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The newicon blog

The trueth is harsh, no one is really interested in your company jargon!

Steven OBrien - Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Working on the latest e-commerce store for a customer I realised we had fallen pray to one of the biggest website user turner-offers classically adopted by old school brochure style websites. That are only good enough for proving that the company have the gumption to at least put a page on the internet.

Can you remember a time not too long ago when searching for a product or a service you found a company website only to read about how wonderful and successful the company are, but not actually give you anything your looking for?

I can. Yet it is still a commonly requested feature of a home page.  Lets have four paragraphs on how amazing we are here at "insert business name".  It is quite delicate explaining to business owners that on-line browsers if they manage to find your site won't actually be interested in how brilliant you are.  In fact when really in the history of the world ever have you been interested in how amazing someone is? Maybe if it is your spouse, maybe your children.  But a stranger? Never.

We are all a lot more vain than we think, it is how our brain works unfortunately, how we understand the world is modelled purely on our own extremely limited experiences of it.  When trying to understand your customer / web user we sometimes only go as far as to put ourselves in their shoes.  This is the classic saying right?  Well it is not good enough.  It is a road to certain failure and poor copy on your site. You need to not only put yourself in the customers shoes, but you must change your brain too.  No longer is flowery text about the amazing achievements of your company going to interest you.

What WILL interest you is what it is exactly that your company can do for me. Even better if you can show understanding of their frustration or problem you solve.

In general when a user visits your site they are looking for a solution first. How your solution fits their problem. Then once they are convinced and ready to buy they might look for signs of credibility. Then and only then they might be interested in how fantastic your business is.


Entering The World Of The Internet At Internet World

Steven OBrien - Sunday, May 17, 2009
Myself and Luke recently attended Interent world 2009.  It's a big trade show for all interenet based companies.  This mainly consisted of Web development, hosting, email marketing and internet marketing companies.  However it was great to see a few diverse and interesting companies there too.  As the internet becomes ever integrated into our daily lives the borders expand and new opertunities emerge.  It was great to see a large thriving community of people all involved with web stuff.

Some of the more unique companies were:
  • mybuybox - these guys provide a solution to failed deliveries by providing a secure locker location where you can arange deliveries.  If your not around (which you most likely won't be) it gets put in your locker.  Then you recieve a message and go and collect it.  No toing and froeing with the local post office or other carrierer used.  And no more lost packages. A great idea.
  • Cashthingy - these guys provide a means to use cash to buy online! All you need is to top up your voacher at a local store. Similar to a pay as you go phone top - up card.

Welcome to newicon.biz!

Steven OBrien - Friday, May 01, 2009
Hello! Welcome to our blog all about running your online business NOT your website!

This is the philosophy, a static website is the same as a flyer or a paper based brochure, it does nothing but display static pre defined content.  Modern websites are much, much different. Your website can collect information about your customers, it can key information to different customers. It can process orders and make money without you being involved.  It can do a whole host of things. You can set up email marketing campaings and automatically queue a program of any number of pre-written emails to be sent to new customers or existing customers interested in a specific topic, for which you have lots of interesting content or relevant information. You can then even gauge the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.  Automated reports on campaigns for example: "30% of people who read this email clicked on (more information about red socks) link... and ... "50%  of people clicked on (buy red socks link)". This just scrapes the surface.

Websites are big business. If your a small business you need to be in the game.
Websites are big business
Youtube was bought by google for $1.65 billion. Acording to a BBC report Microsoft believes facebook is worth $15 billion (£7.3bn). This figure is based on Microsoft investing $240 million (£117m) in exchange for a 1.6% share of the company! The BBC report outlines 15 reasons why it is valued so high.

We will be posting updates, hints and tips to help your online business in the blog, see you soon.