Google Chrome is taking market share from Internet Explorer and Firefox according to Net Applications’ data for January. It’s worth stopping for a moment to think about what this means to you as a small business website owner. It’s important to make sure your website works, and works well, across all the different browsers that visitors use to view your website.

Chrome is Google’s own browser that promotes speed, fast loading pages and (not surprisingly) direct access to search from the address bar. Give it a try – it’s really fast.

The report shows that Firefox usage has dropped for 2 months running. The top browser is Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). IE6 usage is falling but unfortunately has still not reached zero  (I say unfortunately because IE6 is old and has a lot of ‘features’ which mean it doesn’t support certain web standards properly).

So what do these trends mean to you as a website owner? Overall it means more and more different browsers to support, which means that you’ll need to do your homework and ensure your website works well across all of these. It’s good to get to know a few tricks to ensure compatibility across multiple web browsers. Some of the best tips are to start off well with clean code that meets the W3C standards and is validated and free of errors. Use a STRICT DOCTYPE to force browsers to apply the rules properly and test your site on as many different browsers as possible.

The survey is based on a limited sample of 40,000 users and might not reflect your own site. The best way to do this for your website is to check your Google Analytics results under the visitors tab. For example I see Firefox is the most popular browser for one of my technical sites but IE8 is the most popular for my non-techie sites.

Upgrading your wordpress blog is usually a doddle these days with the 1-click upgrade button but you may find it’s not quite so easy with the latest major wordpress 2.9 release. I got caught out with this one as I was expecting to get the job done with a few simple clicks…

Lots of people are reporting issues with their MySQL database version (MySQL is the database used to store all of your wordpress blog info – posts, comments, and so on). The new wordpress requires at least version 4.1.2 of MySQL, so if your version is older than this, you’ll need to upgrade MySQL too. Unless you’re familiar with your MySQL setup, you probably won’t see a problem until you try to run the 1-click wordpress upgrade – something like this:

“ERROR: WordPress 2.9 requires MySQL 4.1.2 or higher”

This is definitely out of the 1-click upgrade territory now so if you’re planning to tackle your upgrade I’d recommend making a couple of hours available.

Don Campbell wrote a nice overview recently of the steps that you need to go through to upgrade your MySQL database. Essentially you’ll need to create a brand new MySQL database using version 5, export all the data from your old database, and then read it back into the new one. It all seems like a lot of work but there doesn’t really seem to be an alternative. I’d highly recommend making a backup of your old database first – there’s a nice tutorial from wordpress and you’ll be doing this as part of the export process anyway.

OK, it’s not exactly pain-free but it certainly works (I’ve tried it on several wordpress installations) and it’s a nice way to spend New Year’s Eve. Happy upgrading!

One of the most common questions I get from people with small business websites (especially blogs) is “what should I write about?” They know that one of the keys to a successful website is to include lots of high-value content, but struggle to find ideas for new topics. Well, here’s a way to get some great ideas. It’s free, the answers are only a couple of clicks away and they use a nice thing called ‘time on site’…

Why is This Useful?

If you own a small business website then you need to spend your marketing time wisely and this includes time spent creating new content for your website. Rather than guessing at new ideas for content, this technique uses clues that are already there in your website traffic.

Analytics First

The key to this technique is to use the visitor analytics results for your website. If you don’t have analytics already running, you’ll need to install this first and run it for a decent slice of time – probably at least a couple of weeks. Google Analytics is very popular and works well, so I’ll use this as an example.

To install Google Analytics for your site, just head over to www.google.com/analytics and register your site. You’ll need to grab the tracking code and add it to each web page.

What to Look For

You can use the keyword traffic report as inspiration for new content. Just look under Traffic Sources -> Keywords. Take a look down the list of keywords and look for ones which match these criteria:

1. They bring you a decent number of visits already (definitely more than 1)
2. Average time on site is low (probably zero)
3. They’re relevant to your business and your website

The image above shows the ‘time on site’ column in Google Analytics.

OK, so why are these numbers important?

It’s because these keywords are already bringing you some organic search traffic (from Google, bing, etc) but your visitors aren’t finding what they want on your pages.

You might find that these are long tail keywords, and the phrases may not appear word-for-word in your pages. You’ll probably find that the pages where they appear aren’t really focusing on these keywords as a topic. Remember that visitors scan your pages very quickly and may move away if the search term doesn’t appear in the title, or early in the page.

What to Do Next

So now you have some ideas for new keywords and topics to write about. Create some new pages around these keywords, and make sure the pages really are focused around these terms. Use the keywords in the title, and several times in the page content (and as near to the top of the page as possible)

Other Questions and Ideas

Can you use bounce rate too? It depends. Bounce rate shows the number of visitors to a page who exit your site as soon as they’ve read it. You might think that a high bounce rate shows a bad page, but for some websites it’s probably fine. Blogs are a good example of this – your readers probably come to your site to read a new post, and then move away to their next favorite blog.

So what about keywords that are already successful for your site? Maybe you have some of these – lots of visitors AND they spend a long time on your pages (i.e. time on site is high). By all means write some more content around these keywords. This comes under the heading of ‘improving what works already’, which I fully support. You should  see more growth if you target the poorly-performing keywords though.

You might also see the time reported as ‘time on page’ instead of time on site. This is just the page-specific version.

Wrapping It Up

So there you go. This is a nice technique for finding new stuff to write about, and it takes away the guesswork. If you’re a small business website owner I think you’ll find this useful. Have a go and let me know if it works – you can leave a comment below or contact me directly.

[UPDATE: I got a few questions on the 'zero time on site' measurement. How can a visitor get to your site and spend zero seconds here? The answer lies in the way Google Analytics measures time on site. It looks at the time between the first page view on your site and the last page view. If only one page is looked at, there is no second page view so a zero is recorded. Visitors may be spending some time on the page, but this isn't recorded. ]

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I sat through a deeply technical presentation today and got the chance to experience what it’s like being completely confused by some technology. It didn’t help that the presenter was unable to speak the letter ‘s’ and every time the letter appeared in a word she just left a gap!

It set me thinking about the challenge of helping you, my reader, to understand all this technology that I talk about in small business website design. I try to position all my writing at the non-technical person, but even so, I get a fair number of people who find that my explanations are pitched at the wrong level.

Some people want it more technical and complain if I’m not quoting HTML syntax or talking about the latest super-tweak on SEO.

Others find any kind of technology completely confusing and if I start to talk about anything involving a website source file or a link or a cookie then they start panicking and get confused.

This is a fun challenge! The trick with explaining any kind of technology is that you need to start from a basic level of understanding and build on top of that. If you don’t have the basic level nailed down then this is where things start to get a bit difficult.

It’s fine if you’re talking to one person because you can have a chat first and find out which level to start from. It gets harder if you’re talking to a group of people. You can still discuss their knowledge level but the levels may be different so you’ve then got to help all of them together to understand your techie talk. It gets harder again if you’re writing for readers who you can’t engage with directly.

The good news is that by choosing a target audience who is non-technical, I’ve narrowed down my niche so that I stand a better chance of writing stuff that you’ll be able to use. I’m making the assumption that small business owners are a clever bunch, but that they probably don’t speak native CSS or PHP. I always make the promise that I’ll leave the white coat by the door! That’s far easier than trying to write techie stuff that works for everyone.

I encourage you to contact me by leaving a blog comment, or chatting on Facebook or Twitter, to let me know if you find that my stuff is hitting the right level for you.

PS. I’m about to start a 4 week road trip so apologies in advance if it seems like I’m ignoring your nice feedback

Have you created your small business website design so that you can easily update it, or, is this a pain to do? Here’s a couple more questions:

• Do you have to talk to a web designer before you can add a new page?
• Even if you can write code yourself, have you made it easy to create a new page, using templates and a separate CSS file, or even better, some kind of content management system?

The best websites grow over time and gradually get more and more useful content on them.

This keeps your readers (and the search engines) coming back regularly for more – a good thing.

One of the best decisions you can make for your site is to make this as easy as possible. If it’s a pain, you won’t update it and this is definitely not a good thing.

I’ve collected all of my posts on Vacation Rental Website Design into one handy PDF document. You can download it here in exchange for an email address (I’ll also send you a few extra tips, and any updates that I create in the future).

I think this is a nice way to read all of these posts, and it saves you looking back through my site. Print out the guide and you’ve got a free book for the shelf!

I’ve been helping out a few people recently with their small business websites and running through the checks from Website Stress Test with them. One question that keeps coming up is whether the overall website score means anything. How important is it?

It’s important, but not as important as the scores for each of the individual checks. The checks take you through all the major aspects of your site, such as keywords, URL, title tags, backlinks and the number of pages. Each check gives you a score so that you can easily see where your website needs some work.

I do provide a total score at the end but this is really just a guideline, for several reasons:

• Every website has different goals, so the relative importance of each check is different for each. For example, a successful blog site should score highly on update frequency, but this would be less important in a site with static pages
• I’m not comparing different sites so the overall score doesn’t really matter. It’s not a competition but it is about making your website better
• I’m not trying to guess Google’s algorithms for ranking pages. Firstly, it’s a secret and secondly I’m not providing scores based on search results. A lot of the checks do relate to factors that are important to Google though, since improving these will give you a better website

If you run through the Website Stress Test checks and make some improvements based on the individual scores, your overall score will improve (a nice motivator, I think!)

As you launch into building your own small business website you’re probably faced with a dilemma.

On one hand you need to create a website that’s unique, highlights your key business differences, includes all those functions and pages that you need and hopefully provides an interesting experience for your readers.

On the other hand you probably don’t have the resources to do everything:

• code your own HTML
• create and adjust the CSS style
• add nice multimedia such as videos and audio tracks
• incorporate e-commerce features such as a shopping cart

Even if you’re a technical wiz at web design, you may not want to spend your valuable business working hours tweaking code (*)

This means that you need to make use of standard templates and frameworks as much as possible.

The problem here is that you could easily end up with a ‘me too’ site that looks the same as many others out there on the web. So much for your individuality!

My advice is to use templates and frameworks as far as you can, but to add your own customization and special tricks to make your website individual and memorable. If you choose a template system, do make sure you can customize it.

Think of your website like your business card – it’s better to design and print up something special and high quality than to buy one of those cheap ‘print your own’ cards. You don’t have to design your own fonts or make your own paper though (now there’s an idea)

(*) Personally, I do like to spend my valuable business hours tweaking code because (a) I’m a geek and I enjoy it, (b) it helps me to learn the nuts and bolts of building sites so that I can write about it and (c) I find it works better for me in making sites that work reliably and successfully

It might seem like a strange question. You’ve built your small business website to help promote your business, increase sales and educate your customers, right?

This is a pretty hefty list of things for your website to do. You probably need to be a little less ambitious with your website goals.

Let’s make things a bit easier. You should define one or more goals that are more manageable, specific and measurable (ever heard of SMART goals?)

What’s the role of your website? Is it:

• a brochure site, with pictures and info about your products? Do you send people to it to find out more about what you offer?
• there to inform or educate your readers?
• a blog or diary type of site, where you add regular updates on subjects related to your business?
• there to gather leads? Maybe you have customer surveys, or you exchange free info for email addresses, or twitter followers
• an e-commerce site? Do you sell your stuff online?

The structure and design of the website will be different for each of these and needs to support your small business website goal. Here’s an example. Which one of these is better defined, more manageable and easier to measure on your website:

1. Promote your small business, or

2. Gather relevant leads by collecting email addresses and phone numbers?

See what I mean?

It’s important to get the goals right for any website, even if you have 10,000 pages. For a small business website though, it’s even more important, because you have to carefully justify the time and resources that you spend on every single page.

Once your goal is defined, you can break it down into the steps that visitors can take to complete it. This will help you to define the role of each of the pages or sections. Are the pages there to educate? Do you want people to read them, then click through to read more information? Or do you want them to come back tomorrow to read your latest update? How about next week?

It’s traditional in web design to think in terms of visitors, bounce rates and funnels, but this thinking could be out of date for your site.

It might be better to think about the time spent on key pages, conversions, single page visits and repeat visitors.

Once you’ve defined your website goals(s) you’ll find it a lot easier to plan out your website, write it and promote it.

Is Twitter the answer for those missing bookings for your vacation rental? Maybe, but you need to use the right approach.

Now I’m not going to go on here about how you started using Twitter and immediately got sick of hearing about what people ate for breakfast. I’m assuming (hoping?) you’ve got over this stage already.

People join Twitter because they’ve seen other people using it. It’s a great story and this is certainly true around vacation rental owners. Once you’ve joined though, how do you actually use it to generate bookings?

Most people try the direct approach first:  ‘my vacation rental is available on 15th December’. Where are the inquiries though? Why doesn’t it work?

The problem is that your customers may not be using Twitter,  so they’ll never get to see your direct Tweets. Even if they are on Twitter, do they use it to look for your vacation rental?

Maybe.

Maybe there’s a small slice of people who search for info about your area. You might be able to pick up some interest that way, but may find that they are just looking for tourist info.

The best approach is to use something a little less direct, much like other forms of marketing. Here’s the plan:

Phase 1: Seek out relevant travel writers and tourist info websites with Twitter accounts – if they are savvy Twitterers they’ve probably published their address on their website or blog, so you can easily follow them. If not try the Twitter search facility (it works).

Phase 2: By following these people they should follow you in return and start paying attention to your work. It’s a pleasant surprise to see how many people follow you back, and it’s not all from auto-follow tools. If you are creating interesting and relevant Tweets then they may pay enough interest to retweet you, reply in public, or even write a blog post or article about you. If you’re feeling really brave, ask them!

Phase 3: This will increase your profile a little bit. If you do this enough you’ll start getting more attention. This is the best kind of attention – when other people start talking about you (and your wonderful vacation place of course)

These are just small steps, and don’t expect success overnight. The key is to start on the right path and take a long term approach.

PS. You can follow me @DrRichard42