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Google is the best known and most used search engine - and when it comes to advertising on search engines most businesses think Google Adwords. But there’s a few more than just Google.

Here’s five sites you might not be aware of - that your business can advertise through to achieve exposure for your product/service.

1. Facebook
2. Microsoft Live Search - (get a $25 credit)
3. Yahoo Search
4. Text Link Ads
5. Blogads

With many more sites available to advertise through - you can get the customers you want and grow your business online. I can help you find the right place to advertise - contact me today to find out how.

Email newsletters are the best way to maintain customer relationships on the Internet. Don’t have a newsletter? Jakob Nielsen says “If you don’t have a newsletter, then publishing one is probably the single-highest ROI action you can take to improve your Internet presence.”

If you already have a newsletter then you will find that your readers will most likely:

• Be inclined to skip the introductory blah-blah text;
• Scan the email; and
• Spend on average 51 seconds reading your newsletter.

To write a better newsletter consider these techniques Neilsen suggests:

• Make your newsletter simple;
• Highlight key terms;
• Be predictable. Keep a consistent newsletter style and delivery time;
• Use meaningful headings and sub headings; and
• Be personal and real. Relationships are not built with marketing language.

Brown Box has the expertise and service to help you maintain your customer relationships. It’s called MailBox - and many of our clients have great relationships with their customers from using it. Contact me to find out how yours can too.

~Andrew

The dot com boom was all about hits - the more hits on your website the more money when you float it publicly or sell it. That’s what the bust was about too - hits weren’t necessarily making any companies money and they meant very little in terms of revenue to a company. It was like telling people that 500,000 people came into your shop each day - but only 5 people bought anything. Not really a sustainable business model. Especially when your company raises $40mil to just get $1mil of sales.

Since then businesses have been much more focussed on what visitors are doing while they are on their website. Where do they go? What do they click on? How many clicked on where?

Those are all good things to know but here are 5 statistics that can help you grow your website and business that most business people and marketers don’t think about.

Brown Box uses Google Analytics to find the best statistics to help businesses to meet the needs of their customers online.

1. Page Bounce Rate
   The page bounce rate tells you the percentage of single page visits that a particular page has had. Lower your bounce rate and you have more people engaging with your website and clicking on at least one more page in the site. The more they engage with you, the more likely they are to buy from you. If your home page has a high bounce rate, measure a few variations of the page and check their bounce rate. Over time you can see if your bounce rate drops or lowers with certain versions of the page.
2. Conversion Goals
   Analytics allows you to set up what it calls goals. A way of measuring if a visitor has taken a certain action on your website (like filling in a contact form). You can set your funnel (the track which you think people will take to get to the goal) and measure its effectiveness. See where people have abandoned the funnel and see if that page needs addressing. A potential customer has come to a page and decided to make payment but sees a security warning and runs away screaming. Your conversion goals will help you find out where people are leaving and can help you move potential customers from scared to confident purchasers.
3. Browser Capabilities
   This may seem like a statistic that has nothing to do with the way you run your website. Nothing could be more wrong. Your website is there to cater to the needs of your customers. If they can’t access your 100% Flash (and so totally awesome) website because they don’t have the latest Flash version then you are losing business. Find out a way to cater to your customer’s needs and give them what they want. Analytics also offers statistics on resolutions, colours, browsers and operating systems, and java support.
4. Language Settings
   Believe it or not - some people don’t speak English. Do you sell products to a market that doesn’t speak English? One of our clients has a website which is visited by customers with 10 different language settings, another has customers of with 34 language settings - the third highest language is Dutch. Those customers view almost 8 pages per visit. Wouldn’t you want those people to be able to understand you? Luckily for the Dutch speaking/reading visitors that website has been translated for them and they can understand how to buy products from the website.
5. Top Landing Pages
   I believe that this statistic is extremely helpful. Use this statistic to work out where most people are when they enter the website. The home page is the most obvious page that people would land on but if people are getting to a page that has no menu, has no other way to view the rest of your valuable information then the action they most likely will take is to leave again. Ensure that those top pages have a way for users to get to the rest of your website. Especially if those landing pages have high bounce rates. Again - engage your visitors, give them a compelling reason to stay around and spend more time there (with great content). You might even find that a large entrance point to your site is a page that no longer exists - well put something there to help people get to your content. It’s that easy. Make the most of the people who come in from wherever they come.

I have many times looked at the statistics in these areas and more to evaluate the value our clients are getting from their website. Lowering a bounce rate 10% for the entire site is not a hard thing to do - and it can bring substantial rewards. If you want help measuring or understanding your website - contact me and I’d be glad to help.

~Andrew.

It seems our friends in Redmond do enjoy making developers lives hard. Whether it be designing HTML email templates for Outlook 2007 or even a basic CSS webpage, we’re affronted by a plethora of inconsistencies and CSS bugs across the Internet Explorer range.

I discovered our friends at Sitepoint feel the same way in this article here. And I think they gave IE a chance to prove itself!

While we do have to acknowlege our lovely AJAX apps owe a lot to Internet Explorer (even as far back as IE 3!) we hope that while IE7 is an improvement on IE6, it’s not everything us developers had hoped for.

So we are left writing hacks and work arounds to get consistent display for your websites.

Well, it’s not a perfect world, so why should the web be huh? :)

~ Rob

Mark Boulton writes a great article on some of the technicalities of typography which help us ensure that when writing copy for the web, it’s formatted in a way that is easily read.

He references three main areas where we can ensure we’re formatting correctly.

1. Measure - The measure is the width of the block of text. He suggests that it’s kept between 52 and 78 characters for legibility. This is a subjective observation and there is much research into line-lengths. However, measure is important when we consider it with other elements of typography.
2. Leading - Leading is the space between line heights and is pronunced ‘ledding’, like the metal, lead. The leading must always be greater than your word spacing. Mark suggests that a small measure requires less leading, and a wide measure increased leading to retain ease of reading. A great side observation made in the article too in in relation to the often controversial reversed out high-contrast white on dark designs we often see. The readability can be increased in these situations by increasing the leading, tracking and decreasing the font-weight! Thanks Mark :)
3. Tracking- Mark gives us one easy to remember suggestion here. Shorter line lengths, less tracking and vice versa

I found this a very helpful article and look forward to working it into our websites!

~ Rob