Rather than buy a new laptop, I recently decided to recondition a four-year-old Acer to see whether it was up to the relatively light duties intended of it. This laptop had been my workhorse during a period when I was regularly flitting between my home office and business headquarters, and had almost no available space on its 140GB hard disk. The first job, then, was to do some weeding.

Microsoft Office was the first package to go, now that I use Google Docs almost exclusively. I found plenty of dross in the Downloads folder of course, but the real shock came when I looked through the list of Adobe programs installed on this machine and realised that I use almost none of them regularly any more.

When I bought this laptop, I reckon I spent around two thirds of my working day using Fireworks, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash and Flex Builder – with the last of these accounting for the lion’s share. And yet, over the past year, Flash based development has dropped away almost entirely.

The rot began with Dreamweaver, which I’d been using since it was first launched in the mid 1990s. Since I began creating websites using PHP, and especially when WordPress became the basis of most of my web development, Dreamweaver became irrelevant and I’ve not used it for over five years now.

As I contemplate the future of my online development, for the first time I can’t see a place for Flash

Flash was a different matter. In the early 2000s, I moved from Adobe’s Director product to its lightweight cousin (at least, it was lightweight at the time) for e-learning development and created a series of authoring tools and online playback plugins based on it. There’s much to like about the platform, and our perception of what’s possible with rich internet applications was largely shaped, for better or worse, by the capabilities of the Flash player. So I have much expertise invested in my ActionScript knowledge and a big library of code.

And yet, as I contemplate the future of my online development, for the first time I can’t see a place for Flash. In the short term, this means extra work for me as I recreate these sophisticated applications using PHP and jQuery, but I can’t countenance investing time updating software created for a defunct platform.

The irony is that it isn’t Steve Jobs’ famous hatred of Flash that has caused this turnaround – the true villain of the piece is Adobe itself. By abandoning development of Flash for mobile, it eliminates Flash as an option for most websites. One in ten of the visitors to my sites uses a mobile device, a seven-fold increase over a year ago, so I’d be mad to develop in a form that excludes them. Had Adobe continued to improve the Flash platform for Android, I might have persevered – at least for sites that attract smartphone users rather than tablet owners. Perhaps I should thank Adobe, then, for making my decision easy. It’s now either HTML/CSS/JavaScript or app – and Flash makes for a very expensive app development platform.

In fact, the only Adobe product I use day-to-day now is Fireworks and that’s the only reason I’m keeping Web Premium on my main desktop. It’s also hard to see on what basis I would, in the medium term, be likely to upgrade even that one remaining product. Assuming that I’m not the only one re-evaluating in this way, this poses serious questions for Adobe’s future income. I think that’s sad because they’ve played an important role in shaping today’s web. Whilst it is making efforts, with Muse, Edge and updates to Dreamweaver, I can’t help feeling that the momentum is swinging away from Adobe. What I really want is a fully working browser-based versions of Photoshop, Fireworks and Illustrator that I can pay for on a per-use basis, and unless it has something quite remarkable up its sleeve, I can’t see myself upgrading to CS6.

The good news for me as a businessman is that I no longer need to budget for expensive licences. Adobe’s pricing policy has long been a bone of contention and, given the downward momentum placed on software costs by the advent of apps, Adobe’s looking increasingly isolated. And don’t even get me started on the fact that Web Premium costs £300 more to buy in the UK than the US (and yes, that’s comparing figures net of sales tax). Photoshop is the one remaining crown jewel – heaven help Adobe if a competitor comes along with a compatible application for a fraction of the cost.

Farewell Adobe. Delete.

IMRG has been running a quarterly index since the first quarter of 2010. The index tracks a range of critical performance indicators across some of the biggest names in online retail including John Lewis, Marks & Spencer and Matalan. In its first index, covering Feb-April 2010, mobile visits stood at 1.4% of the total, but by the Aug-Oct 2011 quarter they’d quintupled to 7%, with some retailers seeing figures as high as 12%. Whilst mobile users, on average, don’t spend as much (making up less than 4% of total sales) the trend in both traffic and contribution to turnover is heavily upwards.

Oddly, the survey doesn’t reveal the breakdown of devices and platforms but it’s not a huge stretch to suggest the rise is, at least, in part fuelled by the popularity of the iPhone and the iPad. Looking at my own figures, I see around 50% of my shop traffic coming from iOS devices, split roughly 50/50 between iPhone and iPad, with users of the latter tending to spend more.

I’d be the first to admit that percentage increases are only of limited interest – after all a 100% increase in “not a lot” is still “not a lot” as Steve Balmer would admit – but 7% of turnover is already significant. There’s no sign of a slow-down yet so it’s reasonable to predict the average might rise to 20% or so within the next year. As an online service provider or shopkeeper, now’s the time to work out how best to get these visitors to buy. At the moment, the figures suggest the conversion rate for mobile devices is much lower than for laptop and desktop users- equalising those figures is a challenge for 2012.

The peak shopping period is upon us and, for most online shops, the effectiveness of their Google AdWords campaigns can make the difference between a fruitful festive season and a bleak new year.

It’s at just such a critical moment that Google is rolling out changes to its AdWords algorithms having successfully tested them on its users in Spain, Portugal and Latin America. The algorithms are used to determine where in the sponsored rankings your ad will appear so a change can mean a dip in your position and consequent loss of traffic which, as business hots up, can cost a lot of money. The knee-jerk reaction is then to increase the bid price which, of course, reduces profitability – again costing money.

To be successful in online marketing, you have to look beyond this immediate response and understand what Google is trying to achieve here. Google has always ranked ads according to two criteria: the “Quality Score” of what you’re offering and the price you’re prepared to pay. The Quality Score is, itself, made up of three factors – the historical performance of the ad (primarily, what percentage of searchers clicked it); the relevance of the ad text to the search term; and, finally, the quality of the landing page.

The changes Google is introducing have the effect of increasing the importance of the landing page in the Quality Score. Google’s explanation is that too many searchers are being sent to pages that aren’t entirely relevant to their search. They get frustrated and leave the site, which is bad news for both the advertiser and Google.

Your Adwords Control Panel will tell you what your Quality Score is and specifically how your landing page rates. If you’re finding that your ad is appearing lower than it previously was, now is the time to check whether your Quality Score has dropped and, if it does, go through Google’s landing page guidelines.

No feedback is more valuable than customer feedback, but mystery shopping comes a close second. Whilst “spot the stooge” was a popular game amongst store staff when I worked for Dixons (rendering the process pretty pointless), ecommerce sites can’t tell the difference so they need to be on best behaviour at all times.

Research firm eDigitalResearch has been mystery shopping leading ecommerce sites for over 10 years now and its latest findings make interesting reading for even the smallest online retailer. For the purposes of this research, they visited 51 of UK’s biggest retail websites — including Amazon, the main supermarkets, online clothing retailers and department stores.

The site ranked best overall was Figleaves.co.uk — hadn’t heard of the online lingerie retailer, but, having visited, will definitely be returning! — with Amazon a close second. Electrical retailers did particularly poorly with Comet, PC Word, Currys and Dixons all ranked in the bottom 10 or so.

So what can small online retailers learn? The good news is that hosted ecommerce software has developed at such a pace that even the smallest online seller can offer much the same experience as giants such as Amazon and Interflora.

1: Make sure your site is easy to navigate

Your customers don’t see the difference between the multi-million pound business and your back-bedroom resale operation. Across the major retailers, navigation has improved immensely in recent years and being able to get around the store quickly and effectively is a given. If you don’t make it drop-dead simple to find and buy your products, your customers will go elsewhere — in a heartbeat.

2: Make your products easy to find

Having clear navigation makes it easy for customers to browse your store but the hotter the prospect, the more likely they are to use search. When I want to buy something from Amazon, for example, I search for the product — when I’m simply killing a few minutes or looking for ideas, I use the category links. So, you must have effective search built into your site — and this means having the technology and tagging or otherwise labelling your products effectively.

3: Be responsive

On average, this is an area where the big retailers still perform poorly. We’ve come to expect poor service over the phone (the researchers found that Dixons never answered the phone within 30 seconds) but this is also true of email contact. As a small retailer, you can knock the socks off the big boys by simply responding quickly. Many’s the time I’ve replied immediately to a customer query only to receive a surprised email thanking me for the speed of response. From my perspective, of course I’m going to respond quickly — the customer is probably ready to buy!

4: Add and encourage product reviews

Customers expect product reviews. Remember that most people have used Amazon and base their final decision to buy on product reviews even though they’re submitted by complete strangers. Any worthwhile ecommerce platform will include some mechanism for adding product reviews, make sure you enable it. However, this is pointless if you don’t encourage them – you can’t incentivise customers so it’s best to simply ask past buyers to review their purchase in a follow-up email.

5:  Be social

The research didn’t look into the use of social media and its influence on purchasing but I think it’s essential. Social media is used both to drive traffic to the site (something that makes no sense in a mystery shopping exercise) but also to make it more likely the customer will buy when they arrive. A customer excitedly proclaiming how happy they are with your product on your Facebook Page (and it does happen) will both publicise the URL of your site and give their friends and other visitors to the page a reason to buy.

Embedding social media into your ecommerce site is another way you can outmanoeuvre the heavyweights — adding Facebook Like/Recommend buttons, Facebook Comment buttons and, depending on your audience, Google+ to your product pages gives your customers one more reason to buy from you rather than your competition.

Modern ecommerce and marketing systems mean small retailers can compete online with the likes of Tesco, Amazon and, ahem, Figleaves. Nothing is more effective at transforming a company than improving its conversion rate, and research such as this offers a priceless insight into the direction the big boys are taking. A better conversion rate generates more profit from the same traffic, that’s my kind of equation.

Now, back to the online lingerie, purely in the interests of research, of course…

I was lucky. Using a barrage of open browser windows I managed to order one of the £89 bargains via Best Buy. I didn’t fully believe I’d succeeded until it turned up on my doorstep two days later.

I’m not the first to say that the TouchPad itself is a lovely piece of hardware and, following the immediate over-the-air update, webOS is stable, capable, reasonably fast and well-thought out. Indeed, looking at the package as a whole, whilst the hardware is not quite as luxurious as the iPad 2, I would place webOS well ahead of iOS4 largely due to its effortless multitasking. It’s a technological tragedy that this device and its OS are now a thing of the past.

According to isuppli.com, the TouchPad costs £200 in materials and labour to build, almost exactly the same as the iPad 2. Conventional logic is to take the build cost and add a margin to come to your retail price, aligning yourself to comparable hardware. This lead to a release price of £399 for the 16GB model which is on a par with the iPad 2.

The problem with this is that it gives potential buyers no good reason to choose the newcomer over the established giant. I estimate that Apple makes around £150-£200 profit on each iPad sold and uses the AppStore to drive hardware sales (although their 30% share of the projected £2 billion pound of revenue the AppStore will earn in 2011 is hardly to be sniffed at).

HP couldn’t hope to do the same with such a limited app store, so the only way it could have made an impact would have been to reverse the logic – make its long term money from apps rather than the hardware. Had the TouchPad been launched at £250 it could easily have been a massive success, which would have created an audience for app developers to target. Particularly the work-related apps that HP’s business image would suit. HP could then have taken a cut of its app store revenue.

The problem is that this approach takes time, with HP barely breaking even on the hardware, let alone the associated R&D and marketing costs. Looked at this way, the TouchPad was doomed as soon as HP chose the webOS route – however good the OS is, it has only limited developer support.

Android-based tablets have more chance because developers can target more than one device with a single app. But the real challenger to Apple is likely to be Amazon. It’s already demonstrated with the latest version of the Kindle that it’s prepared to sell hardware at a market-breakingly low price in order to make money on downloads. As an example, I paid £109 for my Kindle in October last year but I reckon I’ve spent around £300 on books in less than a year since. A £250 Android-based Amazon tablet locked to its app store would blow the market apart.

The lesson for small businesses is to never lose sight of where the money really is. Apple is, as usual, the exception to the rule in that it’s able to make profit from every part of the process – the mistake HP made was to imagine it could duplicate Apple’s success. Bill and Dave, you’re no Apple.

It must be summer because the stories about how moronic our offspring are and how much better things were in the age of steam are surfacing. Indeed spelling mistakes could apparently cost companies “millions of pounds”.

Whilst you might imagine such hyperbole coming from one of the beleaguered red tops, in fact this is a claim made by an online entrepreneur. With a keen eye for a marketing opportunity, the Confederation of British Industry has swooped in to link these spelling mistakes to the lack of skills of school leavers.

Customers are beginning to associate a poor standard of English with email scams, making them even more uncomfortable about buying from such a site

The argument is that spelling mistakes on an e-commerce site reduce conversion rates. The entrepreneur in question, Charles Duncombe of the Just Say Please group, told the BBC that his conversion rate doubled when he corrected a spelling mistake on tightsplease.co.uk (I kid you not). Tempted though I am to speculate on what sort of spelling error puts off visitors to a hosiery website, I’d rather concentrate on the important point here. Yes, little things can impact hugely on conversion rate, as I reported back in February. In that case, changing a menu from a hierarchical view of the site to a drop down had a serious negative impact.

Furthermore, as a writer I am an arch pedant when it comes to spelling, punctuation and grammar. I accept fully that poor spelling can indicate a lack of care and an unprofessional approach that potential buyers will assume applies to the business as a whole. More dangerously, customers are beginning to associate a poor standard of English with email scams, making them even more uncomfortable about buying from such a site.

Given all the existing reasons why potential customers might be put off buying from an online retailer they don’t know, the last thing an e-commerce business needs is to further undermine its visitors’ confidence. In other words, getting the copy right on a website is at least as important as the technology that underpins it. So why would any employer leave that to a school leaver?

I’ve been responsible for overseeing the creation of massive e-learning programmes containing tens of thousands of words. I couldn’t possibly have created those programmes alone but I knew that spelling mistakes would undermine the credibility of the e-learning. In the real world people make mistakes and they don’t always take as much care as the business owner would like. So what did I do? I checked it, for heaven’s sake.

The responsibility for the copy that appears on a website has to belong to the owner or senior management of the company. Any other arrangement suggests that the website is seen as unimportant. I regard it as my duty to check every single web page and product listing that appears across any of my businesses. I probably miss the odd error here and there but rather than blame the writer (my wife is one contributor and I do have at least a little common sense), I take responsibility.

So instead of blaming school leavers and the education system, business owners should take responsibility for making sure that their business is represented professionally online as well as offline. It’s too improtant to degelate.

The Retail Sales Figures for March have been published by the Office for National Statistics, showing a tiny rise in sales over the past year. Some industries were up (mainly non-food) and some down – perhaps surprisingly including DIY sales. All very ordinary, very boring and slightly depressing. Except that hidden within the numbers is a very surprising statistic.

You see, I’ve got only a passing interest in the overall figures. It matters not a jot to me whether B&Q is doing better or worse than last year. I mainly focus on my own companies’ turnover, but I’m also interested in the overall trends in online sales. Fortunately, the ONS presents these figures at the end of its Statistical Bulletin.

The ONS started tracking internet sales in June of 2009 and since then, the overall retail volume has remained roughly unchanged at £5.4 billion per week. However, the proportion of those products purchased online has increased by a massive 72% in only 21 months and now stands at 10% of all retail sales.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, internet sales in March 2011 were up by an incredible 47% on March 2010. In fact, every month from June 2010 onwards shows an average increase of around 22% on the equivalent month a year earlier.

If you’ve got an idea for an online retail business, now’s a good time to get going

What does this mean? Clearly much of this increase is down to big companies such as the supermarkets and department stores pushing customers online to order, as well as the forward march of Amazon and iTunes. The ONS doesn’t separate internet sales figures into small and large businesses as it does with other categories but the more customers get used to buying online, whether through Tesco or Play.com, the more likely it is that those same customers will buy from small businesses too. By joining schemes such as Internet Shopping Is Safe and using high quality e-commerce platforms such as BigCommerce and TigerCommerce the smallest businesses can benefit from, essentially, the same infrastructure and customer protection as the biggest players.

So, if you’ve got an idea for an online retail business, now’s a good time to get going. Grab a copy of How to Set Up an Online Business, sign up for a free trial with an e-commerce provider and grab a slice of this rapidly growing sales platform.

It’s rare that a book comes along that profoundly changes the way I see the world. I shan’t bore you with a list here but my latest revelatory experience came from an unexpected source.

I fully acknowledge that the iPad, in either guise, is a superb piece of design and the £399 price tag for the base version of iPad 2 is extremely competitive compared to the prices of other tablets, or even the launch price of the original iPad. For me, however, I simply cannot justify the cost and don’t fancy the prospect of being locked into the Apple/iTunes dimension (knock another £100 off, on the other hand, and I’d grin and bear it!)

My interest lies in developing Android smartphone applications and apps for credible Android tablets (should any emerge), so you might imagine that a book called Designing for the iPad would hold little appeal for me. Indeed, it’s a sign of my desperation for any guide to Android tablet development that I was prepared to give it a go. I’m glad I did – it is without doubt the best tech book I’ve read in the past couple of years.

Chris Stevens was behind Alice for the iPad, which was one of the launch apps for the original iPad and went on to huge success. In this book he outlines what he’s learned in the process. Perhaps most useful are his insights into the differences between developing for tablets and smartphones, including some very specific user interface guidance.

There’s very little code here and what is included covers the physics engine that adds realistic movement to app components. I’ve rarely been more thankful for a lack of code because almost every point he makes applies to the tablet form in general, not only the iPad.

For the first time, I understood what the iPad is designed to do and who it is aimed at (clue, it’s not the bloke sleeping on a bean bag overnight outside the Apple Store in Cambridge, so that he could be first in the iPad 2 queue). I had been slowly developing the same point of view whilst watching my four-year-old son playing Dr Seuss games on my Desire HD (pretty much a mini-tablet). To him, it’s far more natural to manipulate the interface with his fingers than using a mouse. Indeed, I became aware that, in ten years, the venerable WIMP approach will likely look dated and inefficient. Time to move on.

I’ve finished the book full of ideas. Let’s hope that the wait for a credible, affordable, Android tablet isn’t too long. For now, this is the ideal introduction to developing for tablets of all sorts – highly recommended.

One week after the Government focused on big business with a 2% cut in the main rate of corporation tax (which doesn’t apply to small businesses) it’s seeking to make up for this by supporting StartUp Britain.org. This website, which features a picture of David Cameron levitating and a very red-faced Richard Branson, purports to “make it easier for new companies to flourish” and, perhaps, is the planned replacement for BusinessLink.

The essential difference with StartUp Britain is that it’s been developed and run by private companies rather than the Government. This gets around BusinessLink’s obsessive focus on regulation rather than the development of business. However, the Government’s much vaunted idea – that private individuals and companies will philanthropically fill the gap left by their withdrawal from public services – is immediately exposed as pie in the sky by StartUp Britain.

The site is little more than a series of links to other sites (how original) along with “up to £1,500 of great offers”. Sadly what these offers amount to is a set of promotional vouchers, many offered by the founders of StartUp Britain. For example, Glasses Direct (whose founder Jamie Murray Wells is one of the backers of StartUp Britain) offers a £15 discount voucher.

In other words, I have to spend money with Glasses Direct, contributing to its profits, to benefit from my StartUp Britain voucher. That’s not even a very good offer compared to those available to Joe Public on its site. Whose business is this site supposed to be helping? HP’s link quite hilariously doesn’t work. A Google AdWords voucher, free legal cover (when you buy insurance) and 10% off AXA insurance round off an utterly underwhelming offering.

To make matters worse, many of the links take you directly to products rather than free information. For example, Alan Sugar’s autobiography and Duncan Bannatyne’s Anyone Can Do It (which is very good). A cynical person might see this as little more than a marketing opportunity for the companies involved. Lucky I’m not cynical then, isn’t it?

Perhaps the biggest problem is that, as with BusinessLink, the number of links makes business look more complicated than it is. Essentially, business is about finding a product or service that enough people will buy from you to make a profit, building it and then marketing it. My advice to budding entrepreneurs is to get the book Purple Cow by Seth Godin and, if you’re thinking of an internet business, Free, the future of a radical price by Chris Anderson.

Once you have your idea in the bag, it’s time to get into the nitty gritty of business plans, accountancy and marketing. Perhaps by that time Startup Britain will be worth visiting.

WordPress 3.1 has just been unveiled, with the usual mix of immediately useful changes to the interface and structural improvements that give more options to theme builders.

The first thing you’ll notice on upgrading your site is the Admin Bar at the top, bringing standalone WordPress installations in line with those hosted on WordPress.org. The Admin Bar provides quick access to regularly used functions to any logged-in user with appropriate permissions. Initial reactions to this have been mixed but I like it.

I create sites for clients, many of whom want to update their site themselves and the bar provides a much more obvious and easy to use method to create new posts and pages. The feature can be disabled in your profile if you really don’t like it, but I suspect the next minor update will include an option to disable it globally.

The second major change is the introduction of “post formats”. Not to be confused with custom post types that were introduced in WordPress 3.0 (and went largely unused), this new feature allows you to indicate the purpose of a post so that styling can be applied later. WordPress 3.1 includes a standard list of post formats including images, quotes, status (similar to Twitter and Facebook updates) and video. Bear in mind that this is a change to the underlying code and you’ll need to edit your theme to take advantage.

3.1 also includes much simpler internal linking. If you’ve written blog entries or created web pages with WordPress, you’ll be familiar with the frustration of having to launch another browser instance, navigate and copy/paste from the address bar simply to link to another page in the same site. 3.1 has a search function that means you can find any existing page or post and insert it as a link – the more posts you write, the more you’ll appreciate this.

Other minor improvements include a streamlined look and feel to the writing interface, with fewer fields visible by default. The colour scheme has also been changed, although not necessarily for the better.

I was able to upgrade one of my sites, which uses the Thesis theme, using the one-click install without problems (having backed up of course) but I’m going to leave it a few days before upgrading my clients’ sites so that I can be sure there are no reported niggles.