Over the Christmas and New Year break we decided to give Doggo bit of a makeover and add some new features to help all our doggy mates.

If you are unfamiliar with Doggo, it is a directory of dog parks, beaches and dog friendly accommodation throughout Australia. What makes Doggo different from the other pet directories out there is that it uses Google Map technology to let users search for locations within a particular search radius of a given address or location. Site users can also rate the parks, beaches or accommodation and leave comments to help others select the best place to go with their doggy mates.

We currently have over 700 locations in the directory and are in the process of adding lots more - so if you have any suggestions or would like to add a location head over to the submit page.

If you’d like to support Doggo the best thing you can do is spread the word! Tell all your friends about it, link to it, blog about it. . . why you can even sing about it if you want!

Some other tid-bits about the site:

• Doggo is now built completely on WordPress , demonstrating that WordPress can be used for much more that just blogging!
• You can subscribe to the Blog Feed, Accommodation Feed and Dog Park Feed to keep up-to-date with all the latest additions to the site .
• The site is now gravatar (globally recognised avatar) enabled - so if you’d like a pretty picture to come up when you comment on the site, head on over to gravatar.com to register .

Today, most customers and clients expect the businesses they deal with to have a website, and in fact most small businesses need an online presence as much as they need a phone, mail box, or email address. Used effectively, a website can boost your business credibility, improve customer service, increase the effectiveness of your advertising and generate leads. But simply having a website isn’t enough. To attract and retain visitors it must be well designed, easy to navigate, up-to-date, and clearly provide the information or services that users are likely to want. A poorly designed and managed website may actually be driving potential customers away. To help you determine if your business website is in need of a new year makeover, below is  our list of the top 10 website turn-offs (in no particular order)….

10. Lack of clear contact information

You’d be surprised how many site visitors just want a phone number to call or an email address to contact. They may have additional questions about your product/service or want to make a booking/purchase. Contact information needs to be easy to find. Users are quickly frustrated if they cant find it, and will quickly leave your website. Make sure you also provide a few different contact options (ie. phone, email, web contact form, physical store/office).

9. Slow load times

Graphics that aren’t optimised for the web and complex web animations can cause websites to load slowly which is frustrating for users. Slow load times are particularly problematic for users who access the internet using a dial-up connection. While broadband use is becoming more common, in 2007-08, 17% of Australian internet users were still accessing the internet using a dial-up connection.

8. Having a horizontal scrollbars

Horizontal scrollbars are annoying for users as they make scanning your website difficult and require extra mouse clicks/movement to view your entire webpage content. Websites that are designed using appropriate screen resolutions will avoid the need for horizontal scrollbars.

7. Using “splash” pages (or false home pages) that require an additional click to enter the site

Users want information about your product/service and they want it NOW. Splash pages are usually totally unnecessary - all they do is frustrate the user by adding an additional page and mouse click before they can get to the information they really want.

6. Requiring the use of plug-ins

A plug-In is a piece of software that works in conjunction with a browser to display specific material (eg. animation, sound etc). If your visitor doesn’t have the required plug-in they will need to download and install it before they can continue using your site. Often people are unwilling to or do not know how to do this.

5. Broken links

This is just plain frustrating for users. They are expecting certain information to appear when they click on a link on your site and will be disappointed when instead they get a HTTP 404 Not Found error message.

4. Poor graphic design

The design of your site should be easy on the eyes. This means that text is easy to read (choose appropriate fonts and text sizes), images should be appropriate sizes, colour choice appealing, and layout consistent between pages.

3. Music/sounds that play automatically

Users like to be in control of their web browsing experience. Sites that automatically play sounds or music remove that control and can annoy web visitors. The music on your site is unlikely to be to the taste of all visitors. In addition, if the user is viewing your site in a public place (library, internet cafe) or at work, they may be embarrassed by the sudden sounds and elect to exit from your site immediately.

2. Out-of-date content

There’s not much point in having information on your website if its obviously out-of-date. Users see little value in information that they suspect is out-of-date or no longer relevant. Make sure price lists and contact information are always up-to-date. Consider integrating a blog onto your website as this is a great way to keep users updated with latest news and offers, and it keeps your content fresh (which search engines love).

1. Grammatical and spelling errors

Grammatical and spelling errors demonstrate a level of carelessness, which may leave users wondering if you are careless in other aspects of your business. Have a friend/colleague/family proof-read your website content, and consider signing up for a spellr.us account.

We wish each and every one of you a safe and Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! See you in 2009.

It’s that time of year again when the Christmas trees come out, the Christmas lights go up and the shops are filled to capacity as people search for the perfect gift.

Businesses put a lot of effort and preparation into spreading Christmas cheer within their stores and around the workplace but generally not so much online. Why is that? Everyone loves Google’s holiday logos so why don’t more business do something similar?

Adding some Christmas spirit to your own site is a great way to connect with your visitors and show that your site is kept up-to-date.

We think that there needs to be more of it. So, to help you, here are a few examples of ways that you can add some joy to your own website this Christmas:

• Add some chrismas wallpaper. It doesn’t have to be over the top or tacky (in fact we advise against this). A few transparent snow flakes over an existing background or a simple pattern using the customary red, green and white will usually do.
• Add some decorations. Just like your office or home, why not add some stockings, tinsel or a Christmas tree to your website (but again, don’t go overboard). Simply modify some of your existing graphics (remembering to make a backup of the originals) and you are good to go. A great example is the Canberra Furnished Accommodation website where they have added a stylish looking Santa hat to the corner of their logo.
• Add a Christmas counter. Working so hard you are not sure how many days are left until Christmas? Or perhaps you want to give you customers a subtle reminder that there aren’t too many shopping days left? Why not add a counter to your site counting down the number of days left until Christmas? There are lots of generic timers available online if you do a quick search of Google but if your having trouble finding one, I found this one especially for Christmas which even comes as a WordPress plugin.
• Add some falling snow. If you are feeling a little bit more adventurous you can also add some falling snow to your site like that used on Ma.tt’s website. You can download the code for it here.

Following on from my previous post, the finding simple team had a great weekend attending WordCamp Australia 2008 in Sydney over the weekend.

The location was perfect, there were lots of like minded people doing similar work in the web design space, the food was delicious, the free wifi was flawless and everyone received a funky free t-shirt upon arrival!

Matt’s presentation was easily the highlight of the conference, closely followed by presentations by

• Dan Milward who spoke about experiences with the WP-eCommerce plugin;
• Jane Wells who spoke about the upcoming version 2.7 release of WordPress (we’ll be doing free upgrades for all existing clients when it comes out!);
• Sam Bauers who spoke about his pet project “Prolouge Projects” - a great looking theme which lets teams of people collaborate and track tasks easily;
• Jeff Waugh who spoke about his love of WordPress and his work on Crikey!; and
• Alister Cameron who stirred up bit of a debate on licensing and the GPL.

In a nutshell - it was great to see so much love for and enthusiasm for the ongoing development of WordPress - it can only mean great things for WordPress and WordPress Community.

The finding simple team is attending WordCamp Australia 2008 this weekend in Sydney - a conference for users and developers of WordPress.

It looks like there are going to be some really interesting presentations about new media, blogging and better business using WordPress. Matt Mullenweg - the founder of WordPress - is even going to be giving the key note presentation!

We’ll be posting more about the conference over the next few days. In the meantime - you can check out the live video stream or follow the twitter.

SE-what?
Product and service research is now the second biggest online activity behind email. But, what’s the point in having a great website, with great information about the products and services you offer, if none of your target audience can find it? Internet search engines (incl. Google, Yahoo and MSN) are special sites on the web that are designed to help people find information stored on other sites. Sites’ positions in search engine results (also known as ‘rankings’) are determined based on a number of factors designed to provide end-users with helpful, accurate search results. The process of designing or modifying your site to enhance the likelihood of high search-engine rankings is known as search-engine optimisation (SEO).

Why do I need SEO?
The aim of a good SEO campaign is to achieve the highest possible ranking in search engine results (Google, Yahoo and MSN etc.) by ‘optimising’ your web page content, structure, meta-data and incoming links. The higher your search-engine ranking, the easier it is for your potential customers and clients to find your site, and therefore the higher your website traffic. Your job is then to ensure your site engages, retains and converts the traffic into sales or sales queries.

Simple Five point SEO Health Check
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is not easy – however there are some simple checks that you can perform yourself which will give you an indication of some of the areas that can be improved on your site to help increase its ranking in search engine results.

1. Check your Metadata
2. Check your Keywords
3. Check your URLs
4. Check your HTML
5. Check your Spelling

1. Check your Metadata.
Metadata, is data about data. It allows you to describe your website - largely for the benefit of search engines. There are three main metadata tags which you can check for on your site which are considered by search engines when determining your site’s position in search engine rankings. These are ‘Title’, ‘Description’ and ‘Keywords’.

Specifically you should check for:

1. the existence of these tags in your HTML source code,
2. that your title tag is descriptive,
3. the description tag gives a good summary of your page/site and helps draw users into your site (as it is often what is displayed by the search engines); and
4. that your keywords are relevant and meet your objectives.

In Internet Explorer 7 (IE) you can view a web pages source code by selecting VIEW -> SOURCE from the toolbar menu and in Firefox (FF) you can view the source by selecting VIEW -> PAGE SOURCE also from the toolbar menu.

Once you’ve found the source code look for:

• <title>YOUR PAGE TITLE GOES HERE</title>
• <meta name=”description” content=”A DESCRIPTION OF THE SITE/PAGE CONTENT GOES HERE“>
• <meta name=”keywords” content=”PAGE KEYWORDS GO HERE“>

If your site doesn’t have this information, or if it doesn’t reflect your site’s content and purpose then search engines may not rank your site as highly.

2. Check your keywords
Keywords are words or phrases that help search engines identify what search queries are relevant to your site. Keywords are contained both within your page/site metadata (see step 1 above) and within the content of your site.

Search engines often look at the frequency (often called density) in which words appear within your site to determine what searches are relevant to your site. It is therefore important that keywords appear more frequently within your sites content.

Have a think about how visitors to your site might describe what they’re looking for and write down the key words. For example if you were running a plumbing business in Melbourne, you might identify ‘plumber’, ‘plumber in Melbourne’, and ‘plumbing service’, but also things like ‘blocked drain’, ‘leaking taps’, ‘greywater system’, ‘water saving’ etc. Now, review your site’s content and count how many times these words/phrases appear. If they don’t appear, or only appear once or twice throughout your site, you should review your content and identify how you might be able to modify or add to your content to include these keywords.

3. Check your URLs
Website URLs (which stands for Uniform Resource Locators – basically this is the website ‘address’ i.e. http://findingsimple.com/blog) should be meaningful and descriptive and where possible use keywords within the URLs themselves.

Keeping with the plumbing example, abbreviations within existing URLs such as “watsav” can be expanded to “water-saving”.

Content management tools like WordPress usually have built in functionality which you can enable to create more meaningful urls (or permalinks) which use the page or post titles within the sites urls.
An example of an optimised url is the url of this post as it contains the title of the post itself – which has also been expanded to include the keywords “search engine optimisation”.

While it is good to include meaningful keywords within URLs, it is important not to go overboard because the longer the URL the more difficult it will be for users to remember the address.

4. Check your HTML
Another check you can perform quickly and easily yourself is whether or not your website’s HTML is valid. Invalid HTML often results in web pages that look different (and may have reduced functionality) on other computers, but in terms of SEO in my experience it is often an indication that your site may be poorly designed and not structured in a way that is search engine friendly.

Go to http://validator.w3.org/ and enter your websites address to automatically validate your websites markup language (HTML).

5. Check your spelling
Spelling mistakes believe it or not can also affect (adversely) your search engine rankings.

It is important that the keywords you have used are spelt correctly. You can check your spelling manually or you can use spellr.us to check your whole site for you.

Winning the race
While there are no guarantees that undertaking these 5 steps will put you at the top of the search-engine rakings, they should make it easier for search engines to effectively and accurately locate and index your site, which generally translates into improved rankings. In addition to the 5 steps listed in this article, there are a number of additional optimisation activities that can be undertaken to further enhance your site’s search-engine performance.

Many clients find it useful when I explain that SEO is a lot like coaching an athlete for a race. While the coach can’t guarantee that their athlete will win the race (largely because there are a number of factors outside the coach’s control), a good coaching program will give the athlete the best chance of success. Undertaking search-engine optimisation won’t ensure that your site comes out on top and is number one on Google, but it will give it the best chance of reaching that goal. If you are interested in finding out how finding simple can ‘coach’ your website for search engine success, please contact us.

Soloists, entrepeneurs, freelancers and small business owners need to know other soloists, entrepeneurs, freelancers and small business owners. We need to make new connections, increase our network, hear about what others are doing, and be in the right place when somebody else needs to out-source a gig…

To help this process along I’ve decided to start a little non-event called the Very Small Business Lunch to bring soloists, entrepeneurs, freelancers and small business owners in the Canberra region together for an hour-long lunch once or twice a month.

I’ll be sending an email around for the first event in late October to early November, so if you are interested in tagging along, meeting a few new people and making some connections all you need to do is flick me your address on the Very Small Business Lunch site and I’ll let you know when and where (I like to keep things simple).