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.

At the beginning of November, I received a phone call from someone working at Public Service Events, a quasi government body which organises promotional events such as conferences and workshops on behalf of government.

I had, apparently, been identified as an SME too small to bid for government tenders.  Aware of the discrimination this caused, certain elements in public service were examining measures to enable freelancers, such as myself, to bid on local and central government projects not exceeding £140,000 (or similar figure) in budget.  Various bureaucratic hurdles in the tender process would be waived.

I had come to somebody’s attention as a practitioner of accessible website design.  The caller asked if I would be prepared to speak at an event to be held in London on 6th December.  As it happened, I had a prior engagement, playing Dandini in the East Leake Amateur Players’ pantomime that week, so I had to decline.

If you look on the PSCA website you will find that the meeting was entitled ‘Skills for the Future –Leadership and Management in the Public Sector’.  It’s not quite how I interpreted my caller’s explanation, but is, presumably, the same event.

In the meantime, I have built two more small websites according to accessible principles, for a client in Oman.  In Oman note, not UK.

See them at Oasis Tours, Oman, and Music Awards Oman.

First published 23rd December 2007

Designers who are used to using pixels for sizing fonts on web pages, should find this pixel to em converter a very handy tool.  My only query is that it doesn't tell me about the relationship to different fonts.  For example, text written in 12pt Arial looks bigger than 12pt Times New Roman.

But it will save me time in future.  I can spend a lot of time compared to my present practice of changing values in CSS, uploading the file by FTP and then reloading a page to assess whether the font size is acceptable.

Why use ems rather than pixels?  Pixels specify the font on a web page at a fixed size which cannot be resized by the browser, whereas fonts specified in ems can be resized by the browser. This is extremely useful for people who prefer to read font on a screen at a larger size.  In fact, it is a crucial strand in accessible web design.

The link to this tool came from web accessibility experts, WebCredible.

First published 1st March 2007.

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.

I discovered that Sooz Nooz had vanished on 26th December 2006.  All entry files and templates had disappeared from my web folders.

I still haven't had any reply from the web host intimating how this might have happened.  I think it may be time to consider moving my domain hosting elsewhere. 

There's a strong possibility that the site was hacked.  Or it could have been a security issue.  Following discussions with the web host, I did try installing a .htaccess file using a different FTP client called SmartFTP, which turns off an unsafe php setting, and that does seem to have worked.

Meanwhile, Pivot has released an updated version of its software.  One of the reasons it's taken me this long to get back up and running is that I had to compare old files with new.  The template layout and CSS values had changed very significantly.

I'm reasonably satisfied with my efforts to restore the look and feel of Sooz Nooz.  I still have problems with CSS values for container width in IE 6 and earlier, but that is comparably a minor irritation.

By great good fortune, Google had spidered the website just three days before I discovered it had gone.  As a result, I have been able to restore all the entries from Google's cached versions of the blog.  I would have been quite devastated if I had lost everything.

So now, all entries are being copied into files on my PC as well as into the blog, and backups of the database and configuration files are being rigorously applied.

First published 14th January 2007

I refurbished the Buckles – classic shoes for ladies with small feet website in October and November, launching the new look in the second week of November.

Buckles, the shop in Loughborough, closed finally in October. With access to Biggin Street closed by pedestrian access and council works that seemed to go on for months, the customer base had dropped. The proprietor also had family reasons for closing.

The problem was what to do with the outstanding stock.

Firstly, the company decided that it would sell only its smallest sizes online, since this was a niche market. That means British shoe sizes from 13 to 3, or Continental sizes 32 to 35.

I was instructed to use PayPal as the purchase mechanism. There were several reasons for this.

1. The company already had a PayPal merchant account, and did not want to make the commitment of subscribing to another payment system. PayPal takes a percentage of a sale, and does not require subscription.
2. It's relatively easy to set up payment options on a website using PayPal, providing there aren't too many items. Otherwise, it becomes very time-consuming to list the items and obtain the code.
3. It's now possible for anyone to make a payment using PayPal using a credit or debit card. Customers don't need to have a PayPal account.

My reservations are that PayPal, partly, at least, from being owned and used by eBay, has a mixed reputation. Personally, I have never had any problems with paying via PayPal, but some people have. You only need to hear of one or two bad experiences to begin to distrust an agency or organisation.

The problems probably come from tales of 'phishing', and from the vast anonymity of using the mechanism.

Let's consider 'phishing' first. Phishing is the name given to the practice of deceiving people online to give personal financial information, which is then exploited to defraud the unsuspecting individual of income from a transaction and also to clear out all funds in bank accounts. I am surprised that so many people never seem to question emails that they might get which they are not expecting, which urge them to yield up their personal information, and which they answer. There's a dearth of shrewd judgement in the world. And yet, I have received phishing emails from scammers purporting to be from eBay, and these emails have looked unnervingly real. Click on any of the links and you are taken to a website which can rake in all your details without you even realising.

If you get such an unexpected email apparently from eBay or PayPal, you should forward the email to spoof@ebay.com or spoof@paypal.com. Here's the relevant eBay page with information on how to avoid being defrauded and which will enable you to report phishing websites too. All other financial institutions which practice online will have similar policies and procedures to deal with phishing.

I found a dedicated anti-phishing website at Millersmiles.

With regard to the anonymity of PayPal, everything is fine providing the transaction does what is expected. But what if you have a question, or what if you want to return goods? Both customer and merchant could lose out by not knowing exactly how to complain or who to complain to. At least with a bank, you can always call in at a high street branch and demand to meet a manager.

My own feeling about the Buckles website is that it doesn't offer enough stock at the moment and maybe not even the fashions that people seek, even though it's very difficult for women with small feet to find shoes that both fit and really look good. One reason why we never trod the ecommerce path before was because many of the customers were not, then, knowledgeable about online transactions, and there's nothing like coming in to the shop to try on the stock. I'm hesitant about buying shoes online myself because I can never be certain about the sizes and the fittings. In which case the idea of having an online showcase seemed to make more sense.

It isn't enough to have a website. You need to be able to interact with visitors, try to define the customer base and keep them up to date with offers and new stock via email newsletters. At the very least, you need to examine your website access logs.

And you need to be able to offer a variety of payment options. An ecommerce solution such as OSCommerce or ZenCart might serve the purpose better which would make it easier for the clients to update stock levels themselves and also to offer direct credit/debit card payments as well as PayPal. Pay-per-click advertising is also an option. At this stage, it may not be worth the expense of an ad campaign given the value of the stock. In which case, we have to focus on natural language searches using the keywords that we have identified.

This item was first published on 8th December 2006.