We’re updating SiteBuilder!

We conduct frequent user tests and review your feedback from the blog and our customer support center to plan our development, and we take it all into account (drop-down menus anyone? we hear you). We can’t talk about all that we’re planning, but we’re happy to announce that we’ve just finished an exciting update to our award-winning SiteBuilder website-building tool. Here’s product designer Jerry to tell you all about it –  Phil, Editor

We’re always trying to find ways to make it easier for you to build and maintain your websites, so based on your feedback we’re making some changes to SiteBuilder that we think will make it more efficient to use.

Visual Redesign

The first change is visual: when the update is made in the next few days, you’ll see that we’ve updated the icons in the toolbar at the top of SiteBuilder; same function, easier to identify icons. We’ve also refreshed the look of the element menus and shortcuts too, but that’s just the start for those…

Updated Shortcuts

SiteBuilder used to have four element shortcuts: Text, Image, Rectangle, and Site Navigation. By looking at which elements were used most frequently, we identified several that really should have a shortcut. So here’s the new list of element shortcuts: Text, Image, Photo Gallery, Media File, HTML, Rectangle, and PayPal Button.

If you want some extra screen space to work on your website, you can hide and show the shortcut bar by clicking the arrow button.

To make room for this expanded list, we removed the shortcut for Site Navigation. Why? Because most people create their websites using one of our design gallery’s templates with a site navigation already built in. Of course, if you’re starting your site from scratch or need to add another site navigation menu to your site (for example, to create a footer of links), you can still find that element in SiteBuilder’s element category menu. Only now you’ll look for it in the new Design & Links category…

New Element Categories

One key thing we’re doing is reorganizing SiteBuilder’s website-building elements into new, more useful categories. As we developed new elements over time, our old categorization got outdated, with too many main categories and none with labels. We wanted to regroup elements in a more efficient way that would be easier to use.

The new menu organizes all elements in five main categories, each of which has more specific subcategories to make elements easier to find:

• Content – Here’s where you’ll find elements for adding text, images, media content (like audio and video), and custom HTML to your site; everything you use to talk about your business in your own words, sounds, and images.

• Design & Links – These elements create the structure of your site, including navigational structure and the overall visual design of your site.

• Communication – This category has elements that let you interact with your customers, either through social media channels like your social networking site pages or a feed to your blog, or directly through email and chat. This category also has form elements that let you collect feedback and information from your customers.

• Information – This category holds elements for information display like your location, time and date, and the weather.

• E-Commerce – Anything related to selling through your website can be found here, like PayPal buttons and shopping carts, the SimpleStore add-on, and, if you have an e-commerce package, your Storefront.

Personal Elements

The five main categories hold elements that are best suited for building a professional-looking business website. The remaining elements have been given their own category called Personal Elements, because they’re often used on personal websites. If you want to access those elements, just select View > Show Personal Elements.

We know that there’ll be some adjustment for those of you who know the existing menus like the back of your hand, but we really believe that you’ll find the new categories make better sense and will be easier to learn and use.

Descriptions

Another goal of the redesign was to make it easier to understand what each element does without having to consult a help menu. In the new SiteBuilder, when you mouse over an element in the shortcuts bar or in the main menus, you’ll get a description of the element and some notes about how best to use it. If you want more detail you can always go to the Help tab (the one with the question mark on it) in the element’s properties editor, but now we’re putting the basics front and center so you can build more intuitively, and more quickly.

New Element

We’re also adding a new element called “Social Networking” to help you take advantage of the power of social networking sites to help you grow your business; we’ll be covering that in another post in a couple of days.

That’s it for now! We hope this refresh of SiteBuilder will make it even easier for you to build a great-looking website. We’ve scheduled the update for the next week, so stay tuned, and let us know what you think!

Add a new page to your website’s navigation menu–it’s easy

We just streamlined the process you can use when adding a new page to your website with SiteBuilder.  Now it’s  easier to add a link in your site navigation menu to your new page. Here’s Jerry to tell you about it – Rochelle.

When you start working on creating a website, you need to decide what links to include in your site’s navigation menu. It’s important to give your site visitors an easy way to access key pages on your site with a single click, but, if you have a lot of pages, you don’t want to clutter up your navigation menu with a link to every one of them.

We’ve made it a little easier to make that decision right when you add a new page to your website.  Now when you add a new page with SiteBuilder, you’ll see a new option that makes it a simple matter to either add a link in your site navigation to your new page, or remove it. You can always add or remove a link to your new page later by editing the navigation element, but the new option makes it more convenient.

Here’s how it works. To begin, add a new page in any one of the usual ways:

1) Click the New Page button in the toolbar

2) Select File, then New Page from the menu

3) Right-click and select New Page from the File Manager

You’ll get the familiar page template selector. It looks like this if you’re using a design from our Design Gallery:

Or like this if you’re using a design from SiteBuilder:

Here’s where the new option comes in.  To add your new page to your navigation menu, make sure there is a checkmark in the box labeled ‘Add this page to my site’s navigation.’ By default, that checkbox is checked automatically; if you don’t want your new page to have a link in your navigation menu, just click the box to remove the checkmark. If you don’t have a navigation menu on your site, you won’t see that option at all.

Then make sure you give your new page a title. Search engines use page titles as part of their calculation for determining how prominently your site will appear in their search results.  Perhaps more importantly, your page title will appear as part of the link to your site in those results.

When you’ve finished, just click Next.

The next step is deciding on the details of the link to your new page. Again, if you don’t have a navigation menu on your site, you won’t see this page.

Here’s how that works:

1) If your site has more than one navigation menu, choose the menu you want to use for your new link. Otherwise, the new page link will be automatically added to the only navigation menu on your site.

2) Next, decide where you’d like your new link to appear in your navigation menu. By default, SiteBuilder will add the new link to the end of your menu, but you can move it wherever you like in the menu by using the buttons below the list of links.

3) Now it’s time to give your new link a name. If you gave your new page a title as I suggested, SiteBuilder will by default give the link to that page the same name.  If you prefer a different name (something shorter and more appropriate for a link, perhaps), you can change it here.

4) To finish, you can change the name of the file for your new page, and where it will be stored. By default, SiteBuilder will use your page’s title as the page’s file name, but you can change both file name and location by clicking the change file name or save location link.

When everything looks good, just click Finish, and you’re done!

Hope this makes things easier for you.  If you have any questions about this new process, please let us know!

Website design tips from the pros

Some of you know that Homestead has a Design Services group that builds websites and online stores for members who want help with their designs. They’ve also analyzed a lot of other sites to suggest changes that business owners can make to maximize their results from the SearchLight marketing program. Because of what they do, they know what works well for websites and what doesn’t. The principles they follow can be useful to anyone building or maintaining a website, so I’ve invited Pamela to share some of their ideas with you – Rochelle.

Design concepts can change, but no matter how many sites we build for our members some principles remain the same. I’ve put together a list of some of them here that you can use as a guide for turning your own site into an efficient, professional online presence for your business.

Let’s start out with a couple of common website problems that can hurt your chances of converting a visitor to a customer:

• Site is difficult to navigate — If visitors to your site can’t find their way to the information they need quickly, they’ll likely give up and look elsewhere.
• Site looks unprofessional — If your site is cluttered or visually unappealing, it can be a turnoff to visitors and affect the way they perceive your company, no matter how successful your business actually is.

These problems are common but easy to fix:

• Consider your site goals— What do you want your customer to do on your site? Whatever it is, make sure your home page highlights information that will help them do what you want, like your phone number if you want them to call you.
• Optimize your layout — Recent studies show that visitors scan websites from the top left corner to the lower right. So the best place for your navigation menu is near the top of the page or vertically on the left, and make sure you keep key points about your business near the top so your visitors won’t have to scroll down to find it.
• Keep your site design simple —Try using a standard design with a simple color scheme of 2-3 colors for all your pages, so that your logo, text, and background images have a consistent look no matter what page your customer is viewing. Visitors shouldn’t feel like they’re going to a completely different site when they navigate to another page; a site with an inconsistent look from page to page can undermine your company’s credibility.
• Organize your site navigation — It’s easy to overload your navigation menu with too many buttons or links.  You don’t need to list every one of your pages in your navigation menu; think of it as a Table of Contents, rather than an Index. For example, if you have separate pages for different services you offer, try linking those individual service pages from one main Services page. A good basic navigation we use frequently is: Home, About Us, Services, Testimonials, and Contact Us.
• Make your text work for you — Be concise, using just enough words for people to clearly understand what you offer without overwhelming them. Consider using bullet points to break up large amounts of text so your page will be easier to read, and use bold text sparingly; if your entire paragraph is bold, how will your visitors know what’s important?
• Make your images look their best — Re-size your images with a photo editing tool before adding them to your site. There are many tools out there for free that can easily crop excess background so the focus of your image is clear.
• Test your online store — If you sell things online, test your site by placing an order yourself and see what you’re asking your customers to do. Verify that the shipping and sales tax you’ve set up is correct, and that your return policies are clearly stated on your site.
• Give visitors a reason to come back — Update your content often so that people see your site as a useful resource. One of the worst things you can do is leave outdated information on your site, like listing an event as upcoming when it has already passed. Offer your visitors fresh content and you’ll keep your site on their radar.

Remember, your website speaks for you so make sure it’s saying the right thing as efficiently as possible. If there’s one thing my team has learned, it’s that less is sometimes much, much more.

And be sure to check your Site Statistics regularly. It’s typical to see the number of visitors to your home page taper off as they navigate to other pages of your site. But if you see a severe drop-off, that’s a good sign that there’s something about your home page you need to fix so it stops turning visitors away before they can move further into your site.

I hope you find these tips helpful. Good luck with your site, and if you have any questions about design please let us know!

Your New Year’s Resolutions

We recently invited a random sampling of Homestead members to take a short survey about their plans for their businesses in 2009.  Here’s Sharna with a summary of the results – Rochelle

Thank you to everybody who took part in our recent survey about members’ New Year’s resolutions for their businesses online. From the results I’ve summarized below, it looks like many of you are planning to explore new online strategies to grow your business in 2009, while still maintaining focus on what you know works. With the hope that some of these ideas may help others, here are the results of that survey:

Things you plan to start doing this year

• Search Engine Optimization: Over 50 percent of you want to “Search Engine Optimize” your site, while only 16 percent have done it already.

• Video: 46 percent of you plan to add video to your site, while only 14.6 percent currently have video on their sites.

• Analyze Traffic: 45 percent of you want to start analyzing your site traffic and online advertising to improve sales; 19 percent do it already.

• Online Directories: Over 45 percent of you are going to list your businesses in online directories, while 25 percent are already listed.

• Email Campaigns: 50 percent of you want to start emailing your customers regularly with promotions, while only 16 percent of you are currently doing this.

• Sell Online: 35 percent of you plan to start selling your products online; 37 percent already do it.

• Advertise on Search Engines: 39 percent of you said that you wanted to advertise on search engines, and nearly the same percentage said it wasn’t a priority this year.

• Gearing Website to New Customers Only: Over 20 percent of you will stop gearing your sites to new customers only, and will work to make them useful to your existing customers as well.

Things that are not a priority in 2009

• Monitor Customer Reviews: 64 percent of you said that reading and/or responding to customer reviews on sites like Yelp.com is not a priority, and only 8 percent of you are currently doing this.

• Start a Blog: Over 51 percent of you said you didn’t plan on starting a blog or commenting on forums related to your business, and only 16 percent do it already.

• Advertising in Print Media: Only 24 percent of you will continue to advertise in print media like the yellow pages, 68 percent of you have never advertised in that kind of print media, and 8 percent of you said that you would stop.

• Cleaning Up Website: 31 percent of you will continue to clean up your websites on a regular basis to make sure all links work and that your contact information is up to date, while 36 percent said that this is not a priority.

• Targeting Global Customers: Only 5 percent of you will expand your customer targets to include global customers; 43 percent will continue to target local customers only.

That’s it for now; if you have any other ideas of your own, please let us know. And to those of you who participated, thanks!

YouWant it, YouGot it: the new YouTube video element

If I’ve heard our members say it once I’ve heard it a thousand times: “When are you going to make it easier for me to add a YouTube video to my site?”  I really didn’t want to start on another thousand times, so… we built it!  We’ve just added a new YouTube element to SiteBuilder; here’s Jerry, the product designer responsible for it, to tell you about it — Rochelle.

You’ve probably noticed that websites now use lots of video. Services like YouTube have made it possible to add videos to a page by copying and pasting some HTML code into it. Some of you have already used SiteBuilder’s HTML Snippet element to add a video this way.  But it ain’t easy.  Adding HTML code can be kind of complicated, and frankly it isn’t the way we wanted to make you do it.

So we built you something I think you’ll like: the new YouTube element in SiteBuilder. No need for understanding or handling HTML code anymore–adding a video to your site is as easy as copying and pasting the URL of the YouTube video from your browser’s address bar.  You’ll also be able to see how the video player will fit in with the rest of your site on the SiteBuilder stage (the draft layout you see as you work on a web page in SiteBuilder).

Let’s try it out and add a video to a web page.  First, let’s drop the YouTube element onto our site by simply clicking it in the element menu under the “add images and files” element icon:

When you first drop your element on the SiteBuilder stage, it will look like this:

Now let’s find a video on YouTube to add to our page. To get there, go to www.youtube.com in your web browser, or just click the ‘YouTube’ link in the Properties Editor.  Let’s add my favorite video of the Internet Fairy. All we have to do is highlight or select the URL in the address bar and copy it.

You’ll find the URL you need in the address bar at the top of your screen:

We simply highlight that address from the YouTube page and copy it.  Then we go back to the page we’re building in SiteBuilder, and paste that URL into the ‘YouTube URL’ field in the properties editor in SiteBuilder.

You’ll notice that the element on the stage now shows us how the player will look on our web page.  We’ll be able to see the video itself when we’re done editing our element and we preview or publish our page.

We can control the way the video behaves, too.  There may be times when you’ll want a video to begin playing automatically as soon as a visitor gets to your page. In general, though, unless the video is the main focus of the page, you’ll probably want to let your visitors decide whether or not to watch the video. This is especially true if you have more than one video on the page. So for now we’ll leave the ‘Play Automatically’ option unchecked.

You can also choose whether or not to let YouTube suggest related videos to your visitors when they’ve finished watching your video. You’ve probably seen YouTube recommendations before; they look like this:

You get to decide if other content from YouTube would be appropriate for your purposes, or whether it would be distracting.  For now, let’s leave ‘Include Related Videos’ checked.

One of the best things about using the new YouTube element to add a video is that you can now customize the player’s appearance and see the changes directly on the stage.  For our example, let’s choose a different color for our player; how about dark blue:

Here’s how that will look:

We can also add a border of the same color to outline the player more:

And then we can preview our work; notice that the video plays right on the stage:

If we like what we see, all we have to do now is publish it:

And that’s it!  Adding a video is now just a simple copy and paste from your browser to SiteBuilder. Give it a spin; I recommend starting with Ninja Cat, one of my personal favorites: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muLIPWjks_M].  Have fun!

SEO tips for website builders – Review of Samantha Ostergaard Yoga

Our tips on Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, are among our most popular, so we asked David to pick another Homestead website customer for an SEO review.  Up this time: Samantha Ostergaard Yoga Therapy.  These tips are specifically written for that site, but the fundamentals used apply to everyone.  Happy SEO’ing! – Rochelle.

Hello again!  We’ve selected Samantha Ostergaard for our next Search Engine Optimization case study.  Samantha is a Homestead customer based in San Francisco, where she specializes in yoga therapy.

We’ve covered a lot of SEO basics in my previous posts, first with SEO checkup – Luminous Day Spa, then with Make your website search engine friendly – 3 tips for Milton Ridge.  For this post I thought I’d concentrate this entry on some slightly more advanced SEO techniques that can really help Samantha’s site, and yours.

Keyword choice

For her title tag on the front page, Samantha chose ‘yoga therapy’ as her main keyword.  There’s a really useful tool I like to use for researching how popular different keyword choices are online called the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.  It can give you advice on what keywords to consider, and now it even tells you the number of searches that were made on each!

Using that tool, this is what we find:

Keyword analysis - yoga therapy

‘Yoga therapy’ seems to be a highly competitive word, meaning that you’d have a lot of competition from other websites for people searching for that word or phrase.  What does that mean for you?  That it would be hard to stand out of the crowd of competing sites if you optimized for that phrase.

Instead, ‘integrative yoga therapy’ or ‘yoga therapy training’ might be better keywords—less competition, and still quite descriptive:

Keyword analysis - integrative yoga

Notice that competition for ‘yoga san francisco’ is relatively fierce, but dramatically less so for a semantic version – ‘yoga in san francisco’.

Looking at Samantha’s website with this knowledge in mind, we recommend that she optimize it for this keyword string: ‘integrative yoga in san francisco ca’:

• This works well as a description for what she has to offer, which will help get her more qualified traffic.
• By using that string she can get her traffic from multiple keyword strings (‘yoga in san francisco’, ‘integrative yoga’ and ‘yoga san francisco ca’).
• At the very least, we recommend that Samantha change her title tag to: ‘Samantha Ostergaard | Integrative Yoga In San Francisco CA’.

Getting links

I next checked Samantha’s backlinks (incoming links to her site) using Yahoo! Site Explorer, and got these results:

Inbound links

When I checked she had only 26 external links, mostly from faves.com and yogafinder.com. Samantha definitely needs more links, so we recommend she list her site in these directories: Yahoo Directory, Business.com, Best of the Web, Joe Ant, and the Intuit Business Directory (of course).

Remember, all links are not made equal. A link from each of the domains above is equivalent to a handful of links from smaller sites.  Always try to get a link from high-traffic, high-trust domains, or from sites that cover the same topic as your business.

Another note: while you have to pay for these links, they don’t guarantee inclusion. Your site must be professional and well-made. This is why the search engines trust them.

Get more links by participating in topical sites

As I mentioned above, links from smaller sites that are topically similar to yours are pretty good too.  To get links from these places, look for community sites where you can start engaging and participating:

• With blogs, you can start by commenting on posts.  While links in the comments are usually not followed by search engines, they do tend to attract some traffic.  More importantly, commenting will get you noticed and hopefully featured in a post in the future.

• With forums, your membership (and your reputation) establishes over time. Once it does, you can add a link to your own site on your forum signature.

How do you find these sites?  A simple Google search for ‘yoga forums’ or ‘yoga blogs’ is often sufficient. Another variation is using the inurl: command, which can help identify which URLs in use have certain words contained in them.  For example, if we do a Google search for ‘inurl:forum yoga’ and ‘inurl:blog yoga’, we’ll find examples of yoga sites that have ‘forum’ or ‘blog’ in their urls, which indicate that they might be yoga forums or blogs. Look them up, and see if you can participate in their communities.

Try it yourself

With just these few simple steps Samantha can increase the traffic to her website, which is always good for business.  Try these tips yourself, and see if you can’t raise the profile of your own site!

Making a mailing list, checking it twice…

After writing about the form elements a couple of weeks ago, a few people at the office suggested that I write about the mailing list elements as well. If you have a domain with email service, creating a mailing list is an excellent and easy way to keep your visitors informed about your business, club or group, and is a good tool to get them more involved as well.

Mailing List Overview

It’s easy to set up a mailing list for your website. In fact, you can set up as many mailing lists as you like. Basically, a mailing list is a collection of names which you can use to send information to multiple recipients at the same time.

I like to think about using mailing lists in two different ways: external and internal. As an example, let’s use a site that my friend uses to manage their Japanese drum group, San Francisco Taiko Dojo http://www.sftaiko.com/contact_booking.html.

First, the more traditional, external way to use a mailing list is as a consolidation of your customers or people who might be interested in your business. In my example, we’ve created a mailing list for people who are interested in finding out about upcoming performances or concerts that San Francisco Taiko might be doing.

Another way to use a mailing list is as an internal tool. If you have several people in your organization who might be responsible for the same job (e.g. answering general questions about your business or responding to sales inquiries), you might want to set up a mailing list that includes that group of people (e.g. sales@yourbusiness.com or info@yourbusiness.com) That way, if a customer sends an email to that address it will automatically go to everyone on the mailing list, and anyone would be able to answer it.

Setting Up Your Mailing List

Before you add any mailing list elements to your website, you’ll need to set up your mailing list. Note that you MUST have a domain in order to set up a mailing list!

1. Login to your account at www.homestead.com.
2. Click the domains & email link in the left-hand menu.
3. Click the email services link. If you have multiple domains, you may be prompted to choose the appropriate domain name. The Email Manager page will appear.
4. Click the Create Mailing List button.
5. Select an email address for your mailing list. This will be the address you use to send messages to your mailing list.
6. Enter email addresses for anyone you want to receive messages you send to your mailing list. Separate the addresses with a comma, or by pressing Enter or Return on your keyboard.
7. Click the Save button to save your mailing list.

Once your mailing list is saved, you can send mail to your mailing list at any time by simply entering the mailing list address (the one you created in step # 5) into your email program.

The Mailing List Elements

Now you’re ready to use the Mailing List elements that are in SiteBuilder!

There are three elements for you to choose from:

• Join the mailing list – this element lets users automatically submit their email address to the mailing list of your choice.

• Remove me from the mailing list – this element gives your visitors the ability to opt out of your mailing list by simply entering their email address. Keep your visitors happy by allowing them to choose the amount of e-mail they receive.

• Mail the mailing list – use this element in conjunction with the Join the Mailing List element. That way, visitors who are interested can join and then email something to your website’s mailing list quickly and easily. Note that you may NOT want to let people email something to your mailing list so easily! This is the kind of element that might be better for a club or organization that has a password-protected page.

As with all elements, there are a bunch of things that you can customize on them including font, color, image used and custom messages. Just check out the Properties Editor to see what you can change:

Note that you can also use text links to let people email your mailing list. Just highlight the text that you want to use as your link and use the “Email Address” option.

Hopefully you’ve found this post useful, and you can now unleash the power of Mailing Lists on your site!

Oh, one final word of caution – there’s a limit of 1500 characters for each mailing list. This roughly translates to a limit of 60 to 80 email addresses.

If you hit this limit, here’s a little trick that I use which I like to call “embedding mailing lists”. When I get near the limit I create a new mailing list that I name something like “MailingList2” or “MailingList3” (depending on how many mailing lists I have), that will hold any new addresses I want to add.

Then I just add that new mailing list to the original one, so that whenever I address something to the original mailing list it will include everyone on the new mailing list too!

It sounds kind of crazy, but it works!

Some pictures are worth more words than others – Part III

Ron, from our Creative Services group, is back to give you some more insight into how to use imagery more effectively in your website design – Rochelle.

In part 1 of my discussion on using images when building your website, I talked about how to choose good existing images from free resources like the Homestead Image Library. Part 2 was about dealing with copyright issues when using image services.

Today, in part 3, I’d like to talk about using your own images in your website. Taking your own photographs is probably the best way to make sure you’re getting the exact image you need for your purpose, particularly if you have an online store.

Photos of your products are arguably the single most important part of your online store. A great image gets your customers excited about your products, and gives them the confidence to complete their purchase from your store.

The great news is that it isn’t hard to take impressive photos of your products if you keep a few simple tips in mind:

• Make your product stand out – Try using a white background to make your images jump off of the screen. Whatever background you choose, make sure that the object you’re photographing stands out against it. It’s often a good idea to use the same background consistently for all your products, so they’ll look great on the catalog page (where all the thumbnails are displayed side by side).

• Avoid camera shake – Use a tripod to avoid moving the camera and to get the sharpest possible picture. This is especially important when using natural light.

• Lighting is everything – Avoid using the built-in flash on your camera, especially in close-up situations; it can look harsh and flatten out the object. Turn the flash off and experiment with other methods of lighting, either using natural light or external lighting.

• Experiment with DIY lighting – There are inexpensive lighting boxes available at photography stores, but finding other ways to diffuse light can be fun, and they don’t have to cost a lot of money. Try using two sunlight-adjusted fluorescent bulbs in clamp lights with a reflector, and aim them at a wall near the object to bounce the light onto your product.

• Put your products on ice – My own favorite trick is to use a simple plastic ice chest or cooler as an impromptu product stage. The cooler provides a lovely even light that’s often perfect for illuminating what you put inside. Find yourself a white-lined plastic cooler large enough to fit your products, then bring it outside to a nice shady spot. Put your product inside and shoot away!

• Get closer – Most digital cameras have a macro focus setting; use it to bring your camera within inches of your product to make sure the details are in perfect focus. This key setting is often accessed by a button that has an image of a flower on it.

• Get creative – Finding creative ways to photograph your products can add excitement to your store. For example, instead of photographing your nature-themed jewelry on a table, imagine hanging it on branches. If you need inspiration, you can look on the Web; find ways to emulate the most inspiring product photos you can find.

• Let software polish your images – There are many free or inexpensive software solutions out there that can help you optimize your photos to look great on the web, and they don’t have to be difficult to use. Look for programs that have simple tools to adjust brightness, contrast and size, and those that can save images to your computer in .jpg format.

• Make your images the right size – When resizing your images for use in your online store, look at your product detail pages and choose a size that works well with the layout you have chosen. A good rule of thumb is to keep them around 300 pixels wide.

• Do it yourself – Consider making your own thumbnail images instead of allowing the Store software to create them for you. You’ll have more control and make the smaller versions of your product photos look more sharp and crisp.

I hope these tips encourage you to try your own photographs. With very little practice you’ll find yourself taking professional-quality photos in no time!

Extreme Makeover: Online Website Editor Edition

“So,” I hear you say, “about those posts by Brian on user testing: does that stuff really work?”  Well, yeah!  Here’s Sam to tell you about how we use it ourselves, and what surprising things you can find out with it – Rochelle.

SiteBuilder Lite is the award-winning software that helps people easily create beautiful websites and connect with their customers, friends and loved ones in ways that they never could before. Homestead members have used SiteBuilder Lite to create websites for charitable organizations, non-profits and family photo albums. We’re proud of the way this little tool has touched so many lives.  We’ve put a lot of effort into it, and we were pretty proud of how it worked.

And then we tested it.  And here’s what we found.

We know you’re looking for clearly labeled buttons that are easy to understand, and that you want to add and delete entire text blocks without hunting all over the screen for the right button before giving up and calling customer support.

We know you want to add personal images – the elements that bring websites to life – to your websites and place them anywhere you like, so that your message, your vision, can be broadcast to the world.

What else do we know?

We know that you didn’t find those things.  At least, not in the way you wanted them.  That’s why we test our tools with real people like you, so we can find out it if we’re building things you really want.

SiteBuilder Lite could do some of those things before…but, the question was, could we make them better?  It turns out that yeah, we could, and now we have!

First of all, we improved the look of the element buttons to make their function clearer:

Before:

After:

Next, we made it easier to see how to delete a text element by adding a little button that says, well, delete:

Before:

After:

And we’ve given image handling the same sort of treatment.  We added replace and delete buttons right on the border of your image elements.  You can also drag and drop images easier now.  To move an image, just “grab” the image anywhere you like – you’re no longer limited to the top border:

Before:

After:

In addition to these changes, we’ve improved the “import image” window in SiteBuilder Lite so that it is more straightforward to import an image from your computer and preview it before adding it to your website.

Hope you like the new changes!  We’re still on the lookout for ways to improve SiteBuilder Lite.  Again, that’s why we test – we realize that you, our members, have a lot of time and effort invested in your websites.  The success of your businesses depends on your sites, so we are constantly on the lookout for ways to make things easier for you, either by adding new elements or improving existing ones.

We have a lot of our own ideas in discussion and in the production queue, but if you have any of your own please let us know.  Stay tuned for more to come, and thanks again for using Homestead!

Testing your site – how to prepare for a user test and how to conduct it

A while ago we had Brian, one of our user interface designers, write about the importance of user testing. He works very closely with people we invite to our user testing sessions, so he knows what he’s talking about. Here he is with a follow-up, this time with tips on preparing and conducting your own user tests – Rochelle

In my last post I mentioned how important it is to look at how “user-friendly” your website is. If it’s user-friendly, it’s far more likely that your visitors will come back and make visits to your site a regular thing.

User-friendliness is one of the most intangible and hard to define characteristics of any website. It can be really hard for someone who has built a site to make that determination alone. The very best way to find out how friendly your site is to your visitors is to ask the visitors themselves.

At Homestead, we bring in a group of users every month and just watch them use our website. It’s been invaluable to see where some of the design choices we make work out well, and where some fail. It gives us an opportunity to fix things where necessary, and make Homestead a better product to use. Several changes we’ve made over the past year have come about from observations made in user testing, such as the redesign of SiteBuilder Lite we did a few months ago.

Most software companies test their websites with real or representative users. Some companies, such as Google and Microsoft, have entire teams of people and advanced fancy equipment to test. However, you don’t need to be a large company with vast resources to test the usability your website. All you need is time and a little help from your friends.

Mapping out tasks

Last time I talked about deciding what your goals were for visitors coming to your site, like making a purchase, submitting a survey, finding your location etc. Once you’ve identified those, put yourself in the shoes of your visitors and map out the tasks you think they should do in order to accomplish each of those goals. Each task should be something a user on your site would typically do to accomplish one of your goals.

For instance, if one of your goals is for a visitor to make a purchase, the tasks they need to accomplish might be searching for a product, selecting a size, choosing shipping options and inputting payment information.

Some tasks should take less than a minute to finish, others will take more. It all depends on how complicated the task is. Come up with an ideal length of time for each task. For a simple five page information-based website, any task should not take more than a minute or two. For an ecommerce website with many products, tasks may take several minutes.

During your test you’ll have an opportunity to see how long it actually takes users to accomplish your goals. Don’t be discouraged if each task takes longer than you expected. Either you misjudged, or you just identified an area of your site that needs improvement (more on that in another post).

Who to test

Now that you’ve identified your tasks, you need to identify who your target users are. If you’ve made it this far you probably have a good sense of who they are. If you sell products, such as pet supplies, a target user might be dog owners. If you’re an electrician, a target user might be a homeowner.

To run a proper test you’ll need to observe at least five people using your site. Ideally these five people should be representative of your target user group. If you can’t find representative users, use family and/or friends.

However, make sure that that their technical proficiency is roughly the same as your target group. If you believe your target group is not tech-savvy, you probably don’t want to pick your nephew getting his degree in computer science.

For a good test you should schedule between 30 and 45 minutes of time with your users, either at your home or business, or at their residence. Remember, they’re doing you a favor so take them out to lunch or bake them some cookies for lending you a hand.

I hope this gives you enough tips to help you plan for your own tests. In subsequent posts I’ll discuss how to conduct your tests and how to interpret your results. If you have questions, let us know!