Working with other businesses is great. At Telaco I get to work with many small business owners, help them with their websites and social media, finding out more about how they run and grow their companies.

With Seeu.at enrolled in Entrepreneurial Spark I have had the chance to meet a great set of startup companies.

One of those companies is Nucoco Chocolate and Cake.

Nucoco are a great company – they make delicious chocolate and cakes, all beautifully presented. I’m a particular fan of their cake-pops!

They are currently crowd-funding a small investment to help them grow their business.

For £50 you can become a ‘Founder Member’ of Nucoco. By helping them build their business they will build you a chocolate brick sponsored with your company logo. This brick will form part of an art installation at an exclusive event at the end of the crowd-fund. One of the bricks will have a golden ticket worth £1000 to sweeten the deal. Founder Members get 10% lifetime discount on Nucoco products, and can taste new product lines as they come out.

I’m really glad that I’ve been able to support Nucoco – so Telaco (as Seeu.at) will have their own brick. You should contribute to their crowdfund too!

• Improved administration interface
• Improved media uploader
• New jQuery version
• WordPress post editor easily added to pages
• Additional features to guide new users and provide help information

So what will this mean for your site? What do you need to think about?

When upgrading your current sites: ensure that your plugins are compatible with the newer version of jQuery and ensure your clients / users are notified of changes to the administration interface.

As with every upgrade ensure that you have taken a backup of your database and content. Do you have good recovery procedures in operation? WordPress.org has more information on backups.

Consider your programme for launching new sites. How can you use the new features to guide, train and support your clients and users.

When planning new developments why not consider what you can do with the WordPress Editor. We’re already putting it into a new development for a community-driven resources site. We’ve embedded the editor in a contribution page which helps members of the community send content to the editors for inclusion on the site.

WordPress 3.3 is expected to be released by the end of this year. You can download ‘Release Candidate 1′ from WordPress.org for testing out your sites with the new features.

Telaco are proud to be working alongside NoTosh and Snook to deliver the website for the ITU Telecom World 2011 MetaConference.

The ITU Telecom World 11 MetaConference is all about seeing how young people think technology might solve some of the world’s greatest problems.

ITU Telecom World 2011 is the MetaConference’s physical event in Geneva, Switzerland, bringing together thousands of influential delegates from the telecommunications and technology industries to discuss what steps need to be taken to get more of the world connected. It’s the world’s most important ICT event, where big decisions are taken on how technology can be used to solve some of our biggest problems.

ITU World 2011 MetaConference is inviting 10,000 global school children (8-18) to design the innovations that could make a real difference to their world, by submitting their videos, blog posts, photographs and sketches, through their educational institution, to http://world2011.us/get-involved/ on seven key topics:

• alleviate poverty and hunger
• improve education for all
• address gender inequality
• make sure everyone has access to health care
• protect our environment
• make disabled people’s lives easier
• close the gap between the developed and developing world

Telaco have implemented a WordPress blog platform to allow the sharing of inspiration and ideas between MetaConference participants. The website also features a collaborative wiki, user registration and contribution, and synchronisation with a MailChimp email announcement list.

As a small business owner myself I’m always looking out for new tools to help me find new customers. Just a few days ago I found a sales tool that made me think ‘wow, this could really help!’

Face-to-face communication is often key in sales. Perhaps it’s because of my days successfully selling sandwich discount cards on the street that I find speaking directly with someone seems to lead to more business than anything else!

The tool that I found to help with reaching new customers is called SnapEngage.

I found it whilst browsing a website offering WordPress hosting services. A small chat window opened asking me if there was any further information that I needed. It was one of the owners of the site who was on the chat. He was able to give me a little bit more information about their services, and answer the questions that I had.

It was the personal connection that impressed me. It was a chance to talk to someone directly about the services that were on offer, and resolve questions that I had about their products.

SnapEngage offer chat facilities to help you connect with potential customers. Install the widget on your site then you can chat to customers via your usual tools such Skype and Google Chat. The chat proactively connects agents with people browsing your site. You can have several agents serving your website, with multiple chats per agent. Contacts are logged and can be fed into third party CRM software. There are options for setting the delay and features of the proactive chat. If an agent is not online then a ‘help’ or offline message button can be displayed instead. There is also a Facebook tab available, so people can chat to you directly from your Fan Page.

SnapEngage have a variety of plans, a 14 day free trial, and a free usage tier for very low traffic sites.

I have installed SnapEngage on the Telaco site – so you can connect with me when I’m online. I would recommend that you take a look at what SnapEngage has to offer your business. Thanks to the free trial it’s a risk free way of seeing if your online sales numbers can be improved. I will keep you updated as to how it is working for Telaco.

I have produced a short PDF guide to introduce three of the tools that Telaco uses to implement your online strategy: Getting Started with WordPress, Mailchimp, and Social Media.

The guide is intended for those people who are thinking about building or redeveloping a website for their business, club or association, and who want to know more about what is on offer.

Download our PDF Guide to Getting Started with Wordpress, Mailchimp, and Social Media, or enter your email address below and I will send it and future guides to you:

Get the Guide »

Rookie Oven is the blog of Michael Hayes. It’s well worth following the Twitter and Facebook pages for updates.

There will be another meetup on 1st August – hopefully see you there.

• Circles – social group streams
• Sparks – content sharing
• Huddle – group messaging
• Hangouts – group video chat
• Instant upload – easy uploading of media content from your mobile device

So how will this affect your web site, campaigns and social media?

I don’t think the fundamentals of a good campaign or will change. What will work is engaging and easily share-able content. Content that is targeted to the right market; content that doesn’t make false promises; content that entertains; content that is of some use to the end user.

With Google increasingly using social data what gets looks at, what gets discovered and what is useful will come from your social networks of people. Attacat covered some ground on this when the Google +1 was released in their blog post “Spam Proof? Why Google+1 will be difficult to spam“.

Likes, tweets and +1′s will have an increasing value to your campaign. It’s not just about search rankings anymore. Perhaps it’s time to add the +1 button to your website? You can find a WordPress plugin to add the button here.

I think it will be interesting to see how Google Sparks recommends content to users. There may be potential for optimising your content for discovery through adding meta-data or other rich markup to your content.

Will Google+ take off, or will it flop like Google Wave and Buzz? What do you think?

1. How will this website help me sell my products and services to my customers?

If the purpose of your website is to sell your products and services then you must make sure that your website does just that.

Help your designer understand the market you are operating in. Why are people buying from you? Why are they not buying from you?  Ask your designer how the website will facilitate this process.

2. How will this website help me keep in contact with my customers?

There are many ways that websites can be used to keep in contact with customers:

• Contact forms
• Online chat
• Online support forums
• Email marketing lists
• Social media for customer support and conversion

Some methods of staying in contact will be suitable for your business, some will not. Contact with customers should be timely. Don’t let your designer add features that you don’t have the company resources to support. For example, don’t have a support forum unless you have a member of staff to answer queries there.

3. How can I track how effective my website is?

You should know what return you are getting for your money spent on your website. How many visitors are you getting to it, and how many of those visitors are becoming customers?

There are many tools that  a designer can pick to help you understand who is visiting your site and what they are looking at. By analysing the statistics you might be able to identify key selling points of your products, and also key barriers to purchases. You can iterate through improvements to your website optimising each time.

A web design project is an ongoing process of design, implementation and refinement. Plan a method of tracking how effective your website is, and budget for making changes and improvements.

4. How will I be able to update this website?

One of the most frustrating things for clients is dealing with a web designer that is slow to update the website – even more so if the designer charges an arm and a leg for simple updates!

Talk with your web designer about how updates are made. Websites can be built on content management systems that allow users to make updates. Many such as WordPress come with excellent online resources for training your staff. Ensure that staff training is part of the web design project.

5. What happens if you aren’t available?

As a web designer I have picked up several jobs where the client has fallen out with the web designer, or the designer is no longer in business.

What would happen to your website if you had to part ways with your web designer?

You should ensure that you have access to your data: the content & the design. You should know how to walk away.

If your website is designed for an open content management system such as WordPress then it is easier for a new website designer to take over the maintenance of your site than if it was built on a proprietry system.

What questions do you ask your web designers? How can you ensure you are getting value for money?

Facebook allows you to embed a page in an iframe (i.e. a page that is surrounded by the Facebook site). Many full sites won’t work well in the narrow iframe that Facebook provide. The design and content need customisation and optimisation.

I have been working with Attacat Internet Marketing to develop a plugin that will help website owners easily set up embedded Facebook pages. The plugin can be loaded onto a WordPress site allowing you to manage your WordPress Facebook Pages from within your standard WordPress dashboard.

The first version, which you can download on the Attacat site here, includes some basic options and features to allow you to customise your page, and use Facebook Social Widgets within these pages.

You can look at the Telaco pages generated by the plugin on our Facebook page.

You can find all the information you need on the Attacat Resources page, including installation instructions and a user guide. If you have any feature suggestions (or bug reports) then you can submit them to our request & support spreadsheet.

The website is a single-page design, which provides all the information on the company for potential customers, including:

• Services offered, including exercise and nutrition programs.
• Fitness problems, and how Central Scotland Fitness can solve them.
• About the company.
• Contact information and online contact form.

Telaco provided Central Scotland Fitness with fresh branding, web site design, and preparation of a Facebook page. The layout and colour scheme emphasises their fresh, energetic and personal approach to fitness consulting.

When launching a new company it’s easy to go over-board in detailing requirements for a website. Often a single page with the right information may be the best strategy to engage potential customers. Please do get in touch, if you want more information.