; it's delivered automatically to you. One of the most popular aggregators out there is Google Reader. It's simple to use and free, and can save you time.

How to use Google Reader

If you read our previous posts on how to create a Google Calendar or how to build a spreadsheet without Excel, you're already familiar with Google tools. From your Google account, you can access Google Reader from the 'More' menu pulldown. Or you can go directly to reader.google.com

Google Reader lets you to subscribe to your favourite websites and blogs. To do that, click the big red 'SUBSCRIBE' button. You can either search by the feed's name or paste the feed URL.

There are many tutorial videos on Google Reader out there. I found the one below to be short and easy to understand:

How to subscribe to this blog

Sure, why not start by subscribing to this blog itself? Easy. All you need to do is click Google Reader's 'SUBSCRIBE' button, and then type our blog's address -- blog.yourwebdepartment.com -- in the field:

Click the 'Add' button and Google Reader will start fetching our posts for you automatically. You can also enter a search term there. And keep adding other feeds.

Another way to add a subscription is to do it from the blog itself. Most blogs have an 'RSS' button that allows you to do that. RSS, which stands for Real Simple Syndication, allows you to do just that: it will syndicate the content from the source (e.g. a blog) and feed it into the aggregator (e.g. Google Reader).

In the case of this blog of ours, you'll see the RSS button on the right column, somewhere down the middle. When you click it, you'll be taken to a page where you can either 'Add to Google homepage' (a somewhat deprecated alternative) or 'Add to Google Reader'. Selecting the latter will automatically add that website/blog to your list of subscriptions.

Once you form your subscriptions list, you'll only need to go to Google Reader to quickly browse through your latest news and articles from your favourite sources, without having to visit all of them individually.

It can save you a lot of time.

Related posts:

LiveBuild For the Business Owner - We design & build your website for free and ready in 1hour
yourwebdepartment.com/LiveBuild

Email Marketing Best Practices Infographic

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 15:57:00 +0000

I came across this great infographic from Prestige Marketing Inc. (www.prestigemarketing.ca) about email marketing best practices. It supports my previous post 'Email Marketing for your Business Website', and includes great statistical data, such as: 93% of online consumers interact with brands through email more than any other platform or 64% prefer promotional emails compared to 8% for social media sites. The best practices section is clear and dead on; relevant subject lines, good content and avoid cheesy spammy words such as: Sale and Cash.
Overall it shows how important emails are for your online marketing strategy. On the technical front it addresses the need for emails to display well on mobile and in text only format. Take a close look at the infographic and try to follow the advice and make it part of your overall marketing strategy.

View full size infographic

Related posts:
Your Successful Business Website
The five most important elements for a business website
Landing pages - the key for increasing conversions
Your successful blog
SEO search engine optimization for your business website
Your successful mobile business website
Social Media your business website content distributor
Listening Using Social Media for your Business Website>
Email Marketing for your Business Website

You can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

Update- 75% of U.S. Businesses do not have a website

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 07:53:00 +0000

Okay, last week I wrote about a US census survey that indicated more than 75% of U.S. small businesses did not have a website. Now I've just seen a Canadian survey that makes the case that only 48% of Canadian small businesses have a website. That means 52% of you don't. It is a huge improvement over what is happening south of the border, but come on, that's nothing to be proud of. How can anyone do business these days without a website?

'With the majority of consumers choosing to research and shop for products and services online, businesses without a web presence are missing a significant opportunity,' says Jim Mulligan, national director, Retail, RBC Royal Bank. 'Businesses need to be visible where consumers choose to be, so investing in an online strategy is fundamental to attract new customers and stay competitive.'

In fact, 56 per cent of the entrepreneurs in the survey rate finding and keeping clients as one of the top business challenges that they will face over the next year, yet only 41 per cent of those surveyed promote their business using a dedicated website.

What is the inhibiting factor? Do the majority of non-believers not need a website? Perhaps many are like the consultants who have been recently approaching Your Web Department in signifiant numbers who are telling me things like, 'My business is completely based on word-of-mouth, but now people are immediately checking out if I have a website after our first meeting. It's getting embarrassing, not having one.'

A website is the new business card. It's impossible to think of not having one. And just like a business card many small business owners are happy with the raised ink business card website equivalent, which gets me onto my next tangent neither the American or Canadian survey indicated if the existing websites were any good. My experience is that about 80% of small business websites are truly awful. So, taking the Canadian example, if only 48% of small businesses have websites and 80% are dreadful then only 9.6% of websites are doing their businesses any good. That's like being attacked by a zombie frightening.

We know why this is, I've been over this before: money, time, inclination, fear. If you can't get your email up and running then how on earth could you even consider tackling a website? Yet, some day, you will have to. And we can help. Just call us at our unhappy website hotline: 1-866-986-3464 ext.2 and let one of our trained website emotional support staff help you.

week 95 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 11:39:00 +0000

This past week: No major news to talk about, but I did notice a few things that are about to change the mobile landscape. First is the release of Firefox mobile operating system; open source, free, runs well on low end hardware and phone providers are allowed to brand the interface. Clearly Firefox will take a piece of Google's Android share and offer alternatives for consumers. Second is just a rumour but it has a good point; SamSung has now 40% of mobile devices powered by Android. This is making Google un-easy since SamSung now can demand more from the partnership from Google. Tension are rising and both players have options; Google recently bought Motorola Mobile (so they could do without SamSung) and SamSung could look into Ubuntu for phones the linux based Desktop and Server OS now for mobile. Yet to be released (October 2013 release date) will be the first mobile operating system that can run a full Unity desktop environment when plugged into a docking station. What does all this big companies drama means to us simpletons? Choice, and we are in need of some right now since the market is just divided by Apple and Android (or should I say SamSung). Unfortunately Microsoft and BlackBerry are not making headway in their mobile efforts, therefore we need more players. As a small business we are well aware the benefits that mobile technology provide from both personal and business perspective; the last thing we need is to be confined to just two choices. Having said that, this week's list is all about expanding your business horizons.

Dramatic market shift-> MOBILE USAGE: How Consumers Are Using Their Phones, And What It Means
Very interesting report, gaming and social media are the most used apps on mobile.

It is connected to too many Google things-> Why Google plus is good for business
Google's ultimate goal is for you to spend more time on the internet. Hopefully you will spend that time mostly in Google's internet realm, which is avery big and very compelling to use not only for a business but also on a personal level.

Very good tips, get writing!-> How to Write Articles That Go Viral
Yes, not only videos can go viral. Quality posts that solve a problem can have the same effect.

Content Marketing the new way of things-> SEO Consulting in 2013: What the Pros Know that You Don't
With the recent search algorithm released by Google (Panda) they have mede clear that good original content will take precedence. Therefore the keyword stuffing and dubious back links techniques will be penalized. This is good news for any business, now you only need to focus in providing the best possible content for your customer base and you will be found.

Short answer yes! see how-> Is Social Media Worthwhile For Local Businesses?
It is all about where the eye balls are and where your customer demographic is most likely to be in this social media map. But rest assured they are there. And all those shares from your website counts for your page rank.

Solve your audience problems and they will be leads-> Start Helping, Stop Selling
Provide solutions for your audience's pain and you will build loyalty and customers.

Making use of that big data-> 6 Data Tracking Services For Your Small Business
When you don't have the resources of Facebook or Amazon to do it in house, these services could be helpful for making your next marketing decisions.

Good case study-> How B2B Marketers are Benefiting from Facebook
'Y Scouts, a small executive search firm that started in 2012 in the Phoenix area, needs to foster brand recall in a crowded field in an industry that frankly isn't very sexy.' Read their approach for marketing on Facebook.

Bravo for BlackBerry!-> BlackBerry debuts mobile payment service in Indonesia
One step closer for the promised mobile payments, this time BlackBerry is relaying on the very popular BBM service for payments.

I use it pretty handy-> Review: IFTTT connects social media, photo and other Web services
If This Then That, I started using it (Free service for now) when I first heard of them a while back. It is very helpful for sharing in multiple social networks, but you can set it up to more than just sharing. You can also be alerted when something is uploaded or just mentioned.

Next Friday I'll have another round up, in the meantime you can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

Email Marketing for your Business Website

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 10:22:00 +0000

Email marketing is probably the most mature online marketing technique. Now that opt-in for newsletters and special announcements has become standard there is big benefit in nurturing those email lists. These are people who want to hear from you and want to be notified when you have something new to share.

Collecting email addresses

Before you can start an email campaign you need an email list. Using your website to collect email addresses is a great way to get good leads and build a permission based list. When you are first starting out, we recommend creating your own permission based list rather than purchasing a list. Permission is key - when you collect email addresses be clear about what you intend to do with their addresses. And don't assume that someone who has given you a business card has also given you permission to put them on a mass mailing list.

Setting up a Newsletter

Newsletters are a great email marketing tool. You can create custom content for your newsletter or you can create a newsletter out of weekly or monthly blog posts. At YWD because we speak to multiple channels, we create custom newsletters and create versions out of blog posts. We use MailChimp manage these, they have a great and easy to use interface and they provide fully functional free accounts for 2000 email addresses and up to 12000 email campaigns per month. For these reasons we decide to ingrate MailChimp email lists with YWD forms (which enables easy email collection), more on that in this post: Setting up email subscription to your blog, YWD makes it easy.

Benefits of an email service provider

There are many email newsletter services nowadays; MailChimp, ConstantContact and iContact to name a few. Most of these systems have similar features and pricing models but what they have in common is the ability to send mass emails while not getting black listed as spam generators. I had to mention this since we have come across customers wanting to send email to thousand of recipients from their personal email accounts. This is something we strongly advise against; not only will your internet provider prevent you from sending to this many people but you can also run the risk of getting your email address black listed.

Tracking and reporting is another great feature of tools like MailChimp. You can see how many people open your emails and which links in the email are clicked more. This kind of feedback allows you to work on the content to better suit your audience needs.

Most email service providers also offer a variety of professional templates as well as provide the option to complete customize the email and newsletters you send.

Respecting your audience

Being able to send emails to people that are expecting them is a powerful marketing tool, but don't abuse it. Send too often and recipients will unsubscribe; send your email campaigns regularly and on the same day each week.
Just like on the other systems MailChimp allows for managing multiple email lists of different people at different stages of the selling funnel. For example we place all users that requests a 'Get Started website' (don't pay until you go live) on one list, which only after they confirm the request do they get moved to another list where we have an automated drip emails set up. These emails help the novice using YWD to have an easier experience building their website. They are sent weekly and they last for 8 weeks.

Great content gets opened and shared

Just like visitors to your blog who share your good quality posts, your email audience will do the same with informative and problem solving, well crafted emails. Good quality content goes a long way; this doesn't mean everyone will open your emails, far from it. If you are getting an open rate between 20% and 40%, that is a good average. To increase your open rate you can test different subject lines. MailChimp even has a Subject Line Suggester.

Mobile friendly emails are essential

Mobile versions for your email campaigns are as important as your mobile website. The rate of people opening emails on their phone is rising; not surprising since checking emails on mobile device is easier and feels more natural for the small screen. Therefore the emails you send need to display well on mobile and all the links you include in it (most should back to your website) should open mobile friendly webpages.

Summary

Having an up to date list of opt-in email subscribers has great benefits for any business, but only if you target them with emails that they want or expect to receive. This email should be rich in content and links back to your website, also remember to provide links to your social media presence in the different networks. This could prove beneficial for increasing your followers and expanding your audience.

Looking for examples of how small businesses use email marketing, why not sign up for our newsletter?YWD Blog weekly subscription

Looking for a solution to help your small business grow on-line sign up for LiveBuild and we can have you up and running in one hour. LiveBuild

Already a YWD client and interested in collecting email addresses and integrating with MailChimp then check out the help information or call us and we can set it up for you. Integrating a form with MailChimp

You can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

"How do I create a Google Calendar and display it on my website?"

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 12:30:00 +0000

Previously, we explained how you can build a spreadsheet without Excel or Numbers and put it up on your website. Calendars can also be very useful for business websites. You can use them to post upcoming events like tradeshows, conferences, new product releases, etc. A website management system like Your Web Department includes a very powerful Events Calendar tool that lets you create events and display them in different formats such as lists and monthly calendars. And you can extensively customize its look and feel. But you can also use Google Calendar for that if you prefer, and then easily insert/embed it into your business website.

Creating and managing a Google Calendar

Google Calendar -- www.google.com/calendar -- is a free tool that lets you build (and in our case here share) your own calendars. If you already have a Google account (if you use GMail for instance) you can sign in to Google Drive directly from here. If you don't have a Google account click the Sign up button.

The video below (from Anson Alexander) will get you started on how to create an manage your calendar:

Sharing the calendar with the world

You can use Google Calendar as your own (and private) time-management application. But in this case we want to make our calendar available to anyone accessing your business website. So once you have your calendar ready, rollover its name under My calendars and click on the down-arrow next to it, so a popup menu will appear. Select the Share this Calendar option:

Check Share this calendar with others and also Make this calendar public. This will make all the calendar information available to anyone. I'm assuming you're not keeping any personal information of a private nature in this calendar, of course!

Adding the calendar to your business website

Google automatically generates the code you need in order to embed/insert the calendar into your Your Web Department business website. Here's how you do it:

1. In Google Calendar, click the down-arrow next to the calendar name to display the popup dialog and select Calendar settings. You can use that page to customize your calendar's look and feel, dimensions and other aspects.

2. At the top of the page you will see a box similar to this one, highlighted here in red. Select and copy all the text inside the box:

3. Now go to your website's administration interface in Your Web Department and navigate to the page where you'd like to embed/insert the Google Calendar. Click Add content in the YWD toolbar, and then Embed Code. Paste the code you just copied there, and save.

Preview the page and you'll see the calendar embedded there:

You can always go back to Google Calendar and change its dimensions, colours, etc. then grab their code again.

What's neat is that as you add more events to your Google Calendar, your website will reflect that automatically.

Want to go even fancier?

Let's say you prefer not to embed the calendar itself on the page, but rather pop it up above it. For instance, a page like this one, with a calendar image and a text link:

When either the calendar or the text link is clicked, you would like your Google Calendar to pop up in a 'lightbox' hovering above the page.

To do that:

1. Grab the portion of the code provided by Google Calendar that's inside the first pair of quotes i.e. the URL (the address) of the calendar:

In Your Web Department, instead of using an Embed Code content block, create a link from your text or image in a regular Word Processor block, and paste the URL you copied above. In the Target tab of the link properties window, select .

That's it: when the page is displayed, if people click on the link they'll see your Google Calendar inside this 'floating' layer:

LiveBuild For the Business Owner - We design & build your website for free and ready in 1hour
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75% of US businesses do not have websites

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 09:09:00 +0000

For years I have been telling you people that about 30% of small businesses do not have websites. Now comes this U.S. Census Survey from the end of 2012 that indicates that about 75% of U.S. businesses do not have websites.

Take a look at this chart.

Business Website Statistics	Number	Percent
Number of businesses surveyed	14,441,089
Business had a website	3,580,247	24.8 %
Business did not have a website	10,860,842	75.2 %
Female Owned Businesses
Business had a website	827,450	22.4 %
Business did not have a website	2,860,485	77.6 %
Male Owned Businesses
Business had a website	1,784,806	24.3 %
Business did not have a website	5,571,459	75.7 %
Co Male-Female Owned Businesses
Business had a website	666,330	25.2 %
Business did not have a website	1,982,767	74.8 %

So how are we to interpret this? How many are solepreneurs selling Mary Kay and won't make more than a few thousand a year? How many are consultants with one client and don't really need a website? That information is missing from the chart but it's still a pretty huge percentage.

One thing for sure, because of the recession more people are going into businesses for themselves. But I think it also proves a point that we discovered when we created LiveBuild, while there are bajilion companies offering free template websites most people want help with building their websites.

I wonder where that 75% live?

week 94 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 11:36:00 +0000

This past week: BlackBerry projected 2 million units sold for this quarter got slashed to 300,000. This is not all bad news, since the new phones (Z10 and Q10) are still selling but not at the rate they had hoped. One of the reasons for this is the lack of app support for BlackBerries; having a healthy app ecosystem supporting the mobile OS is proving vital for the adoption of mobile hardware. Just look at the tepid numbers of of phones sold using Microsoft Windows 8 OS. Also the news of Instagram not being developed for Blackberry really doesn't help their cause. This could be a big factor in the decision making for people looking for a new phone and app developers have the same criteria for considering which mobile platform their new app will run on. Why put your efforts on a mobile OS that won't have big adoption? Does this mean BlackBerry is finished? No, they have weathered the worst part of their downfall and they have launched their new phone and OS something a lot of people never thought would happen. Now they are beginning the task of building their customer base, there are a lot of people out there that don't care for Instagram and use only 5 to 6 apps regularly on their phone. As a business owner one gets to appreciate the competition in the mobile sector and how important mobile has become for everyone in the business world; and although BlackBerry is still struggling, their radical changes to the company are starting to show signs of success. On that positive note, I've collected this week's tweet list with great tips and advice to succeed online.

Ranking and other things-> 6 Ways Twitter Can Improve Your Google Rankings
They help, as Google mentions, the SEO juice for links is carried through the url shorteners.

Good alternatives-> I don't have Photoshop, how do I fix the images in my website?
Photoshop has become synonymous with image manipulation, and while it is a great piece of software, you can't justify the price when you mostly need to crop or resize images. Thankfully there are some free alternative.

The art of listening-> Guide to Monitoring Your Online Reputation [INFOGRAPHIC]
I wrote a blog post about listening (Listening Using Social Media for your Business Website), in it I talk about how can you not only monitor your personal and your business online reputation, but your competition's as well. Listening can be a great tool to generate new leads.

Definitely not a fad-> Manage social media like typical marketing
The medium is maturing and the benefits for business are clear. Now is the time to start thinking strategy and make social media part of marketing plan.

Very good question-> Company Social Media Accounts - Who Owns Those Twitter Followers?
There are many stories where small and big brands social media accounts were started by young interns. Many assumed if you were young you were savvy with social media. So they kids went ahead and created the accounts on different network using their personal information. So when is time for them to leave the company; who owns the accounts?

Quality Content is King-> Quality Content Coupled With Consistency - A Rule Every Blogger Must Follow
Consistency and quality, sometimes one is sacrificed for the other. Find the right balance.

Now that LinkedIn is a real business hub-> 8 Ways to Get More Leads for Your Business on LinkedIn
I'm liking LinkedIn more and more and I'm andearly adopter; I joined before social media became a term. I've seen the network slowly transform from a Job seeking network to a real business network. With its social feed and many groups you can get great advice and tips for you business and most important it also can provide good leads.

Looks like YWD is made for this-> Mobilize Your #SEO: Making the Most Out of the Mobile Search Opportunity
There more I read about best practices for mobile websites the more I see YWD as one of the better platforms to have both desktop and mobile websites. See how YWD does mobile:youtu.be/Qr_N6aamAGc

Definitely we are in the era of video-> Benefits of Adding Videos to your e-business
With increased screen resolution and faster internet speeds, video is big and not so hard to produce anymore.

Keep it simple and to the point-> 5 Usability Tips that You Should Implement on Your Mobile Website
Think about what your visitors want to know when landing on your mobile website. I bet you they won't want to browse all the pages of your website. They don't even do that on the desktop version so why would they would they do that on the tiny screen?

Next Friday I'll have another round up, in the meantime you can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

Listening Using Social Media for your Business Website

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 09:34:00 +0000

What is listening?

In previous posts I talked about promoting your business by using social media as the distribution channel for your great original content. Listening to social media is another way to use this medium for your businesses advantage.

What should you listen to?

Definitely you need to listen to what is said about your business (company name), but you can also listen for keywords related to your industry. It is not a bad idea to also listen to what people are saying about your competitors.

How do you listen?

There are a whole range of tools available to help you follow what is being said on social media - about you or about your industry. And with much of social media, there are some fairly effective and free tools available.

This is what I use to listen:

Google email alerts: www.google.com/alerts
I get daily emails with titles and summaries for the different topics and keywords I've requested Google to search for.
The interface is pretty simple. You add the keyword or phrase to search for, then set the timing of the email delivery (daily, weekly or monthly). You can also you can select where to search such as: news websites, blogs, videos etc. Finally you enter the email address you want the alerts delivered to. I have a few email alerts setup, one is for 'Your Web Department' and another for 'Mobile Web'. Sometimes I set alerts for different topics I need to do research for and remove them when I'm done.

HootSuite is a great tool to manage your social media and to listen with; I'm a long time user and I manage many feeds with it. The same as with Google alerts emails, you can search for keywords, hashtags and/or websites domains and save them as additional feeds in the HootSuite interface. I have a one for the has tag #smb (small midsize businesses) and one for yourwebdepartment. Any time some one shares one of our blog posts or mentions YWD, I can quickly respond to thank them or connect with them as required.

Other free listening tools:

technorati.com the largest blog search engine in the world. Technorati tracks 'blog reactions' or blogs that link to yours, upon registration. Search for your name on Technorati and subscribe to RSS alerts, so when someone blogs about you, you will know about it.

socialmention.com Social Media Alerts Like Google Alerts but for social media.

pipes.yahoo.com/pipes Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.

All in one more robust options:

If you have a bigger budget there are a range of paid options that get good reviews.

Recommended paid-for tools by Ben Romberg in a guardian.co.uk article: read the full article

Radian6 - Powerful brand monitoring tool that graphs large volumes of conversational data into charts that segments media and region quite easily.

Meltwater Buzz - Engagement and monitoring tool that allows you to find influencers in brand sectors easily and effectively. Meltwater Buzz has many of the functions of Radian6 as well as an Engagement Module for large-scale community management.

Synthesio - The most powerful monitoring tool for determining brand sentiment as a team of analysts sift through each mention and assign it a positive/ neutral/ negative rank. Synthesio also makes it possible to break conversation volume down by topic of conversation.

Why do you listen?

Why go to all this trouble? If people are talking, don't you want to get in on the conversation? If someone has something good to say, why not respond to them in real time with a thank you. And equally with negative comments, the quicker you respond the sooner you can diffuse the issue. Wouldn't you like to know what people think about your competition? By getting this feedback you can join the conversation about your competitors and try to make them your clients.

Listening in social media can be a useful way to connect to your customers and potential new clients. If you are starting to do this, try the free tools that will only cost you time.

You can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

"How do I create a spreadsheet without having Excel or Numbers and put it up on my website?"

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 16:30:00 +0000

Short answer? Use Google Drive. It's a file storage and synchronization service provided by Google that lets you keep and share files on the cloud and do collaborative editing. It includes Google Docs and offers some nifty features. You can store your documents, photos, music, videos, etc. all in one place. It syncs with your mobile devices and your computer, so if you make a change from one gadget, it will automatically show up if you were to access it elsewhere.

Google Drive provides users with an initial 5 GB of cloud storage for free, with additional capacity available for purchase on a monthly basis.

It also lets you create and edit documents online while collaborating in real-time with other users. We'll use it to create a spreadsheet that we can then insert into your Your Web Department website.

Creating your spreadsheet

Google Drive lets you create word processor documents, presentations, spreadsheets and simple drawings right off the bat. And you can also connect with a variety of other 3rd-party apps.

If you already have a Google account (if you use GMail for instance) you can sign in to Google Drive directly from here. If you don't have a Google account click the 'Sign up' button.

Note: downloading and installing the Google Drive program on your PC or Mac is easy and and in addition will let you upload and synchronize your files, but that's not necessary if all you want to do is to create documents like a spreadsheet.

Click the 'Create' button on the left and choose 'Spreadsheet'. Working on the spreadsheet is similar to using a program like Excel or Numbers. You can format cells, add formulas, etc. Google saves your work automatically as you go.

Making your spreadsheet available on the Web

You can use Google Drive to create private documents that only you or those you determine can access. But in this case we want to embed/insert the spreadsheet into a page of your website so all can see. So select 'File' in the spreadsheet's menu, and then 'Publish to the web', then the 'Start publishing' button.

At the bottom of the dialog, you'll see a text field that looks like:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=etc..

That's the URL (the address) where your spreadsheet is located. Copy the whole thing.

Adding it to your website

There are a few ways for you to add the spreadsheet to your website. You could obviously have a text link with something like 'Click here for our latest financial data' and simply link it to the address you've just copied. It could be simply link opening it on a separate window or, if you want to go fancy, have the spreadsheet open in a floating lightbox (see how you can do it with Your Web Department here, no coding required).

You could also embed the spreadsheet directly into any of your pages. To do that you'd use Your Web Deparment's IFrame content block. It allows you to 'poke a window' into your page and load a page from another website (your spreadsheet on Google Drive, in this case) into it.

You add an IFrame to the page, paste the spreadsheet's URL and set up the width and height. (more info on Your Web Department's IFrame tool).

You know what's also cool? If you make changes to the spreadsheet in Google Docs, your website will reflect them immediately.

So who needs Excel anyway? (just kidding)

LiveBuild For the Business Owner - We design & build your website for free and ready in 1hour
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Zig when your Customer Zigs

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 11:16:00 +0000

Hey, you customers out there. Stop screwing with our brains? The first thing all startups do is try to figure out what you want and we build a business around that assumption. After a few fits and starts when we think we are finally providing what you want you change things up on us.

When we first built YWD we figured that small businesses were tried of being held hostage by web developers who maintained and managed the customer's site for them. We were right that small businesses were pretty tired of having to pay for this extortion. So, YWD took off saving SMBs from rapacious developers. But this model slowly wained as other content management services came on line. So we came up with LiveBuild because one of our learnings was that SMBs just did not want to build their own website. And only YWD could offer LiveBuild. It was a 'unique value proposition' as they say.

Okay, so LiveBuild has been a great success for us and it's been alive for only a half a year, but now suddenly some people are building their own websites and instead have been using the LB service as a way to clean things up before launch. Where did that come from? I don't know, but we love it.

And many companies are now using LiveBuild to prototype their business, figure out their business model, then build something custom a year or two down the road. We're happy to have anyone's business for any time. We are a month-to-month service and this prototyping things is really cool. Helping small businesses get started with their websites is what we're all about.

The lesson here is you really do have to listen to your customers and make sure you are prepared to zig when they zig.

week 93 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 11:40:00 +0000

This past week: The Pope is resigning his post, the first time in many hundred of years. This is not very significant news for your business, but the comments and new choices for Popes were pretty funny. Once again this event shows the power of social media and the ability for us to react quickly to events that affects as a group. This is something as a business owner should take into account; now you can use social media to act quickly to events that might involve your business. Such as a case of misinformation being spread around or a dissatisfied customer venting his/her frustrations about your business to their friends. That's right we live in a world of fast communication thanks to the many different social networks and even if haven't already, it is time for your business to add its voice to this new form of communication. Today's list is mostly about social media.

Bit by bit less PCs are used-> 37% have switched to a smartphone or tablet to browse the Internet
Smartphones and tablets are changing the way we perceive computing making desktop computers and in some cases laptops the choice for the few that need power processing. This is inevitable, the vast majority of people want easy to use and light-weight computers we can take anywhere we want.

Google's enhanced campaigns explained-> 'Multi-Screen World' Means Marketers Must Master Context
Finally, the first steps to make Adwords easy to use. Hopefully soon you won't need a certificate or have to hire an expert to run your Google ads.

You own your website-> Stop Running Giveaways on Social Media! Run Them on Your Website
All links need to lead to your website, this is the Internet property that you own and fully control. Social networks are great for distributing content from your website to help bring traffic back to your site.

Now #LinkedInd is more a business than a job center-> LinkedIn favored by small business, according to WSJ survey
Kudos to LinkedIn, this gradual change has been the in the works for months; from redesign to added functionality. It is great to see a social network fully devoted to businesses.

See! It isn't Voodoo-> Understanding Facebook's EdgeRank
You want your Facebook page post to reach the most people possible; read this article and learn what makes Facebook shares appear on your fan base's news feed.

Good reason to start your business blog-> Step Aside SEO, Content Marketing Optimization Is Here
Content Marketing, a new buzz word . But it is true, not only do you need to have the right keywords, but you need to use these keywords in original and quality content.

In Canada is even worst-> Why US Internet Access Is Slow and Expensive
The internet was first invented in the USA, and Canada was once a leader in telecommunications. No more, Europe and Asia are the leaders now; enabling all of their their population to have access to the internet. It is time to ask our governments to further regulate the industry to give fast internet access to all. Having more people connect can only benefit us all as a society in the long run.

Infographics drive more traffic than regular links-> 15 Tools to Make Amazing Infographics
We all like them and people love to share them. See how you start making them for your business.

Size doesn't matter-> Small Businesses Aren't Too Small to Go Mobile
It could be a business run by just the owner, it still needs a website and a mobile version of that site.

Mobile website is a must if running PPC campaign-> #Mobile Will Drive One-Third Of Paid Search Clicks By Year-End
As a business you need to adapt to the new trends and follow the eyes of your customer base. They are all using mobile devices more than their desktop computers.

Next Friday I'll have another round up, in the meantime you can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

"I don't have Photoshop, how do I fix the images in my website?"

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 15:50:00 +0000

OK, I get it. You're a small business owner and you use a Content Management System like Your Web Department to manage your website. You took pictures of products or real estate properties that you're selling, or would like to include photos of your latest company event. But the pictures are huge on the website, or need cropping or rotating, the 'red eyes' need fixing, they're too dark, etc.

I'm a graphic designer, I've been using Adobe Photoshop since... well, forever. The vast majority of my colleagues use it too. But it's expensive and has lots of features you'll never need. And open source alternatives such as GIMP are not for everyone.

So what do you do? Well, there are many free online image editors out there that will allow you to do what you need (provided you're not a professional designer, of course).

Here are a few of them. Best of all, they're 100% FREE:

http://www.picmonkey.com
Probably does everything you need and more. Very easy to use, and integrates seamlessly with Your Web Department -- if you have already uploaded your images to YWD's Assets Manager, you can edit them right there. The image will be sent to PicMonkey, you do your adjustments and the saved image is sent back to YWD automatically. Very cool.

http://www.befunky.com
Great interface with lots of effects (perhaps even more than a business user would need). Loved it too.

http://ipiccy.com
Not bad, actually. I found it fast and easy to use, and with some funky effects (OK, just don't go too crazy on posterizing board member portraits, turning your product shot into a pencil sketch, etc.)

http://www.online-image-editor.com
Not the prettiest interface, that's for sure. But if all you need is to do basic things like resizing, cropping, flipping, etc. it does the job.

http://fotoflexer.com
Better interface than the one above, but requires that the Flash plugin be installed on your computer (it likely is, I'm just saying...)

Enjoy.

LiveBuild For the Business Owner - We design & build your website for free and ready in 1hour
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Social Media your business website content distributor

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 22:05:00 +0000

Social Media for small businesses

You must have had heard about social media, and for sure some friend, associate and/or family member has told you that you need to do or be in social media. They are right. Both you and your business need a presence in social media.

Ideally, you business blog is your content hub where you post periodical new entries; social media is your distribution system. You should be sharing your content in multiple networks, and you should create opportunities for others to share your content as well. The idea is to bring the unexpected visitor back to your business website and try to turn them into a lead by solving their problems with good tips and advice.

Using social media to curate and share content (created by you or by others) that is relevant to your potential customers helps establish you as a leader in your field.

All this sharing and good will spreading is called Inbound Marketing (WikiPedia Inbound Marketing) a term coined by HubSpot (blog.hubspot.com); themselves great creators of quality original content. This is the new way to market your business online, spreading the word that you and your business are good at what you do and sharing good videos and pictures of your product and or services. Luckily customers will comment and/or tell their friends about your business; in a way it is like word of mouth, the best marketing possible, but on a bigger scale.

Don't just jump in and start creating accounts in every possible network out there, you need to pick the right social networks where your audience (possible customers) are active. And even if you aren't active in social networks you should have the appropriate share features active so your customers/visitors can share your content.

What social media network is best for your business

The breakdown by network
There are hundred of networks where you can share links of your website or blog, I'm just going to concentrate on the ones that I believe are more popular and useful for your business website. One thing you should keep in mind when choosing which social share plugins to use is that unless the content is appealing to the reader it doesn't matter how many plugins you add to your site, your pages won't get shared.

Google+ (plus.google.com)
Google finally got it right with Google+ after a couple of failed attempts. As I mentioned in previous posts, having a Google+ account is of extreme importance since Google made the Google+ network part of the algorithm for search results.

Facebook (facebook.com)
Facebook is the biggest social network in the world and it happens to have the most plugins. Like Button and Like Box are the most commonly used plugins and has good advertising opportunities for any type of business with great demographics data to chose from; so your ad gets delivered to the right person.

LinkedIn (linkedin.com)
Linkedin was launched in 2003 and currently has about 200 million registered users. The most popular plugin from this network is their share button. Of all the share button out there, LinkedIn's share button has the best interface, which allows you to share in different parts of LinkedIn: the updates stream, Groups, Send to individuals or all three. They also have a Follow my business page button, but these business pages still need to prove if they are of any use. In my experience LinkedIn groups are where the action is.

Pinterest (pinterest.com)
Pinterest is the newest and hottest network today. For the last month Pinterest has generated a lot of buzz and has a huge active user base andstill growing. They have the one plugin, the pin button, and I'm sure there will be more to come once they get out of beta. The pin button is tricky, it needs an image to pin, so it makes it ideal for product page display and/or blog posts with images.

Reports say that Pinterest is generating more referral traffic than LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter combined. This could lead to a rethink of how content is presented on websites; I predict we will see more interesting imagery on website pages in response to Pinterest.

Twitter (twitter.com)
The king of microblogging (only 140 characters), Twitter is highly popular partly due to how easy it is to use. It is a great network for distributing your new content. They too have a sharing plugin and a feed plugin, which can be used on your website. The feed plugin can have your tweets (posts) or you can also choose to populate it with your favourites tweets.

Looking for more insight into Social Media? Check out a few of these posts.

Everything you need to know about Social Media Plugins

You're already doing what it takes to be successful on Facebook

Already a YWD customer and ready to active social sharing features onto your site or blog - check out the how to.

Looking for a web solution that 'gets' social media and has all the right tools integrated already? Well then YWD is the solution for you - check out LiveBuild and find out how you could have yours new web site up and running in one hour.

You can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

Blackberry LIVES!

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 11:36:00 +0000

Tech writing is no different from sports or business writing. It all pretty much works the same. The darlings are taken to rediculous heights, the big get taken down, the floudingering get kicked a bit more and the down and out who suddenly rise from the dead, against all prognostications to the contrary, is hailed as the 'comback story of the year.' So please feel free to weigh in on my predictions for the new Blackberry 10 as Scott Thompson (AM990) interviewed me recently.

Week 92 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 12:30:00 +0000

This past week: Two things happened last week related to social media and how deeply it is changing how we inform ourselves and how fast and viral popular news travels. First was the news of the U.S. government working on building a national WI-FI network. Even TechCrunch and Mashable fell for it and reported it; apparently the news (now we know less than a rumour) got started by an over optimistic tech article from the Washington Post . The news of this new initiative spread fast, and so did the correction and apologies a few hours later. Second was Applebee's terrible response to the outcry from supporters of the recently fired waitress. What happen was a Pastor and few other people went for lunch at Applebee's and when they paid they left a note on the bill, an explanation involving god as to why he wasn't going to pay the tip. Another waitress saw it and she thought it was funny enough to take a picture and upload it to the net. It went viral, Applebee's management got news of this and fired the waitress that uploaded the picture. News of the dismissal spread fast through different social networks and supporters for the fired waitress rallied up on Applebee's Facebook page leaving thousands of comments. The Applebee's response and what followed is a very entertaining social media meltdown, which you can read in the first tweet of the list. These two events show how quickly news can spread through social media and it is a reminder that sometimes it is better to shut up and let the people vent. And not everything that is on social media is true. Having said that, here is my list of tweets for this week, all tweets are true but take them as a guide.

Good post on what not to do-> Applebee's Overnight Social Media Meltdown: A Photo Essay
As I mentioned on the introduction it is a fun read.

All good ideas -> 10 Video Marketing Content Ideas that Anyone Can Use
With increased bandwidth availability, video is becoming a very popular source of content. As a business you can create very interesting and fun to watch videos; this post has great ideas.

being on the ball-> RT @AlexMTVTrueLife: 9 Brands That Thought Fast During the Super Bowl
The power of social media; you can quickly react to a major events as it is happening. In this case Oreo made it work and people are still talking about it.

Learn more about Local-> 40 Important Local Search Questions Answered
Local search is becoming very important for every small business. All thanks to the rise of smartphones. It doesn't take long to get your local search going, this article is a good way to get you started.

A guide to success-> How to Map Out a Successful Marketing Plan
As a business we all need a plan, otherwise uncoordinated efforts are just shots in the dark.

When most of them suck it is easy to stand out-> The anatomy of a perfect restaurant website
This so true, why is it that most restaurant websites are made for the owner of the place? Through my experience there are a few thing a restaurant website visitor is looking for: Where is the place, what are the hours, what type of food is served and how do I make a reservation. That's it nothing else.

Like this one: Be willing to adapt->Make the most of local mobile advertising with these strategies
Although mobile is huge and it is still growing; the medium is fairly new and things will change fast. As a business you need to learn how to adapt to the new trends.

Check the demographics by networks-> Is Your Social Media Audience Where You Think It Is?
Great post from socialmediatoday; 10 point list detailing the demographics and their interaction in each of the major social networks.

Hey! maybe you can do this too-> How Social Media Put a Tiny Yarn Shop on the Map
Success story from a small shop that got social media and inbound marketing right.

Geo-Aware ads is the way to go-> Location targeting more than doubles performance of mobile ads: report
Expect this to be the new trend in the near future. Ads based on your customer's location, based on your local search business settings.

Next Friday I'll have another round up, in the meantime you can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

We are driven people -- feedback-driven, that is

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 19:51:00 +0000

We're in the business of providing website solutions for companies. We also enable designers to build websites, using our platform, for their own clients. I have the impression that some other players in this field have a certain attitude. Simply put, they seem to think that they 'know better'.

Our team has many years of combined experience regarding business, strategy, design and programming. And even though we're running a business at Your Web Department, our clients know better about their own businesses than we'll ever be able to. Our objective is -- and must always be -- to satisfy the needs of our clients, without the arrogance of thinking we know it all.

Here are a few ways in which feedback from our clients drives us:

Customer Service

We interact with several of our customers on a daily basis -- by phone, email, social media. They appreciate the effort we put into treating every request with the respect it deserves, even when it comes from trial users. How do I know that? Because they tell us. And how do I know when we screw up? Because luckily they tell us too! Sometimes we let a support request fall through the cracks. When that happens, we acknowledge the mistake and take responsibility. And we act upon that, so we can get better.

We're not feature-crazy

YWD is a very versatile website builder. We're proud that business owners, website administrators and web designers like our interface and the flexibility of the platform. But although we're always coming up with different capabilities on our own, the fact is that YWD as a software has evolved primarily from users' feedback. We receive a request, we evaluate it and implement it if appropriate. There's no point in adding a feature just because we think it's 'cool'. Rather, our thinking is 'is it going to be useful to our clients?'. This has enabled us to develop a website creating system that's workhorse over the years. Perfect? Of course not. But we keep getting referrals through word of mouth all the time, so we must be doing something right.

LiveBuild

Sometimes people would tell us that they liked our platform, but then would sort of 'sit' on their trial website and do nothing with it. After some probing, we came to the realization that many small businesses don't really want a DIY system. What they really want -- and need is to have their website built (and in some cases maintained) for them. It may sound like a throwback from the old days of static HTML sites, but it's true. And we don't blame them. So we created LiveBuild. It's a system that's driven from the client's feedback -- literally. The website gets build for them while they watch remotely, and tell us what they like and don't. Obviously we had to adjust our system in order to handle that.

These are just a few examples of how important user feedback is for us. Want to comment? We'd love to get your feedback!

Your successful mobile business website

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 19:03:00 +0000

Why your business needs a mobile ready website?

The mobile growth is unprecedented and even today there are more mobile devices being sold. Your business website will be visited by someone using a smartphone, whether by search, by a shared link on Facebook or a link from an email newsletter. Chances are the person will be using their phone to click on the link they found interesting and if your website doesn't fit the phone screen most likely they will leave.

This is the world we live in, we are highly connected and access to the internet is taken for granted. And we like to use Facebook and check emails on our phones and whenever we have a doubt about a fact or need to figure out where something is, we reach for our phone and do a search.

The rise of the mobile shopper

70% of mobile users have compared products prices on their phones
65% have read product reviews on their phones
50% of mobile searches lead to purchase
95% of smartphone users have searched for local information
61% of users call a business after searching and 59% visit the location
90% of these people act within 24 hours

There two types of mobile devices, smartphones and tablets; for both, Apple is still the dominant platform, although Android powered devices (both smartphones and tablets) are getting a bigger market share everyday.

Tablets have a bigger screen size and in most cases the desktop version of your website will display fine in them. Maybe you will need to use 'responsive design' to manage the different screen size from the different manufactures and the changing orientation of the tablet; portrait or landscape. But in general the same website architecture as for the desktop version is expected for the tablet version.

Creating mobile sites for smartphone users
With smartphones, things change, with smaller screens it is challenging to fit all elements of a desktop version of a website, especially when things like links need to be larger so we can user our fingers to tap/navigate. Another thing to have in mind is how people use the web on their phones; they do a search, land on the website quickly look for what they are looking for, find it and leave. You need to ensure your call to action is on the home page of your mobile site. These days people are doing more and more from their smartphone, they check emails, read newsletters, check social media - all scenarios where people are often sharing links - what kind of page are they landing on when they click one of your links? Because of the prevalence of social sharing, it is important that all pages of your website be mobile friendly, even if you don't include your entire site in your mobile site navigation.

On our own website (yourwebdepartment.com) the mobile version doesn't have any navigation; the main banner leads you to the home page and there are three links within the main content. One to the LiveBuild (our current promotion) lead generation landing page, one to our blog and one to the Contact Us form. But every other website page is mobile optimized, landing pages for PPC campaigns included. There is a big push from Google and Facebook to make online ads to work on mobile and your landing pages need to work on a smartphone.

Take advantage of mobile technology
We use mobile devises differently than desk top computers, for example, we use our fingers to tap or swipe. And it goes beyond that, smart mobile sites build in features like click to call or geolocation tools that quickly provide users with directions to your location.

Having a mobile version of your website ensures your customers have an experience that is optimal for the device they are using. It means that your website is formatted for a smaller screen and ideally takes advantage of the touch screen technology and geolocation tools. This kind of user experience just may be the differentiating factor that leads a potential customer to call, or stop in to, your business vs. your competition's.

Learn more about mobile with YWD

Request our Mobile setup package for $500.00 package

Not a YWD client? Try LiveBuild - We design & build your website for free and ready in 1hour
yourwebdepartment.com/LiveBuild

You can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

A successful website in only 3,672 steps

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 08:30:00 +0000

I'll bet that got your attention. Everyone tries to bait you with headings like, 'The 10 steps to a killer website.' While those 10 steps sure look doable, to the small business owner, they look like 3,672 steps. If you can't get to any of them then they are not steps, they are chasms.

So, while I feel your pain. I don't really care. If you're not prepared to manage your website to it's fullest potential then don't be shocked when it does not deliver the goods. So, please, heed my list.

The following is a list of items that, when executed properly, increase the likelihood of your website being successful.

Knowing who your market is.
What problem are you going to solve for your customers?
Concentrate on one aspect of your business. Your website should not be a smorgasbord.
What is unique about the way you do business?
How do you do business? Why your corporate culture will make others successful.
Do you have an inspiring logo? A logo is not a brand, it is the graphic representation of your brand promise.
Do you actually have an idea of what you want your website to do? Something that is measurable, updatable, fixable if it isn't working.
Do you have great content?
Clear, inspiring writing that 'sounds' like you.
Great photography or illustrations preferably not from stock.
Do you have a clear ask on the home page?
Do you update your website on a regular basis?
Is your website built on a content management system?
Are you capturing visitor information?
is contact information clear and immediately accessible? (Like in the banner?)
Can you give anything away for free?

Good luck and have fun. Don't say I didn't warn you. And don't be shy about asking for help or hiring experts to fill in the blanks. It will pay off in the long run.

LiveBuild For the Business Owner - We design & build your website for free and ready in 1hour
yourwebdepartment.com/LiveBuild

Week 91 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 11:59:00 +0000

This past week: RIM, now renamed BlackBerry finally released their new phone the Z10 and the Q10 (the Q10 has a full keyboard). The phone (the Z10 that is) and the new OS look very promising and reviews of both have being very flattering. The phones will be available to the consumers February 5 in Canada and March 1st in the U.S. And this 30 day wait for the U.S. market has been the cause of BlackBerry stock falling about 20%. Happy that a Canadian company is back in the game, time will tell if the public feels the same way as the reviewers; but the lack of app support might be something hard to overcome in the immediate future. Nevertheless, now we have four major players in the smartphone sector: Apple, Samsung, Nokia and BlackBerry. This is good news for the consumer and it is a strong signal of how important the mobile market is. So how is it that most small businesses still don't have a mobile friendly website? This would be the first step to get into the mobile trend, which for the looks of it this year mobile will surpass desktop computers in connections to the internet. With that in mind my list of tweets for this week; mostly mobile but other things you should know as well.

Facebook is doing ads on mobile quite well-> What You Need To Know About Facebook Mobile Ads
Facebook is definitely on the right track with mobile advertising, last week the percentage of mobile visitors was bigger than their desktop counter part. This is a trend that will keep on expanding.

Not surprising, it is a good fit-> Mobile usage in commercial real estate up 61%
I would say it is the same storey for residential real estate as well. The property is one permanent location where you need to go and bring your office with you. Fortunately we can carry our offices in our pockets today. YWD has a tool for Realtors, which is mobile friendly and it does QR Codes for your listings; take a look: YWD Real Estate Tool

What is it about them that we like so much?-> Rise of Infographics: Marketing in the Social-Media Age
It has to be that we are visual creatures, but as soon as the first info graphics came out everyone loved them and shared them. Today they are a great vehicle to market you business; did I mention people like to share them? I have my own collection in Pinterest right here: pinterest.com/vacaseca/infographics/

Hard to argue against these-> 6 reasons why every business should have a professional website
It is hard to have an argument against nowadays: search, social marketing, mobile and the list goes on.

It is coming, get ready-> Eight Steps to Prepare Your Facebook Page for Graph Search
Even though a lot of people think their privacy is at risk with Facebook's new Graph Search, I see it as a great opportunity to market your business. If you have a Facebook Business Page, read the article and make sure your page is optimized before the new Graph Search is released to the public. If you don't have a Facebook Business Page, get one, it's free.

Are you a B2C business? This is for you-> 5 SEO Tricks for Pinterest
Although there are some articles out there showing how your B2B business can take advantage of Pinterest, I feel that it is a perfect match for B2C. And if you sell stuff online even better.

Your customers can't find you, they can't buy from you-> Seeking out customers spotlight on social media
You spend all this time getting great quality content on your website, how are you going to tell everyone? Your customers are talking about your products, how are you going to find out what are they saying?

Looking to get a new Z10 from BB?-> Here's How the BlackBerry Z10 Stacks Up With Competitors
I heard from a couple of friends that they would like to get one. See if it is worth it for you.

2 new users joining every second-> How SMBs can Make Meaningful Connections on LinkedIn
Bit by bit, LinkedIn is becoming a strong social network for businesses. Finally they are focusing on business and leaving their Job centric beginnings to the side.

It works with apps-> Facebook Building A Mobile E-Commerce Platform ' And Advertisers Love It
What Facebook is doing is very cool. From time to time you will see an ad for an app on your Facebook news stream (mobile only) if you tap on that ad it will either take you to the app store or Google Play store (depending on the mobile platform that your are using) to download the app. Then it is on the app that you do the buying, and this is getting good results. Getting ideas?

Next Friday I'll have another round up, in the meantime you can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

SEO search engine optimization for your business website

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 14:25:00 +0000

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are the actions you can take that will help your potential customers find you when they use things like Google to search for a product or service. Now more than ever having proper website SEO is vital for any business, any business that wants to be found on the internet that is.

Google (Google is so dominant in the search space that it should be your primary focus) like all other search engines, works on indexing the content of websites, more specifically the text. Therefore when a person does a search, the string of words entered in the search field is compared with the content of all indexed websites on the world wide web. The most relevant and closest to having content matching what was searched shows on the top of the list of the search results page.

SEO Guidelines
It sounds simple but there is a right way and a wrong way to do it. Google tries hard to bring the most relevant results to the user, their primary objective is to serve the Google search customer - not the business or web site owner. Having said that, Google is well aware that without websites their search tool is nonexistent, therefore they provide guidelines and best practices for optimizing your website to ensure you are found.

Google SEO guidelines

Content is King for SEO
Google puts a lot of emphasis on quality content. Original well written content will rise to the top, add keywords (the terms people will use to search for you) in the proper headings and/or body content and your website is further improving its chances of being easily found.

Links are endorsements for your site
Google's search algorithm is a tight kept secret, and it is modified on a regular basis. Just to keep at bay all the people trying to reverse engineer it so they can gain an advantage. The algorithm takes into account the content of a website (as I mentioned above) but also the links from other websites to the pages of your website. Google actually considers these links back to your sites as 'votes' for the quality of you content. Social sharing of your content through tweets or Facebook also reinforce the credibility of your site in Googles 'eyes'.

Blogging - Your SEO partner
Blogging can be one of the most powerful ways to improve your SEO and increase your page rank (how high up the search results page your site will land). Stats show that sites with blogs often have 55% more traffic than sites without blogs. Google loves blogs because it means new content to crawl. And if you create blog content that uses your keywords (naturally, don't over do it or you will get punished by Google) and is well written and engaging, people will link to and share your content all contributing to making your site what Google considers relevant.

Google + and Google Place for localized search
Eager to be found by local customers? Then take the time to set up a Google + account and register your site with Google Places, it will help contribute to the relevancy of your site. Local search works great when people search for a service within a city or region. It takes only a few minutes to add your business address to Google Places. Google confirms addresses by mailing you a postcard to that address with a PIN number to confirm the right location of your business.

Google+ account
Google Places

Mobile sites help with mobile searches
More and more people are using smart phones to do web searches (often for local businesses). And as mentioned above, Google is all about giving their users what they want and on a mobile devise that is content that is optimized for the small screen. Having a mobile friendly web site will improve your sites mobile search ranking.

Don't forget to submit your XML site map
One of the most basic things that can be done to ensure your site is indexed by Google is to submit your XML site map to Google. And be sure to do a separate version for your mobile site too. We have written about how to do this in past posts and Google's Web Master's Tools also include great info.

Google Webmaster account
What is a XML site map

This post only scratches the surface of SEO - there is so much more you could learn online and there are also some great partners you could hire to help you with SEO. A word of caution, there are also a lot of SEO scams out there and you need to be wary of anyone who makes guarantees of number one rankings.

Here at Your Web Department we are constantly working to improve our SEO ranking, we use Google analytics (Read this post for more information on Google Analytics: Your business website just went live? Time to set up Google Analytics and start tracking its traffic) to see what terms are working for us and help us focus our efforts and we are constantly working to create good relevant content to meet our customer's needs. Our system is built for SEO and we even have a basic SEO package to help you get started.

YWD SEO package

You can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

Image galleries are sexy!

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 11:30:00 +0000

There are many ways to make your business website more appealing. Image galleries used to require Flash or complicated programming, but you can now easily add them to your website without much effort.

They can be used to display events, depict relevant projects, add movement to a page. They can be static slideshows, interactive lightboxes and more.

Here are a few recent examples of image galleries being used by actual Your Web Department clients:

www.silvercreekcommercial.com

www.campawakening.com

www.westlondonsoccer.com

www.ewanika.ca

www.hearmatthewcoley.com

www.atecsigns.ca

You can also use image galleries to to provide multiple views of products or real estate properties. Here's an example from a client utilizing YWD's Real Estate tool:

www.fishersisters.com

How to do it

Setting up an image gallery is easy in YWD. You simply add the images to the Assets Manager, and create the gallery using YWD's Image Gallery tool by selecting which images you want it to have. You then add the gallery to the page and select the display options.

YWD offers several gallery styles, each with its own features. There's even a gesture-based gallery that's perfect for the mobile version of your website.

For more information on YWD's Image Gallery tool including examples of each style, visit this section of the YWD online Help so you can do it yourself.

Make sure you are promoting what your business is really all about

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 09:00:00 +0000

Many of us would like to have things handed to us on a silver plater. We'd all like things to be easier. Easier to build the business, easier to get the cash that's owed to you and easier in general. But there are those of us out there who like a challenge. I'm thinking of the type of person who is handed the shampoo or breakfast cereal account at an ad agency and loves the idea of differentiating their product with only a clever slogan or sexy packaging.

Then all they have to do is come up with the brilliant campaign, spend a million dollars on the ad and many more millions promoting it through appropriate media. See, easy. Once again, something that us small business owners just don't have the free cash to do. You will notice a pattern over several of my business postings- the lack of money thing, which is also a lack of time thing, lack of focus thing, etc.

What it all comes down to is that you really have to decide what your business is. And by that I don't mean that brilliant widget you've been flogging. What I mean, is your business also about raising capital? Is it about being sold? There are many reasons for having a business. There are tons of small companies that start up near Google for the sole purpose of hopefully being noticed and then bought. How gauche you say?

The widget you are selling could just be the conduit towards this end goal. Therefore your website should not be directed towards the widget customer alone, it needs to be end-goal friendly, also. Mining websites do this overtly. On one hand they have info on their mines and their great people but have a very clear button that says, 'Investor Relations'. This isn't the best example because most mining companies are public and do need to get information out to investors, but what they really want is NEW investors. That's their market. Gold is not what they want. They want new investors.

If you're an entrepreneur looking for investment money then you will find out very quickly that you will be spending more time trying to find investors than actually running your business as they are two separate and hugely time-consuming activities. But if you are in pursuit of such things then you need to make sure your website serves the needs of your intended audience.

I'd like to add a shout-out to my business partner, Flavio, who's Thursday blog post was brilliant.http://bit.ly/114Z5AI

Week 90 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 11:19:00 +0000

This past week: A lot of talk about Apple and how their stock price tumbled even though they posted their biggest quarter earnings ever. Apparently this wasn't enough for Wall Street, and investors started to move away from Apple creating a 12.4% price drop. On a more entertaining note; Jobs and Wozniak will be at Macworld, well not really, Ashton Kutcher and Josh Gad portraying Jobs and Wozniak will be there in character promoting the new Steve Jobs movie. This should be interesting for Mac fans and I'm sure Apple is not all that worried about the stock price lost, they have over $130 billion in cash stocked up. As a small business we can can only dream of having that amount of money to play around with, but that is Apple, the iconic brand that produces beautiful innovating products that you learn to love. For the rest of us we need to work it everyday trying to find a better angle or just being more effective at what we do. This week's tweet roundup is all about helping the small business maximize their online marketing efforts.

Great post, all you need to know-> Content Marketing for SEO - Very Awesome Content Marketing Cheat Sheet
As I mentioned in my tweet, this is a great article. Has lots of tips and goes into detail on what to do to achieve the best marketing power out of the content you generate.

Remember that software doesn't make you a video editor> How to Use Web Video to Win Business and Wow Customers
Most smart phones can shoot HD quality videos, making it very easy for everyone to become a videographer. This raw footage needs to be edited before it is published, this article give the steps on how to do all these things. Try it out, but if you need a good video for your business soon I recommend getting professional help. Like I said, having a HD video capable phone and editing software doesn't make you a professional video editor.

You heard MySpace relaunched-> Getting Started With the New Myspace: What Businesses Need to Know
This is the third launch of MySpace, this time it seems that it could create more signups to the social service. Although it is a music centric network certain business types could find a good fit on this new social network.

Social media sharing everywhere-> Ways To Integrate Social Media With Email
Email marketing is very powerful these days; with regulation and clear opt in and unsubscribe policies the spam label has given way to audiences that want to get your newsletter or news digest. It is only obvious that you would want your readership to share the contents of your emails with their friends.

It does!-> Social media can boost the bottom line
We had this discussion at one of our internal meetings; the fact is that social media sharing of pages and/or blog posts helps your business's website traffic. Not only by the people creating referral traffic from the networks where these links have been shared, but also by helping your search result page position. They add an extra boost to your website SEO.

Even retailers need to blog-> 4 Blogging Basics For Online Retailers
Not only retailers but every business needs to blog, period.

Good idea to harness Google Analytics tracking power-> Analytics For The New Social Media Manager
Tracking your efforts is feedback for you to measure and guide you on the right path. This post shows a good way to track your referral traffic from the different social networks.

Mobile website is for every business> Is Your Business Ready For Mobile Prime Time Or Extinction?
It is 2013 and smartphone and tablet adoption keeps rising. It is not a choice anymore.

But the article is not RT @erinever People are mobile Your website should be too
This happens to me quite often: I'm reading different post on my phone using my favourite aggregator app Flipboard when I come across an interesting post only to find that the link leads me to a page that is not mobile friendly. I don't even bother anymore, I move to the next post. This article is an example of this situation and ironically it is about having your website mobile friendly.

Explained!-> What Facebook Graph Search Means For Both Businesses & You
So far the best description fn how Facebook Graph Search could affect your business. For the better.

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? Get started now, don't pay until you go live. www.yourwebdepartment.com

Things I?ve learned about our business in 2012

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 10:10:00 +0000

Asking better questions

In 2012, instead of coming up with new answers, we changed the questions. We seriously asked ourselves 'Who really needs us?'. We then investigated the ways in which we could actually help them.

We used to think that all businesses wanted a system in which they could create their websites by themselves. That's true for some (including several of our clients) but what many really need is someone to help them do it. And frankly, more often than not, someone to just go ahead an do it for (or rather, with) them.

From that epiphany was born LiveBuild, where we build your business website - sharing all our years of strategy, marketing and design insights - while the you watches from your computer, make suggestions, etc. It's taking off.

There is an alternative to good service: it's called 'kick-ass' service

Good features are cool and we have lots of them, but what people really want is someone on the other end that understands them and is able to help. Our team is small and we're not perfect but we go the extra mile to solve our clients' problems. Really, we have an extraordinary bunch of people here working hard and long hours to make sure everything is running smoothly.

Whether it's a small business having difficulties with their domain registrar or a designer who needs help designing a website for their own client using our platform, I can honestly say we care and try to do our best. And it's starting to show, we get lots of positive feedback and word of mouth is making a difference.

No silver bullet

Social media is no panacea, yet it's important. Let's say you're a professional runner; you need good running shoes. If yours are much heavier than your competitors and have a hole at the bottom you may still win, but it's unlikely. Conversely, having the best running shoes in the world won't make you beat Usain Bolt in the 100m dash.

But we decided to use our social media 'shoes' more effectively since early in 2012, and have been following up on that ever since. By tweating and FB-ing about things that we believe matter to businesses and designers, we started to interact more frequently with them. By blogging more consistently we forced ourselves to research and be more up to date with the issues that are important not just for us but to our clients as well.

But that's not enough. We also invested a lot of time in making our product and the services we provide much better and easier to use. By introducing YWD Looks we were able to significantly speed up the process of creating a professionally-designed website. By adding new tools to our Content Management System - Google Maps, Real Estate, 301 Redirects and many others - we made our CMS much more robust. And by being proactive in terms of our mobile-optimized offering we were able to satisfy an important need of our clients.

We are our clients

Your Web Department itself is a small company. We've been in business for a few years now and have many clients, and their numbers are growing. But we face competition, just like our clients do. We live in difficult economic times, and we understand how important it is for us that our clients succeed. And I hope they realize that too.

Honestly, there's no better reward in our business when, through the website they have with us, clients are able to achieve their goals. Or when a designer gets new clients for themselves (and in many cases make a living) because they're using our platform.

This happened several times in 2012 and we hope will happen even more in 2013.

And how about you?

I'd love to know from you - whether you're one of our clients or not - if you think we're on the right track. Visit our public website at www.yourwebdepartment.com and let us know if you like our message, our brand, our service. Please feel free to share your own stories here. And best of luck for you and your business in 2013!

Your successful blog

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 09:06:00 +0000

Continuing with the series 'Your Successful Business Website' this week, we focus on a key element of your website, the Blog. Why is it a key element? Because your business blog should be central to your marketing strategy, it is here where you own your business message and put to rest any doubts about what you are offering. It is also the place where you can make announcements, place videos and pictures of your customers, your services and members of your team. Every business website should have a blog with regular posts. A blog brings so many benefits to you business that it is really hard to argue against having one.

Benefits of Business Blogs

Websites with blogs generate 55% more traffic
Data shows that web sites with blogs generate 55% more web traffic than sites without. When you blog regularly you generate more content and more links, which ultimately enables you to build your reputation and increase brand recognition as well as produce better search results and ultimately more traffic to your site.

Blogging and Social Sharing improve search ranking
Each time you create a blog post, you create another opportunity to share your content with social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (add ones you like). Each share means links back to your site. This growth in inbound links is something that search engines interpret as credibility and ultimately helps with your search ranking.

Blogs build reputation and brand awareness
Chances are you are an expert in what you do and that is why you do what you do - so why not talk about what you already know and love? It is the engaging content - the story about the small farm where you source the meat for your restaurant, or the expert advice you share about how to get a new job, or even the story that inspired you to start your business - that people will read and share. It is these stories and how they are shared that over time help you build up your unique brand and your reputation.

Blogging builds your client base
Blogging enables us to explain how our business or product work in more detail or how it relates to a specific client need - in some cases enabling business owners to expand how even they thought their product could be used. Like the natural soap maker whose customer discovered the product cleared up her eczema.

Blogging helps you control the conversation
Blogs at their best generate discussion. And as the business owner and the blogger you can control the direction of the conversation by starting the conversation and using a blog entry to clarify misinformation. If you blog please enable comments and be sure to respond to those who take the time to reach out to you in the form of a comment.

While there are many platforms that you can chose for your blog (Your Web Department included) the one thing you need to make sure of is that your blog and your website share the same domain. This will help tremendously on the SEO part.

Once you have your business blog going you need to post on a regular basis. The responsibility of creating blog content can be shared with multiple contributors (team members of you business) you can even invite guest bloggers (a client perhaps). But regularity is very important so your audience knows when to expect you next post. RSS feed and email subscriptions are great tools for sharing your blog content with your audience. And most blogs platforms have these, YWD included.

For help on how to get you start your blog the right way; our reoccurring guest blogger PIlar Galiana wrote this seven part series 'Your Guide to starting a blog the right way'. Each post is full tips and advice on how to go about creating and managing a successful blog. I highly recommend them.

Are you a YWD client - remember if you have any questions you can always reach us at support[at]yourwebdepartment.com with this request and we will show you how.

New to YWD and interested in seeing a demo of our product. You can Get Started and not pay until you go live, or try a LiveBuild session

Have a specific question about blogging? Please feel free to leave a comment below.

You can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

Facebook's Graph Search. Even the 3 sperm logo looks evil.

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 10:30:00 +0000

Have you heard of it? It's basically better search for Facebook. Where'd they get that sexy name? I don't know, but that is not the point of this discussion. A lot of people have already waded in on the subject. Graph Search is still in beta so most of us can't use it yet, so this is just speculation.

Graph Search is potentially useful, profitable and creepy all at the same time. It's useful because the present Facebook search sucks. Potentially profitable because like Facebook ads I'm sure it will be able to tap into the vast demographic info on Facebook. And it's creepy because you might find out stuff about your friends that you would really rather not find out.

For instance, you could search for all girls/men in your sphere of influence who are not attached. That's kind of creepy. Stalker central or what? Anyway, the problems are vast, but the demo I saw at https://www.facebook.com/about/graphsearch was interesting. Of course they are doing it because they hope it's monitizable. For some reason they now want to show people that they can actually make money. Crazy, eh?

They have a demo search that searches 'people who live in my city'. Even that made me uncomfortable. I think they want us to search for things like, what restaurant do my friends eat at and not, what sexual positions do they prefer. Although that will be my first search.

As a small business owner where does that leave you? Well, I certainly hope you've experimented with ads on Facebook and not slavishly stuck with Google's PPC programs. I'm not saying that Facebook's is better but it might actually be better for your business. It is for ours. You need to experiment.

Read up on Graph Search because it will definitely be connected to some kind of ad service. We always complain about the cow leaving the technological barn before you get there, now here's your chance to hang with the cows for a while.

And finally, doesn't the Graph Search logo look like something they would have used in a sci-fi movie? The evil pharmaceutical company. Actually it looks like 3 sperm.

Week 89 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 11:51:00 +0000

This past week: Facebook Graph Search is what dominated the blogosphere for the last week. It started with the hype for the event announcement (what could it be?), then moved to the actual event and the let down that it was 'only' about search. Now a few days after the announcement a few of the people who had access to the beta version of the new search are seeing the potential from this new Facebook tool. The search is supposed to look at your profile and your friends and pages likes share and checkins to come up with the results, which in theory they will be pretty close as to what you like or are looking for. This is the kind of search everyone wants, show me the things I like or want, not the things that came close to my search term. Now add advertising into the results; you could get an ad in your results but it is an ad that you want to see for something that you are looking for. It's a win for the user and a win for the advertiser; great way to generate solid leads. Filter out all the click-throughs that are driven by curiosity, they never add value to your bottom line. And speaking of bottom line, this week's collection of tweets should give new ideas to help your bottom line. Enjoy!

All good ideas-> How to Write Articles That Will 'Share Well' Through Social Media
Never forget your audience, and show your passion on the subject.

Geosocial and Geolocation; good post! -> What's Ahead For Mobile Marketing In 2013
Mobile users are still on the rise and expect retail and other local stores to take advantage of your phone's geolocation and mobile wallet (passbook for the iPhone).

Every business needs a website-> Business Ideas 2013 Has To Offer Greatly Enhanced By Online Marketing
Your website is the hub for your online marketing, and arguably for all marketing strategies. Your business website is the best place to generate leads or create sales.

The fight for your mobile dollar-> How Amazon Is Trying To Create A Huge Mobile Business
Amazon is going where the eyes are, which is on mobile devices.

The five most important elements for a business website
My post, very simple way of showing how your business website needs to be structured for success.

It can get expensive quickly-> 5 Google AdWords Tips for a Small Budget
Anyone who has ran a Google Adwords campaign knows it can get very expensive very fast. And adding more money to your campaign you should get more click throughs and consequently more lead conversion. But, if you have time and patience there are ways to run Adwords campaigns on the cheap, just like this post suggest.

Promotions on the spot-> How Mobile Technology Is Revolutionizing In-Store Shopping
A great idea, shoppers already have their phone in their hand while browsing.

Never mind the audit you should listen all the time-> Why do a social media listening audit?
Listening on your social media feeds or the web in general is easy, there are many methodologies and even software to do these tasks. I rely on Google news alerts and Hashtags feeds on my Hootsuite account. Read what people are saying about your business or your competitor's business.

It seems is going to-> Facebook Search Impacts Business Pages
This article describes how the new search works and how it will affect your business page on Facebook. Maybe you have already done the right things and you don't need to worry about it.

Who knew TV and twitter would be a good match-> 7 Social Media Trends for Consumers: New Research
Twitter and the TV match is just one of the trends mentioned, but there are other trends equally surprising in this post.

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? Get started now, don't pay until you go live. www.yourwebdepartment.com

Landing pages - the key for increasing conversions

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 10:03:00 +0000

Most businesses advertise products or services, and whether the ad is online or print, chances are the business's website address will be included. While the contents of the website could be great and work fine, to get the most out of your advertising traffic, you should create a landing page specific to each ad. With a landing page you can focus the message and convince the visitor to take action on the offering from your ad without all the distractions that you entire website offers. Effective landing pages help increase conversions.

Effective Landing Pages
Look at the ads we are running for LiveBuild on both Facebook and Google. Both have similar message and both point to the same landing page (screen shot below).

Google Ad

Facebook Ad

1. Ad copy should match landing page copy
This is one example of the many landing pages we are running for this campaign, each matching the slightly changed wording of the ads. The more pages you have for a campaign the easier it gets to track which group of ads performs better than the others.

Notice that the landing page reinforces the message from the ads and adds more information relevant to the offering. The idea is to make sure the visitor has all the information they need to make sure they landed in the correct place and their concern and questions are answered.

2. Avoid distractions
On our landing page, we added more information about who would benefit from LiveBuild, included a short video of the process and a testimonial from a very satisfied customer. What the page does not have are links that can take the visitor away from this page, and away from the focused call to action message. So, even though this landing page is part of our website, it is not included on the main navigation, nor does the page have any of the site's main navigation.

3. Clear call to action
In the example the goal is for the visitor to fill in the form and request more information. This is why the form is shown up high and on the right side of the content, so the visitor gets to see it a soon as they land on the page.

Notice that the form submit button has a call to action instead of the classic submit. This technique reassures the visitor as to what they are doing when pressing the button.
The number of fields shouldn't be a problem as long as they are relevant for you to generate a qualified lead.

4. Easy to share
Another important element on a landing page are the social media sharing widgets, you definitely want the people who land on this page to share it with the friends in their networks. And since you don't know whether the page will be viewed on a desktop or a mobile device; make sure it displays well on mobile. You might need shorten your content for the mobile version since it needs to function on a small screen.

One final point make sure it is search engine optimized, the more people find it the better.

Our example shows how landing pages work with on-line ads. They are also great for any other type of promotion or advertisement where you have a focused call to action. Look at the actual landing page: LiveBuild Affordable Web Design

Landing pages really do lead to increased conversions - we experienced that directly.

Have more questions about our experience with landing pages? Please leave us a comment.

Want to learn how you can create landing pages with your YWD account? Contact support[at]yourwebdepartment.com with this request and we will show you how.

Want to learn how Your Web Department can help you achieve on-line success? You can Get Started and not pay until you go live, or try a LiveBuild session

You can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

Using a content slider to enhance your business website

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 10:30:00 +0000

Content sliders are a great way to convey information in a dynamic way, especially when you have a lot to say. Rather than crowding a page - especially the Home page - with too much information, a content slider enables you to display rich text and images on a single place, and lets visitors interact with it.

Sliders used to be done in Flash by programmers, but a CMS like Your Web Department allows you to add a content slider that you can modify at any time on your own and whose text is fully searchable by Google. They can contain editable text, images, links, etc.

Content sliders can have a multitude of formats, ranging from simple slideshows to interactive ones, with tabs across the top or 'accordion' vertical bars, previous/next arrows, etc.

Here are a few websites built with the Your Web Department platform that utilize content sliders:

www.gp8.ca

www.campawakening.com

www.thecarltonclub.com

www.innovationfactory.ca

www.yourwebdepartment.com

Creating content sliders

If you're a designer, you can easily create content sliders for your clients in YWD. All the information you need can be found on this section of the YWD Help. As usual, no programming is required.

If you're a business owner you can also do it yourself, or contact Your Web Department if you'd like to have a content slider designed for you.

Finally, Apple is on the decline

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 08:00:00 +0000

Well it's been a good run, baby. The news is out. Millenials prefer Galaxy SIIIs over the Apple iPhone. Apple products are no longer cool. Samsung's 'The next big thing is already here' campaign resonated with viewers. Apple has been put into the position of PC as in their famous 'I'm a PC and I'm a Mac' ads.

The above assertion was based an article by a person who sourced research from sources no one has heard of but it didn't stop this piece from circling the globe several times getting picked up and reposted by everyone it seems.

Apple's gone. Toast. Yesterday's news. Chia Pet. Nothing left to offer. A spent force.

See, you can easily sway public opinion if you just spend billions of dollars on product developement, an ad agency, selveral failed attempts at positioning and thousands of hours of television ad buys.

What's YOUR problem Small Business Owner? Just spend the money. Succeed. Get rich. Easy.

Oh my gosh, why haven't we thought of that before? First of all not all of us sell something as sexy as a smartphone. Spending millions of dollars advertising your new line of signature walkers for seniors will probably not provide a good return on money spent. Many SMBs have barely enough money to spend on lunch, forget about marketing, but the thing to take away from this is that even a huge, faceless company like Samsung can create a personality.

Most businesses spend way too much time selling features when they should be establishing a personality. Samsung's'The next big thing is already here' is so spot on and cheeky it makes you forget all the other failed marketing attempts and trust me they were awful in only a way a conglomerate can make them awful. Yet, now they found a personality for their Android products. The difference between Apple and Samsung is that Apple treats all its products the same way whereas Samsung does not sell their TVs, chip manufacturing, mink breeding, Kimchi franchises or ship building the same cheeky way.

What this means is that they won't be able to keep this up much longer because it's a manufactured personality and not an inbred one. I think Google has a strong personality. You can see and feel how it affects their productrs. My point is that you need to find a personality. It will help you sell your stuff. It will help you figure out what you need to do next. But base it on who you are and what you believe in and not something that is made up out of nothing because while it might work now, it won't last.

Week 88 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 12:35:00 +0000

This past week: My first roundup of the year. On the news front the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas is not disappointing with many cool gadgets being announced. A couple I thought were worth mentioning: Liquipel (a coating that makes your phone and other electronics I assume water proof) and Microsoft tablet Surface Pro (It seems this is the Windows tablet that you want; it makes the Surface RT a children toy). That's right many things coming to the market for us to consume, some are irrelevant for your business but there are a few that will help the small business owner run their business with more ease. Keeping on that trend this week collections of tweets I try to do the same: help the business owner with their website success.

Get rid of it->RT @ForbesTech: Another reason to get rid of Internet Explorer
It was never good, but for a while it was the only browser to choose from; and even though it comes pre -installed on all new Windows PCs it is not the most popular browser, Google's Chrome took the lead a while back.

I too think local search will become more important> How Local Search Will Evolve in 2013 [6 Predictions]
With the rise of mobile devices and geolocation this is a no brainer. Geographical location is becoming an important thing while doing searches for businesses or business services.

A rethink on the advertising model is coming?-> In 2013, Social Media Must Prove Its Business Value
All social networks need funding to keep their websites running. The more success the more they have to pay and invest in their infrastructure, we know this first hand at YWD. Since most social networks are free to use the logical revenue stream is advertising. Unfortunately most of us don't like ads on the web and on mobile we like them even less. Therefore a re-think of how to advertise is needed and it seems that Facebook is making some strides thinking outside the box.

Probably heard of Tumblr but the rest?-> 5 Great Social Media Networks You May Never Have Heard Of
More social networks will keep coming out, they might not reach Facebook numbers but some have demographical niche. Take a look at the networks on this post and find whether your audience is there. You could be surprise and find a new place where you can distribute your message.

There you have it-> Brands Should Use Social Media to Engage, Amplify Messages and Promote Trust, Survey Says
I mentioned this before, social media networks are your news and update distribution centres.

More social = more shares-> Small Business: 7 Ways to Make Your Media More Social
Don't worry about sharing your knowledge with your visitors; very few will try to do it for themselves. By showing that you know what your talking about will reassure customers that you are the right person to do business with.

Your website is your more important internet asset->Don't Favor Social Profiles Over a Website
Don't think it for a minute, your Facebook page or LinkedIn profile belong to those networks. Your website belongs to you; and all the social roads should lead to your website.

Getting Mobile right-> Mobile makes Facebook hot again
As I mentioned above, Facebook is on the right track. It is not perfect, but with time you could see that the right ad at the right time will display on your phone screen.

Very funny!-> Google Analytics: What if life was like that? [3 Funny Videos!]
I had to share this, it is too funny. It will lighten your day.

Mobile is no longer an option, but a necessity-> Nearly a quarter of web traffic is mobile
And mobile traffic keeps growing! So are you going to make your website mobile friendly? It is easy; take a look how we do it at YWD: YWD Mobile

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? Get started now, don't pay until you go live. www.yourwebdepartment.com

"House passes gas tax onto senate" (or how to use headlines to increase your traffic)

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 11:45:00 +0000

Hey, how good are your website's headlines? One of the main ways search engines can tell what a page is about is by reading the heading tags on your webpage, so lets use them effectively.

Your website pages can have an inbuilt hierarchy through the use of headings and sub-headings. Websites can have up to 6 levels of headings, with Heading 1 being the most important.

While they're not a silver bullet in terms of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) the use of headings can have a positive impact on your rankings. They define the hierarchy of each page, and when the search engines 'crawl' your page they use it to figure out their structure, and which parts of your content are important,

A few simple things you can do

You should always use a Heading 1 text on each page, so the search engines know what the page is about.
Make the Heading 1 the first heading on each page.
Include your relevant keyword(s) in your headings, and optimize for the keywords i.e. specific. For instance, if your website is about law, include the types of law that you practice and not just the generic term 'law'.
Don't forget humans. There's no point in having headings that are so long that look bad and affect readability. So avoid headings that spread over multiple lines, or copy that makes no sense.

Setting headings in Your Web Department

The YWD Content Management System (CMS) makes it easy for you edit any block of text in your website. To set up any paragraph to the Heading 1 (or 2, 3..6) simply select it from the editor's 'Format' pulldown menu. That's it!

Need a business website? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

The five most important elements for a business website

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 18:33:00 +0000

The truth is that most small business websites are just glorified brochures; with content and descriptions that are meant more for the business owner that their audience.
Does the description sounds familiar? Well in today's internet your website doesn't have to be like that. As a matter of fact your website should earn its keep, in other words it should generate you money; whether through sales or lead generation.
There isn't a business out there that doesn't need a website and keeping it up to date has never been easier. There are hundreds of system to manage the content of your website out there, Your Web Department is one of them. Whether it is an e-commerce or a service based website there are proven techniques and technologies to help you generate traffic and increase your business leads.

Here is a list of the five most important elements for a business website.

Design
Simple uncluttered and easy to navigate design helps the visitor find what they are looking for. Don't think your visitors will browse through your website checking every page and bit of content you have; they come find what they want and leave. And if they have a hard time finding what they are looking for they will leave - for good. So no splash intro pages and please do not use flash animations that user have to sit through, they simply do not add value. Images are good as are videos but be aware of how many you have on a page, too many and it can take a long time to load creating frustration for the visitor.

Content
Content is the foundation of your web site. Be sure that you are describing your product or service in a clear and engaging way. Remember to keep content short and to the point, use headings, subheadings and bulleted lists to help user quickly scan your content.

Blog
Blogging can be daunting, but by far is the best way to keep fresh content on your website and keep those visitors coming back. Good blog content does't need to be long. What you need to do is to blog regularly, stay on topic and try to solve your audience's problems.

Newsletter sign up (forms)
The best way to get visitor's contact information is through forms collecting contact information for something you are willing to give a customer for free, like an e-book, white paper, or a simple newsletter of your weekly blog posts. Most mailing systems such as MailChimp or ConstantContact have ways to integrate their email list with your website forms. Your Web Department integrates with MailChimp very easily.

Landing pages
Your website needs to have the ability to add landing pages with ease. This landing pages are tailored for your marketing campaigns and should reflect the message of the ad they came from, whether it is an online or a print ad. Lading pages shouldn't be part of the main navigation and they should have no links to take the visitor away from them (they won't be able to return to it). They should have a clear message and the call to action (the call to action can be a form) and nothing more. Don't worry I will be covering this in detail in a future post.

Your Web Department has all the tools in place to help you create a successful business web site. If you want more information or want one of our Digital Marketing experts to contact you, complete this form. Get Stared

Please come back or sign up for our newsletter to learn more about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Mobile Websites and Social Media sharing to mention a few. Want to suggest some topics for us to cover - just speak up in the comments section.

Related posts:
Your Successful Business Website

You can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

Paul Chato does the Bauhub, ?Setting your Free, Free?

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 08:00:00 +0000

Hello everyone, I completely forgot to post my 5 minutes of fame at the November, 2012 The Bauhub collective gathering. My presentation was about setting your free, free. Essentialy, the main learning from the concept behind LiveBuild. View. Enjoy. Comment.

A testimonial from the Creative Collective show:

'Paul is a funny, smart presenter. His talk at the Creative Collective captured the audience's attention right from the start, and had them asking for more. He really got me thinking about the value of delivering services for free in business, and how to set customers' expectations. Great talk. I thoroughly enjoyed it.'
--Jeremy MillerSticky Branding

Your Successful Business Website

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 14:57:00 +0000

I was supposed to do my weekly tweet roundup, but due to the fact that it is a short week and nothing outstanding has happened in the online business world I decided to start a series of blog posts that I thought of during the break. This came about after conversations with clients and other business people I have talked with in the past. The usual questions come up: Do I need a website when I can have a Facebook Page? I'm not on Facebook nor Twitter why do I need to share links from my Website? I heard I need to blog, how do I do that? Well I hope to answer these and many more questions regarding doing business online.There are many misconceptions regarding social media, blogging and websites in the business community. My goal will be to clarified them with these weekly posts.

For a small business, having a website has become an essential part of doing business. During the past year, online marketing (or better known as inbound marketing) has emerges as the new method to promote your business products and/or services. Even though social media and blogging has revolutionized and to some point evened the playing field; most small businesses still don't have a website let alone a strategy to integrate the marketing efforts both online and off line.

Fortunately the biggest impediment is the unknown and lack of understanding of what all this new internet stuff does. Therefore you can learn and surpass the challenge, you don't need to become an expert in the field but you should be able to have a clear understanding of what your business needs when it comes time to hire help for your online marketing plans.

For this I plan to have a series of weekly posts looking in detail at different parts that make an online marketing strategy, in which your website becomes the central focus. Whether you are selling products online or just trying to promote your services your website needs to work for you. The days of having this static online brochure are gone, if your website is not generating leads or dollars to your business then it is time to change it and start working at it.

There are many thing you can do so your website can be an online success and this is the list of thing you will need to work on at some point:

Website
The place where visitors will land and learn about what you have to offer. Keep it simple to the point and free of information irrelevant to your audience. And since you want more people to learn about your website make sure each page of it is search engine optimized and has the social media pluggins for easy sharing. Also keep in mind that whatever is being said about your business visitors will find the true message on your website.

Blogging
Do you want visitors to keep coming back? fresh new content is the best way to have repeated visitors. Stay on topic, make it relevant to your audience and your business will gain credibility. Solve a problem for your visitor and you will get loyalty. It is a winning formula and for maximum effectiveness make sure it is search engine optimized and it is sharable to multiple social media channels.

SEO
Search engine optimization, the thing that determines how far up your business ends up on a search result page. Today SEO and Social Media are entangled, one helps the other. The more your content is shared the better your ranking will be.

Mobile
With unprecedented growth a mobile website has became imperative for any business. This means your website needs to fit in your visitors phone screen, not only that, they need to get to what they are looking for fast. Miss any of those points and they will move to the next website; your competitors most likely.

Social Media
Make no mistake, this is your content distribution channel and the most effective way to get more visitors to your website. Having a good presence in the social networks where your audience is can increase your website traffic with the right audience.

Email Marketing
Probably the most mature online marketing technique. Now that opt-in for newsletters and special announcements has become standard there is big benefit in nurturing those email lists. These are people that want to hear from you and want to be notified when you have something new to share.

The list is not that big, but each item has its own intricacies. In the following posts I will try to explain how to best use them and best of all the gains that your business will have when these are set in place. So make sure you register for the weekly updates and you won't miss any of them.

You can follow me and YWD on the networks below:

Don't have a Your Web Department website? Get started now, don't pay until you go live. www.yourwebdepartment.com

How to change the year in your copyright notice

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 09:45:00 +0000

Back from the holidays break? Time to change the year in the copyright notice of your website. If you use the Your Web Department system, that's very simple.

In the main YWD toolbar, click the Design icon to launch YWD Designer.
In the Text section, under Special text select Footnotes.

Edit the Copyright notice field. You don't need to enter the special ' symbol, YWD will do that for you when the page is displayed.

Click the big green Publish settings button at the bottom of YWD Designer and you're done.

Need an affordable website for your business? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

Text formatting: Gangnam Style tips

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 16:30:00 +0000

If you are the one in charge of updating the content of your business website, chances are you are not a designer yourself. With a CMS (Content Management System) like the one that comes with any Your Web Department website you have lots of formatting options.

That's great but I suspect sometimes you may get confused. So here are a few really basic tips how to format text for your website. They're unlikely to make you dance like the Gangnam Style dude, but at least your website will look better. Oppa!

1. Hey sexy _______ oppa Heading style!

Statistically people are less likely to read long stretches of copy on the web, and even less when it's all in what looks like a single, very lengthy paragraph.

While it's perfectly acceptable to have content below the fold, if you have a really long page, consider dividing it into separate pages. If that's not an option, make sure you break long blocks of copy visually into smaller 'chunks' through the use of sub-headings. They'll create a visual hierarchy and help to make your text to look less intimidating and much easier to read.

You have 6 different heading formats at your disposal. YWD adheres to the best Search Engine Optimization practices and automatically uses Heading 1 to format the page headline, but you can use any of the other 5 heading styles on your sub-headings. It's very easy to do that in YWD: simply select the text and the desired Heading style from the pulldown menu in our editor and you're done.

2. Don't hop on bold text too fast

Whenever you feel like making a whole paragraph bold, sit back, relax, count to ten... but don't do it. It will make the text hard to read and will not help to convey your message more effectively. On the contrary, actually.

And both bold and italic at the same time in a long paragraph? Even less recommended.

3. Text links already have their style

One of the advantages of a system like Your Web Department is that it helps keep things consistent. YWD Designer lets you (or your designer) specify the appearence of text links in great detail - their colour, weight, whether they should be underlined, bold, the rollover state, etc. The same look will be applied to the whole website, so there's no need to manually format any links.

So when you create a text link, you don't need - and in fact should not - format it in the editor. Simply highlight the text and link it.

In the example below, although in the editor the link will appear in blue and underlined, when the actual page is previewed it will be automatically formatted according to the design settings of your website.

Editor

Page preview

4. Centered text? Justified? Only on special occasions

You can dance any way you want, but people read from left to right (in English and most alphabets, that is). Visually, text tends to look better if left-aligned. That's the default and it tends to look better this way. Also, it's way more legible if it's 'ragged' right, as opposed to justified.

Centering text should only be done on very specific situations. For instance, on the page below it made sense to center both the logos and the names beneath them:

However, everywhere else on the same website, text is left-aligned:

5. Individually coloured words? This ain't no party!

You'll probably hate me for this, but your page won't look any better if you manually colour certain words or assign a background to them.

You can have coloured headings as part of your design, for instance:

But if you really want to colour a specific word, then you can always use the 'Text color' icon in the editor's toolbar (and remove it with the 'Remove format' icon, the one that looks like an eraser). But don't tell anyone I told you that...

Paul's Big Top 10 for 2012

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 11:19:00 +0000

Happy New Year everyone. First of all I just wanted to appologize for doing a list. It's a popular blogging style, which I don't resort to often. Anyway, here it goes:

I have extensively tried Windows 8 and it's awful.
I like how Psy, of Gangnam Style fame, has recanted all his previous anti-American rap songs. 'Please love me America.' (No, I'm not going to link to his YouTube video.)
Watching Jimmy Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, of Led Zeppelin honoured at the Lincoln Centre along with Dustin Hoffman and David Letterman. Weird.
If you haven't heard, Obama won.
Candy Crowley was by far the best moderator during the American elections. And by best, I mean she kicked ass.
I thought the Pope's hat was bigger this yearfor his Christmas speechthan last year.
Listening to CBC's Quirks and Quarks restores my faith in humanity. There are some really smart people out there doing amazing things.
Jian Ghomeshi, also of CBC, is the smartest interviewer out there.
George Jonas of the National Post is the best columnest in the world.
Don't let anyone tell you otherwise, The Hobbit (part 1) is an entertaining film.

Week 87 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 11:30:00 +0000

This past week: Well the much anticipated end of the world is here and failed to deliver the apocalyptic destruction it promised. The good thing is we keep doing business and everything still works as it did yesterday. Here at YWD we are taking a well deserved break for the holidays, this will be my last roundup for 2012 and I will be back the first Friday of the new year. 2012 was not boring, many changes occurred in the internet world, Mobile asserted its place as the new medium to attract consumer's eyes and Social Media Networks are maturing as content distribution channels. And, despite the negative report from IBM regarding sales through Social Media on black Friday, the reality is that most social networks are still growing and its members are spending more time using them. Before you move on to this week's list I want to wish you a happy holiday and a prosperous 2013.

Your business website just went live? Time to set up Google Analytics and start tracking its traffic
Very simple, if you can't track traffic what's the point of having a business website? You need to see where your visitors are landing and how the are using your website. It is the best feedback you are going to get from your audience and it will help you to change it to better meet your visitors expectation. Best of all Google Analytics is free and easy to setup.

Be social and share-> 15 Link-Building Strategies that Google Will Love
I mentioned before that SEO and Social Media go hand in hand now. For 2013 expect this to solidify further; make sure you share your posts and make it easy for your visitors to share them amongst their social media friends.

See how can it work for your small business-> Social Media Marketing: The Next Generation
'A survey of 600 small business owners across the United States indicates that 90% are actively engaged in social networking sites,' reported Social Media Today, 'and 74% perceive social networking as valuable ' if not more valuable ' than networking in-person.'

Just an extension of desktop screens-> Anyone Who Believes In Mobile First Needs To Look At This Photo
I know Mobile is on everyone's mind, including mine. Smartphones are not going to replace existing desktop computers, most jobs require one and most people see them as their primary device for accessing the web. Don't get me wrong, mobile friendly websites are important but, the should be based on your existing desktop version website.

Time to get the SoME strategy going-> 25 Mind-Blowing Social Media Stats for Financial Advisors
Are you in the Financial sector? Than you should read this article. It might surprise you.

Mobile growth unprecedented-> The Mobile Web: 10 Incredible Facts That You Probably Didn't Know
Check it out, next year is only going to get bigger.

Online video is on the rise take advantage of YouTube-> YouTube Marketing 101 for Business
Movies and television have shown us that we like to be told stories visually, now that access to the internet has a bigger pipe, video is becoming more popular on the web. Everyone with a smartphone also has a video camera and in some cases it is even HD. Take advantage - with a bit of effort and experience you can create compelling videos telling your story.

Thinking what to post? Some ideas-> 10 Content Marketing Tips You Can Employ Now
Great ideas for content from leading bloggers.

Understanding Keywords-> The Keyword Researcher's Guide To Creating Competitive & Compelling Content
Under what terms is my website going to be searched? Most times it's not what you thought, a couple of well placed keywords or phrases can help to be found by the right audience.

Heard about Google+ Communities?-> Google+ Communities: What Marketers Need to Know
Most social networks haven them, even Google had them in a different form. This is another incarnation of Google's groups but with businesses in mind.

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? Get started now, don't pay until you go live. www.yourwebdepartment.com

Zen and the Art of Website Maintenance

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 15:45:00 +0000

I live in a cold place, it's the suburbs, I have a family, not many places you can go by foot, public transportation is scarce. We have a car. If you own a small business, your website is in some ways similar to your car. Here's how.

1. You shouldn't buy in the dark

A car is an important investment and so is a website. Actually you may be able to get by without a car, but no business - no matter how small - can thrive without an effective web presence these days.

Responsible car buyers check consumer reports, talk to other people, do a test drive, etc. So should you before getting a new website. Check out other websites developed by the company that you're thinking about using, engage with them, read their clients testimonials.

2. What's it like to maintain it?

I have great respect for those who know the innards of their vehicles, who can fix them themselves. I can't. But it's still up to me to detect problems ('What's that rattling noise?') or when the performance isn't there ('Car feels sluggish, doesn't it?').

Conversely, if you're a small business owner don't be embarrassed by not being proficient in all social media networks out there, the latest buzzwords and acronyms. You're running a business, not the Internet.

However, just like you do regular maintenance on the car - check the tires, change the oil, etc. - there are plenty of things you should be able to do on your website. Update the content, write blog posts, get the word out there on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. So make sure you have a good Content Management System so you never need to depend on a programmer for that. Why get stuck in the mud?

And when the time comes for a major overhaul, you should have the freedom to do it yourself or get a designer or marketing consultant of yur choice that can do it for you for the right price if they use the same Content Management Sytem and therefore don't need to sub-hire a programmer to do it for them.

3. Is the price right?

A 2-seater just wouldn't do it for me, neither would a giant gas-guzzling SUV. Some 'free' or 'very cheap' websites options do exist, but when you factor in other costs - installation, learning how to use, support, hiring someone to customize it for you, etc. - it frequently ends up costing more than you think. Worse, you'll probably geta website that doesn't look professional, it's hard or impossible for you to update and lacks the business tools you really need.

On the other hand, dumping thousands of dollars on a website is rarely necessary, unless you have highly specific requirements.

The bottom line is that you don't have to be a mechanic to drive a car, and you don't need to be or hire a programmer to develop a website for your business. The designer or marketing consultant of your choice can do it for you without any coding using Your Web Department. Or the folks at YWD can do a 1-hr LiveBuild session with you for free and get your business online immediately.

Screw blogs. Time to start your own YouTube channel!

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 08:00:00 +0000

Yeah, screw blogs. Time to start your own YouTube channel. Time to crank out a small business video every week!

Well, not really, but should you be doing your own YouTube channel? Is putting up a YouTube video every week better than the incessant blogging? Don't get me wrong, I love writing these posts, but one needs to connect with other bloggers and tell themwhat you're blogging about and hope that they post your link to make it worthwhile if you don't already have a huge following as I do. It's a lot of work to make it work. The blogger that becomes famous for blogging about following a French cookbook and having a movie made of it, is kind of over.

That doesn't mean blogging doesn't work, it's just that it has to be part of your marketing mix and it has to be managed. So what about that YouTube Channel? If you can find a way to produce several, short, two-minute videos on a regular basis it has several benefits. We are living in an attention-deficit world. People prefer videos. It lets you cut to the chase. It let's you illustrate difficult to explain ideas. Google loves videos. Excellent for SEO, especially if you put them on your home page. And finally, unlike blogging where it's often really hard to find even a secondary outlet for your brilliant prose, YouTube gives you that instant outlet.

Once again, your video on sewer obstructions is not going to match the millions of hits an OK Go treadmill or a Gangnan Style video gets, but you'd be surprised how many people might find you. YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google's. Something thoughtful or instructional is excellent to share and people will appreciate it.

If you're trying to build traffic to your site I would definitely go for the extra expense of creating YouTube videos on a regular basis. Did I mention that we have a really easy-to-use YouTube tool? Oh, and did I mention you can imbed your YouTube video on your blog?

LiveBuild For the Business Owner - We design & build your website for free and ready in 1hour
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Week 86 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 11:21:00 +0000

This past week: There has been a lot of talk about mobile and all things related to mobile. Even the released of the new Google Maps app for the iPhone made it to the mainstream media, (It seems that this app made the difference and it is helping with the adoption of iOS 6, the latest iPhone and iPad OS). 2012 was the year of, 'we know Mobile is going to be big so lets wait and see where is going'. Well it went and went some more; the rate of mobile growth is unprecedented and tablets (mostly iPads) are helping with the mobile wave. This growth has been so rapid that big companies have been left scrambling, trying to apply business models (mainly advertising) to this new medium, which its taking away eyes away from the desktop computer. It is very hard to add advertising to a small screen and not make it intrusive, from what I've seen Facebook and Google, after a few stumbles are heading on the right track. This is big help for small businesses since it creates a new avenue for advertisement, but more important is the need to have a mobile friendly website. Now is the time for your business website to be mobile ready. With social sharing you have no idea which page link has been shared, which makes each page of your website a potential landing page for a mobile user. Expectations are high when it comes to websites on mobile, most people have no patience for desktop formatted pages on a phone. They move on to the next website that they can easily view on their tiny screen. With mobile in mind this week's collection of tweets help the small business to do better business on mobile.

The group with the most disposable income-> 62% of 12 to 15-year-olds own a smartphone : infographic
And they are not using the phone part of the smartphone. Expect this number to increase dramatically after Christmas.

Can't escape them-> Ads Will Soon Follow You From One Device to the Next
Tracking is going to be more intelligent; I'm sure privacy advocates are going to have something to say about this.

Is this you too!->How We Use Cell Phones Today
'85% of American adults use mobile phones', interesting data. It can help you target the right content for mobile users.

It will be a different place-> What happens to the Web now that smartphones and tablets run the show?
We have already seen internet applications just for mobile devices such as: Instagram and Flipboard. Expect more of that in the future. I wouldn't be surprise if next year we see a shift of web design for mobile first and desktop after.

Think Mobile-> 3 Ways to Make Your Holiday Marketing Mobile
Most people prefer reading emails on their smartphone, more than 50% of social media consumers view it on a mobile device. Ask your self this question: When a person taps on that email or Facebook link, would that web page they go to be mobile friendly?

And guess what? YWD has it-> Why 2013 Is the Year of Responsive Web Design
I agree 100% on this, especially when it comes to landing pages. But, something to keep in mind, desktop type of navigation doesn't work on a phone screen. Content types that look beautiful on a desktop could take a long time to load on a phone and have a negative impact on the visitor.

More powerful PC on the way?-> Mobile Internet forcing PCs to evolve
While for some people, a tablet is a good replacement for a PC, the personal computer will not disappear. There are so many things that a laptop and a bigger screen make it easier and faster to do.

No real surprise on these numbers-> Microsoft's Surface Is Dead Last In Tablet Web Traffic Generation
Well that fact that it just got released is not helping them, but still reception has not been what Microsoft expected.

2013 the year of Mobile-> BII MOBILE INSIGHTS: The Top Mobile Predictions For 2013
It is a brave new future, read what's coming on the mobile front.

Your website needs to be #mobile ready most shared links are viewed on mobile-> Why brands are failing on Facebook
'Despite a significant increase in the number of mobile-driven 'Likes' on Facebook brand pages this year, many companies are still not optimizing their social experiences for mobile.'

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? Get started now, don't pay until you go live. www.yourwebdepartment.com

Your business website just went live? Time to set up Google Analytics and start tracking its traffic

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 11:00:00 +0000

As you probably know, Google Analytics is a free product that tracks your website and gives detailed statistics about your visitors. Whether you just got a website for your business or you're converting an existing one, it's highly recommended that you set up Google Analytics so it can start tracking its traffic for you - FOR FREE.

A sample Google Analytics report

IMPORTANT: your website needs to be live for Google Analytics to start tracking it, so the instructions below only apply if your website has already gone live, using its actual domain name.

Setting up Google Analytics

1. Signing up for Google Analytics

You will need a free Google account. If you have GMail or Google+ for instance you already have one.
If you don't have any Google accounts, you can create one here.

2. Adding your website to your Analytics account

You then need to add your website to your Analytics account. Within this context, Google calls websites 'Web Properties' (don't we all love those geeks?)
There's help from Google on how to add your website to your account here.

3. Getting the tracking code for your website

The tracking code is what collects data from your website each time a page loads, so Google Analytics can well, keep track of it for you. In order to get your tracking code, click on the Admin button of the Analytics interface...

...then click on the Tracking Code tab and copy the whole code you see there:

4. Adding the tracking code to your website

That's the part that's really simple, because it's in Your Web Department. Go to Tools / Google Analytics and paste the code there. That's it!

Your Web Department's Google Analytics tool

Checking your stats

You can get your reports directly by logging into to your Google Analytics account, and there are plenty of good tutorials on how to interpret your Analytics stats.

Now, if all you want to do is check some basic metrics - the number of visitors, for instance - straight from your phone at any time, then you can download one of several free apps available out there.

For example, this free app is called Dashboard for Google Analytics and provides some basic but very useful information - also known as key performance indicators (KPI) - about your website traffic, which it retrieves from your Analytics account, straight into your iPhone:

There are of course many other apps and services, which either for free or through a 'pro' version will give you various degrees of sophistication in terms of reports and analysis, so you can choose the one that best fits your needs and your budget.

Need a business website? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

Ikove Canada: fair trade products get fair looking e-store

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 11:30:00 +0000

www.ikove.ca

IKOVE produces luxurious skin & hair care line exotic products using Amazonian plants and natural ingredients harvested in the rainforests of Brazil. They adhere to the principles of sustainability and fair trade, and are certified by ECOCERT, IBD/IFOAM and USDA Organic.

IKOVE Canada was just starting operations when they approached Your Web Department. They needed a website to serve as their primary communication instrument, so a fast turnaround was absolutely critical. Their expectation was to get their website designed, with content and up and running in literally just a few days. And they also wanted to be able to update the content on their own in the future, without the need to hire programmer or webdeveloper to do it for them.

Their product line is organic, exotic and quite unique but also upscale. Working with that premise in mind, Your Web Department came up with a look an feel that makes use of textures, strong colours and elegant typography. It highlights the client's excellent photographic material in a clean and yet multi-layered way, reminiscent of the Brazilian rainforest. YWD also assisted the client in tweaking the content, with copy that reinforces the brand and IKOVE's message.

IKOVE Canada is now selling online, benefitting from YWD's Catalog/E-commerce tool's built-in, seamless and secure integration with PayPal and Moneris for transactions. The e-store is incorporated into the website and shares the same design.

Don't have a Your Web Department website? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

Build your small business website now, before your start your small business

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 09:45:00 +0000

There are many reasons for having a website, but sometimes the reason for having one is not immediately apparent. At least the uses you might get out of a website at different stages of your business endeavour might not be apparent.

Recently, I was approached by a good friend who is writing a book. He wanted to know what would be needed to make sure that he had a website to support his book when it launched.

I suggested he needed a site immediately. He asked why? Well, wasn't he dealing with some very well known people in the sports arena? Yes, he said. Then didn't he think that after an initial encounter they'd immediately Google you, or search for your website to confirm your credibility? He had never thought of that. Sure, it would probably be very important that he get a website presence for that reason alone.

Frankly, having a website gives any business or individual presence. It's the new business card. I'm receiving a lot of calls these days from senior consultants who are bemoaning the fact that up until fairly recently all their business was word-of-mouth, but now it seemed everyone was checking them out on the Internet first. Yes, a credentials website is an important tool.

Then I asked my writer-friend, if he had had any publicity during the development of his book. He said that he has already had several newspaper stories written about his project. So, I said, how many of those readers might have been intrigued enough about your story to look you up? How many might have put themselves on a mailing list? He had not thought of that either. These were major newspapers.

While, social media and blogging is important, there is nothing more effective than a mailing list. These are people who have self-selected themselves to want to know more about your business, or future offerings. How many people were 'disappointed' when they could not find out more about this great book? People want instant gratification. People want stuff. How many people wanted this book, but found no outlet to purchase it? And since this was also going to be an ebook, a mailing list would have given it a great sales kickstart.

And then there is Google. Having a website a few months prior to releasing his book would mean that Google would have already 'found' him. If people Googled him upon his book launch, he would already have been indexed and he would show up in searches. I cannot tell you how many times we launch websites for customers who ask a day or two later why they don't show up in Google searches. It's because it can take one, two even three months before Google finds and indexes your website. You know what they say, 'Vote early. Vote often.'

We started talking about one website and ended up talking about three websites in one. A business has many stages. One of my favourite quotes comes from Guy Kawasaki, 'Don't wait for your product to be finished before you start selling it.'

You can put this lesson to use for your new small business website, too. There is no reason not to tell people about your intensions. Tell them what stage you are at, invite them to find out more, and then roll it out when you are ready.

LiveBuild For the Business Owner - We design & build your website for free and ready in 1hour
yourwebdepartment.com/LiveBuild

Week 85 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 11:41:00 +0000

This past week: Social Media took a beating with the IBM report on Black Friday Social Commerce: 'Shoppers referred from Social Networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube generated .34 percent of all online sales on Black Friday, a decrease of more than 35 percent from 2011,'. As you can imagine all nay sayers and people who never understood social media jumped on the bandwagon of Social Media is dead or Social Media has plateaued. Well Social Media has never been about selling and it is true that sometimes it seems that most of the buzz in social media is generated by marketing people talking about social media. In reality the core of all social media networks is everyday people from all walks of life and while they are on their favourite social network, most likely shopping is not on their mind. This doesn't mean brand promotion in social networks is a wasted effort, the chances of the promotion reaching the right audience are far greater on a social network that any traditional media available today. The path is clear, we are entering the age of big data; social networks will know more about us and we will be ok with this because it will be convenient. We are going to see seamless advertising where you see the product/service advertising and act on it right on the same spot; and you will be doing it on a mobile device, which will be aware of your location. Presently the best you can get out of social media (marketing) is brand recognition and/or traffic to your website, which is not bad at all since you can target the right demographic for your business at a far better accuracy than you had before all this social media business started. Social media is here to stay, and big changes are coming in the way we advertise and consume. Businesses that can adapt with the changes will have an advantage and this collection of tweets is my way of helping your business stay with the times. Enjoy!

Who needs a filming crew when you have an iPhone?-> Grant Wickes: Using iPhone Photo and Video for Business
Creating content is the goal for every business trying to be successful online, and the best quality content is the one to excel. Grant Wickes explains how he can produce great looking video interviews with his iPhone and a couple of add ons.

That's a good ROI-> RT @leeodden What's the ROI of Corporate Blogging?
Return on investment, all this effort for what? See what Lee Oden gets back from blogging.

Get more out of your Adwords campaign-> How to Improve Your AdWords Quality Score: 5 Quick Tips
I'm in the middle of this; learning how to maximize the Google advertising dollar. There is a method, and it requires daily attention, but I can see results.

Commercial intent is what is missing-> Facebook: Waste of Time for Most Advertisers
As I mentioned on the introduction most people facebooking are not thinking about shopping. On the other hand, they can be intrigued by advertising, or by 'promoted posts'. We have been able to generate traffic and leads expending very little via Facebooks ads.

He said it-> Ronn Torossian: 'Content Creation a MUST for All Brands'
Yours as well, nothing better than creating your own quality content for your prospects. And yes, you will need to become your own publishing house. The good news is that you don't need to go to print, a blog will suffice.

Good manners and being gracious goes a long way-> 9 Social Media Elements Worth Personalizing
Simple advice: while commenting sharing or just posting, think of yourself as face to face with the people you are interacting with and behave accordingly.

Not if you are using an Android Tablet-> Social network apps are on the rise, crush mobile Web
This is true for the iPad line, having a Galaxie 10 tablet, my biggest struggle is finding apps designed for the tablet. Nothing more frustrating to use than a phone designed app on a tablet.

I use it, pretty neat app-> How IFTTT is Changing the Way We Do Things on the Web
When managing multiple social media channels this service comes handy to publish content in multiple platforms. And this is one example on how you can us it.

Not doing email marketing, you should-> What's the Real Value of That Email Newsletter?
Email marketing has come a long way. Today it is a very effective way to market your brand and it fits perfectly with social media and with the new Inbound Marketing philosophy.

You can signup with you FB account-> Microsoft opens its own social network
Finally Microsoft jumped in the social media pool. So.cl (http://so.cl) is their new social network. I haven't had a chance to try yet but will see what comes out of it. As I mention on the tweet, you can use your Facebook account to sing up.

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? Get started now, don't pay until you go live. www.yourwebdepartment.com

Soccer league scores big goal with new website

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 16:30:00 +0000

www.westlondonsoccer.com

The previous version

The West London Soccer League includes a number of soccer teams for boys and girls in London, Ontario. They have a website with Your Web Department that utilizes SportSavvy's popular sports management applications, used by a number of sport leagues throughout Canada.

The West London people were familiar with Your Web Department's easy to use content management system developed specifically for small business, but it was time to revamp the website's look and feel: make it more attractive, colourful and playful (pun intended).

Design considerations

When it comes to typography, one of the interesting features of YWD is its ability to use not only the usual 'suspects' - Verdana, Arial, etc. - but also other fonts that are embedded on the fly (it can also use fonts from the Google Web Fonts Library and from Adobe's TypeKit). So type was made more interesting in this case by using ChunkFive, a robust but extremely legible typeface which gave the website a lot of character.

YWD now lets you duplicate any content block with just 1 click. That allowed for the creation of a visual vocabulary of headers with a 'shiny' background whose text is editable directly by the client and can be found by search engines.

Image galleries and content sliders are also a great way to present information in an attractive way that can be easily updated in YWD by the client.

Easy social bookmarking

The floating social bookmarking bar allows anyone to conveniently 'like', tweet, pin, etc. the website. And if one day the league decides to have its own Facebook and/or Twitter pages, they will be able to embed their feeds directly into their website, no coding required.

Mobile-friendly, of course

One of the common reasons people access a sports league website is to find out where the field is located. Chances are, they'll be doing that from their mobile. So a mobile-optimized version was created specifically for West London. It contains only a handful of the most relevant pages such as field maps. Content that's only adequate for computers such as fancy image galleries, was hidden from the mobile version.

Configuring the mobile-optimized version is done entirely in YWD Designer and doesn't require a single line of code to be written. And like any YWD website, both the 'regular' website and its mobile version share the same domain, a great search engine optimization feature for any business, including soccer leagues (after all, who doesn't want to be found by Google?)

The new West London Socer League website just went live and the client is quite happy with the results (we suspect they'll be even more once the season starts - after all this is Canada and during winter well, hockey reigns supreme).

Your Web Department is looking forward to working with SportSavvy in other projects.

Request our Mobile setup package for $500.00 package

Not a YWD client? Try LiveBuild - We design & build your website for free and ready in 1hour
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Convergence is dead. Long live convergence.

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 08:50:00 +0000

When did we first hear about convergence? When did AOL buy TimeWarner? It was a while ago, for sure. The once mighty Nortel spent bags of cash buying TV assets. Convergence was going to happen but no one knew when or what it would look like. And there sure have been some huge busts in the process. (please see above)

It was a funny time. A lot of the media convergence deals took place out of fear someone else would snag that prized property, but to us simpletons convergence means, 'Oh crap, I forgot to watch the Big Bang Theory.' No matter, I can see it on NBC's website the next day. Missed Jon Stewart? Just get on the Comedy Network's website. For us none-media moguls, convergence is just doing the same thing we've always been doing but with different ways of doing it.

However, there are things those giant conglomerates just can't plan for. Us pions figure it out for ourselves. We cobble together technologies that work for us. My favourite example is Twitter. It went from, 'WTF is this?' to 'This is fun' to tweeting while the Oscars was on complaining to #oscars how The Artist beat out Rango. Or, complaining about the choices on America's Next Top Model. My favourite pastime is tweeting during #thevoice.

This is real interactivity. It's not the crazy corporate dream of being able to get us to buy shit on TV when a flashing banner pops up telling us, 'Buy the sweater Heather Locklear is wearing by pressing the purchase button on your interactive keypad.'

And huge corporations have in the past had been uninterested in working with technology that they didn't possess. The fact that The Voice combines, tweeting, SMS messages, phone calls, iTunes sales into some kind of scoring system to pick a winner is a cobbling together the technologies we like to use. I'm sure NBC wasn't thrilled working with iTunes but damn doesn't it work well.

Getting back to Twitter, I really think that it is the true convergence driver. It's a stream you dip you toe into, leave and then come back to later to dip your toe in again. There are communal events like the Olympics or the World Cup that are great fun on Twitter. The most recent American election, however was so intense that I couldn't read the Twitter feed it was moving so fast. They are going to have to fix that.

Why didn't the giant media companies invent Twitter? The answer is easy, it wasn't the big idea they were trying to invent in house. It was too simple. It came from nowhere. It looked like a dumb idea at first. Who knew where the public would take it? And that's the thing, there are many things we do as small businesses where we just don't know where the public is going to take it. We've had to zig and zag as our customers took us to places we never thought of when we started Your Web Department. It's been kind of exciting, actually. The key is to listen and to act.

In the final analysis convergence is about community. We love sharing that viral video, we love commenting on articles in online magazines like Huffington Post or getting involved in flam wars between Android and iPhone users. Maybe because we care or maybe we just have too much time on our hands.

The Internet is what we make it both in our business and personal lives.

LiveBuild For the Business Owner - We design & build your website for free and ready in 1hour
yourwebdepartment.com/LiveBuild

Week 84 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 13:13:00 +0000

This past week: Well it seems that Microsoft's tablet surface and new OS Windows 8 were not as well received as the company was expecting. The once mighty popular tech company is struggling to capture consumers imagination; this is a good example that the Internet is a constant evolving environment. More than ever businesses need to be ready to adapt to the new trends and major shifts that the emergence of new technologies bring into the market. On a more positive side of the news, there are strong rumours that Facebook is gearing up to extend their ad network outside of Facebook. That's right, pretty soon you are going to start seeing ads coming from Facebook in your favourite websites; and this is a good thing for all of us. Small businesses will have more to chose from when it comes to advertising online, and competition will bring more innovating ways to reach the right audience for the product/services the business is promoting. Having said that, this week's list of tweets are all about doing better business online.

It seems like a good idea-> B2B Marketing - Is it Worth it to Market during the Holidays?
As the articles mentions, a few leads are better than no leads. Also this is the time when everyone relaxes and slows their working pace and has more time to pay attention to thing they wouldn't have before.

RT @Forbes: 10 incredibly simple things that you should be doing to protect your privacy.
It is so easy to protect your stuff, work on those passwords. Use the memory space that you used to use for memorizing telephone numbers.

Liking Gmail? Some tips to like it better-> Ten Tricks To Make Yourself a Gmail Master
Gmail has come a long way, now it is even better than some email clients. With the integration of other Goolge tools it makes it a very powerful communication system. This article shows you how to take advantage of some of Gmail's features.

FB is growing but on #mobile is is exploding!-> Reasons Why a Mobile Facebook is Serious Business [Infographic]
Facebook's growth on mobile is just incredible, who knew most people would like to use Facebook more on the phone than on their desktop.

Good points on what not to do-> 7 Ways to Screw Up a Content Marketing Plan
You should pay attention to these points, otherwise your blog posts and landing pages are just a waste of your time.

Buying followers not recommended-> How To Increase Your Social Media Following
Work on building your followers with people that are actually interested in what you have to share. It is better to have fewer followers if they are going to listen to you.

You own your website!-> Why A Website Is More Important Than Facebook & Twitter
Sometimes I get into the discussion of the importance of a business website when there are so many platforms where a business can have a presence. My argument is it is more important than ever, businesses can reach their customer base through many different channels today. But, it is their website that is the source of their information. You cannot get banned from your website, nor is your website going to disappear because other people's actions. You always have a place to host your website.

Great LiveBuild testimonial, Karen Popoff - The Transformationalist @TransformWithMe
As you might have noticed we are promoting LiveBuild (learn more about LiveBuild), we have had great feedback from people that have gone through it. Karen was so satisfied with the experience that she put it in an email and we decided to share it with you.

We got competition-> iPad And Android Tablet Market Share Margin Narrows Much Faster Than Originally Predicted
Soon the iPad is not going to be the only player in the tablet market, hopefully Microsoft and RIM get their act together and join Apple and Samsung at the party.

61% of ppl searching on mobile say they'll move on if site not optimized-> A Quick Guide to SMB Success on #Mobile
And that number is only going to increase as more businesses get their mobile websites online and the public expectation completely shifts. Get you mobile website ready, it is so easy to do. See how we do it - YWD Mobile

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? Get started now, don't pay until you go live. www.yourwebdepartment.com

Great photography from our clients websites - Part VI

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 11:15:00 +0000

Georgia Hardy Tours is a premium travel company that designs custom itineraries around the globe for discerning small groups, student travelers and educational institutions. What began as a company focused on school travel and March Break trips has grown to include student summer courses, AQ teacher courses abroad, museum tours and custom journeys to many of the world's most exciting and exotic destinations.

They update their nicely-designed Your Web Department website regularly by themselves, including image galleries and videos. The excellent photographic material conveys the kind of unique experience that Georgia Hardy can provide.

Don't have a Your Web Department website? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

Hey laggards, get on line for crying out loud

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 12:12:00 +0000

Let's face it there are those of us who are connected, those that are not, and in between there are many shades of grey (sorry couldn't help myself). I wonder if we are now at a sufficiently developed Internet/smart phone/tablet/Netflix/high speed juncture to say that 'we get it' and pretty much all that's going to change is that things will just get faster and bigger, much like video games.

Have we reached a point in our Digital Age to be able to divine what percentage of people will always get what is going on, how many people will get it with some help and how many won't participate under any circumstances?

The reason I'm bringing this up is because we tend to divide the above along age-lines. The young get it, the middle-aged sort of get it and the Boomers and up are just plain lost. I'm pretty sure that as the pre-Interneters die off a larger percentage of people will have a higher interactivity rate, but there is a big difference between being online and being tech-savvy. I encounter an awful lot of young people who have no idea of the full potential of their word processor, or how hook up a router. Youth is not a bulwark against technical ignorance. There are young geeks and old geeks.

There will always be a percentage of people who will use to a greater or to a lesser extent the technology available to them. What I want to know is when do we reach the point where we will know how these percentages break down and when will it make sense to measure it? Do we need all the Boomers to die off before we do this? Do we have enough people between school age and mature business users to confidently say that the majority of the people are not just reachable online but available? Google and Facebook have very large communities but you can't reach everyone with them. Not everyone with a Facebook account is on it all the time.

I know in our business the majority still find us through word of mouth even though we have a good online presence. This has always been a curious stat because we're an online product. You can't go and buy Your Web Department at a mall. Small business owners, young and old tend to find us through talking with others they trust. How do we reach this group without spending crazy money on print ads or billboards, which we know don't work? Many small businesses have this same conundrum which is why we continue to do outbound advertising and have physical, visible locations.

Remember the predictions of the demise of bricks and mortal stores back at the dawn of the web browser? In fact the opposite has happened we have more physical shopping locations in addition to their web presences. I guess the brand is everything and if it's hitting you on line, on TV, in print and when you're walking in a mall, that's the ideal, but for a small business the costs would be prohibitive. That's why we want this Internet thing to work better.

Listen up all you laggards, get on line.

LiveBuild For the Business Owner - We design & build your website for free and ready in 1hour
yourwebdepartment.com/LiveBuild

Week 83 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 23 Nov 2012 11:41:00 +0000

This past week: Short week for the US, and today's retail madness seems to have spilled over north of the border. In fact there is a general optimism amongst small businesses for the future economy. This is good news for everyone, we cannot forget that small business are the bulk of what fuels the economy in both Canada and the United States. Today's tweet list is e reflection of YWD's commitment to help small businesses succeed online, not only do we help SMBs do business online, but we also try to find the best tips and guidelines for making your business website the best it can be.

A big decline where face to face is not really needed-> Bank tellers disappearing soon?
This is one example of the new trend of virtual offices. Not only are bank tellers going to be a thing of the past, but there are other jobs and services that can be done over the internet as well. Hey! There is even talk of using body scanners to get your body measurements for online clothes shopping.

Very surprising results-> Who Supports Small Business? Survey Says Facebook, Not Etsy
I have to admit, I was a bit shocked when I saw this report. But it seems that Facebook is the best place for SMBs right now.

Go ahead check if is time for yours-> How To Gather Evidence To Determine If It's Time For A Mobile Website
It is undeniable, mobile web is here to stay. Soon there will be more mobile devices than people. Not only that but now we are watching TV with our phone in hand, the second screen. Your website is bound to be visited by a smartphone, is it ready? Take a look at how YWD does mobile

Help to be more effective-> 10 workflow apps to enhance your productivity
Do you have a smartphone? If you do, you know how easy is to stay on top of thing with a smart phone. This post has a few apps that might make your life even easier.

Understand the shift-> The Takeover of the Mobile Web (Infographic)
See it for yourself, growth on the mobile web sector has been (and still is) unprecedented. Adoption is at a faster rate than the adoption rate of the internet back in the nineties. Shipment for smartphones and tablets are surpassing shipments for laptops and desktop computers in 2012. So, do you think is time to get your website mobile ready?

So iPad is king for now-> iPad To Dominate Tablet Downloads For Next 5 Years, Owning 56% In 2017: Analyst
Unfortunately this seems to be true, Microsoft's tablet, Surface, has not been well received by consumers, even though critics are raving about it. And Samsung's Galaxy 10 tablet doesn't come close to the iPad, I know I have one. That is it for competition, all other tablets in the market are not worth mentioning and we need competitors to the iPad.

Not so precious any more-> 61% of Online Shoppers Would Trade Privacy for Personalization
I said this before, we are ok with sacrificing some of our privacy for convenience.

Make yours active and be ahead of the 70%-> 70% of Facebook brand pages are inactive
With more than on billion active users, your audience is on Facebook. With only 30% of all business pages trying to reach out and engage their fans; it is very likely that you will have an advantage over your competitors by making your Facebook business page more active.

Mobile the next biz frontier-> The #Mobile Revolution Will Extend Your Business Model Faster Than The Web Did
This post is related to the one above, it is true mobile, will have a bigger impact than the web ever did.

Our remote control to the world-> What does the future hold for the mobile industry?
And finally, a post about what mobile is about to become. Most likely it will become our remote to the world: appointments, banking, communicating, travel booking, cooking, weather report, home controls and the list goes on.

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? Get started now, don't pay until you go live. www.yourwebdepartment.com

How to insert a photo from Facebook directly into a page of your website

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 16:55:00 +0000

Your Web Department's Content Management System (CMS) includes a nifty Assets Manager so you can upload your images and place them anywhere on your website. But what if you'd like to insert images that reside elsewhere - on your (or somebody else's) Facebook page, for instance? This way you can quickly add a picture without even having to download it to your computer and then upload to YWD.

It's quite easy to do it and you may already know it, but here it is just in case:

First, navigate to where the image is on Facebook. For this example I chose a photo of who's considered to be the most handsome member of the YWD team, that was posted on our Facebook page a while ago. Right-click directly on the photo and then choose 'Copy Image Location' (that's in Firefox; other browsers will label that differently).

In Your Web Department, edit any Word Processor content block, Content Slider slide, News Manager news item - any type of content that uses our editor, really.

In the editor, click the 'Insert/Edit Image' icon and in the URL field paste the image location that you've copied. The image can be aligned, resized, etc. -- just like a 'local' image i.e. one that you've uploaded to YWD's Assets Manager.

That's it! The image will be displayed on the page.

A couple of notes:

The Image Gallery tool can only use images in YWD's Assets Manager.
If the image is removed from Facebook, it'll also disappear from your page. That's because YWD is only using the image location, it didn't actually make a copy of the image file.

Don't have a Your Web Department website? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

Let the Serendipity Engine help your small business

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 10:22:00 +0000

We work on a lot of small business and consultant websites, and one of the things we try to impress upon our customers is that it's a good idea to have a clear idea what you want your website to actually do for you. However, there is another reason for having a website and that is, as I like to call it, a Serendipity Engine. There are times when you just might be found by accident.

People search on Google and you need to have at least a rudimentary regime of optimization on your website, such as:

- H1 formatted headline that clearly 'tells' Google what you do for a living, who you do it to and sometimes where you do it.

- You need your title tags taken care of.

- You need to use a proper naming convention for your uploaded assets.

- You need relevant content on your home page. Of course you need to have a website to begin with.

If you don't know what the above means, contact us.

Oh, and often it helps that you've managed to keep your business around long enough that you have a nicely 'aged' URL. But I love the notion that we can all be found by accident. This is especially true for consultants who get most of their business through word-of-mouth. Many tell me, 'Why do I need a website?' Well, because of the Serendipity Engine, I say. I ask them if their website got them one more customer a year would that be good? For many consultants that would be insanely awesome.

For the Serendipity Engine to work, you need to have a website that exhorts your great personality and expertise. How does that work? Well, think about that introduction you had at a party the other night. The two of you hit it off marvellously. The potential customer was thrilled to meet you, telling you that they will be contacting you for business. Inevitably the first thing they are going to do is check out your website. Does it match the energy and good will you conveyed at the face-to-face meeting? If the answer is no, then the Serendipity Engine won't work. You've probably lost this job and many more you don't know about.

And that's the thing. Sometimes it's not about measuring how many jobs your website got for you but trying to find out how many you lost because of a sub-optimal one. If your website is the kind that gets 50 views a month, you'll probably never know.

So, there you go. Make the Serendipity Engine work for you because you just never know.

And two more things...

Facebook has launched its new Job Board. Initially it's only a U.S.A. affair but LinkedIn, watch out.

And speaking of Facebook, why are the sponsored ads mostly about 'meeting mature women'? Is there something my profile that is attracting these ads?

LiveBuild For the Business Owner - We design & build your website for free and ready in 1hour
yourwebdepartment.com/LiveBuild

Week 82 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 11:49:00 +0000

This past week: Now that the US election is over a lot of talk is being generated on how the election was won. A lot of different things are attributed to Obama's victory, but what stands out was the use of social media. Social media did have a role in this past elections (and elections to come for sure) but it wasn't the defining factor for victory, the losing side did use social media quite effectively as well. It comes down to the basics, you have a good product/content and it becomes easier to spread the message. Social media is just another tool in your marketing arsenal, if you are using it for marketing that is, and like any other tool the better you are at using it, the more effective your campaign becomes. What social media has really done is to empower the small business owner, finally the SMB has a voice and can play with the big brands. Social media levels the playing field for the small business. There is nothing preventing the small business owner from achieving the same level of success as the Obama team did in the past two elections. Provide good content for your audience, promote it through the social networks where your audience is, participate on the discussion related to your industry and good leads will start coming to your website. Without further ado, this week's tweets collection, as usual good tips for the small business to succeed online.

Have an Android phone? check this out!-> Five Free Business Card Readers for Android
The good old business card, which has become a reminder of how things were done before the internet came along. Don't worry, now you can add that pile of cards to your contact list by just taking a picture of the card. I personally use CardMunch from LinkedIn, but I'm sure any of these can work the same way.

Experiences on most PPC networks-> What Spending $66,372.09 On Paid Advertising Taught Me
I started following Neil Patel's blog a few weeks ago, his post are very insightful and fun to read. This one is no exception and provides personal insights on most online advertising networks. If you are thinking on starting a advertising campaign this post will provide a good idea on where to start.

Content!-> RT @seomoz: How To Brand and Grow Your Company Through Marketing
Content Marketing, the new buzz word(s). In existence since we started writing stuff down, but now is in the spotlight again due to Inbound Marketing. Great content, relevant to your audience that is on topic with your industry and search engined optimized.

I agree on tablets go big-> Giving Tablet Users the Full-Sized Web
Only smartphones are the ones with small screens, where a special fitting design is needed. Tablet screens are much bigger and while you can also target content for their screen size, it is not imperative and the desktop version of your website will work fine on a tablet.

Like these-> 3 Infographics Every Small Business Owner Should See
Very good Infographics about: Mobile, Using your time effectively and networking online. Take a look!

Case study for LiveBuild-> Berger Cyclefit Coaching: Accelerating results with LiveBuild
As you might know, we have been promoting LiveBuild recently. We think is the perfect way for a small business owner to have their website up and running in no time with little effort. This case study is the perfect example of a business owner, who did not where to start nor how to get around having his business website live. LiveBuild helped him just do that. Learn more about LiveBuild

Ask yourself is your website earning its keep?-> 5 Things Your Website Should Do
This something we are constantly asking our customers. Is your website working for you? Your business website should earn its keep, by generating leads or selling your products. Just having your website sitting there looking pretty doesn't help anyone.

Agree, I don't see how-> Instagram: the Most Powerful Sales Platform on the Internet?
Now that Instagram is on everyone's radar and its membership has almost double since Facebook bought it, there is a lot of talk about how Instagram can help your business. I've been using it for a while now and I do follow some brands on it, to tell you the truth, I don't see how a business case can be made beyond Brand Awareness. Not even the creators of Instagram thought of a business model to monetize all the activity that Instagram generates.

Ran out of ideas? Here you go-> 7 Effortless Ways to Find New Ideas for Your Blog
As I mentioned above, content is king and blogging is a good idea for any business. Take a look at this post and get inspired to write your next blog posts.

Do you have yours?-> Just 38% of companies have a content marketing strategy: report
Now that you have a blog going and have the right social networks to share your content you should work on the strategy. Just like traditional marketing without an strategy your efforts will not be as effective as they could be.

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? Get started now, don't pay until you go live. www.yourwebdepartment.com

Great photography from our clients websites - Part V

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 11:50:00 +0000

Atec Signs is a full service and manufacturing company specializing in providing signs to the gaming, entertainment, retail, commercial, and industrial sectors throughout Canada and the US.

A client of Your Web Department, Atec's products include architectural lighting & signage, LED displays, program signage, pylons, street furniture and wayfinding systems - they're at the forefront of sign technology.

Their website interface is minimalistic and simple to navigate. It's also very fast and search engine-optimized, as are all Your Web Department websites which include the AT&T Performing Arts Center, The Toronto Design Exchange, PricewaterhouseCoopers and thousands of other business websites of all sizes throughout the world.

Here are a few examples of the great photographic work you can find throughout the Atec Signs website.

Don't have a Your Web Department website? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

Hey, do you need icons or buttons for your website?

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 12:15:00 +0000

Whether you're a designer or a small business, I'm sure you came across the need to add icons or buttons - for social media, for instance. Below I've included a few websites where you can download a variety of icons to your computer, then use then on your Your Web Department website. The vast majority of those listed here are completely free and can be used commercially; some require attribution, and a few need to be purchased by a small fee. Enjoy!

DryIcons

Icon Archive

IconsPedia

Tutorial9

Icones

DeviantArt

IconEasy

Fast Icons

PSDTuts

YooTheme

Don't have a Your Web Department website yet? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

Don?t do what Obama did in 2008, do what he did in 2012.

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 08:00:00 +0000

Social media and the Internet has been pivotal in both of President Obama's election wins. The difference is that many of the first round lessons were not duplicable for most most small business owners. However, this most recent go round is eminently useful to Small Businesses.

How come? While the 2008 election was heralded as the first time social media was used to crush an opponent (Obama got 2 million likes on Facebook) its success was attributable to the confluence of the technology coming of age, the generation, the historical nature of a charismatic African American running for president who spoke eloquently and an insanely awesome wife in Michelle. Pundits grabbed the coat-tails of this social media phenomena and rode it for their own personal gain.

I was at a presentation at the Rotman School of Management at UofT soon after Obama's historic 2008 win. It featured a wonderful woman who participated in the campaign's social media efforts. The audience was fawning desperately. The unctuous, Don Tapscott was there. People were taking notes desperate to pick up any sage advice. It was a pretty abysmal sight. I should add that the young woman did not misrepresent herself, her involvement or inflate the magical powers of social media. It was more the audience feverishly scribbling notes, searching for an apiphany that bugged me.

I got a chance to ask the guest speaker if this social media success had more to do with fortuitous timing of the Bush hangover and the incredibly historic nature of Obama's run and that this was entirely unduplicable, she completely agreed. It was a magical alignment of the stars. Were there social media lessons that we could use, sure, but we couldn't duplicate what was special about it.
Fast forward to 2012. Obama has won a second term. Republican Super PACs spent billions of dollars of über wealthy donors' play money that they would normally have spent on prostitutes to rid them of Obama. TV viewers in some states were saturated by 1400 anti-Obama adds a week! How did Obama win against this tsunami?

It is now coming to light that the Democratic election machine had gone beyond social media, Facebook (this time Obama had 33 million likes) and had created a technological marvel of localized deployment. A system was created where voters lists were analyzed and segmented into demographics and neighbourhoods. No longer did volunteers have to come back to HQ to get their marching orders. It allowed volunteers to join a local field team and get assignments remotely. People were matched with voters by age, or neighbourhood, or affiliations. Boy, wouldn't that improve your cold-call sales results.

An application of this type would never have been able to scale fast enough in the past, but with cloud computing that offers automatic scaling, it was possible. Another reason for not hosting your own website!

The lesson is that social media is not an end in of itself. The first movers who made a killing exploiting blogs and Twitter are gone and writing self-help books. I'm not writing that you should stop doing those things, you NEED to do them, but it's part of a wide range of things you should do that have only one thing in common, hard work. Damn, I was hoping he wouldn't say that. Sorry.

And what this election has shown is that technology used with a plan, executed by an energized group of people is what gets results. You need a plan. Then you have to execute the plan. And you need a place to put all those names you collect. And you need a way to communicate to those people with useful information on a regular basis.

This is the way business will be done for the foreseeable future. Don't copy what Obama did in 2008. Copy what he did now.

LiveBuild For the Business Owner - We design & build your website for free and ready in 1hour
yourwebdepartment.com/LiveBuild

Week 81 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 10:56:00 +0000

This past week: Obama was elected for four more years. Only time will tell how good or bad this going to be for Small Businesses. I got a feeling it is all good; and what is good for the US economy is good for Canada. Christmas is just 6 weeks away and all retail businesses are getting ready for the shopping bonanza this season brings. Experts are predicting an increase in spending compared to last year. Keep in mind that online shopping will also increase and this time mobile shopping will take a bigger share, much bigger according to some experts. So, are you ready? Is your website mobile friendly? Does your advertising strategy include mobile browsing? So many questions, which are answered on today's list. This week there is a lot of mobile information for the small business. Enjoy.

Mobile is here! -> Google Anticipates Surge In Smartphone Search For Holidays
'Failing to 'get your act together' (from a mobile standpoint) could be costly for marketers of all sizes this holiday season.'
Just remember that the phone in your pocket is a window to the internet that is always within reach.

Demystifying Social Media-> Social Media: A Reality Check
Unfortunately there are still some people out there that believe the statements in this post. But just like anything else in life, your returns are directly related to your efforts.

And it so easy to do one-> 25 Reasons Why You Should Have a Mobile Friendly Website
Not that you need this many to be convinced, it just makes business sense. Mobile is so easy to setup and a better medium to guide the visitor to become a lead than a desktop website.

More people are using smartphone and tablets than ever-> Mobile-friendly sites increasingly important
No one wants a feature phone anymore, and when Apple came up with the iPad we discovered that we really like using tablets to do just about everything. Every day there are more tablet and smartphone owners ready to visit your website. Is your website ready for mobile?

From @HubSpot creators of the term #Inbound-> A Super Simple Explanation of Inbound Marketing [INFOGRAPHIC]
Vey well explained, Inbound Marketing is pretty simple and customers expectations are changing.

Network security could be a concern-> Is Your Small Business Keeping Up With Mobile Technology?
With the rapid acceptance of smartphones and tablets in the work place, security should be a big concern. Get advice on how to setup your employees or associates with their mobile devices of choice so they can access and share data amongst themselves in a secured fashion.

SoLoMo: social-locationaware-mobile see how it works-> Retailers Guide to SoLoMo [infographic]
'Smartphone SoLoMo (social-locationaware-mobile) technology is disrupting retail by giving shoppers information and options on the go, transforming shoppers into smart shoppers.'

Hey! you can also do it with YWD-> B2B Business #Blogging - The Complete In-Depth Guide To Creating A Killer Blog
Blogging is the best way to control your brand message and a great way to reaffirm confidence and trust from your current and future clients. This post has great tips on how to maximize this opportunity.

Is you mobile website ready for Xmas?-> How Mobile Commerce Is Shaking Up the Retail Landscape
Expect more QR codes, shopping apps and mobile advertising in the coming weeks. This Mashable article has a great graph showing the use of smartphones vs tablets by the hour. Get a better idea when to target your customers.

Who really owns your internet properties?-> How Far Can You Trust the Internet?
This article really stood out for me - it is something I encounter everyday. Most business owners don't know who, how nor where their domain name is registered. Nor do they know where their website or email service is hosted. For most business owners this is something that happens and they are to technically illiterate to understand. Also while social networks are a great place to distribute your message they are privately owned. They have their own rules and regulations, which are changed as the principals see fit. Make sure you have control over your properties (domain name, website/blog and email), with all other social networks be aware that your work can be erased in a second.

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? Get started now, don't pay until you go live. www.yourwebdepartment.com

Switching from YWD to...YWD

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 18:20:00 +0000

One of the best aspects of YWD is that it's not simply a CMS (Content Management System). It's an extremely powerful website platform that allows people to create websites without programming. It's what enables a YWD consultant to design & build a website in 1 hour as the client watches - the new LiveBuild initiative.

But YWD's flexibility also comes in handy when a client decides to modify not just the content but also completely revamp the look and feel of their existing website.

Take www.smartrg.com for instance. Several months ago, they had an initial version of their website built for them in YWD. It looked quite alright but the company has since grown and decided to project a different image through their corporate website. They also wanted to be able to display products in a more interactive way, while having the ability to add more in the future.

Cloning the website

Because the changes were quite substantial, in this case it was easier to create a duplicate/clone of their current website and work on it. Cloning takes minutes and sometimes is useful because it allows the new website to be designed and then reviewed and modified by the stakeholders without affecting the old website in any way. And once it's ready it's just a matter of 'flipping the switch', which takes literally a few seconds.

No canned templates

While sharing the same tone as the old website, the new one has a clean and pleasant design. It features a distinctive font - YWD supports the hundreds of free fonts from the Google Web Fonts library, as well as Adobe TypeKit. The new look and feel has a minimalist feel that was created specifically for SmartRG; it reinforces the company's brand image. In fact, it's now inspiring SmartRG's own marketing team in the art direction that's being applied to their printed materials.

Integrating a catalog with ease

YWD offers a complete Catalog/E-commerce System that can be integrated into any website. It supports payments via PayPal and Moneris and includes many useful features. Although SmartRG is not selling online, the Catalog's interactive aspects - the ability to display image galleries, rollover effects, product templates and more - are a prefect match with SmarRG's needs.

On time and on budget

It was imperative for the client to have the new website live ready for an important industry event, while being able to make changes on their own at any time. Both goals were achieved.

Once again, YWD proved to be a complete and affordable solution for businesses.

Don't have a Your Web Department website yet? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

Set your FREE, free

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 10:52:00 +0000

This Wednesday I'm going to be a speaker at The Bauhub's annual gathering. The Bauhub is a collective of independent creative types spanning the globe. Basically, it's a virtual ad agency. With so many senior agency people now out on their own, spurning the hassles of big agency politics, The Bauhub is certainly an interesting small business model that takes advantage of digital connectivity. Who needs an office, we've been virtual for three years.

I'm going to be talking about my new favourite topic, Setting your Free, free. This is the premise that is the theory behind LiveBuild. All creative people provide free services to their customers. Sometimes it is in the form of a pitch to land the job. Sometimes it's stuff the customer asks for and you just do it because you don't want to, or are afraid to, indicate that the request is an extra cost service. Sometimes it's something you just do without the customer knowing about it because you have high standards and letting the small business owner centre and bold all their text on a web page will make your eyes bleed.

In any case, my theory is that while Free in-of-itself is not a bad thing, not acknowledging it and not making your customer aware of it is a bad thing. Now I don't mean that you should go, 'Hey, look what I did for free. And look at this, that was free. You didn't pay for that either. Oh, and this was free, too.' That would just make you look like an asshole, but I think we've all been in a position that we just got tired of providing value-added services for nothing and gone too far down the rabbit hole to explain to the customer what has happened so we just got bitter about doing the work.

The thing is this is not the customer's fault. It's yours. Many creative-types are just big weenies when it comes to confrontation and so contain their bile. The solution is to set your Free, free. In the case of LiveBuild we offer a prepackaged suite of value-add services packed into a one hour timeframe specifically for the small business. The customer understands what they are getting and it is clear that everything beyond that hour has a cost.

You can do this, too. Tell the customer that the first hour of the meeting is free and you will be providing XYZ services and everything else will have a budget attached to it. Usually, we pour our creative hearts out at the first meeting without indicating to the customer that they are getting the sum total of our vast experience and that they should actually care, which they don't. So now your unacknowledged genius is sending your psyche into a self-loathing death spiral.

Make sure the customer is aware of what you are going to accomplish in the first meeting. Make sure they know it is free. By indicating that it is free you have actually put a value on it. Wait, that doesn't make sense. Sure it does. Only something of value can be offered for free. If it does not have value then it does not have any value to the customer and they're just going to say, 'Wow, that was crap. Why did I hire you?'

See, it does make sense. And it especially makes sense for those of you who are faint-of-heart and can't get up the courage to manage the customer properly. We all know setting expectations at the start is important. Purposefully giving away something of value for free makes the customer value what you have given them and will make it easier to re-budget when there is a request for something out of scope.

Previous posts that might be of interest:

Why LiveBuild is FREE

Don't create a New Business, just create new terminology

LiveBuild For the Business Owner - We design & build your website for free and ready in 1hour
yourwebdepartment.com/LiveBuild

Week 80 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 07:54:00 +0000

This past week: It looks like all new tablets for 2012 have come out; Surface, the iPad mini and Google's new Nexus tablets are all worth looking at. The iPad mini is pricy, but is Apple made and has tons of apps. Surface has less apps available than Nexus, but Nexus outdoes the new iPad both in screen resolution and price. Lots of options to chose from for that Christmas present. This Christmas a lot of people are going to get a tablet, you better be ready and have a website ready for mobile and tablets. As it is mentioned in one of the tweets below, 20.7 billion dollars were spent shopping with mobile devices last year. It will be even more this holidays, and next year? How much, do you think?

Really, don't do these-> 7 Social Media Mistakes that Can Keep Your Content from Going Viral
This post concentrates on the misconceptions for social sharing; there are plenty of tools out there that schedule and track your shares. Read the data for your shares and build a schedule for posting them accordingly.

Been there > RT @SmallBizLady: Managing The Stress In Your Small Business
Running a small business requires that you fulfill many roles. At times this means you are overworked and stressed. Good tips in this post for managing anxiety and stress.

Be aware and check this list-> How Small Business Owners Become Cyber Victims
Just because your business is small doesn't mean they won't come after you. Every network and computer is constantly probing for vulnerabilities, make sure you have them covered.

Last year 20.7 billion spend shopping with mobile-> Why Small Businesses Need Mobile-Ready Sites for the Holidays
Be ready, as I have mentioned in the past it is very easy to get your website mobile ready; and not just with YWD.

All major SoMe networks mentioned!-> Beyond the Basics: 30 Fresh Social Media Tips for 2012
You are always trying to maximize your efforts doing social media, see how you can do it on the social network you are focusing on.

That's to bad, Win 8 looks very good-> Poll shows tepid interest in Windows 8
I know that Microsoft and Windows haven't been the talk since the infamous Vista. This time Windows 8 is the OS that is the OS that unifies all Windows run devices and their new metro design looks slick and tidy. Pity that reception has been luke warm, we certainly need more players in the OS sector. It can't just be all Apple and Google.

Great interview-> Scott Stratten talks business and social media
'With more than 135,000 followers on Twitter, GTA native Scott Stratten has been voted one of the top influencers on the site, putting him in the ranks of Ashton Kutcher, P Diddy and Justin Bieber'.

There you go here is how-> How to give your content marketing strategy a makeover
Don't waste your time with a half ass job; do it right and save time while you're at it.

Great tips!-> 21 Business Blogging Tips From the Pros
Check out what the pros have to share. I got a feeling you might get something new out of this post.

Looking for the right strategy-> Mobile Marketing - The Elephant In the Room for Marketers
Everyone knows that mobile is what most people are going to be using in the future. How to monetize that viewing time on mobile, we are still looking for the perfect way to advertise on this tiny screen.

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? Get started now, don't pay until you go live. www.yourwebdepartment.com

YWD's new Real Estate tool: who said real estate websites need to be boring?

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 11:25:00 +0000

YWD's latest addition lets you organize and list real estate properties. Interested people can request information about any property. Choose how you'd like to lay out the listings and the detailed view. Includes options to integrate Google Maps, YouTube videos, QR codes and more.

YWD's Real Estate tool is unique: unlike other real estate 'solutions' out there, it integrates seamlessly with the rest of your website. This way you can include lots of information about yourself, the community, news, a blog and much more - all using YWD's incredibly easy to use tools. It can be designed to match your own personal brand, enabling you to stand out from the crowd. It's perfect for real estate agents targeting an upscale clientele.
Outstanding interactive features

Properties can be organized into categories for quick access. They can contain sexy Lightbox-based image galleries that let prospective buyers browse through photos and even 'Like' or tweet about them. They can also embed or link to Google Maps and YouTube videos, and you can generate a QR (Quick Response) code image on the fly and insert it into your flyers or signs, allowing people to can scan with their mobile phone and be taken directly to the specific property page.

Developed for real estate professionals

The tool was designed with real estate professionals in mind - not programmers. It makes it very easy to manage properties; adding, editing, activating/de-activating them is a breeze. You can also create lists of related properties, and interested people can submit a 'Request for information' form that gets immediately emailed to you and is also stored in the YWD back-end.

Your website can be bilingual, and the Real Estate tool fully supports that.

Totally mobile-friendly

Chances are, a good portion of your audience will be accessing your website using a phone. The Real Estate tool can take advantage of the extensive support provided by YWD to mobile devices. If you have implemented a mobile-optimized version of your YWD website, it will automatically adjust the display to take into consideration the mobile device's small viewport.

Here are a few of the features of the Real Estate estate tool when viewed on a mobile:

Layout: Because the mobile screen is so narrow, the list view will always 'stack' the properties i.e. each one will be displayed on its own row, thus optimizing the display.
Images: Auto-resize on the fly to fit within the device's viewport.
Image galleries: If you have assigned an image gallery to a property, YWD will switch to a gesture-based style of gallery designed specifically for mobile. It allows people to use a swipe gesture to easily browse through the pictures in the gallery.

? Read a full case study on this new tool

Don't have a Your Web Department website yet? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

WordPress, the King of Bait-and-Switch

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 19:01:00 +0000

Recently, the subject of WordPress came up again. Hey, it's natural for people interested in building a website to ask about this very popular product. We were sent a document of how a marketing firm, that uses WordPress, pitched the benefits to someone who was also considering Your Web Department. I thought it would be instructive to show you my response.

Dear (name withheld to protect our asses),

Hi, let me reframe this response as a rebuttal. It will be easier for you to understand the differences between Your Web Department and WordPress. (NOTE: The marketing company's pitch is in red.)

We are not just marketers. We are also business owners and we are always chasing the clock to do the work and doing our own online marketing to bring new leads into the sales funnel. So we use the WordPress Content Management System because it is the only CMS framework that allows us to build, implement and maintain our marketing process properly. WordPress provides us with the best platform to support our clients in finding and keeping customers more successfully than any other platforms or web development technique.

This is a very narrow perspective when it comes to the success of a website. This view is entirely consultant-centric and not business owner-centric. These people don't know about other models so they promote that they are comfortable with, as do we all. Explanations will follow.

Here's why:
You can drive more qualified traffic, therefore more qualified leads - WordPress makes it easy for us to implement keyword strategies on the overall websites we maintain or on a per page basis. The blogging power of WordPress drives more qualified traffic because a client's web presence gets updated more frequently. This provides more unique fresh content for Google and other search engines to crawl, and qualifies you for more search results on more keyword terms as you can optimize each page individually based on your keyword strategy.

This is a very misleading headline. The 'can' qualifier protects the claimant from this unsubstantiated assertion. Yes it can drive more qualified traffic. This should have been followed by 'therefore more potential leads.' The success of a website is not driven solely by the use of WordPress. Far from it. But this is a great success-driven bit of copy.

Implementing keyword strategies are of no value if the content is not properly configured. This is not a function of the CMS. If WordPress is claiming that updating content is easier on their platform, well that is just not the case. It's a very obtuse system to manage. Your Web Department's content services are far easier to work with. Updates to Google's search engine penalizes keyword stuffing. It is really becoming more and more about the content.

As well, this statement is only true if your client is going to blog regularly and if your website is primarily a blogging website with some CMS. Frankly, I think WordPress does this very well and I would suggest going WP if the website is primarily a blog site. However, experience tells us that very few customers want a blog on their website, not because of its potential benefits but because they don't have the time, resources or inclination to maintain a blog. So now were are left with a CMS vs CMS battle and in this regard WP loses badly.

I would like to add that there seems to be a growing trend for people who are just blogging to work with Tumblr and even Blogger is making a comeback as the interface is easier to use that WordPress.

You can map the buying process to your website and make it easy to update and customize- WordPress is free and open (GNU General Public License) that makes it possible to build or customize a theme that maps your ideal buying process online. As the marketing strategy evolves, we can easily modify the content and create targeted landing pages and test new marketing strategies. All published content remains portable from one theme to another, thanks to the well-developed framework. Making it easy to change the looks of the site while keeping content integrity. This allows us to focus on developing marketing strategy to engage more visitors and get qualified leads.

Okay, this is the big fudging that WordPress proponents put forward. It's why I accuse WordPress proponents of using 'bait-and-switch' tactics. Also the writer is using very misleading terms which I will elucidate. While WordPress is free for anyone to download. Unless the business owner is doing it themself it is not free to install, setup or host (even if they are hosting it themselves there are going to be bandwidth charges.)

Let's review the steps to starting this great WordPress experience versus Your Web Department.

Your Web Department	WordPress
Login, start designing	Get a technically oriented person
	Download WordPress
	Install on server
	Configure MySQL
	Configure Apache
	Download plugins
	Install plugins
	Download themes
	Start up your copy of html editor

Right off the bat you can see it only takes seconds to get started on Your Web Department rather than an hour or two with a WordPress installation.

Now let's focus on this line, '...or customize a theme that maps your ideal buying process online.' What this means is that someone, not the business owner, is going to have to pull out a copy of some html editor and hack at the theme to come up with a design. YWD is a No-code system. A designer-level person can build, or change a YWD website.

Let's get this straight, WordPress requires a programmer to do anything of value. YWD does not. That is a huge difference in not just time, frustration but of cost. Gee, didn't they say that WP was free?

We maintain that ALL programmer-driven tools remain the intellectual property of the programmer. WordPress is always owned by the consultant whereas a YWD website is owned by the business owner. We represent continuity as employees/consultants come and go. No other system can make this claim. For this reason alone it makes sense to not go with WordPress.

The 'free' open source come-on of WordPress soon disappears into expensive build and consulting fees. As I wrote earlier, bait-and-switch.

You can integrate your web presence, engage and interact with your online audience - WordPress counts over 20,000+ free plug-ins and add-on that allows to simply connect social media and lead nurturing tools with the website. So we can publish to your web presence with little efforts. WordPress also makes it easy for you to invite your visitors to leave their comments about your content, therefore favoring interactions with your visitors. Studies show that people trust Blogs more than static websites alone. People leave comments, tend to share blog posts more, especially if you make it easy for them with social sharing. This interaction is essential and very good for backlink building which will make your site rank better on the long run. The more comments you get on your site, the more people feel conformable and trusts your business and so does Google.

20,000 plugins. Sounds like a lot, but not all the plugins work with all the themes. A lot of the plugins don't work exactly like the customer wants and are not reconfigurable. If you customize your theme too heavily you can break plugins.

'WordPress also makes it easier for you to invite your visitors to leave their comments about your content.' We do this too. We have several options available. However, we're assuming they meant blog content. I don't know of any customer who wants the general content commented on in a real-time way. No advantage to WordPress here, move along.

Oh, and 'backlinks', another thing that the new Google algorithm now penalizes you for.

You can improve your organic page rank, develop optimized fresh content marketing and ping the search engines - Content Management Systems like WordPress ping the search engines every time you post new content, inviting them to come back and crawl your site. To help your business develop more and more content, WordPress provides multilevel user access to tailor content marketing development work flow and a publishing schedule that fits your marketing tactics.

Your Web Department has the Google xml sitemap tool. Nothing to see here. Move along.

You can achieve measurable business goals - With the appropriate add-on to WordPress we can track our marketing actions and measure their success. Once the initial business goals are defined, we can rapidly adjust content, keywords or landing pages according to visitors online behavior and evolving business objectives.

This is a lot of words to describe Google Analytics. There is a lot of arm-waving in this document with very little substance.

You can dip your toe into the online marketing world cost effectively - A few years ago we used proprietary CMS tools or had websites built by web shops using their own systems. It meant that every time we wanted to change navigation, add content or new sections to the website, we had to go back to the developers and rebuild. With WordPress, we can make changes on the fly and depending on the complexity of the changes, we can do it right on the production server without setting up a new development environment. For our clients that want to start out slow and grow and evolve their online investment, using a customized WordPress theme is an incredibly affordable solution.

As I wrote earlier, Your Web Department takes our advantage one step further. Our No-code system means you start faster, much more flexibility than that described above with the added benefit you don't even need the people who put together your YWD site to manage the same changes. If it sounds like WordPress is a generation or two back on the technological curve, you're right.

Closing Thoughts: WordPress has allowed us to basically speed up the implementation of our process, so our customers can generate online leads as soon as possible.

To reiterate, if they think they are speedy on WordPress they haven't experienced Your Web Department.

LiveBuild For the Business Owner - We design & build your website for free and ready in 1hour
yourwebdepartment.com/LiveBuild

Week 79 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 11:42:00 +0000

This past week: Apple announced the release of the iPad mini, Microsoft released their own tablet, called Surface, and with it the much awaited Windows 8 and now we wait for Google's tablet release (Nexus). All this proves that consumers like the tablet idea as a computing platform, and the industry has responded by giving you choices for when you do your Christmas shopping. On the marketing front, the industry seems to agree that inbound marketing is the way of the future. Relying on Social Media, with all its aspect for communications is fast becoming an integral part of any business marketing plan; Google and Bing have even made social media links part of the algorithm that affects the page rank. At the centre of this strategic plan is your website/blog, the place where you the business owner controls the message and shows the world how good and knowledgeable is your business is in the industry that it is in.

A good approach-> Don't forget the blog! Using the Social Media Business Equation in the blogosphere
'The formula is as follows: 40% client interaction + 20% entertaining content + 20% informative content + 20% of conversion content = successful, well-rounded social media'. This, time and consistency will lead to business success.

Own your posts!-> Using Google+ Authorship to 'own' your content and boost search results
Now that your are blogging Google has a new way of recognizing who's the right author for any blogpost. Unfortunately there is a lot of people copying good articles and posting them as their own. With Google+ Authorship, Google recognizes you as the original author.

Do you use it, it s pretty handy -> Evernote For Blogs: Remember Everything.
Coming up with ideas for original good content can be a challenge and you never know when the idea is going to come. With Evernote you can write your ideas and blog posts on your phone or tablet and retrieve them later on your desktop computer.

Your biz website working for you-> Make Your Website a Clearly Marked Map for Better Lead Generation
At YWD we are always letting our customers know that if a website is not pulling its own weight a new approach must be considered. Just having a website because you have been told you need a website is not enough.

That's right don't limit your vision-> 4 Ways To Improve Your Conversion Rate Optimisation (Think Bigger)
Every little bit counts and never settle for seconds. Make sure your message is consistent across all your communication materials for starters.

A good idea-> Why Thank-You Emails Are the Untapped Gold Mine of Email Marketing
As I mentioned above, every little bit counts. Thank you or confirmation emails are great for further engaging your visitor.

Time and strategy-> 7 Most Important Online Marketing Tactics for Any Small Business
It is no secret that inbound marketing takes time and effort, but with a good plan you can execute it on your own. Don't forget that YWD is here to help.

Want to know what it is?-> What's So Special about Content Marketing?
'Content Marketing is creating or curating non-product content'be it informational, educational, entertaining, etc.'and publishing it to contact points with customers to get their attention, to focus on the topic around your solution, and pull them closer to learning more about you.'

You want everyone to know!-> Setting up email subscription to your blog - YWD makes it easy
Once you have your blog going you need people to read it, getting visitors to subscribe for updates is a great way to increase your readership. On this post I explain how to do this.

See! It is a good idea-> 14 Reasons Why Your Business Should Start A Blog
If you are still not convinced or you need to convince your team, this post has very good points to make your case.

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? Get started now, don't pay until you go live. www.yourwebdepartment.com

International websites

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 19:00:00 +0000

Although most of Your Web Department's websites are in English, the platform can be used to build and manage websites in any language. I'm sure I'm missing lots of people but here are a few examples.

Chinese

SciCan China

Portuguese (Brazil)

French

Spanish

German

SciCan Europe

Don't have a Your Web Department website yet? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

Setting up email subscription to your blog - YWD makes it easy

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 11:51:00 +0000

We often get requests from clients on how to set up an email subscription on a blog and as is typical with YWD, it is easy to do.

Benefits of email subscription
Blog subscription or email sign-up on a blog is a great way to collect email addresses of your fans/customers and a great tool for keeping them up-to-date.

How it works
Users submit their email address and then as your blog is updated, your customers or fans will get an email update in their inbox containing a summary of your blog. As the owner of the blog, you can determine how frequently your users get updated, whether it is each time you post, once a week or once a month. We recommend weekly updates.

What you need
For this simple solution you obviously need a YWD site, you also need to use an email marketing services such as MailChimp, Constant Contact or iContact. Here at YWD we are long time users of MailChimp which integrates with YWD forms. If you don't already have a MailChimp account, you will need to set one up.

Become a YWD client today. Get Started
Set up a MailChimp account for free. MailChimp Singup

Step 1 - Set up a mailing list with MailChimp (follow the how-to info on their site).

Create a MailChimp account.
Create a mailing list.
(Optional) Create a campaign and join it with a list.
Create an API Key. This is done under the account dropdown.
Get mailing list's unique ID. This is found under the list's settings icon.
(Optional) If using the 'send mailchimp welcome' - the welcome form for the list should be customized. If this value is set to 'yes' when someone subscribes using the form tool, mailchimp fires off the welcome email.

Step 2 - Access Forms Manager
Log into YWD admin (http://admin.yourwebdepartment.com/), select 'edit content', then select the 'tools' icon. Once you are in YWD Tools Manager, you need to select 'Forms Manager'.

Step 3 - Setup Form Properties
From the top navigation in Forms Manager, select the 'New Form' icon and complete all the required fields. At the bottom of the set up form select 'Yes' next to 'Integrate with MailChimp.

Step 4 - Integrating with MailChimp
Once you select, 'yes' to integrate with MailChimp you will be prompted to add your MailChimp API key and your mailing list unique ID (see Step 1). We also recommend that you say 'yes' to MailChimp's welcome email which you will need to set up in their system.

Don't forget to select save!

Step 5 - Create form fields
Select 'Add Form Element' icon from the top of the page. To create the fields to collect your subscriber's name, you need to select, 'text'. For the 'Form element ID', you need to use the same field tags and capitalization as MailChimp. Their default for email is EMAIL, first name is FNAME and last name is LNAME. You will need to create form elements for each element you want to collect. For blog subscription we recommend collecting email address, first name and last name.

Don't forget to publish the form (use the 'publish form' icon in the top navigation).

Step 6 - Add the form to your blog
We added the registration form into the right column of our blog so it is visible at all times. To add a form to the right column of your blog:

Go to the page you'd like to insert the form, click 'Add content' (icon in the top navigation) and then select 'Forms Manager' (from the middle column).
Select the form from the dropdown list.
Layout: select single column
Content block position: select 'Right col.'.

Step 7 - Define the frequency of your mailings
To set up how often your customers will receive emails from your blog, you need to set up a campaign in MailChimp. From the top nav in MailChimp select Campaign and then select, Create Your First Campaign and then select, 'RSS-Driven Campaign'. You will need to input your RSS Feed URL (simply select the RSS feed link on our site and copy the URL). And then select when you want it to send, as we mentioned earlier, we suggest you send weekly at the most.

You have now completed all the steps to create an email subscription to your blog using MailChimp. You still need to set up the look of your emails in MailChimp, but by now you will see that using MailChimp is super easy.

Get ready for all your new subscribers by making sure you have fresh content for them to read!

Don't have a Your Web Department website? Get started now, don't pay until you go live. www.yourwebdepartment.com

Android and iPhone suck and people who use them are stupid!

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 08:00:00 +0000

Do fanbois defend your business on online blogs and tweets? Probably not. Frankly I don't think I would want the constant insanity that is displayed when Android and iPhone adherents go after each other. Are these people passionate or just stupid? I think we would all like a bit of attention for our businesses but not that much. And heaven help the person who tries to inject some sane commentary. They will be slammed by anonymous assailants. But to passively accept ignominy is also wrong.

What are your strategies to getting some attention online? You might try blogging and using incendiary headlines like I did for this post. This is called blog baiting or nerd baiting. You write a headline that gets picked up and fanbois come and respond driving all sorts of traffic to your site. Of course the headline should be relevant to your business, which mine is not, but who cares, right? Traffic is everything, man.

No, traffic is not everything, relevant traffic is.

Daniel Lyons(pictured) loves baiting Apple fans and they arrive on cue to his idiotic posts like sharks to chum. Lyons' spew is beyond stupid, vacuous and dumb. I hope that gets traffic. Oh, I'm also for Gay marriages. That should get those redneck responses going. (Damn, I'm not using a pseudonym.) The thing to remember is that the blog baiters are just trying to get traffic to their sites. The more hits the more they get for the ads, but small businesses are not selling ad space we're trying to sell our services or products.

When you blog make sure the heading is interesting. If you're starting a discussion on a LinkedIn group make sure the title has zing. A factual lead is only of use if you're pitching the Perimeter Institute.

Momentum is really important. You can't get into a groove writing a couple of blog posts a year and responding to the odd discussion. You have to be blogging regularly and you have to be looking for discussions to participate in all the time. Carve out an hour or two a week to do this and most importantly have fun.

LiveBuild For the Business Owner - We design & build your website for free and ready in 1hour
yourwebdepartment.com/LiveBuild

Week 78 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 11:45:00 +0000

This past week: Major announcements coming from internet giants Apple, Google and Microsoft, but all happen next week. Most likely by the time of the announcements we will learn very little since expectation, hype and information leaks have already ruined the surprise. What it is interesting for the small business is the fact the all major social networks are now focusing on making it easier for businesses to have a branded presence on their systems. Since users alone do not bring money the attention has really shifted to help businesses to do social business better.

Good ones for Page Managers-> 12 Latest Facebook Page Features You Might Have Missed
If your managing Facebook Business Page(s) make sure you are using all the available features.

I need a team -> 10 Reasons Why B2B Companies Are Failing With Social Media
Great post, in our case we need more content creation. We have the sources but we need more writers.

YWD keeps on getting better -> A few upcoming features
At YWD we never stop, development is an ongoing thing for us. And we just launched the beta version of the Real State tool. A couple of clients are currently using it, after their feedback we will launch it to the public.

Shopping season is here! > RT @marketmastery: An 18-Tip Checklist to Boost Online Checkouts
Have an online store? Then this article is for you; nothing beats doing Christmas shopping from the comfort of your living room.

Want to make the next viral video?-> What Makes a Good B2B Online Video
How many times you heard 'Let's make a viral video!'. Well this post might help you do that.

Running a PPC campaign? -> How to Make the Most of a Limited AdWords Budget?
We all want to spend the least in attracting new customers, but the reality is that you need to spend money. This post will help you maximize every dollar.

Yes there is more to it than just write it-> 30 tips for promoting your blog content
That's right, by just posting on your blog doesn't mean people would flock to read what you have to say. You need to tell everybody, and the tools and avenues how to spread the message are out there.

Only 21% of website are mobile-> How to Get Your Mobile Strategy Ready for Multi-Screen Web
It is not a question that mobile computing is going to replace desktop computing. What it is happening is that we are using both; for example: I have a desktop computer, a smart phone and a tablet. I use all of them in different ways and on each device I expect a good experience while browsing for what I'm, looking for. So if your business is part of the 79% with no mobile website; what are you waiting for? It is so easy to setup!

Go ahead tell the writer it needs SEO-> 8 Ways SEO Should Influence Your Marketing Copywriting
I know, every writer wants creative freedom. On the internet if you want to have readers you need to optimize for search, otherwise your audience will be small. This does't mean that you need to cram every possible keyword in the copy, you only need a couple of them strategically placed and targeted.

They do make sense-> Using E-Signatures Can Save Your Business Money
Really, when are we going to stop using hand written signatures? Half of the time these are scanned and mailed or worse faxed over and over to the point they are barely legible. Let's move to the 21st century and have something al little more sophisticated to authenticate a document that just a scribble.

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? Get started now, don't pay until you go live. www.yourwebdepartment.com

Using Google+ Authorship to ?own? your content and boost search results

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 10:41:00 +0000

Ever wonder why some people's faces are showing up in search results?

For instance, if I search for that blog post I wrote a while ago, the result looks like this:

Stands out, doesn't it? It's more prominent and more credible (despite my silly face staring at nowhere, got to remember to change that)

How you can do it

1. Signing up for Google Authorship

If your email address (for example, mary@abcmary.com) on the same domain as your content (abcmary.com), you can follow the steps below. If not, you can still link your posts to your Google+ profile using a new feature within the Your Web Department platform (see item 2).

Assuming you already have a Google+ account, edit your profile and click the 'About' button. Scroll down to 'Contributor to' and click on it. Add the name and URL of the blog/website you'd like to link to your Google+ account. In my case, I added this blog i.e. blog.yourwebdepartment.com.

You need to have a good, recognizable headshot as your profile photo.

After a few days, you should receive an email from the 'Google Authorship Program' asking you for verification. It will look similar to the one on the right. Click on the link they provide to verify your email, and afetr a few more days, your search results should start displaying your photo and the link to your profile.

2. Adding a footer to your blog posts

Don't have an email address on the same domain as your content? With YWD you can now insert a footer at the bottom of all the author's posts, including your short bio and links to your personal pages on Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.

My own blog footer looks like this: (you can see it at the bottom of all my posts, including this one)

If you are a site Administrator, you can enter the footer in your User Information. Or you can do that for people who are just blog contributors - but do not have access to the website's back-end - by editing their user info in the Blogs Manager tool.

Make sure you add a text link to your Google+ profile page and that it includes your name. In my case, it reads 'Flavio Mester on Google+'.

Now, add this piece of text to the link to your Google+ page:

?rel=author

In my case, the link ends up looking like this:

http://plus.google.com/102094331981205544999?rel=author

That's it.

Don't have a Your Web Department website yet? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

Make sure your website isn't a flaming bag of poo

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Today I'm writing about the final frontier of websites, letting business owners see how their websites are built.

It's an amazing thing unintended consequences. And these don't have to be of the nasty variety. Sometimes they are things you didn't expect when you implemented a strategy. In this case I'm writing about LiveBuild. It's a few months old and it's clear it's a big hit for Your Web Department. People love the package of free services we have bundled as part of the half-hour pre-LiveBuild and the one hour LiveBuild session. But my favourite part is that it destroys another tenant in the church of website building, which is that the website build must remain in the hands of the coding clergy.

Let me backtrack for one moment. At the beginning of websites they were all coded in html and if you didn't know how to work in html then businesses were left at the mercy of the programmer or IT department to update the website. The first salvo against this orthodoxy was the CMS, or Content Management System. CMSs let people update websites themselves, but the first ones where insanely expensive. One quote floating around back in the late '90s was, 'Expect your website to cost about a half-million dollars.' Wow. Because I've always hated the way the technically savvy abused the non-technical, we were working on CMSs back in 1998.

Now CMSs are cheap, or free, or offered as a SaaS (Software as a Service) and every business should be able to update their own websites without much difficulty, though many, surprisingly, still don't. So the final frontier was destroying the BlackBox of the site build. The design process is pretty transparent these days but someone still takes the pile of Photoshop illustrations and returns with a bunch of code you know nothing about and mysteriously, there is your website.

Templates don't solve the BlackBox problem, either. They don't reveal the mystery of the website build and worse, they completely remove the design process. You're stuck staring at the least worse template which is begging you to insert content you don't have.

LiveBuild is totally different. The business owner sees their website being built from scratch. They get to pick from a buffet of options and see the results, instantly. This process is exciting for both the customer and the LiveBuild assistant. It's really energizing. True, the client still doesn't get to muck with or see the underlying code, but then again, people don't have to know how a car works to drive one.

It's has been a wonderful revelation how people have reacted to LiveBuild. The fact that they see the website built and not just put on their doorstep as someone rings the door bell and runs away as if it were a bag of flaming poo is a great feeling. Another side benefit is the the client gets trained in the context of their own website; not just how to add content but also how to make design changes.

The next thing to conquer are all those stupid domain services whose interfaces are all different!!

LiveBuild For the Business Owner - We design & build your website for free and ready in 1hour
yourwebdepartment.com/LiveBuild

Week 77 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 10:02:00 +0000

This past week: Nothing really big to talk about on the news front. All articles and posts I read were about the same topic: Small Businesses and how to take advantage of online marketing. YWD is still a Small Business and like your small business we are trying to make the most of what is out there. Our LiveBuild campaign is getting results and meeting my expectations (learn more about LiveBuild), I find Google PPC offering is still miles ahead of what Facebook offers, no a real surprise there since Google has been doing it for many years now. I still feel Facebook could get an advantage over Google when it comes to ads in the future. Facebook has a lot more data from their members than Google will ever have; this alone could be ultimate very important for ad targeting. Never mind age or gender targeting it could also get down to what individuals need or/and want and show only those ads. Here are this week's picks.

Interesting indeed! 81% FB users outside the US & Canada-> Facebook: Over 1 Billion Served Interesting Stats
Brian Solis is always interesting to read, he has great insights and his analysis are right on the money. In this article he goes through all statistical data from Facebook and shows what really means to have 1 billion members on the network.

Great new features on your fav social network-> This Week in Social Media
Good list of what's new on the different social networks, take a look at what you might be missing.

How to do it -> Take Advantage of the New LinkedIn Profile Layout
Just like Twitter has done it with the new Header Image, LinkedIn has followed suite and became the latest social network in which you can further customize the look and branding for your company page. I know LinkedIn business pages do not generate a ton of leads nor traffic to your website, but it is a good idea to show your best at any giving time. Therefore, if only 10 people land on your business page make sure they get a good impression. Every little bit counts!

One of my fav apps, see how they do it-> How Shazam Is Leading The #Mobile Revolution
I use Shazam all the time, no more asking 'What's this song?'. Any time you hear a song playing, simply activate Shazam on your phone and the app will tell you the name of the song and where to buy it. Now they are taking it a step further and they are making it part of TV ads, pretty interesting way of using the second screen while watching TV.

Advertizing amongst your friends-> Facebook Now Allowing Users to Advertise Themselves on Facebook
No, this doesn't mean Facebook is now a paid service, for the most part you will never use this feature and it could be that no one uses it ever. But, I can see the potential of someone wanting to make sure a post announcing a new baby or an engagement is seen by all of his/her followers.

Interesting point-> Is Facebook a Social Network or an Advertising Network?
Interesting idea; well it started as a social only network. Then they needed to generate money to maintain the service we all seems to like so much and the only way to generate money is through ads. So expect more ads in the future, but on the plus side those ads are going to be about things you are interested in.

Change is hard doesn't have to be tho-> How to Painlessly Transition Your Company to Inbound Marketing
This is something we struggle with as team as well. We have some members that try to apply traditional marketing methods to our social feeds, and obviously they show frustration when they don't see results ($$$). Adopting Inbound marketing means a change to your mind set and requires embracing the culture of sharing and spreading good will.

Very good idea and easy to do-> Deployment SEO Strategy and Checklist
Just follow the check list and you are on your way to getting your website SEO'd. Now the fun starts.

How are you using SoMe? -> New Research: Companies Not Using Social To Reach Full Potential
The more involved I get on social media the more I want to get a team to man all the feeds we have. Patience and dedication and you will be able to get to the elusive 100%.

So true > RT @robertomazzoni: 20 Stats That Explain Why Marketers Still Struggle to Measure Social Media ROI [Data]:
I'm sure you will relate to some of them.

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? Get started now, don't pay until you go live. www.yourwebdepartment.com

A few upcoming features

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 14:25:00 +0000

The Web is always evolving, isn't it? So are we at Your Web Department. Whether you're a business owner or a designer, here are just a few things we're busy working on right now, which we'll be releasing over the next days.

New Real Estate tool

Are you a real estate broker or do you design websites for them? This tool will let you organize and list real estate properties, so interested people can request information about any property. Choose how you'd like to lay out the listings and the individual property view. Includes options to integrate Google Maps, YouTube videos, QR codes and more. Extensive formatting capabilities and seamless and robust support for mobile devices.

Revamped Assets Uploader

A new uploader for clients using Firefox, Safari or Chrome which won't require the Flash plugin anymore. Will also include drag-and-drop functionality and other benefits. Long overdue, we know.

Author info for blogs

Do you write your own blog posts on a Your Web Department website? You'll be able to freely edit and display your personal information, which will then appear automatically as a footer on all your posts. It can include links to your own Google+, Facebook, Twitter pages, for instance.

New Vimeo tool

Embed a playable Vimeo video into any page, using Vimeo's configuration options. Similar to our YouTube tool but specifically designed for the popular - and sleek - Vimeo player.

As you can see, we're constantly incorporating new features into the YWD platform. Our updates are driven primarily from the feedback we get from our clients, but even if you're not one of them yet please feel free to use this space to make suggestions - we always welcome them!

Don't have a Your Web Department website yet? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

Humans 1. Templates 0. Business Owner wins!

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 11:51:00 +0000

It's been a few months into our brand new LiveBuild program, i.e. we will build your website live, with you, using screen-sharing over the Internet in one hour for free. The score so far: Humans 1, Templates 0.

There are an awful lot of services that will let you build your own templates website, but what we have found with the overwhelmingly positive response to LiveBuild is that people, especially small business owners, really don't want to build a website themselves. No amount of poking, prodding, leading, form filling can get most people over the anxiety of trying to pull the pieces together to build a website.

I've often joked that if you're the kind of person whose microwave oven is still flashing 12:00, how are you going build a website?

Many of our customers don't know what content they need. They often don't have good content to start with. They don't know how best to structure it. They don't know what are website best practices. They can't write a headline. They don't know about SEO, or social media. They can have the sexiest drag and drop do-it-yourself interface, it does not matter.

There is only one way to solve the above challenges and that is with human intervention. A person can advise you, give you choices, tell you the implications of your choices. A person can write. A person can crop a picture. A person can tell you how to optimize your images for the web. WHY you should optimize them. Why you need a properly formatted H1 heading.

People want a human component but don't want to pay thousands of dollars in design fees but still want something more than a useless template, and that is what LiveBuild is all about. We've packaged one hour's worth of our most valuable services and offer it for free.

One last bit that we've learned doing LiveBuilds. People LOVE the participatory aspect of it. There is absolutely no comparison with the experience of working through problems live and coming up with mutually agreed to solutions compared with the standard method of website delivery.

In the standard method, while there is back and forth when it comes to the design process, few customers are involved in the build process. With the old way, the designer or programmer goes away, bakes the cake and returns with the finished product. With LiveBuild, we build the cake together. It's awesome. And I'm not exaggerating.

YWD does not leave you alone once we finish your website, you can ask questions and requests to our support team or visit our online help: YWD Help (http://help.ywd.ca). Don't worry if you have nothing to ask us; we keep in touch with you via our weekly newsletter with tips and new features added to the system.

You can follow us on Facebook (http://facebook.com/yourwebdepartment) or on twitter.com/ywd (http://twitter.com/ywd) for the latest news related to small businesses doing business online.

And finally here (http://blog.yourwebdepartment.com) our blog.

LiveBuild For the Business Owner - We design & build your website for free and ready in 1hour
yourwebdepartment.com/LiveBuild

Week 76 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 10:55:00 +0000

This past week: It looks like Big Bird might lose her job depending on which the US election goes. On the other hand, the economy seems to be on the rebound here in Canada and south of the border as well. This means that it is a good time for you to concentrate on your online business, you don't want to disappoint all those people with their new shinny iPhone 5 with no mobile version of your website. We are also entering the winter holidays season and you know December is a short month for Business in general so you really have 9 weeks left of the year to crank out all the marketing and promotion for you business and the easiest place to do it is still the World Wide Web.

.@PaulChato latest on #Mobile-> Just because you're Arlene Dickinson doesn't mean you can ignore website trends
Unfortunately Arlene is not the only Canadian celebrity who down plays the importance of a mobile website. Justin Trudeau just announced his bid for the Liberal party leadership with a brand new website (Justin.ca), guess what? Is not mobile friendly either.

Are you scared?-> Business Owners - Stop Being Scared of Social Media
Social Media isn't something to be scared of, like everything else, once you learn what it is and how it works you will be surprised how easy it is to manage. All fear will disappear and who knows; you might get to enjoy it like I do.

Definitely don't do any of these-> 5 Most Frustrating Things That Irritate Your Visitors
The one that bugs me the most is music. Even if you are a musician, please do not put your music on auto play. You don't know what kind of speakers your visitor is going to have, most likely they are going to be crap and your great tune is going to sound awful.

Good guide to get you started-> Too Many Small Businesses Still Ignore Social Media
Good points and great foundation to start your social media campaign.

Easy, connect the dots-> A Step-by-Step Guide to Flawless On-Page SEO [Free Template]
Great guide, easy to implement and no reason to not do it.

Good list! lost of great info!-> 20 LinkedIn Tips for B2B Social Media Success
LinkedIn the oldest social network and it keeps on growing. Today it is more than just a place to network for a job, it is also a great place to get business leads.

Learn and adapt-> Why Do Customers Use Social Networks for Customer Service? Because They Can...
It is so easy to rave or complain about a service or product on social media and what if the person doing the talking has a huge following?! You better be listening to what people are saying about you so you can act quickly to solve problems and thank the people who make positive reviews.

Having a hard time coming with content?-> 7 Rules For Writing Awesome Content
In the world of inbound marketing, content creation is king. Creating quality content is one of the biggest challenges - this article has great ideas to get your inspiration going.

All good but you need good pictures-> 10 Creative Ways to Use Instagram for Business
The best you can hope for using Instagram for you business is brand recognition. There is no linking back to your website nor a landing page. But, if your pictures are good enough to be liked you could potentially get a big following.

Running a PPC campaign? Check this out-> 10 Not So Obvious Tips for a Successful PPC Campaign
If you have run PPC campaigns in the past and they weren't that successful, or your are thinking on starting one, read this article. Pay per click campaigns do work, but you need to stay on top of them.

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? Get started now, don't pay until you go live. www.yourwebdepartment.com

A few simple things you can do in order to be found by Google - Part IV

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 11:30:00 +0000

Previously we discussed how you can increase your ranking by tweaking your page properties, your website structure and link titles. Now we're going to share a few best practices regarding images.

Image filenames

Keywords are very important for your regular text, and the same is true for the names of your images. Using cryptic filenames for a file like 'BSG09087-X9.jpg' won't really help you much, as it's unlikely anyone will be looking for that (unless they're searching for that specific combination of characters as in a product name, of course).

For instance, naming that same image 'Bowman-Cement-Oakville.jpg' would be more useful.

Note: Google also suggests that you organize your image files under one physical folder of your website. Luckily, the Your Web Department CMS already takes care of that for you by keeping the files in all categories of your website's Assets Manager within the same folder, so you don;t need to worry about it.

Using 'Alt' text

When a search engine stumbles upon an image on your website, it doesn't really 'know' what it is just by 'looking' at it (well, at least not yet). So it can be very helpful if you describe it. Whenever you insert an image into a Word Processor content block in Your Web Department, you have the ability to type in a short 'Alternative text' to tell what that image is about. YWD will insert that into the source code for you.

It's that easy.

File sizes

You've probably visited websites with gigantic images that take a while to load and got frustrated for waiting. Search engines don't like that either. In any case, you want to optimize your images for the web. YWD's online Help has some very useful tips on using images.

Using relevant images

Like in all other aspects of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), don't 'stuff'. The images you include should be relevant and related to the rest of the content on the page. Spamming your own content with useless pictures won't help you at all. In fact, not only will that make you look bad in the eyes of your human audience; it can also be seen negatively by the 'eyes' of the search engines.

Don't have a Your Web Department website yet? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

Just because you?re Arlene Dickinson doesn?t mean you can ignore website trends

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 08:00:00 +0000

Okay, this post is going to seem a little harsh. Famous people are easy targets, but it's a cautionary tale.

I am writing about Venture Communications, Dragon Den's Arlene Dikinson's company. I have been moved to write this because of the disconnect between the brand of this marketing company and how they are presenting themselves.

Venture Communications IS Arlene Dikinson. She is their celebrity spokesperson. Shouldn't we all be so lucky, BUT that also puts pressure on a company such as VC to make sure that it is leading the pack and not following it.

I saw Arlene speak at a wonderful event at the Glenn Gould Theatre, in Toronto last Thursday. She was charming. A great role model. I thought I would check the Venture Communications website on my smartphone. To my surprise, it did not have a mobile version. Does anyone else think that's bad for a company that is promoting itself as an expert in providing marketing experience? I asked Arlene about this after the presentation and she acknowledged that she knew about it and said, 'We're working on it.'

Frankly, this should have been done two years ago. Why would anyone entrust Venture Communications with their mobile property if they weren't walking the walk? I wouldn't. We've provided our customers with mobile tools now for about three years. We had to. It's what our clients expected from us.

Then there is the issue of the big honkin' Flash animation on the home page, which is actually very nicely done, but is not tablet or smartphone friendly. On my phone, the home page had this huge white gap. Bad. Bad. Bad.

The site is filled with feet and inch marks and not proper apostrophes and quote marks. That always bugs me, as an old type-guy. For body copy on a website, who cares, but for headlines, you need to format your type properly. So this tells me they don't care about type.

Arlene's blog is a separate site that overwrites the VC site rather than birthing a new page. I think that's bad form, and her last post was from March! Oh my, that's just awful. Get a ghost writer, Arlene.

Hey, it looks like they do good work and that's what really what counts. Arlene's brand will overcome these legitimate mistakes until the new site is completed. She'll survive, but I think that when you have a reputation and you are really OUT THERE you have to work harder to maintain your brand status. You can't just pay lip-service to your brand values.

I wonder if VC is listening to the social web, if they are using Google Alerts or listening on Twitter for news about themselves, good or bad? I can only hope.

Week 75 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 10:37:00 +0000

This past week: RIM showed off their BlackBerry 10 phone, still to be released first quarter of 2013. RIM also had encouraging revenue news although they are still losing money by the millions. As a Canadian I have to cheer for RIM, they did innovate in the past and I really hope they can stay in business. You and I, are also in the business of staying in business; and today's tweets list has great ideas on how to do successful business online.

The much loved Infographics-> 5 Tips to Creating an Infographic People Actually Want to Read
The very popular Infographics; I'm sure you have had ideas of your own for infographic topics. This post will help you to make the infogrpichs you and your audience want.

It makes sense to have a Business FB page-> 50% Consumers Value a Brand's Facebook Page More Than Its Website
Of corse they do, they are already there and they get all of the latest news and deals right in their news feed.

Good points! -> Hashtag Basics: How They Work - Why They Fail
Hashtags are a great way to reach outside your followers, this article shows best practice using them. It is so easy to abuse them.

So easy to add it to your pages in YWD-> How the Google +1 Button Affects your Search Results
Google is making their social network a major part of your website SEO. Make sure you have a Google + account and more importantly make sure your business has a Google + page.

The visual influence-> 3 Reasons Your Blog Needs to Get More Visual
Us humans react well to imagery, so it is not a surprise that most social networks try to include images from a blog post (any webpage for that matter) when it is shared. Make sure you have good looking pictures for your audience to share along with the link to your post.

Good advice on mobile websites-> Mobile Advice [Video]
Mobile is here and most business websites are not optimized for mobile browsing. If you are pat of the majority this can work against you. Getting your website mobile ready is easy, and with YWD it is even easier. Take a look: YWD Mobile

So this is how you do it-> Marketer's Guide to Nailing the Timing & Frequency of Social Media Updates
When is too much, or too little? How to space them out? Good post, it answer all these questions.

It is true that G+ offers great tools for businesses-> Get on Google Plus or get left behind
Google+ is not just about sharing posts and pictures. Hangouts and Photo editor are just a couple of tools from a extensive catalog available for any business owner. You should really take a good look at all you can do with a Google + account.

I've used number 3 and 5 looks for FF-> 6 Tips to Get Retweeted More Often
If you have a twitter account then you know what is like to get reTweeted. Learn how to experience that feeling more often.

Good content goes a long way -> Pinterest: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
As I mentioned above, good pictures gets a lot of attention.

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? Get started now, don't pay until you go live. www.yourwebdepartment.com

Launching an image gallery with style

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 16:05:00 +0000

We have introduced a new option for the 'Lightbox, launched by initial image' image gallery style that allows you to launch a lightbox gallery using an image that's not on the gallery itself.

Sounds confusing? Then go to this page of our Help to see an example. The initial image is part of the gallery internally, but when you click on it, the image itself doesn't appear on the Lightbox -- only the other images.

This way you can have an image that's used simply to launch the lightbox; it can be completely different from the other images that make up the gallery. The option is selected in the content block. By default, the initial image is included in the gallery, but you can now change that if you want.

Don't have a Your Web Department website yet? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

It's now easy to insert YouTube videos directly into your text

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 17:15:00 +0000

Posting your videos on YouTube and then inserting them into your website is great: It's free, fast, works on all devices and YouTube is accepted trusted and popular.

More importantly, it can be a powerful traffic in generating traffic for a business website. Nad if you're a business owner, you'll appreciate the fact that you don't need to know any coding, let alone hire a programmer to insert any YouTube video into your website.

Doing it the YWD way: no coding required

The Insert/Edit Video button on the Word Processor toolbar has been revamped in order to enable the latest embedding techniques provided by YouTube.

You can now simply click the video's Share button for any video on the YouTube website...

...then click the Insert/Edit Video on our editor and paste it:

In addition, you can now use the same method to insert YouTube videos into other tools that use the editor - e.g. a blog post, a slide in the Content Slider, a news item in the News Manager. This new method generates code that's HTML5-compliant and as a result embedded videos will automatically resize themselves to fit within the viewport of mobile devices.

Mobile Advice [Video]

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 14:22:00 +0000

Why business need to jump on the Mobile bandwagon?
Well, for starters mobile websites impact sales:

70% of mobile users have compared products prices on their phones
65% have read product reviews on their phones
50% of mobile searches lead to purchase

Having a mobile version of your website ensures your customers have an experience that is optimal for the device they are using. It means that your website is formatted for a smaller screen and ideally takes advantage of the touch screen technology (touch to call for example) and geolocation tools that quickly take users to tools like Google Maps. This kind of user experience just may be the differentiating factor that leads a potential customer to call, or stop in to, your business vs. your competition's.

95% of smartphone users have searched for local information
61% of users call a business after searching and 59% visit the location
90% of these people act within 24 hours

With YWD mobile websites are part of our core package - that means you can go in and set up the mobile version of your website for no additional cost.

Watch our how-to set up mobile video.

We think that mobile is so important to small and mid sized businesses that it is something we regularly blog about. Check out the mobile category of the YWD blog for tips and tricks on how best to use the features and see examples of how other YWD clients are using mobile.

We can even set up your mobile site for you. For a flat fee of $500.00 we will:

Create a page banner for your website specifically for mobile
Assessment of, which key pages (plus the Home page) are to be used for mobile. We will make sure they are mobile-friendly
Create mobile-friendly versions of up to 2 forms
Add your phone number for one-click call

*Additional work can be discussed. Request our Mobile for $500.00 package.

Don't have a Your Web Department website? Sign up now or try it for free at www.yourwebdepartment.com

Is your business as easy to explain as the Bernoulli principle

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 10:28:00 +0000

I'd like to apologize ahead of time. I'm going to go science nerd on you. Recently, I had an experience at my local bank that reminded me of the miracle that is science. My issue is with these smartphones that have become a true realization of Star Trek proportions science fiction.

Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of science in these damn devices but nothing that is as simply observable or enjoyable as, let's say, the Bernoulli principle. What is that, a new Italian coffee process? No, the Bernoulli principle states that when a fluid moves faster it is accompanied by a decrease in pressure. What does this have to do with anything?

At the aforementioned bank, I was talking with the teller when she said that she was afraid of flying. I told her that this was usually because people don't understand how a big hunk of metal can stay in the air. It was because of the Bernoulli principle I said. To illustrate I took a bank slip and asked her what would happen if I blew down on the paper from above. She said it would get pushed down. I blew over the paper and it flapped up. This blew her and several people in line away. They had never seen anything like that. I explained that the airfoil on the plane's wing caused the air on top to move faster creating low pressure and therefore the slower moving higher pressure air below the wing caused lift. More appreciative ooos and ahs.

This is simple science that is elegant and magical and we should all know this stuff. Instead we feel we have somehow conquered science. The smartphone in our hand is proof of that. We can all be Captain Kirks. But the more we are imprisoned by the increased functionality of these devices the less capable we are of appreciating science that went into it, which is tragic in my estimation.

As business owners we are delivering amazing services often with technology that we have created ourselves yet I think the public is less and less appreciative of it. Like the smartphone, the less people can observe the process of your product the service the less they understand what we are doing for them. If they ask just tell them you use the Bernoulli principle.

Week 74 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 13:08:00 +0000

This past week: So people are lining up to get their hands on an iPhone 5 and apparently the new Apple map app is terrible. None of this would affect your business, but Mobile is here to stay therefore if you don't have a mobile version for your business website now is the time to give it some serious thought. The are too many opportunities for businesses to dismiss mobile; local search and mobile payment are just a couple of a long list of reasons, and it is only going to be better. Moving along, I read a lot about Social Media and SEO and how well they work together - today's tweet list reflects that.

Another product of LiveBuild on YWD-> Opera IS - Opera Tours! Opera Courses!
We launched a few weeks ago (LiveBuild) and it has proved to be very popular. This is another example of a website done through the LiveBuild process: Learn more about LiveBuild

Look! you can make Pinterest work for you-> The Single Pinterest Pin That Launched a Company
I have mentioned before the benefits of using Pinterest for referral traffic, this an example of a business's success story. Who knows, the next success story could be yours.

Done it before? good map! -> How to Create Content Maps for Planning Your Website's Content
This is a great template to follow, and we highly recommend to plan and map out the content of your website before implementing it.

Well it should be different, and YWD has it covered-> Mobile SEO - Just How Different Is It?
Google is now accepting xml site maps for the mobile version of your website. Both versions should have different content - when a visitor does a search on their mobile device they should only get results that are suitable for viewing on a mobile devise.

A few simple things you can do in order to be found by Google - Part III
Link Titles, newly introduce to YWD, another example of how hard we work to give your business website all the tools possible for you to succeed online.

Good advice for the hardcore user-> Rock Your #SEO with Structured Social Sharing
A good read, and as I mention in the tweet it is targeted to the seasoned user.

Be careful how you those email addresses-> How Marketers Can Avoid Those Dreaded Email Spam Traps
Email marketing is on the way up and you should take advantage of the many email marketing services out there. But what you should never do is to buy email lists, the risks are high and today it is very easy to build an email list of people who really want to hear from you.

RT @ywdtips: Do you have 3rd party code that needs to be inserted into a specific position of your page?
We know Google analytics is not the only tracking tool available, we are seeing a increasing number of companies wanting to add their own tracking code. Now you can do that with YWD.

Getting what SoME really is and does-> Social Media Myths that are Preventing You from Succeeding
This is a great article, if you have any doubts about social media, this post will put your doubts to rest.

Mobile to important to be ignore by SMBs-> How Mobile Marketing Trumps the Web http://ow.ly/dRUqd
Good article, it proves my point on mobile made in the introductory paragraph above.

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? Get started now, don't pay until you go live. www.yourwebdepartment.com

Do you have 3rd party code that needs to be inserted into a specific position?

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 16:30:00 +0000

The improvements we're constantly making to the YWD platform are driven primarily by the feedback we get from our customers, especially small business owners. They asked for this feature, and it made sense. So we made it happen.

Although our Google Analytics tool allows you to add the code required by Google so it can start tracking your website and you can get statistics, there are many other 3rd party tools out there - other website tracking tools for instance - that may require that you insert their JavaScript code into a specific area of your page source.

Previously there was no option to do that in YWD - even if you had the Embed Code tool as part of your package - because an Embed Code block is still a regular content block; it can't be placed into the section of your pages, for instance.

But you can now utilize the YWD Designer / Tools / Advanced / section script and the YWD Designer / Tools / Advanced / Closing tag options to do just that. They provide the ability to insert a small amount of code specifically into the area or just before the closing tag of all the pages of your website.

Don't have a Your Web Department website yet? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

A few simple things you can do in order to be found by Google - Part III

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 21:15:00 +0000

When you link content to another page of your website, it can be beneficial for you if the search engine that's crawling your content has some descriptive information about the link itself. Every link that you create can have a 'Title' attribute, and you can use it to your advantage.

Enter keyword(s) that relate to the page where you'll be linking to, and they'll be utilized by the search engine. In addition, the text that you enter there will be displayed by most browsers as a tooltip, which appears shortly after people mouse over the link.

It sounds geeky than it is. Your Web Department now lets you enter an optional Title for any link; you can simply type it there in the 'Insert/Edit Link' dialog form of our Word Processor. No programming required, of course.

Easy, no?

Don't have a Your Web Department website yet? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

The new iPhone Shuffle (one day)

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 08:00:00 +0000

Wow, Apple sure got a lot of meh from the press on the introduction of the iPhone 5. They've only sold out of the first run already. Boy, I'll bet all small business owners would like to have that problem.

It illustrates the problem we all have. How much do we invest in innovation? How long do we try to monetize it before rolling out the next big thing? (i.e. squeeze it for every penny). How many of you are selling stuff that's so old that it should have been shot but you're afraid to touch a 'successful' formula? How many of you just don't have the R+D cash to make those improvements? Heck, even with bags of cash it took Apple 13 years to upgrade their shitty earbud headphones. (The new EarPods are insanely good, btw.)

Getting back to the iPhone, what if you have a product or service that can only stand so much improvement? I mean, a phone can only be so big. It needs to do only a few things well. Yeah, smartphones are becoming the 'computer in your pocket' but let's not get insane about it. The smart phones are so much better than the old feature phones they replaced for the simple reason that you can actually get to most of the features without memorizing arcane keyboard shortcuts or carrying the manual around with you.

Frankly, I think Apple's next innovation for the iPhone will be to add a model akin to the iPod Shuffle that works with a simple iPod interface and Siri command. No screen. Only Apple would have the guts to come out with a phone with no apps. The inventor of phone apps brings out a phone with no apps. What would the press think about that?

Sometimes innovation is about bringing out something that does less. Less is always easier on the customer. I think less is a great feature.

Week 73 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 10:58:00 +0000

This past week: The iPhone 5 is finally out, now we can put to rest all the hype and rumours around it. The world of business is still moving forward even though we seem to be in this constant global economic crisis (similar to Orson Welles 1984) and all this doesn't change the fact that you still need to promote your business. Thankfully the way to promote your product is changing, and for the better. In the near future your product will be only advertised to the person, who is interested in it; not only that, but your client will make the purchase right there on whatever device he/she is holding on their hand. That's right the future for the small business is bright, and with that thought I leave you with this week's collections of tweets.

The dilemma -> Replicate or re-design? How do you take a magazine online?
It is a real dilemma for publishers, the tablet market is only growing and it is very different medium than paper and ink. I guess the decision will be based on cost and revenue.

Small business owners -> Non-scientific survey: 7 out of 10 hate their websites
Paul Chato in his blunt style has a good point. The good news is that it is not that hard to start loving your website again.

Doing email campaigns?-> Five tips for building stronger B2B email relationships
Now that we have rules and good practices for email marketing, this is proving to be a very effective way to maintain a good relationship with your customers. There is always the potential to market new offerings. This article has great points on how to do this.

Often ignored but a good opportunity for re-engagement-> How to have a useful 404 (Page not Found) page
The contents of your business website needs to be fresh and up-to-date. Unfortunately, during this process pages and/or files might cease to exist therefore your visitor lands on a 404 not found page. Well this is the perfect opportunity to direct the visitor to what they might be looking for, or to show them the new offering. Don't leave the default error message, customize it to your benefit.

Nowadays #socialmedia and #SEO work together-> 10 Ways To Improve Your SEO With Social Media
This is so true and it is great for the business owner. Now you don't have to rely so much on SEO agencies, using social media yourself you can influence your own SEO.

These list are always fun-> The 50 Most Creative Brand Pages On Facebook
Purely inspirational, see what fun things you can do with your Facebook business page.

Check it out with YWD you can do all of these-> How Auditing Your Websites SEO Can Increase Your Rankings
SEO is not something you do once and leave it there. Just like the content of your website that needs to needs to change, the optimization content/tags needs be modified as well. At YWD you can easily keep your optimization efforts up-to-date: Learn more

All geared to increase traffic-> Social Media is So Much More Than Likes and Followers
As mentioned above, social media is becoming a major part on your website's SEO. Don't dismiss it.

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? Get started now, don't pay until you go live. www.yourwebdepartment.com

How to avoid being spammed by your own forms

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 12:21:00 +0000

Online forms are an essential method for your audience to get get in touch with you through your business website. You can easily create and manage them using Your Web Department's Forms Manager tool. However, your forms can also be a way in which you - the business owner - ends up becoming the target of unsolicited emails, also known as spam.

Making sure it's a human on the other side

Obviously spammers don't personally navigate through websites filling out forms. They utilize computer programs - known as spambots - that 'crawl' millions of websites, identify their forms, then fill out the information and submit them automatically, inserting their own cheesy ads in the process.

Therefore, the best defense against that is to make sure whoever is filling out the form is actually a person, not some clever software. But at the same time, you don't want to annoy your audience.

Anti-spam options

YWD provides two different options to address that. While there's no 100% solution, by utilizing them you can greatly minimize the problem and almost never be spammed by your own forms again.

Low Protection spam filter
This option uses a technique that employs a hidden field in the form, which the spambot fill try to fill out, whereas an actual person won't, since they can't even see. Upon submission, if the hidden field is filled out, YWD then knows it can only be spam and doesn't submit the form. This technique is not as stringent as 'Captcha' - described blow - but is completely inconspicuous. I'd suggest that you try that first, and unless you're actually being bombarded with spam, do not use Captcha.
High protection spam filter (Captcha)
This feature generates an image on the fly containing a random combination of characters that requires form submitter to match before sending the form. This cuts down on the number of false responses generated by spambots. If the form is generating lots of spam, you may consider using it. Please note that some visitors are annoyed by it.

You specify which option(s) you'd like to use while editing the form properties:

Don't have a Your Web Department website? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

Adding background images to slides

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 15:50:00 +0000

Your Web Department's Content Slider tool is quite versatile. It allows you to create simple 'presentations' containing multiple Word Processor 'slides' displayed within the same area of the page. You can display the content slider using different styles - regular, accordion, with tabs across the top - each with its own set of options. You can now extend its power even more with a new feature.

Overlaying text

Although your slides can have captions, they're limited to short sentences. Also, they're always displayed at the bottom of the slides. But Your Web Department has implemented a new feature that lets you place text within a slide 'on top' of an image. And, in typical YWD fashion, that's done without the need to write a single line of code.

For instance, the sample content slider below is displaying text 'on top' of a background image:

How you can do it

In order to do that, when creating or editing the slide in the YWD back-end, select the image to be used as a background. It should be tall and wide enough to cover the whole content slider.

Then enter the slide content, using the Word Processor field. In the example above we decided that the text would be more legible if it was set in white against a black background, because the background image is quite 'busy' visually. So we placed the text inside a table and coloured the cell black and the text white in the Word Processor:

Finally, when adding the content block to the page, we specified a minimum height for it. That's because by default the content slider's height will be the same as the content within the slide. However, here we'd like the content slider to be 'taller' than just the height of the text.

Also, we'd like all the slides within that content slider to have the same height. So we entered a value of 300 pixels:

Voilà! Enjoy.

Don't have a Your Web Department website? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

How to have a useful 404 (Page not Found) page

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 10:45:00 +0000

According to Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide:

'Users will occasionally come to a page that doesn't exist on your site, either by following a broken link or typing in the wrong URL. Having a custom 404 page that kindly guides users back to a working page on your site can greatly improve a user's experience.'

Also known as the '404 message', a 'Page not Found' is displayed by default by any Your Web Department website if a wrong link to a page is entered by visitors. But you can easily customize it, no programming required.

Customizing your website's 'Page not found' page

You can replace the generic page above with your own, so it inherits your website look and feel and includes your own text/images:

In the YWD back-end, at the bottom of the Special content section, check if there's a link called Custom 'Page not found'. If you have an old YWD website it won't be there, but you can still do it: add a new page and call it Page not found. If you do that, it is VERY IMPORTANT that the page be called exactly that - Page not found. Save the page and YWD will place it at the very bottom of the Special content section.
Edit the content of that page any way you want. Typically you'd have some text explaining that the page or file could not be found.
Publish the page.

An example

If someone uses a broken link - to a non-existing page, for instance - to access the Your Web Department Help (itself a regular YWD website) they'll see a page similar to the one below. Or try this link and you'll get it.

Don't have a Your Web Department website? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

Non-scientific survey: 7 out of 10 hate their websites

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 12:24:00 +0000

A short blog post on this Labour Day. I was recently at a business mixer. It was a very successful turnout. More than 60 business people from all sorts of businesses showed up, mostly SMBs. I probably ended up talking to about 10 people, all really great folk, but a curious thing happened when it was my turn to answer the obligatory question, 'So, what line of business are you in?' When I told them that I was in the website business and did my YWD elevator pitch, seven gave embarrassed laughs and said something to affect of, 'Oh, I hope you don't go to my site, it's awful.' Seriously, that's what they said. Two apologized for not having a website at all and only one really encouraged me to go to their website because they were proud of it.

Why would anyone knowingly have a website that they didn't think was any good? And during our conversation it became quite clear that they weren't interesting in changing that situation any time soon. 'I don't have the time.' 'It's good enough for what I need it to do.' 'I did it a year ago and it's too new to change.'

I asked them, if they were committed to their businesses. They all answered, oh yeah! So how hard was it to create a website that reflected that commitment? 'Oh the designer that I got wasn't good.' 'The web guy that was recommended didn't listen to me.' 'I just grabbed a template off of WordPress.'

The Internet engenders this laissez faire attitude to one's own business website. I have theories, but it's Labour Day. I have to go protest something.

New multi-tiered horizontal menus

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 11:58:00 +0000

With the proliferation of touch screen devices like iPads and Android tablets, dropdown/cascading menus may not always be the best option to have a 'purely horizontal' menu i.e. one without left navigation, as they use rollovers to cascade the sub-pages. But YWD now offers a variation of the 'Plain (no dropdowns)' menu style that does just that.

If you'd like to use a plain menu with multi-tiered sub-menus like the one above, you may choose 'Plain (no dropdowns)' in YWD Designer / Navigation / Main horizontal nav. / Menu style & position and in the 'Use vertical navigation for sub-pages?' option, select 'No'. If you do so, YWD will display sub-pages horizontally, as opposed to a vertical navigation on the left. If you go deeper within the website structure, subsequent tiers/row are added automatically.

Notice that this is different from the 'Fixed 2-tiered with rollovers' style (the last one on the menu styles list), which is limited to the first 2 tiers and relies on a rollover effect to reveal other tier 2 pages.

Customizing the look of the tiers/rows

You can customize the look of the buttons in the tiers, up to the 3rd level -- from the 4th tier down, the settings are then inherited -- including colours and background images for all the button states. You can also specify whether you'd like the button images to tile/repeat and where they should be placed within the buttons. In the example above, the image used for the 'on' state contains the white arrow pointing up, and the images have been set to appear at the bottom and centre, creating this 'pointer' effect.

The colour of the text labels for all states can also be configured for each tier.

You can see examples of all menu styles on this page of the YWD Help.

Don't have a Your Web Department website? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

You know YWD pays for referrals, don?t you?

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 16:40:00 +0000

Sometimes I forget that not everybody knows about Your Web Department's referral program. So I thought it would be appropriate in this end-of-summer, getting-ready-for-fall, let's-get-started-again days to mention it to you.

If you're a business, YWD can take care of all your website needs. But what if your business itself is design, consult and build websites for others? For instance, you may be a webdesigner or marketing consultant that's looking for a robust, reliable and easy to use platform to create content-managed websites for your own clients without programming and get paid directly by them. Yes, YWD offers all that.

But that's not all. YWD will send you a cheque or make you a PayPal payment (whichever you prefer) for every website that you bring in, as soon as you have your first website in the system. You'll get the payments in perpetuity, while your client's website is up.

This way you get paid not only by your client (and that's literally none of Your Web Department's business) but also by YWD. It's a very interesting model. In fact, there are a number of designers in North America already with dozens of websites under their creative belts. It's a great way to complement - and in some cases much more than that - a design or consulting practice in these tough times.

Even if you're just a small business yourself and knows nothing about design - but knows other businesses who could be interested in becoming YWD clients - you could take advantage of that.
Anyway, just wanted to share that with you.

For more on YWD's referrals program and to enroll, please visit this page on the YWD website.

Don't have a Your Web Department website? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

Are robots the new online economy?

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 13:14:00 +0000

I just came back from vacation. Wow, there are actually real people out there, not just Tweeters, emailers and Facebookers. Real people. I'm starting to think whether people are actually doing the Tweeting. I'm starting to think that companies have managed to create a fantastic AI program that mimics human responses and makes it look like human interaction.

Then I thought, what if everyone twigged onto this, got their own AI bots and all digital communication was eventually generated by advanced AI computers and they started responding to each other? Then what if they started to purchase things just to make it all seem real? What if most online purchases became these pseudo-real purchases and there was no way to telling what was a computerized purchase and what was one made by a human? What if it became so omnipresent that it actually became an economy that could not be shut down?

Ad agencies would track the demographics of the different AI in use. There would be studies and seminars and they would be tracked for purchase preferences based on their fake purchase preferences. They would make up new terms like, 'robot media share' and 'digital social vectoring'.

Perhaps I've been away from work for too long. Or perhaps it's already happend and we don't know.

Week 72 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 11:53:00 +0000

This past week: While Facebook gets pounded in the stock market Apple emerges as the richest company ever. Not that this will affect you in any way, as a small business, work never stops. Well with the exception of the occasional holiday, which I'll be taking for the next two weeks. Therefore, my next roundup will come three Fridays from now. But today I have a good collection of tweets that are great resources for any business. Enjoy!

RT @gigaom: How mobile data is making us question everything
The more smartphones are out there the more data is used through the cellular networks. At some point voice and texting will be dropped in favour of data, the problem is cellular providers revenue models are built on voice and texting.

Have you used Hangouts?-> 6 Incredible Ways Google+ Hangouts Can Improve Your Business
I admit, I've only used hangouts for testing this new feature. I'm a big fan of Skype, having said that Google's hangout will give Skype serious competition. You should check it out.

Very interesting->Interesting Marketing Trends of Small Businesses [Infographic]
Great infographic, it has never been easier for a Small Business to do marketing. Social Media has enabled the business owner to own and manage their marketing campaigns.

74% use LinkedIn for branding who knew?> New Data Reveals How Marketers Use Social Media
I found this statistic quite surprising, I still consider LinkedIn to be a job centric network. But, experts reassure us that it is a Business centric network. What do you think?

So true -> Busting Small Business Myths
Read the list, I'm sure you thought some of the items were true.

I like this: posting twitter advice on twitter -> 10 tips for B2B Twitter success
Good best practice guide. Not a bad idea to go over it, even if you have been tweeting for while.

Do you promote your posts?-> How To Use Facebook Promoted Posts Like a Pro
New advertising feature from Facebook, not that your un-promoted posts will reach less people. The promoted posts will reach more.

Someone likes QR codes-> Microsoft's NeoMedia QR Code Patent Deal Puts More Focus On Geometric Boxes
Another sign that QR Codes are here to stay.

We like pretty pictures-> Visual Content Trumps Text in Driving Social Media Engagement
I have experienced first hand while managing our social media feeds. People do react better to pictures and just a link.

Your turn is coming, but you might have to pay-> Google+ Widens Rollout of Custom URLs Sam Laird
So the celeb and well known brands do not have to pay, but the small business and public will have to pay? How is this a good idea Google?

Friday September 14 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? Get started now, don't pay until you go live. www.yourwebdepartment.com

Week 71 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 12:16:00 +0000

This past week: Facebook is still getting pounded in the stock market and many are jumping on the Facebook demise band wagon. Reality is that Facebook is still the biggest social network out there and the one that knows the most about its users. So the ad network is not prefect and they are still working on how to advertise on the mobile side of things. These are challenges that can be overcome and most likely they will find a better way to increase the ad network revenue. I mean Facebook has the potential to show you (and you only) ads that you are truly interested in. The perfect way to sell, promote any business service or product, let the people that want it know and don't waste efforts on the others who have no interest.

Check them out, all good ideas-> Facebook for Business: 10 Tips to Rock Your Brand!
Do you have a business? Then you should have a business page on Facebook, your customers are there already and whether you like or not, they are talking about you. This article is a guide to best practices on Facebook for a business.

Could be if other follow the Australian lead-> Is this the end of Facebook as an Advertising Platform?
This could be detrimental to all businesses, if this ideology keeps spreading through the world. Being responsible not only for what you post but you are also responsible for your fan's comments. This means that you need a body monitoring all your feeds and you must make sure you remove anything defamatory against any brand or person.

Well, in the traditional sense, good points in this post-> Marketing Is Dead
This a good article with an attention grabbing headline. No Marketing is not dead it just needs to change and adapt to the new reality. The promotion of products and services will always exists.

RT @ywdtips: A few simple things you can do in order to be found by Google - Part II -> http://ht.ly/cWzOd
Second part of Flavio's SEO series. Take a look a find out how easy is to do it using YWD. And if you are too busy to do it we can get you going for $500 (one time fee) learn more.

Get those videos rolling-> YouTube Best Practices: Walmart
I truly believe video will become even bigger than it is today. Just look at the new generation of kids; they are not watching TV. They are all getting their video fix from the internet.

Good advice to follow-> 5 Tips for Being Naturally Good at SEO
You have to think about SEO all the time when generating content, not only that but you need to revisit it from time to time.

Not using Google+ much? -> Smart Business Applications of Google+ Hangouts You're Missing Out On
Google+ is becoming quite handy, one stop shop for all your business tools needs.

RT @davidjsampson: Check out our latest infographic find: 3 BIG Reasons Organizations are Heading to the Cloud
Why would you start using the cloud? No hardware software upgrade to worry about, no IT department and the list goes on. In short, it saves money!

How we do mobile with YWD-> Tailoring your mobile website content to fit your needs
I believe YWD has the best mobile solution for websites. One interface to manage both desktop and mobile content, the same url for both mobile and desktop websites and you can optimize mobile search by using the mobile XML site map. Want to learn more about how YWD does mobile? YWD Mobile setup package

Working from home?-> RT @allbusiness_com: 5 Excellent Productivity Tools for Remote Workers
This the new reality for many of us, it is not for everyone; but I have to admit I like it a lot. I couldn't support it if I didn't have good tools to help me with my virtual office. This article has a good list.

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? Get started now, don't pay until you go live. www.yourwebdepartment.com

Tailoring your mobile website content to fit your needs

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 17:40:00 +0000

On a previous post we mentioned that when we revamped the mobile version of our website we decided that its navigation and content should be as simple as possible, even minimalist. But how do you go about doing that using the Your Web Department content manager system (CMS)? Here are a few useful tips for you.

Hiding/showing pages

Unless your website is really small, you should hide most of your pages from the mobile version. People are not likely to spend time navigating through lots of pages (let alone sub-pages) on their tiny phone screens anyway.

You can turn 'off' pages on the mobile very easily in YWD. All you need to do is click to edit the page properties and select 'Computers only' in the 'Devices' list. Conversely, you can create pages specifically for mobile.

Now, the Home page is a bit of a special situation, since you need it for all devices. But you can customize the content blocks within the Home page - just like you can do for any page. See below.

Hiding/showing content blocks

Even if a page is to be displayed on both computers and mobile, it may have some content that's not suitable for both. For instance, you may have a big image gallery or content sliders that should only be seen on computers.

Simple: you just edit the content block and in the 'Display options' select 'Computers/tablets only'. You can also select 'Mobile only', of course (as well as other combinations).

This allows you to have to have an image gallery with a more computer-friendly display style - e.g. a lightbox launched by thumbnails - and the same gallery, on a separate content block, using a gesture-based, full-screen style that works best on mobile.

The same technique can also be used for forms - with a simpler version of the same form being used for mobile - and other types of content.

Hiding/showing layout elements globally

YWD Designer can also play an important role in customizing your mobile content. In Mobile devices / Smartphones / Banner & content you can hide/show which elements of the page layout should be displayed on mobile. Here's a list of the options currently available:

Option	Notes
Left column content	Because the mobile screen is so narrow, there is no room for a left column. YWD Designer lets you choose whether you'd like to simply hide the left column content or display it below the regular (main column) content.
Right column content	Because the mobile screen is so narrow, there is no room for a right column. YWD Designer lets you choose whether you'd like to simply hide the right column content or display it below the regular (main column) content.
Content area images	You may choose to simply hide all the images in the content area of all pages. You may use this option if you'd like to have a 'text-only' version of your website just for mobiles.
Background images	Typically you don't want the background images - for the hole page, a watermark for the content area, the header or footer areas - to be displayed on the mobile. This option will hide them (the default) or you can choose to show them if you want.
Embedded content	Who needs Flash these days? Certainly not people's iPhones. If the computer version of your website must include some Flash movie, you can still hide it from mobile devices.
Floating tabs, left side	Floating tabs may take up too much real estate on mobiles. You may hide or show them using this option.
Floating tabs, right side	Floating tabs may take up too much real estate on mobiles. You may hide or show them using this option.
'Home' button	By default, the mobile will always display a button on the main navigation, linked to the website's Home page (even if you hide the Home page from the website's navigation in the page properties). But you can hide the button using this option.
Breadcrumbs	Even if your website uses breadcrumbs as an auxiliar navigation system, they're probably not necessary on mobile. The default is to hide them.
Social media buttons	The social networks that you select will be displayed on the mobile by default, but you can hide them if you want.
'Full version' button	By default, YWD displays a 'Full version' button at the bottom of the mobile version of the website, allowing people to toggle between the 2 versions. You can hide that button if you want, especially if your website has been designed exclusively for mobile devices.

Need someone to do it all for you?

The folks at Your Web Department can build your mobile website entirely for you. With packages starting at just $300 it's a great deal for small businesses who understand the benefits of attracting a growing mobile audience. You can get more info on this page of the YWD website.

Request our Mobile setup package for $500.00 package

Not a YWD client? Try LiveBuild - We design & build your website for free and ready in 1hour
yourwebdepartment.com/LiveBuild

Don't have a Your Web Department website? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

The LiveBuild experience [VIDEO]

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 16:47:00 +0000

It started with one business owner, who did not know how to build a website. In just one hour the client had a brand new website - all done and live!

Thus LiveBuild was born and is becoming a big hit with business owners of all sizes. We build the website for them while they watch from their own place. They can make suggestions so we tweak the content and design as needed, and at the same time they learn how to update and maintain the website on their own.

Feedback is incredibly positive. Clients are enjoying the experience tremendously, and several new websites have already gone live this way. Watch the video bellow, it'll give you an idea of what happens during an actual LiveBuild session.

Best of all, LiveBuild is 100% FREE.

Learn more about LiveBuild

Don't have a Your Web Department website?
Get started and don't pay until you go live! www.yourwebdepartment.com

A few simple things you can do in order to be found by Google - Part II

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 08:00:00 +0000

In Part I of this series we showed how you can improve your search visibility by setting up titles, descriptions and other options for pages. Now we'll examine how the structure of your website can also be a factor.

Making you website easy to navigate

The navigation of a website is important in helping visitors quickly find the content they want. It can also help search engines understand what content the webmaster thinks is important. Although Google's search results are provided at a page level, Google also likes to have a sense of what role a page plays in the bigger picture of the site.

Planning your website structure is critical. Keep in mind that you can always change it course, but you should think about how visitors will go from your Home page to a page containing more specific content.

How to add pages to your website

If you're just trying YWD out for the first time and would rather have your website built for you, YWD offers a service called LiveBuild. A YWD consultant will design and build your website while you watch and can make suggestions from your own place, while they're doing it. This service is totally free and is a great option for busy small business owners and includes useful SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tips.

How to get your website built for you for free

A site map page: for humans

A site map (lower-case) is a simple page on your site that displays the structure of your website, and usually consists of a hierarchical listing of the pages on your site. Visitors may visit this page if they are having problems finding pages on your site. While search engines will also visit this page, getting good crawl coverage of the pages on your site, it's mainly aimed at human visitors.

You can instantly add a site map to your website, all you need to do is create the page and add a site map content block to it. YWD will automatically display and update the site map for you.

How to add a site map page to your website

Submitting an XML Sitemap: for Google

An XML Sitemap (upper-case) file, which you can submit through Google's Webmaster Tools, makes it easier for Google to discover the pages on your site.

YWD'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.

How to submit a Google XML Sitemap file for your website?

Don't have a Your Web Department website? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

Convergence is in the palm of your hand

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 10:33:00 +0000

It's amazing how things creep up on you. For better or for worse we are living in a digital, Internet, always on time. If it wasn't for the fact that some of us actually have to sleep we'd be constantly occupying ourselves with Facebook, console gaming, iPad movie watching, emailing, Skyping, texting, etc.

For many of us the digital age was ushered in by the Atari 2600 game console in 1977. The Apple II also came out in 1977 but it was expensive and I had no idea what you could do with it. The Atari 2600 had one function. Instant fun. I think the digital Big Bang's epicentre was the Atari 2600.

Sure there were mainframes and all sorts of computing stuff by then but it was behind-the-scenes stuff. Boring stuff. Wires running under floating floors stuff.

I'm not going to go through a chronological history, but we all know there was an explosion of progress from networking, to the Internet, to wireless, to PDAs, cell phones, open source. Sometimes we get the perfect convergence of technology, resources, pricing, vision, luck and out pops something like the iPhone, which single-handedly ushered in casual gaming, decent mobile web browsing, the death of the PDA and most likely the death of the low-end digital camera.

That isn't to say that other things aren't being revolutionized, bridge building and salon treatments for split ends for instance but I know nothing of such things. Our digital world has finally stopped expanding and is now collapsing into the palm of our hand.

I can go on vacation without my computer. Can I go without my phone? Of course not. I might have to make an emergency phone call or play TowerMadness until such time that such an occurrence might happen.

We have an emotional attachment to our mobile devices that we never had to our computers. I'm including the iPad here. iPads aren't 'replacing' computers for certain tasks. We were using computers for tasks that we wished we had an iPad for. The computer was the wrong solution.

And frankly, the TV is a lousy convergence device. Companies are trying to turn the TV into a Minority Report device but it's just not going to happen. What happens if your kid sneezes and the gesture brings up the porn channel? I mean, come on. That's crazy.

No, the convergence devices are tablets and phones and phablets. The question is, are you taking advantage of this convergence? Is your website delivering? If you need an app, do you have one? Are you delivering on the emotional, or at the very least, the convenience aspect of these devices visa vis your business? If you're not, you better start.

Week 70 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 14:26:00 +0000

This past week: Facebook is taking a pounding on the market and its ad network is looking unreliable. But it is not the end of Facebook, remember Google had similar problems with its own ad service when they first launched and now they are doing more then fine. In other news; embedding other people's videos on your website does not constitute Copyright infrigement. This is great news and you will see more videos shared across the web in the near future. I also continue looking at social media for SMBs, still the most efficient way to promote a business online.

Did you know? -> 7 Intriguing Facebook Statistics You Need To See
With such a big membership (850 million and growing) you are bound to see very interesting statistics from Facebook usage.

Not that hard, and can make a big difference-> A few simple things you can do in order to be found by Google
It is very easy to get it going, and on YWD it is even easier; jut fill in the blanks. But to really benefit from SEO you need to work on it periodically. Check all the posts we has publish on SEO, lots of good information on the subject.

SEO & #SocialMedia work together on today's internet-> 3 Ways to Use Social Media to Improve Your Search Rankings
SEO and Social Media go hand in hand nowadays, to the point that SEO agencies are adding Social Media as part of their expertise. But this doesn't mean you can't learn how to take advantage of this as well.

Court Rules Embedding Video Is Not Copyright Infringement
This is great news for everyone! If you like a video on YouTube that can add to the message of your website or blog post, go ahead and embed it, you are not breaking any laws.

LinkedIn lot of potential just need to tap to it-> 7 Ways to Prospect for New Customers With LinkedIn
I keep hearing LinkedIn is great for business (and it is), but it requires more monitoring and participation on the network. This article has good ideas on how to better utilize your time in LinkedIn.

Want to track your pins!-> Pinterest Analytics - Pinfluencer swoops in!
This new service can track not only your pins but also the activity of your boards in your Pinterest account. Check it out!

Semi-Obscure network that can help a lot! -> The 10 Benefits of Using Tumblr For Your Business
Don't know Tumblr? It is a nice blogging network with a great mobile app for updating on the go. Take a look at ours: http://therealywd.tumblr.com/

Well, the signs are there-> Is The Social Media Bubble Finally Popping?
I agree the honeymoon is over, this doesn't mean that social media is going away. If anything, it has changed the way we shop online and the way we keep in touch with the people we know. Most likely we will see some big names in the social media world fall, just as we witness the fall of big websites during the bubble burst of 2000.

Also for the not so professional-> 50 Essential Apps For Social Media Professionals
If you are doing social media for your business or brand, you need to use some of the apps on this list.

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

The secret of LiveBuild? that lets us build websites for FREE

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 08:32:00 +0000

We have officially rolled out LiveBuild and we are very excited. What is LiveBuild? That's easy. We will build your website with you over the Internet using screen-sharing technology in one hour. And the best part is that it is FREE.

Really?

Yepper.

And it's a huge hit. Who doesn't want a website for free?

But wait, aren't we losing money on this? Isn't this going to piss off the designers that are using YWD to make websites? Good questions.

Since I try not being a YWD fanboy in these blog posts and instead offer real business insights I will provide you the business logic behind LiveBuild. It is so simple and offers such great value to both our customers and ourselves I don't mind revealing its secrets.

Wait a second, aren't business tactics supposed to be secret so the public doesn't catch wind of how they are being suckered into your nefarious business trap? There are a lot of people who think that's how businesses should be run.

I've never believed that. The public will figure out if you're BSing them. And once they figure that out they will never buy from you again. What is the point of not being transparent with your customers? Our job as businesses is to offer something that someone feels is of real value to them. It's a simple concept that isn't always easy to do.

Take the website business. There are many outlets to get a site built. Many offer FREE hosting accompanied by a selection of thousands of templates. The idea is that you get some basic services and if you want more you have to pay for it.

I've never been a huge fan of this model as you get a million people using the free service while 500 people pay for the premium stuff. It does seem to offer something people want, but then we realized after building thousands of sites ourselves that most people have a 'content issue' rather than a hosting issue. Sure, you can pick from thousands of templates but how does one get over content anxiety? Most people are not designers or writers. We needed to solve this.

So that was one piece of the puzzle. The next piece of the puzzle was something we had to solve. It seemed no matter what we tried, how well we managed a website build job we would inevitably go over by 2, 4, 6+ hours. So what was the point of charging for a website build if we were going to lose money on most of them?

The final realization came after we built sites live for several customers over screen-sharing just to get people over the site-build hump. This was not only easy for us to do, but no one else could offer this because of our no-code system. We could actually build a website for someone and go live in one hour! And our customers seemed to really enjoy the process.

So, let's review:

1) We can solve the content problem by working with the customer and help them write headlines, expand on the content where required and offer SEO tips in realtime. We start with a clean slate white site and build a site live with the customer often telling us what to do with colours, fonts, backgrounds, etc. Needless to say, they LOVE that. Our experience of building so many sites, applying common sense and best business practices is easy for us. The customers really appreciate it.

2) What if we could cap the 'loss' of building a website to just 1 1/2hrs per site? So, in a weird way, this negative comes out as a positive. We offer a 1/2 hr interview, 1hr LiveBuild. We do it for free. The payback comes in our monthly fee. What we have found is that customers value the free site build much more than free hosting and the choice 6,000 useless templates that don't really reflect their business.

3) YWD's no-code system means no one else can offer Livebuild. Why didn't we think of this before? As I've often said about running businesses. I've never regretted the decisions I've made, only the timing of them. A LiveBuild bonus is that the customer sees their site being built with the tools they will soon be using. So it's also training.

What about designers? Aren't they going to hate us? Well, no, they shouldn't. LiveBuild is not for customers who want strategy or deeper design thinking or more process. In fact LiveBuild could be a gateway to those who go through the process and at the end think, 'This is great. Glad the site is live, but I want more.' We will be happy to hand off any LiveBuild client to any of our accredited YWD Designers.

That's it everyone. LiveBuild is a genuine hit. Will keep you posted. If you want learn more about it just visit our LiveBuild page.

Week 69 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 10:43:00 +0000

This past week: For this week, my round-up is based on a different approach, which I've used in the past; the top 9 tweets according to my Hootsuite analytics. These are ranked according to the number of click throughs during the past week. What it is interesting is that not all the tweets in this list were posted last week, some were posted a few weeks ago. Nevertheless, this list still covers all sorts of topics that a Small Business trying to succeed online will find interesting.

RT @paulchato: Check out my blog post. Your business should be as addictive as texting in your car.
Paul has his unique way of relating current topics with the world of business, this post is no exception and for the last week it has been very popular.

Do you use Flipboard? best way to browse trough your social feed-> How Flipboard is changing everything
If you don't have this app you should download it (it's free) although, it is for Apple devices only. Hopefully they will release one for Android soon. I find it the best way to browse through by social network feeds, it organizes all posts in magazine format making it visually striking and very easy to share onto your social networks.

Still on the fence with LinkedIn? -> 5 Signs Your Small Business Should Be on LinkedIn
The oldest social network and the least talked about. Although initially created as a job centric network it has evolved into a business hub. LinkedIn now has lots of tools available for any business to promote and share their news, services and products. One thing most experts agree on is that it requires extra work to achieve success. But, really what doesn't?

Bridging print & digital under one campaign-> Stamford Symphony Strikes the Right Chord with QR Codes
I really think QR Codes are here to stay, they link the gap between print and digital and the applications are endless. This article is a good case study on how the Stamford Symphony did a great job with this new technology.

YWD has a Mobile only XML sitemap for your website, target mobile search on your website-> http://ow.ly/chbjp
Google in their push to promote mobile browsing has allowed users to submit the XML sitemap for the mobile version of their
website. This is available for all YWD websites, so now, when people search on their phone will get only the links to mobile optimized pages only.

Posting is half of the work-> 12 Things You Should Do After Writing A Blog Post
Don't think that just posting on your blog people will bring readers. Readers need to first find your blog, this article shares good ideas on how to promote your blog posts.

QR Code How To Use QR Codes - VIDEO -> http://ow.ly/cDhei
Good video, great explanation.

Complex2Clear got a brand new look, yes on YWD check it out! -> http://ow.ly/cD7RL
They already had a website in YWD, they took advantage of YWD Designer and changed the redesign an even nicer site. Simply organized and easy to navigate.

Latest YWD website to go live: Berger Cyclefit Coaching check it out!-> http://ow.ly/cB96d
This website is the first product of LiveBuild, YWD's newest initiative. We design & build your website for FREE
We do it together using screen-sharing and in 1 hr you're ready to go live. Learn more about LiveBuild

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

A few simple things you can do in order to be found by Google - Part I

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 16:55:00 +0000

Who doesn't want more traffic to their website? While there's no silver bullet for that, there are many simple things you can do that can benefit your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and the overall visibility of the search results. The best part is that with a system like Your Web Department you can do all this by yourself, and without programming.

Improving the search engine visibility of your pages

Whenever you add a new page to your website in YWD you get the Page Properties dialog. You can also access that by clicking on the Edit page properties button of any page. It contains several tabs, one of which called SEO. It looks similar to this:

The page properties' SEO tab

Let's dicuss each option:

Page title

It's highly recommended that you enter one. The page title is different from the name of of the page in the website's navigation; the title is what most web browsers will display at the top of the browser window and/or in the browser tab.
The title gives a web page some context. It tells Google what the web page is about.
If your page appears in a search results page, the contents of the title tag will usually appear in the first line of the results.
Don't use titles that are too long; Google can use only a maximum of 70 characters for the title, and in fact you should settle for much less.

Description

Search engines like Google will use the information to publish on their search results page, normally displaying below the page title I've described above.
Enter a short, plain language summary of the page, usually 20-25 words.

Keywords

Unlike the 'old days', keywords no longer appear to directly help your search engine results with Google (or Bing) in any way so it's really up to you whether you'd like to use them or not.
They may be useful internally, as a way to document your content or if in case one day the search engines decide to use them again.

Old website URL (301 redirects)

This can be very useful. If you changed the hosting company of your website, this feature - known as '301 Redirects' in geeky parlance - allows you to automatically redirect URLs (i.e. the Web addreses) of specific pages from your old website to the new one. This way you can retain your hard-earned Search Engine Optimization after switching to a system like Your Web Department, which in addition to letting you create and update your website, also includes the hosting.

Don't have a Your Web Department website? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

It?s easy to create a mobile version of your blog

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 06:00:00 +0000

GEO Disco is a club located in Mendoza Argentina. They have their website designed and built with Your Web Department, and they regularly update its content - especially the blog - by themselves. The website is quite popular, with thousands of regular visitors, and a big reason for that is the fact they keep their content fresh.

A sizable portion of their traffic comes from mobile users, so it was critical for them to be able to display their content in a mobile-optimized way, while at the same time retaining the basic look and feel of the computer/regular website. Also very important for them was to use the same www.geodiscoclub.com domain for both computer and mobile devices. Finally, since like all Your Web Department clients they manage the website on their own, so they didn't want to have maintain two separate versions of it.

Creating the mobile-optimized version

YWD lets you create a mobile-optimized version of your website in a few minutes and without any programming. All you need to do is click the Design button in the YWD back-end to launch YWD Designer, and under Mobile settings choose Use mobile-optimized version. This will instruct YWD to use a different layout for your website when it's viewed on mobile so it looks great there (as opposed to a tiny version of the website in which people ave to constantly zoom in/out with their fingers).

YWD uses responsive design techniques that will make your text very legible and provides you a myriad of other design options specifically for the mobile-optimized version of your website. You can even choose to simulate a mobile phone while creating the mobile version in the YWD back-end, which it gives you a good idea of how people are going to see it on their phones.

Next, you'll probably want to upload a separate version of your page banner. It should be 320 pixels wide - and typically you don't want it to be taller than 80-90 pixels - to fit within the mobile's small viewport when viewed in landscape format (if people tilt their phone, the banner will automatically adjust its width).

You can also hide/show certain layout elements from the mobile version - the right column, for instance. YWD's default choices for that are adequate in most cases, but you can toggle them as needed. Publish your settings and you're done in terms of design. Onviously you can launch YWD Designer again and tweak your settings as much as you want.

Tailoring the content to different platforms

YWD lets you choose which content should be displayed on computers and/or mobile. For instance, for the computer version of their Home page, GEO Disco chose to include a Facebook 'Like' Box. On the mobile, however, they preferred not to display it, as it simply wouldn't fit in there. So all they did was edit that content block and select Computers/tablets only from a dropdown. The YWD back-end then indicates that content block will only be shown those devices but not on mobile.

They also had a couple of pages that they didn't want to include on the mobile version. Again, quite simple. It's just a matter of toggling that option in the page properties.

The result

The computer/tablet version of their website is quite flashy and includes a Facebook 'Like' box, a right column with Google Ads, a social media sidebar, etc.

The mobile version has the same blog (YWD automatically resizes the images on the fly so they fit within the mobile viewport, tucks the posts' timestamps and author names under the headings, etc.) but with only the essential elements. Type is big and legible, and only the absolutely necessary content is displayed.

If you'd like to have more information on how to get a mobile version of your website or blog, please check out this page on the YWD main website. Your Web Department can create the mobile version of your website for you, or you can do it yourself (it doesn't get much more complicated than what I described above).

Request our Mobile setup package for $500.00 package

Not a YWD client? Try LiveBuild - We design & build your website for free and ready in 1hour
yourwebdepartment.com/LiveBuild

How To Use QR Codes - video

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 11:53:00 +0000

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.

Don't have a Your Web Department website? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

Your business should be as addictive as texting while driving

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 13:39:00 +0000

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.

Week 68 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 11:16:00 +0000

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.

Going mobile all the way-> JCPenney to replace cash registers with mobile checkout devices by 2013
It just makes life easier for everyone, soon there won't be a need for paper (nor polymer) money!

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

What are QR Codes and how to use them

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 13:52:00 +0000

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).

More on URI schemes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URI_scheme

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.

Don't have a Your Web Department website? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

On revamping our mobile website

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 21:00:00 +0000

www.yourwebdepartment.com as seen on mobile

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.

In the meantime, please tell us what you think!

Don't have a Your Web Department website? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

How to submit a Google XML Sitemap file for your website and get more traffic

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 15:45:00 +0000

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.

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.

That's it.

LiveBuild For the Business Owner - We design & build your website for free and ready in 1hour
yourwebdepartment.com/LiveBuild

Are tablets going to take over from desktop computers - the interview

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 09:35:00 +0000

Scott Thompson of AM900 gave me a call the other day to talk about the future of desktop computers versus iPad-style tablets and the future of RIM. Of course, like every digital-age pundit I'm qualified to talk about anything I want to even topics I don't understand. That's what makes the Interent so wonderful, but I did once talk with a father whose son was also on the same soccer team as my son, and he worked for RIM, so that makes me an expert.

Have a listen.

Podcast Powered By Podbean

Listen to this episode

If the player doesn't work, click on this link to hear it at podbean.

Small Business learning: While you can upload and link audio in Your Web Department, go out and post them on YouTube (with a branded slate-still image) or create a library of audio events on sites like podbean.com as we have done here. The other benefit is that PodBean will publish your podcast to iTunes and other places.

And finally, anytime you can get content for a post, use it!

Related Posts:
How to publish podcasts using Podbean
How to record and edit a podcast using Audicity (cross platform audio editor-free)

Week 67 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 11:20:00 +0000

This past week: Your Web Department is the best tool out there for your business website. In today's world the brochure style website does not work anymore, expectations are that any business website has to have up to date information, be mobile friendly and easily found information that the audience wants. The business website should also have SEO capabilities, the ability to track traffic and integrate social media widgets for your audience to share the pages they find interesting. Your business website needs to be the hub for your marketing strategy, the one place were you can own the message for your business and YWD can do all that for you. This week's tweet collection is all about the business website of the 21st century.

RT @ywdtips: How to get statistics for your business website for free: http://ht.ly/cgZw6
Google is the king of search, and they want to keep that position for years to come. This is why they provides this type of tool for free. With YWD it is very easy to integrate Google Analytics tracking code into your website, we also provide a XML site map for both desktop and mobile websites. The XML site map helps Google to better index your website.

The Carlton Club just launched their new redesign check it out -> http://ow.ly/ch58x
The Carlton Club is in The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Chicago, a Four Seasons Hotel. This long time YWD client went through a successful redesign, with all previous links remaining the same - so the redesign didn't negatively impact search.

FreinMeister Air Brake Education & Teaching resources just launched their new website on YWD Take a look-> http://ow.ly/ch5OA
Another great case study of how quickly a business can launch a great looking website on our platform.

YWD has a Mobile only XML sitemap for your website, target mobile search on your website-> http://ow.ly/chbjp
All experts (and really you don't need to be an expert to agree with this) are saying that mobile web is the future. Since the content for your mobile audience needs to be different form your desktop website, why not index it separately from your main website. Google has added the Mobile XML site map to their 'Webmaster tools', and we just took advantage of this opportunity. Now when doing a web search on a smartphone links for your mobile website will appear in the search results. One more way to not disappoint the mobile user.

You have a choice! -> RT @techvibes: Firefox Sets Sights on the Next Frontier
Just like on you PC, you don't have to stick to the browser that comes as default on your phone or tablet. Firefox raised the bar for user experience on the desktop computer, now they trying to do the same on mobile.

Is #strategy still worth a business owner's time? http://ow.ly/c9jxx
More than ever, read why.

Here, even Herbert thinks is a good idea-> Advantages of a Mobile-ready Website
70% of businesses still do not have a mobile version of their website. Don't you want to be ahead of your competition by being the first to have a mobile ready website?

YWD team member Sam Heron shares forms best practices with YWD-> Forms are a window to (the website's) soul
At YWD we put a lot of effort in developing (development is always ongoing at YWD) the forms manager. Read why forms can be a powerful tool for your business.

Do you use Flipboard? best way to browse trough your social feed-> How Flipboard is changing everything
I have to admit I am big fan of Flipboard and I do recommend it to everyone I know. It is the best way to read all your social media feeds, they are all presented in magazine style format. I believe that it will change the way we consume news and educational material.

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

Forms are a window to (the website's) soul

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 09:11:00 +0000

Self-serve answers

Everyone's searching for the answer (I know I am) so for today's article let's say we found it. One step further, let's say it's a form. A form on your website might seem like a little thing, but it says so much about your company, your outlook, and your business practices that you might not even realize you are saying.

Forms are everywhere. A website without a form is a canoe without a paddle. We convert leads with forms. We grow user lists with forms. They help us be personal without being personally there. For everything they do they CANNOT be an afterthought.

How do I structure a good form?

What are you going to do with it? Now answering a question with a question is generally bad manners but it gives us a place to start. If your form is going to be feeding some kind of database (and it should be - See YWD's Mailchimp integration) then you want to separate first and last names. Contact information is also (obviously) important. After that you can decide to get as much information out of folks as you want. Various studies have shown that a shorter form is not more readily filled out, so feel free to get industry specific information from your visitors.

One thing to think about, there's an entire science devoted to the structuring of questions. Your use of wording, tone, and clarity all play into how your visitor will see the form experience, and your company, and your brand by extension. Take the time to think about what informaiton you need, and how you're going to ask for it.

And now, everything else

Now that you have something that looks like a form, with fields - properly formatted, you need to build everything around the form, the behavior and then get people TO the form. The ubiquitious 'Contact' form is the most common form out there, but forms can do so much more. Campaigns with hidden landing pages (and unique forms) can be created to track specific initiatives. In a system like YWD there is no limit to the number of forms you can create. Take advantage of it.

The payoff

If someone fills out the form, trusts you with their personal information, now you need to deal with this responsibly, and give something back. Immediately when someone fills out a form they are typically shown a 'thank you' message or are redirected to a page with similar messaging. I have filled out lots of forms that promised 48 hour response time only to hear for the company a week later. Be responsible with your follow-ups. If someone puts themselves forward as a lead for your business, do what you promised and follow-up promptly.

A great way to get people to fill out your form in the first place (to get this whole process started) is to offer them something upon completion. The best 'value-add' is a document of some kind related to your business, or whitepaper. These days it costs nothing to create a 3-5 page document, brand it with your company's logo/header and save and upload it to your site as a PDF. Companies like Hubspot have made a gigantic business of using this method to drive traffic to websites.

Creating froms in YWD is SO easy. Everything is laid out step-by-step. You can even clone forms on your site to create unique forms for different pages or campaigns.

Don't have a Your Web Department website? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com/getstarted

Great photography from our clients websites - Part IV

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 11:00:00 +0000

The Carlton Club in The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Chicago is a destination club that offers the ambiance of an urban spa, and an executive fitness center, along with the luxury of private dining and meeting facilities, all located in Chicago's smartest neighborhood. With their magnificent location and luxurious body treatments and services, The Spa at The Carlton Club is the perfect place to unwind, relax and rejuvenate yourself.

A client of Your Web Department since 2008, the Carlton Club website recently went through a complete redesign process. Making use of stunning photography, the new website just went live to rave reviews. The sophistication of the brand is reinforced in every page and every photo, with the elegant use of colours and the serene composition. The human element permeates most of the shots, making the content more approachable.

The website is easy to navigate, very fast and search engine-optimized, as are all Your Web Department websites which include the AT&T Performing Arts Center, The Toronto Design Exchange, PricewaterhouseCoopers and thousands of other business websites of all sizes throughout the world.

The website was created using YWD's website building platform and its powerful Content Management System (CMS) without the need to hire a programmer or write a single line of code. Content sliders and other interactive elements were seamlessly integrated into the design, and the content can be easily updated directly by the client.

Here are a few examples of the great photographic work you can find throughout The Carlton Club website.

Don't have a Your Web Department website? Get yours at www.yourwebdepartment.com

Our first FREE webinar is today at 2pm EST. Join in!

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 10:50:00 +0000

The Your Web Department people will show
how you can design, build and update
a website for your business in minutes.

Open to all: no registration required

Simply click the link below
on Tuesday 2pm EST and join in

www.anymeeting.com/ywdwebinar1

More info? Contact Your Web Department otherwise, see you then!

When is it too late to add a recorded interview to your blog?

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 14:00:00 +0000

This interview with Scott Thompson of AM900 took place June 19th. Just like not wearing white pants in October, what is the etiquette for how quickly one must make available radio or TV interviews online? Is there a freshness factor in social media spheres? Should I have posted the interview when it was HOT and FRESH? Perhaps.

The discussion was about tablets and Microsoft's Space tablet in particular. We also talked about how computer sales have plummeted due to the iPad. Is it a fad? Is it a new category of computer? I think so. Listen to the interview.

Podcast Powered By Podbean

Listen to this episode

Everything seems to be moving at such a fast pace. Everything is a rush. Social media has only exacerbated it. 'OMG I've only got two blog posts up today and 37 Tweets. I'm short my quota!!!'

I asked around the Twitterverse and the consensus was that, I'm okay. I should post it but don't make it look like I did it now. Apparently there is social media etiquette at work.

And finally, anytime you can get content for a post, use it!

Related Posts:
How to publish podcasts using Podbean
How to record and edit a podcast using Audicity (cross platform audio editor-free)

How to get statistics for your business website for free

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 13:30:00 +0000

I'm sure you'd like to know how many people are visiting your website, where they're coming from, which pages attract more people, etc. I bet you'd like to be able to track its evolution over time, see which content changes work and which doesn't, and so on. Wouldn't you? Probably the easiest way to achieve that is to use Google Analytics.

According to Google itself:

'Google Analytics is a free product that tracks your website and gives detailed statistics about visitors to your website. For example, Analytics can show you how people found your site, how they explored it, and how you can enhance their visitor experience. With this information, you can improve your website return on investment, increase conversions, and make more money on the web.'

With a Content Management System (CMS) like Your Web Department you have all the tools you need at your disposal to benefit from what Google Analytics can offer you, for free (don't feel guilty, I hear Google is doing just fine).

Google has come up with some convoluted interfaces for Analytics, so I thought you would appreciate a little help with that.

Note: your website needs to be live so Google Analytics can start tracking it. In the case of YWD you can get started building your website for free and only start paying when you're ready to go live, of course. So you may postpone implementing Analytics as described below until you're ready to go live.

Setting up Google Analytics

1. Signing up for Google Analytics

You will need a free Google Account. If you have GMail or Google+ for instance you already have one. If you don't have any Google Accounts, you you can create one here.

2. Adding your website to your Analytics account

You then need to add your website to your Analytics account. Within this context, Google calls websites 'Web Properties' (don't we all love those geeks?).?There's help from Google on how to add your website to your account here.

3. Getting the tracking code for your website

...then click on the Tracking Code tab and copy the whole code you see there:

4. Adding the tracking code to your website

That's the part that's really simple, because it's in Your Web Department. Go to Tools / Google Analytics and paste the code there. That's it!

Checking your stats

You can get your reports directly by logging into to your Google Analytics account, and there are plenty of good tutorials on how to interpret your Analytics stats. Now, if all you want to do is check some basic metrics - the number of visitors, for instance - straight from your phone at any time, then you can download one of several free apps available out there.

For example, this app is called Dashboard for Google Analytics and provides some basic but very useful information - also known as key performance indicators (KPI) - about your website traffic, which it retrieves from your Analytics account, straight into your iPhone:

It's totally free; you can get more info on this app here.

There are of course many other apps and services, which either for free or through a 'pro' version will give you more sophisticated reports and analysis, so you can choose the one that best fits your needs and your budget.

LiveBuild For the Business Owner - We design & build your website for free and ready in 1hour
yourwebdepartment.com/LiveBuild

Week 66 @ywd tweets weekly roundup

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 11:59:00 +0000

This past week: As usual I looked at posts and articles about social media (or should it be called social marketing?) for SMBs. It is still the best way to promote your business online, this doesn't mean that it should replace your traditional marketing strategy or that you should do one or the other for that matter. Social Marketing should be aligned and part of your overall marketing plan. The other topic I looked at is Mobile - 70% of small businesses still don't have a mobile version of their websites. Hard to believe when the incredible rate of smartphone adoption has been so well publicized. Today there is no doubt that your customers are looking for your business on their smartphones. If your website does not display correctly on their phone, they will move to the next business that does. YWD provides one of the best mobile solutions out there. There are many mobile solution offerings on the web with different functionality and price points, including free; the point is that you have choices and should get your mobile version of your website up and running.

Pinterest and retailers a good match!-> Why a Lot of Businesses are Pushing Campaigns on Pinterest
Pinterest popularity is still growing and it is proving to be a fantastic traffic generator. This post shows interesting ideas on how to stand out from the crowd.

Really, why? -> Why are mobile ads not linking to mobile sites?
This is something you see not only in mobile ads, but with QR Codes as well. It is pretty simple if I'm using my phone to tap on an ad or scan a QR code - my expectation is that I will be taken to the mobile version of the related website. There isn't a bigger turn off than to land on a full website and try to navigate it in the tiny screen of a smart phone.

Real simple -> How to Use Facebook to Promote Your Business
Basic points that give you a solid base to build your business presence on Facebook.

So true! -> It's never been easier (and important) to have a mobile website for your business
Great post from Flavio Mester, YWD team member. It proves my point about mobile that I made in the introduction.

Speaking engagements ideas -> Nothing Brings You Clients Like Speaking
As I mentioned above, traditional marketing ideas are valid even during this surge of social media networks. Speaking to groups of people is a powerful way to influence your potential customers. This post has very good ideas on how to go about getting those speaking gigs.

I believe YWD beats all systems mentioned on this post-> 5 Reasons Why You Need a Content Managed Website
Having your website on a CMS (content management system) is a must for any business. The idea of having to rely on a programer to make changes to the content of your website is just a thing of the past. You have to have the ability to change the content of your website when you need to, and you should be able to do this without any knowledge of programming. This is the web of the new millennium, and as I mentioned on my tweet you are not going to find a better system than Your Web Department for managing your website. You don't have to take my word for it, take a look for yourself.

Ideas on how to make the most out of them-> How To Use Facebook Offers To Promote Your Business
You must have heard of Facebook Offers or at least seen them on your Facebook feed. This post has great tips on how to maximize them.

Running an client email list? @HubSpot guide-> Which Links in Your Email Marketing Get the Most Clicks?
Great guide from HubSpot for email marketing.

Very well explained-> How SEO and Social Work Together for Link Building
At one point Link Building was the thing you needed to do to enhance your website's SEO. With the introduction of social media link building is done with each share of your content. This article explains how the two work together, nothing better than understanding how it works so you can take better advantage of the opportunity.

Great starting point for any SMB-> A free website building webinar open to all
In this roundup I have mentioned how great YWD is for any business, to prove it, we have made our weekly webinar open to the public. All you need to do is show up and after the show ask all the questions you might have. I'm confident you will agree how good Your Web Department is.

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

A free website building webinar open to all

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 14:00:00 +0000

The Your Web Department people will show
how you can design, build and update
a website for your business in minutes.

Open to all: no registration required

Simply click the link below
on Tuesday 2pm EST and join in

www.anymeeting.com/ywdwebinar1

More info? Contact Your Web Department otherwise, see you then!

You should attend this FREE webinar if any of the following statements are true:

I can't control my own website. I have to request changes, wait and pay for them.
I got one of those free websites but they are too simple, not enough features, no technical support and I really want something that matches my brand.
I have an old website. It doesn't work any more. In fact, it's probably hurting my business. I need to change it asap.
I want someone to take care of the entire website design and transfer, but I want to manage it myself. I want a one-stop-shop.

What you'll learn:

How easy it is to manage content using Your Web Department.
How we approach building a fool-proof website.
The secret of making a great website.
How to treat your website like an employee so it actually gets results.
How to measure the performance of your website.
How to set up the mobile version of your website.

Yes, we'll take questions!

It?s never been easier (and more important) to have a mobile website for your business

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 11:20:00 +0000

www.thompsonsmobi.com

In Paul's yesterday's post he demonstrated how important it is to have a mobile-optimized version of your website. And he provided some very useful links related to that. Here they are again just in case:

Video: how to create a mobile website

Request more info

The bottom line is that there's a growing chance your customers will be using a smartphone (Android, iPhone and yes, even a BlackBerry) to access your website. So it needs to be a pleasant and useful exprience for them. Simply serving the same website that's displayed on computers won't cut anymore: all the text will appear tiny, people will have to zoom in/out with their fingers all the time, etc. Not to mention that sometimes all they want to do is find out your phone number so they can call you!

Can you afford to miss that call?

A picture - even if it's coming from a tiny phone screen - is worth a thousand words (oops, should have avoided the clich) and in fact I can give you several of them (both pictures and clichs).

Here are a few examples of websites of YWD clients that have been specifically optimized for mobile so you can see for yourself.

Some of these mobile websites were created entirely by the clients; others by their designers, and some were created by YWD for their clients, by a very reasonable fee.

What they all have in common is the fact that they were built and and managed using the Your Web Department website building platform and that no programming was involved in any way.

The cost? A mobile version is already included with all YWD packages so you don't have to pay anything else to have your company's website available on people's phones all over the world in all its glory.

Request our Mobile setup package for $500.00 package

Not a YWD client? Try LiveBuild - We design & build your website for free and ready in 1hour
yourwebdepartment.com/LiveBuild

Why are mobile ads not linking to mobile sites?

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 10:51:00 +0000

The other day I clicked on 4 banner ads on my iPhone's RottenTomatoes app, 3 went to non-mobile websites and the 4th for Tide went to a French mobile website. I guess P&G thought everyone in Canada speaks French. Parlez vous Anglais?

I thought, 'Hmmm, that's stupid, why aren't I being directed to phone optimized websites?' I tried some more mobile banner ads. Only about 2 in 10 went to mobile specific websites.

I imagine this is because the agency that is placing the banners doesn't check or doesn't care whether their client has a mobile website option for that particular page. Shouldn't they be informing their client that it might be a good idea? They are making the effort to create a mobile-sized banner so why not go the extra mile and make sure the client doesn't look stupid. The website for the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum was totally mobile unfriendly (see image on left) even as a straight desktop site viewed on mobile. (Great museum, BTW.)

In this day and age, at the very least, your desktop site should be mobile friendly. The NY Times comes up very nicely on mobile even as complex as it is. And it does have a mobile version as well as an app (which sucks). So they have all the bases covered.

Maybe the site you've had up and running for the last 4 years just can't accommodate a mobile sniffing option without a major upgrade. But with a large and growing percentage of people surfing from their phones it's a bit insane not to support mobile. That being written, this link from a Nov. 2011 survey shows that 70% of companies had yet to launch a mobile site.

And it's not just the kids. You can't get the damn phones out of the grownup's hands. The number of adults pulling their phones out in washroom stalls, gad, I can hear you typing people! Yech. People LOVE their mobile phones. Too much.

With YWD mobile sites are part of our core package - that means you can go in and set up the mobile version of your site for no additional cost.

Watch our how-to set up mobile video.

We can even set up your mobile site for you. For a flat fee of $500.00 we will:

*Additional work can be discussed. Request our Mobile for $500.00 package.

Don't have a Your Web Department website? Sign up now or try it for free at www.yourwebdepartment.com