Generate Success

For those of you using WordPress to manage your own corporate or business blog beware, the next version – WordPress 2.7 – is already in beta stage and is about to be launched for us all.  And this is going to be a big version change – one of those that cannot be ignored.

WordPress 2.7 will see some big changes that you are going to have to get used to, especially with the admin and backend.

As with all software changes there will possibly be a part of you that wishes they would stop developing the software programs you are familiar and confident with; while another part of you is considering how much better the last major update was, once you eased yourself back into your comfort zone.

As with the last major WordPress update, 2.5, the majority of the changes are going to affect the admin and not make any major visual changes to your readers.  But this version will not just be updating the admin but very much rebuilding the backend development.

Aaron Brazell has written a great post – 10 things you need to know about WordPress 2.7 and is something I strongly recommend you read if it is going to affect you.

I just had a very nice chat on the phone with a man whose first attempt at online shopping seemed to have resulted in a fraudster using his card to buy mobile phone top-ups. I don’t understand why he called us (it wasn’t one of my web shops), but I hope I did the right thing by directing him back to his credit card company’s fraud department.

While I was talking to him, I was checking the shop he had problems with. I wouldn’t have bought from it. Here’s how I checked it:-

1. Check the Page

Open the front page of the site in one browser window and then use another window to get to a page that ought to be secure (the payment/checkout page is my usual one). Look at them both. Do either of them show any logos from well-known payment (Barclays, RBS, Protx, …) or security-checking services (thawte – who else?)? That’s not entirely reliable, but it’s usually a good sign because those companies attack people using their marks without permission.

Look at the payment/checkout page – does the address in the address bar start “https”? If so, is the padlock in the browser status bar (usually bottom right) closed? That usually means it’s encrypted with a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate.

2. Check the Certificate

Open the certificate details. In Firefox-based browsers, double-click the padlock, then click the “View Certificate” button. Then pick “Subject” in the second list box. Usually, it looks like this:-

in that case, as long as the “CN” (common name) is the webserver you thought you were using and the “O” (organisation) and country code (C) make sense, then there’s nothing wrong.

Some shops now use Extended Validation certificates and give a bit more information. Here’s one from a train company:-

In addition to the CN and O, it shows Organisational Unit (OU), Location (L), State (ST) and also other address parts and company number that Firefox doesn’t display neatly. This is a bit more reassuring, but also a lot more expensive for the shop owner (around 20 times more, last I checked), so I don’t blame shops for not using them.

3. Check the Registrations

By this point, the payment processing and actual transaction are looking pretty good. Finally, I check the recipient. Find the business details on the web shop. Does it include a geographic address? If it contains a company registration number, look it up on the Companies House website.

Then I find the business details on the domain names – you can use CoolWhois to look up domain names. If any of the addresses or numbers don’t match (Website, SSL Certificate, Whois), then I call them to ask why their website says they’re based in Bristol but their domain name is registered to Bolton. If they don’t answer messages, or – worse – the domain name says “Non-trading Individual” and the address has been omitted from the public listing, I give up on them and look for another shop. There’s no point securely paying someone that you can never reach if there’s a problem.

4. Buy Stuff and Check the Statements

All being well, I then buy stuff and check my credit card statement each month before I pay it. I think any web shop owner (or webmaster – I help some people with this sort of thing) should be taking care of the basics above. Do your shops measure up?

Despite the above checks, I can only remember not buying something online once in the last year. A couple of times, I’ve worked through the above steps and it’s changed which shop I bought from – and I’m pretty sure it saved me from losing £400 on one purchase.

Maybe, like me, you’ve noticed that you’ve had less junk email this week and you’ve been wondering why. News sites are reporting that a large spammer-friendly hosting service in California has been disconnected by its service providers after they were sent evidence about its activities. (Check out the “Next” links on the report to see how the story develops.)

For the technically-minded, Changes in Spam Levels this week Posted by simonw illustrates the level of disruption and may grow an interesting discussion from server managers – it seems the reduction is less than the 75% reported in some news services, but still significant.

This is great news for all good internet users. It’s disappointing if the spam hosting service won’t have to pay any of the costs they’ve inflicted on other computer users in some way. The only practical negative that I’ve noticed so far is that much of the stopped spam was pretty easy to identify and filter out, so the reduction in spam reaching my “unsure” mailbox hasn’t been anything like 50%. Still, less spam hitting the filters means less computer power used, which means less electricity and network data transfer used, which means lower costs for us. Yippee!

And finally, I smiled at this comment over on the WebmasterWorld discussion:-

“Our spam email has dropped so much in the past 2 days that I was beginning to wonder if there was something wrong with our email accounts.”

I wrote to a site owner last week and I thought I was writing to a webmaster. The site owner complained about some of the jargon and, while explaining who I thought I was writing for, I explained some of it because I think more website owners might benefit from these three explanations:-

“Expat-like terms” – made available in a way that is freely sharable, modifiable and redistributable, similar to the Expat software package, whose terms are published at http://www.jclark.com/xml/copying.txt – this is often used as a clear, simple example for encouraging wide distribution of electronic resources (software).

“clandestine Google Analytics” – Google Analytics is a service from Google, Inc for tracking users through a website in various ways. I believe the Data Protection Act means that English websites should obtain informed consent from users by publishing a Privacy Policy on their site which discloses what the GA service will be used for and linking through to GA’s own Privacy Policy. Some websites attempt to run Google Analytics on users’ computers without explaining why and without any Privacy Policy. That is what I mean by “clandestine”.

“valid xhtml” – validating against the eXtensible HyperText Markup Language standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) – the underlying language of the web. There is a test service provided at http://validator.w3.org/ and passing it is a key stepping stone towards making an accessible website. There’s not really such a thing as “invalid xhtml” – if it doesn’t pass validation, it’s not xhtml. So I guess I’m guilty of using a tautology sometimes – sorry about that.

Is it worthwhile knowing those three phrases? Are there other key technical phrases which you think site owners should know?

Thousands of UK businesses are unwittingly breaking the law because their websites aren’t accessible to people with disabilities.

Disability laws require firms to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ to their sites to make them more user-friendly but most are completely unaware of the legislation.

Websites shouldn’t discriminate against people with disabilities – and that means everything from colour blindness to motor neurone disease.

But more than that, it makes good business sense to make your website accessible to as many potential customers as possible.  It’s not only UK law but a good advert for your business to set a policy of inclusion for all.

Official figures show that 80 per cent of UK company websites aren’t accessible to a fifth of the population.  Problems for people with disabilities include no including text as an alternative to images for translation by audio readers, and having an effective background & text colour contrast.

Simple changes can make the world of difference to someone with disabilities.  UK websites that don’t comply with the first level of accessibility compliance are not only missing business opportunities but are also ignoring their legal duty to make their websites accessible.

Buzzin’ Fly has specialist knowledge of disability law compliance and website accessibility which can be very useful when having your business website desgined and developed.

For more informaion on website accessibility visit the W3 website.

Like all visitors to the Listening to the Social Entrepreneur conference, my pack included a leaflet from a university research centre. Today it popped up on the top of my in-tray while I was making a concerted effort to clear it. The leaflet is a description of the research centre, but it included a web address, so I visited that website. It contained essentially the same information and nothing else. What was the point of that? I already had their contact details in the attendee list. How much did these leaflets cost?

In general, it’s a little disappointing when you get a “null pointer” from a private company, but it’s particularly annoying from a university. University mistakes like “technology transfer programmes” (that stop software becoming free software available to social enterprises) are justified by a need to get more money – but clearly this particular university has money to waste. How about others?

If there was a way to subscribe to email or blog news of their research publications, I probably would have subscribed. Instead, I’ve just ranted here (without rewarding them with a link) and now I’m going to recycle the flier. I’ll probably have forgotten the three-letter acronym by next week. It’s simply bad marketing. It’s paper spam. Please, if you are putting things into conference handout packs, ask yourself why? What are you hoping to get out of it? How are you going to measure its success?

Many businesses fall into the trap of launching a website and then sitting back and waiting for new customers to contact them. Many clients have contacted my website development and internet marketing company, Buzzin Fly, frustrated that they had paid another design company to build an expensive website, but six months later they have not recieved a single lead.

In most cases the design company have delivered exactly what they had agreed to do.  Most website design companies are simplt that – design companies.  They don’t offer or include any form of post-launch marketing, and is some cases the ‘design’ of a website doesn’t even include much time or consideration to the correct development of a commerically viable website.

Therefore, it is very important that when considering your budget for a new website – be it a redesign or brand new, always set some money aside for online or internet marketing.

Marketing your website is essential if you want to attract visitors and get noticed.

There are many low cost techniques you can use to drive traffic to your website, including getting listed in the search engines, advertising to a mailing list or exchanging reciprocal links with other websites.

It’s no good spending £1,000 or £10,000 on a company website if potential customers cannot find your website or are completely unaware of your website or business.  Whether you’re launching a new website, or just want to increase traffic to your existing website, it’s important to plan your marketing activities.

Always allocate a Website Marketing budget & plan for online business success

Choose the marketing techniques which will be most effective in meeting your objectives.

Here are 3 online marketing techniques to consider:

Paid Inclusion – Buy keywords on search engines.  This is the only way to guarantee your website will be listed on the first page of major search engines such as Google

Email Newsletters – Run an email campaign if you want to alert customers to a new product or promotions. But be aware, it is illegal to send unsolicited emails to personal email accounts.  If you are looking to boost sales from existing customers then an email newsletter is a good way to encourage repeat visits and build excellent customer relationships.

Blogs – Start a business or corporate blog.  Write honestly and openly about your business sector.  Try not to overly promote your own products and services but develop an informative channel offering an independent view.  In time, due to the quality of your blog, you will receive traffic and a loyal following; a percentage of whom may then become customers.

I strongly believe that every business can prosper from having a professional website and that either writing for a blog or promoting their business products and services on other blogs will increase awareness and sales.  But to generate online business success you must consider marketing your website or blog as well as building one.

This morning I have found out that BT have changed the outgoing mail settings for email accounts.  You can no longer user SMTP but must change it to MAIL.

As a BT customer I was not informed of this change; and the BT Broadband support representative I spoke with informed me there had been no changes.

So, if today you have found you can recieve but not send emails and your ISP (Internet SErvice Provider) is BT, then check your email account settings.  If in the Outgoing Mail setting you are using SMTP (eg. smtp.btinternet.com), change it to MAIL (mail.btinternet.com).  Save your changes and test.

This follows BT’s recent change that had customers receiving error messages, requiring authentication codes to be added for each non-BTemail address.

A business lesson – if you are successful in business you should look towards change and not stagnation.

As early as the mid-1990s I was taking part in meetings and presentations with a company called MAGEX who was attempting to sell their idea and ultimately their software, to the music industry.  The software allowed someone to legally buy an mp3 and download the file to a specific computer.  The track would not play on another device and therefore once bought, could not be copied or shared.

This concept had its limitations but the main essence was to get the record industry to stop wasting their time and money fighting illegal downloading of music, and concentrate on how best the music industry could embrace the Internet and the phenomemnon of peer-to-peer sharing sites such as Napster.

Remember, this was a time long before MySpace, YouTube and other social networking sites.

Universal, Sony and BMG were among representatives at those meetings who simply couldn’t see past how much money they were losing, and not what they could gain, and moreover, didn’t want to consider what would happen to them in the future.

I beleive what I witnessed in the space of one year or so, was successful businessmen not wanting to step outside of their comfort zone.

The result was that the music industry chose to ignore the changing patterns of music consumption; and only recently, ten years later, are they embracing the Internet through social media websites and free downloads; a lead that was given to them by small independent labels and artists who, if truth be known, need the money more than they do!

I felt engaged to write this post after reading that Mick Jagger, lead singer with The Rolling Stones, has been invited to help the European Commission (EC) to draw up a report on e-commerce and online shopping.

Jagger will be part of a committee (including Steve Jobs of Apple) who will advise the EC on the issues surrounding the online shopping sector, including a particular focus on online selling and downloading of music through eCommerce websites.

Neelie Kroes, a European Union competition commissioner told the BBC that one of the points to be raised will be why it is not as easy to buy music files online as it is to have a CD shipped around Europe will be under investigation.

To tie this in with the purpose of this blog – how to generate online business success – the business lesson I learnt by way of my first-hand experience with MAGEX and the music industry in the 1990s was that if you are successful in business there are at least two reasons why you should look for change and not stagnation:

1. Success should breed more success – look for other ways to expand your business and increase your success further instead of allowing your competitors to gain the upperhand.

2. Every millionaire I have ever spoken to always has a story to tell of when they made a ‘make or break’ decision.  They NEVER tell the story of how they played safe and took no risks or that once becoming a millionaire they are not looking to increase theor wealth.

A new study suggests that effective eCommerce is a vital key element to business growth and success.

Research by StrategyR Global Industry Analysts (GIA) claims that eCommerce increases the distribution of a business and therefore leads to better growth.  Furthermore, in the current economic climate, while other areas of sales are decreasing, eCommerce is still a growth area.

The study, Distribution Channel Research: A Global Outlook, states the market for eCommerce is “bubbling with growth opportunities” and goes on to suggest eCommerce as being “a new and more efficient way to reach customers and channel partners”.