Small Office, Home Office Information

For some reason just about everyone who has a website loves to brag about the number of hits they get to their site every day. If you’re a small business or home office person it’s not the number of hits you might get to your small business site that matters. It’s the amount of money that you make from those hits that is the real bragging point.

So numbers don’t impress us much at all and what impresses us even less is someone who wants to brag about the number of hits they’re getting when it’s obvious that the number is more than just a little inflated. When we come across people like that it tends to make us a little wary of doing business with them.

Just today Toni was talking to a small business person who wants us to do some work for them and he was trying to impress her by telling her that he was getting 600 hits a day to his website. The only problem is that a counter on his site shows that he has had 1121 visitors since October 2005.

Counters that are visible to casual site visitors are counter-productive (no pun intended) and visible counters have no place on a small business or home office website. They rarely have a positive impact and they can have a negative impact that you might not expect.

Pay-per-click advertising has been around for quite some time - even back before Google was anything but a vague thought in someone’s geeky mind there was pay-per-click advertising.

Click fraud has been around just as long as there has been pay-per-click advertising but it’s only recently that click fraud has become all that well known and now companies like Google are wishing it would just go away.

Google’s fortune is built on pay-per-click advertising and so you would think that it would do everything in its power to prevent click fraud but the sad fact is that they don’t do everything they can to prevent it. Even an independant report into Google’s efforts to combat click fraud found that they were only making a “reasonable” effort to combat the problem.

I won’t waffle on any further about Google and click-fraud but what I will do is give you this link. It will take you to a copy of that report and I suggest that you download it and read it. It help you answer the question of whether or not pay-per-click advertising is right for your small business.

More and more these days the marketing aspect of our business is taking a back seat to the writing we do for clients around the world. In fact our team has become so busy doing other people’s work that now we’re looking for other writers to produce the work we need for our own projects.

If you have ever wondered what makes people want to write here is a little quote from the blog Articulate that quotes Australian author, David Malouf. should help you understand us. He considers writers to be “puzzled observers” and goes on to say:

“They’re like small children really in a house where they’re endlessly eavesdropping or trying to see what it is the adults are up to, and trying to work it out and they never really work it out.”

I guess that’s what makes this small business tick

… I think it sucks!

That was a snippet from a conversation Toni had today with a graphic designer in Canada.

It all started a month ago when we decided to employ a graphic designer here in Hervey Bay to design the header for a website Toni is building. It was going to be a major ongoing project so we decided to get a professional design done.

You can read about our attempts to get a local designer to produce something more than hot air here, here and here

When we finally gave up on the local people we made do with something I cobbled together while we looked around for someone else. Last week we remembered that someone in Canada had done some good work for us a year or so ago so Toni contacted them.

She outlined the project, gave an image to the artist that she wanted included in the header and extended the job to include background and buttons. The result came back today and was terrible. It was ugly, the background swallowed the foreground and every page was going to require the text to appear in white.

When Toni said that it was nothing like what she wanted she was met with the response:

“Well my mother and aunt liked it.” along with the inference that if they liked all women would like it.

I wonder how many small businesses survive with an attitude like that?

Edit

They say a picture is worth a thousand words so here is a screenshot of the design we were presented with. To be fair to the designer the green in the centre of the page is a banner we are currently running on the site.

It’s a fact, Google does not care about small businesses or home office people. It does not take you or your websites into account when it’s ready to change it’s algorithms and it doesn’t stop to think about what impact those changes will have on your bottom line.

And if you don’t believe me just think back to the last couple of major changes Google made. They happened at the worst possible time for those small business people who rely on their websites for income. Even though most of the sites were perfectly acceptable to Google the new algorithms wiped them out of Google’s listing and many of their owners went out of business.

So if you rely on your website for your income then don’t rely on Google for your traffic. There are plenty of other ways to get traffic to your site and you should be working hard to exploit every one of those that you can think of.

If you can’t think of any then wander through the archives here for a few suggestions.

Just recently a Rib Shack opened up in our town. Neither Toni nor I are all that interesting in ribs as a gourmet delicacy so we haven’t tried it.

But a regular customer at the computer shop has and the last time he was in the computer he was complaining bitterly about the small serves that you get at the Rib Shack. When our friend questioned him a little more it seems that he had never been near a Rib Shack before he tried the new one in our town and had no real idea what constituted a good serve of ribs.

Even though he had no prior experience he felt that the local Rib Shack was selling people short because he believed that a serving of ribs would be huge because that’s what he had seen on the Flinstones.

I kid you not … he was basing his idea of what a good serving of ribs should be like simply on a cartoon and nothing would change his mind.

Now remember that one dissatisfied customer tells 10 others and the people he told probably didn’t ask him what he had compared the local store to so the local Rib Shack is off to a bad start just because of an old cartoon.

I wonder how a small business can counter misconceptions like that?

A crusty old fart of webmaster once told me that the truth about search engines and how to get your sites listed in good positions was out there but you won’t find it on search engine message boards - and he was right.

I’ve just seen the similar rule on a message board that supposedly helps people get their websites ranked well. A small business person was looking for advice on how to get his site above the number 4 position for a certain term.

The advice he got was comical:

do away with tables in the design because search engines hate tables - THEY DON’T

Re-design your page in CSS because surfers will have more satisfaction viewing the page - SURFERS WANT SATISFACTION FROM A COMMERCIAL PAGE??????????

Move your navigation links from the left hand side of the page - AND HAVE YOUR AVERAGE JOE NEVER FIND HIS WAY FURTHER INTO YOUR SITE??????????????????

Yep you can find a lot of helpful advice on designing your business website but you won’t find it on message boards like that one or others like it.

It’s a bit like a small business board I visited once quite a while ago where the resident expert on small business websites was a kid who didn’t have a website … or a clue.

I know lots of small businesses and home offices run on Dell computers so this piece that I ran over on Home and Small Office Computer Guide might be of interest to you.

CNet is running a news item that suggests that Dell is preparing to announce “a major price initiative” for consumers and small business customers.

You can read the details here but they would have to be giving PCs away before I would think of switching to a Dell.

A wander through their customer message boards or a search in Google will soon turn up enough information to make you want to think twice.

The computer shop that we’re involved in currently has a beautiful wide screen Dell monitor sitting on the floor. It was brought in by a customer who said it stopped working the day after the warranty period expired and it cannot be repaired.

There is a lot of money tied up in something that is never going to be anything more than a boat anchor … or a prop in the shop’s next television commercial.

Quite often it’s so easy to be immersed in the work that’s generated by your small business that you forget about what it is costing you to do business.

Of course your costs should be passed on to your clients but have you stopped to look at what your costs really are. Here in Australia the cost of fuel is continuing to rise and a recent Dun and Bradstreet survey has found that many businesses have reached the point where they will have to increase their charges to cover the increase in fuel prices.

Have you been paying attention to the impact the increasing cost of fuel is having on your small business?

I would like to be able to say that there has been no impact on the cost of running our small business because we don’t rely on a motor vehicle for deliveries or getting around to see clients. However, if I did that I would certainly be short-sighted.

The cost of fuel impacts on every small business whether it’s a home office based business or not because everything we buy has some dependency on fuel and every producer of goods is going to pass his costs on to the consumers of those goods.

Yep, it’s Saturday but we’re working on a rush order for a Russian client - definitely no pun intended.

I’m currently cleaning up a Russian to English translation of the front page of a new website that is selling some very imp0rtant software. While I can correct spelling mistakes in the text there’s not much I can do about a spelling mistakes in the graphics except point them out to the client and hope he can correct them.

You might wonder if spelling mistakes are all that important for your small business. I know I can be rather pedantic about spelling so perhaps I’m not the best person to give an unbiased opinion so instead, let me refer you to Stuff Matters over at Brendon Sinclair’s blog where he tells an interesting story about the impact some poor spelling had on three potential customers of a small business.