For retailers who manage their own website, this is a can’t miss event. However, for those who did miss it, here is a quick recap of the main topics.

Large US retailers like Best Buy, Lord & Taylor, and the Hard Rock Cafe, to name a few, showcased their websites and discussed elements that are working and some that aren’t.

Many discussions geared to remind Internet retailers about proper usages of navigation and its usability, including shopping cart clarity. This had to do with  really going back to the fundamentals.  These days, customers are more Internet savvy and expect a certain level of familiarity as well as functionality.

Where cost is no longer a major barrier, product reviews and videos are paramount.  The benefits of implementing these types of added features are huge and improve conversion rates drastically.

Even small adjustments to components of a product page and shopping cart with  continually testing have shown results of strong returns to sales growth.

Kurt Peters, Editor in Chief of Internet Retailer, said that mobile will be the future of ecommerce.  Most mobile websites are still in early testing mode, but it’s already evident  that providing customers with information at the time they want it, no matter where they are, is of high importance and advantage.

Many presenters at the Conference talked about new features they focused on during their recent site re-designs. The process ranged on average from 10 to 12 months from beginning to end. Interesting to note is that majority of the retailers teamed with an external web design company or technology provider to help with new implementations.

Lastly addressed were our still early days of social media integrations of Internet retailers with sites like Facebook and Twitter.  Some retailers are providing very timely product announcements and discounts through these social sites while others are building communities around their sites’ topics and themes.

As an owner of a website solutions company, the conference really echoed what I come across every day.  Getting the core fundamentals and best practices properly implemented is key. With a sound foundation in place, the next step is to add one feature at a time while testing and monitoring its effects to website analytics and sales to guide the way.

9th sphere’s ecommerce clients will be receiving a briefing of key statistics and features their categories’ counterparts are undertaking.

Feb 2009:

• Yahoo Enables Video and Other Rich Media in Search Ads

March 2009:

• Canada’s first street view provided by joint effort between British Columbia-based Canpages.ca and San Francisco-based MapJack
• New version of Internet Explorer version 8 released

April 2009:

• Oracle buys Sun

June 2009:

• Microsoft launches Bing, a rebranding of Microsoft’s search engine, Live

June 2009:

• Rogers launched Google’s new mobile operating system – Android – in two HTC phones

July 2009:

• Canada’s Privacy Commissioner Takes on Facebook regarding its non-compliance with Canada’s privacy act – PIPEDA

July 2009:

• 9th sphere launches REF:CODE Analytics, a new way to track phone calls that are referred to from a website

August 2009:

• Yahoo announces new versions of Yahoo! Mail, Messenger and Search

September 2009:

• Google launches Google Wave, their vision of next level of email communication
• Century 21 sues Rogers’s Zoocasa for “scraping” property data from the Century 21 website
• Skype available to Canadian iPhone users

October 2009:

• Yahoo shuts down GeoCities servers, the well known free website hosting service
• Windows 7 released
• Google’s Street View launched in Canada (Calgary, Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Quebec, Toronto and Vancouver) – second available street view
• One Degree stops production of its Canadian focused Internet marketing blog

November 2009:

• Amazon’s Kindle, a platform for reading electronic books, comes to Canada
• The Canada Revenue Agency expands investigation of eBay power sellers and GST collection

December 2009:

• Canadians reported as top users of social networking sites in the world, according to a new survey
• Microsoft loses appeal on an August district court decision that awarded i4i Inc. (Toronto based software company) $200 million and an injunction on selling Word in its current form

Looking back, 2009 saw the expansion of numerous US based products and services into the Canadian market. On our front, we’ve seen fewer Canadian innovations and more legal battles spotlighting the social and ethical parameters of the web.  The Internet continues to make more headways into our daily lives, both personally and professionally.  Remember, the web is still very young, but growing at an accelerated rate.  2010 has the momentum to bring the web to its next level, as we foresee companies continuing to push the envelope. Or should I say the processor.

Far too many people take the wrong approach by focusing first on the design and layout of their website, only to fill in the content afterwards. This is a misguided and ineffective approach. First you should decide what and how much you want to say and how it should be categorized, only then would you determine navigation and creative. Don’t sacrifice good content for the creative.

Another common inclination for website owners is to want to share all the information about their business at once. But the key to writing persuasive and compelling web content is selectiveness.

Selling your benefits to website visitors is not the same as selling to them face-to-face or over the phone. On the web, being direct about your goods and services has a greater impact than being warm and endearing. You just can’t afford to be long-winded with your online communication. Your business is competing with hundreds of similar organization just a click away. You have a very short time in which to grab the attention of your website visitors, convey your company message, offerings, differentiating factors, and compel them to act.

Often website projects end up severely delayed as website owners struggle to narrow down the right words to most effectively express the benefits and the tone of their organization.

Many helpful hints for writing website content can be found on the Internet and in print. We’ve determined that they all fall under the basic guidelines outlined below.  Note that these are general guidelines, which may be altered based on different objectives.

CONTENT: Catch attention.

• use the AIDA approach; ideally each element should have its own paragraph :

- attract Attention
- generate Interest
- create Desire
- call to Action

• put most important content and keyphrases in headlines
• convey strongest benefits first
• answer visitors’ unspoken questions immediately
• use popular industry keywords or keyphrases according to your audience
• tell the visitor what you want them to do next – make it easy for visitors to take the next step i.e., “Buy product”, “Contact Us”, etc. -  use verbs
• limit one subject or area of focus per page
• keep length to 200-300 characters per web page – expand on page that call for it eg. FAQs or Support documentation
• provide more detailed information on secondary pages for visitors who wish to browser deeper into the website
• repeat the main idea in the last paragraph using the same keyphrases

STRUCTURE: Write for scanning.

• don’t write walls of information
• use headlines and subheadings where appropriate
• break up large amounts of content with lists, bullets, tables, sections, captions & hyperlinks where appropriate
• highlight keywords
• keep sentences short and impactful
• use short, common words
• keep text lines no wider than 60-65 characters – otherwise they’re unreadable
• don’t use italics if you can help it

Of course, an experienced copywriter will have the necessary skills to incorporate these prevailing tactics and fluently convey your organization’s uniqueness. If you’re overwhelmed or stuck with your writing, hiring a professional to help you communicate your message is a worthwhile investment.

The overall objective that does not change no matter how you endeavour to reach your consumers, whether online or face-to-face, is to sell your benefits. You just need to be more clever with it online.

PHP is an Open Source programming language that was mainly developed by Zend and contributed to by other web developers around the world.  .Net is a Microsoft Framework that supports most popular languages including C#, C, Visual Basic, J# and others.  Java was developed by Sun Microsystems. ColdFusion was created by Adobe.  PHP currently makes up one third of the web applications online due to the nature of Open Source; the environment of continually shared development projects and the low costs involved.

Though each language has its pros and cons, many web developers typically have one preference and it’s usually the language they have most experience in. Nevertheless, a well versed programmer can get the same outcome regardless of the language.  There are also cost differences to be considered between the different web technologies.  Another factor to keep in mind is the level of complexity. Some web technologies can be more challenging to work with than others.

For instance, the Open Source movement comes with its own challenges.  There are complaints about its lack of documentation, support, and reliability.  Since there is really no one company responsible for PHP, if you have installation problems, maintenance issues, want to expand, or if you found an issue that needs fixing, you’re essentially on your own.   Though Open Source doesn’t have any licencing fees, when you add up the time it takes to setup, make changes, any customization, maintenance, etc. etc. it’s no longer free.

9th sphere develops most of its applications in PHP, followed by .Net.  We service, support, and maintain our work for clients, providing the best of both low costs of Open Source and the support needed from a solution provider.

Many software providers have been watching Open Source closely trying to find ways to work around the risks and with the opportunities it brings.  For instance, Microsoft has built a team that focuses entirely on Open Source.  Earlier this week I had the opportunity to meet with Garnett Serack of Microsoft’s Open Source Labs.  He gave a presentation on the initiatives Microsoft has been taking with Open Source and specifically with PHP.  Microsoft’s team of 12 full-time developers, dedicated to these initiatives, have been working closely with Samba, Apache and Zend to more effectively deploy PHP applications on the Windows environment.  This is a very big shift for Microsoft.  This movement from traditionally licensed software companies is not new, but more are working towards a similar model.

A website solutions company should understand your needs and suggest the solution that is best suited for you.  Be sure to ask why, so you can fully understand the pros and cons of the suggested technologies.  Your education and understanding is important to feeling comfortable with making the right final decision.

Inspired by a recent website, 9th sphere has taken the social media tool a step further.  Similar to a social website styled mashup, a Lume is a navigational type widget that can be customize with own image, titles, and links. Now your friends need only to remember one website address to access all your other links. They can also move the Lume to any position on screen so that it doesn’t interfere with their viewing experience.

The intention of the Lume is to provide those with a collection of social media profiles a simple all in one reference point for their friends, colleagues, and other visitors. You could also use if for your own web pages instead of directing to third party web properties.

The process takes just 4 steps if you have your own domain name and website hosting account.  If not, we can assist you with getting set up.  Note that HTML, JavaScript, and Flash are the technologies being used – nothing a basic website hosting service from any hosting company can’t handle.

We’re happy to introduce the first style of our Lume and intend to add many more layouts, colours, and functionalities.  Try it out and let us know what you think.  We would like to hear your feedback as it will certainly contribute to further future developments.

We hope you like it.

Many personal websites have been built using features available through social media and networking websites.  For instance, you may use flickr to show off your photo collection, YouTube to share your videos, and mySpace to display other content.  Put it all together, and you’ve got a website that connects all your user experiences with benefits from the tools and the social aspects of each one.  But could this form of website building spill over into the corporate world?  Well, it already has. And it’s getting a fair bit of attention. Recently Skittles launched a new website doing just this.

Skittles.com utilizes each of the major social networking websites – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, flicker, and Wikipedia, which connect with a navigational box overlay.  The only feature that seems to reside on the company’s own server is the form on the Contact page.  Of course, they could have used a service like eFormIt.com to create the web form, and then the entire website would have used third party properties.

The approach Skittles.com took has some key advantages:

1. Increased traffic from the social and viral nature
2. Money saved in development costs
3. Utilizing the features of these web properties
4. Continual change of content from brand advocates making the site very current
5. Real time display of testimonials
6. More emphasis placed on the brand’s space within the social site, hence effecting each of its properties’ ranking within the search engine results for the term “skittles”
7. Possibly help in controlling online reputation by pushing other content further down the search results page
8. And of course, good marketing buzz

There are also key disadvantages:

1. Limited control over what is said and displayed on these other social properties (there are some monitoring tools, but limited)
2. Possible spam abuse
3. A lot of negative comments may damage the brand
4. Uncontrolled or unknown changes to features, terms, etc.
5. Many of these sites are blocked in corporate local networks
6. Loss of authoritative search ranking on the main corporate website
7. In order for this style of navigation to work, Flash needs to be installed on the computer. For instance, mobile devices can’t view it. Yet!

The approach Skittles took is definitely interesting and creates a reason for people to visit a website for such a product.  It’s worth experimenting with for consumer goods and some other situations. However, I don’t believe this to be a good approach for a corporate website as one should build a quality website design and within a more controlled environment.

Numerous functions can be conveniently executed with the help of web forms.  Gathering survey results, acquiring payment information, or receiving and categorizing inquiries can be a breeze. Regardless of the purpose they serve, same basic best practices apply to all.

To ensure proper utilization and ideal performance of your web forms, the following best practices should be implemented. Note that some exceptions may occur.

1. Title it. Indicate the main purpose of the form(s) with a clear title such as ‘Contact Form’ or ‘Billing Information’.

2. Break up long forms. Lengthy forms should be split up into sections and/or pages by topic. Structuring a form into categories like ‘Billing Address’, ‘Shipping Address’, or ‘Payment Information’, makes it less intimidating for respondents. In addition, all steps in the process should be identified, including an indication of the step currently in use.  It’s also good practice to enable the action of going back to a previous step.  For truly extensive multi-step forms, it is highly advised that you disclose how long the entire process may take. This helps to reduce abandonment rates as visitors are able to gauge if they have enough time to complete the form.

3. Label all fields. Every field or box in your form should be clearly labeled – no abbreviations. Required fields should be clearly marked.  Fields with common answers can be pre-populated with a list of options to choose from. For example, a list of the countries you sell to should be available under the ‘country’ field. The state or province field should provide a drop-down list of choices.  Likewise a general inquiry form could benefit from a list of options in the ‘type of inquiry’ field.

4. Display formatting preferences. If you require a certain format for data collection, provide a formatting example.  If your form asks for an area code or a long distance extension for a telephone number, show the formatting you prefer a respondent to enter.

5. Provide adequate space. Create boxes or fields big enough to display the full contents of a respondent’s entry so they can easily review it.

6. Use Obvious, Comprehensible Buttons. Clear, visible, user-friendly buttons are highly recommended. Buttons like, Next, Buy, Process, Submit, help a respondent understand what will happen if they click on the button.

7. Display error messages. Use error messages to indicate when a respondent has filled out the form incorrectly or missed a required field. Clarify what needs to be fixed to complete the form.  Ideally, data already provided should be saved to alleviate any frustration in having to re-enter it while fixing the errors. Note that clearly labeled fields and examples of formatting help to decrease the amount of error messages a visitor encounters.

8. Ask only for what you need. Limit your amount of questions. Only request information absolutely necessary to complete or process your form’s request.

9. Save your data. Avoid sending data to respondents via email. In fact don’t send sensitive data via email at all – this can be a hole for a security breach.  Save it onto a database and email the respondent a notification to login to your system and view the data this way.  Saving data into a database will also provide much more flexibility for future reporting, sorting, and filtering.

10. Thank you messages. Once a respondent has completed the online form it’s courteous to thank them and inform them of the next step in the process.  “Thank you.  A customer service representative will contact you shortly…” or “Thank you for your purchase.  Your order will be processed shortly.”

11. Track it. A key component of managing a website form is tracking it with your analytic tool(s).  Get a better idea of what a respondent did before and after using the form.  Analysis of this type provides a clearer understanding of what is working or not working. If you are using Google Analytics, be sure to create your own “Goal(s)”.

12. Add credibility. Show that you take a respondent’s information seriously. Use an SSL to encrypt the data provided when sending it from the browser to the server. This extra level of security and the increased confidence it displays is worth the cost of a couple of hundred dollars a year.  Confidence and credibility contributors like HackerSafe that check for security holes within a server, have shown to improve website form conversion rates. Don’t forget to include a link to your privacy policy on your form to explain what you do with the information collected; who you share it with and what other data you collect that the respondent may not know about, like a visitor’s IP address.

Website forms should never be an afterthought. Even the success of a marketing campaign can be gauge by the number of submissions completed. Once you understand their full potential you’ll see that they are definitely worth added effort. After all, a website form discloses an act of intention from a visitor.  It provides a very clear understanding of what they were doing prior to completing the form. Knowing what lead someone to proceed with completing your form will help you to determine the effectiveness of your website.

Here’s what we have for 2008:

February 2008

• Songwriters association proposes fee of $5 for Canadian Internet users for the ability to download “illegal” music files

April 2008

• Canada’s (.ca) domain name registration hits one million
• “Canadian Online Drugstore” is the second-most used subject line for spam e-mails, right behind “Re: hi.”
• Canadian Travel Internet Marketing Conference Presents Industry Experts from Yahoo!, Travelocity, and Ice Portal at the 3rd Annual Event
• comScore launches Video Metrix in Canada, France, Germany and UK

May 2008

• Google AdSense Mobile reaches Canada
• Facebook gets a facelift (one of its largest user base being Torontonians)

June 2008

• CIRA implements changes to the dot-ca WHOIS search tool to protect the privacy of domain name holders
• Google 411 launches in Canada
• iTunes offers movies in Canada
• Search Engine Strategies Conference in Toronto

July 2008

• Canada leads the world in online banking with 67.1% of Canadian internet users banking online

August 2008

• IE8 Beta 2 release
• Starbucks Canada Offers Free Wi-Fi
• Hit TV shows finally come to the web in Canada, as Canwest Broadcasting announces over 50 hit programs online

September 2008

• Canada leads globally in broadband access, report says
• Overstock.com, online discount retailer starts shipping to Canadian customers

October 2008

• CIRA starts Domain Name System Security (DNSSEC) implementation
• Microsoft Office Live for Small Business officially launches in Canada
• NewEgg, a consumer electronics e-tailer launched a Canadian website
• Saks Direct (aka Saks Fifth Avenue, e-commerce div. of Saks Inc.) accepts orders from Canada on its US website
• Amazon’s Canadian website launched new electronics store (previously sold mostly books and music)

November 2008

• Google walks away from Yahoo deal
• Twitter shuts down SMS in Canada
• The Open Source project donates another $100,000 earlier this year to support the ongoing collaboration between Mozilla and Seneca’s Centre for Development of Open Technology (CDOT).
• Canada awarded second place as a world brand

December 2008

• CBS Radio will power Yahoo’s free Internet radio service, Launchcast Radio
• Rich Riley to Head Yahoo! Europe and Yahoo! Canada

Looking back, 2008 turned out to be a mix bag of initiatives, start-ups, shut-downs and expected increases in usage statistics. Surprisingly, one of our predictions for 2008 – that Canada would see more legislation around Internet marketing tactics like email and spam – didn’t come to pass.

If we missed anything, let us know.

Looking forward to more in 2009!

Results, or Return On Investment (ROI), were intentionally left out of my list to help us focus more on the quality of the site rather than the results generated.  ROI is also based on external factors, such as the price of product the good or service itself, and any marketing efforts.

Here is how I define the top factors that contribute to website quality.

User Friendliness
The manner in which a site takes a visitor through the path of achieving desired objectives is paramount.  Clear navigation, legible content, simple instructions, clean page layouts, and professionalism all contribute to a site’s user friendliness.

Engineering
For the longest time, the Volvo was a car recognized for strength and safety, not its aesthetics. The hallmark of quality for the Volvo was its build, not its look.  In the same vein, solid website engineering starts with proper planning of how the site will be strategically constructed and how its parts will fit together to make it run smoothly.  Proper architecture is essential to accommodate a website’s requirements, to ensure structural scalability, flexibility, security, and to meet performance demands – now and in the future.  Using Object-Orientation (OO) modular programming practices will help to achieve these to some extent.  The intent of OO is to improve website performance, scalability, and management by eliminating duplicate code.  If your site is programmed in the open source programming language PHP 5, or greater, Object-Orientation is already built in.  However, just because your site is programmed in PHP 5 doesn’t mean it’s programmed using OO.  The programming language, ASP.NET (read ASP-dot-net) on the other hand, is more object-based, but lacks enforced structure. I find that ASP.NET makes it too easy to re-write rather than reuse code.

At best, a completed site should comply with accepted programming standards.  The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an organization committed to creating programming standards for HTML, XHTML and CSS.  You can easily conduct a W3C validation test online.  Although many large web properties don’t comply, W3C at least is a benchmark.  Other known web programming standards extend to accessibility compliance and security best practices.

A website relies on its server’s hardware, software, and infrastructure. While programming style helps, a website’s server or hosting environment can contribute to the site’s security and performance.

Business Logic
A site needs to function well between the design and code.  The way the visual component, logic, and database integrations work will improve the efficiency of future additions and updates.

Design
Not only does a site need to make sense visually, it should read the same across all computer platforms (PC and Mac) and all web browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera).  Effective site design should communicate an image/brand and help to achieve the site’s goals and objectives. Good design should make a site simple to use. However, some aspects of good design are subjective and it’s only through continual testing that you will figure out what works best for the intended audience.

Search Engine Friendliness
Believe it or not search engines are important to your websites success. At the very least your website should be search engine friendly. Search engines should be able to easily extract all the content you want made public online and display relevant pages from your site within their search results. Many in the SEO industry argue against any standards since major search engines have their own way of defining relevant search results for particular keyphrase.  The three major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) have joined efforts to create some standards related to the most effective way to crawl a website.  This collaborative initiative is sitemaps.org, which outlines the protocol for a website site map and instructs each engine on which pages to crawl, how often to crawl them, and how relevant they are.  There are other common best practices for redirection, avoidance of deceptive tactics like cloaking and hidden text, as well as labels for important content, and linking tactics.

I’m not a programmer or a designer – I’m a marketer, so it’s difficult for me to say that one quality is more important than another.  However, having consulted on many website projects, I can say that approaching website design and development in the order that I have outlined has lead to many successful website projects, ones that have established and sustain industry leaders.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Corp.’s Chief Software Architect, referred to the web as the front door to business and spoke of how critical success on the web is to businesses.  Microsoft is betting on the web to become the central hub of user and enterprise systems.  Today Ray demonstrated a new operating system for the Internet called Azure – a platform which will provide simplified scalability and will allow for better and more powerful web applications.

Azure integrates with Microsoft’s tools (NET Framework, Visual Studio, Sharepoint, SQL, Live, and Dynamics CRM), but is not limited to Microsoft’s products. Web applications or web programming languages like PHP can be integrated as well.  Azure works as a layer  – “fabric controller” – on top of all your web applications.   For example, a web administrator will be able to log into the System Center to view their web applications’ resource requirements and easily add more resources when needed. Extending a resource will add another virtual service within the shared hosting environment at Microsoft and allow for increased capacity when it’s required.

As you might imagine, Microsoft’s hosting of other companies’ data has many implications.  On the one hand businesses may look at this offering as a reliable, scalable, and simple solution for their web services.  On the other hand, it may also pose liability and privacy concerns.  No mention was made of a Canadian data center during the keynote presentation or at Microsoft’s Canadian employees’ roundtable discussion which I had the opportunity to attend. However, the issue of Canadian privacy laws was noted and recognized as a known issue that needed to be addressed at some point.

Ray marked Azure as another turning point for the industry. The importance of the web to Microsoft was made once again apparent with the investment and launch of Azure at PDC2008 today, as well as the dedication of approximately 1000 people in its build, according to Mark Gilbert, Technical Advisor of Server and Tools Business.  Stay tuned for more to come in the next few days.

PS: Thanks Gwen for your help.