Messy can be good (but only if you know the rules)

Ashleigh’s Farm Shop is run from a small lay-by about three minutes from Making Soup’s Kent Headquarters. It is a brilliant, friendly and very popular shop that sells all sorts of groceries and seasonal goods, and is deservedly popular. Because of its location however, it has a very unusual, some would say messy, parking arrangement, whereby you turn up and park where you can, making your best effort to allow other, previously-parked cars to drive away if they finish shopping before you. If you are used to the system, it is effortless to understand, but as a newcomer, the apparent abandonment of your car might be quite confusing.

The same can be said of some older websites. A few pages, added by several different companies, each with their own particular view of what makes a website good, can create a site that is actually quite messy to the outsider. The owner knows the rules, but that doesn’t really matter. The only rules a user should have to follow is what is intuitive to them when using the internet.

MakingSoup offer  range of diagnostic services to those both locally in Kent and Sussex, and nationally. Whether it is blind testing, oral experience recordings or even eyeball/mousetrack testing, all of these are available to new and existing clients. We will aim to take away the mess, while keeping the purpose of your website. Email us for more information.

Straight to the top of the search engine

Up to One (Image: ph0t0 CC)

Here’s the brutal truth – if it was that easy, everyone would be at the top. That isn’t possible, so Google and other search engines have to create complex algorithms to ensure that those who do need to be at the top, are. Read the rest of this entry »

Buying computer equipment under market price

PC need replacing? (Photo: Ervega, CC)

How old is your computer? Are you able to make a drink in the time it takes to boot up? If so, it might need an MOT! If it is still sluggish, it is probably not up to your demands of it.

Computer equipment, especially desktop PCs and Macs, can cause a large dent in your cashflow for any business. We have been asked several times recently if we can advise the best routes for getting added value, so here are a few ways you can shave 10% – 35% off marked prices (information relevant for UK customers specifically). Read the rest of this entry »

Adding CTR value through retweets

Pass it on

Pass on a good recipe to all your friends and some will make it. Pass on a great recipe to a great cook and their even more likely to give it a go. This logic works just the same on Twitter in the form of retweets, and is something that we have been testing out recently.

Our click-through rate (CTR) on Twitter is around 10% (as a percentage of total followers clicking through a link). This is however possible to manipulate, by making carefully-targetted tweets that are likely to be retweeted. Read the rest of this entry »

What are your high-date words?

An interesting survey by dating site Okcupid found the words used in an opening message made an enormous difference to a successful or unsuccessful date. This may seem obvious, yet their analysis showed a very interesting viewpoint on how words are interpreted, and what are flagwords.

If you collected your last ten emails with successful client outcomes, and those without, what would the key differences be? Are you more successful when you are formal with a client, or if you write a briefer message?

Unless you examine, test and review, you’re unlikely to know. Bear in mind also that any message depends upon those receiving it – I recently sent tow messages exactly the same to two different people in the same position (in separate workplaces). One replied that evening, one has yet to reply!

That survey: http://bit.ly/3IDfC

Social bookmarking, with a valuable difference

Delicious is an excellent wayto keep track of sites that you favour, but from a web business point of view, it has two key uses that are outlined below. For those who don’t know what Delicious is, it is an online service that allows you to bookmark favourite sites, so that you may access them from any computer. So far, so handy. How can this possibly be exploited to benefit your site?

Have your own Delicious page

Presumably your website isn’t the only source of information on your subject. Make life much easier for your visitors by delivering an up-to-date list of relevant bookmarks for their use. By doing this, you are also encouraging them to come back to you, as an information portal.

View yours, and your competitors, scores and tags

Each time a site is bookmarked by anyone in the Delicious community, it scores one mark. Add your own site,  and perhaps four of your main competitors. Who has the highest scores? What tags have they got that your site hasn’t? You could be even braver and drill down into these results, and explore which Delicious users are linking to your pages.

Seth Godin’s New Website Checklist

The fascinating writer and broadcaster Seth Godin has created a great list of questions you should answer to consider upgrading your website.

You can find it here: http://bit.ly/unht3

Say goodbye to pendrives

The USB pendrive is a curious thing – at once both powerful and handy,yet small and prone to misplacement. They are at a price which makes them disposable, yet they don’t value your contents in the same way.

Enter the virtual pendrive, in the form of services such as Dropbox. This works in almost exactly the same way as a pendrive, except where you would normally have a drive to put files into, you have a folder.

This is pretty useful, but actually gets more useful the more computers you regularly use. I have access to four different computers over the course of a normal day, and have installed Dropbox on each one. By putting any file into any of these computers, I can see and use it on any one of the others. Added to this, they are also remotely stored, so I can access them on my ipod, or at an airport terminal – anywhere with the Internet in fact. And try as I might, I haven’t washed this virtual folder yet, or lost it behind a sofa or lent it to a friend.

Bit.ly under the bonnet

URL Shorteners are very popular, for three simple reasons:

• They avoid human error when typing a long email address
• They are shorter to pass on in a character-restrictive message
• They can specifically describe the destination contents

There are many to choose from, but from a webmaster’s point of view, Bit.ly has a distinct edge over, say, Tinyurl or is.gd, and that is the ability to look ‘under the bonnet’ of your link.

How many have clicked your link

Bit.ly allows you to watch when someone has clicked on your link. You can gauge an awful lot from the times of responses, and also from the times you send out your link. If most of your site pageviews are in the evening, why send out your email in the morning? If you do, when do people read the links?

Who else is linking

Another interesting aspect of Bit.ly is that it allows you to see what proportion of your link is directing traffic at that page. Given that several different people might be sending bit.ly links about one page, it is interesting to see how much traffic you are helping to create, and also how popular a page is on the rest of the web.

It offers the chance to experiment

Given the two factors above, there isn’t any harm in A-B testing using bit.ly. This could be done either by introducing the same link with two different lead-in lines (and two bit.ly links, to measure the difference in traffic), or by sending out two email newsletters at two different times, each with a bit.ly link.

The bottom line

Data is only rich if you know how to cash it in.