A whole lot of talking is going on around the new Mauritius Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) TV/Radio website. It always is a major event when a major Mauritian company sets sails out for a new web venture and people can question and appreciate the job. Here, the great thing is that the tool used is WordPress which has now gone past the “blog” platform and has matured into a full grown Content Management System and even been awarded the Overall Best Open Source CMS award in 2009. That’s one good point but there’s a major “but” when it comes to the way the MBC managing board seems to have directed this project!

Corporate you said?

The said website is a corporate one, at least, it’s what is said on the main page title. I will not be going into an indepth analysis of the design and the website as well as its functionalities. The discussion between the webdesigner and the public is nearing trench warfare more than anything on Yashvin’s Blog with all the contradictions and accusations that go with such situations. I will not be adding to this!

My firm belief is that Mauritian companies need to mature in their use of the Internet and start working on online presence. They have to invest in development and user experience with indepth audits of user demands and conversion rates. This calls for a good deal of methodology, vision and professionalism. So my concern here is how can a huge thing like the MBC get involved in an amateur construction of its website.

Templating and project management.

To build a new website, objectives must be laid out, budgets (if any) calculated, but more important, the whole project must be managed with validation procedures, content improvement, calls to action and lead analysis. But what do we have here? A webdesigner who claims to have done the job for free by buying a template (Hello MBC managing board, don’t you even have some money to even pay for a template?) and modifying it to suit the MBC’s needs. And what does the poor chap get even with investing his own money into the project? Just a poor link to his website! This is pure slavery! The MBC might even be de-localising some of its own work to China.

So what’s the problem here? Having a webdesigner claiming high to having made just a template modification for such a big company means that all the steps required to make a real, good, managing board driving, visionary and high level website have been flushed down the toilet. All this has been boiled down to a template available to anyone and just modified. Do they care for their image? Do they have a communication & advertising department?

Amateurish and cheap.

The MBC is not the structure that bears the shiniest image in Mauritius and it would somehow have been logical that the directory board would have had the idea of making use of this occasion to buff it up but once again, the amateurs have hit home. The MBC is a leading Mauritian body and one would expect a site to its grandeur with a huge input in quality content. The whole system is heavy and loaded with glitches. Just one example, how many of you readers will ever read every word in this “About us” page. This is where the group should have had clear specifications in terms of content, design and wireframing. But none of all these are here.

An example of what “not to do”.

Overall, this whole project is a great example of how a major company should not be leading a web project. Specifications should be minute and written clearly. Each element should be made to maximise conversion and user experience. All this is done through thorough statistical analysis and user interview. Usability tests should be made to test each page, each way of delivering content and of the service and not just impose a template to any web designer. As sad as it might sound, the MBC managing committee has failed to make use of a great tool just to save money or maybe for some really obscure reason… who knows?

I was hanging about Google making some searches when I got to look for a specific thing involving a “what is” search. Now, everybody knows the game on Google where you use the Google suggest feature to get a good laugh. I however went past the game and found that Google is exploiting this utility more than it has been doing till now.

“What is” v/s “define:”.

As a hardcore Google user I’m used to the tool’s inbuilt utilities such as the “define:” operator to get definitions. This would give these results (the example here is “heavy metal”):

In SEO, one of the first advices we give to clients is to stick to what their target audience usually types in search engines to maximise their visibility. It seems that even Google is now following this advice. With the “what is” game, a new idea must have crept up in the Google engineers’ minds. What if people use more “what is” searches than the “define” operator? This would explain why the automated thesaurus used by Google suggest* is filled with “what is”. This would also mean that the “define” operator is used only by people knowing its existence.

2010, the age of “what is”.

On this basis, Google has made an evolution to the Google suggest feature. If you now type your whole “what is” question, the tool will propose not only the usual “suggest” results but the first available result in its definition list. This would be a full clickable result as below:

I may be wrong but it is the first time that I’m seeing this new option in Google suggest and this is making me wonder about the coming changes on the search engine as well as in search engine results.

The future of search ?

This specific option might itself suggest the future of search engines as Google sees it. The main idea is that the user does not even have to go to the search engine result page (SERP) to get the different proposals or results if the one suggested by Google suggest satisfies him/her. This would mean the fall of organic ranking in SERPS as well as paid inclusion! And what if the visitor is satisfied with the Google suggest answer itself without clicking on it?

In a far-fetched concept, what if Google opens up this suggestion utility to propose the first result of the SERPS on any search keyword and not only in definitions. This would completely change the face of search engine optimisation (SEO) and get people to fight for the first place. This however, will not be the case (at least not now) because it would be a bullet in the foot of Google’s business model based on paid inclusion. But once again… what if?

*Google suggest is a pondered utility that builds and proposes search suggestions based on the popularity of previous searches. E.g: typing “face” would suggest “facebook” as one of the first proposals.

This article is based on a real life project. It aims to show small business owners, whatever the field, how such businesses can drive leads out of a small scale but really optimised website. I’ll be taking the example of a small scale French business (18 employees) specialised in aluminium zinc works with which I worked and which made over a gross million euros over 3 years just through its website.

Website. This word and its concept is rather unclear for a whole lot of users online. Worse, many business owners hear and talk about the Internet and websites without ever getting a grasp of the concept. Some understand the possibilities and power of using the Internet and others just do not want to even hear about “that thing”. Huge mistake, especially when it comes to small businesses. Why? Because small businesses are more flexible and faster than large scale ones which are already missing a lot on the web. Moreover, being small means being more available locally, thus having better conversions locally, therefore securing contracts easily.

Real life example: Euralu.

Euralu Zinguerie is a small family business working locally in the Rhone-Alps and Auvergne regions in France. It employs 18 persons who are all local experts in zinc works and aluminium stripping for roofs. Nothing to do with the Internet, heh? However, the founder of this enterprise is tech savvy and had heard about websites and was ready to give it a try with a relatively low investment. The idea was to compete with its closest competitor regional Dal’Alu. The latter is a big group with small franchises disseminated everywhere in France.

The process.

The Euralu Zinguerie process was rather simple. The aim was to (re)create its identity and build a website that would have permanent calls to action to generate leads. The site would also need to compete with a minimum but long lasting search engine optimisation.

The conversion issue had to be tackled even before getting into the design process. The latter had to be extremely light to be able to give more importance to content (hence content to search engines). After some tries, we settled for the possibility of getting into direct contact with the company from all the available pages. This gave the direction for the design process as well as the upcoming SEO.

Minimal effective SEO.

Based on its nature, the site was more of the static type with minimal PHP just for the contact application. Aluminium zinc works being a really specialised field, it would have been really difficult to find specialised directories, especially in France, to get the site boosted by backlinks and exogenous SEO. The other thing was that the SEO wouldn’t have to be maintained (reducing website costs).

We therefore had to base all the SEO on the content and treated each page as a single, optimised entity. Each page has been built around one theme and we even used the site’s static file structure to optimise the whole lot. Site navigation was set to have it always available at eye level and all the specialised parts have been cross linked to maximise crawling. We also made sure that the business field “zinguerie” was present in the domain name.

Results.

Analysing conversions and results for this website might be done from different points of view but, after a friendly call to the founder, I got material to analyse both sides of the medal: online leads as well as offline.

Online.

Okay, so what goes on online for this website? In 3 years, the website’s PR is 0/10. What? 0? Yes, 0 and this kills all your misconceptions on PR because the site boasts 2nd on “zinguerie aluminium” just after the national leader 4th place on “zinguerie alu” and between first and 10th place on most of its strategic keywords such as: entreprise spécialisée zinguerie.

Along with this, is the conversion rate. Here is a screenshot of the conversions over 3 years.

1.74%, not much? We had set a simple calculation of how much it would have cost to get these persons to convert. The investment over 3 years would have been $495/350€/MRU Rs 14 775. So these are the gross savings made over the Internet for new clients. All in all, about 60% of these clients have hired the company.

Offline.

One of the good ideas we’ve had on this site was to set the phone number just beside the contact form. Notice how easy it is to get contact information from any page of the website. This, on its own, has generated about 150 phone contacts (every new contact is asked how it heard of the company). Here again about 60% of the clients signed for business.

Conclusion

Many are expecting, at this stage to know how much money came in. I have no clear sum to give but this is what I got from the founder. On average, the minimum contract signed (due to the nature of the work and the involvement of raw materials and travel expenses) is 8 000€ (MRU Rs 338 000) and the maximum can go to as much as 30 000€ (MRU Rs 1 260 000). In remaining on the minimum average with an 60% full conversion rate from the web for this small business, the average contracts signed via the website over the past 2 years is a gross 1 008 000€ (MRU Rs 42 504 000). And let’s keep this in mind: Euralu Zinguerie is but a mere small scale local business.

SEO, search engine optimisation, is not a new term. Nearly all site owners know about it and work on it, be it in an aggressive way or just doing the minimum to get traffic coming to their site. I’ve done a lot of that for clients but started living a whole new experience with the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius as it is a niche blog. So niched that search engines do not generate much traffic. True story! This site might be the only one that works like this as nearly all my client sites have Google as the major referrer. On checking thoroughly the site’s statistics, the major element that creeps out is that Twitter is the referrer that generates most traffic.

Social Media v/s Google.

Why did Twitter go beyond Google in the traffic generation rate? Where do other social media stand in this picture? How does this happen?

There are many answers to this question but the main element is content. Building content is fine for a site, however, the main problem is visibility. This site does have the ambition to compete with major web design sites such as Smashing Magazine and the editorial line is quite different due to the fact that the content is really Mauritian-oriented. On this basis, the web designer community in Mauritius is really small hence the small amount of web searches on web design reference for Mauritius. It was therefore necessary to find other ways of getting the content to the user. So I went in for Facebook and Twitter.

Delivering the content.

If the visitor does not come to the content, the content comes to the visitor. This is the main force of social media. If your site is not very well known, your feed subscribers will not be that important. What matters the most is to get people reading the content. Facebook’s feed tool is a great tool for that. All information published on a site is directly re-published on the Facebook page. This will incite people to read that content. Ok, it’s not your site attracting visitors but if the content is what’s most interesting than actually visiting the site, it’s a good deal. Moreover, depending on those readers, many of them might be more regularly connected to Facebook that surfing the web.

Same goes for Twitter. With a tweet, the link content of a post or article is directly sent to the user. This is interesting in terms of traffic as the tool allows retweets. Starting with the number of followers you have, you just have to tweet your link to get the traffic flowing in. If among your followers, a major Twitter personality retweets your post, its all the more good for your content.

Niche industry?

Using these tools are great and are in use along with major search engines for large traffic websites. If you are, like me, in a niche, you might find that concentrating your content on delivery is a good way to generate traffic. This does not, however, replace optimising for search engines. If you check the articles on this website, all of them (except the mini-blogging ones) are search engine optimised. So the use of social media for generating traffic should not be the only way of doing it. One of the advantages of being in a niche and on Twitter is that the community might be more present there and are easier to connect with.

Future.

Social media is taking the pace and this is why search engines are massively indexing social media pages. Google has also started indexing tweets. This shows that search engines know the power of these tools and how users interact with them. In some years, these tools will either be absorbed by groups like Google or will be the base of new Internet empires.

We are currently in the whole “new year resolution” hype all over the place. People around us, and maybe even you dear reader, are telling everybody around that they/you have made the decision of doing this or that for this new year. All in all, it is a great idea to say all this, the prospect of success, the freshness of it all is like a backfire thrusting you forward in your new resolutions for… 3 weeks!

Problem.

There must be a problem for all those good resolutions to go down the drain. Each year we just list a whole bunch of enthusiastic goals that we drop over some weeks later. As a matter of fact, these are the same things that happen in the blogging world. People start out with an idea for a blog, get excited by the prospect, see how it works or not and drop the whole thing some weeks later. Priscus dealt a lot with the phenomenon on her blog.

What is going wrong?

Just like “new year resolutions” blogging is subject to some #epic #failure reasons that mix, mingle and mess everything.

• Too many things in one go. Too many resolutions = too many parameters, topics or possible roads to follow.
• Too much enthusiam in the beginning with a boost of energy which runs out quickly.
• Sometimes, the blogger forces him/herself in the task. Bad, very bad. This is how you get disgusted with the whole thing. Not enjoyable.
• The vagueness of it all. Resolution: lose 20 pounds. Great but there’s nothing that says how and through what steps.
• Life interferes. In the same way that your everyday life will get in the way of allowing you to focus all the time on your resolutions, it interferes in your blogging pattern, be prepared to it.
• Difficulty. Sometimes one tackles a really difficult resolution and find oneself facing a wall. This is intimidating and the whole thing is dropped

Solutions.

The analogy is quite clear here. So what can be done?

• Tackle one topic and stick to it and only to this one for some time (like: every for a month) before integrating a new one and stick to both and so on.
• Keep the juice flowing. Do not overdo things. 200 word posts are enough to begin with.
• Enjoy doing it. This is the core of the chore. Find a topic that fires your passion, this is the only way of doing it.
• You want to achieve something, draw your roadmap. Plan the job. Determine your publishing regimen. Be consistent in it.
• Don’t let yourself get unbalanced by the various unexpected elements of everyday life. Its not dramatic if you can’t post everyday but you need to get back on your feet and carry on posting. By the way, never post apologies (“sorry for not having posted for so long”), readers hate whingerers.
• Avoid the intimidating element. Start out with easy steps. As one masters one’s field, why not start by the beginning. Some introductory posts are easy to start with.

I was toiling through my huge RSS feeds list and was somewhat surprised to see that Six Revisions had published yet another retro colors showcase and tutorial. If I’m not mistaken, the retro trend had its days of glory in 2005-2006 and was less used nowadays though still a sure bet. Even Jonathan Snook came back to it just last month. The idea here is not to delve into retro design but into the assumption that all the web design clichés that we now have are here to stay for ever.

Clichés you said?

Some call them trends but all in all its like this. Someone gets an idea and builds a site with a specific style and layout. This is new and fresh. Web design showcases and popular magazines put this site in their never ending lists of “killer astounding and unbelievable sites that you should absolutely copy and get inspiration from otherwise your mama will give you a good spanking”. Then, some other guy will draw inspiration from it and mix it with the inspiration from another list of “killer astounding and unbelievable sites that you should absolutely copy and get inspiration from otherwise your mama will give you a good spanking” and come up with a new site that will itself be part of a “killer astounding and unbelievable sites that you should absolutely copy and get inspiration from otherwise your mama will give you a good spanking”. And this will start a never ending cycle.

Back to the future.

After some time, when new trends will be catching up, the older clichés will tend to get into the background. New elements, new ideas, new “past” inspired clichés will come up making web design seem bland after running around the same type of sites all the time (this explains why the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius ended up with a really “common” theme). You can’t avoid it, you need to get inspiration and your clients will have seen a lot of the surrounding sites around before asking you for a specific design.

Then you get that little miracle spark. One designer will click around in those “killer astounding and unbelievable sites that you should absolutely copy and get inspiration from otherwise your mama will give you a good spanking” archives and get his/her eyes watery of the reminiscence of past styled designs. He/she would think “Hey, why not go back to this? It would be a real change and an adventure!”. And there you go again, a new venture with elder styles.

What next?

Well, the elder styles mix up with the newest “killer astounding and unbelievable sites that you should absolutely copy and get inspiration from otherwise your mama will give you a good spanking” and you get another new new old based trend… and the uroboros is complete. This is how the clichés will carry on living in web design and will still be served in some way or another.

Its just like those trainer-problem filled trainee(s) cliché film scenario that Hollywood just seems to have the secret:

A great trainer (sometimes retired or having left the competition because of some sad life changing experience) does not want to train some guy or team. The trainer has his own problem and the trainee or team also have theirs. There’s a lot of misunderstanding all around but somehow they get to build up a relationship and solve their problems together while winning their contest and living happy lives.

How many of these films have you seen? Even the award winning “Million Dollar Baby” is based on this scheme proving that this still works. Another award winning one in this category is “Rocky”.

Conclusion.

So, as a bottom line, we could say that Web designing is like being the “Karate Kid” :

Wax on, wax off !

“Form follows function”, most of us have heard this at least once in our lives. This catch phrase is one of the bases of architecture. Its primary meaning is:

The principle is that the shape of a building or object should be primarily based upon its intended function or purpose.

It has lead and still leads to hot debates on its intended purpose. We can however take it literally and analyse it from a Web design angle.

The need for function.

Why would we need function in the first place, especially in the world of Web design? We’ve already seen how to optimise a site for search engines even before its coding:

• 5 tips to a successful seo oriented web project
• The Head element in SEO basics
• SEO in your code

This is one aspect of Web site designing. The other aspect remains the fact that a website has to fulfill a purpose. There are some real world cases that IT experts tend to forget. 90% of the persons out there are not that at ease with the web or a computer as we are. Its so easy to just say: “Ok, they’re not my primary audience so what the f***?”. This is where the leap has to be made.

You’ve integrated the concept of SEO, now integrate this one: people buy products and services, not search engines. Design your sites accordingly!

Be effective, profitable and convert.

Web designers, this is not about you. Many a time a web designer can end designing a site with this idea in mind: “how will it look in my portfolio?”. Its not about your employer also (if you’re in a company), you’re out there to answer to a need, conversion. This is where your work gets interesting. In the current credit crush and economic crisis climate, a website must not be a cost to a business but a real revenue center.

Another thing that should be taken into consideration is that web users, though not all computer savvy, are getting more and more ruthless and demanding from websites as well as a huge demand for simplicity. This takes user experience from yet a,other angle and calls for more usability for more profits. An example is the lack of conversion tricks on some of the Mauritian websites.

DHTML, JQuery, Ajax…

Eye candy! That’s one word that sums it all! We love that, we love the animation thing, the out of this world experience that lasts… 10 minutes. Yes, once the user has seen it, it gets boring to him. When I started my Web design career I was so easily influenced by all those javascript and DHTML tricks that would make a whole page go pop. And we didn’t even have ADSL at the time. I would script for the sake of scripting but there was not any real function to it. This where we fail to understand the function of a site.

Giving more importance to the form turns the site away from its goals and the project as well. A website designed like that will not work (in terms of returns on investment)!

This looks like a flabbergasting John Chowish title but there is a reason to it. It is actually an experiment I lead over 10 days and looks like @kurtavish and @blebon found out the trick and jumped on the wave. The Wave, that’s actually the idea of the experiment. It was an experiment on trends and their impact on a site. The other thing I wanted to see was the increase in traffic with the bounce rate that goes with it. All it cost me to do this was the time I put in posting the trendy topic on the site. The topic in question was to offer Google Wave invites for free (currently running at 15€ apiece on ebay).

The idea.

The idea in itself is simple. Being curious about everything on the web I got into the Google Wave waiting list just as it was budding. Like the 99 999 other lucky Wave enthusiasts, I received my wave login along with some invites to send. The marketing test idea was already here. 100 000 persons, this means a total of 2 million lucky Wave users compared to the billions of possibilities. So I launched out to give them away to see how people would react to the trend.

And they DID react. All in all, this site had a 179% increase in traffic. The increase is easy because of the low but really precise audience the Bureau has. So, it was more important to check the bounces. This would show whether the site was going with the trend or nor. I’ll let you find it out by yourself:

1.23% bounce rate. Meaning that the message got to the reader. This is where you can achieve great things. Related posts and all will drive the readers to check other parts of the site and maybe catch up some interest in your content.

The future.

The contest giveaway idea is not new but the way to do it is also important. The current technique for the Google Wave invite was to either have a tweet or a blog post. Why? 2 reasons:

• The site got 2000 visits with a 1.18% bounce rate over the 10 days, just take 15 persons with at least a hundred followers who will tweet your contest, you’ll be reaching 1500 persons in one go. Along with that, the person makes a back link to your site. Many would say: “A Twitter backlink huh?”. Well, my Twitter profile has a PR 4, other Twitter pages can be 3 or 2. In the long run, the total amount of back links will pay.
• Following the same idea, the blog posts and buzz over other blogs get you to have traffic from other sources. You can also receive the benefits of back links from these. These also will be a good element for your SEO in the long run.

These marketing techniques are really great for increasing your site’s presence on the web. Now, this is not a MMO (make money online) blog. Therefore the persons getting into the contest and actually reading the content are a targeted audience interested in the Web and Wave, while a lot of people on MMO sites would just come round and go. If you want to really use these techniques, you have to understand what type of readers will be attracted and what are the chances of having them staying and participating.

Let’s be honest for a bit. Web design is evolving in Mauritius at a slower pace than everywhere else. There is still a lot to do and a lot to learn. As constantly stated on the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius, there is still a gap to bridge between marketing techniques and web design here. This brings up the problem of conversion. There’s a lot of Web design companies in Mauritius and all in all you can get at least 50 new websites launched every year. The main problem is that those sites is that conversion is not maximised.

A hotel website.

Let’s take a real life example. A lot of websites are “tourism” oriented in Mauritius. These are great for promoting beaches and hotels. Below is a screenshot of one of them (I deliberately took only part of the header and the footer off to concentrate on the content) :

Looks like a normal website. There is a problem here though. No element jumps out to your face. No element drives your attention. No element makes a “call to action”. You might have read a lot about these “calls to action” but they are not yet integrated in the Mauritian “web design culture”. So what is a “call to action”. This is what really makes a site convert an visitor into a customer. It is the way a website builds its return on investment.

A call to action is that element that would take a website to a higher level. So how would it be done on the basis of our example website?

Content and conversion.

As stated before, knowing your clients’/site’s content is a must. This is the core of your website. Knowing the content will help you understand (and it is better if you work with your client) the main objective of the website and how to make it convert. In our particular example, it is obvious that the main element of the site, the one that converts, the one that makes the site work for the global enterprise is… “reservations”.

Being a hotel means that getting reservations is the most important element of the business. Thus, this should be set forward. Here the problem is that the reservations tab is nowhere to be seen at the first glance. You have to read the whole menu to find it.

Solutions

The available solutions are fairly simple. They imply knowing and understanding the aim of the website and setting some elements to the forefront. Instead of showing a redesign of our example, it might be better to show a series of inspirational “call to action buttons” that would help transforming a visitor into a customer. Note how all these are built and are set to maximize the conversion of visitors into customers.

Conclusion

As you see, all these sites have a call to action button that incites the visitor to do an action. This button stands out and grabs the visitors attention. This is one of the most common and efficient ways of converting visitors into customers.

Envato is a renowned name in the web design world. Why? Just because they have some of the best tutorial websites in all the possible fields concerning design and web design. Adobe doesn’t have to be presented, it being one of the world’s IT Megalosaurus. Now, among all its educational websites, Envato had FlashDen, which was the web’s most prominent and precious tutorial base for Flash… the famous Adobe application.

However, as from yesterday. The site is no longer called FlashDen. A whole community of flash users, developers and tutors were just taken aback by a sudden surge from Adobe which simply ordered the web company to change its site’s name under the ruling that Flash was a registered trade mark. Ok with that. But… and there’s a “big but…” FlashDen was one of the most advanced sites and the world’s largest marketplace on Flash. What it was doing was promoting Flash and Flex, which are Adobe technologies that we, web designers, tend to avoid. I’m not meaning that I’ve turned Flash-addict in a day but that Adobe seems to be trying to cut a branch on which it is sitting.

True enough, the site’s name change will not affect the quality of the content delivered by the FlashDen (now called ActiveDen) authors but it is just a sort of questioning about some sort of abuse in authority by Adobe. As the information runs, “FlashDen” is registered as trade mark in Australia for Envato. I think that they just didn’t want to go further in the confrontation with Adobe.

Anyhow, you now know that you just don’t need to have the word “Flash” in your domain name if you want to keep it.

Read Collis Ta’eed’s (Envato CEO) view on the subject.

The title might seem weird to you but let me expose the facts. It does happen that one decides to include Adsense on one’s site. That’s a good idea to base some revenue off one’s site. Trouble is that sometimes you just get some unwanted or completely unrelated Adsense ads on your pages. For example, when testing the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius in the first months, I used to get only a whole lot of furniture ads. When stepping into the detailed view of the site on Google Webmaster Tools, I found out that it was the word “Bureau” that was winning it. Weird to get “pawned” by one’s own site title.

It was necessary to find a parade to this and to improve the Adsense ads. There is a way and a quite simple one as it is. It is given in the Adsense user guide but, hey, like a lot of people, I did not read all online documentation I found as it was just for meddling around. The solution is just to tell the Adsense engine which is the main content of the page and the ads will be modified according to this content. To do this, you need to specify where the content starts and where it ends with these two tags in your code, the first one before your content and the second one after:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

Once this is done, you just have to publish your page and the content will be used as a base for publishing your improved Adsense ads. These being closer to your content should be more interesting to the viewers, hence increasing the click rates.

Now for those using WordPress, you can code this directly into your templates or use this great plugin built by Jim Gaudet. It takes 2 minutes to install and it does the job pretty well.

Ok, I’m not taking Mauritians for stupid people, never had because I’ve always thought that we are capable of the best. The current post is really social media and web oriented but one must take into consideration the fact that Mauritian companies are still in the Ice Age of technology in terms of web presence as I pointed out in my former post: What Mauritian companies are missing on the web. So here’s another thing that we won’t see THAT soon in Mauritius but can open a lot of doors to the young Internet savvy Mauritians: Community Management.

Community managers fall in the web strategist work category. It is a fairly new job but it is up and coming for two things. Social Media is getting much more importance in the world and there must be a way of managing and directing all these to drive information to companies. To get a an overview of the evolution of social media, have a look at Island Crisis’ article on Twitter and personal information.

So what do community managers do? As Jeremiah Owyang, one of the first and most famous community managers, puts it, the community manager is not a customer or a company advocate. The community manager is the “online champion” of a company who will be driving the web strategies for it. His/her role is to get the company into the various social communities and get the possible customers or product users to interact with the company itself. The idea is to use the web as a vector to get the human being as the centre of a brand or a cause. This is done by building and helping the community to grow around the brand or cause.

The community management skills need to go from a deep understanding of the web and the levers, not to say the social levers, that organise it. The use and even abuse of social media is a great quality (hello “good” Mauritian bloggers). Other tools used for social media monitoring and observatory tracking are important. Managing people, knowing how to listen, interprete and reply in a polite and friendly manner while being authoritarian are all parts of the job. The whole picture is that of the person who’s the centre of it all while making sure that the brand or cause is the core if it all.

So any of the readers feel like they’re ready to become community managers in Mauritius? As I said earlier, it is a budding job having no real root if not necessity. Maybe in some years (again!). Otherwise you might also be interested in Chris Bogran’s excellent review of the Essential Skills of a Community Manager.

This is a major question that has been running over Twitter, Facebook and some major Mauritian blogs these last days. It has its roots in one thing only: the new Mauritius logo.

Ok, this is not another “this is a crap logo” post. We all know it and accept it. If you need more info on this deceitful and completely biased logo you can head to SJDVDA’s blog or Guillaume’s article to get a general view of the subject. Not that I wouldn’t have liked spilling some dirt also on Acanchi’s horrible work when you think that they spent 18 months to come to such a mess but something more disturbing has caught my attention.

When will Mauritius, in general, let go of that “occidental supremacy” scope? This logo demonstrates that this state of mind still prevails in Mauritius. How? By asking a British company to analyse OUR culture. If that project were to be given to a Mauritian company (admitting that it is a honest and working type one) the internal workings would make that the project would recognize better traits to Mauritius than the Pieter Both Mountain. The mixed culture and the core of the tourism industry would have been the driving forces. A foreign agency would not have a view of the inner workings of our society to reflect the quality of our hospitality.

Second thing. This logo branding has cost 31 million rupees to the state. That would be around 3000 31 (thanks Bruno) rupees per Mauritian, any age, any class. This money comes from the income taxes the government gets from the people and what do we have here? 31 million rupees going to the UK. What about 31 million rupees going to a Mauritian company and re injected in the banking system or the Mauritian economy?

Third thing. School kids in Mauritius have better ideas than the guys at Acanchi. Are Mauritian designers so bad that none has been able to enter the call for projects? Where are those companies? How come no Mauritian body has been able to defend a project that should represent any Mauritian design company’s pride? Are we that bad?

EDIT
Published in L’Express today, the Director of Circus Ads says that the Logo is great. The Logo has been made by a “Mauritian” agency having its roots in France.

We’ve been talking about conversion and sales in the honest way all this time. The core of the talk has been “how to organise and optimise your site to give it the best chances”. This is how you honestly maximize conversions and offer great service to your customers.

This, sadly, doesn’t fall into the standards. When you make use of some psychology along with some of the core elements dear to a targetted population, the money can come flowing rather quickly. Those having been in touch with the advertising world will easily understand my point. Here is an example of how it is done read the article and come back here to see the analysis: white teeth.

I fell on this website while looking at this article sent over Twitter and this ad was on the top left. As I had already scrolled, I didn’t see that it was an ad but thought it was a current article off the same website (link colour strategy being the same): “Learn the trick, discovered by a mom to turn yellow teeth white for under $5.”

Mind you, I haven’t got teeth problems. Another thing is that my dentists have always been cool and I know that the actual natural colour of teeth is light ivory and not white. What caught my attention is the fact that it was a “mom” and “under $5″. How could a mom find such a cheap trick.

The psychology

The first thing is to hit where it hurts most. Here, the target population will clearly be the American population. Why? Because they are obsessed by health and looks. So white teeth for $5 is a big bet. Second, health insurance is expensive and having no social security makes that caring for teeth comes in second line. Here, the cheap promise for such a demanded look is quite an incentive.

White teeth are an obsession in the States.

The personnae

Telling a person that you are a company selling some low priced product guaranteeing some miracle might not be the best approach to sell your good/bad product. Most of us know this old far west recurring scene where some charlatan selling a miracle oil and has an acolyte who comes round nearly dying, takes a sip and starts dancing around lively and all… Its the same thing here, the only difference is that the guy selling the product is not present.

Here we have a mom of two. Defining the caring American woman who takes care of her house, husband and kids. She respects all the standards of many American women who redempted from smoking and loves her small comfort and “was self employed for many years and had no dental coverage whatsoever”. If she finds a cheap way of doing things, this will surely attract attention.

Photos

Very important thing, photos showing the mother of two and her kids. This gives Cathy Anderson some reality in the world and twice the before-after photos. This is the classic convince through repetition system.

Comments

So here she is explaining how she found out 2 products on via CNN reporters and tried them and got those white teeth. There are links all around on this blog like site (with comments enabled so that “satisfied persons” might say respond to the great product and increase sales) where people can buy all the products online with special offers.

The worse of the comments must be this one:

Diane says:

Hey Cathy, I’m a dental hygienist and I just came across your blog.

My boss would be so upset to know that people have figured out about this stuff! Truth be told, at our dental office we charge about $450 for the same thing you are getting here for free. Nice trick!

So here you have everything to convince one into buying your stuff. But here’s the other side of it. You’re being misguided.

Region

Cathy here is a real American mom. But hey, if 1/5 of US Americans cannot even locate the USA on a world map or know so many things on the world, how do you want them to know ask themselves where is Cathy’s city situated? Yes, because Cathy lives in Lille, Nord-Pas-de-Calais. Hey, is that not the North of France? Now, if she were really living here, she wouldn’t have had to be so stressed by dental coverage, health is free in France.

Comments and shipping

She wouldn’t have had to talk in dollars and even with that, she wouldn’t even get any free trial from the US, postage and packing would be around 15€. Worse, there’s even this comment:

I tried to enroll in this free trial but I found out its offered only in the United States, Canada, and the UK.

So how the hell did she get it in France?

Photo

I’ve known Cathy for a long time. She’s been roaming in the web design business for so long that her face is now so ever familiar. Here are some 3 other sites where she is present:

Babble
Playborhood
The Lost Ogle

Cathy Anderson is really well known as well as her kids as you can see.

Conclusion

Here we are then, this is how you can “pawn” the American market by using false elements and playing on the sensitive parts of the people on only one page. This site and offer has been done to rank and sell eveyday to some poor person who doesn’t have money to go to the dentist. This is a great selling strategy but it does not follow the lines of challenge that do give you the thrill of fighting for ranking and selling through conversion. Shall we call it the American way?

All in all, I’ve just left a comment, for the fun of it, on the site. I don’t think it’ll be published but here it is exclusively for you:

Hi Cathy, I’m sure I know you. I work at the pawn shop down Opera Lane in Lille. I’ve always thought that you had a great smile .

Many a web designer out there hold blogs telling you how they made the move and stepped off the web design agency hook to go full freelance. These experiences are great and offer you an overview of the alternate career you could be leading if you’re in the web design industry.

My experience is rather different. I started out in a web agency but later on turned towards a bigger company where things didn’t work out well. In the end I got into the “Web Mastering” (ooow, so old-skool) job. It actually consists of leading a large enterprise into the Web world by offering solutions for their websites and working on their online reputation. I must say that the experience is really different from any other.

First things first, the persons working with you might not have a single clue of what the web is. For some of them “Google is the Web”. For others web trafic is a complete alien word (well, you can’t expect everybody to know that we record their tracks) and for some web design is merely the copying and pasting of a paper pamphlet online (… and we’re in France).

The second thing is that most of the time such companies really require your services, so its a real pleasure to work with these people. Some might have pre-conceived ideas all the more but most are open minded and are ready to win the conversion rate battle.

Mind you these things might not be the simplest situation of all. Some people think that nothing is good if its not their brainchild. This usually ends up in the person wanting to drive the project completely oblivious of web design concepts, conversion rules and search marketing. This is where you have to take out your positive criticism cape and try to change things. It might somewhat turn really sour for one in this situation.

All in all the experience that I’m now living is proving to be really different from any other I have encountered in my professional life. I’ll keep you posted on this new experience

I had a discussion with a Mauritian blogger yesterday who was explaining that no Mauritian company has really undergone a major advertising policy change to invest in online ads. Sure there are some communication agencies that would surely pay some rupees to get their clients on L’Express‘ site but none really has an aggressive online presence.

Sure enough, the market seems cold today because no one in Mauritius is bold enough to get in the ring alone and say: “I’ve invested thousands of rupees online”. Actually, the next step would be : “I’ve invested thousands of rupees online and now I’m getting contracts each worth at least thrice the price I invested.” This surely means that the company should be seeing the real power of a global marketing project where seo, sem and advertising are nothing but components.

I’m not a dreamer. I know that no Mauritian company is that far-sighted and that what is being said here will take years to become a reality. For example DCDM‘s site does not reveal the true power and driving skills of the company in Mauritius. Nothing has been invested in SEO or online presence and reputation. DCDM does not represent the Andersen group in Africa anymore but the meta description content has not been updated. Worse, a swift look in the code shows that the site has not been updated since 2001 :

Copyright (c) 1999 Thomas Brattli (www.bratta.com)
Modified for the purpose of this site by DCDM's Web Development Team @ June 2001'

And don’t you try the French version of the site. I haven’t, by the way, seen any in depth traffic analysis device on the website. Correct me if I’m wrong, they might also be using much more advanced Business Intelligence tools like Web Trends.

Does this mean that the group has missed all the Web 2.0 bubble, no online interaction with the public, no online marketing? How can this be so when a company like this has a “marketing research” unit? This analysis of DCDM‘s online presence is just to show that Mauritian companies are still lagging 10 years (approximately for DCDM) behind while the world is moving faster than ever. How? By seeing the new market shares.

The Telegraph has published a very interesting chart this morning. Weights have shifted and, in 6 months, online advertising has gained more importance than TV adverts. It symbolises the change in habits and way of consuming. People have a different approach to the Web now.

Mauritian companies would gain so much more if they approached online marketing strategies for new fields to be exploited. These needs can be easily targeted when asking people what they would like to have in terms of services like in some of the comments available on the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius contest.