August 31st, 2010
This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.
For all the praise that brand advertisers have for social media, they must be aware that it’s very much a double-edged sword. And for all the free marketing, advertising and brand promotion via Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Linked In, and other platforms used to help build an identity and relationship with your customers, it can just as quickly turn on you and your brand.
Social media disasters occur for a number of reasons, the first being that your company probably messed up. It may not have been intentional, but something, somewhere down the line, went wrong enough for someone to complain and it was enough for others to vocalize that complaint en masse. One mistake is all it takes for social media to turn against your brand.
No one is perfect and you can’t expect to please everyone all the time, so the best trick is to be prepared for how to handle things if your company finds itself under attack in the social realm. Here are three examples of companies who were attacked by social media and how they handled, or should have handled the situation. Learn from their mistakes or successes so you can stay on social media’s good side.
Read more …
Posted in FL1, General, Marketing | No Comments »
August 2nd, 2010
It’s been an interesting past few weeks at FL1 Group.
As well as building blogs, shops and content managed websites, we’ve been involved with securing a company’s website that wasn’t PCI/DSS compliant. The website stored credit card details in a database that was hacked into and the credit card details were retrieved. Two of them were used fraudulently, and that’s where the story began. The banks got involved with fines and costs to recover the costs of the fraud. Added to this the company has been forced to go through a programme of becoming fully compliant. To-date, adding the costs of consultants, website changes, fines, costs to re-issue cards, and significant amount of off-line processing changes and new equipment, the cost to the business at this current time runs in excess of £170,000!
This particular business is lucky enough to be owned by a much larger parent company that could absorb these costs, but these sorts of costs would easily put most small companies out of business.
It’s been an eye opening project that’s for sure, and based on what we’re learning from it, we’ll certainly be putting together a seminar to help more business understand what PCI/DSS is all about and how to stay on the right side of the banks.
It’s not all been about “the dark side” of the internet though…honest!
Ali’s been settling back in and taking to his new role as designer and project manager like a duck to water.
We’ve also teamed up with some a partner that will help our online stores excel using the shopping and affiliate portals, which has to be a good thing in these challenging times.
More on that next month!
As Google’s superb Analytics package gets better and better, we’re proud to announce some free workshops we’re running throughout the summer holidays. We install it on every single website we build, so if you’d like to know how to see how your website is really working, let us know.
The most important thing to consider, is tools like Google Analytics allow you to discover what’s working, but more importantly what’s not!
If you’d like to book a Google Analytics workshop or want to know more about PCI/DSS, drop us a line or call 01727 739812.
See you next month!
Posted in E-commerce, FL1, General, Search Engines, Seminars, Technology | No Comments »
July 1st, 2010
If you’re running an e-commerce website, improving the conversion of your product pages can have a dramatic effect on your bottom line. While many site owners focus the majority of their time on managing various advertising sources, focusing some time on optimising your website for conversions can often yield even stronger gains.
With Google recently releasing some tips for product page conversion, I thought I’d share the most useful advice with you below.
Product Images
Use a minimum of 3-4 images for each product so visitors can see it from different angles and being used in different ways.
Add the functionality for visitors to zoom in and get a closer look at the product.
Make sure to use professional, high quality images.
It’s common practise to place images on the right hand side of pages, but make sure to test alternative placements within your layout.
Product Descriptions
Benefits vs Features – Customers want to buy the benefits of your product, not its features. Tell customers that the grill they are buying will cook tasty and healthy food and save them money rather than having low emissions and four individual burners.
Test writing alternative sales copy instead of using the existing description provided by the manufacturer. This is one way to set you apart from competitors.
Delivery and Stock
Include current stock levels on your page. If your product is running low, tell the customer to order today.
Set expectations around delivery times and be as accurate as possible.
Run free shipping promotions – this can be a great way to boost conversions during major sale periods.
Other Important Elements
Reviews can be a great way to increase conversions, but make sure to only use legitimate reviews.
Give your page a single clear call to action or add to cart button.
Test including cross sells on your pages and see what impact it has on overall conversion/revenue.
Posted in E-commerce, FL1, Marketing, Search Engines | No Comments »
May 25th, 2010
One school of thought could be, so long as it works and achieves your business’ objective, no.
This thinking is perfectly fine, until you need to develop your website further or more importantly find a developer and platform that can take your website to the next level.
A little history?
To generalise you could put website development technologies in to two categories: Microsoft, or non-Microsoft (Betamax or VHS if you will!).
Circa 1996 onwards, Microsoft introduced their well developed Visual Basic technology (VB) to website development in the form of Active Server Pages (ASP).
ASP was quick to learn, and powerful in that it was easy to create a database driven website with very little programming experience. It became popular with entry-level web developers and experienced programmers looking to move to the web. Running on a Microsoft Windows server platform, it also suited most businesses that used Microsoft products as a core part of their business.
For non-Microsoft developers, technologies such as Perl and CGI were also popular however not so widely adopted and in some case more specialist. These technologies require the long serving and well established UNIX/Linux platform.
As things moved on, PHP started to become popular with those not wishing to jump on the Microsoft band-wagon as a well documented, easy to learn, and flexible language, however in the early stages wasn’t as powerful and well developed as many comparable languages.
Fast-track to 2002 and Microsoft announced its new .NET programming platform. This replaced the popular ASP technology, and offered a far more powerful toolset, aimed in part at enabling existing Windows developers to develop for the web with a minimal learning curve.
This was a significant step forward in one sense; however the complexity and power of ASP.NET came at a price. Compared to its predecessor, it was complex and a steep learning curve.
ASP.NET to some became a daunting learning curve, and to many developers new and old, PHP become a better adopted alternative and FREE. At this point, the shift began!
So today?
PHP as a language is well adopted and without question the most popular language for most small to medium scale websites. Microsoft’s ASP.NET is also a strong contender and continues to hold its own.
Why does all this matter?
In our opinion some 70% of most web development agencies will use PHP as their language of choice for small to medium scale websites. It is a language that is productive and easy to learn and well suited too many websites.
For more complex websites with high volumes of transactions or users, consider Microsoft .NET or Java. If you need integration with third party systems, Microsoft products (such as Microsoft Office) or external web services, Microsoft .NET is a good route to consider.
For us at FL1, we’ve got an equally strong footing in ASP, ASP.NET and PHP and dare we say; we’re different for that simple fact. That said; each technology is quite different in its own way and better suited to different types of website.
For more information drop us a line at client@fl1group.com or call us on 01727 739812.
Posted in FL1, Technology | No Comments »
May 5th, 2010
PCI DSS is a set of rules created by the PCI Security Standards Council with the intention of protecting credit and debit card data and enhancing awareness of these standards. The organization was founded by American Express, Discover Financial Services, JCB International, MasterCard Worldwide, and Visa, Inc.
Many people are confused about this so we have spent some time going through documents trying to un-ravel it for you. In short, if you are using a credit card terminal or are handling customer credit card details then you will need to research this further and probably either need to change the way you accept payments, or become PCI DSS Compliant.
Yes or No! – Do I need to be PCI DSS Compliant?
My web site stores card details for me to put into my credit card terminal. Do I need to be compliant?
Yes you do. If you store, see or handle credit card details, you need to be compliant.
I use a payment service provider to handle my credit card payments. Do I need my shop to be compliant?
No you don’t. If you are using a payment service provider and never see a shoppers credit card details, you do not need to be compliant.
To summarise
If you ever come into contact with a shoppers credit card details, be it using a terminal or a web site to store the data, you DO need to be PCI compliant.
If you never come into contact with a shoppers card details and use a third party like PayPal to handle your web site payments, you DO NOT need to be PCI DSS compliant.
We do, and always have, suggested that clients use third party payment service providers as it takes away the headache of PCI DSS compliance such as SagePay.
For more information visit The PCI Security Standards Council
Or
call us on 01727 739812
Posted in E-commerce, FL1, General, Technology | 1 Comment »