No more excuses: let's get your small business Website whipped into shape. People who are moderately online use the Web as their first search source. Phone books are dead trees; if your business is not online with an easy-to-find phone number, I'm clicking elsewhere. People spend money in browser-based shopping sprees and your Web site has to compete.

Let's whip your site into shape. We've already discussed how you can grade your own site; offered tips for upgrading your site; and suggested ways to increase your search-engine ranking. Let's take the next step and whip your small business Website into first-class shape.

What do your site visitors want most of all from your site?

LET ME SEARCH!
I want a search box, plain and visible, preferably at the top of every page but definitely at the top of the homepage. If you don't have a site search, you can get a great free search tool in phpDig but you'll probably have to pay someone to make it work. It's worth your money. Put it at the top of your list.

TALK TO ME!
Company contact information belongs on every page, preferably in the footer. The footer area should also tell me a mailing address, a fax number and not merely supply a link to a contact page. Think: single-clicking! One click to get where you most want to go should be a navigation goal.

HELP ME!
You can add online help to your site through volusion's Live Chat (free edition) or through the Open Source PHP Lively at Sourceforge (the holy grail of Open Source apps to try). Of course, you have to make an employee available to respond, even if only a few visitors click the icon. Surely, someone sits at a desk during the day. Think how important they will feel!

FEED ME!
I want to know what your company is up to and what new products you have that will benefit me. Send out an RSS feed of new information or products. The nitty-gritty of RSS is here and if you're not into coding, try one of several free Open Source apps to generate RSS from your Web site.

Pheeder claims to be easy to implement and has loads of documentation. RSS Genesis works on any type of server and is PHP4/5 compatible and RSS Feed Creator claims simply to generate RSS feed.

While you're at it, how about offering RSS feeds for companion products that might interest me? There are some free RSS services that enable adding feeds to your site relatively easy and, of course, FeedRoll.

While you're RSS'ing, you can create a feed of any Web page that interests you. Feedity is a free service that will create a feed for any page and alert you to changes or updates to any site's page. Keep on eye on the competition or sites of businesses that impact what you sell through easy RSS reading.

WHOLE PACKAGE ME!
Robert Scoble, an online evangelist, lists his best practices for your business cards. Why not incorporate these ideas into your small business Web site?

1. Start the conversation – make your site engage the visitor.
2. Make it a standard size and shape but be different – that's why you need a Web development firm with creative builds in their portfolio.
   
3. Make sure the basics are easy to find.
4. Tell us what you do. Unless your business is globally recognized, we need to see what you're selling in clear language on the home page.
5. Break some rules but stay on the good side of obnoxious.
6. Highlight your corporate tag line. Don't have one yet? Get one.
7. Use language options if appropriate.

Use the rest of 2008 to build a plan for your small business Web site to move toward as many best practices as possible. A site re-design isn't free and is also not a silver bullet that will increase sales dramatically in the first week. You still have to market your Web site. Stay tuned.

Let's pretend you read this column and agree that it's time to embark on a Web site overhaul for your small business. You understand a little about Web 2.0-ness, want some interactivity, are considering using new online tools and have created a real job for the webmaster to do site updates. What's on your Web Overhaul Due Diligence To-Do List? What steps should you take to ensure that your site gets architected, designed, programmed, launched, and updated correctly?

HOMEWORK – let's start browsing sites and making favorites/bookmarks out of the ones that catch your eye. Note that you like the drop-down menu in one and the fading background in another. Make a "how did they do this?" list of snazzy features to ask your designer about implementing. In fact, build a spreadsheet and make column headings such as: URL, feature, forms, Flash, menus and more so you can keep your design notes and questions in a handy electronic document to share with all the design firms you interview, and we want you to talk to more than one.

Every year, small businesses struggle with the customer appreciation gift. Should we give one to every client? Only to new clients? What about long-term clients? Should we order pre-printed (and clever) cards? And the big question: how much is this going to cost?

Saying thanks to our clients in a better fashion is something we set out to do last winter during the re-creation of our branding model. We rebuilt our logo, changed colors, formalized templates, printed letterhead, stickers and designed mail-ready new-client packets and generally upgraded our schwag. It was time for us to have something to hand out besides business cards.

That's why we don't send out holiday gifts anymore; heck, we don't send out "winter holiday" cards anymore. Instead, we thank our clients all year long. With a simple Access database, we keep track of each client who's referred business to us and we send a handwritten note (on those new branded and printed cards we designed) and a small gift card to an omnipresent store. First referral? A five-dollar Starbucks card. Second referral? A somewhere-else gift card. If a referral turns into business? A larger Target or Paneras card is coming your way inside a handwritten custom-branded notecard. If you're local, it might be a lunch gift certificate at a restaurant (also a client).

Now that we've harangued you to upgrade your Web site, take advantage of business blogs, read your Web stats/, incorporate search engine tips and use Web 2.0 themes, it's time to choose a Web design firm to make all of the above happen for your small business. Google "web design" and spend the rest of your natural life clicking links or narrow down your search around some specific best-practices criteria.

"And we want to be on the first page of Google," another new client said matter-of-factly, as the after-thought of our Web design meeting. I nodded, inhaled, and began my spiel.

"What are your stats now?" I asked, although I knew the answer. Many small businesses don't review their site stats, don't know how to view them online and can't really interpret them, but all Web site rebuilding plans include being on the first page of Google results. Let's try to marry the want with some how-to and understand how this works.

KNOW YOUR STATS
Know what your Web stats are. Contact your Web firm and demand the link. Bookmark them. Look at them! Pay attention to the "search keyphrases" and "search keywords" that users enter into search engines and find your site.

Site traffic is saved to logs and statistics programs display the data. Web stat programs are usually loaded on the server, so they have to be available from your hosting company. One of the most common stat packages is Webalizer, a fast and free log file analyzer. There are countless guides to help you interpret the numbers. And the mystery between "hits" and "visits" is explained here. Another common stat program is AWStats, an open source project at SourceForge There is a plethora of stat programs, many of which are free [see DLS for more info]

BUY BETTER STATS
You can buy access to better, more colorful stats with graphs and charts and circles and arrows. If you have a marketing department, they should take a look at WebTrends for small business, one of the older analytics, and check out the demos. WebTrends, like many other quality stat packages, is not free, so decide if the pretty pictures are worth the price.

I WANT TO BE ON THE FIRST PAGE OF GOOGLE!
You want higher ranking in the search engines' results? In the olden days, everyone played on the same field. Nowadays, it takes a village to raise your rankings. Try these suggestions, many of which are human-intensive.

Microsoft Office 2007 is big, bloated and brilliant. There is a plethora of new features for PowerPoint, Word, Excel (the jewel in the crown) and Outlook, my other husband. Microsoft recently brought the 2007 show local and I couldn't resist spending an intimate day with hundreds of other geeks. When the demonstrator's overloaded power laptop blue-screened, the crowd of small business owners cheered. We're a testy bunch when it comes to ROI on computer purchases.

Office 2007 runs on either Windows XP or Vista. The changes we saw were primarily cosmetic but productively important: when it takes employees a while to re-learn what they already know how to do, we lose money on the learning curve. (Using Outlook as a business contact manager was a large part of the demo and deserves its own post.)

The Ribbon
The most user-challenging feature will be the "Ribbon," which replaces the two friendly toolbars we know, love and customize.

Office 2007 is intuitive. The ribbon morphs unasked into the tasks it thinks you want to do next (called "contextual tabs"). If you're in a table, it moves to table commands in a disconcerting and resource-sucking visual blip. I predict we're going to lose monitors due to thrown objects caused by ribbon morphing, but right-clicking is a better alternative. Microsoft promotes it with '[T]he tabs on the Ribbon display the commands that are most relevant for each of the task areas in the applications.' Remember that the question of relevancy is highly individual with power users.

Going Home
The Home button provides easy access to the most frequently used Office commands. To new 2007 users, it's an extra click, a superfluous layer, another mouse move but in reality, it's the place to click to share, print, publish, and send documents.

Emailing files
Do you send Word or Excel files? Word 2007 saves in a new format (no more .doc) and you'll have to "save as" an "older" version (that'd be XP, which is lumped into Office 95 as an antique format) to share with those not yet blessed with Office 2007. A happy new feature is "save-to-PDF" and sending PDF files is the best choice anyway. Recommendation: send PDF files whenever possible.

Do you have the techno-horsepower?
Upgrading your current Office version might be cheaper than buying new, but it is time-consuming to load, resource-intensive and requires more RAM and better video (especially if you're considering Vista). Office 2007 is exceptionally graphical (and resource-intensive). In preparation, we upgraded our machines from 1Gb to 3Gb of RAM (older RAM costs less) and double-checked the video cards to make sure they had at least 128Mb of on-board RAM (we replaced only two because we knew it was coming 2 years ago). Call your IT folks and talk it all over before buying Office 2007 or Vista.

The money question
Does your business need Office 2007 with its bells, whistles, contextual tabs, galleries and Ribbon now? At the demo, the leader pointed out that things the "geeks" could do are now available to "regular" users like 'us' (well, them). The quandary: those things were always available and regular users could rarely do them so what makes you think they're going to start doing them now because they're prettier?

The bottom line
The reviews are in. ZDNet advises that if your current version works, don't upgrade even though there are significant improvements to Excel formula referencing, pretty PowerPoint, and better document recovery. They note that the drastic design changes demand a steep learning curve and the new interface isn't intuitive.

If you've got power users, they're going to love Office 2007. Regular users will face a learning slippery incline (not quite a steep curve). Your costs for both software and people frustration may vary.

Google has just added an update to its popular small business Mini search tool that lets users plug into Google Analytics for tracking. With this new integration, Google Mini owners can now add Google Analytics tracking codes into data, enabling better tracking and analyzing of search results. This new understanding of what visitors are searching for will allow for the discovery of how little tweaks and changes can be made to satisfy visitors, helping them find the information they have requested faster. I have not had a chance to play with the administrator account on the Mini, but Google does say that it is a simple procedure for administrators to configure the Mini to use Google Analytics. Simply set the Analytics account number inside of the admin interface. The output formats for the search results will supposedly automatically include the JavaScript that Analytics uses.

The Small Business Administration (SBA) has been around for a while mostly trying to make the life of a small business owner easier, and boy we need it. Running a small business is hard, and for many business owners, getting started, or better yet, keeping the thing going is especially tough. The SBA wants to help by offering a bunch of free podcasts to help you get or keep going with your fledgling enterprise. Here is the list of currently available podcasts:

• Check List for Starting a Business
• SBA Programs Support Entrepreneurial Veterans
• Is Entrepreneurship for You?
• The SBA Small Business Training Network-Log On!
• Selecting a Business That Fits
• Disaster Preparedness for Business Owners
• Financing a Small Business
• Creating a Business Plan
• Making Your Business Plan Work for You

I haven't listened to all of them yet, but they seem to contain some useful information for business owners.

[via Lifehacker]

I don't know how you feel about blue collar, but if you want, need, or simply must have yet another email account, BlueTie is one to check out. BlueTie however, really is much more than just an email account. Not only is it free email with 5GB of storage per user (yes, more than Google so far), but provides unified calendar and other collaborative tools including shared file storage, an "enterprise" user manager, tasks, and a frighteningly Outlook-like calendar. Many features of BlueTie remind me of Outlook's meeting requests, contacts, calendar, and other features in fact. The free account limits you to 20 users, but who's counting? Small business owners and groups will love this app. It is AJAX based and looks good enough that I am considering putting my business on it entirely, since most of the app can be shared with all your people, contacts, calendar, and file storage. Did I mention that you can use your own domain with BlueTie, as well as the fact that it has Virus and Spam protection built in? Oh yeah, it has that too.

[Via TechCrunch]

Microsoft is entering the world of free software. Who would have thought? Today, Microsoft released Office Accounting Express 2007 for free. The software is an updated version of the previous Office Small Business Accounting 2006 that was sold for $179 US. A higher end version of the application will be for sale early next year. Microsoft has integrated eBay and Paypal into the system which I think are great features that a lot of people will jump at the opportunity to use. It does supposedly have great connection abilities with Outlook 2007, and a strong set of accounting tools that support up to five currencies.

Unfortunately I can't seem to download a copy to try out, the site looks like its down, however, I have some screenshots of the application in progress after the jump.

UPDATE: As "joshj" in the comments writes, you must open the link in IE in order to gain access to download the application. The application file size is 369.35 MB.