Poor Richard 8
#008/22-May-98
POOR RICHARD'S WEB SITE NEWS
Geek-Free, Commonsense Advice on Building a Low-Cost Web Site
Editor: Peter Kent
Top Floor Publishing
THIS ISSUE
- Beginner's Column: The Two Secrets of Web Site Success
- The Recommend-It Service
- Business-card Web sites
- Geocities Shopping-cart Service Offer
- Forwarding This Newsletter to Discussion Groups
- The "Sell It On the Web" Web Site
- More on The =20 Email Problem -- Using TextPad
- Poor Richard's Web Site in the Press
- Reading Back Issues
- In Future Issues
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**** IF YOU FIND THIS NEWSLETTER USEFUL ... FORWARD IT TO FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES ****
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Beginner's Column: The Two Secrets of Web Site Success
The process of creating a successful Web site can be summed up in two statements:
- Give people a good reason to come to your Web site.
- Let people know that there's a good reason to come to your Web site.
Now, these statements might seem obvious, but think about them for one moment -- and consider, perhaps, how you came to set up your own Web site. It seems to me that most people think about what their Web sites can do for them. If they consider at all what to do with a Web site (many companies still have the "we've got to have a Web site, and quick!" mentality, without really thinking about Why), they look at it from their own perspective. "We can provide product support," "We can sell our products," "We can promote our products, and so on."
But it's important to change shoes and look at the Web site from the _visitors_ perspective: "Why should I go to that Web site?" There has to be a really good answer to that question, and far too many companies are not thinking the whole process through. For instance, many companies post their products at their site, then sit and wait for people to arrive. Why should people arrive, though? What's going to bring them in?
No, the answer is not "because our site is cool." The old story about how your site must be cool and exciting or people won't come is complete nonsense, perpetuated by graphic designers who make money by making Web sites cool. The real answer is, there has to be something at your Web site that is useful, or interesting, or entertaining, something so useful, interesting, or entertaining that people are willing to take time out of their busy day to visit.
I can't say what that something might be for you, but you'd better figure it pretty soon, or you'll be wasting time and opportunity.
The second step in this two-step process is to let people know that they should visit your site. That, of course, is what I write about in this newsletter every week. There are many ways to bring people to your site, but all the successful techniques revolve around one idea; you are letting people know that there's a good reason to visit your Web site. (If there isn't, they won't come back.) Don't just put a line in your paper catalog saying "Visit Our Web Site!," for instance. People don't care about your Web site, however proud you are of it. Instead, give them a reason to visit. Tell them they can find additional information about your latest products, product support, useful articles ... tell them they'll get a discount coupon, or can sign up to win something. Think about _why_ they should visit, provide that information or service, then tell them it's there.
The Recommend-It Service
The Recommend-It service is an interesting idea you may want to check into. It's a special service that makes it easy for people to recommend your Web site to their friends and colleagues. You put a Recommend-It button on your Web pages, and when visitors click the button they see a form into which they can enter several email addresses and a comment. When they click the send button, an email message is sent to each recipient -- the message contains the comment, and a little blurb provided by you, too.
I first found out about this after visiting a Web site produced by a subscriber to this newsletter, George Lawson (The Marantha Christian Journal: http://www.mcjonline.com/ ). He told me that in four months around 700 people had used the service to recommend his site to friends.
The benefit of the service is two-fold. First, it encourages visitors to recommend the site right away. If someone visits your site and likes it, they may mention it to friends ... but they may forget to do so. Recommend-It makes it easy for them to do so right away. Secondly, the very best recommendation comes from a friend. People are far more likely to pay attention to something recommended by someone they know than to any other recommendations, such as reviews or ads.
For more information, visit ...
Business-card Web Sites
A little while ago I was a guest on a syndicated radio show called CompuTalk, hosted by Tom King. Tom mentioned something I thought was worth passing on, the idea of a "business-card web site." It's quite simple. A company that has its trucks or personnel out and about in the public can display their Web site's URL prominently; on the side of the trucks, on the back of their peoples' uniforms, even on yard signs. (For instance, house painters often put up signs with their phone numbers on; they could include their URLs.) Now, this works best if you have your own short and simple URL, of course: HousePainting.com (which, incidentally, is for sale), NYPainters.com (which is available), and so on.
Such a company's Web site doesn't have to be complicated; it's merely acting as a business card, a quick way for people to find out about a company they remember seeing at work a little while ago, or as they drove through the neighborhood. The site would have contact information -- phone number, email, and so on -- and a description of the services available.
Now, what I find interesting about this idea is that it's a way for a company to make use of a Web site even if it's the type of company that _isn't_ likely to get much Web traffic. For instance, few people go online to search for house painters -- or if they do, they search the yellow-page sites which provide real-world contact info, not links to Web sites. They're most likely to look in the paper Yellow Pages, or at an ad in a newspaper. If a house painter sets up a Web site hoping for people to wander across his site and call him up, he'll be very disappointed. The idea behind most Web sites seems to be to capture Internet traffic, to catch the attention of people surfing the Web by listing in search engines, getting links from other sites, and so on. That simply won't work for many small businesses, because almost nobody's out there in cyberspace looking for someone to mow their lawn, to unplug their sinks, or paint their porch.
But this business-card concept makes having a Web site worthwhile for such businesses. The URL on the side of the truck or on a yard sign becomes, in effect, a link to business card, and the site can be worth having even if it never gets a single visit from a search engine. Such a site can be very cheap, by the way. It's possible to set up a site, including domain-name registration and Web-site hosting, for as little as $12 a month.
Geocities Shopping-Cart Service Special Offer
In the last issue I mentioned iCat's free shopping-cart service (for companies with 10 or fewer products). I ran across another special offer recently. Geocities, the company that provides free non-commercial Web sites, also has a commercial Web-site service, in effect a shopping-cart service. They will waive the $120 set-up fee, and won't charge their normal $80 minimum transaction fee, until July 15th. (Instead they'll charge a basic $2.50 transaction fee, so losing the $80 minimum only helps if you don't sell much, of course.) This service includes online credit-card processing -- you'll have to have a compatible merchant account or sign up for a new one, so there may be more costs involved. For more information see ...
http://www.geocities.com/join/geoshops/
I've added this to my directory of shopping-cart programs and services, along with a few others; it's over 70 entries now.
See ...
http://www.PoorRichard.com/freeinfo/special_reports.htm
Forwarding This Newsletter to Discussion Groups
Now and then recipients of this newsletter asks if they can forward it or use it in some way. Feel free to forward the newsletter, or any portion, to whatever newsgroup, mailing list, or online-service forum you wish ... however you must include the copyright and newsletter-subscription information that you'll find at the bottom of the newsletter. This newsletter is _not_ in the public domain.
If you want to use the newsletter in some other way -- such as posting it at a Web site or including a portion in a printed document, please contact me: pkent@topfloor.com
The "Sell It On the Web" Web Site
I ran across the "Sell It On the Web" site recently. If you're currently looking for shopping-cart systems, or want to know how to improve the way you sell products online, you may want to check out this site. (Of course you'll also want to see the earlier issues of this newsletter that dealt with this subject: http://www.PoorRichard.com/newsltr/archive.htm ). Sell It On the Web reviews shopping-cart systems, examine Web sites that sell products and tell you what they like and don't like about them, have announcements about new services, and so on. For instance, they currently have an article about eCHARGE, a service that allows you to take orders that are charged to the buyers' telephone numbers. (I'm not sure I like the eCHARGE system, because buyers must install the eCHARGE plug-in before they can buy ... but the concept of charging orders to telephone numbers is an interesting one, something I'll look at in a later issue.)
To visit Sell It On the Web, go to ...
More on The =20 Email Problem -- Using TextPad
In the previous issue I discussed the =20 email problem; how some mail servers will insert strange codes -- such as =20 or =3D -- into email messages that contain certain "high ASCII" text characters. This is a problem that often occurs when you create a document in a word processor, then copy it into an email program. I said at the time that I'd continue creating this newsletter in Word for Windows, because I needed word-processing tools that text editors don't have.
Well, I've changed my mind. Alan Hersh, who publishes The Hersh Web Site Observer email newsletter ( http://CyberJournalist.com/ ) suggested that I try TextPad. I did. And I'm a convert. It's a great little text editor. In other words, it doesn't insert any special characters that aren't plain text -- no curly quotes, em dashes, ellipsis, and so on -- so it's perfect for email documents. Yet it has a lot of features you don't normally get in a text editor; you can drag and drop text, spell check, do fast and sophisticated search and replaces, have several documents open at once, and so on.
It even has a special "clip library" bar that allows you to quickly grab particular codes and control characters. Just before I wrote this newsletter I was working on an article for CMP's Techweb Web site, and wanted to use a few HTML tags; the clip library had them all there, I just had to double-click on the one I wanted in order to enter it. So TextPad is a also a simple HTML editor.
Every time I need a feature I think TextPad probably won't have, I find it somewhere in the menus or dialog boxes. I needed to check how many words I'd written, for instance. I didn't think there was much chance that TextPad would have that feature, but there it was, the Tools|Word Count command.
One thing did take me a little while to figure out (I'll explain just in case anyone decides to use this program for their own newsletter). Each time I finish a newsletter, I save the text so that each line has a line break after it. Then I do a search and replace on the line break and add two spaces on the left side of each line -- for some reason it makes the newsletter easier to read. I can do this quickly in TextPad. I press Alt+Enter to open the Properties dialog box; enter 65 into the Break at Column Position box; select Save With Line Breaks; then click OK. Then I save the document, and Textpad adds line breaks at the end of every line. Then I change the Break at Column Position value to 65, open the Search and Replace dialog box, click the Regular Expressions check box, search for ^ (which means the beginning of a line), and replace it with two spaces.
TextPad is a Windows program (if any Mac users have a recommendation for a powerful Mac text editor I'd be happy to mention it in the next issue). You can find it here:
Poor Richard's Web Site in the Press
With journalists requesting around 600 copies of "Poor Richard's Web Site: Geek-Free, Commonsense Advice on Building a Low-Cost Web Site," reviews turn up all the time. Here are a few we've received recently ...
- Richard Mann, book reviewer for ComputerCredible Magazine, just picked Poor Richard's Web Site as the magazine's Book of the Month.
- Marketing Technology said this about Poor Richard: "We highly recommend that you get a copy of this book, just to see how a complicated subject is presented in a thoroughly understandable manner. ... No matter how familiar you are with the Web, we guarantee that you will learn something from this book."
- Edwin Bell, writing in Ed's Internet Book Review, had this to say: "If you are looking for a no-nonsense approach to evaluating your options with regard to implementing a web site, you can't go far wrong with Peter Kent's Poor Richard's Web Site. ... Even if you've already created a site, Mr. Kent has number of suggestions that make this book a worthwhile read. ... the potential for increased quality to your site by heeding some of the advice will pay back in the long run."
For more reviews, and many readers' testimonials, visit ...
Poor Richard's Web Site is in many bookstores, and can be ordered by others; it can also be ordered online, through the mail, by fax, or by phone.
See ...
http://www.PoorRichard.com/order/
Order direct from the publisher, and you'll get a 100%, 1-Year Guarantee. If the book doesn't help you set up a low-cost yet effective Web site, send it back for a refund!
Reading Back Issues
If you need to refer to back issues of this newsletter, you can find then at the following location:
http://www.PoorRichard.com/newsltr/
In Future Issues ...
I keep promising to cover a particular subject in the following issue ... then I don't get around to it because something else comes up. Here, then, are a few subjects I'll get around to covering eventually ... along with plenty more:
- Getting the Word Out about your Web site
- Setting up an email mailing list for newsletters, bulletins, product announcements, etc.
- Secure servers: why you want one, how they work, who has them
- Mail-merge programs and mailing list programs
- Managing link directories using off-line browsers and bookmark programs
- A quick way to inform Web sites when you change your URL
- Registering your newsletter with newsletter directories
- Are people cheating at the award sites?
- Charging purchases to the buyer's telephone numbers
- Electronic press releases _do_ work!
