There are probably many more than three reasons not to let your brother-in-law, Uncle Joe or your best friends geeky son design your website - but I'm just going to keep it simple.

One - Looks. It is said that you have 3 seconds to impress the potential visitor to you website and if it looks "home-made" or amateurish they will not take you seriously and just click right on out. Making a website does need more than knowledge of html, good design does its job quietly in the background in an a way that is subtle. Bad design jumps right out at you!

Two - SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), brother Bill or uncle Pat may know how to put a website together, but are they up to date with the ever-changing requirements of Google's search engines? Google have moved the goalposts on a number of occasions and what may have got you a good ranking 3 years ago doesn't work now (keywords in the meta tags is one good example of this). Don't take the risk of getting black marks against your ranking. Good rankings are earned. There isn't a quick fix - but there are basic building blocks that your professional web designer knows to build into your website.

Three - Professionalism. No matter how good a family you may be or friendship you may have, it's hard to expect perfection from people in a non-business relationship. You, the client, have a right to expect the best, to want your brand to shine, to have your logo showing at its best. Nephew Wally just isn't going to react too well to revision requests. A professional website designer takes it all in their stride, - it's what we do.

The world is changing. Fast. What used to work does not seem to be effective any more and not grasping this can cost a business a lot of money.

Let me explain. Five years ago we still used the Yellow Pages to look up a business. Now most of us reach for Google, the Yellow Pages propping up our computer monitor while Yellow (the corporation) post eye watering losses. The search giant Google has gained a foothold in all our lives, not least the lives of our businesses.

When your customer Googles you, only half remembering your business name or putting in what sketchy details they can hurriedly think of - do you come up in the search? Because if you don't your competitors will. Those who are more tech savvy and have employed good SEO techniques in their websites, (or a good SEO consultant,) will come up ahead.

I'm amazed to find a lot of businesses don't give their websites much attention, they don't want to spend the money. To me, that's crazy. It's like spending a million dollars on a fabulous building - except the front door is a tatty old wooden thing with a hand written sign tacked to it saying "Go Away".

I look at web stats every day. It's part of my job and having a head for patterns in numbers and geeky stuff like that, I look for the story behind the numbers. How many visitors didn't bother to go past the front page? How long did people linger? This is the feedback a business owner needs to have at their fingertips. How many of those visits are converting to sales? What do people use the website for? All grist to the mill. A website is not a static thing, it needs adjusting to suit the changing winds of the market.

If you are feeling lost by all the technological changes, for goodness sake get a consultant who can help you! There are a few of us out here :-)

I'm going to have a little rant here, so put on your rain-hats, bring out the popcorn and listen up!

The website industry here in New Zealand seems to have very little (make that no) regulation and anyone can set themselves up as a website designer. Apparently there is an association, but I'm not overly impressed with their website - so a bit hard to take seriously. I see many people with website woes in the course of my business. I'm pleased to say that I have brought about positive results for the people who have had the good taste to come on board with me. OK enough of me.

These poor people have usually been sold websites by salespeople that talk a good talk, and because the majority of people don't really understand what's involved with a website they don't realise something is amiss until much later.

There are 3 parts to a website - whats seen, the functional bits, and whats unseen - the code.

Websites that suck - visually
Well, of course these are the easiest to spot. They look cheap, they are made from templates, or made 6 years ago, the colours clash, the links have underlines and are blue, all caps everywhere - you get the idea. You can tell these websites are bad for business by looking at the statistics - a 100% bounce rate is a dead giveaway. People click in, shudder, and click away as fast as possible. If you are trying to sell things on line you need a good looking site - or people just won't buy. If you want people to take your business seriously you need a good looking website.

The Non-functioning Suckiness
I have seen an awful lot of websites that have broken links, the navigation is confusing and leads to dead ends, and links that lead to the good old 404 message. BTW 404 messages are bad for your SEO - they all get recorded by the little googlebots that index everything. I have seen a number of websites (and I'm not going to mention names here) whose broken links lead back to the website designer. I cry foul at that one. Nice way to get inbound links guys. I'd be pretty mad if I was your client though.

The Suck That is Not Seen
Now this is the stuff that makes your website come up on page 652 of a Google search. Bad coding. And boy do I see a lot of this stuff. You need to keep your website up to date as things change out there in Cyberland. There are Standards - the W3 Consortium was formed to sort out standards for html and css etc (I'm over simplifying here - not writing a thesis) and there are basic things a website needs - a DOCTYPE declaration for starters. (you can Google any of this stuff to find out more) It needs to say what type of webpage this is. Things change, for example HTML5 is now coming into effect, so you need to make sure all the necessary code is still valid to current standards. Now some page errors are a little less serious than others, for example writing code in capitals is now not ok. But when you have errors around your DOCTYPE declaration it's not a good thing. I have seen some corkers lately. I encourage anyone to run their website through the W3 validator tool that will tell you what sort of errors your website has.

No-one knows for sure what the algorithms are that Google uses to get a website to page Number One - they guard their secret to prevent people 'gaming' their system, but one thing is sure, badly written code, missing pages and dead links and a very high bounce rate are all factors that will impact negatively.

Paying less for a website will ultimately cost you, lets be careful out there.

Ok, forgive me for going all female on you all, gentle reader, but sometimes life is not about competition its about participation. Completely off the topic of websites today, I'm going to share a little something of me - what drives me, what motivates me to get out of bed in the morning, a small glimpse into my psyche - hopefully its not too scary for you.

Now I am not an athletic type, far from it. As a kid in school I was last to be picked for a team, sports day was a misery for me as I couldn't run, and I loathed everything sporty and energetic. I'm a geek, thinking is my thing - my brain is my best friend, and I spend most of my time on my computer. So what on earth could have prompted me to do what I did today and participate in a duathlon? Insanity? Well yes, that too.

About 4 years ago I had been struggling with my weight (again) and had managed to lose about 10kg when disaster struck. I fell down three steps and broke both my feet, one of them very seriously with a Lisfranc fracture/dislocation. (Look it up on Google). I was in hospital for 9 days, had 2 operations over the period of 10 months and was in a wheelchair for 3 months or more. My weight of course ballooned, and today I am left with a foot injury that still gives me some pain. I must confess I did get a little depressed about all this, depressed and pretty mad.

But you see this is the thing about me, I will not let anything beat me. No matter how often I get knocked down I will always get up again and keep on going. I have had set-backs, quite a few I guess, but it always makes me more determined to press on. Who was it said "Don't let the bastards get you down"? Its almost a motto for me, so thank you whoever you are.

So back to the duathlon. I entered the first one last year. The 'REAL' duathlon series is for women of all shapes and sizes, ages, and levels of fitness. There is no competition, no winners are announced, the prize is in participation. I love it. My times aren't fantastic in fact I place close to last, but I get such a kick out of being able to do it. To have the use of my legs - even though they are somewhat feeble. The taking part and just being able to get to the finish line is a massive feeling of satisfaction.
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I'll post a pic - I'm no beauty queen that's for sure, but my face says it all.

I know what its like to learn something new, I do it all the time. I am totally addicted to learning new things, actually. One of the hardest parts for me is getting those basic (and I mean really basic) bits of information on which the rest of the knowledge builds. Those snippets of information are often missed in tutorials. Its like, "well everyone knows that!" And I feel stupid for even asking. I find that once I can get a toehold with these foundation facts I am well on my way.

So I am starting with a series of articles on Google Analytics, as this is a great resource which is also free. I set my clients up with GA and I know that some (not all) struggle with getting their head around it and some (not all) give up.

I am publishing the articles through www.ezinearticles.com and have been given the heady status of "expert author". One among hundreds of thousands it seems, the most prolific has written 22,001 articles. Goodness me!

Here is the link to article number 1 in the series "Google Analytics - Too Much Information?", to be followed shortly be "Google Analytics - Delving a Little Deeper".

Worst. Gift. Ever.

Is there such a thing as a bad gift? What’s the worst thing you have ever been given as a Christmas present?

Not just those boring socks and underpants - although unexciting they can be put to good use at some point.

When I think of bad gifts my mother comes to mind. she has a knack, (ahem) gift. The earliest bad gifting was back in her girlhood. There was a pparently a girl in her class that she didn’t like, and my mother being an imaginative if somewhat vindictive 9 year old gave her two dead bees. Carefully wrapped in gift paper. The girl, surprised and pleased unwrapped the present - her expression changing from joyous anticipation to mortified horror, and thence to outraged sobbing. Which got my mother into a whole bunch of trouble.

Another fairly average gift was given to my ex-husband (the psycho - and another story), the gift of a rather old worn black petticoat. Funnily enough the giver was again my mother. He was very upset as he thought his cross-dressing was a secret.

My brother one year wrapped his entire grocery shop in Christmas paper and so the family ritual of gift giving was marred by what at first was amusing, then tedious (it was a big shop), and finally extremely annoying as yet again he unwrapped a can of beans, or some eyewash.

I’m wondering if this is just my family - or do others have bad gift experiences too?

Send your bad gift experiences to me. I will list the best ones next week.

Have a great Christmas everyone!
Alirat

I've heard of a couple of instances of sites being hacked in the last month, its a troubling trend. I have been doing a fair bit of reading on the subject, an excellent article here is very technical but takes you through the steps from 'How to know if your site has been hacked' to cleaning up and preventing future attacks.

Hacking is not just the senseless defacement of a website, it has turned into organised crime where robots (programmed by the criminals) crawl the web looking for vulnerabilities, take over websites and create zombie like bot-nets that keep infecting other vulnerable sites. Why? To get credit card details, user names, passwords, etc and ultimately steal money. Lots of money. Yours and mine hard earned cash.

If you think your site has been compromised, for example your visitors complain that your links take them to a different website, or Google puts a warning message on your sites search results, take your site down immediately. Your customers will not thank you if they get infected with some key-logging virus, in fact they will probably not forgive you at all. But if they find your site down, they will most likely try again later or give you a call. Second, get an expert to clean it up, and I mean an expert, not your cousins whizz kid brother who is doing an IT course. A lot of hacks are very subtle and hard to spot. Try and find out how it happened - so it doesn't happen again. One way that hackers can gain access is through your webmasters own PC where they have their ftp passwords stored. Sad but true.

About passwords. I have always said that it is more secure to have a strong password (not a dictionary word or what they call leet speak - p@$$w0rD for example) written down on paper and stored on your desk! A hacker cannot see what you have on your desk. Even use a simple code to write the passwords - for example if you have an 8 character password, write a list of 8 words with the last charaacter making up the password. That sort of thing. Too many of us (me included) take the easy way out and use the one word password for more than one account. If a hacker finds one they will apply that password to several others. If you use this method you can change your passwords frequently, just don't lose the piece of paper.

Take care out there.w

It's been a hectic two weeks with a big site going live - www.suremount.co.nz and an e-commerce site very close to popping out onto the web. In betwixt all this activity my feverish brain has devised a cunning plan. Well its actually these two big projects that prompted me to think about the other type of customer I cater for - the ones who want it fast and easy. So with the help of some brilliant associates the cunning plan bore fruit - www.easywebsite.co.nz. This is a simple way for someone to get up and running quickly.

I have also put together a gallery of nearly 80 templates - so all the client needs to do is choose one, give me the stuff and I can have them up and running within a couple of days. This also will help differentiate the clients who want a customised site, logo, animated banners, all the trimmings.

I want to be able to provide the best service, and with each job I try and give a clear picture of what I believe that job entails. I like to set out in my quotes the details of what is it my client is wanting, so its important when choosing a website to be really clear on what it is you want. I can help you with this by sitting with you and running over some questions. I have a look at websites you like, and try and look at what you need from your own customer's perspective.

It's not an overnight process and I want to give my very best attention to that. On the other hand, the new Easy Website product is for someone who doesn't want to mess about and just wants to get their website up - and Fast.

Whats all this about? Do I have to wear a costume? Will it hurt?

Basically this is a referral rewards programme. If you want to sign up as a "Friend of the Rat" just email us and let us know. We record you in our register and sign you up for the newletter. Then if you know someone who might need a new website, or see a website on the web that could really do with a makeover drop us an email with the name and phone number. We record that lead against your name and follow it up. If the lead turns into a sale - we send you a Westfield Voucher to say thank you! Simple.

Give it a try and email us today!

Its been a month since I launched Alirat Website Design officially and what a full and exciting month its been! It struck me the other day that, personality or socially-wise I am and have always been a bit of a loner. Being an accountant gave me the opportunity to hide away and count beans by myself all day, and I was comfortable with that. Now the world is turned upside down (in a good way) and I have to make contact with people all the time in order to promote my business.

Its not enough to sit behind a computer screen with an Adwords campaign and expect business to come flooding in. There is a lot of hard work involved, making connections with people, establishing trust, and learning how to sell. Starting a small business takes a dogged focus and the willingness to work 18 hour days. I am loving it. I would never work these kind of hours in paid employment, but my new boss is a hard taskmistress!

Networking is the key for me. I have a lot of contacts from my previous career that I can now call upon, already established business relationships. I have also joined BNI, Business Networking International, an organisation I have been familiar with in the past and whose philosophies are closely aligned with mine. Like eating nice big cooked breakfasts.

In the course of meeting clients I am having a lot of discussion around what makes a small business successful, and how to market on a tiny budget, as a lot of my clients are small businesses themselves.(My prices appeal.) So the contact is stimulating and interesting and very positive.

So it is with amusement that I realise that this new challenge of meeting people, making contact, is in fact a very positive thing and not the dreaded drag that I thought it would be. As they say...Woot!