Blogs

What: Amazon Web Services Office Hours and Open Co-Working
When: 2pm - 6pm, July 22, 2008 (4th Tuesday of each month)
Where: StartPad, 811 First Ave, Suite 480, Seattle - (206) 388-3466

Amazon is returning to StartPad today for their monthly - Amazon Web Services Office Hours.

Stop by for one-on-one support and get your questions about EC2 or S3 answered in person!

You're also free to setup your laptop in our conference room for a (free) co-working session.

 

One of the pleasures of being at StartPad is meeting the founders of some pretty cool new web services. I've recently been trying two of them and finding them to be really useful.

RescueTime has been a StartPad tenant for a couple of months, and several of us in the office have been using their service. RescueTime is great for productivity nerds - it will tell you how many hours per week your spending on different applications and web sites. I've found it really interesting in helping me focus on spending more time on actual software development, and less time on email and web surfing. It's pretty eye opening to see just how few hours per week I can be "inside" my dev tools when I thought I had been working pretty hard at it.

Chatterous is working at StartPad just for the month of July, and then heading down to the Bay Area. Their product lets you set up group chats and will direct communication to your choice of GoogleTalk/Jabber, email, or cell phone. We've tried in the past to set up a group chat room for StartPad members (using CampFire), but I've gotten out of the habit of opening up the web site to use it. Since Chatterous integrates with my existing IM client, I'm more likely remember to use it. Come join us at: StartPad chat group.

P.S. A while back I set up a Faves.com account called StartPad. Members are invited to send a friend request to that account, and this will allow you to bookmark sites of interest to our other members which will then show up on the sidebar at right.

What: Amazon Web Services Office Hours and Open Co-Working
When: 2pm - 6pm, June 24, 2008 (4th Tuesday of each month)
Where: StartPad, 811 First Ave, Suite 480, Seattle - (206) 388-3466

This month, we're starting a new service at StartPad - Amazon Web Services Office Hours.

One of the AWS evangelists will be working in our offices once a month and will be available to answer questions and give some one-on-one help. Anyone in the Seattle software startup community is invited to drop by.

So if you're an AWS user, or are thinking about using S3, EC2, or any of the other AWS services, you can stop by our offices to talk to an expert one-on-one. We also have internet access here for you to use so you can pull up a chair and do some co-working while you're here (no charge).

 

 

 

Faves.com (a Seattle social bookmarking website) just released a new widget which I'm now using on StartPad.org.  The cool things about it are:

• It displays the latest web sites you've saved on Faves.com.
• Very customizable in styling.
• Can customize the query used to only show Faves with a particular tag.
• Can syndicate Faves from more than one user (options are you, your Friends, or Everyone).

I've created a "virtual user" on Faves.com (startpad).  I want to allow any member of the StartPad user community to be able to find cool web sites, and have them displayed on the StartPad home page in the widget.  If you want to participate, just following these steps:

• Create an account on Faves.com (if you don't already have one).
• Send a Friend Request to "startpad".
• Start Faving content using the tag "startups".

 Once I accept your friend request, your Faves will automatically start showing up in the sidebar widget -->

[Note - please don't create SPAM - I prefer sites of general interest to the Seattle software startup community.  If I get spam from your account, I will "un-friend" you (gasp!)] 

I recently helped a friend of mine set up a business website for her condo rental business on Kauai. The website is pretty simple, needing just a single main page to describe her property, provide her contact information, and display a calendar for it's availability.

It worked out pretty well, but took quite a bit longer than you'd think. Here's the basic task list:

1. Decide on Search keywords for which we want to have decent search ranking (SEO).
2. Register domain(s).
3. Enable domain-based email.
4. Author the copy for the primary web page.
5. Identify images to display.
6. Design and format the web page.
7. Create a blog for customer information and feedback.
8. List business for local search.
9. Create a search advertising campaign.
10. Setup visitor monitoring and analytics.
11. Setup search engine keyword monitoring.

Whew. That's a lot, which explains why this took about 20 hours to complete. With many different applications and tools required, it's no wonder that "ordinary people" don't often have much success in a do-it-yourself project like this (which is a shame, if we hope to make the Internet the great equalizer).

Impatient to get started?  Here's a quick summary of links to all the tools used in this guide:

• Bust A Name (free) - Domain name searching
• GoDaddy (not free, but cheap) - Domain name registration
• Google Apps (free) - email, calendaring, simple web page hosting
• Blogger (free) - blog
• Google Page Submission (free) - add urls to search engine
• Faves.com (free) - social bookmarking link
• Google Local (free) - local business listing (Google Maps)
• Google AdWords (not free) - Advertising
• Google Analytics (free) - web site traffic reporting
• Google Webmaster Tools (free) - search engine statistics
• Yahoo Site Explorer (free) - inbound link report

Identify Search Keywords

The primary way people are going to find your business is through search. So, it's really important to put yourself into the head of your customer and figure out how they will be searching for your product or service. Rather than buy a domain first, and then figure out the keywords you want, your site will perform better if you can get the keywords you want in your domain name itself.

For this site, we knew we wanted keywords like "kauai", "vacation", "condo", "hawaii", "Waipouli", "resort", "beach", "ocean view", etc.

Domain Registration (not free, but cheap)

In our case, we registered 4 domains (the first one being the primary one and the others redirecting to the primary):

• kauai-condo-vacation.com
• hawaii-condo-vacation.com
• waipouli-condo-vacation.com
• waipouli-condo.com

There are so many domains purchased now, it can be difficult to find one that suits you. Domains with hyphens are not the norm, but I think they are perfectly fine for a low-traffic site like this business (although I do strongly feel that a .com domain is essential - we did not even look at .org, .net, or .us domain names). Tools we used:

• Bust A Name - Fast searching for available domains that use 2 or more keywords of your chosing. If you can find a relatively short .com domain name with 2 to 3 of your top keywords in it, you're ready to go.
• GoDaddy - A great domain registrar - price includes DNS hosting so you can direct your domain to a host of your choice. GoDaddy is pretty easy to use once you get used to their site. And their customer service is amazingly good (I've even had GoDaddy service people call me just to make sure everything was OK with my account). Expect to pay less than $10/year for a domain name (including DNS support).

Hosted Email (free)

I find that the easiest to use (and free) hosted email is Google Apps (otherwise known as Google for Domains). Google will provide your email with an interface identical to Gmail accounts (@gmail.com), except that they will use your own domain name (e.g., btaylor@kauai-condo-vacation.com). You can also easily set up incoming email lists that will forward mail to multiple users (e.g., sales@kauai-condo-vacation.com, support@kauai-condo-vacation.com). You can have Google forward all of your mail to another email address if you don't want to have to log in to a new email account to read your business email.

Google will walk you through the steps of creating DNS entries in your GoDaddy account that will link your domain name to Google's email and web servers (you basically have to create MX records that point to Google's mail services, and CNAME records for sub-domains like mail.kauai-condo-vacation.com and www.kauai-condo-vacation.com).

We were also able to use Google's Calendar features to create a scheduling calendar for the condo and display it as a widget in the website so potential customers can see the dates the condo is available without having to call the owner.

Create a Compelling Web Page (free)

Keep in mind the information that your users will want to know about your product and service. Be mindful of the keywords they may be using to search for your business and use those in your web page. Make sure important keywords appear in heading tags (e.g., <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, etc.).

One of the applications included in Google Apps, is Google Page Creator (or "GPC" - called "Web Pages" in your Google Apps control panel). There are some simple templates to choose from, and Google lets you edit HTML in your page directly (which we had to do to get the formatting we desired for images). The online page editor is simple enough for most users to be able to edit and update the copy on their website themselves - so it's a good solution for ongoing site maintenance and upkeep (even if you need the help of someone experienced with HTML to get started).

Note: Your web address has to use www.your-domain-name.com - you won't be able to use simply your-domain-name.com with GPC on it's own. I created another site at kauai-condo-vacation.com specifically to redirect (301) to www.kauai-condo-vacation.com.

Warning: As of this writing, Google has a bug in their GPC Settings page that does NOT allow you to change the default "home page" for your site. There is a workaround if you need to fix this - but Google has been very slow (over 2 months!) to address this major flaw. Be careful not to delete your default home page.

You'll want to create a link to your site so the search engines will know about it. You can either go to Google page submission tool or add a link to an existing blog (I used my Social Bookmarking account at Faves.com).

Creating a Blog (free)

Since our primary page will be very focused on getting future customers to make a booking of the condo, we wanted to have another set of pages where we could add extra information like customer testimonials, or activity information about the island of Kauai. These are designed to bring in additional search engine traffic, and also provide meaningful background information for potential customers.

An easy (and free) blogging platform is also available from Google - Blogger.com. You can associate this with your own domain as well (e.g., blog.kauai-condo-vacation.com). Both sites are linked to each other so users (and search engines) can get to both pages.

Local Search (free)

If your business is in retail, or associated with a physical location, I'd recommend that you create a Local Business listing on Google Maps. After verifying your phone or physical address, Google will put your listing into Google Maps when people are searching for local or regional businesses.

Advertising (NOT free)

Until your site is the most popular on the internet for your desired keywords, you're going to have to buy search engine advertising to bring people to your site. Depending on your product or service, you may have to spend anywhere from $0.05 to $5 just to get people to click on your Ad and visit your web page. The best place to advertise is on Google. The secret to a successful advertising campaign is targetting; you want only the people who are ready to buy your product to be the ones that click on your ad.

Google's AdWords advertising program lets anyone bid on keywords for their ad to be shown on Google's search pages. It's really amazingly simple to setup, create a text ad, bid on keywords, and be up and running in a matter of minutes. Google will even help you identify keywords by scanning the text of your landing page and suggesting the best keywords to use (this is one reason you want to have your web page complete before purchasing advertising).

Some recommendations:

• Set a daily budget - you don't want to be surprised with a HUGE bill when you're getting started and don't know how much your clicks are worth.
• Plan to run a one-week trial. Bid on 20 to 30 keyword combinations and let your ad run for a week. You'll get excellent data on which of them people are really searching for, how good your ad placement is (at your current bid amount), and how frequently people are clicking on your ad when they see it.
• Run two to three ad variants. Each variant should have a selection of your top keywords in the ad title, and the ad body. Google will highlight these words in your ad when they match a user's search terms, making your ad more visible. AdWords automatically will present different ads and try to show the most optimal one for any given search.
• Be very specific in the wording of your ad - you want people to know exactly what to expect when they land on your site. If you are vague, or imply a benefit that is not there when they reach your site, you will get stuck paying for the click when the user is disapointed in your offer and leaves without converting.
• At the end of your trial, you can remove underperforming keywords and ad variations, adjust your bid amounts on some keywords up or down, etc.
• Plan to review your Adwords performance on a weekly basis.

In the event that your website begins to get a high amount of organic search traffic (un-paid searches), you can start dropping some of your paid advertising for those keywords. How will you know? That bring us to Analytics.

Note: The best way to run an ad campaign is to understand your return on investment (ROI). To do that, you need to know how much a click to your website is worth. This usually means understanding how well visitors convert to paying customers. If you have an e-commerce site, you can report the value of actual sales back to Google AdWords and they will automatically calculate your ROI for each keyword and ad! In our case, potential renters will call the owner on the phone to make a booking. But it's still important to try to understand how to close the loop - ask your customers how they found out about your product. You should be able to calculate the value of all the sales being generated by your advertising campaign and adjust your budget according to the returns you're getting.

Analytics (free)

Since you can't physically see when people are visiting your website, its effectiveness will be unknown to you. Google offers another tool, Google Analytics, that will show you lots of detailed information about every visit.

Once you create a Google Analytics account, you will get a small snippet of JavaScript code to place in your web page(s). You should add this to the footer of your GPC page (use the Edit HTML feature to paste the code in). You can include the code in an HTML widget in your blogger template. You can either use the same code, or create a unique profile in Google Analytics for your blog if you don't want page views for both the blog and the main website counted together.

Note: Once you have your Analytics account setup, log in to your Google AdWords account, and link it to your Analytics account by clicking on the Analytics tab and following the instructions. Your Analytics reports will now have detailed information from your AdWords campaign integrated into them.

The reporting in Google Analytics is extensive. The primary things of concern are:

• Visits - Analytics will count the number of visitors you've had to your site. Especially watch the trend over time.
• Page Views - If you have a single-page website, this is not very relevant. But as your blog grows, you may find that visitors are looking at several pages.
• Traffic Sources - These reports can tell you how people are finding your site. You want to know if other sites are linking to you (Refererring Sites), and which Search Engines they are using (you'll see that most traffic is coming from Google).
• Keywords - This report will show you which keywords people are using to visit your site, whether via paid links or via organic search.

You can have Google email you a report once per week, so you are reminded to check the status of your new website.

Webmaster Tools (free)

Google's Webmaster Tools are a great way to get a summary of how your website is being indexed and linked to. The most relevant reports are:

• Statistics/Top Search Queries - Not only can you find out which queries are generating clicks to your site (as Analytics will tell you), but you can also see which search result pages list your site. Google recently added the ability to report on different time periods so you can see how your site is changing over time.
• Links/Pages with External Links - This is a very important report. Since your search engine ranking depends heavily on other (popular) sites linking to yours, you'll want to have as many incoming links as possible. This report shows you what your incoming links are in Google's primary index. Yahoo's SiteExplorer often contains a more extensive listing of incoming links to a site.

On a recent flight, I was amused to see the following message displayed on an Airport Kiosk:

There are unused icons on your desktop.

Besides looking exceedingly silly on a airport departure gate display, it also totally obliterated the status of the current flight (presumably "On Time", in this case). No airline personnel had access to the computer to update the display and dismiss the unwanted dialog. This is also a fairly common occurance as a quick search on Flickr reveals here and here. This is just one of the reasons that people can find software so frustrating. But it reminded me of a categorization of software annoyances I've been thinking about:

The Eight Levels of Software Annoyance

When people become annoyed and frustrated with their computers, I think it can be traced to a mismatch between the users intention, and what the computer/program does.

1. I don't know if the computer can do what I want (and I don't know how to find out).
2. I think the computer can do what I want, but I don't know how to tell it to do so.
3. I know how to tell the computer what I want, but it does something different (or nothing at all).
4. The computer did something "on its own" without my having requested it (possibly interrupting me).
5. The computer is doing what I want - but it is doing it unreasonably slowly.
6. The computer demands that I do extra work (like repeating myself) in order to get what I want accomplished.
7. The computer loses data/work that I have invested my time in.
8. The computer crashes/dies.

Our frustrations come from anthropomorphizing the computer, whom we feel is acting like a very stupid or very rude person. We certainly expect the computer to be subservient to us, and not the other way around. The example above is a Level IV failure. At some point, a (misguided) programmer at Microsoft felt that too many icons on the desktop was a problem that users needed some help correcting; so they added this nagging feature when Windows XP was introduced. Amazingly, there is even a user-settable option that allows you to turn this behavior on and off. No wonder Windows is so bloated.

The Seven Levels of Software Delight

Since I'm an optimist, I thought I would create a parallel list for the ways that computers and software can delight us as well:

1. Programs that tell me how to accomplish something, exactly when I am looking for it.
2. Programs that do exactly what I want/think they will.
3. Programs that pleasantly surprise me by doing something I wanted, but had not asked for.
4. Programs that are Fast.
5. Programs that do all the work for me without my having to repeat myself.
6. Programs that reliably retain all of my data.
7. Programs that don't crash.

Note that Delight III is pretty close to Annoyance IV. As I'm a conservative fellow, I'd recommend that any software designer think hard about trying to achieve delight in their users by doing something they don't explicitly ask for.

I finally got around to replacing the old (and nearly worthless) static page for StartPad.org - this site now uses Drupal (a PHP based CMS system). This is my first experiment in using Drupal - so the site will look pretty rough for a while. Our hope is that, using this platform, we will be able to more easily provide some of the community features (forums, directory of service providers, directory of startups, etc.). If you're a Drupal-naut and would like to help - drop me a line at mckoss@startpad.org.