StartUp Britain – business advice or marketing machine?

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

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.

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WordPress 3.1 review: first look

Thursday, February 24th, 2011

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.

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How one small design change can kill your conversion rate

Wednesday, February 9th, 2011

BigCommerce, a hosted ecommerce service, recently pushed out a minor update to all its shops including my MakingYourOwnCandles site. Developers Interspire allow shop owners to schedule the upgrade to a convenient date and, as part of that process, require them to tick a box that says, in effect, “I understand that this may mess up my store design”.

So, once the upgrade had taken place, I checked our shop to see what damage had been done to discover that the menu system had changed. Gone was the simple, tree-type list of categories and subcategories to be replaced by a swanky new “fly-out” menu which, as I’d made changes to the text colour in the main shop, featured black text on a dark background.

After half an hour’s feverish work sifting through the various CSS rules to find out which controlled the text colour, I had a visible menu system again. So, for Tuesday and Wednesday of that week, we ran with the new menu. It was a disaster.

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BusinessLink to close: where to turn for business advice?

Thursday, January 27th, 2011

The Government announced earlier this year that BusinessLink’s regional network is to close in November 2011. This means that the business advice service it provided through paid consultants will disappear, to be replaced with a much larger number of unpaid mentors provided through existing agencies and organisations.

The website (which costs a reported £35m per year to operate) is to be turned into an online “business startup hub”. Typically of our beloved Government bureaucrats, what they think it’s important for a budding entrepreneur to know is how to stay on the right side of their own regulations and how to register their company. However, without a viable business idea, the wherewithal to get it up and running and the marketing expertise to keep it alive, regulation and information filing are irrelevant.

My experience of BusinessLink has been poor. For someone setting up and running microbusinesses employing only one or two people, the vast majority of information on the current site is useless to me, or, if I were less experienced, intimidating. It’s worth bearing in mind that there are more microbusinesses than any other sort and today’s tiny firm might be tomorrow’s SME. The business advice from the paid consultants was, in my experience, traditional and academic rather than reflecting real business practice – it was as if it had been lifted from an MBA programme.

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Microsoft WebMatrix review: hands-on

Friday, January 14th, 2011

Microsoft is famous for developing new technologies only to abandon them later, leaving early adopters high and dry. WebMatrix is one of those rare exceptions to get a second life (or third, depending upon how you count them) after being dropped like a stone six years ago.

In a nutshell, WebMatrix provides a free web development environment for .NET and, to a lesser extent, PHP. The aim appears to be to provide a simple entry point to .NET web development for beginner coders – the hope being that once snared within the Microsoft development environment, programmers will upgrade to Visual Studio. The initial install includes the IIS Express web server, the SQL Server Compact Edition for databases and support for the new Razor mark-up syntax.

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The VAT increase: what’s a small business to do?

Monday, December 13th, 2010

On 4 January 2011, VAT rises 2.5 percentage points to 20%. If you run an online business that sells VAT-rated products or services then, naturally, you need to ensure that your systems tick over to the new rate on that date. Any decent hosted e-commerce service will do this automatically, as will online accounting software such as FreeAgent.

Harder to anticipate is the effect of this hike on your customers. If you sell to VAT-registered businesses, the effect should be non-existent since your customers can reclaim the higher VAT. Selling to consumers is another matter. The increase in price on low-ticket items is small – the perception of your customers is another matter. If you sell a product for £9.99, the VAT incorporated in that is £1.49. From 4 January, this will increase to £1.70 and the price paid by your customer becomes £10.20. Or does it?

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Promoting with Facebook: four ways to free marketing

Friday, November 19th, 2010

Time and marketing pounds are limited, and one of the most important skills in running and promoting a business is knowing which particular horses to hitch your cart to.

For the past several years there’s been only one player in town: Google. So marketing experts have recommended, quite correctly, a two-pronged approach of working on search engine optimisation (SEO) for long-term traffic and Google AdWords/Display Network advertising to instantly drive potential customers to your site.

I’d hate to calculate how many hours I’ve spent learning, practising, analysing, adjusting and worrying about AdWords in particular. This is because of its near-legendary ability to drain the deepest pockets unless strict limits are set and extreme vigilance exercised. And it’s been a big success for me. AdWords has driven the success of several of my businesses and is currently performing admirably in the run up to Christmas for MakingYourOwnCandles.

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Building a business website: why you should (mostly) avoid the DIY option

Monday, October 25th, 2010

Creating a business website requires specialist design skills and technical knowledge: neither of which are necessarily in the toolkit of the average business owner. And yet having a professional website is increasingly a matter of necessity rather than choice. Stir in a measure of financial restraint and the traditional choice of hiring a web design firm for a four-figure fee is simply not a viable option.

So what are we left with? PC Pro reader Grahame Berney got in touch regarding this very dilemma. As a designer himself, Grahame is constantly being asked by small businesses how they can have a professional web presence without breaking the bank. (more…)

18 ways to boost your e-commerce conversion rate

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

It’s amazing what a tiny increase in your conversion rate can do for your profitability. Why? Because increasing conversion rate goes straight onto the bottom line, whereas increasing traffic might well cost money in terms of pay-per-click, banner or traditional advertising.

Here are 18 ideas for boosting your online shop’s conversion rate. I have used them on one or more of my sites: it’s all about testing to see if they’re effective for your particular business. There’s no sleight of hand, trickery or underhandedness here – it’s mainly about making your e-commerce site easier to trust and buy from.

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5 free keyword tools for blog writing ideas

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

Search engines rank your site based on the relevance of the content. They do this by examining the site pages and comparing them to the search phrase typed in by the searcher. They then examine how many inbound links the most relevant page on the website has and, crucially, the quality of those links. In Search Engine Optimisation as in life, quality trumps quantity every time.

At the heart of it all is good content that will attract links to the site and, ultimately, buyers. Each blog entry or page should be about one keyword or keyphrase. But how do you come up with these keywords and, therefore, the blog entries? I’m in the process of optimising my candle-making blog and one of the challenges is knowing what to write about.

Most people will be familiar with the Google Adwords Keyword tool but there are many other ways of finding inspiration. Here are five of my favourites:

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