Web Matters

Cross Browser Compatability

There are now lots of browsers on several platforms (operating systems) but Windows and MAC are the most common operating systems by far.

However, more and more people are beginning to use their mobile phones as well so this is an area to keep an eye on.

The image below shows a screenshot I took from Google Analytics (see below) and you see the Operating System/Browser combinations of people that viewed one of our sites (this sample is over 80,000)



I've only shown the top ten here - but note the iPhone creeping into the picture!

You can see that Internet Explorer in Windows is far and away the most popular combination, but if we look at this more closely and just examine the usage of Internet Explorer (about 50,000 of our original 80,000 use IE) you can see



I've only shown the top 5 versions here and you can see it tailing off dramatically, but you can see that versions 6.0, 7.0 and 8.0 are the top ones.

In an ideal world we would all be on version 8.0 at the time of writing (and if you are not I would encourage you to upgrade as it is far more secure than it's predecessors) but your web site needs to work for all three.

If you can't check all this yourself I have found a clever web site that will let you see what your web site looks like in the different browsers. The basic edition is free, and you can find it here . I suggest you only check your site on a few combinations to start with as it takes a while and there is often a queue!

Shopping Carts

If you are going to sell any type of product directly, be it physical goods, or information products, then you need to have a method of collecting money.

The simplest and cheapest way to get going is to use PayPal and if you are selling a single product then the PayPal Buy Now buttons are really easy to set up and use.

For more than one product, you will need a shopping cart, and again PayPal is the cheapest and quickest way to get going.

The scale of charges are utterly transparent, and you see that PayPal will take a small percentage of each sale and there are no up-front charges.

There are lots of shopping cart packages available but you need to be aware that once you start down that road for anything other than PayPal, you need to also find a payment gateway and a merchant account.

If you are employing a web designer they should help you navigate this minefield, but bearing in mind the story I told you here, do make sure you research any products your web designer recommends for yourself - just type the name of the product into Google - it couldn't be simpler!

Finding Your Web Site

How are people going to find your web site?

Well there's online and offline advertising.

Offline you can advertise in trade magazines, get editorial, pamphlet drop, use direct mail... whatever you do, make sure you include your web site address on everything including your business card and stationery!

Online, you need make sure that the keywords you researched are embedded in the appropriate place in your html pages, and if you can, into your domain name as well.

Also, you need to make sure the other sites link to you.

Both the above methods are free but to get quick results to see if you are onto a winner, it's worth a flutter on a Pay Per Click System. Google Adwords is excellent and very versatile - you can set up an account by clicking the Advertising Programmes link at the bottom of the Google home page. At the moment it costs only £5.00 to get started.

A word of caution though - Google can be very effective and you can keep a tight control over your budget, but it can also run away with your money very easily!

Who is Looking at Your Site

In order to see how well your site is performing you need to know how many people are visiting it. Your web host will provide a free statistics package, and you can pay for more sophisticated statistics software but Google have produced an all-singing all-dancing super duper statistics program called Google Analytics and it's absolutely free!

Just type "google analytics " into Google and you will find the page where you can sign in and set up your analytics account. Once you have done that you need to put a small piece of tracking code into each of your pages and then within 24 hours you will be able to see how your site is working! You can see how many people visit, how many come back, which page(s) they looked at, how long they stayed on a page and much more!