Real SMB IT: Web Site Improvements; The Site Map

This post is the next in an intermittent series looking at your smaller business web site from a marketing perspective -  When you don’t have marketing staff!

This series started with this post, IT In Marketing? here and covers looking at real world web site improvements that SMB’s can make that don’t require major work or extensive help from experts. Stuff that can be typically done by a smaller business either by themselves, or in some cases just basic tech staff assistance.

In the previous post in this series, I wrote about the importance of adding a Site Map to your Web Site. That post also links to a full definition of what a Site Map actually is, and what it does as well.

I wanted to dig deeper into this topic for one reason; When it comes to a Site Map on your Web site, you actually want two of them!

Your Web Site is collection of pieces of content broken down into various pages. These pages could include Contact Us information, products and services you provide, case studies The works. That can be a lot of content scattered over many web pages. These site maps simply ensure that it is easy for visitors to find the information and content that they are looking for. Because if they don’t find it quickly, odds are that they will just go to the next web site.

The first Site Map; For Humans

The first Site Map that you create is for those of us in the human category. It is simply a hierarchical set of links that ensure that people that are on your Web Site don’t get lost. If they find themselves in unknown territory and get lost trying to find the information they were looking for, the site map is a quick way to ensure that they stick around.

Similar to a table of contents, the site map is a link that when a user clicks on it, takes them to a page that gives a quick summary of all content, and the links to all that content on your Web Site, it could look similar to this;

About YourCompany

* Overview
* News
* Our Philosophy
* Why Choose Us
* Our Staff
* Careers

Services & Solutions

* Overview
* Product_name
* Solution_Name

I am confident you have seen those type of links along the side, or bottom of other web sites. Again, need a quick check of where you are in that web site? The above sample tells you quickly and easily.

The Second Site Map; For Computers

More specifically, this second Site Map is a computer readable format that allows the search engines to quickly and efficiently index all the content that exists on your Web Site. You want to ensure that all content is properly indexed so that if some one searches the Internet for; “Who sells this widget in my town?” your information can appear in their search results.

This second map looks a little different, and after you create it, humans don’t see it. The data for this machine readable site map is in a data format called XML and sits in a file called Sitemap.xml right at the root of your Web Site.

This XML site map can be created manually (ugg) but there are also tools that can do it automatically for you. Note that the tool I used to generate this sample is shown in the second line below.

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″ ?>
- <!– Created by Devintelligence.com Sitemap Generator
–>
- <urlset xmlns=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84″>
- <url>
<loc>http://www.yourcompany.com</loc>
<lastmod>2009-11-06</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
- <url>
<loc>http://www.yourcompany.com/about_news.asp#27Oct08</loc>
<lastmod>2009-11-06</lastmod>
<changefreq>hourly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>

As you see, this one is not pretty! but again, once you create it and place it on the root of your web site, humans won’t actually see it. The only time the you need to see it is if you add new pages to your web site, make sure the the site map gets updated as well.

The SMB Takeaway

For the human readable site map, you will most likely need the help of your web site developer, the second you can do yourself very easily.

The two of them together ensure that all content on your web site can easily be found, by people, or by computers!

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Real SMB IT: Repetitive Problems

(Let me guess – You have that complaint as well?)

What are repetitive problems? And what is so bad about them?

Repetitive problems are IT service issues that either do repeat on a regular basis (eg. Jane Can’t print) or seem to occur on a regular basis (eg. The Internet is dead).

In both cases these issues will both suck the life out of your staff, and leave a lasting perception that IT staff or suppliers are never meeting expectations in the quality of IT service and support delivery.

The Quick And The Dead

Sure you want IT related issues and problems resolved rapidly. But it is important to understand that rapidly must be balanced by permanently.

You do not want IT staff or suppliers fixing the same problem again and again. Avoidance of these repetitive problems comes down to investigating and communicating the root cause of that IT service or asset failure. Identifying and communicating this root cause permits a reasonable discussion and decision on mitigating that possible repeat of that failure.

In some cases, it may not possible or desirable to permanently kill all repetitive issues. As an example, perhaps your current budgetary considerations make replacing that defective printer a low priority. But at least having that decision agreed upon and documented can remove that vague perception that your IT staff or supplier is not delivering adequate service.

The SMB Takeaway

I have talked with many SME business owners and managers over the years, and a common theme in complaints about their IT service staff or outsourced service providers is when failures occur in the same IT service or asset consistently and repeatedly. So the discussion must be held on that root cause, that why?

These type of Repetitive problems must be avoided and killed where ever, and when ever possible.

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Photo Credit donnjmck via flickr

Real SMB IT: DNS, MX, What Is It? (And Why Should I Care?)

Could your business be kicked completely off the Internet?

The answer is yes!By kicked off the Internet, I mean invisible. Impossible to find.

So lets start with a little background.

At its most basic, all computers on the Internet communicate with each other with a unique number called an Internet Protocol (IP) address. As an analogy, just imagine this number as similar to a phone number.

But! when you visit a Web Site, or send an e-mail, you are using words, not numbers. you type in the www.yourcompany.com, or you send me an email by typing elliotross@company_name.ca

Since the computers communicate with each other via IP address numbers, and we humans prefer text and words, something is needed to translate those human readable words, into the machine readable numbers.

Enter DNS!

If you think of a phone book, you look up the words Elliot Ross which points to the listing for my telephone number. The domain naming system (DNS) provides a similar ability for our computers to translate human readable text we type into the machine IP address.

If you want to see this in action, simply open your Web Browser and paste these numbers into the address bar: 74.125.45.100

You will see the Google Web Site appear. (at least at the time of this writing!) I say at the time of this writing, because the machine readable number can be changed, and just like the phone book, If I change my phone number, as long as Elliot Ross is pointed to that new phone number – you won’t have any problem.

That little MX just stands for Mail eXchanger, in other words, when you send me an e-mail, that little MX tells the internet that to reach me by e-mail, “send that e-mail to this server over here!”

And Why Should You Care?

The first and easiest, if you think you cannot get on the Internet when you type in a company name, DNS problems are a common source of the issue.

But that is NOT what this is about

A SMB that I am acquainted with had an issue where an unknown individual tried to hi-jack that DNS information from them, and make it point to servers that were not associated with their business.

To continue with my phone book analogy, imagine that when you look up my name, the phone number that my name points to is yours, not mine.

So I would never get any calls.

Except on the Web, it is not missing some phone calls, it means that you completely disappear from the Internet. No Web Site, no e-mail. Nada.

There are checks and balances to make this difficult to do, but it goes to emphasize;

You must make sure all critical information about your on-line presence is owned by you.

Not your supplier.

Not your contractor.

That includes the contact information for your Internet domain and its DNS records. They may help you set that information up, but the contact name and information must be yours.

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Photo Credit merfam via flickr

Real SMB IT: Don’t Edit E-Mail Attachments in Outlook!

I personally know two people have been upset (OK livid) having each lost a lot of work by making this mistake!

You know you have probably done it too!

Like many businesses, lets assume that you are using MS Office and Outlook at your office. Lets also assume somebody E-Mails you a Microsoft Office document, you open the e-mail and then double click on that attachment. Up pops that document and you start editing away.

I know you are careful; you religiously make sure that you hit the Save button periodically! but still, after a couple of hours and a coffee or two later;

* With the document still open, you close MS Outlook, you notice that Outlook makes some weird message asking if you want to save your changes, and heck – since you haven’t changed anything in the  e-mail itself, you just click no.

* Or, perhaps MS Outlook or MS Office crashes on your computer. Boom! - a big time blow up forcing you to restart MS Office, or possibly even restart the whole computer.

You guessed it (or have been there!) All your work could be gone. Hours of work could have vanished.

Save that attachment outside of Outlook first!

When ever you receive a document or spreadsheet as an attachment in MS Outlook, you first open that attachment, but! before starting to make changes, select the File menu, and click the Save As thingy and save it to a folder on your local PC, or your shared network storage first!

Because?

When you edit a Microsoft document that is located in a directory (folder) on a physical disk, the software opens the document and creates a temporary copy of the document in that same folder. That is normal and the mechanism used by MS Office to recover your data after any possible crash of MS Office.

But! If you edit that document while it is still an e-mail attachment???….

First, even though you are editing a Microsoft Office document, it is still truly a simple e-mail message that you are editing. No matter how many times you hit Save, that saving of the document does not save those edits to that e-mail! You still must save that entire changed e-mail. And second, editing that e-mail as an attachment doesn’t save that temporary working copy of the document in a easily accessible working directory.

When you edit that document while it is still an attachment, there is still a temporary working copy, but it is not sitting neatly in your My Documents, or other easy to find location.

Depending on your version of Windows, and the version of Outlook etc, the edits you are making to that document get saved in temporary places controlled by the operating system. Those areas are hard to find and pretty ugly. For example, if you use Outlook 2003 those temporary files will be hidden in;
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\OLKxxx

In this example, username is the user name that is used by the person who is currently logged on to the computer, and xxx is a randomly generated sequence of letters and numbers.

And Outlook 2007?

C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\xxxxxxxx

The SMB Takeaway

You get the idea, those crashes happen, don’t edit attachments within the original e-mail. Save them first

Real SMB IT: Web Site Improvements; The Next Step

This post is the next in an intermittent series looking at your web site from a marketing perspective -  When you are not a marketing person!

I introduced this series with this post titled; IT -  In Marketing?,  this is the next post on helping smaller businesses to improve their Web sites at little to no expense.

This series has been looking at real world improvements that don’t require major work or extensive help from experts. Stuff that can be typically done by a smaller business either by themselves, or in some cases just basic tech staff assistance.

In the last post I identified and fixed an issue with how our Web Site is found on the Internet.

For this next stage, I wanted to start working on two more (very) common errors for smaller businesses;

1) You created your Web Site, but then have not updated it in years

2) Your Web Site does not have a Site Map (Full definition of what a Site Map is, and does from Wikipedia)  to improve how people can navigate around your Web Site, and secondly, to assist the Search Engines to index all of the content on your Web Site. NOTE: Two Site Maps are actually required, one human readable and one machine readable, for search engine indexing spiders. I will go into the machine readable type in a later post

Search Engine Spiders!

To get this started, I asked our Web Site Developer to create the human readable Web Code for the Site Map, and the Web Code for a spot where I could add new content in the form of press release type News articles.

I will be looking at improving the core content on each page of the Web Site, but I wanted to get these ‘News’ pieces ready to go first as we have been pretty bad at demonstrating what we have already done successfully for our customers.

Once that framework was created, I wrote our first News content, formatted it and placed it in the container that the Web Developer had created for me.

Keyword Alert: Container or Template!

Don’t forget, my goal is NOT to have to go to developer staff each and every time I need to get each new piece of content added to the site, so I asked that they create a template that basically says; Insert new content here!

I still had to format the content the way that I wished, but did not have to write any ‘code’ to get it working.

So now we have a new site map and some new content on the Web Site. The machine readable Site Map is also there, but it is a little different and worth its own post. It will be a little while before the next search engine visit to index the new stuff, but I will keep watching!

There will be more to come, so stay tuned by getting updates with the RSS icon on the Home Page!

Photo credit scoobymoo via flickr

Build It, Grow it, Improve it

This post has been on the to-do list for months, but a recent conversation with the president of a small business declared to me that it was time to git ‘r done!

This SMB Exec has been working on a new and improved Web Site.

Actually they have been working on it for a very, very long time. And even though this new Web Site is not even live yet, he is already planning to redo all the design.

So, How Long Will That New, New Web Site Take?

I don’t know – plain and simple

So what we have here is a new Web Site that no one has seen. And no one will see until it reaches its ‘2.0′ version.

What’s Next Version 3.0?

Now the historical part, Mark Gould at Enlightened Tradition pointed me to John Gruber’s blog.

The article deals deals primarily with the R&D and design stage of product development (Apples’ iPhone in this case) But it i is a valid concern for all parts of IT, including SMB Web Sites;

Start with something simple and build it, grow it, improve it, steadily over time. Evolve it.

The SMB Takeaway

Get it out there, build on it, improve it.

But there is no point in trying to wait for that one vague future day that everything is perfect. It won’t happen

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On-line Backup – Speed Bumps

I previously wrote about some of the due diligence questions to look at on looking at hosted, on-line backups.

Michael Krigsman at ZDnet has some personal observations from experience on that very topic.

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Photo Credit gwen via flickr

SPAM Exists, Get Over It

In the “old days”, circa 10 years ago, to avoid E-Mail SPAM you bought anti-spam software and your IT staff would spend hours tweaking the rules that the software used to decide what to block (and what not to block).

These filtering rules got pretty complex, as spammers quickly learned not to use a pure word. You probably have seen SPAM emails with misspellings this in the title; Viagra, V1@gr@, vi@6ra .. you get the idea.

The trick was to build filters that would catch as much of that crap as possible, but without stopping the legitimate e-mail.

Today?

Anti-spam tools now are mature and can be contracted out to service providers for about 2 bucks per person per month. These tools are now mathematically driven and rarely (but still occasionally!) block legitimate e-mail.

The point is; there is no excuse any more for your staff to wade through through hundreds of SPAM emails looking for the few that are not SPAM.

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Published; The Hard Questions For Your Tech Team

Thanks to Jim and Ian, Canadian Business Magazines entrepreneur supplement PROFIT published another article by me on asking the pointed questions that ensure you are getting the most value out of your IT Staff or suppliers

The column is for growing business owners, ‘C’ level execs and managers, and briefly covers;

* How quickly can we fix breakdowns?

* What’s our long-term plan?

* How are we managing our tech spending?

* What will we do if a tech disaster strikes?

* How are we using technology to boost productivity?

The full column is here!

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1 Simple Way to Never Miss That Sales Team E-Mail

Marketing expert Seth Godin has a brief  rant post regarding his frustration at being unable to contact the sales teams at several organizations via an e-mail address.

After searching for that type of product or service, he found the web sites of some businesses that met his criteria. Next step, Mr. Godin starts looking for some pricing information, and…. was having difficulty finding a way to contact the business sales team to get that information!

Yes, as a SME, your Web Site must have the Contact page within 1 click of every page, and I am going to assume that your business would not give Mr. Godin that same problem. I know that your Contact Us page clearly  gives your sales@ e-mail address, your phone number, the works.

What I wanted to expand upon a little, is  how you can ensure that those critical e-mails coming from people who actually found your Web Site actually get monitored by more than one person.

Which of these methods do you currently do?

If you are like many businesses in the SME space, these critical functional e-mail addresses usually work as follows;

* Someone is assigned to manually check an e-mail in box for sales@yourcompany.com. (probably others such as HR@, info@ too)

* Or perhaps one individual has an e-mail alias (secondary address) for this functional sales@ account.

The Problem?

Those methods both require humans and are prone to error.

First; an individual is assigned to do the e-mail check. If that individual is sick one day – will someone know to take on that task? Or will that sales request languish until the one person responsible returns?

Secondly, in the second example, where the e-mail is assigned as an alias, again human intervention is required. Does someone check that e-mail if that individual is sick, or on vacation? How about if that individual leaves your business? that alias must be transferred to somebody else. If you forget to do that, any e-mail saying; ..we need your product tomorrow! is gone to that great computer in the sky.

The Other Option: The Distribution List

Using Distribution Lists is a far more effective, less error prone method of dealing with those critical  sales@yourcompany.com and other functional (eg. HR@, info@) e-mail addresses.

This does assume that you are using an e-mail platform that supports creating these distribution lists. (some Web Only E-Mail programs may not) But rather than relying on one individual to look for these important e-mails, create a a Distribution List (the exact steps will vary depending on your e-mail platform) then assign two or more individuals to that distribution list. In this case all team members assigned to the list will receive that critical e-mail.

With some mail servers, you can even have a central copy of that e-mail stored in a common public folder before the distribution list sends copies to all memebers of the list. This gives you a permanent copy of that e-mail.

The SMB Takeaway

I know you have great people, but if one individual has been checking that sales email address for years, I guarantee that it will be easy to forget that a plan B must exist if that individual is away.

That individual can still be the primary person to act on all email coming in through your distribution list, but since the backup individual automatically gets a copy – they cannot forget that they are that human backup!

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