UK small business website design, website maintenance by Dave Wilkinson

Photo by Tjeerd

Believe it or not, there are more ways to browse the Internet than just using the current release of Internet Explorer.

Across the Linux, Windows and Mac operating systems, there are at least 60 different web browsers users can (and do) use to view websites. And to make matters worse, computer users also have a variety of screen sizes to choose from (there are 11 generally recognized screen sizes currently on offer).

So today why don’t you try a quick website management activity. It shouldn’t take more than about 10 minutes to visit browsershots.org and get a free list of screenshots for your website’s homepage.

Download the screenshots and study them. You might just be surprised at how odd your website looks to users who probably account for up to 20% of your visitors. That’s 1 in 5 people in your target market who probably get turned off by your website before you even get a chance to make them an offer.

Photo by markhillary

When I started my website management business a little over 2 months ago, I expected my clients would want me to spend most of my time handling website updates. I was wrong. To date I’ve landed 3 clients, and they all want the same thing: more sales leads and more phones ringing. Of course I still need to update their websites and add content to make all this happen, but lead generation has become the primary goal.

So I thought I’d go out on a limb and write a short series of articles on how I’m approaching online lead generation.

Not surprisingly, none of my clients are too keen on me publishing what I’ve done for them. So I thought I’d use myself as a case study. I’ve been trying to find the time to do some decent marketing since kicking off the service, and I can think of 4 good reasons why using my own business as an example is a good idea:

1. I don’t have to ask anyone for permission to publish data. If I give away too much information about my own business, nobody suffers except me.
2. I only started offering a website management plan 2 months ago, so there’s still a lot of growth needed.
3. My lead generation budget is ridiculously small. Sound familiar?
4. I don’t have an in-house customer database to work from. We’re starting from scratch here.

As with the 3 companies I’m already working with, I’ll be trying to answer the following questions:

• What are my lead generation goals, my target market and my budget?
• What’s the best way to get you to visit my website?
• How am going to get your permission to let me market my services to you?
• What am I going to do when you decide you’re interested in what I have to offer?
• How am I going to check that we’re compatible?
• How am I going to move you to the next level if you’re not ready to buy yet?
• What metrics should I put in place to measure my performance and my expenses?

Every business owner needs a source of sales leads, even when they’ve got enough work. Putting a well planned, automated (as far as possible) online lead generation plan in place helps keep the phones ringing even when you’re not thinking about marketing.

Article 1 will be published on Monday. Why don’t you play along?

Photo by foxtongue

When I first started out in web design I gave all my clients free hosting. While it worked well as a marketing tool, the monthly server I rented from Mediatemple was rather pricey. Even though Mediatemple’s service was quite reliable, I decided to look for a cheaper option.

So began my Dreamhost affair. In my opinion, Dreamhost have quite a few things going for them; they’re cheap, their accounts have very few limitations, and the guys who run the show have a brilliant sense of humour.

For a while, all seemed happy in Dreamhost land. Until last month, when this website, which is running WordPress, started breaking for no good reason. Every day, for 2-3 hours, it just died. And Dreamhost still haven’t been able to identify the problem, let alone fix it. Experiencing a couple of hours of downtime every day isn’t the greatest way to run a website, especially if your job is to keep websites running!

So I’ve made the decision to go back to Mediatemple. If you noticed any issues on my site over the weekend, it was probably due to DNS changes doing their thing. But as of this morning, it should all be sorted out. Which reminds me to send a big THANKS to Gerard McGarry for his article on Moving WordPress from Dreamhost to Mediatemple’s Grid Server. The move was hardly rocket science, but it’s nice to read about potential pitfalls from someone who’s been in your position before.

I think I’ve learned a good lesson in small business website hosting: don’t choose a service provider based solely on price. Choose the guys who can give you the support you need, and who have the infrastructure to keep you up and running.

Photo by foshie

I’ve decided to change my comment links from no-follow to do-follow.

If you don’t know what this means, I can sum it up like this: Most often, when you leave a comment on a blog, that’s it. Even though your comment has a link to your website, Google won’t recognize that link, and you get no reward.

Conversely, with do-follow, you can leave a comment on my blog and I’ll reward you by sending you a tiny little bit of Google juice (that’s a good thing!). Now obviously a do-follow link is something other bloggers want, so while I’m expecting a few more people to comment, I’m also expecting a lot more spam.

Because I moderate all comments by people on my site, this means I spend time reading what you have to say. So in exchange I expect you to play by the rules. Here they are:

• Links to offensive sites. If you wouldn’t let your kids look at your site, I don’t want to know about it.
• Scraper site links. If you’ve decided that stealing content from other people just to make money, you don’t deserve my links. In fact, you deserve to be shot at dawn.
• General spam. I’m opening up my comments to do-follow in order to start a conversation. So posting a comment that reads ‘great post!’ doesn’t really do much for me. If you want to get published, write something worth reading.
• Very few parents name their kids “Make money online now!”, so don’t try keyword sniping in your comments. Unless you publish your real name, you won’t get my link.

So the question is, do you have anything to say?

If ever you wanted to learn how to build and manage websites, one of the greatest online resources ever is back, and I only found out a few minutes ago.

For many web designers, Webmonkey.com was our classroom until it got sold off a few years ago, forcing us to either spend money on a library of books we didn’t want, or subscribe to a bunch of less impressive web resources.

But now the guys at CondeNet (who also own the very cool Wired Magazine) have brought the site back into their stable, given it a fresh redesign and begun posting new tutorials. I’ve got this really cheesy grin on my face right now!

If this seems like a totally trivial thing for you, it’s probably because you have absolutely no intention of understanding how the Web works. But for the rest of us this is definitely something worth adding to our feed readers.