Recently I was asked by a new client “Why should I have a website?”

This is a good question. But it is not the whole question. To really get at the issue one needs to address all of the following (together and separately)

• What can a website do?
• What is it I do?
• What can a website do for me?
• Is the benefit worth the cost/risk?

One of the things I do is wash my car every week or two. Can my website do this for me? No, not directly. So let’s ignore that type of answers when working with the question “What is it I do?”

Another thing I do is try to keep my clients up-to-date on what I’m doing and future presentations they might find of interest. This sounds like something that a website can do. In fact, you could probably name a half dozen ways in which different websites accomplish this exact type of service. So, this looks like a fruitful direction. Even though I would really like some help in getting the car washed — it just happens to be that websites are better at communication than using soap and water, websites don’t have opposable thumbs.

Below is a sample list of what a website can do.

• Advertising — stand alone or as an extension of other campaigns (radio, tv, press, etc)
• Announcements
• Answer common questions for you
• Art Exhibit — show your art in a public forum
• Appointments — let folks schedule service calls and/or meetings
• Biography — inform people about yourself
• Bookmarks — store your book marks in a public, or semi-private, or private ventue.
• Branding — increase public awareness and identification of you and/or your service and/or product
• Build credibility
• Collaborate with others — on a book project or other venture
• Community — establish a virtual community to interact with others
• Consolidate — bring related but desparate content under one roof to highlight the connection.
• Contact Information
• Coordinate activities — some of the original flash gatherings were communicated through website.
• Customer Service
• Demo tape — let people listen to your music
• Diary — many blogs are of this exact sort
• Direct Sales – generate money through direct sales
• E-Commerce — take credit card information directly
• Educate — students, customers, friends, family, and potential customers
• Forum — provide a place for people to meet and talk on a certain issue
• Gather customers
• Generate Contacts
• Globalization — sell outside your area of direct contact
• Image — enhance company’s image
• Information — present information such as “Warning Signs of a Stroke”
• Links — publishing a list of related links
• Map – provide directions to your location
• News — deliver news/information on topics
• Point of Presence — establish an internet presence
• Portal
• Position yourself in marketplace
• Product fact sheets
• Profile – Give folks an impression/feel for you
• Prospect for new clients
• Provide a service
• Public Relations — offer company information and public impression
• Publishing — either self-publishing or for others
• Qualify prospects
• Referrals — direct folks to distributors and retailers of your product
• Research
• Review
• RFP — request of proposals
• Sales — a website can support each of the main phases of a sales process.
• Schedule Events
• Sell a product
• Soap Box — websites can provide a place to rant and spew forth with one’s opinions
• Tell your story
• Trademark — A website can be used with trademark office to demonstrate useage.

The above list is fairly complete, yet still a partial list. Every day someone finds a new way to carry what they are doing in life onto the web through one website or another.

Even though we have the above sample list of what a website can do for you, it is still your task to go directly to the source (yourself) and answer the question: “What is it I do?” along with the companion question “Can I get a website to do that for me?”

Your alternative to performing this bit of homework is to let some snake oil salesman dangle promises of what a website can do for you in front of your eyes until there is a “hit”. After which you will find yourself suddenly motivated to get a website to do exactly that.

You should never go grocery shopping hungry. You should never enter into a conversation about getting a website until you know what you would like it to do. A webmaster might know html and css a heck of a lot better than you. But, you know your business.

Come to a meeting with your webmaster as an equal. The way to do that is for you to know your business and what you want. The webmaster has the job of knowing his business. And you have the job of knowing your business.

Given a “wish list” of what you would like your website to do, I could tell you pretty quickly what the cost and projected benefit will be. Armed with this information you will be in a great position to make decisions about how you would like to start your website, and your first milestones of functionality.

In my blog SEO: Must #1 Get It Right I used a graphic illustrating a google search. I’ve pasted the same graphic here for your easy reference.

The google search was on the word morphotony. In that blog I promised to give a little history on this little adventure of mine. So here it is.

One day the band started a hunt for a name. “Hey let’s get together and play some music” was a bit too long for fliers and other marketing materials. So we began a hunt for a name.

One of the names we thought (momentarily) about was morphotony. I did a google search on the word. There were zero results. It is hard to come up with zero results in a google search. Even if you type a random array of characters into a search you will come up with some pages that contain the character string.

With billions and billions of web pages there is bound to be someone, somewhere, that somehow at sometime use just about every character string — except for morphotony. There were zero results.

I found this very bizarre. So given that apparently no one on the planet had ever written morphotony into a single sentence (on purpose, by accident, or as a typo) it seemed only fitting that I should start a website — morphotony.com.

So now I have morphotony.com and periodically I make dribbles and drabs of effort to get the word into usage. If you want to get in the act, just use the word on your page. Create a username of morphotony on your favorite gaming forum. Create a youtube video and somehow work the word morphotony into the title. Just use the word here and there.

Just think you can be one of the few pages showing up when some non-existent users does a non-likely search for a word they have never seen nor heard of.

Now that’s an opportunity.

The title of you web page is found in the <head> of the document HTML.

The <head> contains several important fields of importance to your SEO. The one we are speaking about today is the <title>.

The title will appear at the top left of the browser — typically next to the program icon. In Microsoft Windows that is the blue bar at the top of program windows. Most users never see this area of the screen. They are busy concentrating on the content found in the body of the page.

 Another place the title will appear is on tab headers — if the browser allows for tabbed browsing. Tabbed browsing is where you can open several pages at the same time — each one in its own tab. When this occurrs the first part of each page’s title appears as the identifying text in the page’s tab.

In the image above, you can see the at the top left the title of the web page I have open at the moment (my Blogger Create Post window). Then near the bottom of the graphic you can see two tabs. One of the tabs (to the left) is for this same page. The tab next to it is my Blogger Dashboard. This is how it looks in Firefox 3.6 on WinXP. The details will vary in different browsers — but the general idea should remain the same.

Another place the title will appear is on toolbar icons typically found at the bottom of the screen when you have multiple programs running — provided you are using a standard windows installation. This will look different in Mac and Linux. But still, in a multi-tasking environment the title of your web page will be used in some fashion to label the icon leading back to the application showing your page.

For SEO purposes the most important place that your title will appear is in search results. Here is the big duh of SEO. Whenever a user does a search engine search the results include your title.

Above are the google search results for “morphotony” — meaning “to become bored with change  ( See “Morphotony A Little Of The Story” for a little history on this little adventure.)

If you study the above image a little, you can see that in google’s search results the title is used for the link text, and is the top of the listing.

I ask you: does the search results page contain just one result or many? It contains many of course. So when your page appears in the search engine results you are competing with every other result appearing on the same page. Hence, your title needs to give the user enough information so that he or she can determine whether or not your page is a better match for the content they are looking for.

Please note, (turn up your attention) I did not say that your title needs to help attract the user to your web page. Rather, I said your title needs to help the user determine if your pages is the one they are looking for.

Herein lies a major difference in attitude and headset. One headset is: “I am doing my best to trick, hoodwink, and generally bamboozle readers into coming to my pages.” Another headset is: “I have content that will be of interest to the right audience — if only they can find it — hence I need to do my best to quickly and efficiently let that audience know what I have so they can decide if they wish to visit my pages.”

Very different approaches. Even if you are desperate for traffic — I mean really, really desperate for the traffic — you still need to use the second approach.

The true secret to SEO is to provide good content, then manipulate things such as title so that people can quickly and efficiently find your content — provided it is what they are looking for.

And, because some uses for the title will truncate the title after a few characters make sure that the beginning of the title contains some of the uniqueness.

This is not a complaint — just an observation about the nature of blogging.

As a public posting, the blog is available to anyone that manages to find it. Hence, everyone has the opportunity to read the blog. This means there is a total blending of potential audiences. If you want to say something that you’d rather your parents not overhear, then you will need to disable their browser function, implant a worm that prevents certain website urls from being loaded, or install Net Nanny on their computer without telling them. Otherwise they are among the most likely candidates to actually read whatever mixture of alphabet characters you are typing into the “New Post” window.

Old girl friends and boy friends could be reading your blog. As well as friends from work (that weren’t supposed to know about the ahem… er… hobby. Your children, distant relatives, friends of friends, strangers from any and every part of the world. Basically everyone. Not everyone individually. Everyone all at once.

Since everyone is reading the same blog you can’t tell the tale a little different depending upon the audience. You can’t use the politically correct version at church, the risque version with the boys in the locker room, the well enunciated grammatically correct version for the management team at work, the “honey you know I would never do that” for the misses. It is all the same version for everyone.

You can’t blog about winning the lottery when you are still playing duck and hide from the neighbor down the street that lent you the money you don’t want to pay back just yet.

You can’t talk about the great golf score when the only reason you could get away from the weekend yard work was a little white lie about being totally disabled and needing to soak in the sports sauna at the gym.

It is the same version for everyone.

However, you don’t really know who specifically is reading any particular blog. Granted, you can count your followers. But you don’t know if they happen to read a specific blog. So, you can’t rely upon them having read anything in particular.

In practical terms that would mean that if you post an invite to a lawn party in your blog, you will still need to personally invite everyone you actually want to make sure know about the event. It’s worse than email. With email you have no guarantee but you do have a vague notion that the content made it to their inbox (except for the ever present spam box and internet glitches). With a blog you don’t even have the imaginary certainty that the content made it to their inbox. They may or may not have even glanced at the page — let alone actually have read it.

So, in a strange way, even though may people can read the blog it is no one at all — at least no one in particular.

The only folks that you can know have read the blog are those that comment. And since a mircoscopic percentage of readers actually comment that means in general you can’t know, which means in general you are typing to no one at all.

I have developed a simulation of this designed to give a peek into the dynamics of this for anyone curious about the inner effects this type of communication.

I invite psychologists and anyone studying social dynamics to try this out.

Blogging Simulation 101

Set up a room with standard lecture seating.

Have each individual present take a turn telling a joke or story. The joke or story should be two or three minutes long.

As they tell their joke everyone in the audience is sitting with a cloth bag over their head. This should allow them to see out, but not display their expression — or even whether or not the eyes are open. The members of the audience say nothing, do nothing, make no action that would reveal whether they are listening or not. They could be listening or totally ignoring the speaker.

After each person has taken a turn then discuss the results.

Report back if you dare.

After you have worked out (to your satisfaction) exactly what it is you want your website to accomplish, then how do you tell if it is working? Or, in other words, how will you measure success?

Let’s suppose that what you really want from your website is to increase sales and find new sales leads.

If you have set a goal for your website to increase sales, then you must implement some method of tracking sales coming from the website.

If you have set a goal for your website to find new sales leads, then you must implement some method of knowing the source of sales leads.

Basically, you need analytics. If you know that you were getting 20 sales a day prior to adding the new product catalog and now you are getting 30 sales a day, then you can demonstrate an increase of 50%.

If you know that marketing was receiving 50 inquiries a week before the website and now they are receiving 150 inquiries a week, then you have 300% increase in new leads.

If you have no method of tracking sales or of counting new sales leads, then you have no method of determining changes in stats.

This seems very obvious. But until you sit down to actualize the process it may escape your notice that the  current invoicing system doesn’t have a data field for source. Or, you may not discover that it will become necessary to expand your reporting software to sort on sales source. And, it is not that impossible to imagine   your sales people don’t even collect information about where new leads are coming from. They could be so happy to have a new lead they don’t even bother with “where did you hear about us.”

All of the above you most likely are very familiar with, and should not need to be told. The part that may have escaped your attention is the importance of going through this process as early in the website design as possible. The reason is: your webmaster may need to revise the structure of the site to facilitate tracking of your goals.

Heard that expression before?

Lately that’s been my experience — except in addition to be the “caught” I’m also the “rock” and the “hard place.”

I can hear the knowing chuckle of a few forest monks wafting through the air. [Note to self: haven’t used waft in a decade or so, better look it up.] [Subsequent note: yep it means what we thought — to float or be carried, esp. through the air. Ah, the wonders of dictionary.com]

As always the trick is in the attitude. Can’t change the being caught between a rock and a hard place. Don’t really have control over that. But I do have a choice in attitude I adopt.

That is a question that should be asked by every website owner — maybe not in that form. But it still needs to be asked. Other versions of this question could be:

• Why Do You Want A Website?
• What do you want your website to do for you?
• What do  you think a website can do for you?
• How will you measure success of your website?
• What changes in your life (or business) do you expect after getting a website?
• If you don’t do this website how will that change your situation?

The above questions are more or less the same. However, like the five blind men feeling an elephant — each question will give a different perspective on the same animal. In this case that animal is the expectations you have for your website.

Those expectations can be reasonable or they can be totally unreasonable. That is not the point. Before you can even begin to assess the appropriateness of an expectation you really need to know what the expectations are.

These expectations for your website are very important. If you can confess to your web designer what it is you want the website to do you will make life and the development of your website so much easier.

Armed with knowledge of your expectations the web designer might suggest splitting your proposed website into two or more smaller websites. How could this be? Well, let’s suppose your expectations for your website are to establish better customer relations, support your sales staff in their marketing campaigns and explore your family genealogy.

An odd combination of expectations for a single website. But very valid expectations for two or more websites. One website could be created devoted to the family genealogy. Another website could be created to handle the customer support with a sub-domain devoted to sales staff support. Or, perhaps you could benefit from three separate websites — two public domains and one running on an intranet devoted to staff issues.

Each of the above goals (or expectations) were equally valid. However, it could be very difficult to design one website to do all of the above. Thrusting personal and family topics into a business website is just a bad idea — unless of course you are in the business of genealogy. The language and topic appropriate to a frank and open discussion with your sales staff might be a little off-putting to your customers. Or, perhaps not. Depending on the nature of your business, you could very easily use public communications to sales staff as a back-door method of speaking to customers about topics that might be more difficult straight on.

There is no single solution. However, until you confess your expectations for your website it is very difficult to even start the process of getting down to it.

Those you watching the past two weeks may have noticed the appearance then sudden disappearance of several blogs on SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Well, they are not gone. I’ve started a new blog: made-easy-seo.blogspot.com

Click on over there if you’d like to find the missing SEO blogs that were here, and several new ones besides.

Get Maximum Results By Optimizing Communication With Your Webmaster

Seven Simple Steps that will increase effectiveness of website development and decrease costs by optimizing communication with your webmaster.

• Have a List
• Ask For What You Want
• Email Confirmation of Phone Conversations
• Single Topic Emails
• Expect Confirmation
• Expect Milestone Deliveries
• Freely Confess

These hints for better communication were not invented just now.
I expect you may already be very familiar with many of these suggestions. They are just being stuffed into one common location for perusal’s sake. Admittedly this is not a complete list. But these should get you headed in the right direction.

Have a List

Lists are wonderful — Christmas lists, todo lists, shopping lists, lists of all types. They are great
tools. If you are preparing for a phone conference with your webmaster create a list of points you wish to
cover. This list can include points that must be discussed today, and also include points that just need to be
discussed at some point — not necessarily today.

If you have friends, family and/or staff doing usability testing of your new website collect their observations
into a list. By having a list you can check off items as they are covered and make certain to not become distracted by topics of the moment. Seems obvious, but I really could have used such a list last week when speaking to my tax accountant. These recommendations come from a combination of things we have benefited from doing *and* from things we really wish we had done.

Ask For What You Want

Admittedly, it is not always possible to know what you want.
But if you do know what you want, then ask for it. Don’t be bashful. Do not think that the current
status quo is the only way it can be. Don’t fall into the “good enough, we’ll wait and see.”
The current status of a project is simply the current status of a project.
If you suddenly decide that you really want the background
for the site to be black not white, ask. If you realize part way into the project that
you need more in the way of social media integration, then ask for it. Problems do not improve with age.
The sooner you communcate the better. This is after all your web design project. The webmaster just
happens to be someone skillful enough in html, css and other programming to help you with your website.

Email Confirmation of Phone Conversations

After a phone confersation email the webmaster with your understanding what transpired. Include requests for
changes, specification of additions, and perhaps acknowledgments of points that were completed.
This type of email confirmation does not need to be massive or ultra detailed. Just include enough detail
to confirm whatever the specifics were.

Who knows… after sending such an email you might get a reply such as: “Thanks so much for the heads up,
I thought we discussed dropping the one thing and doing the other thing instead.”
The fewer the number of hours your webmaster works in the wrong direction the better for all concerned.

Single Topic Emails

Whenever possible dedicate each email to just one topic or a set of closely aligned topics.
For example, if you have several graphic issues to discuss in addition to a pile of content corrections,
write two separate emails. In one email address the various graphic image issues. In the other email enumerate the various content modifications you want done.
Why? Because, graphic manipulation and content correction are different types of activities. When
a webmaster is working on graphics they will tend to continue working on graphics until all known graphic
issues are handled. And, when a webmaster is making content corrections, he (or she) will continue
making content edits until they are complete.

So, if you send the instructions in two separate emails the webmaster can break your job into two
separate work sessions without fear of letting anything fall between the cracks. And, they can hit the
email reply button to acknowledge completion of all items in an email. This type of focus has many benefits. Not the least of which is ease of tracking completed and open items.

Expect Confirmation

Make it clear to your webmaster that you expect confirmation on each aspect of your work together.
If you give him or her a list of todo items for the website, expect one email confirming that your requests
have been received and understood and a separate email confirming completion. This may seem like too much
communication. But, it can be so invaluable for detecting lost emails and misunderstandings. The savings
in time and confusion are well worth the few extra clicks.

Expect Milestone Deliveries

I’m a big believer in Agile Programming — basically reviewing results periodically during development
so that adjustments can be made when changing status of the project suggests them. It makes a
world of sense to have your webmaster design and present a rough template of your pages before
spending hours or days creating those pages. Let the webmaster use latin gibberish to fill in
paragraphs and clip-art as placeholders for grahics. In this way you can see where the page is going,
and make adjustments before a dozen pages have been created based on a bad design. Granted no web page is carved in stone. Design can be adjusted quite easily. But it will still cost time to move paragraphs around.
It would be silly to have a printer produce 10,000 brouchures before you have a chance to review and approve and proof. And typically you will be shown a mockup before the printer invests time in typesetting.
Use everything you know from standard business practices.

Other types of milestones might be related to functionality. For example, it could be useful to
view a slideshow widget in basic operation before having it fully programmed. Basically make sure you are
in the loop and get to see what is happening in smaller chunks so that you can change directions
when your newly educated vision dictates.

Freely Confess

Everyone runs into speed bumps and even road blocks. If you have tasks on your plate that you are
finding difficult or impossible to complete, then tell the webmaster. For example: “Just wanted to let you know
that I am not going to be able to deliver the graphics in a timely manner. I just can’t find the right program
to convert the tiff files to jpgs.” The webmaster upon hearing this should instantly reply: “Not a probem at all
just send me the tiff files and I will convert them. Will just take a few minutes.
Or perhaps you can’t find the sales brouchure from last falls marketing campaign. Tell the webmaster: “Just letting you know it may be a week or two before I can get you that brouchre we discussed.” At this point the webmaster may reply: “Perfectly fine. I was hoping to use the brouchure as a way to develop an appreciation for your standard look and feel. But after last weeks meeting I think I have everything I need.”
Or, perhaps the webmaster will reply: “You idiot how can you expect me to do this project without that.” This will tell you two very important things. 1) It is important to find that thing (whatever it is) and 2) You need to get a new  webmaster that has more respect and is a little more flexible and creative.

That was my question. How often should one post to a blog? What is the recommended frequency. So, I went to google (still prefer google over ask, bing, yahoo, and all the rest). In google I did a simple search on the expression “How often should I post my blog?”

One (less than helpful) article suggested not posting too much and not posting too little. I kinda think that bloglet was posted to meet some daily quota.

Another article suggested the following pattern:

• 3-5 times a day for your super bloggers
• 1 (once) a day for good steady growth of your blog
• 2-3 times a week if you are serious at all
• less than 2-3 times a week for someone that is just playing around (i.e. not serious about traffic)

I didn’t see any listing for once every couple months.

So, until further notice, based on the dozen or so articles I’ve looked at I think trying for once a day with a few days missed because of god only knows what interruptions will be a good plan.

Okay, now let’s see how that goes……