This applies to your business life just as much as it does your personal. Are parts of your work making you unhappy? Change them or let them go!

have a clear direction for your website

“Define your goals from the get go and you maximise your chance of achieving them.”

Just like any other form of your marketing, you need to have a plan for your website. Why are you having a website built? What do you want it to achieve? What action do you want your website visitors to take? Any good web designer will discuss these things with you, whether during a meeting or during a briefing stage, but knowing the answers to these questions before your web designer asks is beneficial for both of you. Define your goals from the get go and you maximise your chance of achieving them.

organise your photographer

Unless you’re hiring a full service agency to design your website, your web designer probably won’t organise a photographer for you.

Having professional photographs of your workspace, staff and products can do wonders for your website. Nothing says cheap like bad photography. If the photos of your products are dodgy, what’s to say your products themselves aren’t too? It may sound like a silly conclusion to draw, but that’s the way consumers’ minds work.

know what you want from your web designer long term

Some web designers aren’t in it for the long haul. They want to design your website and move on to the next one. Some clients aren’t either, and are just looking for a keyboard monkey to follow instructions. Having an expectation and letting your web designer know what it is up front helps you both figure out if you’re suited for one another. In most cases, it’s simple enough to leave your web designer for another who’s interested in partnering with you, but it can be more costly in the long run.

register your domain name

Domain names are big business and domain snatchers do exist. Even if you’re not planning on getting a site online for a year, make sure you have the domain name you’ll want to use registered in your name. It’s a good idea to research domain names when registering your business name, as leaving it open to chance can be incredibly disappointing.

have a budget and be prepared to disclose it

“Knowing your budget helps us figure out the best solution for you.”

It’s really important to have a budget when shopping around for a web designer – and to tell potential designers what it is. Web designers don’t want to know your budget so that they can max it out. Knowing your budget helps us figure out the best solution for you. The beauty of the web is that there are so many options when it comes to building a website. Some of them are less than ideal, but they’re cheap. Letting us know what your budget is tells us if we should tell you about the very best solution we can provide you with, or the to-be-built-on-later solution that squeezes into a small budget.

Image via Rays of the Sun

“Focus on what you love, not what you hate.”

Have you heard that saying? Similar to the one in the image above, I always took it to mean you shouldn’t dwell on how much your neighbours dog annoys you, or how much you can’t stand the way your father-in-law laughs. And you know, since I’ve tried to put it into practice, I’ve generally been happier.

Thinking about it this morning, I realised how much we’ve applied this to bergan blue over the years, too. When we first launched in 2007, we had a massive list of services on offer. Web design and development, graphic design and a huge range of on-site IT support and “interactive marketing” options. I remember having plans to get a station wagon to fit all of the computers we’d be re-selling and delivering, and interactive CDs were where it was at, don’t you know?!

Within about six months, we realised that IT support and quite a few other bits and pieces on our service list just weren’t working for us. We didn’t enjoy offering them, and so we weren’t selling them. We culled. Since then, we’ve culled some more.

We’ve also, from time to time, applied this to our clients. We’ve been very lucky to have a long list of regular clients that we genuinely enjoy working with. Once or twice though, we’ve gone against our gut feeling and said yes to a client who has turned out to be a nightmare to work with. We had to recalibrate. Why were we working with them? We weren’t enjoying the work (or the 9pm emails demanding a phone call or the abusive language. Yes, it happened with one!) and it was time to say adios.

When you focus on doing what you love, things fall into place. A certain weight lifts from your shoulders and things just seem to work out.

Is there something in your life or your business that is taking your focus away from the things (or people) you love?

The wonderful folks at MDG Advertising have put together this little Pinterest infographic on the how and why.

How to use Pinterest for business. Source: http://www.mdgadvertising.com

We’ve offered hosting to our clients since we launched in early 2007 and have worked on improving them year after year. Today, we’re happy to be able to offer 100% Australian hosting with generous limits and competitive pricing.

We now have four simple plans that should suit just about any website, starting at just $15 a month. But don’t fret. If you can’t find one to suit you, we can tailor a plan to your needs.

what you get:

• Generous disk space and data transfer limits
• Spam protection
• Unlimited email accounts
• FTP access
• POP3, IMAP & webmail access
• SSL support
• Daily backups
• Extended support hours
• Friendly and skilled support team
• 99.9% uptime
• NO contracts
• NO setup fees

For more details, check out our hosting plans here.

it’s not always a bad thing

If your e-commerce software tracks abandoned carts, you might be shocked by the figures. Research conducted in the last 15 years indicates shopping cart abandonment sits at anywhere from 45% to 90% – that’s massive. But it can also be a fantastic indicator of future sales. Taking the time to add items to their cart could be the customer’s way of tallying a total so they can gather their funds and come back later.

why it happens

There’s a plethora of research on shopping cart abandonment, and some of the most important is on the reasons behind it. Some of the top reasons revealed in various studies include:

• Unhappy with payment method options
• Lack of funds
• Preferred to shop in person
• High shipping charges
• Unsure of the online store’s credibility or security
• The item(s) unavailable at checkout
• Confused or overwhelmed by the checkout process

fix: be transparent

When shopping online, customers often forget about shipping when considering the total dollar value of their cart. Be up front and very clear about your shipping costs. If you have a flat rate, advertise it on your home page. If it’s calculated based on the cart contents, try having a minicart visible on all pages of your store, and include shipping costs in this section. Shocking customers with your shipping rates when they’re almost finished checkout is enough to a) turn them off and b) piss them off. Not a good combination.

fix: revamp your site

If potential customers are questioning the security and credibility of your site, you need to consider what it looks like, what your e-commerce software brings to the party and what information you provide. You could:

• Review what information you make available about your business. Does your site consist of an online store and nothing else? How do your customers know who they’re doing business with? If they have no idea, how can they trust you?
• Revisit the site’s design. If your site doesn’t quite scream “We are trustworthy!” you can’t either, can you? First impressions are important. Your DIY or templated website design may have served you well for the first year, but it might be time to think about the next step.
• Make sure checking out is easy. Don’t make the checkout hard to navigate or too long. You don’t need their date of birth, fax number, all 4 numbers they can be contacted on, or anything else that isn’t absolutely necessary for the sale. 2-3 page checkout maximum is good. 1 page checkout is even better.

fix: inline validation

Use a shopping cart that uses inline validation. In English: make sure your shopping cart tells your customer if they enter a mistake when they enter it, not after they’ve filled out a whole page and submitted it.

fix: make it safe

It’s important that your site makes your customers feel as secure as possible handing over their credit card details. Make sure you have an SSL certificate installed behind your site, and also make it obvious. Most SSL providers will have images you can place around your site to tell your customer they’re about to checkout securely. They may not be pretty to look at, but including one promotes trust.

fix: have a guest checkout option

Not every customer that visits your online store wants to register. It’s like walking into your local K-Mart and being told you need to hand over your full name, address, phone number and email address before being allowed to make a purchase. Choosing online store software that has a guest checkout option as default or comes with the option to upgrade means less risk in the shopping cart abandonment stakes.

There are plenty more ways you can help reduce shopping cart abandonment, although you’ll never get it down to zero. Our advice is to constantly review your site, make notes of what’s working and what’s not, take customer feedback seriously, and never stop looking for ways to improve.

shameless plug: We’re big believers in e-commerce software that just works and we get as frustrated as you do at software that doesn’t. That’s why we spent hundreds of hours developing blueCart eCommerce, our online store software. It’s smart. It’s beautiful. It’s easy to use. If you’re ready to dropkick your dodgy online store and upgrade to a shiny new blueCart store that’ll make you and your customers happy, let us know.

Like this infographic? Get more copywriting tips from Copyblogger.

1. The copyright notice in the footer of your site says ©2004. It’s 2012.
2. Your website plays music when it’s opened. This will make people a) vomit or b) angry.
3. When people visit your website, they have to click on “click here to enter”. Would you make people do a dance before entering your store or office for the sake of your entryway looking super duper awesome?
4. You’re having to knock back daily requests for computer repairs that have come through your website because two years ago you decided to become a business coach.
5. Clipart and gif animations. Enough said.
6. Your site uses the <marquee> tag for those really important bits of text you want people to read. See #2 and #5.
7. When you meet a potential client for the first time and they ask for your web address so they can read a bit more about you before they make a decision, you hand them a flyer that was printed on your office’s laser with a business card stapled to it. Because your website is way too embarrassing.
8. When people first get to your site, they see this (before closing the site and going elsewhere).
9. When you click on ‘contact us’, a PDF of your business card opens in a new window.
10. This is your website.

If any of those things sound familiar, give us a call. We promise we won’t tell anyone what your site looked like before we helped you redesign it.

You’re shocked. You’re annoyed. You don’t have time for this and you don’t understand why they need it when you spoke about all of this stuff in your meetings. Why can’t they just get on with it?

For good reason, actually. Briefs are boring. They’re annoying. They’re time consuming. We get that and so does your designer. But they’re necessary. No matter what you’re paying your designer to do, the design will only ever be as good as the brief you provide them with.

what’s in a brief?

The brief is really the most important part of your project. Not the most exciting part, no, but it’s the heart and soul of it. A few things your designer might want to know about during the briefing process are:

• What’s the nitty gritty of your business? What do you do and how do you do it?
• Who are you trying to sell to? What do they want from you and why would they choose you over someone else?
• Who’s the competition? How do you differ from them?
• What do you want to get out of the project/design?

why complete a brief?

Answering all of these questions tells your designer not only exactly what’s needed, but why your business needs it. It give your designer a good foundation for the project and decreases the chances of you getting something you hate.

Depending on what you’re having designed, the project could span over weeks or even months. Having answers to all of this information on paper allows your designer to come back to it when they need a refresher.

it’ll save you money

Still sound boring? Let’s put it a little differently: it’ll save you money. A proper brief = you getting what you want = less time trying to get to the final design. If you designer is completely in the dark and has to spend six months trying to figure out what you want when they’d usually spend 2 weeks on the design, chances are you’re going to pay for that extra time.

what can you do to help?

Set aside a block of time where you won’t be interrupted by the phone, clients, kids or pets. Give it your full attention and don’t answer if halfheartedly. Make your answers well thought out but to the point and not too long winded.

Call or email your designer if you’re stuck on a question. Ask if they’d be happy to discuss it with you. Trust us, they’d rather spend the time on the phone with you nutting out the question than getting a brief returned to them with big, blank areas. Call or email them after you submit it, too. Ask if you provided enough information. A good designer will come back to you if you didn’t, but help them out and be open to further questioning.

Were there things you wanted to tell them that didn’t fit in the brief? Send a separate email. Send links to samples of work you like. Provide additional information that you feel will help define the final design.

the brief is for you, too

Don’t just think of the brief as something your designer needs, but something that will benefit you as well. Think of the brief as an opportunity to re-evaluate your business and where it’s at. Think of it as a way for you to revisit your values and goals and get back to its roots. Suddenly it seems a little more worthwhile, don’t you think?

“There’s no such thing as an accident these days. Most successful viral marketing campaigns owe more to marketing than they do to virality.”

Interesting! Check out the post here.