In the following post I’ll highlight a couple of actions that will give you the information you need to build a better online business.

Start with the basics

To get started ask your web developer or site administrator to give you access to your website analytics reports. The most popular service that I would recommend is Google Analytics. Analytics is free and used everywhere so as a ‘starter for 10′ I wouldn’t suggest you waste time looking anywhere else. If your webmaster hasn’t set this up yet, ask him to do it. If you’re running an online shop you should ask him to set it up to capture your eCommerce activity. This isn’t rocket science but is something that isn’t usually done simply because it’s not turned on by default.

Add a bit of salt and vinegar

With Analytics turned on and set up to report surprisingly useful information like “how many times people visit before they buy something”, you might want to get into more detailed analysis of user behaviour. A great way to do that is to look at where users click on your website. Although Analytics does have this capability, it’s a bit limited (read: rubbish!) so I suggest using an external ‘Heat map’ service. There are plenty of these about (CrazyEgg, ClickDensity etc.) but they’re all pretty expensive for ongoing use. A new service that is currently ‘in beta’ is Seevolution. It looks promising and offers free heat maps of both where people click and where they’ve scrolled. Other services like MET from Picnet are able to capture and replay customers’ mouse movements. I’m not sure how useful this really is but if it’s bells and whistles you’re after this could be the service for you.

So what?

Using Analytics and tracking user behaviour via heat maps is huge for website optimisation and design but also for informing the rest of the business what appeals to your customers. Think about it for a second. You can tell which images draw customers’ attention. Which brands should be promoted within your offline shop. With this kind of information you not only get the business intelligence to make your website better, you’re also able to make your real-world shops and print catalogues perform better. So go and speak to your web guy about setting this up for you (it shouldn’t take him long) and if you need any more website advice or insight give me a call, I’d be happy to help.

There are as many different ways to sell your products online as you can think. However, what we’re after here is a simple answer, a starter for 10, not an exhaustive list of all the options. In this post I’ll give you a ‘stake in the ground’ that you can use to make some business decisions and get started.

The solution

I suggest you build the shop based on an open source platform. There are many benefits of going down the open source route:

• you’re unlikely to be the first person to need a particular feature so it’ll probably already exist
• you don’t have to spend ages waiting for a bespoke system to be designed, built and finessed
• there’s no licence fee (but that doesn’t mean it’s free)
• there are a lot of consultants who can develop the product for you so you’re not left in the lurch if you fall out with your web developer

An example Magento premium theme

The open source platform I’d recommend is Magento – it’s actively being developed and there’s a thriving community of developers creating themes and extensions. I’ve heard of implementations selling more than 25,000 product lines so scalability shouldn’t be a problem for most of you.

So, what’s it going to cost?

Here are my ball park figures:

Setup/one off costs

Magento licence: £0
Magento extensions: £300* (You’ll probably want to add a couple of ‘Bells and whistles’ like 1-click purchase and automatic cross-selling)
Magento theme: £200 (lots of free themes are available in the community but the premium themes are typically a bit more polished)
Domain name: £10
Initial setup, data load and design: £2000

Ongoing cost (per year)

Hosting: £360
SSL certificate: £200
Support/tweaking: £2400

Transaction fees (payable every time someone buys something)

20p + 3.5% of transaction (speak to your business bank manager if you have one otherwise look at Paypal, Google Checkout or Worldpay).

Total cost (rounded)

Year 1: £5500
Year 2 onwards: £3100

Ways to reduce the cost of your online shop

If you’re able to hack the odd bit of code and have access to some basic design skills you can remove the support costs and do it yourself. If you’ve got the time, and are comfortable with things like WordPress etc you can also install the software yourself (it’s a pretty straight-forward installer). You can also get your hosting provider to set up your certificates for you (you’ll still need to buy the certificate from someone like Thawte, Verisign etc) which means in theory you could get an online shop up and running for about £570 a year.

If you still need to reduce costs you can find hosting for less than my £30 a month (Google’s your friend here) and using a 3rd party payment system (Paypal, Google checkout etc) would mean you don’t need a certificate of your own. So my final answer for a bargain-basement-do-it-yourself cost is £190 per year.

What now?

If you’re thinking about getting started in etail check out the Magento showcase and then have a look at the demo admin section.

If you’re struggling with which way to take your eTail or eCommerce activity and would like some help and straight-forward advice, get in touch – I’d love to help.

You probably already have an OpenID account but just didn’t know about it.

Examples of OpenID providers are Google and Yahoo! (if you have one of these accounts you already have an OpenID). This is great but if you want the flexibility to use your own, easy to remember domain you don’t have to set up your site to be an OpenID provider. You can simply choose a 3rd party you’re already using for other things.

This approach means you’re in complete control of your online identity and can easily see who has access to your credentials. If you’re no longer happy with them, you can simply revoke access…easy! Watch this all in action in the video below.

The code you’ll need to embed in your site’s homepage is:

So, if you’re a website owner and thinking about authentication, reducing the friction created by the sign up process is very important. Implement OpenID and as you can see in the video, your users will find it very easy to log in and start using your service.

Greg’s High performance SEO

Out of the box, WordPress doesn’t insert some common meta tags in your pages. Although the importance of these (specifically keywords & description) has been reduced since the early days of SEO, they still hold some value and it is just general good practice. This plugin has a wealth of features (and documentation) to help make your site a bit more Google friendly and to get it set up properly took me about 15mins. If you only have time to install one plug in, this is the one – it really is superb.

Google XML sitemap generator

To make sure that Google (and Bing and Yahoo!…) knows where all your pages are, you can submit an XML sitemap. However, editing the file manually every time you create a new post is a major pain. This plug in does the editing and submits the new sitemap to all the search engines automagically! Make sure that you take a couple of minutes to configure the plug in to get all the categories and tags that you want into your sitemap.

Wordtwit

There are a whole host of ways to integrate your WordPress blog with Twitter but this plugin gives you a couple of powerful features that are really slick. Once installed, you can create your own url shortening structure (now, that looks pro doesn’t it!) and you can track clicks from Twitter in your Google Analytics account. You can also restrict the posts that are tweeted by including or excluding a specific tag/category.

One of the ongoing annoyances for committed users of the web is the number of user profiles we need to create to engage with the all these websites. Fortunately, Google’s recently launched social networking platform, Friend Connect allows us to embed social networking tools into our websites without the need to ask users to create a new profile when they want to use the features.
Adding the various free widgets will allow you to create a plug & play community for your website without the barriers usually associated with setting up and using a social network. You won’t need any programing skills but you will need (ftp) access to your server to set it up.

Check out this intro video from Google:

Take a look now: A visual round-up of successful blog evolution

Of course in this web 2.0 world its a free service, allows you to work collaboratively with your team and the interface is simple. Perfect!

Linkorama: WriteMaps

One of the most well known and a site I have used several times is Stock Exchange. The selection is good and the quality is certainly good enough for most projects especially if you spend a bit of time editing the images for your specific application. Make sure you check the licencing terms of any image you use as sometimes the photographer will require you to tell them where its being used (usually for interest sake more than anything else).

Another great source of images is searching through Creative Commons licenced shots. Flickr’s advanced search provides options towards the bottom of the form, for searching only those images which can be licensed (via Creative Commons) for use on your website.