I have had a few clients approach us and have seen quite a few projects on the freelance websites where businesses have wanted forums, chat rooms and blogs - essentially they want it all.

So this brings up the issue of who really should have forums, chat rooms or blogs, or better yet, who shouldn’t:

• New websites
• Websites who’s primary responsibility is to sell products or services (ecommerce)
• Small businesses, home businesses and entrepreneurs (some exceptions apply)
• Businesses targeting North American clients who’s English is not exceptional or those who aren’t comfortable writing professional text.

Why you ask?

1. Traffic - New websites just don’t have the traffic to fill up a forum or chat room.  Nothing looks worse to a prospective customer than a website with a dead forum or chat room or a blog with only a few postings.  It shows your “newness” to the internet or makes them wonder why you don’t have any activity and usually will take it as a negative sign.

2. If you are selling a product or service see #1 - a dead forum, empty chat room and empty blog is a sign of an unbusy business which will concern potential clients that you might be going out of business, have no busy and then wonder what is wrong with your product or service.

3. Time - Forums and chat rooms require monitoring.  You’ll likely end up with spammers trying to fill up your forum or chat room with links to illegal or questionable sites which hurts your site in the search engines. You may get unruly members who post offensive or negative comments which will reflect negatively back on your business if not quickly removed.   You need to be sure you have the time and staff to dedicate to monitoring a busy forum or chat room.

4. Writing Skills - This applies mostly for blogs.  Everyone wants a blog these days and there’s no restriction on who can have one, blogs are a great way to communicate to your visitors and perhaps build a following.  However, poorly written text, mispelled text or text with grammatical errors will turn away customers and reflect poorly on your business.  If writing in English is not your strong suit than hire someone to do the writing for you. 

In closing, Forums are best for social sites as a means of having members communicate, if there isn’t much hope that you would have at least 1000 active members to keep your forum going, than don’t bother with a forum.  Chat rooms, like forums, are best for social sites, I can’t think of an instance where I would be going to a business, a service provider or an ecommerce site where I would plan to chat to anyone.  Enthusiast sites, news sites and social sites are the normal places one would see a chat room.  

Blogs, however are great for anyone.  Just be sure to make it a habit to post at least once per week with meaningful content and you can get a good following or be a great SEO tool.

There are about as many popular ecommerce software platforms out there as there are web design companies so how do you make heads or tails out of what is best for you, your company and your budget?

To begin there are 3 main categories of ecommerce software; Open Source, Hosted and Custom.  The following explains the differences between each.

Open Source

These are ecommerce software that are free or relatively inexpensive. Examples would be Oscommerce, CRELoaded, Xcart, Zencart (all which are based off of Oscommerce platform but modified in different ways) and Magento to name the popular ones. 

Pros:
Great way to have an affordable custom designed site
Usually a large assortment of features
There are templates available at affordable prices
Designers are easy to find and usually affordable

Cons:
Designs are not overly flexible and looks can be limiting or boxy
Admin consoles are typically confusing and hard to use
Stability issues and numerous patches and updates

 Overall this is a good cart for those needing an entry level cart, but plan for frustrations and problems and the time needed to sorting out how the admin console works.

 Hosted

Hosted solutions would include any that provide you the software hosted on their server.  If you were to leave you would not be able to take the cart with you.  Examples would be Volusion, ProStores and Yahoo Stores. 

Pros:
An all in one price for everything
Ongoing support
Stable platform
Feature Rich

Cons:
You can’t take it with you, you can pay and pay and pay and in the end never own the site.
Can be costly - Designs with Volusion can average $2000
Boxy and inflexible - designs can be limited
Pricing based on the number of products carried
SEO Unfriendly - Volusion is known to be SEO friendly however ProStores and others are difficult to make fully SEO friendly
Hosting Costs - Volusion is very well known for their expensive Bandwidth, in other words if you have a popular store expect to pay for all that extra traffic

Hosted solutions are great for those that want full support and don’t feel comfortable having to manage a hosting company and web designer, however in the long run it will cost you much more than running your own site on your own hosting account.

The perfect solution would be to look for web design companies who offer their own shopping cart, hosted and supported but offer a contract term so that after some period of time you will own the cart outright.

Custom

Custom doesn’t necessarily have to be a custom hand coded shopping cart, you aren’t likely going to find many of those these days with the availablity of top tier shopping cart software like Miva, NetSuite, PinnacleCart and others.  These shopping carts however typically have a some very high price tags starting at $1000 up to $10,000 and even higher.  These sites typically offer a more flexible design than the boxy look of an open source and are stable and feature rich.

Pros
Flexible designs
Feature rich
Stable
Easily incorporate video and flash
Search engine friendly
Unlimited products

Cons
Costly to have designed
Support and additional design work may be costly based on the limited number of design companies that are experienced with the software

Overall these are the best shopping carts, but lower top tier carts start at $1000 and up and are the perfect step up from an open source cart when you are ready to move up.

Key things to look for in any ecommerce cart is that it’s search engine friendly and has the features you need for your specifc products.

Do you have a website or about to get one?  Than you need to understand the 15 second rule, or at least ensure your web design company does.

The 15 Second Rule is essentially how long you have to convey to website visitors:

1. What you do or what you have to offer
2. How professional your site is
3. How easy it is to navigate your site

5 years ago this wasn’t so much an issue but many search engine users know that when searching not all the results are valid and therefore over time an “evaluation” behaviour has evolved where searchers evaluate a website within 10 to 15 seconds to determine if the site does or has what they are looking for and also looks at the overall design for appeal.

What does this mean in terms of your website’s design?

It means that visually with graphics, images and large font text you need to communicate the general products or services you offer visitors that can be looked at and processed in less than 10 to 15 seconds.  It means you need an uncluttered page, well labelled navigation and photos, graphics and text that very clearly reflect the topic of that page. Remember this doesn’t just apply to the home page but all pages, since every page of your site can be used in the search engines to drive relevant traffic to your site. 

Do’s

• A good banner/header that is visual and clearly shows your business name and a related slogan
• All images and graphics reflect the topic of that page
• A main title sentence bolded and in bigger font at the top of the page that describes that page
• Bullet point text instead of long drawn out paragraphs
• Break text up in sections and put a header title to each paragraph
• Have a visible, well labeled navigation and use a drop down navigation to easily group pages together instead of using top and side navigations
• Make sure everything on your site works the way it is supposed to work

Dont’s

• Have a cluttered home page with lots of little boxes of different information
• Have too many images as it makes it hard to scan the whole page an absorb the over all message
• Have too many different navigations - some sites have a navigation bar across the site, plus a side vertical navigation bar and then also put a navigation above their header or down at the bottom with the copyright text. 
• Have lots of text in a small font or one long page, instead break it into a few pages

Lastly what it means for your site is that you need a current and update design.  Your website makes such an incredibly strong first impression of your business that having an outdated design from even 3 or more years ago is the same as having a brick and morter location in a run down strip mall on the wrong side of town.  It’s functional and affordable, but doesn’t leave a great impression. 

This doesn’t mean you have to break the bank and redesign your site every 2 years.  What it does mean is that you need a professional design, time lasting design with professional looking graphics, buttons and navigations.  When designing or redesigning your site don’t go for the latest trend stick with a design that is true to your business, that acts as graphical representation of your business.  Don’t design in the latest trends. 3 years ago black/dark coloured sites were all the rage, now it’s beiges with blues or beiges and pinks with big thick borders.  But what has happened to the black/dark websites - they now look outdated.  Equate web design to car designs, that Grand Prix, Camery or Intrepid that looked so cool 5 years ago looks so outdated now doesn’t it? The same happens with website trends and this can reflect negatively on your business.

Lastly, make sure everything works!  So many sites have missing graphics, broken links, mis-aligned graphics or buttons or have different fonts on different pages.  All these things will deter a visitor and reflects very poorly and usually causes a visitor to leave instantly.

 Have site now and want to know how to tell if it meets the 15 second rule?

Usually your website visitor statistics can give you a good clue.  How long does the average visitor stay on your site, what are the average number of page views, what is your site’s bounce rate (number of people who leave after only visiting one page).  There is no definitive average that shows your site is doing well or not but if you don’t have more than 2 or 3 average page views and have a bound rate higher than 60% and the majority of visitors spend less than 30 seconds on your site you may need to re-evaluate your site and consider fixing it up.

Don’t have these stats?  Sign up for a Google Analytics account which is free and they will provide you all this great information and more.