5. Sound communication skills: Its important that you and your point of contact in the agency understand each other. Prompt responses, clear communication and the ability to explain things in a language that a layman can understand are the key points you need to check on. The first few communications with the design firm will give you a fair idea of this.

6. Hidden costs: Some agencies will make a very low cost offer initially but as you move along, you soon discover that stuff that you had assumed to be a part of the package need to be paid for. So before you hire, make sure you have a clear list of deliverables and the associated costs.

7. Need based or fad based: Flash sites may be pretty and experiential but are they suited to your business and your target audience? A good web designer will not hard sell the latest fad to you but will suggest what is likely to work best for your site, bring in most visitors, generate more inquiries, result in more sales and the like. They will start with your site objectives and work with you to achieve bang for your buck.

Stay clear of the web design agencies that do not ask you what your site objectives are.

8. Search Engine Ready: Although it appears way down in the list, this is one of the most important factors to consider when hiring a web design company. All your time, effort and money spent in creating an impressive online identity will go down the drain if your site can-not be indexed by search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Make sure your web designer knows how to create search engine friendly websites. Make sure you tell them you want a search engine friendly architecture. Even if you do not currently have the resources to hire search engine promotion services, it would be prudent to make sure that your site has a search engine friendly architecture and that you are ready to go when you have the resources.

9. Original designs, original content: Your website is your online identity and should represent what your business stands for. It should be unique and not a pot-pourri of graphics copied and pasted from other sites or a clone of someone else’s website layout. Make sure that your web designer does not use images or text stolen from another site in your designs or you could run into copyright issues. Remember, your website is available anytime, anywhere to anyone who is on the internet and it won’t be long before they discover your site uses someone else’s layout or content.

10. Full service: When you are setting up a small business, you want to focus all your energies on it and not waste time running around trying to find different agencies for web design, database management, hosting, marketing collateral design or printing. Make sure the agency you hire is a one-stop shop and have the wherewithall to provide the bouquet of design and programming services your small business will need over the next few years.

As your business grows, your branding and IT needs will grow. Invest your time and resources with a company that has the potential to deliver during different phases of your business.

Finally, to ensure the success of your project and to help the agency deliver on its promise:

• Be prepared: You know your business the best. You know your customers the best and you know your industry and competition better than any web designer would. So do your homework and prepare a brief for the web design agency. It would be a recipe for disaster if you leave everything to your designer initially and then get them to do several rounds of changes. Most small business websites are done at low margins and requesting too many changes will only drive the web design firm against the wall, often resulting in reduced commitment and unpleasantness.
• Trust your design firm: Just as you know your business better than any web design firm, they know web designing better than you do. So, once you tell them what you want, trust them with the creative and the technicalities.
• Create your own identity: Avoid trying to get your web designer to add all fancy animations that your friends’ and competitors’ website may have. You don’t want a me-too identity for your business, do you?
• Avoid legal issues: Often times to cut costs, clients ask the web design agency to take images and text from competitors’ websites. While it is unethical and tantamounts to piracy, it can also land you in legal issues with the rightful owner. Google is known to ban erring website links from appearing in search results and display the link to the DMCA complaint instead. Thats not what you want your first time visitors to see on the web about you, do you?
• Pay on-time: Expect the web designer to stick to the timelines they promise. But remember, they have a business to run and salaries and bills to be paid as well. Pay on-time to avoid any delays or reduced service levels.

It is not unusual for a small business to be tempted into contracting the firm that offers services at the lowest price. After all, it makes sense to save every penny when the business is just being set-up and evolve one’s online presence as the business evolves, and the needs evolve.

Yet, quite often a small business finds that it got a raw deal or finds itself being arm twisted by the once seemingly perfect web design partner. So what goes wrong in these cases? If you talk to the smart SMBs who succeeded in finding the right design/IT partner in the first go, you will notice a common thread. The smart ones took care of the basics.

What are these basics and how do you find yourself the right web partner who also has the capability to ‘deliver’ at all phases of your business?

In this two part series, we look at the top 10 things you need to check.

1. Domain Rights: Stay clear of the potential arm-twisters. Make sure that the company you hire registers your domain and hosting in your name. And that you are provided all login info for both your domain name control panel and your web hosting account. It is quite common to find unscrupulous small business owners who had to change their domain name or fight it out with their web design firm because it refused to give them control of their domain name when they decided to part ways.

2. Fly-by night operators: Low barriers to entry and a large pool of freelance web developers have meant more choice and better prices for customers. If you are on a shoestring budget, you may want to hire a freelancer to design your website. But will he be around an year later when you need changes to your web pages? Or will he have the time to meet you during business hours? Will he have the time and the skillset to launch a fully-functional website in the committed time-frame?

3. Competence Levels: Your website is your online presence on the world wide web. It is what most visitors who come to your site through search engines see first. And we all know the importance of the first impression. Does the web design agency have what it takes to deliver the “right’ first impression?

• Do they have the requisite skills?
• And the creativity?
• What kind of work have they done for other small businesses?
• Do they have any references?
• Have their clients used them more than once?
• Do they deliver on time?

These are the typical questions you need to find answers to when deciding on your web/IT partner. Again, don’t get carried away by a big client list. Talk to a few of their clients and find out what their experience in dealing with this firm was.

Ofcourse, as in all cases, there may be exceptions where you may want to hire a completely new design firm because they may offer the lowest prices or because they may be willing to provide more for the same amount or simply because you know them personally and so feel that you can trust them. In such cases, avoid the urge to rely entirely on your gut-feel, and do a background check. It will pay to check if the people behind this new firm have the right skills & competence levels and if they are capable, credible, hard working and trustworthy.

4. Usability: How the information is presented on your website is critical to the success of your website. If site visitors feel lost when they arrive on your site or have to pore over the site pages to find the info they are looking for, then you have lost them. It takes a lot of effort to get targeted traffic on any website but takes only a click on the x icon to lose it. With several thousands of options to choose from, the average internet user decides in the first few seconds of arriving on a site whether its good enough for him to stick around. If they have to wait for pages to load or if there are annoying animations, broken links, too much clutter, it won’t take them 10 seconds to bid goodbye.

It is imperative, therefore, that

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While studying tips for good writing, I got to know about the concept of SEO copywriting. This technique indeed distinguishes your copy from a general one. I think an SEO copywriter is the actual hero and not merely a writer. He is a chef who has to convert a complex structure into a simple one and blend all the suitable items together. While preparing a write-up, he must have a clear picture of his aim in mind.

My list of 3 basic must-dos in seo copywriting is:

1. Define Your Target Segment Clearly – As a first step in seo copywriting, very clearly define your target customers. Who are your readers going to be? Who is the copy meant for?

2. Researching Keywords – Once you are over with the job of defining a particular target group, its time to find out the related key phrases and traffic generated through them. This can be easily done with the help of several user-friendly Keyword tools available online. My personal favorite is the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool. This tool shows traffic of the key phrase and competition going in the industry. A must-do again for any seo copywriter.

3. Checking Keyword Density – After shortlisting key phrases, start developing the copy. Make sure however to weave the keyphrases judiciously into your writing. Its imperative to ensure not to end up with overuse of keywords. Stay clear of keyword stuffing. This may not only put off the reader, but also lead to your site being penalized by search engines.

Apart from these fundamentals, this article on principles of good writing has always been my true guide in my seo copywriting assignments. The gist of the article is:

• Be specific about your idea. Crystalize and organize your thoughts.
• Use simple and clear words to express yourself.
• Maintain conciseness as well as accuracy.
• Make proper use of punctuation marks.
• Use short sentences. The KISS rule applies here too!

That said, experts have suggested 6 C’s of good writing. They stand for:

• Clarity – Be clear about what you want to convey to your target audience. Do not mislead them by giving vague ideas.
• Conciseness – Expressing more in less words should be one of the qualities being possessed by an SEO copywriter.
• Crispness – The write-up should have smoothness as well as an easy flow.
• Coherence – A write-up reflecting a logical approach might provoke thoughts and instant reaction of the reader.
• Continuity – All the paragraphs in a write-up should remain linked or connected to one another.
• Consistency – From beginning to end, a write-up has to be given a uniform shape. It means the style and format of writing should remain the same to bring harmony among all its various parts.

These points might have given you an idea about SEO Copywriting and how it is different from a normally written copy, say for a brochure. They have worked for me and hope will work for you too. Do share your own experiences!

Given its importance, no designer can take the choice of fonts lightly. And that often means hours spent surfing fonts online or trying various combinations through graphic design applications or perhaps flipping through printed font directories. In case of trying fonts on the computer, well…anyone who has done it, will tell you how cumbersome it is. And in case of the printed font albums, one doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure that there is a limit to the choice of fonts you have. And thats where the folks at Fontplore have come to our rescue.

They have devised an interactive application for searching and exploring font databases. It helps you browse, preview, compare and print fonts on an interactive table using tangible objects. Quite futuristic.

The sad bit is that the interactive tables are still something only the big agencies can afford. Though, given the way technology has made things accessible to people over the last decade or so (remember how expensive the first mobile phone was?!), it won’t be wishful to think that we will soon have an interactive table with Fontplore to vet font choices with clients for their design project. Can’t wait to lay my hands on it, honestly.

Fontplore Showreel from Mphasize on Vimeo.

In simple terms, its goodbye to optimising your website for yahoo and the focus now is on Google and Bing. While Google still has the majority share (70%) of the search traffic, Bing’s share of the market is likely to increase with Yahoo’s search volumes.

As a webmaster or an seo, therefore, you need to have an seo strategy for Bing in place. A step in that direction is using Bing’s toolbox. The toolbox, in ways similar to Google’s webmaster tools, offers sitemap submission, url submission, malware detection, an seo toolkit and guidelines for webmasters. Using Bing’s toolbox, webmasters can get valuable insight into how Bing sees their sites and improvise as per its guidelines for webmasters.

Using Bing’s API, one can create dynamic 404 not found error pages. Which means that one can serve customised 404 pages, based on what the visitor was trying to access. And not just serve the standard, generic error page. From a user’s perspective, this makes a whole lot of sense. When customised cleverly, you can use it to give your user clear instructions on what to do when the page they are looking for is not found. Not leave them in the lurch groping around!

Bing’s toolbox also offers an “ads and campaigns tool” to create and manage ad campaigns.

Our seo strategy for our clients’ websites now also has a significant focus on Bing though admittedly, earlier it was heavily loaded in favor of Google. True the traffic that Bing can bring in pales in comparison to that a site can get through Google, it is nonetheless prudent to not ignore Bing.

Internet has made it easy to reach out to far flung markets like never before. It has made communication way cheaper than what it used to be in the olden days. Skype phone calls, IM conversations with clients are a norm now. And a website provides you with a 24×7x365 office – reachable anytime, anywhere. That is the beauty of the internet.

Those who boarded the bus early will gladly vouch for it as they also benefited from easier search engine indexing (read visibility). Since there was lesser online competition then, search engine promotion too involved far lesser efforts and hence resources.

Who is affected? Those with the following versions of flash player, AIR or Reader are vulnerable:

• Adobe Flash Player 9.0.159.0 and 10.0.22.87 and earlier 9.x and 10.x versions
• Adobe AIR 1.5.1 and earlier versions
• Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.1.2 and earlier 9.x versions

What surprises me is that until I read this article incidently yesterday on WebProNews, most of us had neither heard of the security vulnerability, nor the patch release. This is when the patch was released over 2 weeks ago.

An important update like this one, which affects as much as 80% of internet users, should be given more publicity. I would have expected news releases going out to even mainstream newspapers. After all, don’t we all use the free flash player and the acrobat reader? Infact, it would be hard today to find a PC or a laptop that does not have atleast one of these applications installed! Lets hope that those involved wake up to it. In the meantime, we request our readers to download these security patches and also spread the word around.

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Wasik feels that the viral culture, of sudden sensations that capture imagination widely and then disappear just as suddenly, has been further perpetuated through the web. Think viral games, viral videos. Think Twitter, think advertising. Viral marketing is the buzz word today. This interview and Wasik’s book make for a fascinating read as he de-constructs the hype around virals.

In the interview, Wasik says ”…the idea of a quick hit disposable culture…the idea that everybody piles on something and then everybody disperses from it, and you repeat the process, and that’s the media culture that we now live in — and the internet has only tightened the cycles and made that more pronounced.”

He terms these spikes as ‘nanostories’ and goes on to add in response to another question…”We are social animals, and the internet plays to that — it plays to that urge to try to get attention and to try to make connections and to try to get on board with the interesting new thing as it’s happening and to feel in that way like we are at the very heart of the culture.”