About Websites

Your website is the hub of your online marketing activities, and the online and mobile channel is only going to get more important. Knowing that, the average company should have a website that:

  • Positions your company correctly, answers customer questions, etc.
  • Has content that is easy to change without going to an outside person.
  • Loads quickly (helps conversion and SEO)
  • Is usable on a smartphone
  • Allows you to test different versions of a page, to see what works best.

 

With extra effort you can also have:

  • A secure "extranet" area for partners or outside sales.

 

Talk with Andrew to learn the upside and effort of building this.

Blog Posts about Website Development and Upkeep

Sending Client-Billable Expenses From Expensify to QuickBooksOnline

Submitted by Andrew Benkard on Tue, 02/14/2012 - 16:32

Expensify is a very slick and lightweight service for handling business expense reports.

QuickBooks Online is the cloud/Saas version of QuickBooks. It's not pretty, but rather is a safe choice with a large ecosystem of bookeepers who understand the QB way.

Four Great Remote Training Tools

Submitted by Andrew Benkard on Mon, 02/13/2012 - 11:45

As more companies use web-based apps to power their sales and marketing campaigns, we have become acutely aware of the need for good user training.

This winter we have rolled out installations of Solve360 (a CRM), SugarSync, Expensify, QuickBooks and various Google products.

The canned help for these services is generally good, but usually not enough to fully engage everyone. Personalized handholding and troubleshooting goes a long way towards full user adoption -- which is the key to a project’s success. 

Hooray for crude solutions

Submitted by Andrew Benkard on Thu, 12/22/2011 - 10:16

The good folks at GigaOm take note of a study that shows how web pages have increased in size: 

...The HTTP Archive charted the growth of the average web page and found that average web pages have grown from 726 KB a year ago to 965 KB now...

And a graph: 

Monitoring web page changes with Page2RSS

Submitted by Andrew Benkard on Thu, 04/07/2011 - 08:14

Monitoring what your compeititors and partners are doing can give you the occasional edge in selling, a negotiation, or product decision.

Here's a relatively simple way to monitoring what your compeititors and partners are doing, by learning when their web site changes. 

A nice bit of marketing automation from Wufoo

Submitted by Andrew Benkard on Wed, 04/06/2011 - 08:34

Automating the rote tasks of your online marketing allows you to spend more time on more important stuff: talking with your customers, creating engaging content, and measuring what works best.

So today we look at one small improvement in that direction.

Why have a website when you have Facebook?

Submitted by Andrew Benkard on Tue, 03/08/2011 - 17:47

My English friend Frank makes cakes.

What begun as a hobby is now a day job. So he made blue polka-dotted business cards, and over coffee on a Sunday morning he handed one to me.

Under his email address was a URL. Was it cakesbyfrank.com? Nope.

www.facebook.com/cakesbyfrank

Did he have any intention of building a "regular" website?

No.

Making Website Tweaks Easy

Submitted by Andrew Benkard on Wed, 11/24/2010 - 11:52

A recurring theme for 2010 is the increasing availability of web tools that make effective online marketing more accessible. Hot categories include a/b testing, mobile website maintenance, content management systems, and the interoperability of social media tools.

Yesterday I found another modest, but elegant, service that fits right in.

Better Content for Better SEO and Lead Conversion

Submitted by Andrew Benkard on Mon, 11/15/2010 - 12:01

Is a search engine optimization program just for lead generation?

Nope.

Website Navigation Done Right

Submitted by Andrew Benkard on Thu, 09/16/2010 - 13:47

How do you help website visitors go straight to the page they need? Have good site navigation, for one.

Below, my 90 seconds with the nice menu navigation at www.logmein.com.

 

A shopping cart usability hangnail

Submitted by Andrew Benkard on Thu, 12/10/2009 - 09:59

It's high season for ecommerce, and showtime for shopping carts all over the world.

Good marketing managers should have spent the entire year reviewing how their checkout experience is converting customers, since a problem in the Christmas season hurts twice as much as in the summer.

Marketing Rule #1: Make it easy for the customer to buy. Specifically for shopping carts, don't do things that confuse people, cause hesitation, or prompt rework. You are delaying or losing sales.

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