If so, check this list of common mistakes to see if you are making your prospective clients angry or just turning them away.

5 Ways Your Potential Clients May Be Reacting To Your Contact Form (And What You Can Do About It):

1. “That contact form is sooooo long! I feel tired just looking at it!”

• Does everyone type at 60 Words/Minute like you? No. Most people I know type with one finger. A long form looks like half an hour of work to them
• It doesn’t matter if some fields are “not required”. Visitors don’t notice the little asterix, and they feel obliged to fill in every field because of “form momentum”

What you can do:

• Trim back your fields to the absolute bare minimum. Do you really need their postal address, physical address, all their phone numbers and date of birth? No you don’t.

2. “Bah! Another error message: ‘Syntax of field 624 is invald’? WTF?”

• If prospects take the time filling in your form, click submit and they get an error box in their face they will get angry and hate you
• It’s worse if your form validation script doesn’t highlight the field in red and provide helpful guidance so the prospect knows exactly what to do next. They will feel lost and confused
• They will subconsciously ascribe these negative feelings to you. Is that the right way to start a business relationship?

What you can do:

• Keep the form super short. Less fields = less potential error messages
• Lighten up on the validation

3. “Does this contact form even work?”

• This is a fear of the message not being delivered at all
• Sometimes when you click the “submit” button does it feel like you are launching your message into space and you’ll never see it again? That’s because experience tells us that is exactly what we are doing. Sometimes the contact form is broken and no-one find out for months

What you can do:

• Regularly test that the contact form is working

4. “How long will I have to wait before I hear back?”

• Closely related to the fear of the message not being delivered at all is waiting an age for a response
• Perhaps part of the problem is that most contact forms go to generic email addresses like “info@yourdomain.co.nz”. How motivated is the recipient of emails sent to this generic address to respond fast when the message isn’t even addressed to them? If Bob gets these messages, which will he reply to first: Emails addressed to Bob, or emails addressed to “info”?

What you can do:

• Send your contact form messages to a real person not just “info” (yes, it may need updating when your staff change)
• Make a promise in your email receipt “we will respond within 1 normal business day. If you don’t hear from us, please call our tollfree hotline”

5. “What did I say? When? To Who? I can’t remember!”

• When you send a message from your own email system you can always check your “sent” box later to check:
  • That it was actually sent
  • Who it was sent to
  • The date/time
  • and most importantly: what you said
• With a contact form you get nothing. Sometimes you might get an email receipt that says “thanks for your message, we’ll contact you soon” – yeah right.

What you can do:

• Send the prospect a copy of their own message “here’s a copy of your message for your reference”
• Let them just click on your mailto hyperlink so they can send their message from their own email system

What Else You Can Do To Improve Your Contact Form

Double check that you provide a clear “mailto” link for your email address like this: “sheldon@firstbyte.co.nz“.

If you don’t, you may be forcing your web visitors to use your contact form and face all the problems listed above, or they may just give up and leave, and take their business to your competitors.

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1. Contact Us Sheldon Nesdale Your Website Design Expert, Tauranga Phone: (07) 575...

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Use a .co.nz website address if you have a NZ business.

Even if your target customers are overseas, being a .co.nz adds to your brand story.

*The statistics in this article were made up for dramatic purposes

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The End Result: Reversed Order for the Ordered List

End Result: Reversed Order for the Ordered List

Here’s what the html code looks like:

<li value="51">Andrew Martin</li>
<li value="50">Carlene Sykes</li>
<li value="49">Lee Clifford</li>
<li value="48">Debrah Breedt</li>
<li value="47">Gina Sterling</li>

Because this testimonial page uses PHP I was able to do this dynamically in the code in 3 steps:

1. Set the start value by counting the total number of testimonials:

$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM testimonials");
$testimonial_number = mysql_num_rows($result);

2. Then set the li value with this variable

<li value="$testimonial_number">$student_name</li>

3. Finally, subtract 1 from the counter

$testimonial_number--;

Clever huh?

I made this change because it makes the website just a little bit easier to use and a little more intuitive, and because I care.

Do you want a website developer who cares just as much as you do about your business?

You’ve found him.

Hire me.

Call (07) 575 8799 or email me.

Cheers,

Sheldon.

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But lately, I’ve been searching for more complicated plugins for my own websites and for clients, and the free ones just aren’t doing the job.

And support for these plugins is virtually non-existent.

The developers are too busy working on projects that pay them money, they haven’t got time to serve me for free. I don’t blame them.

So where do I turn?

I turn to Google of course and search for “Premium WordPress Plugins”.

Here’s what I found:

• Source: Tomuse’s list of 11 Premium WordPress Plugins
• 5 more Premium WordPress Plugins from WPHacks.com
• 13 more Premium WordPress Plugins from Sociatic.com

Are there really only 29 of them?

Let’s have a closer look at the more interesting ones:

1. Gravity Forms
2. Add-ons for WordPress e-Commerce
3. PhPurchase
4. Shopp

1. Gravity Forms

I’ve been using the free Contact Form plugin “Contact Form 7” for free on all my WordPress websites so what does Gravity Forms offer that Contact Form 7 doesn’t?

Here are 3 features that appeal to me:

1. Email Notification Routing – Now you can set up notifications to route to different email addresses based on rules that you define. Use one form to route form submissions to sales, marketing, customer service department
2. Create Autoresponder Emails to Users – Send automatic emails to users in response to a submission. Add any form field content to your message to create professional and personalised messages.
3. Easily Export Form Entry Data to CSV Format – Need your entry data for other applications? Easily export all or part of your entries to CSV. Our export tool makes it a breeze to export only the fields that are needed.

How much does it cost? US$39 for a single site license (US$99 for 5 websites, US$199 for unlimited websites)

2. WordPress e-Commerce

The base plugin is free (open source) and then you can choose from a list of add-ons like:

• Gold Cart & Grid Module (US$40) – product search, multiple images, more payment gateways (including DPS.co.nz)
• DropShop 2.0 (US$100) – drag and drop into shopping cart
• Fedex Shipping Module (US$25.00) – just that
• Members Only module (US$25.00) – just that
• Product Slider (US$25.00) – fancy product display
• MP3 Audio Player (US$10.00) – sell music
• NextGen Gallery Buy Now Buttons (US$10.00) – adds a buy now button to images

And the open source community has provided another bunch of free add-ons for WordPress e-Commerce.

3. PhPurchase

Another premium e-commerce plugin.

• US$49 single site license
• US$199 5 site license
• US$299 unlimited license

Can I distinguish between this one and the previous e-commerce plugin? No. No I can’t.

4. Shopp

Another premium e-commerce plugin.

• US$55 single site license
• US$299 unlimited license

And for another US$25 you can choose from a list of payment gateways.

“Is that all? Just 4?”

Yes. That’s about all I could find.

I must say I am pretty disappointed.

These premium plugins are mostly about advertising, classifieds, shopping carts & seo.

I don’t really need those.

To paraphrase one of elance’s top WordPress professionals “2009 was the year of Premium Themes, perhaps 2010 will be the year of Premium Plugins”.

Let’s hope so, because surely all the developers providing us with the free plugins in exchange for feeble requests for donations isn’t motivating them to continue to develop and update?

What Other Premium WordPress Plugins Do You Use?

Add them in the comment below.

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Need More Help To Plan Your Website?

The task of planning a new website is one of my favourites, call me on (07) 575 8799 and we can brainstorm together.

- Sheldon.

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And sometimes elements are completely missing or broken and don’t work how they do on your computer at work or home?

Using BrowserShots.org, you can simulate what your website will look like to all sorts of people with dozens of configurations, for free.

For example, I often wonder:

• What does my website look like in old versions of Internet Explorer?
• What about if Javascript is disabled?
• Does my website look different in the latest version of Firefox?
• What about Linux, Mac or Windows PC, do those operating systems display my website differently?
• What does my website look like on different screen sizes?

Now I can find out using BrowserShots.org for free, and so can you.

How to use BrowserShots.org

1. Paste in your URL (either your homepage or any other webpage)
2. De-select all the checkboxes using the link “None” at the bottom
3. Select up to 5 or 6 browsers you recognise (eg I choose 2 or 3 versions of Firefox, 2 or 3 versions of Internet Explorer “MSIE”)
4. Leave the other options as as “Don’t Care”, for “Screen Width”, “Color Depth”, “Javascript”, “Java”, & “Flash”, unless you are specifically testing those options (because it will slow down the processing time)
5. Click the submit button
6. On the next webpage your results will be shown when they are ready. They can take an hour or two to appear, so save the page to your favourites/bookmarks, and return in an hour or so to check the results.

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• Unique Visitors – The number of individuals who have visited your website. But, if a person on a dial-up connection disconnects and reconnects, they will be assigned a different IP address and therefore be counted as another unique visitor if they return to your website.
• Visits or Visitors – The number of visits to your website. A single unique visitor could be responsible for many if about an hour passes between them taking action (eg they leave your website open on a tab in their browser and forget about it until they click on it an hour later).
• Page Views – The number of web pages your website serves. So a single visitor may go back to your home page several times, or refresh a page, each instance counts as another page view.
• Hits – The number of files your website serves. Every time your CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) loads, every time each image on your website loads, each time your php or html files load, all these count as 1 hit. So if a website has a lot of these items on its home page, a single page view of that home page may generate 40 hits. And if a website has very few items, a single view may only generate 20 hits.

Why should you care?

You should care because the method that you choose to measure your websites success is important.

You should care because there is a lot of confusion out there about which one to use, and especially when selling advertising space people will brag about how many “hits” they get, so now you know to ask them “what about unique visitors, or page views?”

Which one should you use? Unique Visitors? Visits? Visitors? Page Views? Hits?

Unique Visitors.

• Hits is no good because you could double it overnight just by adding a few images.
• Page Views is no good because you could have pages that need lots of refreshing (F5 on your keyboard).
• Vists/Visitors is ok, but if one particular person comes back several times in one day because they keep getting interrupted, you really only want to count them once.
• Unique Visitors is the best choice (and most webstats software reports that statistic accurately)

So the next time someone says to you “my website is so cool, I get 1000 hits a day”, you can say, “Whatever! I could put 100 tiny images on my pages and generate 1000 hits an hour! How many Unique Visitors do you get a day? That’s the only number that really matters!”.

And then they say “Wow, I’ve been such a dumb arse, how did you get so smart?”, and then you say “I learnt about it at Sheldon Nesdale at Firstbyte Websites in Tauranga, New Zealand, you should get his help with your website, he’s so skilled and very handsome!”.

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By default, your WordPress installation will have one url to ping, but that’s not enough, you need more.

Here’s What You Do In 3 Easy Steps

1. Login to WordPress
2. Go to “Settings” tab >> Click on “Writing”
3. In the “Update Services” box copy and paste the following list (and then click “Save Changes”)

List of urls

http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://coreblog.org/ping/

http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt

http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.twingly.com

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2

That’s it!  Using this technique I’ve had new blog articles appear in Google Search Results pages within 30 minutes.

Not Using WordPress?

That’s a real shame, because you probably don’t have access to this feature. Would you like me to build a website for you using wordpress? Call me (07) 575 8799 or email me.

- Sheldon.

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If you see “99.5% fat free” on the side of your yoghurt, you’d think “great!”, but “99.5% uptime” is not very good at all.

How many minutes/hours of downtime a year can you expect? Here’s the calculation:

(1-0.995) x 365 x 24 =  43.8 hours of downtime per year!

Would you be happy if your web developer told you upfront that you can expect your website to be down/broken/unavailable-to-your-customers, for almost 2 days in the coming year?  I don’t think so.

But it’s the reality.

Infact, many providers actually perform worse than that, but they expect you not to notice because you aren’t looking at your own website all day, every day.

Even 99.9% uptime is almost 9 hours a year.

And if one of your customers notices your website is down, are they going to email you to tell you? Unlikely. In fact, they’ll probably think their own internet connection is to blame!

So what can you do? Is there such a thing as “100% uptime”?

I’ve seen a few US based web hosting companies offering “100% uptime”.

How can they offer 100% uptime?

They say they have backup web servers that kick in automatically if the primary servers go offline.

I used one such web host for 2 years, but my websites went dead many many times. 100% uptime is bullocks.

I was even talking to one of their technicians on the phone when they were down and he told me “they are working fine for me, there’s no problem at our end!”.

They can get away with this because there are so many links in the chain between the web server and the person loading that webpage in their browser.  If something goes wrong anywhere along that chain, your website will be dead, but it might not necessarily be the web hosts fault.

How can you improve your uptime?

By simply choosing a webhosting company in the same country as your primary web visitors.

For example, if your primary web audience is New Zealanders, host your website in New Zealand.

Seems kind of obvious, but many people choose US based web hosts because they are so cheap.

This works because it reduces the number of links (routers/”hops”) in the chain. With fewer links in the chain, the chance of a router failing is reduced.

(If you’re interested, you can run a “traceroute” for your website to see how many links there are between your web server and your customers using this cool visual US based traceroute – however because this tool is US based, your results will be a little distorted because the traceroute programme will use US servers! – I couldn’t find a NZ based equivalent to show you, sorry).

I used a US hosting provider for all my clients websites up to the beginning of 2008 because it was so fantastically cheap but my clients paid the price with slow loading times and occasional downtime.

Then I changed to the NZ based webhost Ramsu, which is well priced and provides my clients with faster load times.  Sadly, we still have to put up with occasional downtime.  It’s just the way it is, computers are unreliable, it’s a fact.

Speaking of faster loading time, it has just become much more important. Google recently announced that load time is now a factor in it’s search engine ranking decisions.

How can you choose between NZ hosting providers?

Most of the time your web host is dictated by your web developer.

They will choose one that offers them:

• a good profit margin (the difference between what their wholesaler  cost is and what they charge you, the client, per month)
• the features that they need to run the websites they build (every web developer has their own quirks and style and sometimes they need special web server settings)

And that’s about it really. Were you expecting “fast customer service” on that list? Sorry to disappoint you.

It’s easy for a web developer to get stuck in a rut with their choice of web host. It is super painful and time consuming to change web developers (things inevitably break during the move), so web developers will put up with a lot of shit before they pack up everything and move all their clients websites somewhere else.

If your choice of web host is up to you, then you will have to ask around. You’ve heard my opinion about Ramsu.  Just make a decision. And it if doesn’t work out, I hope your website is simple enough to allow you to move it somewhere else.

I’ve heard mixed reviews about Maxnet, Iserve, Xtra, OpenHost, WebDrive, Net24, WebFarm. What do you use?

I guess the best webhost is one that you never hear from, and never have to talk to, or submit a support ticket to, because it just works like it’s suppose to.

Are you changing your website hosting provider right now?

I may be able to save you some headaches down the road, give me a call today on (07) 575 8799 for more free advice.

- Sheldon.

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Do you choose an international web development company?

Do you choose a major New Zealand webdesign company that is based in Auckland, Wellington or Christchurch?

Or do you choose a web designer in Tauranga? Someone who is local, that you can meet with face to face if you want to, that knows the Tauranga area?  They might not be a big company, they might actually be a one-man band, but they are less expensive and when you’ve talked to them a few times you can just tell they know their stuff and have your best interests at heart.

The choice is yours.

All the best,

Sheldon.

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