On Internet Business

Improving your Website

Posted by Michael under Online Retail, Social Media

Mashable has recently produced an excellent round-up of the resources available to designers seeking to obtain advice on how to improve designs.

An outside perspective on the design of a new website can make a difference both in pinpointing issues that are more important to users than the designer had realised, or to help validate design areas that the client may not be fully convinced about.

Critique The Site

This is a sweet little tool, allowing for instant feedback about a website’s design by means of a frame to the left of the web page under consideration, where users can leave feedback. There are a couple of downsides: first, reviewers have to log in using a popular web service such as Twitter, Gmail, Facebook, or OpenID before posting a review, and there’s a limit to the amount of people you have access to – it doesn’t have a pool of reviewers to review your site, unlike some of the other options. Plus point, it’s free.

Please Critique Me

Please Critique Me is an interesting approach in that it’s a resource run by web design agency offering free design critiques by one of its design teams, with a panel that includes some notable names. Valuable both for its critiques and the resources available on the site itself.

SitePoint

SitePoint is an online media company with a forum that allows for feedback from its pool of more than 350,000 registered users. On the plus side, it’s active and informed, on the minus side it’s a time consuming and sometimes frustrating way to read feedback and there’s some veering off topic which will probably infuriate the designer seeking responses. Still free though!

Bounce

Bounce is a web app that plugs in your web design’s URL, generating a screenshot of the site which people can then comment on. Minus points, a screenshot is not necessarily a good way to examine deeper website functionality. Plus points, it’s easy, its fun and it’s free, which has to be a plus.

Five Second Test

Five Second Test is more based on functionality – reviewers see a screen capture of the web design and then respond with one of two forms of evaluation: memory test (shows users a web layout for five seconds, then asks them what they remember) or click test (participants are required to click on the most prominent items on the page within five seconds). If you wish to find out if your web design’s crucial design elements are both visible and memorable, this may be a tool for you. It’s free, which is a plus, but the free option gives you only five responses and you’re put at the bottom of the testing queue in terms of priority, so it could take a while. There are paid options from $5 to15 which allow you to have a higher queue placing and to customise the user instructions

Concept Feedback

Concept Feedback is something of a crowdsourcing approach. Each reviewer rates one of four items on your site, those items being: design, purpose, originality and engagement. Reviewers are themselves reviewed, both by being given feedback on their own designs and by rankings. It’s a free service if you choose to review five concepts before you post your own, but premium services ($10-50 per concept) allow you to post the concept before you review others, to have your concept featured on Twitter to generate more reviews and to be guaranteed a minimum number of reviews.

UserTesting.com

This costs $39 but it guarantees remote trials of your site – you receive videos of each visitor as they explore your site, alongside written summaries of any problems they discover. On the plus side, it’s really fast to get feedback, minus points – you do have to pay and you may find you have to convert video feedback to some other kind of recorded information before you can adapt your site. A user’s confused expression may be worth a thousand words, but if you’re working for a client they probably won’t want to sit through videos to discover what people think of the site you’ve built for them.

Usabilla

Usabilla useful for usability testing on live sites. It works by gathering visitor feedback using both annotation and task performance measurements and asks people to complete tasks for which the time taken is recorded. Free for a single web page and offering up to fifty participants for that page, it’s a good system for a small site. There are paid-for features that can be anything from $49 to $950 per annum, which may be cost-effective only for the bigger retail sites.

Feedback Army

For $15, Feedback Army will ‘host’ a focused debate of your design based on 4-6 questions you supply. You get ten reviews with an estimated time lag one to three hours turnaround – a fantastic way of obtaining swift and cheap reviews.

Userfly

Is a funky little system that gives you a screencast of how users interact with the site which may make it a more useful system in analysing why an existing site doesn’t work than in assessing a new site. You plug a line of code into your web page and that’s it. Plus points, it’s a simple system. Minus points, you have to do the analysis yourself. There are premium plans $10-200 per month and get you more captures (results), the ability to use the https protocol and longer storage of your captures.

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What are the top industries to start a business in?

Posted by Michael under Entrepreneur Resources

The world is changing fast, and new industries emerge as old ones disappear and some go around and around. One of Victorian England’s growth industry was mica, used to make the transparent doors in stoves and fires at that period. After a long decline the mica industry has been resurgent since the plastics industry discovered that ground mica was a lightweight insulator that could suppress sound and vibration and improve the strength of plastic car components.

So what industries are the best to launch a new business today?

• Go green – environmental consulting is expected to grow at 9% a year for at least the next five years, and it’s going to expand into every area of life, from governmental contracts through to individual household assessments and support.
• Be a Babel fish – while Douglas Adams may have coined the creature in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, translation and interpretation are amongst the world’s biggest service industries today with a market growth of nearly 20% last year. It’s an industry fuelled by peace time commerce (think India and China) and wartime negotiations (think Afghanistan and Iraq) and has applications everywhere from serving as an interpreter in a GPs surgery to providing simultaneous translation at War Crimes Tribunals and mobile on demand translation is becoming a very big business indeed.
• Apps mean Opps – For real entry level success, being in on the mobile apps market as a programmer, developer or designer requires no more than skills and a little bit of luck. Allied to this is the indie market for niche computer games: those designed for specialist audiences that won’t sell to the mass market.
• Juicy, smoothie, fizzy, hot – Tea is a growth industry with the explosion in recent years from the teabag market into green and white teas, herbal teas, health teas, detox systems, and other drinks with large potential markets to tap, such as healthy juices and vitamin-enhanced waters.
• Hobby habits – it might be the recession causing nostalgia, or just because people are spending less on complex technological hobbies and more on classic pastimes, but the toy and game industry – excluding computer games – is undergoing a minor surge. It’s a good gamble anyway, because the next inventor who comes up with the equivalent of the Rubik’s Cube or Heelies will soon be a multi-millionaire.
• Intellect building – coaching for kids, mentoring adults and training for teens – tutoring, especially in languages like Russian, Chinese etc is a big growth area at present, as parents hothouse their children and adult learners seek to retrain for fast moving industries.

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Giving feedback to improve business performance

Posted by Michael under Business Growth

Heather Townsend has an interesting article at Real Business on how to give feedback to a poorly performing team member. She has five key tips to making feedback work for you, the recipient and their team:

1. Don’t shy away from the conversation – Townsend says the longer you leave it, the tougher it gets to open the discussion. Also, I’d add, the further you are in time from the event that caused the need to give feedback, the more likely it is that both you and the recipient of the feedback will have begun to forget the details of what happened, allowing them to get into denial about the situation and you to start to feel insecure about your own memory of the event/situation if you were present.

2. Be specific – Townsend recommends using the Situation – Behaviour – Outcome approach, which is a good way to establish the grounds for feedback. You need to state the situation in which the behaviour occurred, and outline the behaviour which needs to change before describing the outcome you require. As an example:

Situation – a busy day in the office when everybody was under pressure
Behaviour – the person was heard speaking rudely to a client on the telephone
Outcome – In personal terms this person needs to recognise her pressure levels and manage her own well-being by taking regular short breaks in high-stress situations. Professionally, ensuring she uses a script for the calls she makes means the person can avoid losing her temper and get through calls without losing her cool.

3. Be clear about what you and don’t want to happen – using a technique described in Crucial Conversations, Townsend outlines how to handle a feedback session: “I’m having this conversation because I want to see you be more successful in meetings. I don’t want you to think that I’m getting at you, or for you to think that I think you’re incapable. I do want you to be listen and digest this feedback carefully – and I don’t want you to dismiss the feedback as not important. I am giving you this feedback because I want to see your career develop further in this firm, and in my opinion, changing this behaviour will have a positive impact on your career development.”

4. Listen to the reaction – defensiveness, undue emotional response or an attempt to avoid the conversation, means you need to make the conversation safe again, before you give more feedback and you do this by restating what results you do and don’t want to happen.

5. Work with the other person’s agenda – Townsend says that feedback works best your purpose is supportive, so talking to somebody when you are in a bad mood with them is counterproductive, because you need to be able to see the benefit of giving constructive feedback, not just wanting to let off steam.

I’d add that what you do before, during and after the feedback session can make a substantial difference to how your feedback is received and how the person you’re talking to handles the need to change their behaviour:

• Prepare yourself by making sure you’ve double-checked facts and positions (perhaps the employee was dealing with a personal call, not a work one, in which case your feedback needs to be about time use in the workplace, rather than rudeness)
• Deal with excuses calmly but factually – and don’t fall into dealing with the excuse rather than staying focused on the behaviour that needs to change
• Make sure people can make the changes you are asking of them – this may mean providing training or a mentor, setting a target that will be monitored or just something as simple as giving them a go-to person if they feel they are slipping back into an unacceptable behaviour – the role of the go-to is to provide a safe space in which the individual can explore why they aren’t keeping up their performance so that if they need something further, they have identified it before they go to their line manager or mentor to request further support to maintain their constructive change.

Photograph by Stan Random under a creative commons licence

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What motivates people at work?

Posted by Michael under Business Growth

When I was studying Management the key research that described the role and function of motivation was the work of Maslow.

His hierarchy of needs was the classic model by which management designed the processes that were supposed to lead to greater productivity.

Daniel Pinks looks at motivation in a different way in an entertaining clip that is, in itself, evidence of how thinking differently can lead to different outcomes – it’s an example of using mastery, technology and imagination to change the face of business presentations.

What Pinks explores is the way that a wide range of studies show that paying people more to do better work doesn’t achieve the desired result when that work ceases to be monotonous physical effort and requires intellect and complex thought.

Instead, once you ask people to do more sophisticated tasks to achieve their bonus, they actually do LESS well when the incentive of meeting their ‘hierarchy of needs’ is used as a motivating factor – ie if they are offered more money on a sliding scale, they actually perform less well.

So what factors can lead to better business performance today? They are factors relating to personal satisfaction are and achievement:

Autonomy – the desire to have control over our thinking processes. It has been proved in several studies, including some run by MIT, that when you free up employees to think for themselves, they come up with fixes, solutions and improvements in the workplace – not because they want a bonus for a good idea, but because given the chance to make things better, they often focus naturally on improving workplace performance because it’s a big and important part of their lives

Mastery – the inbuilt need to get better at things may be an evolutionary advantage; individuals like to develop their skills, whether it’s the time it takes them to complete a Rubik’s cube or the ability to play a Chopin sonata on the piano. This drive towards mastery is innate and can be harnessed to improve workplace performance when linked to autonomy: people want to improve, but forcing them to improve destroys their autonomy and makes them resistant so you need a balance that recognises these two drives working together with the third

Purpose – having a big purpose helps people want to do better. Money is not a big purpose for many people and ‘more money’ doesn’t inspire a lot of people to get up and do something. Purpose comes from believing you’re doing well in helping make something better – just doing well in a business that is not making something better (or may be making something worse) demotivates the individual so businesses need to look for ways to be ‘good at being better businesses’ as well as just for ways to ‘get better at being in business’.

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Use a bit of monkey business to replace performance appraisals

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Leadership

Recently Cameron Herold told me about an interpersonal review process he calls Monkeys Looking Sideways, which he’s described in detail on his blog.

He uses it in place of the standard 360 degree review process because he wanted to build teams that were able to enjoy and even embrace healthy conflict. He also wanted to increase trust and good communication between individuals.

Essentially it’s based on a story he heard at a seminar years before. It was about a group of monkeys sitting in a tree. The top monkey looked down and all he could see was smiling monkeys looking up. But every monkey further down the tree had a very different view!

So he used this account to create a verbal, real time, 360 degree feedback exercise from group to individual. To use it you need at least a half day, preferably a full day and a pad of sticky notes and a pen for each individual taking part.

You start with the review of the most senior person, the team or group leader, or CEO

Each person in the group writes down the top 5 things that the person being reviewed:

a) Should continue
b) Should improve on

That person says in their seat but everybody else stands up, one at a time, and reads out their sticky note. They start with the positives and then move on to the aspects that the person being reviewed should work on.

The person under review can only either say thank you or ask a clarifying question., they can’t debate, explain or excuse themselves.

Then all the notes are stuck to a flip chart and the individual being reviewed is given them to type them up and use them in their personal development meetings over the year.

The process is repeated for each person in the room and takes around 45 minutes per person.

Herold says it produces more valuable feedback than any other review process.

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Angels Den

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Entrepreneur Resources

The popularity of TV programmes like Dragons’ Den has led to renewed interest in the role of investors in new business – but the co-founder of Angels Den, Bill Morrow, says that his organisation, which connects fledgling businesses seeking funding with high net worth individuals looking for investment opportunities, hasn’t always benefited from linkage with the TV show because some entrepreneurs fear being ridiculed and humiliated by their potential ‘angels’ but – he claims, nothing could be further from the truth.

How does it work?

Business angels are people with some money to spare and a naturally adventurous nature. From his own experience when seeking Angel funding, Morrow saw that the traditional process of engaging with business angels was overly complicated and too costly.

His online business, Angels’ Den, allows his team to react fast to customer feedback which makes them flexible and innovative. This means that the more than 2,500 Angel Investors and 10,000 entrepreneurs who are registered with Angels’ Den are given a more reflexive service in which both advice and funding can be swiftly exchanged.

Before joining up, SMEs and entrepreneurs are invited to attend a free Business Funding Clinic to work through their proposal and ask questions about the nature of business funding. Then, when businesses become members, they are ‘led by the hand’ through the process of putting together a proposal to Angels. Around a fifth of those registering as business have already found an Angel – which Morrow says is ten times the national average. The services offered range from advice clinics to Speed Funding and private meetings organised by regional managers.

What does it cost?

There’s a £799 (plus VAT) registration fee and then, once you achieve funding from and Angel a 5% success fee.

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Best online storage

Posted by Michael under Uncategorized

What is online storage?

This is exactly what it says on the tin – a facility that stores your data, encrypted, in an online location.

Why is it useful?

• Reduced risk of loss – if you lose data it can be costly to your business and irreplaceable in your personal life: having your data stored in a location separate to your physical location gives you a guarantee that no matter what happens to your home and business premises, your data remains preserved.

• Ease of access – having data stored remotely can make it easier to access it wherever you are in the world, regardless of time-zones etc.

• Storage cost – sometimes, storing large amounts of data can be prohibitively expensive, particularly if your business is growing fast and is a huge data generator.

How much does it cost?

Simple storage accounts like the Dropbox and Mozy ones are free. Each offers 2 gigabytes of space. The cost then rises according to the amount that you store and there are a range of ways to pay from the monthly account:
• (Dropbox = Pro 50 (50 GB) is $9.99 a month or Pro 100 (100 GB) is $19.99 a month
• Mozy = £4.95 per month regardless of storage capacity used.
Through to the annual payment option:
• Carbonite = £41.95 per year per computer, unlimited capacity or 2 years for £75.95.

What are the differences?

Dropbox – allows you to sync files of any size or type. Work on files even if you’re offline. Sharing files and folders lets several people to collaborate. 30 days of undo history, with unlimited undo available as a paid option. Free Dropbox application for iPhone, iPad, and Android.

Mozy automatically backs up the files whenever changes are made and only backs up data that’s not already been backed up.

Carbonite users are given the option to manage their own encryption key and can store as much data as there is on any computer. However, they say that current DSL and cable internet services may make it unfeasibly slow to back up more than a few dozen GB of data.

Free storage without strings – if you’re looking of an effective way of sharing and storing documents and spreadsheets, Google docs is simple, universal and totally free.

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Ways to finance your business

Posted by Michael under Business Growth

In a cash-strapped period, innovative ways of financing business growth can make the difference between success and failure – have you explored all your options?

Ways to do it yourself

1. Put in more equity – taking on a second mortgage is the traditional route, although that may not be as easy as it used to be, given the doldrums of the mortgage lending market too. Perhaps there’s an insurance policy to cash in, or an heirloom that you could sell to raise capital? G2I is an organisation that helps businesses see themselves through the eyes of potential investors and offers insight into how to raise money in tough times.

2. Phone a friend, or ask a family member – many small businesses start with money invested by family or friends who believe in the brilliant idea of an entrepreneur – perhaps you should be pitching to your nearest and dearest?

3. Pay less – if the issue is cashflow, HMRC can help. They have a Business Payment Support Service that can schedule payments to help businesses cope with the humps and slumps of cashflow.

4. Consider leasing – if it’s capital rather than cashflow that’s the problem, leasing plant/machinery/vehicles/IT equipment etc can be a way of getting over one of the big hurdles.

5. Bond issues – if your customers are loyal and dedicated and your product is distinctive, a bond issue allows them to invest directly in your success by showing their loyalty to what you do.

Investment from outside

6. Venture capital – is often seen as the ‘scary option’ but id needn’t be. There is a definite bias towards technical based companies in the current venture markets, but it’s still an option for more traditional companies, and for start-ups it can be a true launch pad.

7. Building societies – there are over fifty building societies in the UK that haven’t become part of multinational financial institutions: many of them are more willing to lend money on commercial premises than the banks.

8. Public flotation – definitely a choice for the brave and rugged, you need to have a market valuation of around £2 million and to be prepared to invest time and money in getting your flotation story just right for the currently somewhat flat flotation process.

9. Find yourself an angel – the British Business Angels Association claim that anything from a few thousand to a million can be found to develop a business via an angel who will expect to see a tenfold return on their investment in four to six years.

10. Seek funding online – Zopa is an online marketplace where lenders can vet the schemes in which they want to invest – PRIME is a Zopa-dedicated scheme for over fifties wanting to set up or expand a business.

11. Asset-based funding – another one that isn’t for the faint-hearted, this is a buy now, pay later based approach. Traditionally funding was offered against plant and equipment, but you can also borrow these days against stock inventory and even brand … if you’re brave enough.

Specialist funding

12. Government grants for training (upskilling rather than continuing professional development) or R&D are obtainable, but may require quite an investment of time in preparing the application so they aren’t an easy option for firms that are both cash- and time-strapped. There are also EU grants for small firms (employing under ten) or those made redundant who want to start a business of their own.

Game-changing approaches

13. Invoice discounting – this is the new name for what has always been known as factory – this means ‘selling’ your invoices to a third party who then processes the invoices while you draw loans against the money owed to your business. In other words, it’s a debt collection and ledger management service and while you end up working closely with the factor, it can free you to get on with what you’re good at while they get on with what they are good at – getting the money you are owed!

14. Cut your staff bill – ask your employees to take a pay cut to ease you over your current problems. In return, offer a share option, a sabbatical or some other way of supporting their dreams as they support yours.

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