10 web trends to watch in 2011

Think your website is ready for 2011? Think again. Just as you’ve mastered the latest web trends, suddenly major changes in SEO, web design and eCommerce appear from nowhere - and your business had better be prepared.

Expanding your use of video, adapting to the growing use of smartphones and using your website to become an expert in your field are just some of the tasks you’ll need to tackle this year if you want to keep on top of the competition online.

And as Martin Hosking from RedBubble says, integrating social media throughout your online strategy is a challenge every website operator must address.

“People aren’t just shopping through search now. What we’re seeing is a combination of interaction with friends, along with looking on a website. So if you’re operating a website you really need to start thinking about your whole social experience.”

Here are the big web trends you need to address in 2011.
Web sales
Add something new

Physical retailers practically fall over each other trying to stand out among the crowd, offering extras like discounts, gift-wrapping and other promotions. Hal Pritchard from kitchenware site Everton Online says eCommerce sites need to be doing this as well.

“You really have to do more than just the basics now, and add-on features such as gift-wrapping and other types of benefits. People are getting more discerning, and it’s not just enough to just have a product now, and then offer it for a good price.”

Pritchard says the high Australian dollar means retailers need to start acting now. If businesses want to keep dollars onshore, he argues, they need to offer some extras.

“The more creative you can be, the better. I know of a clothing company that puts in handwritten notes into all of their products, thanking the customers. That’s a great example of what you can do when you’re a small retailer.”

“This is the type of stuff you can do when you’re a small company, and you have the chance to do it. Make yourself stand out and keep those customers coming back.”

Make it pretty

One of the biggest problems a new online shopper may have with the digital process is that they can’t touch and feel the product they’re buying. In order to eliminate that fear, you need to make the experience as visual as possible for them.

Craig Reardon from development firm the E-Team says photography has been one of the most misunderstood media available online.

“Because of its proliferation, many business operators are unwilling to pay for professional photography, opting instead for poorly lit and composed snapshots - sometimes by themselves or a family member.

“But this practice is a false economy. Cheap looking photos cheapen your website and in turn your business image. Large companies invest heavily in ensuring their photos look as professional as possible because it is such a critical indicator of quality.”

Reardon says small businesses don’t need to hire top-of-the-line photographers – they simply need to find one that is good enough to provide solid and professional results.

Failing that, most manufacturers will provide press images of their products, and you can use those instead – just don’t use cheap images that ruin the look of your site.

Content
Become an expert

Your website shouldn’t just be a place for customers to grab a phone number or send you an email. These experts say in order to distinguish yourself from the crowd, you need to be setting up yourself as an expert in the field – and the perfect way to do this is through a blog.

Lisa Taliana from Taliana Designs argues creating a blog is now becoming expected of certain businesses.

“Plenty of businesses and simply people in general are either adding a blog to their site, or using a blog to communicate with their audience. And while blogs are not new, they are on the increase.”

Taliana points out these blogs are great avenues for your business to post tips and resources for customers to come and have a look at – but they require dedication. Post too infrequently, and you risk looking lazy.

“I run my own blog mainly aimed at designers and customers looking to improve their brand. So the type of topics I include are things like tutorials, how-tos and inspiring design products and reviews. In doing so, users comment and have actually contracted me.”

“The best thing about blogs is that you can manage the content yourself. You can add pages, posts and images to your heart’s content. I recommend WordPress blogs. You can "pimp" them up, inject your personality or business branding into your templates and there are lots of free add-ons.”

But blogs aren’t the only answer. Todd Sullivan, who runs GlobeTrooper, says you should be highlighting your expertise across the internet.

“As always, becoming a subject matter expert can give a business credibility and targeted exposure. In terms of social media, a relatively new channel for building reputation as a subject matter expert is Quora.com.”

“The fundamental concept isn't new, but the execution is quite unique in that they've managed (so far) to keep topics and conversations quite serious. It's becoming known as the place for subject matter experts to share thoughts and ideas.”

RedBubble director Martin Hosking says there are always ways to publish content online, no matter what type of business you are.

“If you’re selling kitchenware online, you can spend a lot of time thinking about the SEO aspects of that. You can print recipes, create a community around sharing cooking ideas, and so on. There are always good ways to do things.”
Online video

Watching video online has been popular for years, but until very recently many businesses hadn’t even thought about producing their own. But Amblique chief executive Justus Wilde says you should be doing exactly that.

“Video is starting to get more and more momentum online, and we’ve seen that when we’ve implemented video with clients in the last few months, we’ve seen a huge impact on engagement and conversion.”

Plenty of businesses are now creating their own channels on YouTube to promote products, portray themselves as experts and connect with customers. Good examples include blender manufacturer BlendTec, which has become infamous for its “will it blend” videos and Wilde says other businesses should take their lead.

“So if you’re selling furniture, you could have a video describing the product, showing off the features that might now be able to be seen on a picture, describing the material, and so on.”

“In the fashion industry, it’s very useful. You might have a piece of clothing, like a skirt, and people want to know how it looks on someone rather than just seeing a picture. We’ve seen a conversion rate of between 50-250% with online video, and people are spending more time on sites where videos are uploaded – the difference has really surprised me.”

Social media
Connect your customers

Social media is nothing new and we all recognize that businesses without Facebook and Twitter pages risk being left behind. But now comes the next step – connecting all your social media links together and plugging them whenever possible.

Hal Pritchard says all of your pages need to link to social mediate sites, and vice versa.

“Interconnection with social media is the big thing now, you really need to be looking at having your Facebook page, Twitter and other sites all linked together. You need to make these sites are not just the place users go to buy something, but be sure they can get to other places as well.”

“We’re moving into a second generation now. In the early days you could have a product online and that would be good enough, but now you have people being a lit bit more discerning.”

But connecting all of your social networks together is just one method. Lisa Taliana says you should also be making use of the Facebook plugins to make all of the content on your site appear more social.

“You’ve probably seen lots of little “like” buttons on various web pages around and about. These buttons are generated through Facebook and you should place the buttons all around your web pages.

“When someone ‘likes’ your page, it will appear in their friend’s feed, alerting them to their activity. Remember – word of mouth is powerful.”

5 Tools to Googlize Your Business

Whether you love or hate Google, it’s hard to go a day without touching one of their services. From Internet inquiries to mapping your way to your next destination, the search engine giant has come a long way from its days operating out of a Menlo Park garage.

Today, Google is changing the way that we communicate on a personal and professional level. Although many organizations aren’t ready to leave the comfort of out-of-the-box software, there are many advantages to computing “in the cloud.” Web-based tools from companies such as Google offer cost-effective solutions (often free), better scalability, easier collaboration, and enhanced security. While these services aren’t for everyone, many small businesses are starting to make the switch to Internet applications without suffering any major technical setbacks.

To join the Google love affair, there are a few products that are worth trying out. They won’t take too much time to set up or install, and if you hate them there will be no nagging tech salesperson showing up on your door trying to convince you to give ‘em another shot.

1.Google Buzz.

This is one of the newest additions to the Google family. To access this product, you’ll need a Gmail account (see below). Buzz is aiming to compete with the Twitter and Facebook communities, among other social networks. In other words, it’s trying to improve online conversations. Last year Google launched Wave, which was trying to capture the social audience. While Wave did have some cool features, Buzz definitely looks more promising since it’s integrated within your Gmail account. What also makes it interesting in a business environment is the ability to have private or public real-time conversations, helping to increase your organization’s productivity with easier collaboration using comment threads with status updates.

2.Google Chrome.

This Google download is like the ugly stepsister in the browser world: it just doesn’t get the attention it deserves. While Mozilla’s Firefox is an excellent web browser, what makes Chrome even better is one simple thing: this Google product allows you to search directly from the address bar. Sure, this seems simply enough, but when you start to use Chrome on a regular basis you realize how much time you can save by entering your queries in the same place you normally type a full URL. You might call this lazy searching, but whatever you say about it, there’s no doubt it’s a winning feature.

3.Gmail.

Many corporate Internet email services make sending, searching, and sharing messages frustrating. With Gmail, aside from ease-of-use, there are many business advantages. For starters, Google offers you more email storage than you will ever need (and if you do need more, you can buy it at a reasonable price). Although managing emails is a fine art, with Gmail you don’t have to spend a lot of time organizing your messages because they are easily searchable in seconds. However, if you love organizing your email account, there are stars, filters, and labels to make Gmail sorting a breeze. Another obvious benefit to this Google service is the ability to check your email anywhere, anytime, on any computer with Internet access.

4.Google Calendar.

There is no more important tool in a business than a company’s calendar. With Google Calendar, you can easily manage all your meetings. The app’s built-in reminders make it easy for you to send a text message or email to yourself at scheduled times before an appointment. If you’re worried about your clients or customers calendar programs getting confused with your Google ways, Google Calendar plays nice with Microsoft Outlook, among other programs. Finally, even if you’re offline, you can still see your meetings.

5.Google Docs.

Word processing is a breeze in Google Docs. From creating documents to designing a presentation to crafting a spreadsheet, all of these items can be created and exported to popular file formats, such as DOC, PPT, and CSV. There is no new technology to learn within Docs since the terminology is the same as what you’d find in much of the business world’s popular software. Oh, and it’s free, just like everything on this list, which decreases your software license fees and increases your company’s productivity.

Six Sri Lankan cricket players wounded in bus attack in Pakistan

Six members of the Sri Lankan cricket squad were wounded when around a dozen gunmen attacked their bus as it drove under police escort on Tuesday to a stadium in the Pakistani city of Lahore, witnesses and officials said.

Lahore Police chief Habib-ur-Rehman said five people were killed in the attack by the unidentified gunmen, who fired AK 47s and rockets and hurled grenades as the team bus drove to the 60,000-seater Gaddafi stadium in the eastern city.

Sri Lanka's sports minister said five players and an assistant coach were wounded, two of whom were being treated in hospital.

"Police are chasing the terrorists," police chief Habib-ur-Rehman said. "They appeared to be trained men."

The attack had echoes with one on the Indian city of Mumbai in November which led to the Indian cricket team cancelling its planned tour of Pakistan.

India blamed that attack on Pakistan-trained militants and the incident sharply raised tension between the two nuclear-armed neighbours.

Sri Lanka, which had been invited to Pakistan after India pulled out, immediately cancelled the rest of the tour.

"We are trying to bring the team back as quickly as possible," a Sri Lankan cricket official said.

Pakistan TV showed footage of gunmen with rifles and backpacks running through the streets and firing on unidentified vehicles.

The driver of the Sri Lankan team coach said one of the attackers had thrown a grenade under the bus, but it did not detonate.

A witness told Reuters he believed two police commandos were killed along with a regular policeman and a traffic warden.

Shopkeeper Ahmed Ali said the two police commandos had been driving behind the team bus when they were hit.

"It was a very heavy firing and I heard at least two explosions at the time," said a Reuters witness who had been on his way to cover the test match between Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Cricketer Thilan Samaraweera seemed to be the worst hit, suffering a thigh injury, a player on the team bus who did not wish to be identified told Reuters by phone.

It was unclear whether injuries were caused by bullets, shrapnel or flying shards of glass.

Google Launched Knol --- Unit Of Knowladge

Knol Is Open To Every One


A few months ago we announced that we were testing a new product called Knol. Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. Today, we're making Knol available to everyone.

The web contains vast amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing is on the web. An enormous amount of information resides in people's heads: millions of people know useful things and billions more could benefit from that knowledge. Knol will encourage these people to contribute their knowledge online and make it accessible to everyone.

The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It's their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good.

With Knol, we are introducing a new method for authors to work together that we call "moderated collaboration." With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public. This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content. After all, their name is associated with it!

Knols include strong community tools which allow for many modes of interaction between readers and authors. People can submit comments, rate, or write a review of a knol. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads from our AdSense program. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share from the proceeds of those ad placements.

We are happy to announce an agreement with the New Yorker magazine which allows any author to add one cartoon per knol from the New Yorker's extensive cartoon repository. Cartoons are an effective (and fun) way to make your point, even on the most serious topics.

Everyone knows something. See what people are writing about, then tell the world what you know: knol.google.com