To our international readers, Thanksgiving day kicks of the season of holiday sales. The Friday after Thanksgiving is called Black Friday. Quite a morbid name for a Friday. But the name makes perfect sense – it is the day that retailers turn a profit (black ink on their books) for the year.
BlackFriday sales or BF sales are the big thing for large box stores and large online retailers. Small businesses are usually not a part of the big BF day sales. This year there has been a push to make Saturday the day for Small Businesses to turn a profit for the holiday season.  It has been aptly named “Small Business Saturday”. Then there is Cyber Monday. Cyber Monday is the first Monday after Thanksgiving and was primarily the big sales event for online retailers.

The big box stores or big brand online retailers have one thing in common, they have well established brand names. With this comes some well deserved credibility as well. As a shopper, I know that if I order an Xbox 360 with Kinect from Buy.com or Amazon.com – my credit card details are safe and I will end up receiving my super cool Xbox.  That is, if they do not go out of stock.  The big brands remove my online shopping anxiety. Unfortunately if you are a small online store, lack of credibility is the number one factor online shoppers cite as a reason for abandoning their shopping carts.

When I shop at a small business online store, the following comes to mind:

Are these guys legit?
Will they steal my credit card and sell it to the mafia?
Will my Xbox 360 actually make it?
Will it be under warranty?
Will it ship on time?
Can I call these guys?
How long have  they been in business?
What have others said about their experience with this store?
Are they affiliated with any organizations?
What is their return policy?

The questions go on and on. For a small business website, answering the above can be a daunting task.

Here is a quick check list of items to help build Online Credibility

1) Toll- Free Number
Yes a toll-free number(TFN) makes a huge difference. I know almost all cellphone plans and some land line plans offer free minutes and calling a regular number is no big deal. Apart from the obvious statistics of domestic land line users,  TFN numbers (preferably the 1800 ones)  give the business a professional look.  Keep in mind, international callers cannot dial toll-free numbers, so do keep the regular phone number listed on the contact us page or even on the footer of your site.

2) Contact Address
When people visit a brick and mortar business – they know it will be still standing a few months later, should they have any problems with their purchase (well maybe not in this economy, my neighborhood Blockbuster is closing down – who would have thought?) When I visit an online store I want to know where are they located?  If you run a home-based online business get a mail box, rather than expose your home address.

3)  Professional Web Design
This point is often glossed over. But it is crucial to have a professional website and e-commerce design. The entire shopping experience must have the same branding and look and feel. Imagine walking through Target and you stroll into the kitchen Isle and it has the Dollar General’s branding all over. Confusing to say the least.  Select a web designer that knows how to either provide a complete custom e-commerce shopping experience or someone that understands third-party e-commerce tools and can integrate them into your site  seamlessly.

4) Industry Affiliations
Display any industry affiliation logos, such as Better Business Bureau or similar reputable organisations.

5) Shipping & Handling Info
A huge pet peeve of online shoppers is lack of shipping information upfront. Let them know the shipping information as soon as they select a product. This can be done very easily by either having a popup question for their shipping zip code or have a mini cart summary on the right hand side with a button to enter their zip code.

6) Privacy Policy
The simplest and most reassuring privacy policy in laymen terms “We will not sell your information to anyone period”

7) General Terms and Conditions
Any additional legal conditions that must be stated up front.

8 ) Return Policy
Publish your return policy it will save you tons of time in responding to emails over and over about return policies.

9) Operating Hours
A no-brainer  -  important for customer service.

10) SSL Certificate
An SSL Certificate is a must have for e-commerce transactions or any other secure information transactions. If you sell more than $5000 per year of merchandise, get a Verisign SSL cert. It costs a lot more money than other SSL certs but the Verisign seal is synonymous with safe online shopping.

11) Testimonials
Testimonials show that others have had great experiences with the store and put users at ease.

12) Product Reviews
Product reviews can help buyers make informed purchase decisions. Amazon is the perfect example of how well it has used reviews to build its business.  If you are confident about your product, you will get glowing reviews from customers. Occasionally you may get negative reviews if any, try to work with the customer to resolve their problems promptly.

13) Credit Card Security
Every online business has a legal and moral obligation to protect customers information, especially credit card information, social security numbers etc. Our advice to small businesses is to never store credit card information on file, either on a database online or offline at an office computer. However secure you may think it is, it is not worth the ultimate headache of admitting to your customers that their data has been hacked. Always pass on credit card details to a bank or merchant provider to process the information using their secure API’s.

14) PCI Compliance
PCI or Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard is a set of rules & standards outlined to help prevent Credit Card fraud.  Merchants that do small volume transactions do not necessarily have to comply with PCI standards. However we recommend merchants get an website application scanner similar to Trust Guard to ensure their e commerce app is PCI compliant.

This is not a final and absolute list, there maybe other items that help improve online purchase ratios. Let us know what you’ve done to improve credibility online.

SEO for businesses today must consist of much more than using the latest design trends. Designers should also be designing sites that take the full range of people viewing the site into consideration. The largest and most successful companies know that they have to offer different versions of their web content so as to appeal to everyone who accesses their websites.

If a company fails to present its online information in ways that are suitable for all types of cultural audiences, it is sure to miss out on potential customers who cannot relate to how the information is being presented. Take a quick look at the McDonald’s U.S. website and then at the site for Indian customers and you will notice very stark differences in how the information is presented. The Indian site is heavy on color and is much more interactive. The U.S. site on the other hand is more minimalistic and straightforward in nature. This illustrates how web design for businesses should be approached – by understanding how people from different cultures prefer to have their information presented.

It is absolutely essential to the success of your business that you focus on the website user experience for so that your visitors, no matter where they are located, have a successful visit. Studies have shown us that if a visitor to your site has a successful visit, he/she is three times more likely to recommend your site than if they find the visit unpleasant. Successful websites are often customized or localized for foreign markets, taking the local language into account, social standards and aesthetic preferences. Localizing a website is a rather complicated chore but it is necessary. Making versions of a site for different cultures shows consumers that your organization is willing to accommodate their needs. When a user sees a version of a website in his or her language, even if they are proficient in English, results in that user having a very favorable experience.

Users from around the world have special needs related to entry fields on websites for names and addresses, dates and measurements and information about regional product standards. Considering all of the issues related to international usability, it is recommended that international usability testing with users is done. This testing can be done from wherever you are located as you could make telephone calls to users to ask them to think aloud as they navigate the site, assuming of course that you can locate these foreign users who speak your language well enough to complete a telephone interview.

The internet is called the world wide web for a reason and more and more web design professionals are realizing that the emphasis today must be placed on the first two words: World Wide. If you want to truly go global and succeed with your website, resist going with those web designers that offer those too-good-to-be-true web design deals and instead work with a team of experts who understand the importance of website globalization optimization and how to implement it.

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Brian Wong(18yrs old) was super inspiring. He has some amazing perspectives on life.

TED who? That’s what one of my friends said.

If you haven’t heard of TED.com, it’s about time you did! TED.com is a conference that brings together the great thinkers of our time, to give the lecture of their life… in about 18 minutes!

Over the years, TED has almost grown a cult-like following and the free videos on their website are used in universities and schools all over the world. Whole blogs have been created around these vidoes and it would be safe to say that many have been inspired by the ideas that the speakers so freely share.

Attending a TED conference comes with a rather hefty price tag though (no surprise!) and there is often a long waiting list.

TEDx events on the other hand are independently organized TED conferences(minus the sticker shock) and if you’re quick, you can often snag yourself a pair of tickets.

I’m happy to say that I did just that last week and this Friday for a few hours (I couldn’t get tickets for March 18), I’m hoping I’ll be informed, entertained and inspired. I’m hoping to do some live tweeting but if not, at least a blog post with some post conference thoughts.

Learn more about TEDx Brickell.

I’ve been talking to friends about SXSW and the cool things that have emerged as a result of it and the one question I get from many of my non-techie friends is “What is SXSW?”

So this post is not for those who are well acquainted with all things SXSW but for everyone else!

South by Southwest (the X is actually for ‘by’) is series of interactive, film and music festivals and conferences that take place in Austin Texas every year around this time. It started in 1987 and has become somewhat of an annual pilgrimage for a lot of people in our industry. Lots of cool apps and websites get launched there and well…you get to mingle with lots of celebrities. You can read more here.

This years festivities run from March 12th to March 21st.

Since we’re techies, we’re most interested in the Interactive Festival (March 12th to March 16th) – not to say the music and movie festivals aren’t any cooler.

Just to give you a taste, here are two sessions that were relevant to the areas I work in:

3/12/10 – 2PM - Beauty in Web Design (Great web design is all around us, but can we go beyond ‘cool’, ‘usable’ and ‘fun’ to create something truly beautiful? This session examines our changing attitudes to beauty, art and meaning, and why the web is ideally suited to become a vehicle for true beauty in the Information Age.)

3/12/10 – 2PM – The UX of Mobile (The term ‘user experience’ used to be an afterthought in mobile application design. The iPhone changed all that and has set a new benchmark for user experience on mobile devices. )

In case you’re interested, here’s the full sxsw schedule

Can’t make it to Austin? Don’t worry. Just do a Google blog search and you’re sure to find some interesting posts. The following WSJ blog is just an example:

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/03/12/big-at-the-sxsw-conference-location-location-location/

(Click the image to expand)

Some complain that this is a breach of privacy because the Google algorithms seem to be reading email content as it is being written. But this is no different than what Gmail does when it’s serving up ads while you type your email.

“…Ad targeting in Gmail is fully automated, and no humans read your email in order to target advertisements or related information. This type of automated scanning is how many email services, not just Gmail, provide features like spam filtering and spell checking. Ads are selected for relevance and served by Google computers using the same contextual advertising technology that powers Google’s AdSense program.”
Ads in Gmail – Google Help

Gmail also presented some advanced features to its service such as the much ‘celebrated’ (by some of course!) Drunk Email prevention tool called ‘Mail Goggles’. This is a service to prevent emails being sent through Gmail while one is “under the influence”. The service can also be customized to apply at different times and dates. Once activated, Gmail presents a set of mathematics problems to be solved before any emails are sent by the Gmail user. An example of the tool is given below.

With Google’s current domination of the global search market and aggressive expansion in many spheres of the internet, many are skeptical as to whether Google will keep true to its privacy policies.

In general, it would appear that many Google tools and features are geared at improving the overall user experience and maximizing the utility of Google products.  How much privacy you are willing to concede is of course entirely up to you.

HTML & CSS

HTML is a presentation language. Unlike programming languages like C# or JAVA, HTML is used to define the way content is presented in a web page. The primary tools for defining presentation characteristics of a web page are tags.

Ex:  ‘<html> <title> <br> <p>’

There are open tags such as ‘<p>’ and ‘<l1>’ etc. But compared to the number of closed tags, these tags are comparatively very limited. All the other HTML tags need to be closed to make them meaningful and add the intended formatting.

However, HTML carries some basic limitations. One of them is that, styling has to be applied to individual tags. For example, though the H1 tags may appear the same in every page in a web site with 30 pages, the formatting has to be done individually. This is a tiresome and a time consuming task that can lead to many unforeseen problems. Also, this increases the size of the web page leading to much larger websites.

Cascading Style Sheets [CSS – a Style sheet language] was introduced to address this issue. CSS is intended to be used as a substitution for individual HTML style tags pertaining to attributes of HTML tags. For example, a single CSS script can be used to apply attributes for ‘<h3>’ tags throughout a website. These scripts can be called by a hyperlink or can be entered at the head of the web page or at the intended place of formatting.

Sample CSS script

CSS gives web developers much flexibility to address formatting issues. Also, a CSS can be altered and given the circumstances, [ex. Call the CSS via a hyperlink] the changes can be automatically applied to all HTML formatting done using that particular CSS script. This is considered to be a very important development in web developing.

HTML and XHTML

The introduction of Extensible Markup Language [XML] is considered to be one of better developments. It allows users to define their own tags and use them accordingly. XML needs an Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT). Which is an XML-based language used for the transformation of XML documents into other XML or “human-readable” documents. The original document is not changed; rather, a new document is created based on the content of an existing one. The new document may be serialized (output) by the processor in standard XML syntax or in another format, such as HTML, .wmv, .avi or plain text.

Due to the ease of use provided by XML as well as the cohesion, orderliness and well-formedness, a new standard was adopted for web development as well. This is XHTML.

The Extensible Hyper Text Markup Language, or XHTML, is a markup language that has the same depth of expression as HTML, but also conforms to XML syntax.

Whereas HTML is an application of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), a very flexible markup language, XHTML is an application of XML, a more restrictive subset of SGML. Because they need to be well-formed, true XHTML documents allow for automated processing to be performed using standard XML tools—unlike HTML, which requires a relatively complex, lenient and generally custom parser. XHTML can be thought of as the intersection of HTML and XML in many respects, since it is a reformulation of HTML in XML. XHTML 1.0 became a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Recommendation on January 26, 2000. XHTML 1.1 became a W3C recommendation on May 31, 2001.

This is very important because most HTML validators use XHTML by default. To override this, specific script has to be added at the head of a HTML page.

Ex: ‘<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN”>’

‘<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>’

Most web development tools available in the market today such as Macromedia Dreamviewer have the ability to define the way web pages are presented as XHTML or HTML. The latest versions of such tools create web pages in XHTML by default.

The failure to define the presentation medium, [I.e. XHTML, HTML] can lead to an unprecedented number of errors when HTML coding is to be validated. Web developers need to take extra care to define the medium to prevent this problem.

So what’s Ubiquity? In simple terms Ubiquity is purported to be a really new cool way to interact from your browser with your desktop applications by using natural language commands.

Watch a demo by Aza Raskin on Ubiquity. That’s probably better than me trying to explain how it works. Sometimes a video is worth a thousand words.

You can download Ubiquity if you’d like to try it out yourself. I downloaded it as I got home and played around with it for a few hours. Keep in mind though that it’s still in beta.

I highly recommend trying it out – very simple to launch (ctrl + spacebar brings up ubuiqity in FF)

When I talked about with some other folks who had heard about Ubiquity their main concern was how long it would take them to learn how to use it since you need to remember the commands. (Are we going back to the days of DOS?

I think the key to Ubiquity being ubiquitous is its learnability – how quickly people will be able to learn and remember the commands. For now, I’m pretty excited by its potential.

I was privileged to work for a start up during the dot.com hay days. I remember when things were great, massive sign up bonuses, gadgets and goodies galore. Then things started to go south. Every Thursday was a tense day, we would be guessing who’d get the axe on Black Friday. Then Black Friday came and lunch time was the designated Axe time! We’d see a supervisor walk into our department with a box or two, stand next to our friends/colleagues and give them the bad news. It was a terrible, gut wrenching feeling. The poor soul hurriedly packed up his belongings and was then ‘escorted’ to the front door – A Royal Thank You for all those many nights we stayed up doing amazing things for the company.

I kept asking “why should they treat their fellow employees with such distrust?” Why?

A few months later(yes I survived for quite some time) they decided to let go a senior SW developer. This guy was fuming, fuming mad. He had threatened to ‘bring down the place’ quite explicitly. So needless to say, the day they were letting him go, 2 supervisors came to escort him out.

My turn eventually came up at the very tail end of the companies existence. By then, no one really cared even if I ran away with our beloved gumball machine!

I never thought we’d see another dot.com like era of boom and bust for a long long time. But here we are in 2009, looking down another long dark stretch. My advice to senior executives is be compassionate to their workers. They helped grow your company with their sweat, so don’t treat them like some balance sheet figure that has to go away in an instant. They’ve got feelings and families too. Try to work with them as if though it was your job on the line at Axe time on Black Fridays.

My advice to those on the Axe line ‘hang in there – things will get better’. It’s hard to know that you’ve worked so hard and yet, in an instant these so called pigs at the top can cut your job without much remorse.

It’s easy to get revenge. You may have inside access to everything, passwords, customer lists, company secrets etc. In some cases you ‘can’ bring the company to its knees. But take it from someone who’s been there, its not worth it. Although you were escorted out, doesn’t mean that everyone in there now hates you. On the contrary, there would be many that are willing to help, even those at the top. Get in touch with them via phone/email (I say this as in our case, we were not allowed back in the building) the sooner they hear from you the better. They may know of other openings or opportunities.

Keep an open mind – If you’ve worked in one industry, let’s say IT, doesn’t mean to say you’ve got to work in IT for the rest of your life. There are many other opportunities out there that may surprise you. As my friend says “Stay open for business”.