6 success tips for business from your websites

[caption id="attachment_813" align="aligncenter" width="432"] 6 success tips for business from your websites[/caption]

The first thing is – a happy birthday to Internet. Yes, today is the 30^th birthday for Internet.

Internet Websites are an essential element for modern business days. It can be a personal, organization, product specific or sometimes service specific. A website is not just HTML information on internet, but it is a brand value of you / your company or your product / service. Many websites even act as online sales points through its e-commerce channels. A strategic report from investornews, pcworld and hubspot says that approx 571 new websites are created every minute throughout the world around us.

Well, do you have your website for personal brand promotion or to promote the brand value of your organization?  How do you reach international customers to create an awareness of your product /service? In my study, many non-IT Smallbiz and enterprises are having websites but those are just HTML pages. I see this scenario in many IT startups too.  The point is the website is live, but it is not active to its audience. It always provides some static information from their business catalogs, and images from their photo gallery.

4^th Week of Dec 2012 - I participated in a group discussion with Smallbiz owners. Some of them are from IT startups too. I presented a strategy model for them to create / improve their websites and active information management. The goal of the strategy is to increase the brand value and improve the business transactions through their website. I would like to share some of the important points from our discussion here.

#1: Simple Website: The website should be simple. It means it should be understandable to any kind of visitor. Simple navigations, and easily understandable icons / photos / information diagrams can increase the readability of content. Use Color wheel theories to understand the minimal usage of colors, and site-map model to build navigations. The content should be updated regularly.

#2: Fast Loading: The fast loading website gets more attention from users. I always suggest avoiding flash and shockwave content in business websites. It is required only in specific sections for example:  a workflow demo of your ERP product. JQuery is good for simple web slideshows, photo galleries and UI designs. JQuery loads fast, provides impressive results with its new versions now days. Similarly HTML5, AJAX and other JavaScript frameworks helps improving performance of websites.

#3: Understand your visitors: Analytics is the best way, to do a reach on visitors and their actions. Google Analytics is the free one available, but there are many paid analytics systems to help us – some of them are not costly. Every website should be connected with an analytics engine to capture visitor activities. It required very less programming knowledge to integrate an analytics engine, but to evaluate the results from analytics engine, you need a strategist. A strategist can guide you about content planning, goal setting, bounce rate management and visitor count management.

#4: Connect with World: Social Media is an active marketing space in India from 2010 – but very fewer companies are utilizing it for business brand promotions. Facebook, YouTube and Blogs should be connected with your website to create more visibility. The URL of the website should be promoted though Social Media channels with every post and campaign.  Create engagement programs through social media and guide the users to website for more details: for example – to download an eBook or watch a video. Search Engine Promotions are also required – you can use free plug-ins available to download. A strategist can help you to build promotion strategies and insights analytics.

#5: Think about Mobile: Approx 30%* of visitors use their mobile devices/smartphone to browse internet now days. If your website is not responsive, it may not show content in expected way. Make sure, the website works for all required mobile device resolutions, and changes its shape accordingly. There are many free validation tools available to test the website with various resolutions. The alternative idea is to create a sub-domain for mobile users [m.yoursite.com] and redirect them to it via a small code script. Mobile website development needs some frameworks to build fast loading and content delivery – for example Wordpress for Mobile-sites. A strategist can help you to build technically qualified mobile version of website.

#6: Build a small web-store: E-commerce is for selling products / services online. But a web store can provide something even for free [for example: EBooks, PPT, PDF files etc]. Let the content be relevant to your products / services [example: manuals, learning books etc]. It creates a reason for visitors to increase their frequency every time. Talk about your updates in social channels to improve awareness. Take the suggestions from a strategist for more ideas.

I hope the above mentioned points are useful to you too. If you have questions and suggestions – please communicate with me.

New wave - Mobile Internet Development

Internet is growing rapidly, and mobile internet adds jet to it. Few months before, many mobile companies started to introduce smart phones and internet ready mobile devices. The browser manufactures also started to release their mobile version of popular browsers – one best example is Opera mini browser. Opera mini is one the best browser I have used for mobile internet browsing. I am using a Nokia S40 Device, but I heard that Opera mini is showing a lot of magic in Nokia S60 and other advance models, including smart phones.

As many of us know, the websites for mobile should be little different than usual websites. If you take a look for available mobile websites – they will have less graphics, easy navigations, and smart way of information display. This helps to load the pages quick, and saves the internet browning cost.

There are many developers working on developing websites and web designs. The emerging mobile internet world will give them more opportunities to build mobile websites, mobile web apps and related content managers etc.

While developing mobile websites – just keep these points in mind.

1. Always choose Single Column Layout for Mobi Site Web Design. Two or more Columns make the site slow and also incorrect content display with many devices.
2. Decide your menu Items while planning for mobile site– and show them as breadcrumbs. It helps for better navigation in many devices. Limit the website for less than 10 pages.
3. Use XHTML for coloring the

tags – avoid images as much as possible. If you want to show photo gallery or similar stuff – give them options to use Flickr viewers, Picasa Viewers through Snaptu or related tools.
4. While using Images, compress them to low file size – keep them with always.
5. Try using simple Server side plug-ins for RSS integration or Twitter calls. It saves the loading time. For Videos, and other downloadable content – give them options to download in PC / and save it to device later.

The future devices will have more facilities to browse internet sites – I expect the mobile browser providers will also come up with new additions. The internet browsing cost is also becoming less now days, it will improve the usages. I suggest – the small and medium size teams, should learn more on working with mobile internet apps / sites – I am sure it’s a next level business.