January 2010 « Edge of the Web Blog

1001 ways to make your business better

January 28th, 2010

Cut out the other thousand things you were doing.

Why provide seventeen mediocre services when you can provide two that are fantastic?

Why have five processes for each order when you do it in three?

Why use ten web pages to say what you could say in two?

When you start a business, it’s common to lose focus. Your ideas and plans for the company often change and shift when you’re just starting up, and as a result, things often get overcomplicated.

At every stage, you will save money, time, and energy by keeping things simple.

Don’t try to do everything adequately.

Do one thing, and do it brilliantly.

hannah Uncategorized

Separating “you” from “us”

January 22nd, 2010

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It's all about you

Every website needs 3 staple pages, Home, About Us and Contact.

But sometimes the lines blur between the content for Home and About Us pages.

But there’s an easy way to solve it.

“You”

Your home page is undoubtedly the most important page on your site. It’s your best opportunity to create your message, build up interest and pull visitors towards the buy it now button and the contact page.

So don’t waste it talking about yourself.

Your Home page has to focus entirely on your customer, on how they benefit from using your company, on the ways their purchases/experience/life will be improved through this relationship.

If you have a sentence that begins with the words “we”, “our” or “I”, then they either need to be re-focussed, or banished to your About Us page.

“Us”

About Us is the place to explain who you are and how your company works. This is the place where “we” belongs.

So for a simple rule of thumb: If it’s about them, it goes on the Home page, if it’s about you – it’s About Us.

Easy!

hannah copy writing, website strategy

Recently built websites

January 21st, 2010

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Websites added to our portfolio over the last week include:

Asat Media Systems – making the most of home entertainment installing Sky, Freesat, & Freeview
KPI Optimal – business solutions with specific processes and timescales
A J Brooke – independent family funeral directors & monumental masons

bhups Uncategorized

is the internet a cheap way to grow your business?

January 19th, 2010

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is the internet a cheap way to grow your business

seeking attention?

The internet has made many things cheap.

Building a website and creating a retail platform is cheap.
Maintaining a website is cheap.
Conveying vast amounts of interactive information in text, image and video is cheap.
Talking to somebody on the other side of the world is cheap.
Selling to people on the other side of the world is cheap.

However, there is one that is definitely not cheap, and that’s ATTENTION. People’s time is as valuable as it ever was (arguably more), and just because your website can be accessed by somebody in Mexico, doesn’t mean that person will access your site.

Search engines are, of course, a ruthlessly efficient way of finding the right attention for your products (because people type into search engines what they are interested in) but you pay for that efficiency. If you provide pay-day loans, you now don’t have to cast a wide net over the Jeremy Kyle television demographic. You can restrict your advertising to people who type “pay day loans” into Yahoo (Google, Bing etc).

The internet is a mature sales environment however (it matured quickly because huge sums of money were involved), and the growth in potential targeted attention is mirrored by the growth in competition for that attention.

So yes it’s cheap to get to market, and you can open up your business to the world…but so can everybody else. We are all competing for attention online, and it’s the demand for attention that drives the price.

thomas marketing attention, cheap

Always encrypt Passwords in a database

January 15th, 2010

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As a web developer I obviously, well, hopefully have a good idea on how most websites fundamentaly work. One thing that always worries me though is when I am signing up for a new account on a website and have to enter a password. Now most of us would have a few or probably just one password that we use when signing up to accounts on-line. This obviously means that we don’t have to remember loads of different passwords, but what worries me is how these passwords are being stored.

When I was a junior developer, just learning to code websites with the facility to sign-up and login to accounts, I would simply store the information entered by the user in a database. So if someone entered the password “jimmy” I would store it in the database as “jimmy”. Now obviously there are limited people who have access to this information, but it is actually quite powerful information to own. This information could be used malicously if in the wrong hands. Take the following as an example:

You sign up for a Facebook using the following credentials:

Username: mark@myemailaddress.com
Password: mypassword

You then also sign-up for an account with ‘my-made-up-website.com’ (this is an example) using the same credentials. Now if ‘my-made-up-website.com’ are storing your username and password as plain text in the database, anybody who has access to the database will be able to see these credentials. They would then have a pretty good idea that you could have used the same log-in credentials for Facebook. Hummm imagine what havoc they could cause on your Facebook page hey or even Amazon account with your saved credit card details?

So…now that I’m a much more experienced programmer, what do I do differently? Well as a minimum I encrypt any passwords being entered into the database. For this I use the following PHP function:

sha1();

So to encrypt the password ‘mypassword’ we would apply the following before adding it to the database:

$password = sha1(‘mypassword’);

This encryption is non-reversible so people who have access to the database wouldn’t be able to use it. There are methods out there to reverse this encryption, but it certainly isn’t easy.

You could also go a step further and add a ‘Salt’ keyword to the password and also run it through sha1() twice, making it a double encryption and this should make it very very very very difficult to reverse. The method for this is as follows:

$salt = ‘shake-it-up’;

$password = sha1($salt . sha1($clean['password']) . $salt);

So adding the ‘Salt’ keyword means the hacker would not only have to guess that you have added that to the start and end of the password, but also that you have ran it through sha1() twice. They would also have to guess the ‘Salt’ word used.

mark development credentials, database, encryption, php, security, sha1, sign-up

How to be the best

January 13th, 2010

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Ask people to vote for you!

Edge of the Web is

Vote for us!

proud to have been nominated for an award as the Best Business Provider 2010, by The Best Of Warwick.

However, that pride will turn to embarrassment and self loathing if we don’t actually win the thing.

So we’d like to shamelessly solicit your vote.

Obviously we can’t provide you with any sort of incentive (Hannah has already eaten all our muffins), but if you’ve dealt with Edge of the Web and been pleased with our designs, our prices, our service, our blog or even our tea-making skills, then please head on over to http://www.thebestof.co.uk/local/warwick/awards and vote for us.

We’d really appreciate it.

And maybe in return, we could provide you with a free cuppa if you stop by the office (providing that Tom has finally done the washing up).

hannah marketing

Additions to our Portfolio

January 12th, 2010

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Here is a list of websites added to our portfolio over the last few weeks.

Bower Property – bespoke, discreet, and professional property service encompassing a whole spectrum of property solutions
Iso Advertising Pvt Ltd – community public art inspired by the environment, climate change, and carbon emissions
Graham Short Engraving – copperplate hand engraver, including the smallest engraving in the world
Divinely Vintage – specialising in selling vintage clothes and designer curtains
Sales-Logix – business-to-business sales process transformation to make your company stand out.

bhups Uncategorized

how long does it take for your website to show up in Google?

January 11th, 2010

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shutterstock_15237865 So, you’ve just spent your hard earned on a (hopefully) shiny new website, and it’s time for the search engines to start sending visitors through to your website, right?

“I’ll just navigate to my favourite search engine, tap in a term that is related to my company and shazam! ”

Nothing.

And worst of all? It’s a list of less good competitors with rubbish websites and a bunch of unrelated services.

Time to put your expectation management hat on, and here’s why.

Search Engines (i.e. Google) are not the internet. They are websites.

Google (and Yahoo, Bing etc) have done a smashing job of becoming a first stop online for almost everyone, but fundamentally a search engine is a commercial online service that make money by helping people find their way around the internet (through selling advertising). Whilst their agendas are fiercely commercial they are still reasonably complimentary to the needs of owners of good quality websites.

The agendas of search engines are heavily influenced by spammers.

In life and business, lots of money is made by understanding rules and exploiting loopholes (see any lawyer, tax accountant or benefit cheat for more info). The world of search engines are no different. They were created using rules intended to support the successful exposure of good quality information, and inevitably these rules were flaunted and abused by people who wanted to make money with rubbish websites. This abuse happened to such an extent that search engines now find it hard to trust what new websites have written on them. One way of overcoming this barrier is by having trusted and established websites link to your website. This is like a vote of credbility. The more votes of credibility you receive, the more confident a search engine will be to trust your content and suggest your website to it’s visitors.

(please note: any good idea you may have to get links artificially has already been thought of by spammers and search engines alike…don’t bother unless you really know this industry)

So to get to the point…when is your website going to show up in Google?

Well, if you just use the “site submit” services that the search engines offer, it can take many weeks to get your site reviewed (crawled) and, even when it has been reviewed, there is no guarantee that your site will be in the top 100 results for any given search term.

If you can get some links from established websites, you can get reviewed in just days (or sooner), and you are much more likely to appear more highly in the results.

But it’s very hard to get links from popular and established websites (which is kind of the point). So you can make a choice:

1) Sit and wait for your website to be found

2) Get out there and start building links to your website.

Mention your website in discussion groups (don’t spam them!)
Ask related websites to give you a link (don’t spam them!)
Call in favours from old companies and contacts who have websites (spam away!)
List your website on web directories
You can provide articles to related websites
You can do something newsworthy which will get your website mentioned around the net
You can start a blog and compliment or insult some of your industry peers

There are lots of ways to get links back to your website. As a rule, the ones that are provided by third parties for just a few (hundred) pounds with almost no effort on your part are a total waste of time, however good the rhetoric.

thomas marketing

7 steps to a more attractive home page

January 7th, 2010

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018-7 steps to a more attractive home page New Year’s resolutions rarely survive past January, but this year I advise you to stick with just one – this one.

Put your content on a diet.

The vast majority of websites could stand to lose a little weight. Most could stand to lose a hefty chunk. Especially when it comes to your home page.

You have only a few seconds to draw people into your site, and fat expanses of text are a big turn off. Visitors don’t want to wade through heavy paragraphs of information. They want small snacks that provide them with the information they need.

The Home Page Text Diet

Bullet point each individual aspect your customers need to know: whether that’s the quality of your services, the products you sell, your location or your free delivery option.
Flesh out your bullet points into sentences – remember to focus them on the customer’s experience and not your own.
Preview the text the way it would be seen on the site (this is a LOT easier if you have a CMS!), check that the paragraphs don’t continue for too many lines. For a home page, I’d suggest 3 or 4 lines at max.
Read your text to see if you’re repeating yourself, or simply trying to explain too much on the home page. Save the hefty info for your Services or About Us section.
Spell check!!!
Get someone else to read it. 9 times out of ten they’ll spot something you didn’t. Not necessarily a mistake, but maybe a better way to phrase something, or a point you missed.
Spell check again (you really can’t spell check enough!).

These 7 steps will provide you with calorie controlled to make your home page more attractive, easier to read, and will give visitors all the vital information that they need.

hannah copy writing

happy new year!

January 4th, 2010

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new years eve Happy New Year from all of us at EOTW. A new year, a new decade and a time for changes.

What changes do you have planned?

We will be working really hard to find more ways to add value to our special offer which was such a hit last year!

We are also working hard on a new look and feel for our own website (which Mark hates!) We really should update those profile mugshots too!

On a personal note, my wife and I are expecting our 2nd child in a few months time, so it’s certainly going to be a year of change for me. Well, nappy changes anyway.

In fact, the extent of change in my life was brought home to me just after midnight on New Years Eve. I had fallen asleep in front of the television at about 11pm, to be woken up by my “merry” fathers phone call just after midnight on the 1st January. If not going out to celebrate wasn’t bad enough, if falling asleep before midnight wasn’t bad enough, definitely being out-partied by my father was bad. I knew that roles would reverse one day, but I thought that meant bottom wiping!

Still, I’ll be doing enough of that already this year.

thomas random