Zarr Blog :Experiences of running a UK web design company

For those of you living in the UK, you’ll probably remember Summer 2007 as the wettest ever with some of the worst floods in many decades.  This bank holiday weekend was quite a change in that it was hot!  Well about 25C which was a nice surprise (especially with an extra days holiday) when we’ve just had its been 17-19C and rain rain rain for the rest of the summer.

I checked today to see what the traffic has been like collectively across all the site’s that Zarr has developed and Saturday, Sunday and Monday were all down - by about 40% compared to normal Saturdays and Sundays.

Thats quite a drop and looking again collectively across all the ecommerce sites we’ve done, it looks like orders in general dropped proportionally.

Of course, it may have been just because it was a bank holiday weekend, or possibly due to the hot weather -difficult to know for sure, and the only time we normally see a drop to this extend is on Christmas Day.  Even on days such as Saint Valentine’s Day in the evening when people should be romancing their partners, traffic doesn’t seem to drop!

I wrote just over a week ago about what Zarr does to stop spam emails.

We’ve just had an existing customer phone us and signup to using our spam filter. He was pretty cheesed off with himself, and you can see why from how the conversation went:

We get around 100-200 spam emails a day. I thought I was dealing with it okay, but amongst the spam, I deleted a genuine customer enquiry (which came through on a day I was on holiday) and I just happened to come across the deleted email when searching for something else. Although the lead came through about 4 weeks ago, I tried calling them back but they said that as we hadn’t replied, they didn’t think we were interested. I think the work would have been about £5000. ($10,000).

Our spam filtering doesn’t need any changes your end - instead we do a slight change to the domain name to tell it that all email goes through our spam filter first before it gets to you - and no changes needed on your end to Outlook.

If spam is becoming a problem, why not give us a try?

Google… the god of search engines.   Its got the highest market share, its releasing new products every few months (take a look at Google Sky announced today), but there isn’t a quick or easy overnight solution to getting your site to the number 1 spot, or first page of Google.

 There are from what I recall in a The Times newspaper article, over 120 pieces of data that contribute to your overall score or pagerank.  What these are is a closely guarded secret (a bit like the Coca Cola recipe) known only to a select few at Google.

However… In the SEO world there are a handful of respected and experienced SEO people who’ve contributed their comments to what the top ranking factors are for Google.  I won’t duplicate what they’ve said, but its well worth a read

I just happened to be checking some of the numerous domain names that Zarr owns and came across a problem.  When Microsoft announced the successor to Windows Server 2003, they code-named it “Longhorn”, and so we reserved “Longhorn-Hosting.co.uk” and a couple of variations.

 I did a whois search and by mistake entered the .com version of the domain name and saw it had been registered by someone else.  Hmm… I went to the site and saw the following:

The content is identitical to our zarr.com site, even the layout is the same.  Its nice they are promoting what Zarr does, but the links don’t work and definately don’t go through to our zarr.com site.

So what can I do about this?  Well I’ve dropped them an email telling them to remove the content but as the registrant is not in the UK - where we are based - the chances of getting it removed is slim.  I’d guess the longhorn-hosting.com domain is one of many they’ve reserved and sat on - which is fine, but please don’t use plagiarised content from an existing website.

My next port of call is to report the site to Google, MSN etc.  Not sure of the outcome but will let you know.  If anyone has any advice, please let me know.

An American student has developed something he’s called “Wikipedia Scanner” which reveals who has changed Wikipedia entries.  Quite dull you may think, but its shown that:

• Apple have edited Micrsoft’s Wikipedia entry adding more negative comments.
• Amnesty International have removed negative comments from their entry.
• Coca Cola removed comments on the negative effects of its drinks.
• MSN Search added “is a serious competitor to Google” to its own page.

 and there are many more.  Read the BBC news story or visit the official Wikipedia Scanner website for more info.

I don’t think there is anyone I know who doesn’t get spam email. Its a problem thats been around probably since the very early days of the Internet and continues to get worse.

My company provides website, database and email hosting for websites that we’ve developed, and also people who just want to host their own sites with us.

I think we are quite unique in the web-design world as we have our own servers - and by that I mean that we rent the racks, organise our own IP transit, and no-one else apart from authorised Zarr staff can access our servers. A lot of web design companies outsource the hosting to companies like HostEurope - which do offer cheap hosting, but you get what you pay for.

Anyway, back to spam. Zarr provides spam filtering facilities for quite a few companies and using our hardware spam firewalls, we receive each email, do a virus check on it first (using 3 virus definition providers), and then do spam checks - using Bayesian filters, intent analysis, known spam sources and other several other tests. The email is given an overall score which will determine whether it gets blocked immediately as spam, tagged as “possibly spam, but not 100% sure” and let through, quarantined or let through as “looks like genuine”.

Since January this year, the number of emails we filtered each day was relatively constant - about 250,000 +- 20% each day. Then on 28th June, this shot-up to about 650,000 literally overnight - without any specific new clients added to the system. it then stayed roughly constant until a few days ago when it peaked above 1,000,000 for the first time.

The peak and increase seems to be bad receipient and rate controlled emails - where they are targeting your email server with invalid domain names, or one source sending too many emails without a certain timeframe. Luckily, as we filter out over 95% of spam our customers are happy that they aren’t having to wade through a full mailbox each morning.

Zarr charges (at the time of writing) about £35 per user per year to filter email or about 67 pence per week. I’d estimate that if you are spending more than 30 seconds per day fighting spam in your mailbox, then you can benefit from Zarr filtering your spam email.

After being offline for a few weeks, I’m back online. I used to use dasBlog before, but was getting inundated with Trackback and Pings - to the level of probably 1/2 million per day. Perhaps it was the version I was using that had a few bugs, but either way I couldn’t stop them without taking the blog offline for a while.

I’m now using Wordpress as I’d read a lot of good comments about it on other blogs. Even though the version I’m using runs on l-i-n-u-x, at the end of the day, its software and installs easily and straight out of the can!

It also looks to be quite flexible and easy to amend through the theme editor. Hmm.. think I’ll take a look.

Although we are based in Rugby, Warwickshire, we launch anything up to 10 websites per month for our customers around England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

Being in the centre of the UK in Rugby is a benefit as the majority of the UK’s population live within about 60-90 minutes of travel. When you are on the Internet, trading online and advertising to get traffic & sales, you don’t know if your competitors are across the street, overseas or in the same area of the country.

So when it comes to Google Adword advertising, I thought I’d pass on a few comments on our recent experiences from our customers.

A customer launched a new site, wanted more traffic and started Google Adword advertising on a set budget per day. Within the first day, his budget was being used up before the end of the day. However, although this generated clickthrus, it didn’t result in huge number of sales. For the sales it did generate, the amount of profit from the sales wasn’t enough to cover the online advertising - resulting in a loss being made.

Zarr Retailer is a comprehensive ecommerce package but also includes a significant amount of management information to measure and track sales, clickthrus etc. I think that the information it provides is essential if you want to trade at a profit online.

By using the information in Zarr Retailer, we were able to see that the majority of clickthrus came during the midday to 5pm timeslot, and from these, a tiny percentage resulted in sales. I’m of the opinion that it was our customer’s competitors using up his Adword budget by clicking regulary during the day. Google obviously put in measures to Adwords to stop this happening, but I’m not convinced that it can be stopped or wiped out completely. Outside office hours your competitors will have gone home too so can’t use up your budget.

We suggested to our customer, who was running the site, that they switch-off the Google adwords between midday and 6pm and only run it outside those hours. Since then, the Google Adword spend has reduced by 70%, and sales have increased by 20%.

Obviously, this may not work for all sites, but if you do find that your Google Adword budget disappears before your eyes, leaving you with little or no sales, try just enabling it outside office hours and see what happens!

We’ve started using HTTP Modules quite a lot recently for optimising links and making URLs more english-like than the http://…./productDetail.aspx?ProductGUID=8c66abc4-0197-4596-9b21-e5e40b4917c9 type convention you normally see on database driven websites.  So using HTTP Handlers, a URL can now be http://…./A-sample-product.aspx instead.

For getting websites to work on the internet, attract visitors from search engines and be highly ranked, HTTP Modules definately are worth their weight in gold.

We do a lot of ecommerce websites for our clients and when they get online, one of the few ways to get a guaranteed stream of visitors to your website is to do advertising on a search engine(s) - fo example, Google Adwords.

The more people you get to your site - the more change you’ve got of people buying from you.  We did some analysis in the 2nd half of 2005 and we found that between 2% and 7% of visitors to the sites we develop actually buy.  So if you get 100 visitors, you could expect 2 or more sales. Please note, these are just averages not “the rule”.

By spending money on Google Adwords (for example), you can appear on the right hand side of any search results for specific keywords.  THe more you are willing to pay, the higher up the list you are and your account will be debited when someone clicks on your little advert to go to your site.

First time sellers on the internet often fall into the trap of spending their marketing budget very quickly - and then run out of money.  So below are some misconceptions that I feel about online advertising.

MISCONCEPTION #1: Being first means you pay a lot, but statistics show that people area as likely to click on number #2 than number #1 in the list.

MISCONCEPTION #2: Don’t necessarily have your adverts showing 24×7.  During working hours (9-5pm), a lot of office workers surf the internet during breaks, lunchtime or boredom time and click on adverts to get to sites and have a look around.  They don’t really have an intention to buy, they just want to window shop to pass the time.  Try turning off your adverts during the day (or part of), and only enabling them in the evenings and weekends.  You probably won’t get a huge reduction in the number of orders, and your advertisting budget won’t take such a huge dent.

MISCONCEPTION #3: Google may be the biggest search engine, driving the most visitors to your site through advertising - but are some of the other advertisting campaigns driving less traffic, but more purchases?  A product such as Zarr Retailer is very good at analysing this type of information and telling you where the buyers are coming from.  We sometimes find that sites may have 70% of traffic from Google Adwords but get 50% of their sales from MSN.

I’m not trying to say that certain search engines aren’t worth advertisting on - to the contrary.  All of the major search engines can drive traffic to your site quickly - but its ultimately the value of obtaining a customer’s purchase that you need to measure.