Technical Archives - Crocus Communications

02/03/2016 By crocuscomms 2 Comments

10 Simple Steps To Auditing Your Website

It’s a given that we have a website for our business these days, whether it’s a tech startup or a museum, a beauty brand or a consultancy; the quality of both the design and the content, however, varies significantly.

Those of us who are solopreneurs or early-stage startups are likely to be managing our websites ourselves, and although there are many platforms and tools out there now that make this possible it can still be difficult to reach the professional results that we are after. Even when we can afford to work with an agency, it’s important that we ourselves understand what it is we want in order to properly brief them.

Here are 10 simple steps to auditing your website in order to identify areas of improvement that you can address yourself or pass on to your agency.

1. The strategy

a. Who is your audience?

All effective marketing, and this includes your website, starts with a clear understanding of the “who” that you’re targeting.

Who is your ideal client or customer? What insights do you have about them, in terms of both demographics and psychographics? What are they looking for when they arrive on your website?

Understanding who your audience is and what they want is crucial to being able to meet those needs on your website.

b. What are your objectives?

Before we start reviewing your site, we need to understand what it is that you’re trying to achieve.

When it comes to your overall marketing efforts, are you looking to establish yourself in a new industry, to increase awareness of your product or service, or perhaps to increase engagement with your brand? How does your website fit into your overall ecosystem and what is its role? Is its function to demonstrate your credibility and establish trust? Are you trying to generate leads and build your email list? Is it about making sales online or driving people into your physical stores?

Make sure you’re clear on the objective of the website before you launch into the rest of the audit.

2. The home page

When a potential client or customer arrives on your homepage, you want it to be immediately obvious what it is that you actually do. If there’s any element of confusion, even your ideal customer may leave in frustration or indifference and your bounce rate (the % of people who leave your website having only viewed that one page) will be high.

What’s the ONE message you want your visitor to get, above all others? What’s the next step, the action that you want them to take? Is your home page currently meeting your objective?

This can get a little tricky if you have different customer targets and different service offerings all on the same website. The goal is the same, however: be as single-minded as you can be.

EXAMPLE: The 4-hour work week

This is an unusual example but potentially very effective. Tim Ferriss, of Four-Hour Work Week fame, has created a home page with a START HERE box where you are immediately encouraged to sign up for a bunch of freebies. To persuade you to do this, the rest of the page includes a promise of “10x your per-hour output” along with quotes from prominent media outlets including the New York Times and some impressive stats from Amazon. If you’re not convinced, he still has a simple navigation at the bottom pointing you towards his TV show, his blog, and his podcast.

3. The navigation

It’s not just the dreaded Millennials, everyone today has a short attention span. You want to guide your website visitors quickly and seamlessly along the desired path to their ultimate destination.

If they’ve arrived on the home page for the first time, what’s the next step you want them to take? If it’s a returning visitor who’s already done their research and now wants to buy, do you offer a fast path to purchase with a minimal number of clicks? What if they need more information, is it easy to find the FAQs or to get in touch with customer services? Is the menu at the top of the page self-explanatory? Keep things simple and straightforward.

Again, this can get more complicated if you have different paths you want users to follow depending on who they are and what they’re looking for, but even here: keep things super simple, make the message very clear, and provide a natural next step for each of your customer segments.

EXAMPLE: Gary Vaynerchuk

Gary’s website has a clever “First-time here?” button to direct new visitors that appears on your first visit only, at the top of his page. The rest of his menu is super clear: Blog, Recent Press, Books, Events; and the final item in the menu is a strong call to action “Hire me to speak”. You can go straight to one of those menu items, or you can keep scrolling down, where you’ll be able to sign up to the newsletter, find out more about Gary’s story and his media appearances, and follow him on social media.

4. The content

Does your website contain content that is relevant and engaging for your visitors? Does it answer all the questions they’re likely to have?

You want to create content for your site that sits in the sweet spot between your business objective and your customers’ needs. Understanding who your visitors are and where they are coming from will help you to create relevant content that answers their most burning questions and keeps them coming back to your site. Think beyond the most obvious brand and product content and ask yourself: what problems can you help to solve?

A part of this equation is what your users are actually searching for online. You can use Google Keyword Planner to see the search volume on different keywords and phrases in your industry. Sign up for a free account here.

5. Social media

You want people to be sharing your material, whether it’s a blog post, a podcast, or another type of content. Have you implemented sharing buttons so that it’s easy for your users to post directly to the main platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and so on?

Are the images and text being pulled correctly when you do share? You can use the Facebook Debugger tool to check why content is not being properly shared on Facebook.

Apart from sharing, you probably also want people to follow you on social media so that you can continue talking to them. Is it clear on your website how to follow your Facebook page, your Twitter feed, your YouTube channel, or whatever your main social networks might be?

6. Other channels

Speaking of your social media networks, are you being consistent in the look and feel of your brand across your various channels? If personal branding is important for your business, are you using the same or similar profile pictures across the board? Are other tangible elements like your logo, colours, fonts, and background pictures consistent?

Ultimately what you’re trying to do is create a distinctive and cohesive brand experience for your consumers over a period of time and over different media. In theory, this means that if you hide your brand name then your consumer can still identify the elements as being associated with your particular brand.

EXAMPLE: Kimra Luna

Kimra has recently come to the fore with an impressive story of going from unemployment benefits to making a 6-figure income online. She now has a very strong brand, which is instantly recognisable first of all thanks to her own personal look and secondly due to the colours, fonts, and overall look and feel of her materials. You can love it or hate it, but it’s a cohesive brand.

7. Your images

It’s all very well to have a lot of text that explains the details of what you do but a picture, of course, tells a thousand words. Images on your site will help you to tell your story in a much more emotional way.

Look at the photos on your site and ask yourself: What are these images telling me? Are they bringing to life the benefits that you offer your clients and customers? Are they representative of the kind of people you work with? What emotion are they stimulating in you? Are the colours warm and comforting, light and inspiring, or dark and menacing?

Don’t undo all the good work you’re doing with the written content with dull or off-putting imagery.

8. The data

a. Behavioural data

Google Analytics can be quite overwhelming for a beginner, and even for website professionals: there’s more data than you can dream of ever needing! The best way to approach this is to identify a few key metrics that will measure what you want to measure. In fact, most of these metrics that you should be looking at when you’re starting out will appear on the main landing page of Google Analytics:

Users – Unique visitors to your website

Pages/session – Average number of pages that someone will visit in one session

Average session duration – Average time spent on the site in one session

Bounce rate – % of people who leave the site having only visited one page

% New sessions – This is the proportion of people who are visiting for the first time.

If you scroll further down the page, you can also see the demographics of visitors including their language and country.

Looking over to the menu on the left, the Acquisition section can be very interesting. Click on the Overview and you’ll see where your visitors are coming from: organic search, paid search, social media, direct (typing in the URL), or referral from other websites.

Another section that can be useful is Behaviour: in the Overview you can see the pages on your site that have the most views.

b. Technical data

If you’re a little more technically advanced, you may also want to review the speed of your website with one of these free tools and address the areas identified as issues:

Google PageSpeed Insights

Pingdom Website Speed Test

GTMetrix Website Speed and Performance Optimisation

9. Mobile

Look into Google Analytics to determine the split of visitors who are viewing your site on their desktop versus on their mobile. This will vary by industry but the overall trend of course is that more and more website traffic is mobile driven. You want all these things that we’ve looked at so far to apply on mobile too: clear messages, simple navigation, easy to find what you’re looking for.

Use Google’s mobile friendly test to get a quick feel for whether or not your website performs in this area; and, of course, you can try using the website on your own mobile!

Rather than create a whole separate mobile site, which will require a different design as well as different content, the best approach is usually to have a responsive website. A responsive website will adapt to the screen size of your device – website providers like WordPress have a number of readily available responsive themes that do all the work for you.

10. Updates

Now we don’t want to just make these improvements to your site and then leave it for another five years… Likewise there’s no point in launching a blog, or creating lots of social media profiles, if you aren’t going to be creating content for these on a consistent basis.

What can you do to make sure that the website is updated on a regular basis, both in terms of content and usability? Can you schedule a regular website audit in your calendar? If you have a team, who is responsible for updating the site? What structures can you put in place to make sure that your website is maintained at the professional standard that you set for other areas of your business? Set yourself up for success with a systematic approach.

Download this free overview of the 10 simple steps to auditing your website HERE.

If you feel you need help in this area, get in touch to arrange a professional website audit that will give you clear recommendations on how to improve your site to support your business objectives.

28/10/2015 By crocuscomms Leave a Comment

How to Comply with the New EU VAT Regulations

If you are currently selling or planning to sell digital products such as e-books online to customers within Europe, you will be painfully aware of the new EU VAT regulations. The new requirements have created complications in particular for small businesses that now find themselves either having to close down part or all of their operations or having to implement some kind of sub-optimal solution.

Having failed to find a ready-made solution online, we want to share our experience of addressing these new requirements in the hope that this can help other businesses to continue operating in a way that complies with the new EU regulations while also providing a smooth customer experience.

Note: The solution applies specifically to sites using WordPress and WooCommerce to sell their products.

So what are the new EU regulations?

In essence, the new EU regulations that came into force on 1^st January 2015 mean that businesses now have to charge VAT in the country in which the digital product is purchased, under the “place of supply” rule. There are no minimum thresholds (previously only businesses that made a certain turnover had to register for and charge VAT in the UK), so every business needs to comply, however small their earnings within the EU.

The requirements for a business selling digital products are now as follows:

Charge the correct VAT rates based on the customer’s location (actually, their permanent address)
Validate the customer’s location, ensuring that there are two pieces of non-conflicting evidence
Report your VAT to each individual EU state

VAT reporting: the MOSS scheme

One option, if your sales are negligible in certain EU countries, is to block customers in those countries from buying your product.

In terms of the reporting itself, however, there is a solution that allows you still to sell to all countries without the added complexity of the paperwork. This is to register for the Mini One Stop Shop (MOSS), a scheme that allows you to only report your VAT to one country – in our case, HMRC in the UK – who will then handle the reporting to the other EU states on your behalf.

MOSS requires you to keep all records for ten years but it is still a huge simplification versus having to register for VAT in each and every EU country.

Charging the correct VAT and validating the customer’s location

Of course, the MOSS scheme only handles the reporting part of the new requirements. Before that step, you first need to be able to charge the correct VAT rates and you must do so by identifying and validating the customer’s location.

When it comes to plug-in solutions for sites using WordPress, we found a number of options online:

WooCommerce EU VAT assistant (free)
WooCommerce EU VAT compliance (free but there is a paid version with additional features and support)
WooCommerce Taxamo (free plug-in but with a charge per transaction)

These plug-ins each claim compliance with the new EU regulations, identifying and validating the customer’s location, charging the correct VAT, and enabling reporting.

A smooth customer experience

While complying with the new EU regulations, the proposed solutions above create a discrepancy, both between the price on the initial product page and the price when you finally check out, and between the gross price in each country. This is both incredibly messy and misleading to the customer.

We wanted a simple and transparent customer experience. That meant the same price appearing from the product page right through to final checkout, and also the same price in each country (we had decided to absorb the tax to allow for a standard global product price, both EU and non-EU). For this, we turned to a plug-in solution that would keep a fixed gross price:

WooCommerce Checkout

This plug-in, however, only worked within the EU – so the price ended up being different for non-EU countries – while it also didn’t do anything about the rest of the EU regulations i.e. the double confirmation of the customer’s location and the reporting requirements.

The perfect solution

To get full EU compliance as well as standard product pricing for our customers globally, from product page through to checkout, we finally settled on the following solution:

The free EU VAT assistant handles the compliance with the new regulations: it identifies and validates the customer’s location, accepts and validates EU VAT numbers (if you have VAT-registered businesses buying your products), and enables easy VAT reporting.

The paid Tax Display plug-in (currently priced at $21) gives us the front-end behavior that we’re looking for, keeping a constant price globally and from product page through to checkout.

You can see how this final solution looks on the website here: Wolf Leaders Academy.

Disclaimer: We are neither legal nor technical experts and can in no way advise you officially on these matters. Our explanations above are based on substantial research and correct to the best of our knowledge and understanding, and the solution is one that we believe has worked well for us.

03/06/2015 By crocuscomms 1 Comment

5 Basic Principles of Effective Web Design

These days, only the most remote and old-fashioned businesses remain ignorant of the necessity of having a website; but unfortunately that doesn’t mean that we all know what we’re doing. Clunky websites that are slow to load or impossible to read on mobile phones are surprisingly common.

But you don’t need to spend big budgets on big agencies to get an effective website for your business. Whether you go it alone on a platform like WordPress or you brief a designer to create a bespoke site, there are some basic principles of effective web design to bear in mind…

1. Start with your business objective

What is the purpose of your website? What action do you want your visitors to take? Do you want them to read your blog posts? Sign up for your newsletter? Buy your product? Clarity on your number one objective will help you to focus on the most crucial information ‘above the fold’ (i.e. within the first part of the website that is visible without scrolling), with a clear call to action (a green button has been shown to work well!). This focus will also mean that you can get rid of all that clutter that doesn’t really contribute to your objective; white space can be very effective.

2. Make the navigation simple and intuitive

You may think you’re being creative with some never-before-seen design but all you’re doing is creating barriers between you and your potential customer, and the likely outcome is that they will simply give up and leave. People tend to read from left to right, they’re used to horizontal menus at the top or vertical menus down the left, and they’re impatient and will drop off if they have to go through too many steps or clicks. Bear this in mind and follow the basic conventions so that people feel immediately comfortable and can get straight to work with finding the information they’re looking for.

3. Make sure it’s mobile friendly

A lot of small business websites still don’t take into account the large and ever-increasing number of visitors that are using a tablet or a mobile. Depending on the nature of your business, the proportion of mobile users can be larger than desktop – so what’s the point in having some fancy design that simply doesn’t work for half your customers? Making your website mobile responsive (so that it adapts to the screen size of the device) doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg – many WordPress themes are mobile responsive as default, while if you’re working with an agency or designer you should specify this as a mandatory criterion of the site.

4. Keep the writing short and crisp

Don’t try to sound clever or get too creative with your writing, whether we’re talking about menu labels, call-to-action buttons, or the main body text on the site. Instead, make sure you’re using consumer language and avoiding jargon, highlight important words and phrases using bold and italics, break up long text with bullets and short paragraphs. Again, people are impatient and will be scanning the site for the information they’re after – confuse them or take too long to get to the point and they’ll get frustrated and go elsewhere.

5. Content, content, content!

Create content for your site that sits in the sweet spot between your business objective and your customers’ needs. Understanding who your visitors are and where they are coming from will help you to create relevant content that answers their most burning questions and keeps them coming back to your site. This content will help to build your credibility as experts in your field, build relationships with your customers and, of course, build your search rankings to get even more traffic to your site. Don’t forget to make the content sharable, so that your customers can spread the word for you; once you’ve created this content, you can also push it out yourselves in other ways, whether via email newsletters or via social media such as on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Next time you’re on a website – perhaps you’ll be doing your online banking, or booking a hotel, or trying to find a local restaurant – we suggest you spend some time thinking about how easy it is to find the information you’re looking for, whether the design of the site helps or hinders you, and what you might learn from their mistakes. Never forget that you’re a consumer, a human being in fact, as well as a business owner or a marketer!

We’d love for you to share examples of websites that you’ve found to be particularly good, or shockingly bad, in the comments below!

16/01/2015 By crocuscomms Leave a Comment

5 Digital Marketing New Year’s Resolutions you absolutely should keep in 2015

We’re already well into the New Year, and it’s now that all your good intentions may be beginning to falter. Are you still going to the gym? Eating that celery? Leaving work early? De-cluttering the house?

And what about in business? Did you call out any big goals or strategies for this year? Are you planning a re-stage of your website? Are you seeking to increase conversion? Are you building your organisation’s capabilities? Here are 5 New Year’s resolutions you absolutely should keep in 2015 when it comes to marketing your business…

1. Find your purpose

Consumers now are looking for much more than just a product benefit or brand name in order to give you their money and their loyalty. In fact, it’s not just consumers but employees as well: 60% of Millennials are looking for “a sense of purpose” when choosing which company to work for. Dove has been running their popular Campaign for Real Beauty since 2004, while 2014 saw the powerful Always #likeagirl campaign, which came out of research commissioned by the brand that found that 50% of girls report a drop in confidence after their first period. As an example of what not to do, just look to Victoria’s Secret perfect “body” fiasco, which led to a backlash with women responding that #iamperfect, thank you very much.

Brands like Toms and Warby Parker are also now showing that it’s possible to do good, with a social mission right at the heart of their business model, while making a profit. So what meaning can you bring to your business? What do you believe in? What’s your underlying purpose? Why should consumers care?

2. Embrace the newsroom approach

People are engaging (or not) with your brand 365 days of the year: they’re complaining on Twitter, sharing on Facebook, creating wish lists on Pinterest. Sometimes you just can’t plan ahead – remember the Oreo Superbowl #blackout? Static strategies written in PowerPoint last year will do you no good and agility is key, especially as the environment in which your business is operating is so rapidly changing. One big success of 2014 was the Adidas ‘All in or Nothing’ campaign during the World Cup. It was expensive but arguably paid off spectacularly, making it the most talked about brand and hashtag #allin while Adidas was even the sponsor for both teams in the final. The approach was also risky, and engaging real-time with consumers does bring with it any number of pitfalls: see J C Penney trying to be funny during last year’s Superbowl and Delta’s ignorance during the World Cup, or Build-a-Bear wanting to mark the anniversary of 9/11.

You may get lucky with a few interns who come up with something funny now and then, but to be really successful in real-time engagement you need a robust combination of planned, anticipated and reactive content, with a multi-functional team ready to respond with the right message at the right time.

3. Get geeky about data

In order to engage in real-time marketing, you’ll need the right information and data at your fingertips. The internet is a gold mine of customer intelligence, but companies are not yet taking full advantage of this. Attempts at re-targeting are annoying rather than helpful: adverts for products you’ve already bought, hotels you’ve already booked are following you all across the web. Then there was the case of Target congratulating a girl on her pregnancy before she had even told her parents. Oops.

Analytics are critical to understanding how your website is performing, what content people are engaging with in social, and what you should be doing to improve.

4. It’s all about integration

Consumers don’t think about your brand in silos: every interaction on desktop or mobile, Facebook or Twitter, online or offline, should be seamlessly working together as one holistic experience. If a product is out of stock, the shop assistant should be able to take you onto the website and order it online for you – likewise, when browsing an eCommerce site, you expect to see availability in your nearest store. And integration is not just about the digital and the physical world: we are also seeing a need to integrate across different parts of a business, with marketing having to align with everyone from customer service to PR to legal; work on content creation feeding into web and SEO, social media, email; different social media platforms needing to work together; and so on.

You may need to drastically think your organisation in order to address these changing needs of the business.

5. This really is the year of mobile

Every year has been called out as the year of mobile for as least the past five years if not more, and yet we’re still not reflecting this shift in our activities. Mobile has already overtaken overall desktop traffic on the internet. Half of Google’s search queries come from mobile but many websites are still not responsive for different screen sizes (Google recently a mobile-friendly testing tool for a quick check of how your site is performing). More than 70 per cent of Facebook activity is now via mobile but many brand pages have apps that only work on desktop.

It really is time now to take mobile seriously, with mobile-driven, short-form video on the rise, mobile payments becoming more and more common, and proximity messaging and hyper-targeting more and more effective.

So will you be sticking to your New Year’s Resolutions? You’d better, if you want a business that thrives in this fast-evolving digital landscape.

11/12/2014 By crocuscomms Leave a Comment

Apple Names the Best Apps of 2014: So what makes a good mobile app?

A few days ago, Apple announced its pick of the Best Apps of 2014. Log onto your iTunes app store to see the top choices for your region. Making it onto this list, or onto others like the Best New Apps or Top Paid Apps, is becoming increasingly difficult. As of June this year, the iTunes app store had 1.2 million apps; overall, 75 billion applications had been downloaded since launch; and users were visiting the store 300 million times per week (data via TechCrunch).

So what makes a good mobile app? What are the common elements we can see across the best apps as chosen by Apple? Here are four lessons we can learn from Apple’s list of Best Apps 2014:

1. Do one thing and do it well

The most successful apps either solve a problem, or entertain. If you’re trying to do too much at the same time, you’ll most likely end up doing neither (I refer you to the Fat Daddy video fiasco on The Apprentice). Once you’ve chosen your focus, make it the best that it can be, with great visuals and user experience. The best apps list is full of examples that do that one simple thing and do it well: BBC Weather, Top10 – Hotels (does what it says on the tin), Post-it Plus (allows you to capture and organise your notes from that brainstorming session)…

When it comes to entertainment, games have always done well in the app store. The 2014 winner is Threes!, an addictive game based on a very simple 4 x 4 number grid and a swiping motion. Another game on the list, Ruzzle Adventure, has a similarly simple grid and swipe action but with letters instead of numbers. You don’t have to design the most epic of all adventure games to become popular, in fact, the simplest games are the ones that take over and have the biggest impact on productivity (i.e. by distracting workers worldwide away from their work).

2. Design for the platform and make it intuitive

Uber, the ever more popular app that lets you order a car more quickly and cheaply than a taxi, offers ‘one tap to ride’. Its functionality is simple and requires no long instruction manual: just click ‘get an uber’. An intuitive user interface ensures a fast adoption rate of your app, so that it doesn’t become one of the many million apps that are downloaded and then abandoned. A single-minded focus on the core function of the app will make it easy to use on a (usually small) smartphone screen.

Photo applications do this very well, and photo or video editing apps appear many times in Apple’s list, including the UK winner of best app overall, Replay Video Editor. Such apps are all designed specifically for the device and serve to leverage and optimise its built-in camera functionality, allowing the user to create beautiful images and videos at the touch of a few buttons and without any technical expertise. Others on the list: Camu (apply filters, add text and effects, make collages), Tunepics (add music, weather and emotions to your photos), Fly video editor, Hyperlapse, Litely, Afterlight, Cinamatic…

3. Build virality into the app itself

One new social platform included in Apple’s list is Storehouse, a ‘visual storytelling’ app. Intrinsically social apps are more likely to spread and become popular: think of Whatsapp, Instagram – their value grows the more people use them. Another more functional example on the list is AirBnB: all users benefit as the database of hosts and guests using the app (or the site) grows.

Another way to increase virality, of course, is to make sharing easy. Integrate your app with existing networks to leverage their scale; let your users post their creations, articles, results to Facebook, Twitter, or other relevant social networks; offer incentives for inviting their friends. Make virality a core part of the app’s functionality.

4. Give your users a reason to come back

Push notifications can be unwelcome when they are from an app that you don’t need to use every day; make sure you offer your users an incentive to come back the next day. Runtastic Me monitors your daily steps and activities, letting you set yourself goals and challenges that make you motivated to return. Peak Brain Training similarly sets training goals and tracks your performance over time.

Fresh content is another great way to encourage your users to return – The Guardian, Yahoo News Digest and BBC Sport are among Apple’s highlighted apps, by their very nature providing updated content on a more-than-daily basis. Users return in order to get the latest news. Ultimately, going back to the first point, people will come back if an app is incredibly useful or incredibly entertaining. What will make users return to your app again and again?

So did your favourite apps of 2014 make it onto the list? What makes you come back to an app again and again? Share your insights in the comments below.