OK so been very busy lately and haven’t posted details on any of the exciting projects I have been working on. One such project is a PRO scanner. It has been written for Attache PRO but it can be changed to work with most accounting systems and it could be extended to do more in terms of features. The first version has been written for a food company here in Auckland. They need to record the best before dates on products as they ship them. The system scans a special GS1-128 barcode that has the product expiry date encoded into it.

In fact these GS1 bar codes are great as they have the ability to store business logic by way of what are called application ids. These are a predefined series of business information tags so (01)  means the product unique id ( GTIN) and (15) means expiry date. Similarly there are codes for user values so we use (92) to store the product code but you can store lots of other useful info.

Pick | Check | Ship

The application works like this

The delivery note is printed and sent to despatch

The stock is pulled form shelves onto a packing bench

The packer scans the items and enters the order number – each scan is logged and the best before date and stock code are extracted from the GS1 barcode

The system checks that what was scanned matches the order and highlights any mistakes

Then once the order is correct there is an option to update the best before dates back to the order. This is a requirement for food sales in NZ.

This system goes live in March and I really enjoyed the coding and the learning. Click to learn  more about GS1

It is also, very easy to blame yourself and ask what could I have done differently. It is easy to see why you would do this but it is also fair to say that the share of any blame should be evenly spread. That would therefore include the client. It also makes sense as the client has as much input as you if not more. They are also controlling the direction, attitude and the speed of the project.

When a project goes wrong you can almost always bet that the client has a hand in it. If the client doesn’t supply the content, answer your questions and doesn’t help you keep things moving, your project will be late and you will be left looking like you messed up.

So what should you do whe a project goes wrong?

Well this comes down to communication, and planning. The old saying “fail to prepare and you must prepare to fail” is never truer. You need to take control from day one. The client is looking to you for directio so either shit, or get off the pot. You need to have the plan and the project must be kept on track by constantly updating the plan which like all things in life must be adaptable and needs to evolve.

basecamp is a great collaborative project planning solution, as is MS Project. I have used both and they both have their merits. But you don’t need to pay money to get good results, a good checklist is often quicker and easier. In my experience anything that is easy is much more likely to be used, and that is the real key to project management. If you have a list of what needs to be done (some call this a functional decomposition – ie a list of functions) then you cross them off you know how much is left to do. When you find a new task that was never on your list (and yuo almost certainly will) add it to the list and make sure everyone involved in the project can see that new tasks have come to light. They will be much more forgiving if your deadline slips if they are away of any challenges than if you try to be a hero.

Please give me your feedback. I’d love to hear about your failed projects, and your successes but please only where the client made the difference…

Seriously that’s a question and I welcome your feedback.I have a few clients that work in a closed market. One sells spare parts for lawn mowers. There a limited number of mower companies in the country. He reckons he has over 98% of them as clients, so why bother looking for more on the internet? He knows who they are and there are a variety of reasons why he isn’t already selling to them. So what to do?

Well I guess not everyone actually needs SEO, and you can’t win them all.

As for the rest of the world, good SEO means free visitors to your web site and we all want that. But I want to remake a point I have made before, we don’t all need 1000 new visitors to our site every day. Surely what we really want is a 1000 new customers to our site.  This month I am launching two web stores, one is already live selling stationery products. They are both private stores so only existing clients can see the prices. I’ll write more about this soon. But back to my point… we need customers not visitors and that isn’t always done via SEO.

What we need is effective marketing for our business.

SEO and our website for that matter is only one part of that. Relying purely on one way to find customers is just plain crazy. There’s heaps you can do, here’s a few ideas

• regular newsletters
• cold calling
• referrals
• networking
• local business association netwroking sessions

So my next question is – what have you done this month?

If you haven’t done at least one of the above then stop reading right now and go do something pro-active to grow your business.

Please post some feedback, tell me what you have done this year and what you are going to do…

More soon

Most online stores rely on a simple email to the store administrators, but if you have a large number of orders this isn’t practical.

Just some of the additional benefits from the interface are

• Images are transferred and thumb nails are automatically generated. When you have 1000’s of products this is a real life saver.
• Categories are automatically generated allowing browse store by category.
• Brands can be maintained within Attache and then transferred automatically, allowing browse store by brand

• Orders are automatically transferred and imported into Attache preventing errors from rekeying of orders.
• Can be configured as a private store, online customers with a valid login can see prices.

If you have Attache PRO and would like to trade online I can help you get your products online quick, easy and without breaking the bank.

1. I like Vista and have had a relatively good experience with it but I am still very excited about 7 as it is better
2. I don’t think it’s fair to call Windows 7 what Vista should have been – 2-3 years on, all products are better and generally because of the prior version – who would have waited another 3 years without panning MS for that?
3. Having played with 7 it rocks in all the good ways – speed, memory, requirements, power saving
4. My media centre runs 7 and it’s so much better than Vista – dual tuners yay!
5. There isn’t enough info about the upgrade and we should be able to buy the upgrade and enter a key into the RC 7100 version and not have to reinstall but that’s life
6. It always amazes me that some of the nicest features in a new OS were there before. I read an article on 50 neat new things in Windows 7 and one was press the windows key and up to move up a folder in Explorer. Awesome I thought that has long irritated me about Vista. Then I recalled how this is a pattern, new features are often only now being mentioned that were in old versions. So, I tried it in Vista – Bingo it’s there also – it’s still nice though

One final thought – every forum is full of people saying yeah but Mac is better cos  this or that – if you love the Mac great but why waste your time telling PC lovers that? Just go use your super productive err sorry wrong word because where are the business systems? Anyway, go use it and enjoy. Likewise if you love PCs go use that and don’t waste your life (you only get one) bagging Macs. It’s the same with iPhone v the world. I have an iPhone and love it. I’ve had a Nokia N95 – loved that too – so what?

Ok so I lied one last point, PC stands for Personal Computer – if the Mac isn’t a PC then what is it? Is it neither personal or a computer? Sounds about right to this PC lover..Thanks Bill Love your work, always have

Recently I have been incredibly fortunate to work with a great client Kalamazoo on the reworking and redesign of their website www.kalamazoo.co.nz

One of the really great things about kalamazoo is the people, I have been fortunate enough to have a client that gives me virtual free rein with their project. This is meant that I’ve been able to use tools such as IBP to fine tune and quick pages and when I’m finished or at least when I get to a good break point I published a page and they provide me with some feedback. In general though they have trusted that I know what I’m doing and have left me to get on with it. It has been great for us and the working relationship is moving from strength to strength.

But it isn’t always like this,  some clients quite justifiably want to have a high level of control over the content on their website. And it pays to remember that at the end of the day, it is their website and they do have the right to choose what is and what isn’t published.

The problems start when a client simply won’t listen to your advice, you’re the expert right? And they’re paying you to your knowledge and expertise. Don’t be afraid to remind your clients of this fact, they won’t thank you when their site is nowhere to be found on Google and they aren’t getting the return on investment that they had hoped for. Just remember to keep your argument  constructive and helpful and always use facts and figures if you have them. For example, if you use a tool such as IBP it helps to educate your client, show them their ranking before and after your proposed changes and asked them to trust you for a couple weeks so that you can show them the before and after SERP. If you are right then their page rankings will improve and you will build confidence with your client that your suggestions are worth consideration.

One mistake that is really easy to make, is to tweak your page relentlessly and to use words that might give you a good search engine score but doing nothing towards helping your client win more business. Ultimately the purpose of a website can be many things but in general is there to help people do more business. It does this by explaining the product or service and taking the client through a sales process that ultimately ends in asking for an order. There’s a saying in selling “ABC — Always Be Closing”. So look at how you go about inviting the visitor to become a customer by buying your products

If your web page has been tweaked too much it also runs the risk of not being readable and that is unlikely we knew any new business. It can’t all be done over night. Most of my SEO clients pay me on a retainer basis. I offer to review the pages every week / month and check their performance. I record the SERP every week (Monday morning to be exact) and I use the results to fine tune my efforts. On the Kalamazoo site featured below I still have lots to do in terms of visitor to customer conversion. I am busy implementing an online store and that has changed how I want to tackle this. On the visitor security pass page I have a PayPal buy now button which is working really well but once the store is online, many more common products will be linked through to the store.

Here are some examples of the SEO work that I have been doing recently for Kalamazoo

http://www.kalamazoo.co.nz/index.html

This homepage puts the information that the casual browser is looking for instantly at their fingertips. There’s no need to dig through 10 pages to find out whether this company does in fact supply business stationery or cheques or continuous stationery. When a visitor comes to the site they can instantly see a summary of the major product groups covered by kalamazoo if they are interested they can drill down into the individual product pages where they will find more information.

http://www.kalamazoo.co.nz/visitorpass.html

Kalamazoo provide visitor security passbooks that cover the legal requirements to record visitors into a place of work so that should there be a fire vendor file warden will be able to ensure that everybody is evacuated and accounted for. This page has been optimised for the search term “visitor security pass”. As Kalamazoo are based in New Zealand I have optimised this site for Google New Zealand. This search term they now rank number one and this has taken about eight weeks.

http://www.kalamazoo.co.nz/printedproducts.html

Kalamazoo one of the largest independent printing companies in New Zealand. The purpose of the printed products page is to discuss business stationery printing high-quality commercial Fliers leaflets and brochures and so on. This page has been optimised for the search term “colour printing” and is steadily making its way from completely unranked and is now in the top 100 and I confidently expect it to be in the top 10 on Google within a few weeks.

http://www.kalamazoo.co.nz/businessstationery.html

Obviously optimised for the search term “business stationery” this page was quite difficult and I spent quite a lot of time getting this to rank highly. It is currently around 22 on Google but I think my recent batch of changes will have is moving onto the front page when the next 2 to 3 weeks.

Working on SEO for a client is very different from working on your own site. If you want to make changes to your own site then it’s very simple we just fire up Dreamweaver (or your preferred tool set) and off you go. Working in the real world offers some unseen challenges, but the experience is worth the effort and the financial  rewards can compensate somewhat.

Read more about Polychrome website design

Technorati code 8a4czg36m7

That said, it did give us an excellent vehicle for launching their website and with clever use of the various add-ins and some hard work we have achieved some excellent results in terms of search engine optimisation.

For almost 3 months now we have ranked in the top 10 results for a wide variety of search terms such as business software solutions, accounting software Auckland and business software for New Zealand.

We could not have achieved these results if we had not been using tools such as IBP but it is important to recognise that the tool is just that and it requires lots of effort and determination to get high rankings which ever tools one uses.

Some of the keywords in the Polychrome target of very heavily contested however we have still managed to squeeze less determined sites off the front page of Google.

If you need help with your website search engine optimisation please get in touch.

The client is extremely happy which is always the most important test.

We are now three weeks on and the results of our search engine optimisation efforts are starting to bear fruit. We have been targeting around 15 key search phrases and for all the New Zealand search engine we now have at least five first page listings of which three are already ranked number one.

Obviously the higher ranked terms are for lightly contested keywords however even on the main search term which has 304,000 results we are already ranked at position 16.

Over the next few weeks we will put more effort into off-site promotion. To date our efforts are focused on on-site promotion such as page optimisation. This week we started adding the website to as many local directories as possible. These make great links as well as increasing the number of places where potential customers might find a client.

If you need help with your website optimisation is giving touch.

Choosing whether to use a website template can be a little controversial. Some website designers believe themselves to be purists and think using other peoples templates makes for a bloated website that can be difficult to maintain. Personally, I believe one of the main reasons for the introduction of CSS was to allow artistic people to handle the visual design and for technical people to handle the implementation. Besides, there are templates and there are templates – some look amazing, some look err well not so good.

For the websites are designed I’ve chosen to use templates from http://www.templatemonster.com I am not an affiliate I do love their products. What I particularly like is that after my initial consultation with a client unable to choose a selection of web designs that I think offer a good starting point. This serves two purposes, first the client can visualise what I’m trying to describe and second using a template as a starting point saves a good number of hours which translates into cost savings for the client.

Traditionally this as being any real compromise but having used several of the templates from templatemonster.com I have found them to be of a very good quality and the layout is very meaningful and obvious. Sure there’s always one for improvement and I will write a second blog on one area that I think requires particular attention, namely, handling navigation for flash-based websites for users that don’t have Flash installed.

Most of the templates on offer are around the $64 mark. When you think about the number of images, the basic layout and a starting CSS template; this represents excellent value.  Most of these templates come with a small JavaScript file that handles sizing of boxes and it works very well. There is a very good selection of templates arranged into categories and if I were being picky, I would suggest this is one area where the website could be improved. When I last looked there were over 16,000 templates to choose from and it can be rather tedious scrolling through trying to find a suitable template. However, with so much to choose from you are never short on choice.

Flash templates

These templates offer some nice visual effects and an enhanced user experience without much work required from the web designer. Nearly all of these, use Flash for the site navigation and this could be improved by allowing the page names and the button labels to be controlled via an external XML file rather than requiring a copy of Adobe Flash in order to rename pages. Whilst this is possibly just me being a little picky, I believe, this really would add value to anyone who doesn’t own a copy of Adobe Flash.

Similarly, the templates that I have used have only had a very basic text message for when Flash is not installed. For my sites I have now amended the background CSS to allow the navigation from the non-Flash version of the website to be substituted when Flash is not installed. I’ll be writing another blog post to cover how I did that for anybody that interested.

Seperate Content from Design

Layout.CSS

One thing I particularly like about the templates I have used is that the styles.CSS has been separated from the layout so that pages are laid out in one file and the visual theme is handled in another. Maybe I’m just overly organised but I particularly like this feature. I’m not a big fan of the default page names used (because my work doing a SEO has led me to believe that the page name plays a huge part in improving your Google ranking). The first thing I do is to rename my pages; however this is pretty easy as I use Adobe Dreamweaver and it handles fixing all of my links. However, when using flash-based menus you still need to update the Flash file to point to the new page names, as I said before using an external XML file would make it much easier.

Summary

To wrap up, I really enjoy using the templates from template monster.com and would recommend them to anybody. The quality of the background CSS, the images, the layout and the overall look and feel are always of a high standard. For the price, choice and quality you can’t go wrong.

Pop over and take a look http://www.templatemonster.com