Site Review – Small Business Dive

This week’s site review is the website of the week at Blog Whammy ….

website : Small Business Diva
url : smallbusinessdiva.wordpress.com

This site is written by Donna-Marie, the owner of Jacaranda Business Support Services and editor of Business Mum’s magazine.

suggestions for change :

• People buy from people that they know and like so it is important for readers/prospective buyers to know the name and a little about the person they are buying from. A photo here would be a great inclusion (just to make it that bit more personal) as well as a couple more paragraphs about you – don’t rely on them clicking on the link to the website for them to find out more about you.
• Increase the size of the headings in the right hand sidebar to draw more attention to them..
• Move from a separate website and Wordpress-hosted blog to a combined on the Wordpress platform. At the moment any traffic and link love that you blog is getting is not providing the same level of SEO (search engine optimisation) to your website. If they are combined into a single platform then there is common branding and common traffic targeting which should result in improved page rank on Google and overall traffic ranking on other sites.
• Fix the problems that are stopping the site from validating (why validate?)
• Contact information and/or link to “contact us” should be on the blog and not just on the website and above the fold.
• Contact details should have a phone number (recommendation from the Australian Consumers Association is to only buy from vendors who display “Contact details including a contact phone number for customers“. A Contact form would also be a good idea.
• The RSS Feed link (currently only showing as Subscribe to Bloglines) should have a more user friendly description like “Subscribe to RSS Updates” and the option to “Subscribe to Email Updates should also be provided” (Feedburner can help you with this and with managing all aspects of the feeds and subscriptions to your blog). This Subscribe information be placed at the top of the sidebar just under “About”.
• Recent Entries and Categories links should be swapped around with the Recent Posts just under the Subscribe links and the Categories under that.

Donna-Marie obviously has a passion for small business and for helping business mum’s achieve their dreams. It seems that we share a common passion. Keep up the great work Donna-Marie.

If you have any feedback on the site or questions about what I’ve had to say then just join the conversation in the comments.

Working Solo now does Support

Many of you know how passionate I am about demystifying technology for small business women (and even the odd handful of guys). It can get me quite fired up that there are clever, cluey women who don’t have access to understandable, practical and cost effective answers to their technology questions.

Monday morning (wow that’s tomorrow) sees the formal start of a new service offering – Solo Support Services.

For a numbers of years I have been the helpful, practical advisor on the other end of the phone or email, and even in person for clients who come to visit me in Sydney. Now it is time to formalise these services and reach out to a wider range of small business women.

I’m not going to do the hard-sell, that’s not how I do things. You can find out more about it here, and even sign up to the specially discounted Patron Account (only until March 15th), if you think that having some support might help you along.

If you are an existing client there is no need to worry about me stretching myself to thin. Things are changing here and 2008 will see me growing a Working Solo team (yes I know that it’s an oxymoron to have a “working solo” team ). Stay turned for more announcements about that later this week.

If you’ve got any questions about this just let me know.

Site Review – Jenni’s Papercraft Designs

There are changes in the wind here at Working Solo, and you will here more about that between now and the end of the month, but one of the changes includes offering website reviews.

As part of that change each week I will be posting a mini-review of a site of a business woman of my choosing. For the next few months (possibly more) that review will be best on the website of the week at Blog Whammy.

website : Jenni’s Papercraft Designs
url : www.papercraftdesigns.com

This site is a fresh, light site with a good use of empty space (I just hate too much information all crammed in) whose primary purposes is to sell the custom, hand-made paper products developed by the sites owner Jenni Markham.

suggestions for change :

• Nice personal approach with the”about us” page. People buy from people that they know and like so it is importnat for readers/prospective buyers to know the name and a little about the person they are buying from. A photo here would be a great inclusion (just to make it that bit more personal).
• The navigation on the main pages and the blog is a little hard to read with the dotted background.
• Add clickable link from paper image on the home page to the store would make a good quick link. The image is in a prime position “above the fold” so it makes sense to link from the product images to the products themselves.
• Have both the images and the words at the bottom of the home page clickable (the words are good keywords and should be highlighted via the links)
• Move from a table based layout to a CSS web standards based layout. If/when you do this I suggest that both you pages and blog be combined onthe Wordpress platform that is just being used for the blog at the moment.
• Fix the problems that are stopping the site from validating (why validate?)
• Contact information and/or link to “contact us” should be easy to find and above the fold.
• Contact details should have a phone number (recommendation from the Australian Consumers Association is to only buy from vendors who display “Contact details including a contact phone number for customers“
• With the “Store” section of the site the navigation back to the main site via the home link is not clear and easily identified.
• With the blog section of the site :
  • The navigation bar should have more link than just “about Jenni”
  • The “Control Panel” information – home, register, login – should be moved to the bottom of the sidebar or removed altogether
  • The RSS Feed link should have a more user friendly description like “Subscribe to RSS Updates” and the option to “Subscribe to Email Updates should also be provided” (Feedburner can help you with this and with managing all aspects of the feeds and subscriptions to your blog). This Subscribe information should remain at the top of the sidebar.
  • Recent Entries and Categories links should be move to the top of the sidebar just under the Subscribe links

It is great to come across yet another creative person who is so passionate about the work she does. Keep up the great work Jenni.

If you have any feedback on the site or questions about what I’ve had to say then just join the conversation in the comments.

Is your website living in the past?

When I browse around the web I almost always use the “copyright statement” as an indicator of how much attention the company pays to their online presence.

It is generally just one small line at the bottom of the website but it can say a great deal about the freshness of the site and whether they should come back to see new content sooner or later (or never).

With the start of a new year it is one of those things that can get forgotten amoung all the other new year to-dos, but in browsing over the last few weeks I’ve not only seen loads of 2007 but even some 2006 (and one 2002).

UPDATE: If you use Wordpress and are looking for a tip on how to automate the date roll-over each year then have a look at the post by Lisa Sabin-Wilson on modifying your copyright statement in Wordpress.

This is not a hard task so stop putting it into the roundtoit basket. Do it or get it done! I know that your readers, clients and prospective client will think better of you for doing so.

PDF – How to Create Your Own

Charlene Polanosky (from Essential Kystrokes) has beat me to the punch this week and has written a great explanation of how to create your own PDF files from any other file that you might have.

I had been meaning to write something similar and then send it through to all the sites that are still posting links to Word documents on their websites (a pet peeve of mine).

What many people don’t realise is that office-type documents (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations) as well as most other applications are very specific in who can read the file you create (you must have the smae applications, at the same or new version). Applications have different versions, on different operating systems and will render the document layout in different ways.

What you might think is a great looking document can end up looking like a pre-schooler just got through with it. Or the person trying to read it may not be able to open it at all. Worst of all is that many of those office documents are open to attracting viruses (achoo! sorry you must have caught that cold/virus too).

If you create a PDF file (which standards for Portable Document Format) you will increase the readability, deliverability and professionalism of your electronic documents.

No excuses now! Thanks to Char for ticking that one off the list for me.

Monday Morning Question – Do You Love Technology?

In this month edition of The Calm Space (which has a theme of heartstrings), I’ve written an article about the love-hate relationship that some people can have with technology and posed the question “what technology do you love”.

This got me thinking about how you, the wonderful readers of the Working Solo blog, and made me curious about the technology that you love, and hate.  Let me know in the comments and let’s have a conversation about it this week.