Sauce Software Blog

If there was ever a time to start learning how to grow your online channel, it’s now. Being creative and starting to use your online tools can help leverage your business, improve customer service and extend your market reach without a huge cost investment.

In this newsletter we’ll be describing three easy ways to help you action an online channel. Some you will already be aware of and even use in your business activities. They are easy, quick and measurable.

1. Tracking Offline and Online Promotional Campaigns by using CRM reporting tools and Google Analytics to measure the touch points. Click throughs to the site is only one part of the measurement, by measuring and analysing the other activities, for example conversions over time (leads vs visitors), lead source via forms, potentials pipeline, market input and revenue will help you optimise your next marketing activity.

   For example, a success story is Shapland Swim School, had the highest online registration in January 2009 via a TV commercial. Hilton quoted “To achieve on-line registrations we’ve invested in advertising on other websites, SEO and television. We’ve certainly found the television campaign managed by our agency RHA Advertising to have the “most bang for the buck” in terms of achieving online registrations and cost per lead. Our franchisee’s send us emails telling us how happy they are with the online strategy. And that’s the best measure you can have.”

2. Online customer service. Create a 24/7 Knowledge Base by publishing FAQ’s in vTigerCRM. By using the database for displaying answers to frequently asked questions, allows for self-service client support. Having the ability to deliver information quickly about products and services from a searchable database removes the need for a pre and post support, lowering support costs for both you and the client. People are automatically turning to the web to get more information.
3. Start a Blog. Blogging is a great way to get more traffic from the right audience. Blogs allow you to engage your customers and guests in a dialogue and humanise your brand. For example, testing new products and services before you launch. Just by encouraging your prospects to engage with you online through a blog or forum opens up a new way to receive genuine client feedback.

The web is turning into a new communication channel.  Companies can now successfully correlate market input to online response rates as an effectiveness measurement.

For further information or would like to discuss your online requirements, contact Emma Puttick at Sauce Software.

Tags: analytics, blog, campaigns, crm, customer service, Marketing, online, reporting

One of the most challenging issues facing business is cashflow management. Having run a small business for nearly 3 years now, we’ve certainly learnt some lessons.  Some of the systems which we’ve implemented have reduced internal inefficients, cross purposes and miscommunication, allowing time to be a more strategically focused company.

Being able to measure the amount of money your company makes and spends during a given period can be used used as a barometer of your company’s health and worth.  Understanding your cash flow lets you evaluate:

• Borrowing needs
• The timing of new hires and major purchases
• The timing of payables

Assessing Incoming Cash Flow Processes

• Your company is not a bank. It’s always a good idea to get the payment terms out on the table at the beginning of the business relationship. This allows you to get on with business of delivering the exceptional service or product, knowing the cash is flowing in.
• Staying on Top of Receivables. Don’t wait to invoice, not even a day. Any extra time to send the invoice stalls the money coming in as well as widening the cashflow gap.
• Accept credit cards. “Can I put that on credit card?” should be a common question within the business, you receive the money within 2 days. Setting up an internet merchant facility is very straight forward these days, there are a variety of different services the banks can offer for all amounts of revenue. DIY alternatives are Paypal.
• Cashflow forecasting. A simple spreadsheet which records actual receivables against a forecast can show a 3 month projection if your business is on track, or you need to notify a provider that an invoice may be paid later than usual.

Assessing Outgoing Cash Flow Processes

• Bill Paying Arrangements. If you have set payment terms, you can ask the vendors if they would consider different arrangements. For example setting up a quarterly payment schedule versus a monthly payment schedule could work better with cash inflows, or having a few extra days will help smooth out cashflow.
• Make the most of your employees. Throwing new people at a problem may not be the best solution. One of the biggest expenses is the company payroll, can additional responsibility be added to current staff? If tasks can be separated and assigned to different people that is great. Think processes, not people.
• Consider outsourcing when processes are in place. At an early stage of a business there are a lot of processes which need to be established prior to outsourcing. However any part of the business which isn’t a core part of your business like, bookkeeping, marketing, copywriting, testing, administration can all be serviced by outsourcing providers.

Tags: business, cash flow, management

Continued from Websites are houses too - Part 1

Last week, I talked about a classic recurring dilemma among IT, and especially web development - that is a perception that making websites is somehow easier and less critical than, say, building houses. When a house is getting build, tonnes of time is spent planning and organising it - but with websites, time spent doing that is often perceived as a waste, and the “just get it done” mentality prevails.

There is a solution for the dilemma faces in part 1, and that is a little something called the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).  There are many difference processes available for handling a project, and the best should be chosen based on the team, the size and nature of the project, time constraints and experience. A few of the more popular ones are Waterfall, Agile and Iterative (Spiral). I will go into a little bit more detail about the waterfall model, as it is what we use to manage our clients’ requirements.

The waterfall model splits development up into a handful of phases - It basically boils down to Requirements, Design, Implementation, Testing, Maintenance. The idea of the model is to specify as much as possible in an early phase, signing it off, before moving down to the next phase. Any irregularities that are found in a lower phase should be passed up to the earlier phase before continuing.

Continue reading “Websites Are Houses Too - Part 2″

Tags: devlopment, model, process, scope creep

…but zero to a search engine!

There are some who argue that it is useless to use alt tags in images from an SEO perspective. But most SEO experts claim that it does make a difference.

Sure, if you cram in 200 keywords in a single image, it will be useless and ignored. But use a few words that are unique, relevant and useful in describing the image will help search engines such as Google understand what its about.

Continue reading “ALT Tags : A picture means a thousand words”

Tags: content, images, SEO

Spring is well and truly in bloom now, and while you’re taking care of all your other business activities, have you been putting off a website spring clean?

… It’s not as hard as you might think to give your site content a creative lift and draw more interest by your site visitors. Here are a few important design tips to make your pages clearer, interesting and give that polished and professional look overall.

1. Graphical Appeal

Carry through your message in images.

It might sound like a no-brainer tip, but adding some well selected graphics or photos to your pages is great for evoking a response from your potential customers or info-seekers.

• Select some small photos to break up large blocks of text and try to make them as relevant to the text as possible.
• You can get your article’s text to wrap nicely around the image by using the editor’s image align options in the SauceOpen CMS.
• Where do you get images? - try istockphoto.com

This is a great way to attract a potential customer’s eye to a block of text; Putting in a catchy graphic near your critical sales point or call to action is a definite winner.

2. Are you listening? - Put Up Some Signs

In the way that we add images for allure, we can also use a tried and true technique often called signposting - put simply it’s the use of graphical elements, indention and blocking, bullets or numbering, or text styles such as bold and italic that makes your content much crisper and lucid.

1. People on the web have a VERY short attention span! so numbers and bullets are fantastic to use as people may skim most of the text, but bullets are usually read.
2. Bold and italic emphasis should be used within reason, but when really hammering home a point - are essential.

Continue reading “Don’t put off a spring spruce!”

Tags: tips, web design, website ideas

We have realized for some time that the internet was one of the most powerful market tools we had available. The increasing number of our clients who used the term “We’ll Google it” re-enforced this so early 2008 we decided to look around for a firm that could develop a web site that would fit our needs.

Shapland Swim Schools are a franchise which supply friendly, experienced, caring and AUSTSWIM qualified teachers, small learn to swim classes and a warm environment. A successful formula, which ensures everyone, can learn to swim with ease and confidence.

By using franchising they were able to deliver a dream (smaller more personalised centers) as their franchisees are able to supply the most important ingredients for a successful swim Schools, stability, 100% commitment and passion for making a difference in children’s lives.

Continue reading “Case of: Shapland Swim Schools”

Tags: Case Studies

It’s strange how people take web development a lot less seriously than other kinds of development. When a house is being built, does the builder get told “give me a quote on a house”, and expect an answer in 5 mins? Asking something like that would get the customer laughed at to the point of embarrasment, or a large series of forms and questions relating to it:

• How many rooms?
• How many stories?
• What colour walls?
• How do you want interior decoration?
• High set house?
• …and so on

Yet a large amount of people asking for things in web development ask the simple question - “how much for a store?”, “We just want to capture information to use it in an email campaign”. Let’s focus on some of the nuances of a simple online store, to show there’s just as much thought required into scoping out requirements before being able to accurately quote things:

• Are there different categories of products, or just 1?
• What fields do you want people to be able to search on?
• Tax rates? Multi currency? Shipping?
• Do you want the user to have to sign up to the website
• What about order tracking?
• How do you want payments taken? Paypal? Saucepay? Securepay?
• Are offline payment methods available - COD, pay on pickup, invoice, direct debit?
• What do you want the store to look like? (This is a whole new can of worms - I’ll leave this one open to the designers!)
• Do you want it friendly to disabled users?
• …the list goes on!

Continue reading “Websites are houses too…”

Tags: model, process, programming, requirements, scope creep, specification

Last week we were reminded that a mix of traditional marketing and online marketing can produce great results.

Chris Shapland from Shapland Swim Schools and Hilton Sentinella from Rha Advertising produced a campaign which launched their franchise business online. A TV ad which played for one week promoting the Swim School then directing the viewers to book online. The result was a 90% increase in registrations from last year via the online registration form and 40-80% conversion rate, the lower conversion rate was because that  particular swim school had filled all the places.

Just by “going live” online doesn’t mean magic will just happen, you need to work it, test, measure and improve.  There are so many ways to start marketing your business online. It is all out there for you to grab today.

An example of a CSS document

You may have heard us web designers talk about it or stumbled upon this term before without much of a clue as to what is.

The definition:
Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL. (courtesy of wikipedia)

Still don’t get it? Basically, it is a document attached to your website template that helps us designers build your website. With CSS, we specify colour, backgrounds, positions, padding, lines, fonts, spacing - basically everything to do with how a page looks.

Now with SauceOpen, the editor that you use to manage your content has buttons to allow you to change colours, font-sizes etc. BUT this is not tied in with the CSS, rather the thing that makes a piece of text “green”, for example, is created directly on the page (in line HTML styles).

CSS vs inline styling

With CSS, it is applyed site wide. So you can specify all images to have a border. On the other hand, with inline styling, it is only specific to that instance. If you make this font green, it will only occur on this page and no where else.

Tags: code language, CSS, web design

Why integrate, when we can use a big single system to do everything?

The answer is simple - smaller niche applications do a single role much better than huge applications do every role. What’s better for blogging; blogger or geocities? Would you use hotmail or cpanel to organise do your email?

But it’s very annoying to go around to every site - updating blogger when you want to talk about some news, logging in to gmail when you want to send an email, logging in to your webstore when you want to update product prices - all these logins, passwords and starkly different interfaces can get overwhelming quickly!

Bring in the power of integration - what if all of your blogger posts would automatically show on your main website frontpage? What if you could post on blogger using the same administration area as you do when you update your webstore? What if, whenever you logged in to your website administration section, you were also logged in to blogger, so you could get there and do the more advanced functions at the click of a button?

You wind up getting the best of both worlds! One centralised interface, one username and password, one place to log in - unlimited access to the various applications and frameworks out there. And it’s virtually unlimited - any application with a published API can theoretically be added to the mix!

Tags: Development, integration, interoperability