Frank Schulte-Ladbeck

A quick thank you for listing this site in a post goes out to Janelle Vadnais of http://createbusinessgrowth.com for the following post:

http://createbusinessgrowth.com/who-said-that/who-said-that-127

Have you crowded out what the visitor needs to see with what you think will convince him on your site? What do you need on your site for a conversion?

For a couple of months, I have been taking apart websites from various small businesses to see if they work. Not how do they work. I wanted to improve one of my websites, but I also wanted to understand visitor behavior. Each week I take one site to analyze. I go through the site. I look at the links leading to the site. I try to discover if the business uses any social media to drive traffic to the site, or if social media is used to encourage use of the business. I realized that I had fallen into a trap. I was looking at what the site owners considered to be working, and I was not looking at what actually may be working.
    The interesting aspect of my study has been that you can pick a field of business only to find that there will be the most basic of websites designed twelve years ago to sites that play with all of the current thinking. In some ways this does matter to finding an audience in the search results page. You could put up a simple flier of a website, and you may obtain traffic or a good result in a local listing. My point is that sometimes design choices like a static site or dynamic site do not make much of a difference. However, when you do have a visitor on the site, does the site help convert that visitor into a client?
    I began looking at my own behavior to make guesses about my visitors possible motives. To determine the seriousness of a business when looking at their website, I go to the “about us” page. You will be surprised how many firms forget to fill this out or do not have one. I then look at contact information. If there is no good way to contact the site owner, I a wary. Yet this goes farther. If the contact information is “info@thiswebstie.com”, I am not too trusting. This changes though depending on the circumstance. When going to a page about advertising, then “advertising@thiswebsite.com” does not put me off. The same applies when looking for information and I find the info@ email, but when the site is all about Jane Smith Consulting, then I wonder about info@ emails. I feel better if I am sending an email to a person (tom@thiswebsite.com who is the personal assistant to Jane Smith). Little details left an impression, and I feel better if I believe that I am contacting a known entity (hello tom, can Jane Smith…).
   What did dawn on me is that I am not really reading. Like most users, I have a certain set of websites that I like to go to read, and I do think of myself as reading, yet I am not too concerned with everything there. A website that I discovered not too long ago in my Google Reader for an alert on sustainable architecture is Green Building Elements. This is a wonderful site if you are interested in green or sustainable issues in building. At first, a few articles came up in the reader, and as it turned out, I was lead to this site, so I am reading the article, and I explore the site a bit. Eventually, I type the site into my browser to go directly there, instead of waiting for an alert to pop up. So there I am. Do I look at the ads? Do I read what is in the sidebars? The header? No, I quickly scan the article titles to see what may interest me, then I read that article. If I have time, I glance over to see the recent comments, which may lead me to read that article. If I have a bit longer, I may read the advertising or any promotional cop on the site. Why not pay attention all of the time? Because that is not why I am on the site. I want to read the article, and provide a response to join or engage a conversation.
    Let us turn this around. Say I am searching for a water filtration system to be used on my greywater system that I am building. I type this into my search box, and I find an article about these systems. I land on the page, and I begin scanning. Does this page have what I need? I then check out the advertising too. Again, this is a quick scan, and I will click the ad if it seems to take me to where I want to be. My point is that we are scanners. We read when it matters to us, but a website visitor is scanning for that tidbit which brought home to the site.
    This brought me back to my website analysis. I delved into the content of each site to find a morsel that would show me how to convert my user into a client. I missed the point. A competitor’s copy does not provide the answer. Understanding the user does. Some users will want to check you out, so the details have to be in place. Little clues reveal a lot about the business. For example, I noticed quite a few websites reporting to be from larger firms that had teams, but much of the data indicated that there was only one person working for the firm. I also noticed that web users want something quick. The trick is to figure out what that something is, and give it to them. Do they want to know how much a consulting fee would be. Maybe Jane Smith consulting will get the job if the price is right. Do they need a quick turnaround? Can same day service be achieved? Ms. Smith can meet clients on the same day. This is where competitor copy may come in use. When each competitor is touting a certain feature, then maybe they are doing so because the consumer has asked for it. However, you may also want to ask your own clients what information they need to make the sale. This is where I came to another conclusion: too many small business sites are working too hard to make that conversion that they cause the customer to leave the site. We pile on marketing copy before we give the price in the hope that the content will help make the sale. The user does not want to wade through it.  Redacting content to make the scan of a website easier can be the best thing that you could do to win the user over.
    Have content where it matters. To give users a better option, I have teaser content in some spots on a page. Other times I do not. The depending factor is how do the users to your site use the information. I also discovered that I am guilty of repeating content, as if I am trying to make a point. I saw this happening on several sites. Remember that people who want to read will continue to explore, but a scanner will leave the page if he does not think the data is on that page. Putting too little content can be a problem as well. One service company had a slogan that included the term “five point service”. Being familiar with the type of work that they do, I realized what the five points were. Nowhere on the site was the five point service clearly explained. An intelligent user would eventually discover the meaning though, yet we have to remember the scanner. They are not going to bother looking for the explanation. The slogan had no significance to the scanner, so it became wasted copy. Another aspect is the site that contains all of the basic content that every one of his competitors contains. No content differentiates itself, and the questions a visitor might have, like price, was not answered. Having the price listed may be what the visitor wants, but you may not want it on the site. You may want the visitor to call you to make the sale. I found that visitors to one site are fairly evenly divided: some want the price listed, some want to send a request for a quote, and some call. Of course callers may be better for you, but they may not be the only ones to convert. If you are focusing on having them call, you need more than a phone number. Having a call to action to encourage them to call, or a simple explanation why they should call is the best option.
    What is the lesson: clean up your act, but be sure that you made yourself clear. Go through your own site with fresh eyes of a scanner, but maybe ask friends to do tasks on your site to find out their reactions to their site. You may be adding content, but you may discover the need to reduce.

A three columned theme in green and yellow tones with a more newsprint style. The idea that this blog theme would be good for new reporting.

I have been reading quite a few blogs that are industry or topic specific news reporting sites. When I have a newspaper in front of me, I do enjoy glancing through all the sections to see what may catch my eye; however, I do not care for such generalities in a website. I prefer going to one site that will delve into the topic. More and more I find that these sites are written by a team of writer/editors who take submissions for ideas for posts or the posts themselves. Being curious about green home trends, I have spent a good deal of time on a few green/sustainable news type blogs. One thing that I noticed is the fact that they do not use what are really green design elements to reduce the user’s energy usage on their pages (dark backgrounds to reduce power outputs). White backgrounds are the predominate choice. Standing outside on this cold clear day, I was looking at the green and yellow leaves on the plants around me. Having everything look crisp meant a white background to me.
    Another three columned theme. News sites have this desire to pack in the information or objects. I am beginning to appreciate three columns more as a few of my sites mature. I do not have the desire to pack stuff into the sidebars, but I do have the desire to give everything space.I found that cramming it all into one sidebar was too much. In this theme, I separated the sidebars around the content. If the object was less important to me, say a list of links that I want on my site, but that I know the users hardly ever click, I would want them in the sidebar, which I would place to the side further away from the content (the sidebars being side by side). In news sites, we have a different scenario; we need to stress a few objects (most recent posts, most popular stories, or a photo of the day and all of this interspersed with the advertising). In this case, I think having the content flanked by the sidebars works to our advantage.
    Even if you are dealing with one topic, you can still have different subtopics. I placed the header above the menu navigation. The title is to the left, as is the slogan. The navigation bar is tabs with the open tab being shown clearly in the white background. Other tabs are left darker when not in use, and the submenus have the yellow background to distinguish them from the body of the site. I heard an argument against submenus You may be hiding a topic under another heading, which a new user might not realize. True, but maybe not. Thinking back to the newspaper, I could have a “Lifestyle” section. Under this heading we could find fashion designs, new places to hang out, and cooking. A submenu may not be great or perfect if you have not thought through your information architecture.
    Stripping it all away. You have to look at the icons that you are using. I love icons, since they can add visual interest to a plain site. Yet I found using some standard icon designs for the comments or author obtrusive. This theme leaves the data of posting date and author below the post title. I find that useful. Below the post, we can find the tags. I wanted to move away from listing the category of the post here, and I find the comments listed in the post footer can be a benefit or hindrance. I removed the comments icon, since a new site might not have many comments (I do not like the idea of turning the comments off as some suggest- just do not advertise no comments).
    As a final note, the idea for this theme was playing around with a basic news site, but this can work as any type of blog. The sidebars are currently filled with the basic features of search, archive, and category. The footer contains the basic link set up for a business site. The rss is left in the footer. I like the rss feed at the end of the article for a news site. If I like the article, I can subscribe, and you want subscribers who like the articles. Then other space can be used more wisely. If I was establishing a blog, I would add the rss feed into the sidebar or the header (I left the header slightly larger than I normally do for adding something like that or an image). The theme name? I was listening to Souixsie and the Banshees “Kiss Them for Me” (maybe because I had recently seen the Cary Grant film) when I began this theme, but the inspiration was looking at a garden on a winter’s day, so “Monday, Monday” came to mind.
    Download the theme Monday.

We want our customer experience on a site to be good, if not great; however, have you considered why they come to your site, and how those fancy effects change their experience?

I am still dealing with past experiments. I created a forum, so I could see how I could design a theme for it, and how I could work with the program. I never worked on visitors for the site. I created a real estate listing service for the same reason with the same situation for visitors. I never did play with adding flash. I set my browser to ignore it to load pages faster, and I noticed that this must be happening with others. I am glad for experimenting, but they had repercussions. I spent time last month creating redirects, because I found that other sites were referring visitors to those pages, which I had deleted. The problem was that my experimental blog had become a main vehicle for my business.
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A dark toned three column theme with a blue header. Yellow writing on the dark background.

I analyze sites. Mainly those of my competitors, but I look at the design of each site that I am on, and I try to determine what do I like about the site, and what can I do without. I have also been thinking about how we interact with digital media. Furthermore, I have been considering the energy efficiency of having dark backgrounds. At first, I thought of dark background for sites which loaded quite a few images. They work better. Then I thought about readability on a dark background, and could we have a site that uses a darker hue for a more content driven site. This theme addresses those thoughts.

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Can font color choices enhance your design? Can it draw the eye to marketing copy?

I have been examining a few sites that were designed almost ten years ago. I was looking at marketing copy. We mainly use a bold font or an italic font to make a statement stand out. A web page is more versatile than that technique. Sometimes to highlight a phrase, a box was created to highlight that sentence. It was almost as if we sat down with a piece of paper to design a page with no thought of the possibilities. Looking at a page that I had created, I saw that I had a different issue: a color was being used for the font of two different texts. Why was this a problem? Each text had a message, but I found that I and a few people that I asked to look at the site skipped over the second paragraph, which was placed to the right of the first.

We have so many options with color that I have seen designs which go wild. I think in part this happens because we evolve our websites over time, and we do not have a consistent color theme that we follow. Another problem is that we allow our perceptions to guide us, instead of analyzing what we see. For example, we can use a black background, and forget that a grey font will not read well on the screen. This happened on a site where the business owner, a photographer, had seen a book with a black and grey cover. The cover was gorgeous, but as a small font, it was a hard color combination to take. White font on black is not so great either all the time. I have an easier time reading yellow font on a black background. I think we go to our admin areas for our sites to update content, that we forget what our visitors are going through. When studying other sites, I became sure I had not looked at my site for a while.

I prefer minimal sites that have bits of eye candy. I do not want to overpower my visitors with colors. I know that there is a splash here and there, and that may suffice. When it came to these fonts, I did not want a glaring difference, but I did want the user eye to stop, while he thought that this is something else. I took a color that was in the same hue range, but lighter. In this case the colors were an orange approaching red, with a lighter orange for the next font. Orange was used in the title of the site on a black background. So three different oranges separate the fonts. I think a subtle cue like a color change can cause a visitor to pause, and that is my goal. My test subjects may have been bias at this point, but they saw the change as acheiving its goal.

How do you go about picking new colors? Some designers spend a good deal of time creating color themes. You can incorporate these themes into your site theme via the stylesheet. That is in a perfect world. The simpler method is to set the font color through html.  For example, I set the color and weight for the first lines of this post by using this code: <span style=”font-weight: bold; color: rgb(153, 0, 0);”>text here</span>. By using this code, I can change the color scheme away from what the stylesheet tells the browser to do to what I might consider the best option. One paragraph is darker, and one paragraph becomes lighter.  Let’s say I wanted the color to be a bit lighter, I would change the 153 to 204.  The question is will the browser render these colors correctly though. Another question may be how did I come up with the 153 and 204 in the first place. First question: there are sites that can test your color choices with a bit of javascript to see if your choices will work. I choose a simpler method. I create a test page in my web page creation program Kompozer. There I can control the background and font colors, so I can experiment. The program allows me to look at the source code, so I do not need to remember all of the codes. You can become quite creative, but sticking to the predefined colors will keep you browser safe. Kompozer is open source, but you can go with any web page creating program to play with colors.

I guess that if I was going to be elegant, I would find the way to have these font colors set in the stylesheet. Most items I do set that way. I find that if you do not know what you are doing, you may make a mistake, and this method works fine. The benefit of this method is that I can change up the colors from section to section fairly quickly. Do not judge the color combinations on your own though. Ask others what  they think (remember the grey font on black).

Is your business prepared for problems? You may think that internet attacks launched against your website may never happen, but they can be accomplished quite easily.

Last year, I experienced a rather clumsily executed denial of service attack against one of my business sites. The idea behind a denial of service attack is to keep loading a website into the browser, so that requests are sent to the server. The server becomes overloaded with requests, so the site becomes unavailable. This does not always need to be an attack though. If a major website with huge traffic linked to your site, the result can be the same. Last year, my site was loaded by a single person 5000 times in one day in the area where my local business takes place. Since this person allowed the site to load, the service was not denied, but the event caused an anomaly in my web analytics. This past week saw another more sophisticated attack launched against my site, which promoted my hosting company to limit access to my site. This kind of attack lasts usually for one day, so I was not too concerned. More annoyed than anything.
    I am not sure that I will ever know the reason for this attack, and I may never be able to prevent another one in the future, so I have to think about options. If you take your business seriously, you watch your competitors to ensure that they do not outperform you. Both attacks coincide with marketing campaigns that I launched, so I think that may have something to do with it. When a competitor revealed an advertising campaign that stated you had to use his service, because it was the only way to obtain good results, I reacted by countering his claims. Others in my industry did not see his claims as a threat to their business, but this competitor was successfully convincing our market that his claims were correct. My counter to that campaign was quite effective, which did not make him happy, but that is the nature of business. I looked upon these denial of service attacks as one method to counter my marketing efforts. This is a poor means to hamper marketing, but this may have been the intent.
    Our small business websites go through growing changes. We begin with a free blog or page from or industry association. Those of us who are successful with these efforts move onto having a website of our own. We obtain hosting with a company, which is probably a shared hosting account, since that is more affordable. As we continue with our success, we have to start considering semi-dedicated or dedicated hosting. More expensive, but we need the server capacity to handle more traffic. I am at the point of changing my hosting from shared to semi-dedicated, and this attack may have firmed up my plans. My marketing efforts have been paying off, causing more visits to my site. Upgrading my hosting does allow me to increase the capacity of visitors my site could handle, as well as improve load speeds. This choice is one step in a plan to deal with a future attack.
    Yet upgrading my hosting may not be the only answer. For most small business owners, what happens at are hosting company is out of our hands. They have to deal with the attack, which is usually done by limiting access to the site. I thought about my marketing campaigns, particularly the newly launched effort. This advertising was on the internet, and I was having the campaign point people to my site. It was the fourth day of the ads being live, so I would be leaving a bad impression if new visitors could not even load my site. There was a solution though: redirect the ads to my local listing on Google Places. I did a study of my competitors last year, and I discovered that many did not have a listing. Of those who did, their listings were not complete. This makes sense, because we all hope that people will either call us or go to our website. I did have a complete listing (in the vague notion that Google may see my listing as more valid, which did not seem to be the case). With a complete listing, I do provide the basic information needed by a potential client, so I could redirect my campaign to this listing, until the denial of service attack ended.
    This is where small businesses can fail. We focus our marketing efforts, due to our limited budgets. We try to do the right thing by having all of our marketing tie together, so we attempt to funnel the effort into having customers go through our website, come to our store, or to call us. We need to keep our options open, and we need plans in place if these funnels are closed.  So what can we do when we have a denial of service attack? With internet advertising, we have a quick way to redirect traffic to another site, so a Google business listing or a business listing on another site may be a good fall back. Make sure that our marketing does give other means of communicating with our customers (ads having phone numbers as well as a link). Then it may be time to consider upgrading your hosting. We cannot really stop this kind of interruption; we can only find ways to live through it.

If you are a local business, how do you quickly find the data to check on your targeting effectiveness?

At the end of each year, I perform a final evaluation of my business efforts before working on the plans for the new year. This year I was taking a look at my metrics to see if they helped me achieve my goal, or were they more data that clouded the picture. One discovery that I made was that I had not organized data efficiently. I decided to simplify my analysis by looking at what data sets were needed, and how should they be presented to make a quick assessment. While I was in this process, I read a post on Google Analytics reports from Occam’s Razor that I found quite useful. All of a sudden, the report that I wanted became clear to me.
    First, you should understand the background. I have a consulting business, home inspections, which focus on a specific subregion, the area around Houston. Some of my clients are moving into the Houston area, so I do have website visitors from outside my area who will hire me, but the vast majority are already living in the city. I need to know what people in Houston are doing on my site, and how they came to me. I also want to check if some design choices in my website are working with this audience. I chose these factors to help me understand how well I am targeting my audience:
Unique Visitors- due to the nature of my business, I am interested in the unique visitors, because tat gives me an idea of my reach
New Visits- most people hire me once (most people are not buying or selling a home all the time), my clients will be new to my service
Bounce Rate- I am keeping them on the site. If people are leaving the site quickly in greater numbers, I cannot convince them to hire me. I want this number to be below 15% eventually. If it is higher, then either I am obtaining people to the site for the wrong reasons, or I am not fulfilling the reason why they came.
Page Views- this metric may just be here to make me feel good, because the next metric really gets to the heart of the matter for me, but I like knowing how many page views have occurred.
Pages/Visit- I have found that when the pages per visit is going up, I am engaging the visitor more, and they are likely to become a client. I want this number to go to 2.75 pages per visit.
Average time on page- again, I am looking at the idea of engagement. If they average time is around a minute, I know that they are only scanning my blog posts (which have a tendency to be a bit long). If the average time is closer to five minutes (which is about how long it takes to read one of my posts), then I know that they are actually reading the article.
User Interaction Goal more than four pages- this is a goal that I set up when I discovered from asking clients who hired me that they read more than four pages on my site. I am trying to sift out the casual visitor who came for one bit of information to find the person who is checking me out.
Depth of interaction being time on site more than thirty minutes- people who are more likely to use my service will be scrutinizing my posts more.
Real estate investor- my clients/audience are broken down into groups. I created a means for tracking one group, real estate investors, by tracking people who click on a link to a landing page meant for real estate investors.
Quote Request- one of my calls to action is to dive visitors to the request a quote page. However, I find that most people prefer to call me, so I have my phone number in that call to action. I record phone calls on a separate form, but I want to see if that call to action is working, so I created this goal.

Are these the only metrics that I am using? No. These are only the metrics which help me understand if I am reaching my target audience, and if they are behaving like a person who may hire me. You will have to determine how such visitors behave on your site. I broke my report into two tabs: one is looking at the data for general behavior; the second is looking at my personal goals which relate to aspects of how my site is designed. The dimensions is how I am viewing this data. I first look at the regions dimension. This breaks the data down to the state level for me here in the United States. Then I can look at the city dimension. There are many small cities around Houston, so I do have to scroll to see them, but at least with this dimension the top five cities give me an idea if I am hitting the Houston region effectively. Next I look at the medium dimension. Did people from this city find me through search, through another website, or directly? If they came directly, they may be coming from one of my off line marketing campaigns that lists the url of my site. I also want to know the percentage from the different mediums. By drilling down to this level, I obtain a quick breakdown. I currently want fifty percent of my visitors to come from search, twenty-five percent from other sites, and twenty-five percent directly. Roughly, I should say. I do have a sliver of site visitors that fit in the other category. Finally, I look at the keyword. This helps me understand how they are searching and finding me.
    If you want this report, here is what you have to do:
1) in another tab, open up your Google Analytics account
2) com back to this site, and click on this link (this will open up the create a report form in your analytics).
3) save the report. If you want to use this in more than one profile, then select the profiles that you wish to use the report in before saving.

    How can you change this report to benefit you? Research and an understanding of your site. My site is in a blog format with many informational articles; that is why I look at visitors who read more than four pages. You may want to track your “About Page”. Do your clients hire you because they like your bio? Are they likely to use you if they go to the page with directions to your store? Are you more interested in repeat visits to your site, rather than new visits? I am always evaluating how can I define the behavior of a potential client from just a visitor who likes my site. Some of my goals were picked from past observations, but I need to keep testing this, since maybe factors will change. You will have to find the way of determining this behavior in your own clients, but I hope this report points the way.

Mobile devices are changing the way that we interact with our world and the internet. Social Media may be the trend, but QR codes and augmented reality may be the future.

Early this past summer, I watched a young couple step out of a car to look at a home, which was for sale. The young woman pulled out her phone, taking pictures of the property. She probably wrote a message to herself about the address and the Realtor. This caused me to speculate on Facebook and Twitter that this situation could have been different. The engagement factor by the Realtor might have caused these people to buy the home. However, the Realtor was not there, so what about a website? Having a dedicated page or even a website to a home that is for sale is not uncommon. What if there was a QR code on the sign?
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A grey toned three columned theme with splashes of purples and reds for excitement.

I have not produced one of these free themes in a while. I have been working on a few projects that took me away from these little experiments. Usually for a free theme, I play with a few basic ideas that I see being used by a small business to discover how I can tweak the theme a little. I had been exploring various Steampunk sites, because I liked what I was seeing in the artwork. As for the sites, I would really love to explore the use of typography more, which is not easy to do in a free theme. Today I had a break, so I began to play with textures instead of thinking of a business or art style.  This doodling lead to the following theme.
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