Lesson 2 for B2B websites - from the master

If you feel that Lesson 1 & 2 were too basic and didn't apply to you, then this is the post to listen to.

Actually, don't listen to me, go read what website usability guru Jakob Nielsen has to say about B2B websites.

"It might seem unfair that sites must provide both B2C's quality of service and simple user interface and B2B's depth of specialization and complex workflow support. And typically, such sites must do all this with fewer resources than Amazon because the site isn't seen as closing the order. You don't click "add to shopping cart" when you want a deepwater cementing system for your North Sea oil platforms."

The article lists three goals for B2B websites:

• Survive the screening process--make the site usable and content useful.


• Support your advocates--give enough content for visitors to select your product and justify it to others.


• Provide great service--use the power of the web to improve customer satisfaction.

He then suggests some tools to add to your site for your advocates. This was already a goal for me this year, and these are useful suggestions. Just realize there are some people at your client's companies that are 'nerds' for your type of product and they need (and crave) lots of tools and data.

Lesson 2 for B2B websites

Yesterday I covered the simple things that need to be fixed on B2B websites. One reader provided a list of other no-nos. A lot of these are what Father Flanders preaches at his website and in his book, Web Pages That Suck. Read his blog to see a near-daily fix of bad websites.

• Don't use Flash intros. Why? Most don't say anything of substance and just waste the visitors time. 'We are dedicated to serving our customers' is not compelling content, and even worse when it is spelled out one letter at a time.


• If you have to tell the visitor how to use the site, chances are something is wrong. Telling them to download special software, or to have their screen set to a certain size, or to use a certain version of a browser is likely to be ignored anyway.


• If you have a more than ten pages in your site, a 'site map' is a great idea to help people see if your site is even structured to hold the content they are looking for. I prefer all these types of navigation on a website: buttons, breadcrumbs, site-map, and search. Different users navigate differently.


• Another issue is to address, especially for EU companies, is making sure that the multi-lingual versions of your site are easy to find. I've seen very confusing flag icons and other methods used. I'm not sure of a right way to do this, as I haven't had to deal with more than English.

Most of these have to deal with greater issues and aren't as easy to fix as the ones I identified yesterday. But they need to be taken care of.

Back to the basics folks...

I talk here a lot about the details of using the web to build your B2B business, which for many businesses must be highly-advanced stuff, based on what I've seen recently. So, lets take a moment to go back to the basics of your website to make sure doing things right there:

• Make sure your site is accessible if someone doesn't type in 'www' before your URL. Double check that you aren't showing a message like "under construction", which certainly can't help your business. Call your host and get it fixed!


• If your going to put dated material on your website, make sure you delete it or update it. Don't offer a 2001 Directory on the homepage of your website if you are trying to sell a 2004 edition in your outbound telemarketing.


• Blinking and spinning images are out, too, by the way (see above link for another example). Animated GIF files are easy to fix...almost any graphic editor can animate, or unanimate an image file.


• If you want to post email addresses on your website, don't leave them unprotected where the spam-bots can harvest them. A simple Javascript code that you can copy here can protect those email addresses.


• Make sure all your web pages have Titles. Father Flanders recently highlighted that there are two million "new page 1" web pages out there. (See the spambot example above for an 'untitled document'.) The Title of your webpage is the most important thing that the search engines look at, as well as the surfers using the engine.


• And if you are going to post an email address, use your domain's email account, not your AOL account.


• Lastly, get rid of the gastly wallpaper on the background of your web pages. All you need to do is replace the background image with a blank/white image. This look went out six years ago.

Master the technology or hire someone who can. These kind of errors should have been taken care of years ago!

More about putting php-icalendar on your website

At the beginning of the month, I posted an article on how to install phpicalendar on your website.

In going back to tinker with it, I learned that you can modify the header and footer of the calendar pages universally (easily). Just look in the 'includes' folder and edit the header.inc.php and footer.inc.php files to add your HTML. Doing so screwed up my calendar, but I think it is a problem with style sheets. Like I said I was tinkering. But this is still way-cool.

Local search

In my business, local search isn't important. But for a lot of B2B companies it can be, either as a local distributor or service company. The recent roll-out of local search (Google, Yahoo) is a good way to find people ready to spend money.

I just made my first purchase of a local service via Google Local Search. It was so much easier than a phone book, too. The only dissappointing thing is that the listing Google brings you to doesn't necessarily have the vendors website listed, but thats most likely because these local companies don't have one.

So this looks like a new reason for local B2B companies to get on the band-wagon and get their own websites. For a local landscaper, I previously advised that they shouldn't expect to get leads from the web, especially since general results are crowded with directory services. Now the local search cuts those out.

Here are some tips to make your site local search friendly from the MarketPosition Newsletter April 2004: "Therefore, it's important that you design your Web pages with local searches in mind even if you also sell globally.How do you do this? It's easy. Simply add local keywords such as
address, city, state, province, or postal code to all of your keyword-rich Web pages"

Photo shoot

We've often toyed with doing product photography in-house, and digital cameras make is so tempting. But its surprising how much more quality you can get from a pro. Of course our equipment can be large and loaded with stainless steel, which makes getting the lighting right hard. So, I've limited use of our own photography to special shots for our website, usually close-ups to highlight special features.

Mike Boyink was shooting some small parts for one of his clients and documented his set-up. Seeing that the parts were metal, I'm sure he spent a good deal of time getting the reflections to look right.

Product Photography on the Cheap

Selling B2B services

I thought all B2B marketing was more-or-less the same. This article from MarketingVox helped me clarify why I find selling 'services' was so hard--because I am a 'products' marketer: Differences in B2B vs B2C Sales Strategy: "Whereas a product site will sell the product directly, a B2B service site must establish trust and credibility to encourage contact by the potential client."

That sounds really hard to do! Especially on a website.

Geeks outdoors

About two months ago, our local paper ran a feature article on 'geocaching'. My wife was quite intrigued by the idea. I had planned to buy her the geek-tool required to do this for her birthday, but she beat me to it. So we went geocaching for the first time together, along with our sons (daughter was out with a friend), last Sunday afternoon.

What is geocaching? Its an activity using a GPS navigator to find hidden 'caches'. The caches are smaller boxes (ammo-cans seem well suited for this) hidden by other people. After the boxes are hidden, the coordinates are posted to the web for others to use. The most popular site for this seems to be geocaching.com.

The caches are hidden in public places, especially in parks. My wife feels a little self-concious about being seen wondering in the woods aimlessly. The inherit inaccuracy of the GPS tool left us wondering around a 20 foot patch of ground several times. And some of the hiding places are crafty.

To me, it brings back memories of doing 'compass courses' when I was in the National Guard. The GPS makes it easier, but the game of geocaching is much more fun.

B2B News Week Part III - How to sell quality, or not

In my industry, we sell a quality product, but its fit to the application is of prime importance to the end customer. So I enjoyed reading an article yesterday from 'Sales and Marketing Management' about why high quality still beats price any day (online content requires subscription, so no link). The writer, Tate Williams, said he was a 'technology salesman' as opposed to his competitor who was a 'commodity salesman'. So I cheer for the technology salesman who gets the order.

Later that day I talked to a potential client from Honeywell, who is very interested in two of our products. But there is a very strong barrier to buying...his purchasing department. He cannot get quotes from us, formal RFQs need to be made, and months will pass before his order can get placed.

What he is most frustrated by is that once he writes the equipment specification, the decision is made on price. For this reason, our normal salesperson for this account doesn't work hard on it. The client already has equipment from low-bidders who will likely be asked to bid on this RFQ, and he has a very low opinion of the quality of their product. He says he wants to try to sole-source our equipment, but the bar for that is high.

He can try to write-out certain brands by the way he creates the purchase-spec, but how can a purchasing structure like this judge quality? Most engineers make a gut decision on quality, but such a logical process would require some kind of definition and measurable guide.

Perhaps, worse yet, we as salespeople and marketers depend on this gut feeling to create a perception of quality. So I have little resources to help define quality in a measurable (and useful) way. How does one make the intangible easily comprehended? Figure this out for your product, and you will make selling so much easier.

B2B News Week Part II - GlobalSpec changes

GlobalSpec seems to be doing what Yahoo recently did--downplay its directory of industrial suppliers and serve-up search engine results.

The pitch is that the search results are filtered for engineering-related sites and also finds the 'hidden' web pages that other search engines miss. My quick test showed relevant sites, but hard to distinguish from other search engines.

One wonders how this affects their existing clientele. In practice, their search box has a pull-down menu that you need to select 'the engineering web', otherwise you get their directory results. But when searching the 'engineering web', I expected a stronger pitch to use their directory or list their suppliers ala AdWords, but this wasn't the case.

The next logical step would be going to a PPC model for the search results. That's when I can afford (and justify) advertising with them.

B2B News Week Part I --Vertilog

This week I will be acting more like a reporter, giving you the scoop on the latest B2B marketing news (as far as I'm concerned, anyway):

Last year I said: "Imagine being able to have articles about your company's new innovations published in a peer-reviewed setting, much like a scholarly journal? Imagine it is powered by the web, allowing publication within ten weeks. Very targeted, very truthful, very timely."

Well, that time has finally come, and Vertilog is delivering the goods for with their first 'journal', Advances in Electronics Manufacturing Technology. They have stayed focused on their task. The only important change they have made is offering multiple languages, which is helpful for the growing Chinese market for electronics. Marie Mayer of Vertilog says they plan to publish 6-8 papers a month.

The focus they offer is terrific, aiming to let suppliers educate their potential clients in the new processes and technologies that they can apply to their products. This type of article is hard to get published in a trade publication and scholarly journals for industry have very limited reach. With a published eight page paper costing $3,650, it is a fair price to get a quality marketing tool on the web and in the hands of potential clients. The quality comes from a significant editing and review process.

This Is Broken - New Uno card design

Sorry for the lack of posts, but its spring-break week and I've been off to visit my family. A pleasant surprise is to find my contribution to This is Broken posted. And with some lively discussion, too.

This Is Broken - New Uno card design: Sample comment from someone who understood my point: "The poster's point is that what used to be dissimilar and easily distinguished -- if arbitrary -- are now similar and easily confused."

In other words, while RTFM (Read The F'in Manual) may give the right answer, it doesn't mean the product isn't Broken.

Getting a calendar on your website, part 2

Last week I told you about my experience with creating an iCal format calendar and posting it to the web. I had 'cheated' and used an online service to generate the calendar, framing it into the site.

Not content with that solution, I decided to try installing the latest version of iCalendar, the open source web calendar tool (the service I was using is still using 0.9, I installed 1.1). I deeply appreciate the geeks who create this stuff, but they don't provide a lot of documentation. The coolest thing about this new version is that I can display more than one calendar at a time. Anyway, here is a walk thru in installing the application for non-code-geeks, assuming you have a host with PHP capability.

1. Download the package, which is a tar.gz file. This was one of my big problems. The gz file is easy to open with an unzip tool (I use PowerDesk Pro), but I didn't know how to open the resulting .tar file. Instead of just double-clicking it, I had to manually select it for extraction from PowerDesk. Now I've got a bunch of files in a folder.


2. Open the readme file. Not as easy as it sounds, since the file doesn't have an extension. I found WordPad the easiest to work with (or use Word). The readme doesn't tell you too much about installing, and is targeted at Mac users installing on their own Mac server, so let me summarize for you: Create a folder on your server ('phpicalendar' is the most convenient name, to match their defaults) and then copy the files you expanded into the folder. How simple!


3. Here's where I screwed up at first. I would check to see how the default installation worked out by going to www.mydomain.com/phpicalendar/index.php. I didn't do this, but if you do, I think you should find that it is up and working. There are three sample calendars installed already (something I didn't know until later). I jumped right to the next step:


4. Edit on your local machine the config.inc.php file. I used WordPad again, which automatically formats in a readable layout and saves the file as php type. Go thru the settings...most you don't have to worry about, but there are a few regarding 'paths' which you should pay attention to. If you are hosting your .ics (iCal) files elsewhere like me so you can use WebDAV publishing, don't worry about the paths to them. This slowed me down considerably.


5. When editing the config, set the admin.php page to be active, and leave verification via FTP (uses your FTP account logon/password).


6. Save and upload your config.inc.php file to overwrite the one you initially put on the server. Now go check to see how the calendar looks on the web.


7. Go to the admin.php page by typing it in your web browser. After logging in, you will see that the only thing you can do is add and delete calendar files. I cut-and-pasted the URL for my .ics file at my webDAV host to add it. I tried deleting the sample 'home' and 'work' calendars from here, but it didn't work. Instead, I deleted them via FTP.

With all that done, your calendar should be up and working. I still need to figure out how to integrate it with the rest of my website, but you can take a look at the result. I think this is sooo cool!