But this may not be a bad thing as long as the content of the website provides the answers your visitors need. Ask yourself if you really need that page – or if the information that is parked there would be better on more relevant pages.

Frequently Asked Questions are not Questions You Wish They Would Ask

This is a common mistake – adding a page full of information about your products and services, in a question-and-answer format, that isn’t what your customers want to know when they click onto a “Common Questions” or “Frequently Asked Questions” page.  A genuine Frequently Asked Questions page should support your site by reducing the number of common enquiries submitted to you by e-mail or on your customer service telephone number – and should not replace having quality copywriting and search engine optimisation on your content pages.

If your customers really ask “how do I order this from your site? What payment methods do you take? How much does delivery cost?” your page content should be optimised to include these details on relevant pages to ensure your users do not have to go searching for it instead of completing their purchase.

For example, if your site offers personalised car widgets, and your goal is to have customers contact you for a quote, the individual product pages should answer the questions that you think your customers should ask – or that they might actually ask – about the widget. The fewer clicks they have to make to find out that the A2019 widget they’re interested in is made of chrome-plated steel and takes up to 3 weeks to customise, the better.

Are you writing the right questions?

If you’re building a Common Questions page to reduce the volume of simple enquiry messages or calls, make sure you’re asking and answering the questions in an accessible way your readers will understand. Assume that your customers do not have inside knowledge of your industry and simplify the language – instead of saying “What vehicle manifold will my A2019 fit onto?” phrase the question as “Where can I attach my new widget?”

Your answer should be equally simple – remember that your readers will be skimming the content, and may only read the first couple of words of the answer.  Answer the question briefly in the first sentence, and explain it further if necessary:

Q. Where can I attach my new widget?

A. Rear-view mirror or external aerial. The widgets are designed to clip securely, with a rubberised grip to prevent scratching.

What questions should my Common Questions page answer, then?

The best answer to this is “The questions your customers have actually asked.” If you have an enquiries form or a customer service number, note down the questions and topics you are contacted about. When you’ve assembled half a dozen or so questions that have been asked more than once, it may be time to consider adding the questions and their answers to your website.

You can also solicit questions from your readers, to find out whether your content is providing the information a user needs – if multiple people ask the same question, it may be helpful to add that to a FAQ page, or to update the copy on the existing pages in order to answer the questions asked and improve the page’s relevance to your users.

Any questions?

If you visit www.wsi-ebizsolutions.biz and look through the site, are there any questions you have that you didn’t see an answer for?

I’d like you to ask them in the comments for this post.

The number of times I found a site within Google saying that they had a sale on boots, only to click on the site and land on a completely irrelevant page which only made be close the page and continue looking for another site that would actually land me on a page showing Climbing Boots.

With this in mind here are some tips on the best practices for landing pages, which should engage the user and be able to show higher ROI.

• Unify the aim – Landing pages perform best when the content is promotion-based. The content should be concise and focused on one message.

• Engage the Visitor – Tell a story or sell a product using impactful imagery.

• Focus Visitor Experience – Landing pages should be used as a teaser to easily point the customer to the desired action.

• Direct Headline – Make a good first impression. A clear and direct headline should be the first thing the user sees when viewing the page.

• Leave Plenty of Space — Visitors tend to scan the page rather than read bulky text. Good use of space allows visitors to scan and understand the key messages.

• Call to Action Buttons – Attracting attention is what the main action buttons are all about. Make the button is above the fold on the page. Also, don’t skimp on button size.

• Convey Trust and Security – Branding, trust/security icons can provide credibility and give confidence to the visitor.

• Provide a Compelling Message — Think of your landing page as your online salesperson. Make sure you have one compelling message directly above the call to action.

Understanding what visitors want and how the interact with your site is essential to get the best ROI, continually monitor your analytics and modify your pages. Just some minor tweaks could really reduce your bounce rate and increase visitor interaction and stop people like me leaving your site within 3 seconds of arriving on it!

In this post I’m going to discuss some of the popular techniques used to allow more flexibility with online fonts as well as newer solutions that could be on the horizon

Web-safe fonts

For reasons both technical and legal, web browsers have really only been able to make use of fonts already installed on a visitor’s computer. That means that for the most part we’re left with the following list of fonts which are common to both Windows and Mac machines (or at least have a close Mac equivalent):

• Arial
• Courier New
• Georgia
• Impact
• Lucida Sans Unicode (or Lucida Grande on the Mac)
• Tahoma (or Geneva on the Mac)
• Times New Roman (or Times on the Mac)
• Trebuchet MS (or Helvetica on the Mac)
• Verdana

Font Stacks

When CSS became the standard for styling your website it brought with it greatly improved tools for defining and transforming text. One of these tools was Font Stacks, a prioritised list of fonts to be used by a particular part of your site. To list multiple fonts in this way you use the “font-family” property, for example:

p
{
font-family:”Times New Roman”,Times,Serif;
}

This would instruct all of the text in your paragraph tags to use Times New Roman, if that font isn’t available on a user’s machine it would check for Times (the Mac equivalent) and if it can’t find either it would fall back to whatever generic “serif” font was available. This also means that designers can be a little more adventurous, for example adding a relatively rare font at the front of the queue, there’s always a fall back option that everyone else could use. The downside to this being that the majority of your visitors will be seeing a different version of the site, something that a lot of clients may not be happy with.

Font Replacement Techniques

If you’re familiar with the web-safe fonts listed above you may be thinking they all look a little tame. They’ve generally been selected because they are easy to read on screen and so work well as the font for your main body text, but what if you’d like to try something a little more adventurous for your headings? Headings are usually going to be just a few words and rendered in a larger font size which means readability becomes less of an issue, they can be the perfect place to inject a bit of creative flare and give some personality to your design. Over the last few years several options have been developed:

sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement)

sIFR uses Javascript and Flash to convert your plain text into any font you would like. It was first developed in 2005 and has been open sourced so anybody can use it free of charge. You can find out more about it here – http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/

Because the switch is made by the Javascript after the page has loaded, you don’t have to make any sacrifices in terms of search engine optimisation or accessibility. The downsides to sIFR are that it requires that both Javascript and Flash being installed, the text may not show up if the visitor is using ad-blocking software and some browsers can have problems with selecting/deselecting sIFR text.

Cufón

Cufón is an alternative to sIFR which doesn’t involve Flash. It uses a specially created font generator which converts standard fonts into the necessary format, then Javascript to render the finished font on the page. You can find out more here – http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/

It has the same benefits as sIFR but doesn’t need Flash which means more people will see the results and the page should load slightly quicker. On the other hand there can be more work involved in getting it set up and it doesn’t have complete browser support, there are still problems stopping it from working in some versions of Firefox and Chrome. It also has show-stopping problems in some screen readers which would make your site almost useless to visually impaired visitors.

Typekit

So while there are options out there for swapping more adventurous fonts into your websites, they all come with their own drawbacks which is why they’ve not achieved mainstream success. Typekit is a new service which was announced earlier this year and promised to change the way type is handled on the web. It uses a previously available but underutilised CSS property called @font-face which is starting to be implemented by more browsers.

The Typekit founders have made deals with various typographic foundries to offer hundreds of custom fonts specifically for use on the web. The service launched this week allowing website owners to sign up for one of various payment plans. I’ve been testing the service myself with mixed results, you can take a look here although depending on your browser you may or may not see the results – http://www.wsi-ebizsolutions.biz/typekit/

A comparison of my Typekit test between two modern browsers.

The Typekit founders claim the service works in Internet Explorer and recent versions of Firefox and Safari although I’ve not been able to get it to work under IE. There is no support for Chrome or Opera until those browser manufacturers include support for the @font-face property, however for now these browsers will simply fall back to the next font in the stack.

The service itself is easy to use and the collection of fonts available is impressive. I’d have to recommend against using it on client sites until the browser support improves but it’s definitely a technology to keep your eye on.

There’s definitely a bright future for typography on the web, there are many other companies working on similar products and the amount of buzz around Typekit shows just how much demand is out there for better fonts! Once the bugs are worked out and the browsers catch, up I’d be very surprised if custom typefaces don’t become commonplace on the web.

Flash technology has been a welcome addition to the internet. When used well, it can be the best way to get your message across. If used unwisely on the other hand, it simply deters your site visitors from sticking around. So how can you get the best out of Flash animation?<!–more–>

Using Flash Animation to the Best Effect
The internet community is split over the effective use of animation on the web. Some feel it has its place and is the direction the web should take. Others feel it is overused and not always effective, citing the following issues:

• Potentially long download times, which slow down the Web
• Usability problems from a majority of hand-held devices
• Lack of programming skills amongst developers
• Search Engine readability issues (although improvements have been made in this area)
• Prohibitive development costs.

All of these are valid concerns. Consideration should be given to your own circumstance: Who is your target audience? How are they going to be accessing your website? Could animation help enhance your message?

A measured approach can help you identify the most effective way to use animation on your website. The following suggestions are offered to help you use Flash to great effect, rather than simply using it with no real purpose other than ‘it looks great’.

1. Subtly Rotating Content
The main reason for using Flash animation is to draw the eye and give attention to your main message. A subtle rotation of well-thought-out slogans, perhaps with accompanying images, will enable you to convey your most important sales messages.

The subtle animation will draw your visitor’s attention without overly distracting attention away from other content on the page. In other words, the rotating slogans enhance your other content, rather than become an unnecessary distraction.

2. Image Galleries
If you need to display a number of images in an orderly, professional manner, you should consider using Flash animation. A well-devised Flash-based image gallery will not only look great, but will also give the user a simple-to-use interface to navigate through your pictures with ease. Some features might include:

• Self-navigation buttons
• Functionality to scroll through the images
• An auto-play slide show function
• The option of including copy with each image
• The option to link to another web page from each image
• Little or no delay in loading images

It’s important to keep in mind that the aim of your image gallery should not only be to look good, but also (and perhaps more importantly) to provide a good user experience.

3. Video Footage
One area in which Flash technology is being well utilised is to enable the playing of video footage over the internet. Websites such as YouTube, Vimeo, and a myriad of other video-sharing sites have made online video almost commonplace with most web users.

The trend now is for businesses to make effective use of video on their company websites. A short 2 to 5 minute video enables the presenter to share a message on a whole new level – without having to cost the earth to produce or broadcast.

Other more complex uses of Flash animation could include product walkthroughs, interactive tutorials, animated calendars, multi-track audio players, and more. When incorporating animated content, the key is to enhance – not distract from – your main message. If you would like help implementing Flash animation effectively on your website, call us on 01484 690430.

Microsoft has been slowly losing the web browser war to newer, more user-friendly web-browser programs such as Firefox,  Safari, the new Google Chrome and more. A few months ago, in an effort to improve its position, Microsoft launched the latest version of Internet Explorer.<!–more–>

The new, improved Internet Explorer 8
The introduction of tabbed browsing in Version 7 was a huge step forward from Internet Explorer 6, (although it was a long time after Firefox had tabbed browsing as standard). In Version 8 Microsoft seeks to build on this with some other useful features. These include:

1. An in-Private Browsing mode, which conceals the user’s online activities.
2. Search suggestions being made as you type, with images where relevant.
3. Session saving, to allow you to pick up where you left off.
4. Crash recovery, so you don’t lose your open tabs if the program (or your PC) crashes.
5. An improved screen filter for protecting surfers against malicious websites.
6. Additional right click options for highlighted content.

Microsoft is calling Internet Explorer 8 its fastest browser, but in tests against its main competitors, Firefox and Chrome came out quicker.

What about the Competition?
If you haven’t used any of Internet Explorer’s competitors’ browsers, you may be denying yourself of a richer web-browsing experience. Here’s a round up of the top alternative browsers, together with some of their key features.

Firefox 3 – Mozilla’s Firefox web browser has the second-biggest market share after Explorer. The open- source browser’s main strength is the number of add-ons available to enhance your browsing experience. If you have ever thought of a nice function missing in your browser, you will probably find a Firefox add-on for it.

Opera 9 – The Opera browser doesn’t get as much publicity as some of its rivals, but it has been a reliable and innovative option for a long time. Some key features include an integrated email client and news reader, excellent file download tools, wide-screen monitor support and the ability to synchronise your favourites over the web. Coming soon, Opera Turbo is anticipated to take surfing speeds to a higher level.

Google Chrome – The Google browser has made huge inroads into the web-browsing arena. Chrome has a sleek, minimalist design, which maximises the viewing window. It’s early days for this browser, so we can expect more features to be added with updated versions. The lack of tools in comparison to its rivals is not all bad though, as the flip side means it opens and renders web pages quicker.

Safari – The Safari web browser is the default web browser on Apple Macs. Recently, Apple extended the browser’s reach by making a PC version available. As you would expect from Apple, the browser is fast, looks great, and adopts the now familiar iPod thumbnail image Cover Flow view.

Other browsers include Flock, Lunascape, Maxthon, Songbird and more, each sporting unique features and tools that appeal to surfers’ niche interests and business processes.

What it Means for Your Website
An increasing number of web-browser options is good for end-users (no one likes a monopoly), but be sure to check that your website presents correctly in each rendering engine.