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We get feedback, comments and queries from the seminars, which I either post into blog items, add to the uservoice forum we have linked to the site, or put into a general FAQ, depending on where I think they best serve most people. 

Please see below for where you might find what you’re looking for, or if that fails, use search!

  1. Website, user experience and social media common queries I place into blog items for easy finding using search
  2. More specific queries and questions about visiting your business are in FAQ below:

General FAQ from the seminar feedback

How relevant is social media to my business, or B2B?

Social media is as relevant as you make it. My own view is that without social media communication channels, and my use of them, I would only know about one quarter of what I know about my area of business (Technology). Obviously your type of business has some influence on whether modern communication has a greater or  lesser bearingon it, however, everyone needs the internet and uses the internet. Your current customers will not alwats be the same people, and time moves on, as the saying goes. The only way to really answert this kind of question is for individuals to carry out their own research into relevance and usefulness.

How can you measure if a website is attractive?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder? Not really, it’s all about whether your website does ‘what it says on the tin’. Design of a websiote is as much about efficiency and clarity as it is about wonderful and inventive approaches to page layout or colour schemes. The best way to find out if a webiste is ‘attractive’ is to ask your users, and find out if people actually use the website. See also ‘usability’.

Open source, free hosting, or other cheap (free) solutions to websites

This is an enormous topic, and could take a weeks worth of study! The main advantage of Openr source solutions is that they are FREE, and you can do anything with the code. The only cost to you is the implementation of your website - design of pages and content. Everything lese is available out of the box. Free hosting can be really useful if you have no budget, I berlieve that any website ius better than none. However, most free hosting will be limited in terms of what you can have online - possiblity of having to carry host company ad’s, limit of page design and content, or other types of limitation. You do get what you pay for.

The Analytics session is a bit confusing!

Us too! We are trying to give a layman’s introduction into what is frankly a technical and very involved subject. The only real way of getting used to analytics is to start to use them. Google Analytics for your website, Facebook Page Insights and stats like HTML Email Client or other subscription analytics all contribute to being able to enrich your users experience in the type and delivery of content right for them. Other applications we introduce are Trends and Ad Planner, and these too take a lot of time to get used to to, especially with real relevance to your own business type. We cannot cover your exact needs in this area. We can only show you where and how to styart to find out about this.

Time resources are tight in my business. How much should I devote to my social media or other online presence?

It’s about two things - what you get out depends on what you put in, as well as knowing a bit about the tehcnology available to help you get the most out of the time you do have available. Applications we mention in the seminar - TweetDeck, Hootsuite and others, are really good at making a little time go a long way. They can also keep you abreast of what other people are doing that you follow, helpign you to take part in a bigger conversation and see a bigger picture. Planning is everything, and having some idea about what you want to achieve, keeping your goals realistic and constantly trying to improve and develop what you’re doing to achieve them.