I love beautiful and full of art design. I love working with designer and customer pitching ideas about whole concept and different elements in design to make it a piece of art, yet user friendly and goal orientated. As I’m programmer, I also love to come up with innovative solutions in terms of programming the functionality once the design is ready. But in the middle there is a important phase in web development: design (Photoshop PSD and vector graphic) files must be “cut” into HTML code, styled with CSS and made dynamic with JavaScript. That’s the job that must be done on most projects and often people want to cut in cost here but correct but that may result in bigger investments in future stages. In this blog post I want to explain what means correct HTML.

HTML5 has 28 additional tags and some new techniques so it should be used today. Also, all browsers support it: Chrome, Firefox and Safari. For Internet Explorer 7 and 8 (IE 6, too) you can just add  to the head following code and they’ll be also HTML5 browsers:

<!–[if lt IE 9]>
<script src=”http://html5shiv.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js”></script>
<![endif]–>

Cross-browser compatible. Although we hate Internet Explorer the website must look like the PSD file from designer unless designer haven’t used web safe fonts with cool shaddows, Photoshop sharp, shaddow etc. effects as various browsers deal with font rendering differently.

Mobile version of the website is something that still most people leave for future to cut costs but the future is today! How many of your friends and business partners use mobile devices? Android and iOS users’ percentages grow in all websites’ Google Analytics every day!

Some technical must be’s:

• Always jQuery not MooTools or any other smaller JavaScript frameworks. jQuery is most beautiful and is served from Google! Only single JS file is loaded.
• Code must be UTF8 and W3C valid HTML5 or HTML 4.01 Strict. Only very out of a box JavaSctipt IDs get in conflict. W3C validness makes it more likely to appear in same way in all browsers and it’s also SEO friendly. Of course beautiful HTML is anyway SEO friendly!
• Only single CSS file! Different media types can be declared in one stylesheet.
• Inside the content areas there shouldn’t be any <div> tags. In CSS must be defined the style of titles (h1, h2, h3,…), <p> paragrapgs, tables and images. Paragraphs can have classes if needed.
• All menus must be with clean <ul>, <li> tags.
• Use <dl>, <dt> and <dd> tags for lists where needed.
• For quotes use <q> or <blockquote>.
• Always <em> and <strong> for emphasis – don’t make text bold or italic instead.
• Use semantic markup.

Finally one very useful link: ultra–lean set of HTML5, CSS, and jQuery (javascript) files, layouts, and elements designed to give you a headstart and save you 10′s of hours on your next web project.

How you can benefit from economic recessions:

• You’re small business and more flexible – last crisis showed that high quality SME’s won customers from big players.
• Do lot of e-commerce as people have less money, they will be looking for cheaper solutions from internet.
• Do lot of internet marketing as it’s most cost effective.
• Meet less, use more Skype and remote desktop – it will save lot of time and money. People are less emotional and more practical and money orientated when hard times kick in:)
• Take a hard look at expenses – what’s the real ROI (return of investment) on each expense?
• Cut off the nonsense from your products/services as you can bet that others will also really look at their expenses and will buy only from businesses that deliver REAL VALUE!

Recession is actually making the air fresher in business world. All those non-valuable competitors and useless prodcts/services will disappear and you can buy high quality labor with reasonable price and keep people happy:)

Google+ social media marketing

Google+ tries to combine best features of number one social media gigants Twitter & Facebook and combines it all with GMail. It’s also connected with Google search, it’s search partners and AdWords. Basically Google+ puts all together.

In terms of web marketing, when someone will click on Google+ button on your website or next to your website in Google search results then…

1. His friends will get the message that the person suggests your website (services/products that you offer).
2. It will extend to Facebook and Twitter as Google+ will invite them to join.
3. Every time someone clicks Google+ button it will increase your page rank. Google+ click will increase your ranking more than link to your website. Linkbuilding will become less important.
4. When his friends search anything from Google then next to your website or AdWords ad will be text “John Smith, Carol Perrot, …., …. and Tim Smith (all names of friends who have clicked Google+ button) suggess this site to you”

And it’s all free internet marketing for you! Google+ is right now only available via invitations as they’re still testing it but it will be soon available for all and be prepared to start using it. Start thinking how to make people to click your Google+ buttons. One small tip: increase all your prices let’s say 5% and add marketing message everywhere: “Click Google+ button at our website and get 5% discount!”

We say right now “To get 5% discount you just need to go to our Facebook fan page facebook.com/seo.web.dev and then click ”like” button. Finally click “share” and write nice testimonial about e-Stonia.” but we’ll change that message once Google+ will be launched.

Do you think that maybe Google+ will fail and Facebook and Twitter will remain most importand in social media marketing? Well…. Google is already owning Android that is the king of mobile phones future and already now huge amount of visitors on most websites are with mobile devices. Google Chrome owns ~23% of browser market. Google owns business applications and servers. Google owns Google Search and about 80% all web searches are made through Google. And Google owns all the tools competitors want or are failing to acquire.

Believe me – Google+ will be super important for you in the internet marketing World! Contact me and I’ll tell you more about Google+ marketing.

1. MODx Revolution calls itself as a CMS & PHP framework when MODx Evolution called itself as content management framework.

2. I believe that although WordPress has way more plugins the fact that you can do ANYTHING that isn’t already there exactly as you need it you’ll develop it in MODx WAY faster than in WordPress if you’re at same level with both.

…gotta run out – continue next time:)

Creative design

There are many web design questionnaires and some are good for some type of web design customers, some for other type of websites that need to be designed and developed. We have also used different web design questionnaires but here I try to create most general one that could suit to most of companies who are planning new website. If you order web design and development from e-Stonia we’ll ask you personalised questions but it’s not bad idea to think about these questions, too.

1. What for you need website? What you want that your website’s visitor will do at your website? What is the goal of your website?

Are you selling product(s) and the goal is that visitor will add products to “my products” or “shopping cart” and then will enter contact details and will click “buy now” or “ask for a price offer”? Website’s goal can also be to make customer to call you, use live chat to ask information, fill in questionnaire, use price calculator or fill in contact form / request callback form.

Website can also have many goals – side goals can be to make customer to join your Facebook fan page, subscribe your news feed, join your newsletter or share your content with friends. Goal can be hidden, too – your website may look like sharing free value and does not sell anything more than advertising space but actually that’s just your landing page from where you try to direct visitor to you actual sales webpage.

2. Who is your website’s visitor?

Web design for young people should look different than for older people. Also, what’s your visitor’s nationality, sex, income and education? Are they employers, entrepreneurs or corporate decision makers? What are their interests?

3. Have a look at your 2-3 biggest competitors websites

Tell your web designer what you like about them and what you don’t like. What’s missing and what’s not needed. At one moment you need to draw your website’s layout and structure so it’s very helpful to look at competitors’ websites’ design and layout. It’s useful to send to your web designer also any other websites’ links that you like with some comments what exactly you like there – usage of a photography/illustrations, color scheme, layout, icons, vintage feel, etc.

4. What will be the functionality of the website?

Content management system is a must these days so no need to mention that:) But – what forms there will be? Any animations? Front page AJAX banner fading, scrolling, sliding, rotating? Interactive Flash solutions (eg. at e-Stonia’s front page)? Web video somewhere?

5. What price range you are looking to spend?

Not only on web design but on the whole web development project. It’s important to know already for a web designer as if the budget allows then designer can draw more attractive solutions that need more investment in later stages. For example there’s no point by designer to draw elements that in his/her mind should start animating if there’s no budget for making it animate in later stages. Also it’s important to know how many hours are paid so how much time can be spent on each element on the website.

Please, contact us and we’ll find you the best solution considering your needs and budget. For new customers first hour of consultation is free;)

There are so many time consuming things you should do to improve your SEO that it’s a good idea to have a list to follow and then start from the beginning. A lot can be written about each task and many SEO tasks could be added but with this post my goal is to provide a general picture. I GUARANTEE that if you do all these tasks during one year (even if you’re not good at all in most tasks) then you’ll get brilliant results in Google!!! And you’re not cheating in any way.

Content marketing (remember – content is the King!)

• Open a blog for your business to give away free valuable knowledge (write posts regularly like twice per week or once per month)
• Write also about others to build relationships with them
• Write an e-book
• Add Facebook “like” button and maybe other social media sharing options
• Submit your content to social hubs
• Bookmark your content in social bookmarking websites like Delicious and Stumbleupon
• Create an infographic
• Set up an editorial calendar

Conversion optimisation (it’s not only about the traffic you get – it’s also about how many of the visitors convert into customers):

• Do A/B testing for landing pages with Google’s Website Optimizer tool
• Integrate a free (with ads) or let your developer to create own feedback widget and live chat for user insight
• Create CTA (call-to-action) with single purpose for every page
• Put all your pages into a list that is sorted by conversion scores
• Segment traffic as well as you can
• Do five second test on your landing page (eg. fivesecondtest.com)

Organic search results (SEO / SEM)

• Keyword research – define and analyse your business’ core organic keywords
• Architect your site for search engines (directory and file structure, robots.txt, java-script, secure area usage, server-side includes, etc.) Here you probably need a SEO experienced web developer’s help most.
• Lot of one-way quality linkbuilding

PPC (pay-per-click)

• Start with signing up a Google AdWords account
• Join us at Facebook and share with friends to get worth of £60 AdWords vouchers and free service to set it all up
• Send traffic to landing pages and create just one landing page per ad group
• Improve message match to get high quality score
• Improve the CPC (cost per click) to keep your costs down. Remove expensive keywords and leave cheaper ones.
• Buy some help from PPC experts like us as it’s just a few hours you need to hire us and then you’ll set up!
• Try some other PPC campaigns like LinkedIN, Facebook, etc.

Social media marketing

• Sign up at LinkedIN and start networking there
• Create a viral social media contest page like this
• Sign up at Twitter and build a following there
• Leave Twitter open in live tabs so people see you as online
• Create your Facebook fan page and seed some Facebook fans till you have 25 fans then create nice URL
• Time your Tweets, blog posts and Facebook fan page posts
• Connect your Facebook fan page and your blog
• Have something to contribute/say: Curator or Creator
• Claim your brand name

Email marketing

• Choose an online e-mail provider and pay monthly or ask your web developer to set up e-mail marketing platform
• Ask your web designer to design nice branded e-mail template
• Start building your e-mail list
• Segment your list
• Drip campaigns for acquisition & education
• A/B test your emails

Lead generation

• Use Feedburner for your blog to capture and track your RSS readers
• Gather emails for a product launch
• Give something away for free to acquire customer data
• Answer questions in Quora, LinkedIN etc.

Analyse (last but not least):

• Sign up to Google Analytics (GA)
• Set up conversion goals and funnels in GA
• Annotate important events in GA
• Create custom dashboard reports
• Find out which areas of your site are under-performing

Yii framework

I have written why it’s always good idea to develop web on open source platforms like MODx, WordPress, Magento and I have written why MODx is better content management framework compared to others but today I want to explain why sometimes things should be written from scratch rather than using ready-made CMS systems. When you need more complicated functionality to be developed then often using ready made solution will mean actually same amount or even more hours of work to modify it, change what’s needed and remove unneccesary functionality. In the future when changes or amendments are needed then it may be even more expensive and complicated as existing script have been hacked so much that it might be even not possible. At more complicated cases downloading ready made scripts and hacking their core is never suggested by programmers who are able to program solutions from scratch and only “script kiddies” use ready made scripts.

Now, sould everything be done from scratch? Yes and no! Yes, because using ready made scripts is no good when you need rich functionality but not every piece of code should be written from scratch as that would take too many working hours and increase the price. So, frameworks should be used and below I’m going to explain why Yii framework is at the moment best PHP framework available.

Yii is fast!

It’s really fast!

All frameworks are slower than plain PHP but click on the image on the right to see the comparsion of Yii framework’s efficienty compared to developing in other most popular PHP frameworks that we have used in our development – CodeInteger, Zend, CakePHP, Prado and Symphony. There’s compared the amount of requests each framework can do in one second without very often used APC extension and with APC. As you can see the Yii is a hugely faster than other frameworks.

There are many reasons why PHP software developers consider using frameworks to be more effective but the main one is the speed of development. Frameworks save PHP application development time, help PHP web developers in creating stable applications and reduce the amount of repeated code. And that’s the most important in modern web application development and creating complicated dynamic sites and business applications. By oxagile.com

Well, of course performance isn’t the only important thing as otherwise just no framework could be used and written in plain PHP but with such a great performance Yii framework still has super rich set of features compared to others that improves the effecienty of web development.

Just some of features Yii provides:

• built-in hierarchical role-based authentication support
• Facebook, YouTube, Google etc. integration (eg. no login needed but just “Facebook connect”)
• works well with third party code – for example it’s very easy to use in Yii some code from Zend
• jQuery AJAX widgets (auto-complete input field, treeview, data grid, etc.) that let us develop modern and very versatile user interface (UI)
• super easy to keep design (templating) separate from functionality
• simple form helpers, validators and handlers
• errors handling made nicer and easier
• secure (safe from SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), cross-site request forgery (CSRF), and cookie tampering, etc)
• XHTML compilant
• stricktly object-orientated (OOP)

Is it fast? … Is it secure? … Is it professional? … Is it right for my next project? … Yes, it is! By yiiframework.com

Sometimes it's good first write/draw on paper

Following the previous blog post by Runo that explained the importance of foreseeing the scares of your customer and about writing about your unique selling proposal at your website then below some more tips how to do good copywriting at your website according to the science of persuasion. The suggestions below are collected from most prominent books in this field including Mr. Cialdini’s books that all marketers who want to be the best have followed.

• If possible try to give something away for free or teach something valuable on your website before you start selling! Priciple of reciprocity – people feel that they need to give something back if they have got something. This tactic works great if you don’t sell low-budget products/services.
• Consistency – try to sell something not so big first and just mention that you offer also big deals. Once the customer has bought something that maybe doesn’t bring big profits for you he feels like your customer and will most likely buy more from you if he/she had good experience.
• People like real people – write the texts on your website like a friend of the website visitor. Be personal, tell about yourself, write blog posts, add photos of your personal, write also somewhere what your employees do at their free time, etc. Personal touch is important! Statistics says that people buy less from websites that use stock photos instead real photos of their company, products etc.
• Write why your product/service is best! Well – the first one probably is nothing new for you;)
• Call for action. In many places ask website visitor to buy or contact you and write exact steps that must be taken.
• Write: “I understand your needs” because you know your customers’ needs.
• Make limited time and/or quantity offers at prominante place in your website. Tactic of “scarcity”.
• Add as much bonus products or services as possible to really convice the website visitor to buy.
• Explain all the ways why your product/service will benefit your customer. Try always to think what your website visitor needs not what you need!
• Present the price in the way that it looks like very good deal.
• (Money-back) guarantee is a must!
• Give many proofs like examples of work, (video) testimonials by experts (nobody cares if someone Bob says “they’re best”), charts and numbers how many people already have bought from you etc. Demonstrate your authority!

I would also like to share one great video by Simon Sinek I found today: How great leaders inspire action

All the modern SEO and web 3.0 marketing stuff is the future and old traditional agencies must become digital new media agencies (or they’ll die) but in the middle of this all technological buzz don’t forget the content! Content is still the king! Think about the questions and fears that your customer might have before making the purchase when you write your content!

What I mostly see in this market today is that from one side there are digital (web) agencies that promote from marketing side SEO, social media and other internet marketing methods to get more and more visitors to your website and from other hand traditional advertising companies that are thinking how to tune your marketing message so that it will work. Both have their pros and cons.

Modern web agencies that are the future and killing more-and-more the old-fashioned traditional web agencies. More and more highly talented people join digital agencies and “web” isn’t any more fr bunch of geeks but everybody know that it’s most essential and cost-effective marketing channel nowadays.

Although more and more talented marketing people including graphic designers and copywriters join these days digital agencies but still most of the web agencies doesn’t yet take too seriously the content of marketing message. Also customers who come to us don’t expect us to start spending lot of hours on the content from the point of view how to make the marketing message more attractive. People expect us to brief the design, do the programming and web development. Finally of course they ask how much it will cost now to do the SEO so that they’ll get best rankings in Google.

Good traditional advertising agencies from other hand do one thing perfectly that modern web agencies often doesn’t pay too much attention – work hard on the marketing texts (good designers hang around both – “old” and “new”). It’s a super necessary part of the job and modern web agencies here tend often to just measure how heavily the content is filled with keywords that potential customers may be using in search engines and not spending too much time on thinking how to convince that visitor that finally arrived to website.

So few tips this time not about how to get more visitors but how to deliver your (internet) marketing message so that maximum amount of your website’s visitors will go to your website’s goal (contact form, “buy now” button, price calculator, booking form or whatever it is in your website):

1. Most probably you have a (advertising) message that describes (and tries to sell) your product/service. Yes, of course you have to describe what you offer but that’s not enough.

The best message creates a conversation in it’s reader’s mind – it answers to the questions that your potential customer may have in it’s mind. What wonders your customer? What problems your product/service can solve?

Let’s take an example. You’re a building company. What you do? You have some money in your pocket and buy nice website design, order content management system, log into it and start writing: “painting, plumbing, decorating, electricity erc.” Everybody does that and adding here “trusted provider” or “high quality” wont help much.

A little better way would be: “Cowboys ripped your neighbour and you’re afraid to call unknown building company? You can trust Bob but he’s old and not really experienced to do complicated tasks? How to find a company that won’t charge the earth and still can be trusted? Call our talented and friendly project manager Jack and he’ll come and make a reasonable price offer and we’ll write a clear transparent contract if you’re still in doubt after meeting Jack! We never push to sell anything and if you’re not happy with our quality you won’t pay!”

We’ll I just wrote that without analysing it too long and it’s just an non existing example company but can you see the difference? Calm down your customer’s fears, be firendly, be different, be honest, be reasonably priced (don’t look like cheap and then try to rip off to live).

2. Unique selling proposal. How your product is different from most of your competitors? How you do it (bit) differently, (bit) better? It can’t be that you do exactly the same way like any other provider. Even selling roses on the street can be done differently (better) than anyone else.

3. Most important messages as shortly as possible to the front page. Within first seconds visitor will decide if he’ll stay at your website so you must answer a) what is it – what can be done here; b) why are you different if you have competitors; c) what do I get from this website – if you didn’t convince the visitor with a and b then try to say with c at least that he’ll find useful/interesting/entertaining content here.

MODx Revolution 2.0.2 with some bug fixes is out already for a while and it’s really great. It takes time to learn as it’s quite different but it’s worth the time. Must move on and Evolution must become history.

What is even greater news for many who have been thinking that MODx is great but there’s missing a good shopping cart – from MODx forum you can read that two great MODx developers have started to develop MODx Revolution native shopping cart called VisionCart. They say it’s gonna be awesome! They hope to  to release the first version around November or December (maybe earlier).

Nice, isn’t it?