Having met many business owners over the years who have dabbled in creating or promoting a website themselves

We feel very strongly about this at Savvy Marketers and more recently have found that some people we have met or who are clients of ours have been given a less than satisfactory service by their provider.

We understand that most small business owners are not web experts, but specialise in what they’re good at. Therefore there’s a certain amount of trust that their provider is going to provide a decent service, or at least explain in non-techie terms what the contract they have signed up to involves.

So, to help you, these are some of the questions you really need to be asking before you hire a third party to help you build or promote your website.

1. What does the price for your service include and more importantly,what does it not include?

2. How much do you charge for any extras or extra work I may need now or in the future?

3. How quickly can I expect to see results? If your provider promises high Google rankings in a short space of time, or even guarantees rankings, then be very wary!

4. Will you provide me with regular reports or contact me about how my site is progressing? Will you respond to my questions in a timely manner?

5. Will you freely offer me information about how I can improve my site or any tips & suggestions you may have?

6. How do you bill your clients? 

7. Do you have case studies or testimonials from other clients and can I contact them?

8. Will you find out about my business, my goals, challenges and target market so that you can provide me with the best solution to fit my situation?

9. Is my site secured against hackers? What measures have you put in place to prevent my site from being hacked?

10. Where will my site be hosted? Can I move it if I ever need to? Will you register any domain names in my own name? (this is very important if you’re using a web developer and asking them to buy domain names on your behalf).

It’s very important that many of these questions are answered and you’re satisfied with the answers given, not only so you know what kind of service to expect, but to make sure that your provider really understands your business so they can provide you with the best possible service. It’s also important that you and your provider are on the same wavelength to avoid any problems that may arise once the contracted work starts.

Make sure you really know what you’re paying for. For example, does the new website include any search engine optimisation? Some developers include this and some don’t. If it does, make sure you’re involved in the process so they target the right keywords and you understand what it involves. You should also receive regular feedback on traffic to your site, and how it’s performing in the search engines and know how to access your website analytics (visitor stats).

Most importantly, whoever you use, they should be proactive in helping you make your website the best it can be, and if you don’t hear from them for a couple of months but are still paying them, find out exactly what they’re doing!

We hope this helps you get the best possible service for your website, and if you have any feedback or this raises more questions for you, please get in touch!

What are your experiences of outsourcing web development or marketing? Please share in the comments! 

QR Code Generator – what you need to create your own QR code. Here’s a post with a useful list of code generators to choose from. (I’ve just used QRMobilize to set up my personal QR code and found it quite easy to use.)

We’re also experimenting with Goo.gl which is a URL shortener combined with a QR code generator. The benefits of this is that it lets you track the number of visits to the page where the QR code was read. Make sure you’re logged into Google and just type the URL of the page you want to direct people to. You’ll then see your newly shortened URL. Once you have your shortened URL, click on “details” and you’ll see your very own QR code has been automatically generated for you. You can then right click and save it as a JPEG (for best resolution) or take a screen shot of it. Then you can use it on any of the materials listed below AND you’ll be able to see clicks generated from the QR code and track what’s working for you.

QR Code Reader – which one you choose depends on which smartphone you have. For my BlackBerry, I’ve downloaded the free lynkee.com which was quite straightforward to do, and seems to work well. However I do find that you have to be very precise (and have a steady hand) when capturing the code to enable it to be read.

QR Code Applications for Small Businesses – While some TV ads are sporting QR Codes, personally, I’d struggle to snap the code in the very few seconds it was on-screen!

Perhaps their best applications are to be found offline, on printed media, such as:

• Business Cards
• Trade Show Literature
• Posters
• Direct Mail Postcards
• Take-away Menus
• Magazines and Newspapers
• Product Instructions
• and many more!

The QR code you can see at the top of this post is for our own Savvy Marketing Tips! In this case, we’re using it to encourage people to subscribe to our newsletter, and the link will take you to a sign up box.

If you’re using QR Codes, what’s the best application you’ve seen so far? Please share in the comments below, we’d love to know!

Many of us use remote data storage on a daily basis, and have done so for years, particularly with email services such as Hotmail & Gmail. More recently these services have become increasingly sophisticated with huge increases in the amount of storage available. For me, using Gmail for my email has made life much easier as I can access email on any computer and it replaces the rather clunky system called ‘Entourage’ which I used previously.

Another service I’ve been using over the last couple of years is a secure remote back up called ‘Sugarsync‘. I’m somewhat obsessed about data backup after nearly losing all my business data several years and now back up remotely as well as locally on an external hard drive. As with the email providers, the Sugarsync service has increased the amount of data that can be stored for a fairly small fee, and it gives me peace of mind that my data is safe. I can also access it from any computer and from a mobile phone.

And there’s so much more! Louise and I regularly use Google Docs to share documents between us for review and editing, there are numerous collaboration tools out there with even more features, such as Basecamp. Many ISPs offer a certain amount of data storage to their customers too. Battle lines are being drawn between some of the internet giants as remote music storage is being rolled out this year, starting with Amazon who announced their ‘Cloud Drive’ offering just a couple of weeks ago. Apple and Google no doubt will be announcing theirs before long! You can read more about this here: Amazon Beats Apple And Google To Cloud-Based Music Storage/Streaming.

So how do you feel about keeping your data in the cloud? I know I’m happy to be able to store my data for backup purposes online and it’s been great switching over to Gmail for my email. Photos and music can take up huge amounts of storage on computers, so being able to store some of this remotely takes away having to buy ever larger hard drives. However, I wouldn’t be happy about storing certain data solely in the cloud. I would never replace storing important documents locally for the cloud just to free up space on my computer. As with some of the free services, you don’t know how much longer they’ll be free for or if they’ll continue to exist in their current form, so in my opinion, there are risks to using cloud computing, as well security risks if they ever get hacked into. Having said that, I’m happy to take that risk by using Gmail!

What are your thoughts? Do you use the cloud to store documents or just as an additional backup? Are you comfortable storing data remotely? Please share your comments here!

Image: Clouds by ►CubaGallery, on Flickr

The information provided by the application is very useful, albeit rather technical but gives insight into how well your website is being indexed by Google and if they’re encountering any errors on your site. Other information provided is

• when your site was crawled
• how quickly the pages load (important for Google),
• which keywords your website is being found for and which ones are resulting in click throughs to your site
• which sites link back to your website
• if any malware has been found on your site, i.e if your site has been hacked!

To set up Google webmaster tools, you need a Google account. If you have one already, for example for Gmail, you can use the same login. If not, create a brand new Google account. Once you sign up to Webmaster Tools, you need to verify that you own your website. In order to do this you need to paste some code into the home page of your site or upload a blank webpage – Google will provide the filename for this page. You can ask your web developer to do this for you if you’re unsure, it should only be a 5 minute job!

Once done, log back in and click that your site is verified, then you’ll have access to all this information. You don’t need to check the stats every day, but perhaps every week or so depending on how large your site is.

Let us know of any useful tools you use to keep check on how your site is performing!

Has your business benefitted from the internet?  What questions does this clip raise for you? We’d love to know!

Shortening an unwieldy and long URL is very convenient. If you use Twitter, you’ll know the number of characters is at a premium (only 140 per tweet), so the shorter the url, the longer the rest of your tweet message can be.

When you use a long URL in an email, there can be problems as a long link is more likely to ‘break’, in other words clicking on it doesn’t take readers where you intended them to go.  Instead they end up with an error message.  While you’d think people would get in touch and let you know the link was broken, often they forget because they’re busy, and you’ll always wonder why there were so few click throughs to your latest promotion.

Some URL shorteners enable you to ‘personalise’ the result. For example, you might want to include ‘mynewproduct’ – so the shortened URL would be http://tinyurl/mynewproduct (hopefully not a real web page!)

If you use Hootsuite as your Twitter client, they offer two URL shorteners: Ht.ly includes a ‘social bar’ (see below – the bar is at the top of the screenshot).

This means you can easily Retweet the blog post and have access to submit the link to Digg, Reddit, Delicious, FaceBook, etc.

The second of Hootsuite’s URL shorteners is Ow.ly – which creates a simple short link.  Both Ht.ly and Ow.ly provide click through statistics.

Click through stats are possibly one of the most compelling reasons to use a URL shortener (not all of them provide this service, so check the one you use does).  Being able to see how many people are clicking through to your webpage or blog using your link is very valuable marketing data to have.

It’s a good idea to check the shortened link before you give it out – just click to make sure it takes you to the page you want to go to!

There are many (over 100) different URL shortening tools, some more reliable than others.  For an in depth analysis of performance and uptime, see Mashable’s helpful blog post from earlier this year.

Have you tried URL shorteners?  If so which do you like?  Please share in the comments below – and if you found this post helpful, we’d love a retweet

When I couldn’t see any details on the home page, naturally I went straight to the ‘Contact’ page – to be confronted by a form.  And that’s all that was on the page – no phone number, no address, no email – nothing but a form to complete – which I don’t want to do.  I know forms have their place, but surely not as the only way of getting in touch?

I wonder how often this chap’s phone rings with new enquiries?

It got me thinking about how we often don’t see the obvious on our own websites (I even had a quick look at ours to make sure you can contact us easily!)

Find out if you’re a mystery to your clients by taking a critical look at your website.  Better still, ask someone who hasn’t seen it before to visit it and ask them to answer a few questions:

• How do they get in touch with you?
• Can they explain what you do?
• Do you make it clear who you do it for?
• Is it obvious what you want them to do next?

Visitors to your website should be able to easily see all this information on your home page (even if it’s just a summary and they need to click through to other pages to read more detail).  After all, the home page is often the one most first-time visitors land on, so it’s important to let them know if they’re in the right place quickly.

Make it very easy for your customers and prospective customers to find basic information.  If you don’t, they’ll click away because they don’t have time to solve a mystery.

Have you come across websites that kept you guessing?  Do share in the comments below.  And if you found this post helpful, please retweet it!

WiseStamp.com – If you use Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo or AOL to send your emails, and Firefox or Chrome as your internet browser (there are plans to increase coverage very soon), do take a look at this very versatile tool which will let you create a professional-looking signature block for emails.  The free version (although it’s polite to make a donation) provides 2 alternative signatures and several templates to try.  I especially like that we can include social media links AND a latest blog post, by pulling in the RSS feed.

Tungle.me – I only started using this online diary a few weeks ago and so far am very pleased.  It enables me to arrange meetings with several people, or just one person by emailing over my availability – avoiding that annoying email ping-pong that usually ensues when trying to agree dates and times.  Tungle not only emails me when a meeting has been booked, it also sends a reminder if anyone hasn’t booked, so I can follow-up.  The other parties don’t need to sign up for an account in order to schedule a meeting either (which can be a barrier for some people).

Another great feature is that Tungle not only books confirmed appointments into my Google Calendar, it also syncs automatically with my lovely new BlackBerry (Bold 9700) so I can schedule meetings even when away from the office.  (Also syncs with iPhones).

Paymo.biz – I originally tried out this timer tool to find out where my time was disappearing to! (see post on my other blog).  More recently, I’ve found it very useful for tracking time spent on various projects and client work.  There’s a downloadable desktop widget which is very quick and easy to use and great if you need to stop working on a task, handle an interruption and then restart the timer.  The reports are very detailed, as long as you take time to type in a few notes, and can act as professional looking back-up time sheets to invoices.

We love to hear from you, so please share any favourite online tools you’ve found helpful. And be sure to re-tweet this post so we can keep spreading the word about the good stuff!

General Link Housekeeping
When you’ve put a lot of effort into creating a promotion, blog post, email newsletter or other online content, do take time to test all links before tweeting or publishing, especially if you’ve recently made changes to the structure of your website or blog.  It will save you that heart-sink moment when a kind soul tells you they tried to click but got an error message.  The worst part is that you’ll never know who else might have been interested but didn’t get in touch when the link didn’t work for them.

Using Links on Twitter
Links on Twitter need to be prefaced with ‘http://’ to make them into ‘live’ or clickable links (you don’t actually need the ‘www.’ as well).

With the restricted number of characters in a tweet, use a URL shortening tool like www.tinyurl.com so you have more room for your message!  (If you use a Twitter client like TweetDeck or Hootsuite, they have built in URL shorteners.)

Free Twitter Resource
If you’re new to Twitter, or want to find out more about using it, there’s an excellent little e-book entitled ‘Twitter is Not Just about Cheese Sandwiches’ by Twitter-Guru @MarkShaw (go to www.markshaw.biz to get your copy).

1. Sugarsync – I’ve banged on about Sugarsync many times on this blog, but it really is one of the best tools I subscribe to. Not  only do I have peace of mind that my data is backed up, but when I work on my laptop, which I do quite a lot, I can access all of my folders through the Sugarsync file manager and use them as if I was working on my main desktop computer. All I need is a wireless internet connection!

2. Feedly – Feedly is now my RSS reader of choice (basically the way I subscribe to blog posts). I much prefer the interface to Google Reader and it’s interface (to me) is more like reading my favourite magazine. It’s very easy to categorise the blogs you subscribe so you can just look at blogs in certain categories rather than sort through all of them. Well worth taking a look at.

3. Evernote – I’ve been using Evernote for a few months now and it’s an easy way of bookmarking information that I come across on the web. I can tag pages I bookmark, save links or images, snippets of pages and even video notes using a webcam. Of course it’s free, so another one worth checking out.

4. Skype – has to be one of the best money saving ways to call business contacts, friends and family! If you don’t use it much then start using it as it’ll save you a bundle of money on phone calls!

There are loads of really useful tools out there and no doubt plenty I don’t know about! If you’ve any favourites that you’d like to add to this list, please let us know!