Image Editing for Your Website
Posted on | April 9, 2010 | No Comments
My customers say the images load slowly on my site, but it works fine for me.
Slow-loading & distorted images.
I’ve heard this from quite a few people before. I just happened upon a site with incredibly slow-loading pictures, and it prompted me to share with you today how to fix it. While there can be many factors contributing to the speed at which your site loads, I’m going to address one of the most common culprits: image size and resolution.
The reason you may not notice so much on your own site is that your browser caches (or remembers) these files. After you’ve visited your own website and loaded the files once, they pop right back up the next time. However, when new visitors arrive, they may not bother to stick around through the first download.
Adding an image to your website is not the same as posting it on Facebook or Flicker. While these sites may re-size images for you, you’re supposed to do it yourself before you display an image on your web page. There is no need to publish high resolution photos on the internet, unless the purpose is for somebody to download and print them. The limiting factor that determines the quality of image we view on our computer screen is the computer screen itself!
The standard recommended resolution for web graphics is 72 dpi. With continued improvements in monitor quality, some people can see a clearer image up to 85 dpi or so. Beyond that, you’re really just wasting the computer’s effort loading a larger document (the file size is larger at higher dpi, not the display size). Since I do e-commerce, and the photos are key to showing off my products, I like to use 80 dpi. Sometimes I’ll go down to 76 dpi, and sometimes up to 85 dpi. Even that jump from 80 dpi to 85 dpi can impact your page load times.
In addition to resolution, you want your images to be set to the same display size you want to see on your web page. If you take an image that’s 1200 x 1200 pixels and insert it into a space that’s 180 x 180 on your site, the web browser is forced to re-size the picture on the fly each time your page is loaded. While browsers can do this, your page load times will suffer, and the image quality is often compromised as well.
I see these same mistakes time and time again as I browse the web. Often, small business owners are trying to build websites themselves or have their son, daughter, or neighbor do it for them. If you’re paying for professional web development, your webmaster should know this stuff. If yours doesn’t, imagine what else he or she doesn’t know.
Yelp: Local Business Reviews
Posted on | March 21, 2010 | 1 Comment
Q: Should I be using Yelp for my business?
If you’re local, yes! You should use Yelp if you target local customers, and it’s REALLY helpful if you have a local physical location. What is Yelp? A place for customers to write reviews of local businesses, and a place for potential customers to find a business based on its reviews. Yelp has become incredibly popular, especially in certain industries. You may already have reviews on Yelp and not even know about it. Have you checked? Visit http://www.yelp.com and search for your business. If you’re on there and haven’t claimed your page, you should create an account and verify that you’re the owner.
The idea of online reviews makes some business owners nervous. If you’re doing a good job serving your customers, reviews are one of the best marketing tools you can use, and you don’t even need to pay for them! The key is to get lots of reviews (and, of course, to provide good service in the first place). If you only have two reviews and one’s good and the other’s bad, people will probably hesitate to do business with you. If you’ve got a bunch of reviews and there are maybe just a couple of so-so one’s mixed in, they tend to be discounted. Yelp has even added a new feature that lets you respond to poor reviews.
So, how do you get more reviews? My natural suggestion would be to contact your customers and invite them to write a review, or possibly give them something at the close of a transaction asking for their review. The folks at Yelp did not agree with me. It turns out that if a reviewer is not a regular Yelp user, their review will drop off the page fairly quickly. Yelp says they do this to avoid the influence of potentially fake reviews. I guess they figure if someone comes to Yelp just to write a review about your business and doesn’t come back, they may be someone you know who just raved about you as a favor.
Yelp wants you to go out and get existing Yelp users to come to your business so they can review it. Yelp gives these reviews more weight and leaves them on your page longer. How do you get Yelpers to come to your business when you don’t have many reviews yet? Why, advertise on Yelp, of course! So, is Yelp’s policy really about protecting visitors from fake reviews, or is it a ploy to get more advertisers? When I looked into this for my online boutique, I didn’t have any reviews yet. (Since I didn’t have a physical local location, my primary target market was not local.) I thought, why would I advertise to bring visitors to a Yelp page with no reviews? What conversion would I get from that?
What’s the answer? If you have a local business, I think you’ll benefit from a little of both – marketing to Yelp users and asking your customers to visit Yelp and post a review. Who knows? If your customers are new to Yelp, they may fall in love with it and become frequent users. Maybe some of them already are. Also, if you receive reviews on a regular basis, old reviews that drop off the page will be replaced by new ones. If you aren’t ready to dive into Yelp’s advertising program, there are other ways to increase your exposure. First, you should claim your business and fill in all the details in your profile. You can also post a special offer on your page (this doesn’t cost anything), and it will show up under your business listing in the search results. Change your offer frequently to attract attention and bring new customers, or test two offers to see which one gives you the best results.
To learn more, here’s a good article to read: http://mashable.com/2010/03/20/yelp-for-business/
Tags: Local Business Marketing > Reviews > social media > web 2.0 > Yelp
Facebook Group, Page or Profile?
Posted on | March 16, 2010 | No Comments
Q: I want to set up FB for my business, Chef Bambino. Should I set up a group or a new user?
There are three different types of pages on FB – the Profile, the Fan Page, and the Group. According to FB rules, Profiles are only for people, not businesses, organizations or other entities. I see this rule broken often, sometimes by people who do so unknowingly. Businesses that do this may be perceived as amateur, and run the risk of getting kicked off Facebook.
For your business, I would definitely create a Fan Page. This is like your business’s homepage on FB, and you would be the administrator through your personal Profile. Businesses are able to assign multiple admins if they want to. Your Page will have a wall and whichever other features you select. People can become fans of your business, and your posts will show up in their streams. If they like or comment on something, then the post will be repeated out to their friends.
One big benefit to your customers of becoming a ‘fan’ of your business rather than a ‘friend’ is that they can become your fans without opening their personal accounts to you. In your case, you may be friends with many of your fans as well, but many businesses don’t have quite as personal a relationship with their customers as you do. I might think twice about becoming a ‘friend’ of a business if it meant they could see all my personal posts.
One major drawback of a fan page is that they don’t have notifications. This means that if someone comments or posts on your business’s wall, you won’t receive an email letting you know. Same thing if someone new becomes a fan or ‘likes’ a post. There are two ways to deal with this that I know of. One is to ‘like’ or comment on your own posts so you will then get notified through your personal Profile. The normal way that I suppose FB expects is for you to just visit your page all the time to check.
You can create a Group in addition to your fan page. You may name it after your business, or you may name it for a related theme that people are likely to engage in discussion for, such as cooking with kids. Again, the problem is that you don’t get notifications from groups. The groups haven’t been very useful to me so far because you don’t get notifications, and wall posts don’t even show up in members’ streams. From what I’ve seen, the only way people engage is if they visit the group on their own to see what’s up, or if you send them a private message to come join an immediate conversation. Also, it seems you can only comment on the last entry, more like it’s single a forum discussion, rather than comment on any post.
Groups and Pages each have their benefits. In a group, you can send a private message to members, which you can’t do on a Fan Page. You can also choose to have groups open, private (membership on approval), or secret (not seen by anyone unless they are invited). Someone needs to be logged into FB to see a Group page, even an open one, while a FB Fan Page is visible without being logged in and gets indexed by search engines. On a Fan Page, you can invite all members to an event, although I believe you need to click on each one individually for some reason. Although I’ve read you can’t invite group members to events, that must have changed because groups do have events now.
Here’s an article with an on-going discussion of Pages vs. Groups. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/facebook-group-vs-facebook-fan-page-whats-better/7761/. The original article is over a year old, but the discussion is current.
If you’re not sure how to create a Fan Page, you can go to mine at http://www.facebook.com/satinwebsolutions and look for the link at the bottom of the left column that says, “Create a Page for My Business.”
Let me know how it goes!
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