Seating is limited, so don’t delay! The response to the spring web marketing workshops was very positive. As a result of the large number of signups, there are several people still on the waiting list who will receive first priority on the fall/winter workshop registrations.

CLICK HERE for details and registration.

Free BBQ from 10:00 – 4:00 for the first 1000 visitors!

Live music provided by The Linzy McMurter Trio
have a listen:     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQwDMq4iK7U

Meet the Emerald Recreation (ERG) Group and all its dealers and their great products, services and discounts.

Become an ERG Member on this day only $30.00/yr., (tax incl.) And get two free gifts when you join, from rounds of golf, scuba diving, skate sharpening, horseback riding, paintball or a boat cruise.

Some of the ERG dealers will be blowing out their end of season inventory, so don’t miss out on some really super deals!

Sponsored by Montanas & Kelsey’s Restaurants and Thompson’s Tents!

At InfoLink we use the term ‘business smart’ to describe sites that meet or exceed a set of criteria that we apply to every site we develop.   How does your site measure up in these areas?

Sample of a cluttered site

Is it Visually Appealing?  There’s only one thing worse than a site that opens to flashing buttons and links, intrusive popup boxes and unnecessary animation, and that’s a site with no swag at all!

• Is your site design appropriate to the desired audience?
• Are pages structured in an appealing manner, uncluttered and easy to read?
• Are images and flash properly optimized for quick downloads?
• Are colour palettes appealing and appropriate to your product?  Is there good balance between text and images?

Is it Engaging and Targeted?  Knowing your audience is a great start on the road to business smart.  Choose your design, your colour palette and navigation with that demographic in mind.

• The first thing visitors to a website do is look for something to click on.  Knowing this is the case, why not give them what they want.
• Clear calls to action, such as “Buy Now” , “Click for free downloads”, “Sign up for free newsletter”   or “Read More” invite visitors to go deeper into your site, hopefully engaging them in a measurable action like a purchase, providing an email address or downloading a flyer.

Is it Easy to Navigate?  Begin with the end in mind.  What do you want visitors to know about your business and how will your website’s navigation help them get to that information.

• A clear, intuitive navigation makes it easy for visitors to move through your site and quickly find information.
• Equally important however, is making it simple for them to find the information that YOU want them to find, thus converting them from visitors to customers.

Is it Search-Engine Optimized?  When you throw a party, you send out invitations, right?  Building a great website without optimizing is a bit like forgetting to send out those invitations.

• If you want traffic on your site, you must be ‘findable’ on search engines, particularly Google.  To be found on search engines, optimization is essential.
• Every site should start out with at least basic search engine optimization in place, for example pay attention to page titles, effective placement of keywords in text and alt text behind images.

Is it Secure?  The boring, nerdy stuff behind the pretty picture, your website’s security is an essential that is often overlooked.

• Always insure that coding is up to current standards
• Apply secure passwords
• Implement a clear set of procedures for website maintenance and updating.

Is it Measurable?  How will you know that your website is being found on search engines?  What pages get the most visits?  How long are visitors staying on your site?  What makes them leave?  How often do they come back?

• All of these questions can be answered by using tracking programs that are readily available and are usually free.
• Be sure your web developer/host provides you with access to your cPanel statistics tracking site,or, if you want an even more powerful tracking programs, have a Google Analytics tracking code applied to your site.

Are Appropriates Policies Included?   Every business needs policies, and sound web policies should be considered standard business practice.  Depending upon your business and your site, your web policies will vary.

• Protect your content, so always publish a copyright policy.
• If your site has e-commerce capabilities, your purchasing policies should be made clear.
• One of the biggest concerns among web users is privacy.  Visitors need to be reasonably assured that their personal information will be kept private and not shared with third party operators.
• Whether you are operating an online directory, an information site or even a simple blog, you are playing with fire if you do not have a disclaimer limiting your liability.

Is it Sustainable?  Your brand new website is launched and paid for!  It looks great!  So that’s it, right?  Wrong!

• Because your website meets your business needs today, doesn’t mean it will next year.  Investing a little more in the early development stages of your site can insure that it will be both scalable and sustainable– that it can grow with your business.  Consider the many options for content management and site updating capabilities.
• Don’t forget to budget for ongoing costs like domain name renewal, hosting, reliable technical support and ongoing site maintenance.

The importance of a well-thought-out, engaging and interactive website is a key business tool. In many cases, it is the first line of contact that your existing clients have with you and the first impression you make on your potential customers. If it’s not up to par, you probably won’t get a return visit – and your audience won’t become engaged.

InfoLink’s dynamic team’s experience in graphic design, website development, e-commerce and marketing offers a combination of artistic creativity, business best practices and exceptional listening skills that few web design studios can rival. You can be confident that whatever your project demands, we can deliver, on time and on budget.

Contact us for a free consultation about your “business-smart” website.

Web hosting terms:

Web hosting – A web hosting service makes a website accessible via the World Wide Web. The website files are stored in a secure data centre with high-speed access to the backbone of the Internet.

Domain – An example of a domain name is www.yourbusiness.com.  Domains can have different extensions ie. .com, .ca, .net, .org, .mobi … Domains are registered/renewed on an annual basis, but registration can be paid in advance for several years.   See article :: Demystifying the Domain Decision.

Domain name server, or DNS – the system that automatically translates Internet addresses to the numeric machine addresses that computers use.

Web server – A computer dedicated to the storage and delivery of web pages on the Internet.   InfoLink’s web servers are housed in a secure data centre with ultra-high speed access to the backbone of the Internet, as well as redundant power supply and daily backups.

FTP – File Transfer Protocol is a common method for sending files between two computers.  In the case of web sites, this is the transfer of files between a local computer and the web server (computer).  This would be “uploading” and “downloading” of files.

IP address -  Every web server has an IP address, a unique address that allows other computers to know where to find it.  An example is the IP address for this web site:  74.53.239.51   You can check your IP address for your computer’s network at http://www.checkmyip.com

Disk/Storage Space – The amount of disk space allowed for your account on the host’s servers. Usually quoted in megabytes. InfoLink standard and advanced hosting accounts have 300 MB of disk space allocated.

Bandwidth – The amount of monthly traffic or data transfer through your account. Usually quoted in megabytes per month.  InfoLink standard and advanced hosting accounts have 3,000 MB of bandwidth allocated.

SSL secure server - “Secure Socket Layer” basically means secure encrypted communication. E-commerce sites require SSL.

Email features:

Autoresponder - Application that automatically responds to emails with a pre-written reply.

Spam Filtering - Application designed to reduce the receipt of junk email *SPAM*

Domain based email – Email accounts based on a website’s domain name.

Web applications:

A web application – is a program that is accessed over a network such as the Internet or an intranet.

Blog (WebLog) – a shared on-line journal where people can post entries; “postings” on a blog are usually in chronological order.  In recent years, blog software has become more full-featured and is commonly used to create and maintain regular web sites.

• Blogging - the act of posting on blogs
• Blogger - a person who blogs
• Blogosphere - The internet blogging community
• Tags - labelling / attaching keywords to collect similar posts
• Tag cloud – Displaying tags lists or keywords in a blog
• Blogroll - list of links to other blogs in your sidebar
• WordPress -  popular blog software

Content management system (CMS)- A website maintenance tool for non-technical staff.  Administration is typically done through a web browser interface, but some systems require the use of desktop software.

Control panel (Cpanel) -Your gateway to your hosting account. Contains features to monitor your hard disk space and bandwidth usage; to access your web site traffic reports; to administer your email accounts; to back up your website files; and more. Available with all InfoLink standard and advanced hosting packages.

Plugins – Small files that add improved functionality and new features.  An example of a WordPress plugin adds more options to the navigation menu system.

Shopping cart system – Software used to process e-commerce transactions online.

Widgets – are stand-alone applications you can also  embed in other applications, like a website.  Blog software commonly uses widgets to display such features as a calendar,  a Twitter feed …

Web Activity Reports:

Definitions

• Unique Visits – this is the actual number of users who visited your site
• User Sessions – this is the actual number of times the site was visited
• Page Views – this number represents how many of your website’s pages were visited
• Pages per visitor – an average number of pages visited per visitor
• Bounce Rate – the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance or landing page

Awstats – Awstats is a web traffic measurement program that shows the number of visitors & page views daily/weekly/monthly/yearly; how visitors found your site; what actions they took in your site … Awstats is included on InfoLink standard and advanced web hosting package.  See video tutorial  How to Use Awstats and apply it to your business.

Google Analytics (GA) – is a service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website.  Google Analytics installation and website traffic analysis/recommendations are included in InfoLink custom web design packages.  See video Beginning Analytics: Interpreting and Acting on Your Data

Web Marketing Terms:

Page Rank- A number between 0 and 10 that rates a web page for its popularity (the number of other web sites that link to it). Very popular sites may have a page rank of 6 – 9. Your average web site is flat out getting a Page Rank of 5.  Try the free Page Rank Checker Tool www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php

Search engine optimization, or SEO - to improve your search engine rankings.

Search engine marketing, or SEM -  is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of search engine optimization, paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.

Social media – Websites and applications that allow the sharing of information and creation of communities through online networks of people.  Examples include blogs, wikis, podcasts, and sites to share photos and bookmarks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter pages.

Web design:

“Business-smart” web site – this is an InfoLink term for web sites which meet the following criteria:

• engaging
• easy to navigate
• appealing visually to the target audience/s
• search-engine optimized
• secure (software is kept updated; coding is up to current standards; secure passwords and procedures)
• measurable (measurable web traffic – volume and sources; measurable results)
• targeted,  contains calls to action (knowing who and what you want, and asking for the business)
• contains appropriate policies (ie. copyright, privacy, terms of use, disclaimers, purchasing policies)
• sustainable (setup and ongoing costs are reasonable; a reliable support system is in place)

Custom design – exclusive one-of-a-kind web designs.

Template design – a preset format for a web site design, used so that the format does not have to be recreated each time it is used.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) – is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics (the look and formatting) of a web page.

HTML – Hypertext Markup Language, a standardized system for tagging text files to achieve font, colour, graphic, and hyperlink effects on World Wide Web pages

XML - short for eXtensible Markup Language. a general-purpose markup language for syndication formats used on blogs.

Scripting/Language - Programming language that adds functionality to a web page. Examples are: Javascript, PHP, Perl and C++.

Miscellaneous:

Cache – Cache is a web browser feature that saves copies of web pages on your computer’s hardrive. You may need to “clear your cache”  to view recent updates to your website, since your browser may have saved the previous version of the page.

CAPTCHA - or “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” is a piece of code put into a website that gives a user a simple test to determine if the user is a computer or human. CAPTCHA’s are often seen as distorted images or text at the end of web or ecommerce forms.

Digital assets – A digital asset is a digital file that has value such as images, graphics, audio, video, Web designs,  domain names.

Interactivity – A Web page is interactive when it prompts a response from the user or in some way can interact with the user dynamically (eg; filling out a form or a poll etc).

RSS - a family of web feed formats used for Web syndication. Short form for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary

WYSIWYG - A WYSIWYG or “What You See Is What You Get” editor is a view often found in today’s content management systems (CMS). The WYSIWYG editor displays web content (that you’re editing) in a very similar fashion to the final output, rather than in HTML.