However, one big change that happened in December is that Google Chrome has become the second most popular choice for browsers and pushing Firefox down to number 3. Firefox changed the way they handle updates to their software which often broke add-ons and I think a lot of people got frustrated and moved to Chrome as a result. I still personally use Firefox but I can say it is 100% solely because of the fantastic Web Developer Toolbar which is irreplaceable for web development (the Chrome version is not nearly the same thing as the Firefox version).

Here are some important points to understand:

Groupon (or Living Social) is doing this for their own benefit, not yours. They seem to have little to no care about your business except how it can help their business make money. That kind of relationship is never a good one to get into.

The goal of a deal is not to make money from the deal itself, but recurring income from those customers coming back or buying more product/services than the deal itself. The deal company wants you to sell your product for 50% (or more!) off than it’s original value. Whatever profit you would make selling it so low, the deal company then wants to take 50-100% of that. This leaves you with nothing financially at the end of the deal.

The type of customers Groupon attracts are not customers that will help your business grow. Typically customers that are buying from Groupon are bargain hunting and not looking for the best quality product or service. Based on experience, customers that only care about a bargain typically are the most difficult to work with as they have the most demands or requirements of the product or service. According to the article, they also don’t even tip! If you are a very small, local shop that thrives off local business like the bakery in the article then getting new customers from 30 miles away will not help grow your business in the end. These customers are also more likely to cheat you even out of your already ridiculously low prices by taking advantage of the fact that it’s very hard to track the coupon usage.

Logistics of the increased business a nightmare. Tracking coupon usage, the sheer volume of customers can quickly overwhelm a small business. Although it may be nice to see people lined up out the door, trying to take care of them is very difficult – let alone in a way that will give them a positive experience about your business and want to come back. The end result could be a large number of negative reviews about your business which will never disappear from the internet.

Some businesses have reported huge successes as a result of using this new online marketing method so this isn’t the case for everyone. However, you should really consider if this is right for your business. For Erika and her photography business, she would have been so busy for about a full year before she would be able to come out from under a daily deal promotion after she did all the  photo sessions, post processing, managing print orders and more. We did some math and she would have ended up making about $1/hr for that year – clearly not worthwhile for her.

“The commercial message here is clear”, says Roger Willcocks, director of Screen Pages: “If mobiles are 10% of your business and conversions are 40% lower, on a site with 10,000 visits per day with a conversion ratio of 3% and an average order value of £50, mobile usage can represent a loss in revenue of over £300,000.”

However, I believe this just shows that people don’t want to buy something while they are using their mobile device – they are on the site with their mobile device for other reasons most likely being research. When I’m on my iPhone and visiting an e-commerce website it’s usually because I’m at lunch and researching presents for my wife. Or, again while at lunch, someone posted a link to a product on Facebook and I wanted to check it out. On my lunch I am not looking to actually make a purchase. I only use my iPhone for quick online usage, not for regular web browsing. To me this is the most fundamental issue that all the data analysts always forget to take into account. I do not believe that users on their iPhone do not use it for primary web browsing and interaction with websites. It is merely a convenience tool to quickly look up something while you are out and about. While they may visit the same website on their iPhone as their PC, their end goals are very different. Research while on the iPhone when you have a few minutes then wait until you get to your PC to actually make the purchase.

So one stat I feel supports all this is the bounce rate:

Average bounce rates are lower by 5% (40% vs 35%). Bounce rates are a measure of engagement and show the % of visitors who arrive on a page and leave. Driven by smaller screens and possibly the more demanding mobile user, websites must work harder to engage.

To me this means users are not leaving (or ultimately converting less) because of the website not being optimized for smaller screens like the iPhone. At the end of the article they discuss how the iPad stats are very close to PC stats in terms of bounce rate and conversion. Based on my personal experience this sounds exactly right since we use our iPad at home extensively while sitting on the sofa for regular web browsing just like we would on our PC (but we don’t have to go to the office and stop watching our favorite TV show).

So what does this all mean? Do you need a mobile version of your e-commerce site? Like I wrote previously – it depends. According to the article 10% of all visitors to their test sites were on mobile devices. Is 10% enough traffic to make a small screen version of your site for iPhones and other similar devices? In my opinion, for our clients, no. Of that 10%, only a certain percentage were iPhone (or similar device) users and the rest were tablets like iPad. As I have written, I don’t believe iPhone visitors are on the website with the intention of purchasing. Our clients are not multi-million dollar companies but small businesses so the investment to build a small screen version of their site does not have enough ROI to make it worthwhile. If you were making $100 million in sales per month, then absolutely the ROI on doing a small screen version of your site to maximize conversions for those few people with purchase intent on their iPhone would be worthwhile.

The one thing I have not yet seen discussed about Google+ vs. Facebook is in regards to Google+’s “circles” feature. With Google+, you can create “circles” (or groups) and then share certain content with just those people. For example, my grandma doesn’t care when I find a new article related to the browser wars – she just wants pictures of her great grand daughter. Google says only on Google+ can you share content with specific users. What I don’t understand is that in fact you can do this very same thing using Facebook already*. The only difference is that Google simply promotes it more and their UI to do so is significantly easier. But give Facebook a couple months to make some simple UI changes and then the entire “advantage” to Google+ is gone. With no advantage or reason to use Google+ over well established Facebook accounts – why would anyone switch? Exactly, they won’t.

To be honest, I don’t know what “normal web users” think of Google+. In the web industry, it was all people seem to talk about for about a month after it launched. Thankfully the chatter is starting to dwindle down. If even the web industry is starting to get over it then it seems likely most casual web users are already over it.

* To do this in Facebook, edit your profile and go to “Friends and Family”. You can then create a new list at the bottom of this page and then assign the people you want to your new list. When you post a new update, click the security lock icon, choose “Customize”. You can then choose which group or list of people you want to see the update you are posting. Like I said, the UI on this isn’t simple but Facebook could easily change this without much effort in the future.

UPDATE: Just two days after this post, guess what? Facebook announces changes made to their UI to make it easier to share with you want.

With growth comes change and we are no exception. This summer has seen AshWebStudio bring on it’s first “employee” (technically a sub-contractor on advice from our accountant – you small biz owners likely know how that goes), Blaine, who is going to be helping with many of the day-to-day tasks that are necessary in both the business and client sides of things. What exactly does that mean? Basically he is learning the entire business alongside Derek to help alleviate many of the time consuming tasks so Derek can regain his full attention on what he does best – helping clients create great looking, effective websites. From handling support requests from existing clients or doing internal tasks, Blaine is going to be an extremely vital component of the success here at AshWebStudio.

Not so much of a change, but an expansion. We are currently working on our plan for offering a new hosted content management system, AshWebCMS, in addition to WordPress. WordPress is a fantastic platform for developing client sites and we will continue to use it. However, we have learned that sometimes WordPress is actually bigger than what some clients need. AshWebCMS will be positioned as an even more affordable content management solution for our clients and we look forward to getting it launched soon!

We hope you have enjoyed your summer so far and look forward to working together to continue mutual growth online.

The key feature we’re excited about is the dedication to improving the speed and stability of WordPress. Although most of the sites we build with WordPress are fast already, it’s nice knowing they were able to speed it up even more. They did this by dropping support for IE6, PHP 4 and older versions of MySQL. By ignoring older technologies, the code base can become smaller, lighter and thus faster and any decent web host should already be up-to-date with the minimum requirements of WordPress. Clients hosted with us don’t need to worry as the servers we have were way ahead of these requirements ages ago.

As with most things the answer is, “it depends.”

The biggest factor in deciding if you need a mobile version of your site or not is your statistics. If 30% of the people visiting your site are on a mobile device, then you absolutely need a mobile version of your site. If your site is like ours and 1.77% of our traffic (iPad, iPhone, Android, iPod) comes from mobile operating systems (see graphic below), then it may not be worthwhile. In fact, we don’t have a special mobile version of our site because of these statistics and honestly we’re slammed with client work to spend time on it. The ROI for us to build a mobile version so that a very small percentage of our website visitors get a mobile-optimized site is just too low.

So when you consider creating a mobile version of your website consider your specific audience. Not every website attracts users using mobile devices and so the ROI of a mobile version of your website may not be worthwhile.

This is a very simple banner ad management system but could easily be extended to include custom start/end dates, max clicks and more.

A couple times in the video I refer to TextWrangler – I really meant to say TextExpander