Top 10 Tips for Effective Online Business Networking

[wecando.biz]

Hello all

As we get close to the formal launch of WeCanDo.BIZ -- we are waiting only on the contacts import feature now -- we have prepared a guide to help people get the most from our site using the technology of one of our members.

Called 'Top 10 Tips for Effective Online Business Networking' you can reat it at http://publishing.yudu.com/Freedom/A...DoBIZTop10Tips .

All features are available to you at http://www.wecando.biz for free.

If you like what we have used to publish the guide, check out our member Les at https://www.wecando.biz/pilot/profile.php?bid=117 .

Regards


IH

[fisicx]

http://publishing.yudu.com/Freedom/A...DoBIZTop10Tips - 404 Not found

PS: Whats wrong with simply adding the page to your site? Would make life so much easier for your visitors and give you a boost in the search engines.

[Chris Butler]

Graham

Will have a look at why the link is failing today. It was working fine.

These tips will of course be on our website in due course. I should point out however that marketing means promoting ideas in a variety of different ways and using different mechanisms. Our business is NOT about search engine rankings or page rankings it is about bringing people together. If we get high up in the rankings, that's great. If not, I for one don't really care at the moment. That may change of course.

Let me be really clear - we are not in the business of simply getting footfall at the moment, we want people to come to the site, register and get something useful from it. Of course, people need to find it, but right now we are in pilot and we have not integrated certain features to PREVENT mass take-up until we are happy that we are ready for it.

Thanks for your continued interest in the site.

One question. I notice you have posted a huge amount on this forum and that is to be lauded, you clearly take a great interest in the businesses who are looking for advice here; now, this is a bit prying I know, but do you engage many clients as a result of your advice and input?

Regards

Chris Butler
COO
WeCanDo.BIZ

[wecando.biz]

Working link here: http://publishing.yudu.com/Freedom/A...DoBIZTop10Tips

Not sure what happened on the above, but my apologies. As Chris says, we'll be adding a link on our site soon.

Regards


IH

[fisicx]

Hi Chris,

All the advice I give here is the same advice I give to my clients. In fact I sometimes think I spend more time talking than working on the sites themselves but the advantage of discussing their needs before I start work is paid back because I spend less time trying to make an unworkable idea workable.

I had a good look at the 10 tips. Some useful stuff but...

The opening screen is too small to read. Each barrier you place between the visitor and the information they seek reduces the likelihood that they will stay on the site. I had to: click on the magnifying glass, scroll up to the top and scroll to the right. 3 actions get to the content. And when I turned the page had to do the same thing again.

Basic usability and accessibility.

Graham

[Chris Butler]

Graham

The tips are shown on a commercial site called Yudu which allows people to publish documents online. This is not part of WeCanDo.BIZ.

I am very happy with the way it works. The simple expedient of making something which is small a little bigger is hardly onerous!

C

[fisicx]

People are very fickle when it comes to the internet. They are used to instant results, not necessarily the speed of loading but they don't want to have to work out what to do. This is the whole basis of Steve Krug's book: 'Don't make me think', an invaluable tool for any internet business.

The Yudu page requires me to carry out three actions in order to read the contents of the page. It is not intuitive as to what those actions are, I have to work out which button to press - I am having to think. I read a study once that demonstrated that you only get 2 seconds after the page loads to make an impact. Every second after that reduces the influence of the page. Because I need to take the three actions to read the tips, I have already gone past the 2 second barrier and my interest is beginning to wane.

This isn't me having a whinge, it's reccommendations bourne out from years of research into Internet behavoir by some very influential people. You may be very happy with the Yudu page and I agree it does look professional but the questions you should be asking yourself are: Does it meet my customer's needs? What benefits does the Yudu page bring to my customers? Can a visitor using a PDA or screen reader still access the information?

Incidentally, Yudu is about the 5th site I've seen over the years offering a similar service. I'm not sure if any of the others still exist, they certainly haven't become mainstream. It's not that the technology is poor, it's just that the results are not very useable, and that is one of the keys to a successful website.

[wecando.biz]

Useful feedback Graham.

Our intention with the guide was to provide a "document" that people could have to hand to help them get better use of our site. There was a number of ways this could be achieved:

1) Pop up browser box, potentially as an extension of our help. Attractive, but would require a lot of switching sessions to read while acting on the content and can be hard to control how it looks in print;

2) PDF document, a universal standard for this kind of thing but not everyone has Adobe Acrobat Reader and you don't get to see much of how people use it;

3) Something like Yudu, which we like because it is easy to link to, easy to contain links within it etc. Such products also allow you to collect stats on how it is used.

Arguably, any of the three would require someone to do SOMETHING in order to get the most out of it, either scrolling around, maximising to full window or more. I couldn't agree more that you need to deliver quickly on the web, but there is more to it than that. Prime considerations for us were how to deliver professional and easily readable content to people who may not have Acrobat Reader, who may wish to send it on and who will probably want to print it. That someone has to click a few buttons to get it to the size they want is no hard task - certainly no harder then going and downloading Acrobat from the Adobe website!

As a matter of interest, how have you tackled this in the past? I am always keen to learn the specific of better ways to fix the same problem.

Regards

IH

[wecando.biz]

By the way, if anyone else reading this has a view on which of the 3 options is preferable, knows of any better options, or has feedback on the document at http://publishing.yudu.com/Freedom/A...DoBIZTop10Tips feel very welcome to add your views!

My thanks in advance.

IH

[YUDU]

Hi,

the URL displayed / being used is incorrect -

It should be -

http://publishing.yudu.com/Freedom/A...ipsforEffectiv

Les (YUDU)