I’ve just refurbished my website and its companion blog, SoozNooz.

October through to December, I’ve been very lucky to be able to attend several business seminars sponsored by East Midlands Business Link, paid for by the East Midlands Development Agency.

The seminars have come at an auspicious time for me, covering issues of online marketing, search engine optimisation, selling online, pay-per-click advertising and social networking.

I’ve already implemented many of the practices suggested, which means I’m on the right path. All the same, I learnt something new in every session, making the investment in time very worthwhile.

I’ve discovered over the last year or so, that when I tell people that I design websites, they ask me to take a look at theirs.  “I’ve just paid out all this money on a new website, and I’m not getting any business from it!” they complain.

It takes no time at all on clicking through to their sites, to discover that the designers have not optimised them.  Simple things like Flash animations without entry text, no page titles, lack of copy text on the home page and generally, no targeted proposition or call to action.

I think there is going to be more and more emphasis in the future on making your website work for you, rather than just on building websites to have a directory presence on the web.  Online marketing is all about connecting with your customers.  Use your experience in dealing with customers face-to-face combined with web 2.0 technology to sell online.

For example, I’m hoping to have my bathroom overhauled in January.  It makes sense to me to look at bathroom websites to see what ideas bathroom companies can offer and evidence of their work.  Very few of the tradesmen who came to see me had an understanding of this need, often dismissing their websites as ’something the wife does.’

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a structured process which aims to lift your website to the top of Google search engine results for your particular product or service.  There’s no mystery about how it’s done.  There’s plenty of websites out there falling over themselves to offer advice.  In fact, Google offers some of the best resources.  See my page on SEO for some starter links.

In the end though, do you have the time?  This is work that you can out-source. Or you may like some guidance on how to set up your own SEO strategy and maintain it yourself.  These are services which I am now offering.  Call me on +44(0)1509 650759 to talk through the options.

I have joined a cooperative of enterprising ladies, including my daughter, who are organising a gothic bellydance event in Leicester in June 2007.  We've found that we've been able to do most of our PR and marketing via the web so far, using niche groups at Tribe.net and LiveJournal.

The website was created with one page initially to which the MySpace diverted enquiries.  Our aim was to collect email addresses of people who were interested in attending the event.  I use List Messenger Pro to manage the database and to send out email newsletters.

List Messenger also allows people to confirm their subscription and to opt out.  I haven't used the facility to design forms to collect preferences yet. 

Paying for the software meant that I did get a personal reply from the creator, and I can use the ticket system to get priority support but otherwise, I have to use the forum just like everybody else.  A free version of the software can support 100-200 subscribers.

The Gothla website is designed for a specific event, and thus is likely to have a limited lifetime – unless the weekend proves so successful that the organisers decide to do it again.

Thus we have focused on just the information likely to be required by attendees.  We've used PayPal for bookings, but also allow people to download a booking form to send with a cheque if they prefer.  We've used a Google map to highlight the whereabouts of the different venues, bus and rail stations and hotels.

Each member of the cooperative has her own email address.  One of the benefits of doing the website is that it seems to have focused the organiser's attention on their specific roles – a great aid to management of the project.

I commend Compila, the webhost, which was in turn recommended to me, for the facilities it provides for just £20 a year, with second year free.  250Mb web space, unlimited POP3 email addresses, 2 MySQL databases and unmetered bandwidth.

We have also used MySpace and YouTube to garner interest.  And I have learnt how to convert a video in DVD format to something that you can see and hear on the web.  Every web project pushes the boundaries that much further.

First published 15th February 2007.

This entry was first published on 6th August 2006. I moved over to WordPress in December 2008, and am currently loading all previous entries.

Welcome to Sooz Nooz, the blog accompaniment to Sue Hutton, which enables me to share information with you more speedily, to update articles from the past, and to present new articles relevant to my professional interests.

The tool that I'm using for the blog is an open-source (free!) program called Pivot, which I have been able to configure to echo the layout of my main site.

It requires PHP to be installed on your web server, but unlike other software, does not require MySQL, which saves you having to set up a database in which to store the entries. The postings are stored in a flat file.

It's appropriate, I suppose, for relatively light use.  The developers believe that the maximum number of postings can be 6,000 to 8,000 increasing on a fast server to around 12,000 postings.

However, you can create different user profiles which facilitate searching for individual contributions, and also several blogs in the same account, each stored in its own flat file, which will increase the maximum number of postings accordingly.

I've seen a query on the forum about using the software for 800 different users on an intranet.

I use NucleusCMS, another open source software, on my newsBriefsOman website. It uses both PHP and MySQL.  This software was very easy to set up and configure.  There are lots of templates, and I found that it was easy to hone the display.  It's a breeze to use, although I'm still stuck on getting an include file to display on single-entry pages.

Another very popular blog software that I have considered using is WordPress, which also uses both PHP and MySQL.  

But it requires your server to enable mod_rewrite, so that you can use easy urls.  This is supposed to make it easier for Google and other search engines to find your entries.  My current webhost does not permit mod_rewrite, so I've had to look for alternatives.  WordPress is now offering free hosting to get around some of these problems.

Postings on the NucleusCMS forum suggest that they haven't been able to configure the easy urls extension totally reliably, so I've chosen not to use that extension for the time being.

A tetchy little problem I've come up with web servers, is whether they will accept .htaccess files which can override some server settings, as well as enabling you to redirect, and to install custom error 404 pages.  I've tried to install a .htaccess on two different servers now, and the file simply disappears once it's renamed.  That's something that has to be resolved with the webhost.  (I resolved this problem by using a different ftp client.  SmartFTP can rename files .htaccess on some servers).

Given the flexibility and power that these tools offer, you're almost beholden to donate to the projects, although no-one will force you to.  I usually find all the support that I need from the associated forums.

And of course, there's all sorts of free blogging tools out there now which require hardly any tech knowledge to use.  Think of Windows.Live, on which I post The Kitchen Drawer, Live Journal and My Space and Blogger.  Yahoo! has just started Yahoo! 360 degrees.  The focus of these sites is social networking and staying in touch with friends.

You can even contribute to your blog with your mobile phone.

Happy Blogging!