Web Design | Dangerous Common Sense

The More You Ask for the Less You Get

Volunteer form scraped from the Internet

Tell Us (too much)!

A friend wanted me to sign-up for her non-profit’s email announcements. I went to the subscription page and happily entered my email address. The form had additional blanks for my home phone number and street address. I didn’t think this non-profit in Oregon needed to have this information, so I ignored those fields and clicked submit.

Wrong.

I was told that those fields were mandatory. So, I left my browser and sent my friend email explaining that I was not going to know what her group was up to because their web form asked for too much information.

Most people wouldn’t have sent the email. They would have just clicked away.

I understand that non-profits and businesses want to know all ways to reach me. They want to add me to their mailing lists, phone trees, and email blasts. But, their desire to reach out and touch me can feel as inappropriately creepy as the clueless lecher at a party.

My friend’s organization’s made a common — and fairly serious — blunder. They focused on their desire for information instead of considering the site visitor’s experience and mood. Sure, the visitor wanted information. But, they didn’t want to become BFF on the first date.

I scraped the graphic for this blog from the web this morning by searching Google for “sign-up form”. One of the top pages had this form which even requires your cell phone number. Geesh!

Businesses have the same problem, of course. Last week I wanted some comparison pricing information and I found myself being asked for my street address before getting the prices. Huh? No. No, thanks.

E-commerce sites track abandoned shopping carts left behind by people who have picked out items without purchasing them. The more client information required during check-out, the more abandoned carts a business has. Still, marking information as “required” remains irresistible for so many webmasters.

Here’s what to do:
Ask for all the information you want, but require only that information you need to fulfill the current transaction.

Your goal with most sign-up forms is to establish a relationship with a new client or supporter. When the visitor is filling out the form, you’re 90% there. They’ve found you on the Internet, liked your web site, and about to ask you to contact them. Don’t blow it by being greedy.

When your new contact starts receiving information and service from you, they’ll open up. They’ll place orders. They’ll phone you and ask for return calls with answers to their questions.

Being patient and measured when asking for information on the Internet is polite and professional. It is also the only successful way to build your contact data base.

By Ozdachs|2010-03-11T11:12:41-08:00March 11th, 2010|Web Design|1 Comment

Stupid Web Hosting Tricks

A new client approached me today and asked for help updating her site and solving her email dilemma. The changes to web pages were not problem.

However, I couldn’t solve her email issue. She complained that she had to log on to each email account on her system every 33 days or else the hosting service would delete the email box.

I’d never heard of this before.

I have heard of hosting services limiting the amount of stored mail each mailbox could save, and I’ve heard of limits on the total amount of email stored for all accounts. But, I have never heard of an activity requirement for an email account.

But, PowWeb.com indeed has a requirement that each email account be regularly accessed or its suspended and then deleted. Their FAQ says they do this because inactive mail accounts attract spam. When we asked that our client’s account be set up to escape this requirement, tech support said:

On our platform, the mailboxes which are inactive for 90 days or more are disabled automatically. This is an automated process which is done from the backend. Please note that this is being done to provide our customers with the better services and smooth flow of emails on our servers. This is the reason, we suggest our customers to access their mailboxes via WebMail. This is the only option we provide our customers.

Say what? This policy is nuts!

Inactive accounts don’t attract spam — publicly known email addresses attract spam. Besides, PowWeb already has a limit on the amount of disk space each email account can use, so even an inactive spam magnet will fill quickly and not hog additional resources.

More importantly, my client says that this policy is enforced even on email accounts that forward all incoming mail to other addresses hosted elsewhere. Email addresses such as [email protected] forward to the owner’s personal email account where she retrieves all her mail. Those forwarded accounts take no disk space. Yet, PowWeb is insisting that she log on to the phantom [email protected] account every 90 days.

Note: the policy says the email accounts must be accesses every 90 days. My client accessed her email addresses October 8, and she received 5-day deactivation warnings on November 5. That’s more like 33 days.

My client now wants to move hosting services to a place that doesn’t have such an email policy. I recommend Webmasters.com, and they don’t have a policy like that. But, aside from personal experience, I don’t know how I would tell that a hosting service is free from such a squirrelly access requirement.

What are you supposed to do when you’re shopping for hosting services? Ask, “Do you have any incredibly stupid rules that I should know about?”

By Ozdachs|2009-11-10T07:54:41-08:00November 10th, 2009|Professional Services, Web Design|1 Comment

Are All Hosting Services the Same?

My policy of using whatever web hosting service a client has previously signed up for has been challenged this month as clients have found hosting services with small annual fees that have turned out to be cheap rather than inexpensive.

Here are some basics about hosting and why you might want to let your web developer choose the service for your site.

At its simplest, a hosting service merely needs to be reliable so that 99.some% of the time anyone trying to get to your web site will see your information. Because of the limited requirements for hosting, it’s very tempting to sign up for a hosting plan that costs $5 a month instead of paying $200 a year in advance.

However, each hosting company offers different services and conveniences. The hosting businesses vary on how you can upload information to your web and the features included in their hosting packages.

Most businesses need only very simple hosting. But, there are some fundamental qualifications for a professional hosting service.

What You Need in a Hosting Service

Uptime. You want your site to be available 99+% of the time. Ask a potential hosting service for their uptime stats!
An online way for you to make certain changes to your account. The hosting company should provide you with a “control panel” which lets you add new email accounts, change passwords, and do other administrative chores.
File Transport Protocol (FTP) access to updating your web site. You want to be able to use common web authorizing programs like Dreamweaver which employ FTP to publish web pages. You don’t want to be limited to using the hosting services custom file updater.
Unrestricted, 24×7 updating to your site. Yes, you want only authorized users to be able to update your site, but authorized users need to be able to authenticate themselves and do updates from anywhere at any time. Typically, hosting services control access through a user name and password (which you can change). However, some hosting services demand more, and their additional security requirements — such as IP authorizing — can make updating your site difficult.
Mail accounts. You want to use professional looking email accounts that include your domain name (e.g., [email protected]). You should be able to set up, modify, and delete at least 10 of these accounts for your hosting dollars.
Scripting language support. Even a straight-forward web site may include a contact form that you want validated. Or, the site may grow to use a login for certain pages. Or, other bright and shiny functionality may become a need. In any event, you want the host to support PHP and perhaps other scripting languages so that you don’t have to change hosting companies suddenly when you want to add a particular feature to a page.

Like many web designers, I charge clients by the hour. But, up to now I haven’t started the clock when learning the ins and outs of a new hosting company that a client picked. I figured that I was learning more about the hosting marketplace.

But, enough! After spending hours on work-arounds to comply with the quirks of some inexpensive hosting services, I have learned already!

Spending a reasonable amount of money for a full-service hosting company is truly the least expensive way to keep your site on the Internet. We recommend Webmasters.com who charges $120 year. From now on, I’m going to ask that clients use that choice… or make sure that the client’s existing service has the convenience and features we need.

By Ozdachs|2009-10-27T13:26:31-07:00October 27th, 2009|Professional Services, Web Design|2 Comments

Web Design, Search Engine Optimization, Data Backups, and Other Topics. Huh?

A non-web designer colleague asked this afternoon which topics a group of us techies would like to speak on:

• Computer security
• Backups
• Computer maintenance
• Web site development
• Search engine optimization

The grouping of ideas illustrates exactly how too many web designers approach a new site. Web design is one topic and optimizing the site for visibility on search engines is another subject all together.

Of course, one of the purposes of most business web sites is to attract new clients who stumble across the web site by searching Google or Yahoo or Bing or somewhere.

But, designers and their clients too often create a web site without focusing on the site’s purpose, getting new clients. The new site is structured without thought to showing up in search engine result pages. In fact, the new site may be difficult to modify to add search engine friendly text, graphics, or tagged information.

The problem is more broad: in today’s world of hyper-specialization, the creation of web sites has been deconstructed into too many discrete tasks, each lorded over by a guru who is quick to say that this or that aspect of a web site simply isn’t in their field.

There are the designers for the look of the site. There are usability experts. There are functionality designers who are distinct from coders that implement the functionality designed. And, different from all these experts is the search engine optimization analyst.

All of this specialization might be reasonable in a design project team for a major corporation. For 90% of small- and medium-sized businesses, the tunnel-vision specialization is detrimental.

Most businesses want to sit down with their web person and have the one expert create an Internet presence that will meet the commercial needs of the business. The business owner doesn’t expect to talk to one person about the site’s look, another about its friendliness to users, and still another person about placement in search engine results. The owner wants a general contractor who will build the site.

At best, separating the topics of web design and search engine optimization is another sign that the Internet is coming of age. It now supports a bureaucracy, or at least a Curia. It won’t be long before there are Search Engine Optimization college classes and technical certifications — if there aren’t already.

But, I question the awkward division of the unified task of web site development.

Most businesses cannot afford a web site project staffed with specialists and, I suppose, coordinated by a project manager. The businesses need a single web designer who takes into account visual appeal, usability, search engine optimization, and all other aspects of the site.

I enjoy seeing a business owner look over a new site that we created together. One where I may have even taken some of the photographs while designing the pages and tuning them for showing up in Google.

My customers cannot afford an army of Internet technicians working on their site. And, they don’t need one so long as we remember the business goals of the business web site.

So, I suggested to my colleague that I would be happy to give a presentation on web design that would include tips on search engine optimization. We’ll see what he says.

By Ozdachs|2009-09-30T18:56:52-07:00September 30th, 2009|Search Engine Optimization, Web Design|2 Comments

It's Not Stealing If They're Your Friends?

So, you find a really neat article on a topic that relates to your business and you want to share the find with your clients and visitors to your website.

Here’s a scenario I run into frequently with clients.

You’re not a thief, so you make sure that you give credit in the re-posting to the original author. You even link to the author’s page. You mark up the article a bit to emphasize what’s important to your clients, but the entire article — byline and all — is still there. You send the article to me to post to your website with some nice graphic.

I ask if you have permission from the author to copy their work.

You say that you’re acknowledging their authorship and that you’re just spreading their expertise and helping their reputation.

I ask if you have permission from the author to copy their work.

You ask if I can’t just put up the page. You’re sure no one will mind.

I ask you to confirm that you’re ready to indemnify me and to defend me at your cost for any copyright claims by third parties.

Let me confess that I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on television. However, I understand something about intellectual property rights and respect the right of creators to be able to determine where their work is shown.

By default, creative works, including Internet postings, are copyrighted by their creators and no one can use them without permission. The author or artist doesn’t have to do anything special to have copyright rights.

Permission to use someone’s work may be very easy to get. I have been emailed at least a couple of times by people wanting to copy an image on my personal website. The emails explained what the photos would used for and also told me that there would be a credit line but no money. I readily agreed to each request, flattered that someone liked my photography. I think my reaction is a typical one.

In the case of web article or blog entries a lot of authors would love to be considered an expert whose opinion is worth repeating. Re-posting their work with a link back to their website offers them exposure and a chance to sell their services.

Permission to copy is also sometimes granted on the website. Instead of saying nothing or “All Rights Reserved”, a copyright holder may choose to use a Creative Commons or other model copyright statement that specifies that people can re-use their work in some — or all — situations.

Copying from your friends (even those friends you’ve never met in person) expands the store of knowledge you can share with your clients. You look good for sharing valuable information. At the same time, the original author gains stature and potential clients for their own business.

Just make sure you say “Please” and get permission before you do the copying!

By Ozdachs|2009-09-25T14:31:31-07:00September 25th, 2009|Professional Services, Web Design|1 Comment

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