I tried to place an order with a online jewelry company yesterday and put in the wrong card security code, so they emailed me today and asked me to send my credit card info, security code and expiration date.

I told them I’d just submit another order instead and that they might want to be careful asking customers to send info like that through email. Here’s what they said in reply:

“I hear ya, but all the emails are deleted instantly.”

That doesn’t matter. The risk is that mail contents will be intercepted during transmission. Don’t ask your clients to send sensitive information in an email! Have them call you instead.

Thinking about adding a CMS package for your new or redesigned website because it will be so much less expensive in the long run than asking your designer to make updates for you? You might want to reconsider.

Prominent web professional Paul Boag of boagworld.com wrote a great article on the hidden costs of running a CMS - and there are many of them. A full-fledged CMS is often not the best choice for a small company with limited financial or human resources. There are other options that will let you edit your site for text and images without the steep learning curve or related costs after launch.

When you offer an email address, or a contact form, or a quote tool, or allow people to order services online, you’re giving them a promise that you will follow through when they reach out to you. Not responding is breaking a promise and I can tell you, word of this definitely gets around.

Recently I’ve had two experiences that really drove this idea home.

We needed a lot of mulch for our backyard. I looked at types and prices online at several local dealers, we visited two of them to compare for ourselves and then the next day, I went to the website of the one we picked and filled out their online order form. This is great, I thought. I’ve seen their product, and now I can order right here. They had a well-built form where everything made sense, and I could choose the type and amount of mulch I wanted and it gave me a total with local delivery. They even had an area calculator so I could determine how much mulch I’d need for two inches of coverage.

When I submitted the form a message came up thanking me and let me know that I’d hear from this company within 24 hours to confirm my delivery time.

More than a business day went by. At the end of the second day I called to confirm my order.

“Oh,” the employee said, “that form doesn’t work. We haven’t got our website figured out yet.”

Not very happily, I gave my order again. It was delivered correctly and promptly, but the experience of a broken website (and especially one that appeared to be so helpful) left a bad taste in my mouth and will make me think twice about recommending them again.

The second experience was with a prominent dealer of a certain type of vehicle in Fort Collins. I filled out a rather extensive online quote form and immediately got an autoresponder thanking me for my trouble and assuring me that I would hear back within 24 hours about my potential purchase. I said in the form that I was interested in purchasing immediately.

That was last Thursday morning. It’s now Monday and I have yet to get a phone call or email. I emailed them again on Saturday but that apparently didn’t have any effect.

When you offer a tool that makes your customers’ lives easier, don’t just blow them off by allowing it to remain broken or by ignoring the requests that you get. The entire point of your website is to open up new lines of communication with customers - when you offer such a service then fail to even respond, that’s breaking a promise. People can and do go elsewhere very willingly.

I worked on a site for a small client recently, where the client declined to use any testimonials on their website.  Personally, I think that testimonials are essential for a small business site - you can go on all day about how great your product/service is, but if you don’t have any ‘proof’ in the form of happy customers, why should we believe you?

I say the more testimonials, the better. Don’t just have a page full of them - scatter them around your site. Make them change whenever a visitor comes back to a page. Consider audio or video testimonials.

When you have fans, put them out in front. What they say about your company carries far more weight than what you say about yourself.

What if you don’t have any testimonials? Have you asked for them? If not, consider asking your best customers - usually they don’t mind at all.

Also think about having some kind of survey or follow-up email or phone call and ask some questions - are they enjoying your product? Would they recommend it to someone else? Be creative and see what information you can glean; all of this is good source material for testimonials.

Red Kite turned 3 last week and is happily at its busiest and most productive since the start of business. Thank you to our valued clients who refer us so positively and so often.

You know how when you order from Amazon and you don’t have to pay sales tax? Unless you’re in Washington, North Dakota, Kentucky or Kansas, where Amazon has physical office or shipping and warehousing facilities, there’s no tax.

Until June 1, that is… The State of New York expanded its rules regarding what constitutes a ‘physical presence’ in the state. Because Amazon gets commissions from many small partner businesses, some of which are located in New York, the State decided that Amazon did indeed have a business presence and starting on June 1, buyers from New York must now pay sales tax.

Amazon is suing the state on the grounds that the ruling is unconstitutional. But this sets a scary precedent; brick-and-mortar business owners have been talking for years about how web and other mail order retailers ‘get away’ with not contributing to the local tax base.

A 1992 Supreme Court ruling states that businesses that don’t have a physical presence in a state can’t be made to collect sales taxes for that state.  And, if they do have a physical presence, they can only charge sales tax on buyers from within that particular state. But this may be changing soon due to the current condition of the economy.

Tip of the day - ever notice that your cursor (the insertion point) in Word has shrunk to half-size? Fix it by typing, not selecting from the menu, 100% in the Zoom box.

A few years ago I was working for a small company, preparing their first e-commerce site for their retail shop. Things went well until the day that they presented me with a drawing they had worked up in Illustrator (which they’d just bought) and wanted to use it in place of our agreed-upon layout.

Not that I mind getting design input from clients (quite the contrary!), but their idea was, frankly, something I thought would be a turnoff to customers who came across their site. I felt so strongly about this that I advised them against going in that direction, and we wound up terminating the project at that point.

Now it’s over two years later. They have just recently put up a few placeholder pages, with a design that has a few elements in common with their Illustrator sketch but is much more put-together. I do like the design…

But the designer they hired, that’s another story.

Their designer is building their new site in tables. Must be an old-school developer type who has decided that learning modern, table-less design methods is just not worth the effort, or a graphic designer with a good eye for a cool look and feel but not a lot of web development experience.

The designer is using a font for the headlines and paragraphs that almost no customers are likely to have on their machines. I suspect my former clients are in for a rude awakening when they find out that what looks so good on their computer defaults to Arial, etc. on their visitors’ machines.

This is really too bad. They’re getting a site designed using techniques popular 8 years ago. Their site (so far) is not optimized for search engines, and the designer has already demonstrated that they don’t have a good handle on even basic web-friendly fonts. Usability is fair, but the cart is not online yet so it’s hard to tell how things will trend. I’ll keep an eye on it for curiosity’s sake.