Web Class Blog

One of the major aspects of marketing that gets people down isn’t that it is difficult. In fact, most of it is pretty easy. But it is tedious because you have to do the same things over and over.

Even for us – marketing other people’s sites is tedious.  Of course, we can see the money more easily then, so it is easier than doing it for our own sites, where the money comes in much later. If it were more difficult, it would probably be more interesting.

But 90% of marketing consists of nothing more than doing what you know to do.

• Show up at the event.
• Submit another batch of links.
• Write an article and post it.
• Analyze your site traffic and conversion patterns.
• Re-optimize your website for search terms.
• Reply to one more question that you’ve replied to 100 times already.
• Hand out one more business card that you know someone will just lose or trash.
• Return one more phone call that probably won’t go anywhere.
• Make one more round of the social networking sites to drop comments.
• Post one more article to your blog…

It is all very boring after a while. So we get lazy, or we only do the ones we feel like doing – which is ok, as long as you do enough things, but which kills a business if you only do one thing and procrastinate the rest.

Once you have the text written and the logo designed and the literature created, it is just doing it. Over and over.

Our clients fall into two groups – those who do as we instruct (or who pay us to do it for them), and those who do not. We see them succeed or fail based on that effort. If they do it, they learn and succeed. If they do not, their business sits there without growth and without sales.

90% of life is showing up – and the same is true of marketing.

So what is an internet class anyway? Think you know? Think again!

An internet class may be any one of the following:

• A text course delivered via email.
• A text course delivered via website.
• A video or audio course delivered via email or website.
• A full modular class delivered through a system that also delivers quizzes and issues a grade and certificate of completion.
• A class delivered via chat, or video conferencing.
• A class hosted by an organization, broadcast through intranet to another location, utilizing specialized equipment.

And the options are growing daily!

The thing is though, that when you read that someone offers an “internet class” you’d better find out just what it is, because there are many definitions, and value is different from one to another.

Our new networking site, Front Porch Folks, recently went to Public Beta status. So what does that mean?

It is really just a pretentious techie way of saying that a site is good enough to be publicized and tested by lots of people, but not yet ready to be taken seriously as a fully marketable business. Big sites do this to get people to the site before they’ve worked out all the bugs, and to put it through natural stress testing to find the rest of the bugs.

It works too – on both counts. If you have a fairly complex site that you know you need to have a lot of people visiting before anyone is going to take it seriously, a Public Beta phase can help to get it out there and noticed enough to be a contender. This is especially important for membership sites – you need members to get members, so you can offer free memberships during Public Beta, then charge when you go to full launch.

You can go to Public Beta as soon as you have enough of value to be worth something, but not quite full value. That value may be, in part, determined by traffic volume. Public Beta can last an indetermined amount of time. It gives you time to get the feel of things, and to see how the site performs under fairly natural settings.

Front Porch Folks is a Networking Community. It has some twists on the normal one though, so it catches people’s fancy even in its infancy. But we are still doing a Public Beta, until we get 500 members, because value depends partly on the number of members. Membership is free until then, later it will have a low yearly fee – because we want to keep it affordable for our target market.

Opening the doors to a Public Beta is a good option for a complex site, and provides a sometimes much needed transition between ready for something, and not quite ready for everything!

If you own a website, it pays to stay on top of the rules for online trade. The FTC website has a number of regulations that you are required to comply with.

http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/ruleroad.shtm

Most of them are common sense, dealing with honest disclosure, which a business owner with high integrity will do anyway. There are a few that are specific to certain businesses though, that you might not think of.

Most of these regulations have been created to avoid misunderstanding in communication  – they require you to list things in ways that people cannot mistake for something more than what it is.

Once again, integrity is the greatest protection.

Shortcuts just don’t work in the web world. A blog created from automatically scraped material just doesn’t earn or grow. Sadly, that doesn’t stop people from doing them.

Worse, many of these people are selling the service of creating a blog for someone else, and just putting together a shoddy scraped blog. Search engines don’t like them, because they aren’t original. People don’t like them either.

Many site owners have no idea that blogging has to be done in a certain way in order to be profitable. When someone promises them a cheap and fast solution, they jump on it, because they think that blogging is easy. And it is, but getting traffic to a business from it ISN’T easy. It isn’t cheap if you pay someone else to do it either!

No blog owner of intelligence and morals is going to approve comments that have nothing but a quote of their own scraped content. Why should they? The backlink doesn’t help them one bit, since search engines will disregard it. The link to the other site from theirs though, is potentially harmful.

So now we have this network out there of scraped blogs – they exist solely for the purpose of automatically seeking out and reposting bits from legit blogs. Eventually, the only links they’ll have back are links from other scraped blogs. Everybody frantically auto-scraping and auto-posting and nobody listening.

Pretty much a waste of time… But then, shortcuts usually are.

I’ve been sickened by designers who have to use Flash for the whole site, or site owners who think they have to have it just because it is there. Using something because it is there is unprofessional, because it may actually impede the goals of the website. The function and purpose of the site comes first, over any desire to use a cool new toy.

I think with each new thing that people can do, they go through a phase of doing it just because they can, and everybody thinking it is neat that they can – look at the pre-WWII cartoons. Most aren’t even funny, they have these characters doing stuff on screen just because they can. They didn’t put much thought into how to really make it entertaining, they could make those characters move, and that was all they tried to do.

So now we have things like Flash, PDFs, Movies, Audio, etc. And all these people out there saying, “you just GOTTA do this!!!” without thinking about the purpose of the site, the target of the business, or the needs of the visitor.
After the shiny wears off, people will start thinking more logically about it – at least, the pros do.

No matter what the new toy, we always should consider whether it will add to the site and to the purpose and function.

There are very few sites that can benefit from Flash headers at this point. And even fewer that can benefit from any other Flash elements which are unfriendly to search engines and the disabled alike.

But there are tons of dynamic features which can benefit a site when they have a need to automate certain features, or break the hourly rate barrier, communicate more efficiently, etc. No feature is right for everybody, and each one has to be weighed carefully, the cost against the benefit. The major problem we see with many so called professionals is that they are recommending the features without mentioning the long term cost, so the site owner gets stung with a site that isn’t really what they needed.

Select carefully. Each choice has a long term impact.

Cultural differences do matter. In ways we do not understand if we have not been exposed to other cultures. Cultural differences may perpetuate feelings of distrust if they are not understood.

It is important to understand that if you recognize differences in the way people from other cultures think, that it is not a matter of prejudice. Rather, it is one way of beginning to bridge the gap in a way that is workable.

Our client base, and our associate base, has broadened quite a bit lately. And I have learned many things because of it, in why I have always felt a certain way about some people I associated with, never even identifying what it was that made me feel that way.

One example is, in dealing with someone from a middle eastern business background. Haggling is second nature to them. They do not understand why we would NOT haggle. Setting a flat price with them is not understood. They have perceptions and responses going on through it that would not occur to me, but which are second nature and important to them.

A client had a bill that was overdue from a man from a middle eastern background. The client tried to get them to pay, but they kept trying to talk the client down. Finally the client filed a lien, which got an instant response. But still, the intent was to not pay full price – in the other man’s culture, to give in now would be a loss of stature. So our client added up the interest due, and presented that for collections as well. The other man haggled on THAT, and the client let him win. The funny thing is, that it ended up costing the business man more than if he’d just paid it in the first place, but since it gave him the feeling that he had won a point in the end, he was satisfied. Our client ended up with more than he’d have asked also.

This all sounds sort of silly to someone living in the US in isolated western communities all their lives. But it was an education to me, in how people can just think about things differently. It stood me in good stead when a client of mine started to haggle. One of my colleagues said she would have just told him flat out to pay or go away. But I did realize that this was his expectation – that if I understood how he thought, we could still have a good business relationship. I did not give him what he wanted, but I did knock my price down a bit, enough so that he could accept knowing he had won a point.

Since then, I’ve learned many other things from this client – the manner in which he does business operates on a different set of principals than it does for us. Not better, or worse, just different. When he first spoke of “old bazaar”, I did not know what he meant. I have since learned that it means many things. And that many of the standards that he operates around, are responsible for some misunderstandings between cultures, and a sense of distrust.

You see, in a haggling culture, you present your wares in the best possible light. It is the customer’s responsibility to examine, and point out the flaws, to lower the value, and the merchant’s responsibility to point out the good points and enhance the value. It is an expected exchange, and both feel certain that if they do it well, they’ll end up with a good balance in the end.

In our American culture though, if a price is inflated, we feel that the business owner is trying to cheat us. We would not generally consider offering a lower price, we’ll turn and walk away and find a stated price that is more reasonable. We consider pricing to be evidence of integrity. They consider it to be a matter of perception between two people.

We think they are telling us to pay full price without complaint. They are actually telling us that they’d really love to get that much but that they’d never expect you to actually pay it!

This is only one set of cultural differences that can influence business relationships. It is important that you understand if you are marketing in a culture that you are not native to, that things may be different for reasons that would not occur to you. It is also important to understand that when you are dealing with clients, suppliers, or contractors from other cultures, that their long held traditional behaviors and thought patterns may influence your interactions in ways that are easy for you to misinterpret. A little bit of consideration can go a long way in easing tensions and avoiding conflict.

The client of ours who started out by haggling, has been a good one. Utterly predictable, patient when he we had no right to expect him to be, and willing to trust me as long as I continue to do what I said I would. It was worth making a concession that I would normally not have made.

One of the questions we get most often from site owners is, “How can I protect my images from being stolen?”

Our answer is, “You can’t. And if you do it right, you don’t need to!”

We recently presented this concept to a group of museum personnel from around Wyoming and Colorado, and watched the light bulb go on in their eyes as we explained what that meant.

Methods of protecting images by blocking the right click, or cloaking the code are pretty much a waste of time. If I can see it, I can get it if I want to. There is no way you really CAN protect images from being stolen by a determined thief. That might sound distressing, unless you determine to use that reality as an advantage instead of seeing it as a disadvantage.

Instead of trying to lock them down, use them for your benefit. If they are going to take them, then let them do so with your blessing.

Apply a watermark to any of your images that may be desirable for theft. You can apply a watermark in two basic ways:

1. A high contrast URL placed in the bottom of the image. Typically, white text with a strong black extrusion or drop shadow will contrast with virtually anything and be readable. This is most appropriate for images that are central to a message where the center needs to be clear.

2. A low opacity watermark in the center. This is appropriate for images that are samples or examples, or for images that are of products that you do not want someone to lift. Most graphics programs allow you to do this. A logo, or a URL is appropriate here, but a URL is more viral – it brings people back to you.

Some people will “hotlink” to your images. They show your image, and you get no credit – but you pay for the server power to display them since they just link them from your server to their page. They do NOT show a link back to your website though, so you pay, but don’t get any benefit.

When you use a watermark URL on your images, you at least get some benefit and advertising from people who hotlink to your images, or otherwise steal them.

They COULD remove the watermark. But it is WORK to do so. And most people who steal images or hotlink to images are lazy – work is definitely a put-off, so they are more likely to either use it as-is, or leave it alone.

So instead of trying to lock up your images, invite people to use them – and let it work to the advantage of your business.

The more we add to web pages, the more important it becomes to take simple steps to ensure that those pages can be accessed by virtually anyone. It isn’t only good business, it presents legal risks if you do not!

ADA Accessibility for the web means basically two types of compensation – making sure visual elements can be understood by those with visual challenges, and ensuring that auditory elements can be understood by those with hearing limitations.

This is done through text. Text is the universal equalizer. It can be read and understood by people, and machines, so those who rely on machines to interpret web pages for them can still access plain text versions of elements.

This is most commonly seen in an image alt-tag. A bit of text that is displayed if the image is not shown. This is absolutely critical if you use image links on your pages, because otherwise, if the images cannot be viewed, your site cannot even be navigated!

There are other basic ways to compensate also – if you have audio on your site that is critical to the function of the site, simply provide a written transcript for access by the hearing impaired. If you have video, provide either an alt-text or a written transcript, whichever is most important.

In addition to ensuring that major elements are understandable, it is also important to pay attention to simple courtesies in your design – good contrast between text and backgrounds, easy to read font sizes, and other friendly tactics.

These simple tactics beat getting into a wrangle with a lawyer who has an agenda, any day!

I learned it in less than a day – at least, I mastered the rudimentary skills to produce a fairly decent Flash header, in about 4 hours, with totally unfamiliar software, and very little experience with animation or movies. I’d made animated GIFs before, but that was about it.

No matter which program you use, Flash is going to be complicated to work with. It is necessarily more complicated than image editing, because there are more functions, and more variables. Each of those variables has to have a control, and those controls happen differently in each program. Simplified programs generally will not have the flexibility to allow you to make the animations do what you want them to do.

For the record, I experimented with Namo FreeMotion. I’m a fan of Namo WebEditor, so this seemed the logical place to start. The learning curve is still fairly high, and the manual is confusing – some tools are described, but no information is available as to what they actually mean, if you are not already familiar with their terms. The whole section on symbols is completely incomprehensible. But it is possible to learn to create a basic animation fairly quickly.

You’ll learn more quickly if you have experience with object oriented graphics (vector graphics like Illustrator), because some of the concepts are the same. You spend more time telling the computer what you want to do, than you spend actually doing things directly like you would in a bitmap graphics program like Photoshop.

FreeMotion is available in a trial download though, and is worth taking for a spin. You’ll get off the ground fairly quickly if you follow the tutorial in the back of the manual, after reviewing the tools and concepts.