Launching a small website

The other day we had a new boiler installed in the house. The boiler man told me about this new website he had bought and asked me why he didn’t get enough visitors and conversions.

I had a look at his website and the first thing that struck me was this:
This guy had paid for the website, and still the company he got it from had put a link to their website from his website. I think this is analogues with having a haircut and the barber shaves his name in the back of your head!

When you approach a company to build a website for you, don’t let them advertise their product on your website. If they want to advertise on your website, get them to knock the price down.

I made a check list for him as an initial assessment of his website, and I thought I’d share this list with the rest of you.

When you launch your website there are a few things you can do to ramp up the traffic and get some more interest.

• Create a twitter account so your visitors can get news nuggets about your product
• Create a blog and add a link to it from your website
• Add your company to Google maps
• Create a content section on your website where you can write articles about subjects related to your product
• Remember to create “calls to action” (http://boagworld.com/design/10-techniques-for-an-effective-call-to-action)
• Create two sitemaps: An html version for your visitors, and an XML version to submit to search engines
• Submit your website to search engines
• Listen to our visitors by collecting feedback (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeoDYFUrsSw)
• Submit your website to various directories related to your product / business.

Get your visitors to feed back into your site!

Everybody loves feedback (at least everybody who cares about their users).
I was looking at GetSatisfaction today and saw that they charge quite a lot for their feedback system, and a thought occurred to me: anyone with their site on LiteTest can just put a feedback link on their website directly.
Under your account details where your test is listed, you can copy the link to the test and just add an <a> tag with the link to your site.
Feedback directly from your visitors and since the feedback is running on top of the site, your visitors are still able to use your site.

Website feedback from your users could prove invaluable to the progress of your website.
You might discover things that you did not even know about!
If you want your users to know more about how to give good website feedback, you can always direct them to HowToTest

Hide your email from the bots

I was doing some research into html formating for emails today and started thinking about all the "mailto" links that are spread out all over the web.

I remember seeing what crunchbase does to the email addresses the post to companies.
When I added LiteTest to the list companies on Crunchbase, they asked for the company email address. I thought nothing of it and added it.

Later on when I viewed the company profile I saw the email on the page, clear as day.
This spooked me a bit and I thought "surely they can't just post our email address out in the open like that? Bots will have a field day trolling the company pages for emails."

I took a closer look at the source of the page but the email address were nowhere to be found.
An even closer look showed me that they just url encode the javascript to print out the email on the page.

"That's clever" I thought. This should be available to everyone who wants to put their email on the site.

It did occur to me that if someone wanted to, they could still just grab all the pages, and url decode the email addresses and have them all at their spammy disposal.

What is needed is a way to make it less obvious and to give the user a bit of flexibility to how they change the email address.

I wrote a very simple script for this that I posted on LiteTest (or you can just download the script right here).

The idea is that we don't want to put the word mailto anywhere in the actual html.
Since the bots will only scrape the html looking for either at signs (@) or the mailto property in the <a> element, we simply conceal the link by changing the href attribute.

<a href="mailto:name@domain.com">Send me an email</a> can be changed to

<a href="name*domain.com" class="mailto">Send me an email</a>.

There is no hint for a bot that this is an email address, and when it tries to follow the link all it will get is a 404 page and think nothing more of it.

By including the lt.emailencode.js in your page, you can simply add this script snippet:
$(document).ready(function() {
    $(".mailto").emailencode();
});

No more bots stealing your email, and your visitors can still benefit from having instant access to mailing you without going through a contact form.