What would you do if you found out one of your best sales people was randomly turning away 1 out of every 5 people?  People who might have bought from you, but the salesperson  turned them away because of their own prejudices.

Recently I was on a conference call with a client, and one of the services he was using. We were trying to work through some issues  and during the discussion one of the issues that came up was that the services site was designed to run in Internet Explorer only.

I can understand if you are running an Intranet, inside a company where the browser is dictated by IT, but for a public website, you are essentially turning away 1 out of every 4 or 5 customers.

So I ask again could you imagine your  bank, grocery store, or gas station or your store randomly turning away 1 out of every 5 customers because they drove a mini-van instead of a car to get to the store? Of course not! That salesperson should and probably would be fired for such foolishness!

Web browsers are like cars in many ways. They are the vehicle which your customer uses to get to your website. Just because Internet Explorer holds 80% of the market share, doesn’t mean that it should be the only browser you allow your customers to use. Your site should be designed to work with all modern browsers – and if it doesn’t you should fire your web designer.

(Note: names withheld to protect the guilty.)

Popularity: 2% [?]

This summer I’ve been working on several projects with two of them being very large.  Well I just finished the first large project, Our Wedding Circle. Built using an existing framework, so it should be easier to maintain, there is also large sections of custom code and several key updates.

The updates, allow for, as all websites should:

• easier administration to add/update/and disable users,
• faster searching for users than before,
• more optimized database structure, and
• improved findability for search engines, so it should rank higher than it’s predecessor.

The client brought me their ideas, and I worked with them and showed them some others things which could be done to make managing a site of their size more manageable.

The site is huge already with many wedding vendors from all over the US, indexed by location and category and is growing daily. Sites have to designed with growth in mind, or they will fail, and this site is a perfect example of one which is growing as it should.

Popularity: unranked [?]

The government will be starting back the ARC loans (more info) which will given struggling businesses up to $35,000 to borrow interest free.

ARC loans are supposed to help the small businesses which are stuggling due to the economy and thus the fact that there are fewer customers, and the customers are buying less.  ARC loans are to help bridge that gap in income, and help you remain solvent while looking for new opportunities.

Many businesses are turning to the Internet to find new customers, but they are sure how.  Evidence of that is the fact that 90% of small and medium businesses quit using pay-per-click and related on-line ads after only 6 months. If you want to use your ARC funds to help you expand your business, you need to work with someone who specializes in small businesses.

This is because many business owners, while excellent at what they do, do not know how to properly set up and run their website, and many web designers, don’t know how to help clients once the website is launched.  I work exclusively with small businesses to help them be successful, often staying with them months after the launch to make sure the website is doing what it needs to do to help them be successful in getting new customers.

Likewise, some companies try to work with anyone, small, medium, and large, and they treat them all the same.  I only work with small businesses and I am a small business, so I understand the need to be quick to change, cost effective, and how to create that personal experience on-line.

If you need, I can help your business make more money on-line through my experince in Search Engine Optimization, website optimization (both speed and customer experience), pay-per-click campaigns, and more.  Contact me if you need help.

Popularity: 1% [?]

There are lots of interesting theories out there about how one can get there site to rank better in search engines. Unfortunately much of this advice, while it would make since, is wrong.

One example is that correct, valid HTML code is important for search engines to read your website, and thus for you rank highly.

This makes sense for several reasons:

• bad code may not be read by a search engine as it doesn’t know what it sees,
• search engines want to promote good code, to clean the web of garbage, or even
• bad coding appears unprofessional, and therefore is likely to be web spam/fraudulent/etc.

Unfortunately, there is little evidence that any of these statements are true.

First, lets consider that it is estimated that over 99% of the web is made up on invalid HTML code [source]. If this is the case, could you imagine being the search engine which cannot read those pages, or which pages you would be able to read. A search engine which only searched valid HTML pages would find so little, that no one would really use it.

Search engines, while many do claim they want to promote good clean HTML pages, also realize search engines need to promote finding appropriate information on the web. While a web designed might find valid HTML important, the common user is more interested in finding out about the new digital camera, how to download a ring tone to his phone, or other related information.

Of course the proof is in the pudding, as they say. So I took several random search queries.  If the given hypothesis is true, then the top search engine rankings will have clean, or nearly clean code.

The first item I searched for was “shoes”. The top three results, in order was:

• Shoes.Com – has 253 errors and 124 warnings on there homepage [source]
• Zappos.com – has 144 errors and 101 warnings [source]
• payless.com/store/ – has 81 errors and 22 warnings [source]

I also checked two other popular search terms “travel”, (expedia.com with 154 Errors and 194 warnings [source]) and doctor (webmd.com/physician_finder/ with 101 Errors and 32 warnings [source]).

Given that these are popular search terms, one would think that search engines code find plenty of valid HTML webpages. However, it decides to rank these.  And as you can see with the shoes examples, the further down in the search results you went, the “better” the web page.  So, based upon this basic information, I would have to say that any boost a search engine gives you based upon valid HTML code is limited or more likely imaginary.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

Does this mean we shouldn’t develop valid HTML websites? NO!

Instead, look at developing content which a search engine wants to see. I assume that if my browsers can read it, the major search engines can read it. We should develop new code to be valid, but not worry about fixing old code if it is working. There are clearly other things that we can do to make our sites more search engine friendly.

Popularity: unranked [?]