Category: How To

Last month we let you know how to explain the Internet to your, well, less interested friends. And here’s another way you can help with their computers.

Do you – as someone who takes an interest in computers, the web, building websites and all that stuff – get asked tech questions by your friends and family all the time? Do they always want to know why ‘it won’t print’ or ‘where is that file’ and ‘how do find that website’?

Well here comes Google to the rescue with a website designed to help people (well, kids) teach others (erm, parents) about computer basics.

It’s called TeachParentsTech.org, and it lets you choose from over 50 how-to videos to send to people who don’t know how to do stuff. It’s all the way from basic copy and pasting onto other things like how to share a big file. You can customise an email and thend send the video off to the person who needs help.

Here’s a video with a bit more detail:

So no longer will you spend half your evening and weekend helping others with their computer problems!

It’s now twenty years since a chap called Tim Berners-Lee first published his concept of the World Wide Web.

And where are we now? 47 bn web pages, 350 million different websites 500m domain names; a place where one company alone (Google) adds more than 20,000 servers a month to their data centers. We’ve got websites, blogs, photo sites, video, apps, email, Facebook, browsers, clouds, collaboration, open source, cookies… the list goes on. How can you explain all of that to someone who – up to now – has turned their back to the web?

Google have tried to do just that as easy chapter sized chunks in their new guidebook ’20 things I learned’ about browsers and the web, in collaboration with illustrator Christoph Niemann. It’s not just for beginners, but for anyone who wants to ‘better understand the technologies we use every day’.

Google wanted to give the guide the same feel as reading an actual book – holding the cover, flipping a page – and have used some very smart HTML5 programming to come up with it.

Once downloaded the book can be read offline too.

So next time one of your friends says to you “so, I hear you make those web wotsits” you know where to refer them to!

Take a look and let us know what you think.

Do you have trouble finding images for your website? Are you able to find a good matching image for your carefully crafted text?

If you’re anything like me, it’s a real challenge and part of the challenge is in the choice.

You can choose an image that you have taken, but the chances are that it lacks the right lighting and setting of a professional shot. You could also resort to searching on Google images, but of course run the risk of infringing someone else’s copyright. And then there’s buying images – I like fotolia.com – but you may not want to shell out each time.

Wordle is a fun way to create a relevant image without actually resorting to an image. This online service creates a word-based masterpiece from a paragraph of text on your (or any) web page.

You can choose from a basic cloud image popular on WordPress blogs, or something a little more artistic. Just go to Wordle.net/create and paste your text into the box.

Here’s a something made from the text of this post

Take a look and share with us what your image looks like!

Do you ever get sent email attachments that you can’t open? This is usually because the original file was made with a program you don’t have on your PC.

Sometimes you can ask the sender to resent in a different format, or as a last resort you can download the program in which the file was made. But what if neither of those are an option?

Thanks to some format wizardry, new website fileminx.com can solve your problems. It’s a web based too that open documents in all sorts of formats and let you have a look at the content.

For normal office files it handles DOC, DOCX, Word 6, Word ’97, PDF and WPS.

When it comes to music you can unscramble iPhone, iPod, MP2, MP3, WMA and WAV.

And as for video it can reveal what DIVX, iPod, MOV, Flash, MP4, WMV, XVID and MPEG files inside.

Take a look at Fileminx and let us know what you think.

Did you know, the average visitor spends just 5 seconds on your website before deciding whether to stay or leave?

This make it so important to grab their attention, and get them to do something, using a ‘call to action’. This ‘action’ could be reading an article, clicking a link, leaving their details or buying a product.

Here’s my top 7 ways to improve your web pages so that visitors respond to your call to action. You can do ‘em all with the WebEden Website Builder!

1. Make sure your buttons are BIG!

Seems a bit Alice in Wonderland, but if you want someone to do something, give them a great big button to press. Make sure the big button is:

*above the fold
*a contrasting, bold colour
*Includes some action text like ‘buy’, ‘order’, ‘sign up’.

Don’t be worried about repeating your call to action elsewhere on the page. Keep it the same size, and in the same vertical line if possible.

2. Give your visitors a reason to act

If you’re selling a product, or want your visitors to do something else, make sure you let them know why they should! A picture of a product won’t sell it alone, you need to list the benefits.

*Sell it with a headline
*Use a supporting image
*Add benefits in bullet points
*consider adding customer testimonials
*Make good use of white space
*Avoid blocks of text – 50 words max

But make sure these benefits don’t compete with the call to action for your visitors’ attention

3. Don’t give your visitors a choice

If you give your visitors a choice between two or more calls to action, many will dither, and some would sooner leave your site than make that choice.

Simplify your pages so that you funnel visitors towards your desired action, and don’t let them consider alternatives.

4. Create a unique page for every product

Not only does this give you a chance of grabbing more traffic from the search engines, it also lets you showcase each product in the best way, and without choice.

5.    Have to have more than 1 product per page?

If you can’t get away from offering more than 1 product per page, help your website visitors decide by highlight 1 product with extra benefits. This might be ‘most popular choice’ or ‘best value’ or it might be the product with the biggest discount.

6.    Let your users buy from every page

If you list your products on the homepage, a category page and an individual page, make sure visitors have the option of buying them from every one. Make it easy to buy – not hard.

7.    Test your theories

If you’re not sure which layout works best, try them all and then:

*Ask a friend what they think
*Submit your alternatives to our forum to get feedback
*Submit your website to 5 second test to get feedback
*try to test which version sells more products

That’s it

If you want your website visitors to do something on your site, then make it clear what that is, give them no choice, and make it easy for them to do.

Got an experience of changing design and improving (or ruining!) results? Leave us a comment below.