Welcome to the Revision Technology Newsletter

• What's happening at Revision Technology?
• So you have a website?

What's happening at Revision Technology?

Welcome back Revisionaries to the March 2008 edition of Revision Tech News!

Earlier this month I received an interesting question via email. What is the difference between a web designer and a web developer? So, I had to think... and into the mind of a web developer we go.

There are eleven distinct parts of the web developers mind.

• Part 1: The area of the brain that allows you to remember hundreds of lines of code and cryptic syntax, yet still occasionally forgets where the car keys were left.
• Part 2: The second area induces the gag reflex upon reading code that was hacked together ten years ago by an incompetent coder.
• Part 3: Regular Expressions - This region of the brain is usually impossible to make sense of. (If performing surgery, I recommend cutting this part out and inserting your own brain matter... just start from scratch, it'll be easier - trust me.)
• Part 4: Provides euphoric happy juice when code works right.
• Part 5: Copes with the despair of a caffeine crash.
• Part 6: This is the part that entertains fantasies about strangling the developers that made Internet Explorer 6.
• Part 7: Makes you feel guilty about writing a bad hack.
• Part 8: Supplements that guilt by making you promise yourself that you'll fix that bad hack later.
• Part 9: When you read the manual it goes into these brain meats.
• Part 10: This area is responsible for keeping you up at night when you know a page doesn't validate.
• Part 11: This part safeguards you from slipping into a state of dementia after taking in approximately 12 crap-tons of information every single day.

Our blog is still experiencing performance issues, so we have pushed the project back to May.

In this article we will discuss how to measure your return on investing into a web presence for your company.

Michael: The wireless-n protocal isn't going to be released until 2009, why are the routers already in stores?

Return on investing in a Website

After spending thousands of dollars to have your website developed, now you are thinking about what returns you're getting out of it. Here are some tips to ensure your ROI and position your website towards success.

The web server your site is hosted on collects a range of information such as, your site visitors internet protocol address (i.p. address), the type of browser the visitor was using, and what links were clicked while accessing your site. Words and word phrases used in search engines are also tracked, as well as what pages were viewed and the order they were viewed in.

So what does this mean to you? Well, a better understanding of how visitors interact with your site can lead to a more positive experience that will turn them into paying customers and ultimately maximize the return on your company's investment.

Before measuring your return on investment, ask yourself how many visitors convert into sales? What keyword phrases generate sales? From which search engines do your sales generate? What is your customer's post click activity? Do you use tracking software to calculate the final conversion rate?

Carrying out the proper analytics is very important in determining the true value of your website to your business. There are many aspects in assessing website performance, such as using key performance indicators. The bottom line is to try and calculate its value to the business as a whole.

Cost avoidance is another area where your website could be helping your business with little effort on your part. If your website could reduce the number of inquiries made to a call center, it could save you a fortune. For e-commerce and information only websites alike, there are numerous ways of determining website R.O.I.

Here is a quick checklist:

1. Dynamic Content: Making sure your resulting ASP or PHP web pages don't have a lot of numbers and question marks in the address bar or in other words, be sure your dynamic content can be created without the use of numbers and question marks in the URL.
2. Contact Details: Make it very easy for your viewers. Build your contact details into your website pages so that it's always visible.
3. Make it simple and uncluttered: Minimize the clutter and busyness. Be sure your site has lots of open space.
4. Research: Check your competition at home and abroad. Check out keywords, page titles and descriptions in their source code.
5. Think like your client: Put yourself in your client's shoes. Remember most of your clients may not know anything about you so build a site based on common sense, not just your management's egos or structure.

So if you are still thinking in terms of the number of hits your site attracts, you are missing out on the true value of your website to the business. It's never too late to start calculating, most of your competitors probably don't know the value of their sites either. That gives you the advantage by beginning a program of web analytics.

Valencia: I don't think so...