Small Office, Home Office Information

Want a website for your small business? Make sure you get a number of quotes.

This morning we wandered down our favorite cafe for a flat white or two. We were going to talk business but I forgot to bring a pen and anyway the sun was shining, the birds were singing and water out in the bay was crystal clear … so who in their right mind would want to think of work in a place like that?

As we were leaving the owner of the cafe - who we have known almost from the time we arrived in Hervey Bay and someone whose previous career path was not dissimilar to mine - called us into his office and asked us to run an eye over a quote he had received to build a website.

We nearly fell over at the figures we saw on that sheet of paper - they were staggering to say the least and Larry had been very lucky that he withstood the hard sell the company had hit him with to try and get him to sign on the dotted line.

I still cannot get over one of the figures on that sheet of paper. This company wanted to charge him $140.00 to register his .com.au domain name. Twenty minutes later we registered his domain name for him for $29.95 plus a couple of bucks to cover our time and expenses.

There were other overcharges on the quote and several instances where they inflated costs by implying that they would include certain extras … that basically have zero cost.

NEVER get just one quote for website or for hosting.

NEVER take the lowest price just because it happens to be the lowest price

NEVER pay for the whole deal up front.

If whoever is trying to sell you a website wants all the money - or even a substantial part of the cost - up front invite them to leave. The industry ’standard’ is a third up front - a third at the time the first draft is in front of you and a third on completion.

The salesman might walk the walk and talk the talk but that doesn’t mean he can deliver the goods so be careful and don’t get ripped off.

Images can deliver the right … or the wrong message

Just choosing the right images is not the end of the story. There is a lot more work involved to make sure that the images load quickly and don’t end up looking like they’re shrouded in fog.

Many people use Photoshop to prepare their images (we’ve been using it for many years) but it’s quite a complex programme to work with. If you’ve tried it without much success then you might find this post Photoshop Resources - Enhance the Images on Your Blogs over at ProBlogger to be helpful.

You’re small business could be losing money if you are

Well last week was just plain brutal. Long long days followed by more long long days interspersed with a return trip to Brisbane to pick up some stock for the computer shop and fit in a little Christmas shopping - hey all the good bookshops are down there

By the way - in case you missed it - that was my excuse for not posting much last week.

We also took a little bit of time to hit a Dell kiosk in one of the malls to look at laptops. The computer shop that we’re involved in doesn’t deal in laptops to any great extent and it’s often cheaper to pick one up from a department store … or even from Dell (their PCs might not be all that wonderful but their laptops aren’t too bad)

So we fronted up to the kiosk and started displaying some interest in a mid-range laptop. The Dell representative took one look at us and went back to doing whatever she was doing on her PC. We played a little more, made some encouraging noises but she didn’t want to know us.

Maybe we looked too old, too technically challenged or even too dumb to ever really be interested in anything that Dell had to sell us and so she ignored us.

We left without buying a laptop.

Do you or your staff make judgements like that about people who come into your small business?

In one of my postings when I was a Sheriff’s Officer the town had a well-known derelict (skid-row bum) He really did look down and out and he lived most of his time in an old tent. One day I saw him go into a jewellery store and the shop assistant immediately tried to get him to leave.

Fortunately the shop owner saw what was going on and stopped the attendant. You see she knew from experience that this old guy was loaded and he often bought very expensive gifts for people who took the time to show some interest in him.

On this occasion he bought a necklace worth several thousand dollars for another shopkeeper who often gave him his lunch for free. That other shopkeeper had been in hospital and the old guy wanted to buy something to cheer her up.

Value judgements can often end up costing you money.

Print isn’t dead - you may just need to look beyond the obvious choices

Here in the town where I live more and more small businesses are finding that advertising in the local papers is becoming uneconomic. That’s not surprising because circulation of the daily paper is dropping as the quality of their reporting drops and few people bother to read the free papers.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that advertising at the local level is becoming uneconomic because advertising in newspapers at the state and national level is going the same way.

But some businesses are finding that there is one type of newspaper where the return on investment for every advertising dollar spent is still worthwhile. Those newspapers are the college papers in the United States (university to most other people) and they are effective because:

1. The readership is local

2. Students do have money to spend

3. Research has shown that 76% of US college students read their campus papers.

So if your small business is located near a university/college and you have a product that students would buy think about the campus paper the next time you want to advertise.

You can read more about campus papers here

Sometimes charging nothing can make your small business much more money

Here is one great marketing suggestion/story related by Seth Godin that can work for any small business - a friend in need

I know you think they look strange.

And you’re right, they do look strange and they look like they would be an absolute pain to use but if you or the staff in your small business can type with more than just two fingers - and you spend a lot of time pounding the keys - then an ergonomic keyboard is an absolute must.

I learned to type on an old Remington typewriter almost 40 years ago and since then I’ve used a wide variety of keyboards and these ergonomic keyboards have to be the best I have ever used.

I had one of these several years ago and when it died I decided to go back to the standard keyboard for some reason I now can’t remember. But last week when one of Toni’s keyboards died we did a little shuffle and a nice new black version of the board you see above arrived on my desk. And I’ve fallen in love with them all over again.

The one I’m using is a Belkin Ergo Keyboard and if you live in the US you can pick one up cheap from Amazon (yes that’s an affiliate link).

Here in Australia you can find them at any good computer store (around $A59.00) and I’m sure the same applies in other parts of the world.

A survey shows up some interesting facts

The Australian Institute of Criminology has conducted a survey of small businesses around Sydney that has turned some some interesting links between the nature of crimes committed against small business and the ethnicity of the small businesses that have been the victims of crime.

Small businesses run by people with an English speaking background are more likely to experience vandalism, graffiti, credit card fraud, physical assault and robbery.

Chinese small business owners are likely to experience more shoplifting.

Vietnamese small business owners are more likely to experience property crime and burglary.

Google could have the answer

There are a lot of very unhappy small business people who use PayPal simply because there has been no real alternative up until now. High fees, lack of meaningful customer support and the threat of locked accounts tends to make PayPal a scary proposition. (Although here I should say that our experience with PayPal has been quite positive.)

However, many other small business people have not had the same experience and would happily jump ship if there was a viable alternative.

A couple of months ago Google launched an alternative to PayPal. It’s called Google Checkout and at the start it certainly had its problems. Quite a few merchants who signed on for the launch quickly left when they found that regular customers were getting their credit cards rejected for no apparent reason.

Since then though Google seems to have listened to the complaints and worked to resolve them. Now it really could be a viable alternative to PayPal. So if your small business needs an online payment option then perhaps Google Checkout could be worth looking at. Not only has Google added new features but they have also waived fees till the end of the year

You can find a more in-depth review of the revamped Google Checkout here at Techcrunch.

And of course to find Google Checkout simply type those words into a Google search box. By the way, our small business has no affiliation with Google Checkout

It might be cheesy but it’s a fact if you have a busy desktop in your small business or home office

Space is a major problem for many small offices and fitting a PC somewhere on your deks can be a difficult.

The other half of this partnership had been telling me for ages that there was a solution to my space problems and it really did take a while for that to sink in but last week it did and, as I said last Friday, I did a little upgrade of one of my PCs on Saturday to fix the space problem. And this is the solution to my space problem:

This is the Aspire X-Qpack Micro ATX tower (sold in some countries as the Apevia X-Qpack) and it’s just 13.8″ long by 11.2″ wide. It stands just 9″ tall.

And if you think you can’t fit everything that’s in your current PC into one of these small boxes let me tell you that the one I currently have on my desk holds 3 hard drives, a DVD burner, a floppy drive, a dual head graphic card and a firewire card and, thanks to bigger fans and better ventilation than you’ll find in most towers, it runs cooler than the box it replaces.

After working that computer hard for the last week I can tell you that there have been no temperature problems and it has worked perfectly.

Not only are they small but they’re light-weight too and come in a range of colours. If you’re here in Australia check your local computer shop (because of their size only certain motherboards will fit in them) and in other parts of the world you will find that they’re available from Amazon (aff. link).

Thank God it’s Friday

I’ve got a very mixed bag of links for you today so let’s start with some creative advertising.

Creative Advertisements Around the World - even if you’re never likely to advertise anywhere some of these are absolute works of art.

How to Motivate Bad Employees - let’s hope you never need to do this

How Much Should a Design Cost - lets face the facts, you pay cheap then you get garbage

Five Simple Steps to Designing With Colour - hmmmm, not sure about this one but it is interesting and Darren Rowse over at Problogger likes it

Top 25 Free Web Directories by Page Rank - if you have a website getting it listed in good spots can be hard so a list like this can be helpful

And that’s it for this week. I’m spending tomorrow upgrading one of my computers and Sunday we’re going to enjoy a rainy day I hope.