Initially I am looking for someone to join our Hungarian development team, although I will consider home workers from any country if you can convince me!

Here’s the original ad, you can also see this on LinkedIn:

Based in the UK and Hungary, we are an innovative, well funded startup with a unique product. We have exceptional leadership who have already built other start-up companies from scratch and made them into success stories. Currently, we are looking to hire an extremely bright developer that wants to make a difference within our business.

This is an excellent position for a talented developer with a great knowledge of HTML and with a passion for producing high quality, functional web and webkit applications. Day to day you will work closely with other developers in the company, working on a range of high profile clients requirements.

Must have skills:

• Object Oriented PHP
• HTML
• Very strong Javascript
• CSS3
• MVC experience
• UI / UX experience
• Good written and spoken English

Additionally any of the following skills would be beneficial:

• PhoneGap
• Mobile app development
• Objective-C
• Java
• Sencha Touch
• Experience with web services architecture and SOAP/REST interfaces
• Good visual design skills

The job is home based with regular meetings at Budapest and occasional travel to UK.

Image: Some rights reserved by Zach Klein

Question: iPhone or Android?

I’ve got a great idea for an app that I think can make a lot of money, either based on pure sales or on a freemium model (I haven’t decided yet). But I don’t know whether it’s best to develop for the Android or iPhone market. Which platform has the most users and, I guess, which audience buys the most aps?

This is a great question and one I’ve recently had to answer myself with my mobile startup WorriedNow. We spent a lot of time talking to our target market but for us it was pretty fragmented with a comparable number of iPhones and Android devices. In the end the choice was simple, we chose the path of least resistance, the iPhone. Apart from the fact we all have them it meant we could lock down our development to a very small number of devices, this was a great decision as it made testing, feedback from users and rapid development much easier.

Question: Selling a website

I have had a number of offers to buy my website, but I have no idea if these are realistic valuations. It has about 700 daily vistors and is ranking first or second on the Google rankings for about a dozen keywords. How would I go about calculating a reasonable price to sell it at?

The value of a website is completely proportional to the opportunities it will create for the purchaser. Sorry if this sounds vague but if you have 700 daily visitors all turning up to learn about Tea and Tetley want to buy it, well its worth worth much more to them that it would be to me for example. Do a quick calculation, if you are selling something on your site what its the conversion of traffic to sale, then look at trend, how is this going to change over time? At the end of the day only you will know the amount of effort you have put in to get your site into this position. Good luck.

Question: Buying a Twitter name

My startup is involved heavily in selling a service to web developers. Devs use Twitter a lot so from my point of view our Twitter name is as important as our website domain name. My ideal name is currently being used, but the user only posts like once a month. Is it possible to buy someone’s Twitter name, and is there an official process for going about this, or should I just contact the guy direct?

How brave are you feeling? According to the official Twitter Terms of Service ”Attempts to sell, buy, or solicit other forms of payment in exchange for usernames are [ToS] violations and may result in permanent account suspension”. So the official line is no, this is a bad idea. However if you have the cojones there are lots of stories of people offering large sums of money and getting away with it. Twitter themselves even helped arrange the sale of @Israel from a blogger to The State of Israel, so its clear the lines are blurred. Get in touch with them, if your desired handle is being sat on and not used I know of people that have simply been given them.

Photo: Some rights reserved by bondidwhat

Sound confusing? Let me demystify it for you. Based on your browsing habits Google assigns a set of categories to you in a cookie, Google account or not this data can be used to display the most relevant ads.

My data is pretty spot on, although I an only 33, maybe I should change my browsing habits.

What has Google got on you?

Actinic powers over 12,000 stores in the UK and I get to see a lot of sites, both big and small, broad and niche. I also talk to loads of designers and merchants. In fact it’s the best part of my job. However it doesn’t matter who you are, I always receive the same set of questions: what’s the best checkout experience, what should my content pages look like and how do I engage with customers better?

Within this article I look at a number of best practice tips and advice for ecommerce merchants, designers and implementers in these three areas.

Checkout

The single most important piece of any ecommerce site is the checkout. I don’t care how impressive your calls to action, product imagery or descriptive text are, without a decent checkout process it’s all for nothing. To prove my point, if customers experience problems in this area, they will abandon your site without a second thought.

After talking to hundreds of merchants and online shoppers last year in our market research, the biggest causes of cart abandonment are down to.

Forced registration: If you want your customers to become registered users make sure you do it after the purchase. Putting a registration wall in the way introduces doubt and uncertainty.

StanleyGibbons.com asks you to register before you can make your purchase

Security issues: Failed SSL certificates on the checkout, non compliance with security standards (PCI-DSS), or worse 404s during transactions are all consumers’ worst nightmares. Reassure your customers. Detail how your store is a good and safe place to do business with, and above all test your checkout on a regular basis.

Number of pages: When it comes to best practice advice for checkout length, everyone is an expert. Some extol the virtues of a single page checkout while others prefer to split it up into easy-to-understand chunks. At Actinic we spent a long time analysing the leading online stores (like Amazon, John Lewis, Play) and determined three pages is about right. Too few and you risk introducing questions and worries, too many and you risk cart abandonment though excessive requirements on the customers. This area is perfect for A/B testing.

Product pages

I often compare the humble product page to the car showroom. It’s the place where decisions are made. The name of the game is detail and answering questions effectively.

Depending on the type of store and the products you sell, the requirements of a product page differ greatly. Here are some basics:

Product title and description

The classic error a lot of small merchants and implementers make is to undervalue the age old art of descriptive writing. It really doesn’t matter what products you are selling, decent copy sells products. I spent some time recently with a pretty successful merchant operating in the clothing space. His problem was one of conversion. He was landing quality traffic through a great ad campaign but once on the site they were failing to convert to buyers.

Looking at the product pages of their store it was clear he had made a classic error – cutting and pasting the manufacturer’s technical detail and passing it off as descriptive text. We ran some A/B testing for a few weeks; the products with decent descriptive copy outsold its cut and paste rival by 5 to 1.

Little or no description, or hiding below the fold is a mistake

An example of a clear description and multiple images 

Sometimes the product you are selling requires you to go to the next level. Maybe you need to list technical specifications or break out detail. If you need to do this, don’t be afraid to use a second page or a tabbed section. Another neat trick is to put the detail below the page fold but make the link to the detail obvious. Here are two examples. The first is Dixons, which does a great job of breaking out the complex product details into a well designed tab. The design makes it easy to find the important detail that people may otherwise go elsewhere to obtain.

Conversely Amazon does a really bad job. The page is massive, which isn’t normally a bad thing, but in the fight for page space the all-important detail is lost right at the bottom. Amazon tends to get a little carried away with cross-product promotions and detailing customer behaviour to the detriment of the product on the page.

Imagery and video

If the descriptive text is the brains to your operation the photo you place to sell your product should be the beauty. You don’t have to be an art director to realise good imagery sells product. However, conversely I would argue poor imagery actively puts people off purchasing. Depending on what you are selling, your requirements for imagery will vary, but that shouldn’t stop you from being a little creative.

A great example is the Nike online store. At a top level view, the images are clean and clear and most importantly, interactive. I can change the colour and style without diving into detailed product pages. For the consumer this is very powerful and allows the merchant to display a range of products effectively.

Nike continues to do a great job on its individual product pages. From here I can browse the product from different angles, zoom and rotate, as well as select colours. It’s a very powerful sales tool and one Nike has used incredibly effectively.

Effective use of video is also a great way of detailing your product. However, with video it needs to be compelling enough for people to click and watch. This is something Amazon does really well. Embedding video into the standard image section of the product page puts the content into view and it’s natural for the browser to click.

The good news: this isn’t that hard, even for smaller merchants. It just takes time.

Customer relations

The network effect

A network effect is what happens when a product or service becomes more valuable the more people use it.

An example of this is Facebook. Using Facebook without connecting to your friends, family or work colleagues would be a pretty miserable experience. The more connections you have, the richer experience it becomes. One way to achieve the network effect within ecommerce is to pull your customers together. At my company we have a very vibrant customer community. This is a place where people can come to ask questions about our product and have discussions with both us and other users. Managed correctly, a community enriches your brand and your offering.
Product reviews

On customer feedback, we have recently been working with an innovator in this arena,Feefo. The goal of Feefo is to collect accurate, independent reviews on behalf of both the customer and the business owner. Not only does this provide a rich source of information, it also allows the customer to talk directly to the business owner as well as publicise their opinion of your product or service on your website and even their Facebook page!

Now this may sound pretty scary but if you are doing a good job then more people know about this the better. Also, who’s better to sell the benefits of your business than a satisfied customer?

I’d love to hear your reactions to these tips and also your own favourites. Fire away below!

Image by isawnyu, Some rights reserved

The reaction to the post was interesting. I had a number of people contacting me via Twitter, both to agree and strongly disagree with my point of view.

The most interesting comments were from people who are considering moving into the contract world, which surprised me. It seems 2011 really is the year of the self-employed. However, based on those comments it’s clear moving into the freelance world isn’t quite as easy as it seems.

Someone who has just made the move tells me the key is organisation and learning the difficult skill of keeping existing customers happy while lining up new projects. It’s a balancing act that many get wrong, leading to feast or famine scenarios which are both stressful.

So what tools are available to help businesses which are looking for help with an IT project connect with suitable freelancers? In my original post I mentioned Freelancer.com as a great place for businesses and freelancers to connect, but there are others I’ve tried:

Elance - The site is tailored to both businesses and contractors in equal measure. The main plus point for me is that it includes a great project management area that really helps ensure good communication.

99 Designs - I used this site recently for some graphical work. It allows business owners to run competitions for projects, such as designing a new logo. On my particular project I had 67 entries, all to a high standard.

oDesk - I really like oDesk and for short term contracts I think it makes a lot of sense. Its approach is simple: it takes a 10% cut of all payments going through the system and gives business owners and contractors a powerful marketplace and application to use as they see fit.

As someone who has hired multiple freelancers, the first piece of advice for anyone in the freelance world is to remember why you made the move. 99% of the time it’s to focus on something you’re either highly skilled in, or passionate about. However, setting up and running your own business often requires you to do a fair amount of the mundane, creating business processes and doing admin.

The good news is IT can really solve this riddle. There are a number of tools and services available online that can take the pressure off. I’ll go into those in my next blog. Meanwhile, if you have some favourite sites to find work or hire good techies, then let us all know in the comments.

Photo by Laughing Squid, some rights reserved

Question: Social Media

In your opinion, where do you think the main strengths and weaknesses of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter lie? Which online businesses can benefit most/least from incorporating them into their sites? From Toby

Hi Toby,

A strong social media presence isn’t the preserve of the hip young startup, in 2012 its expected. Strengths are everything from better customer care to engagement. Google “Comcast and Twitter” for a brilliant case study on how to get it spot on. While your there google “Habitat and Twitter” for a better example of how to screw up.

Question: Bank Finance

I’ve started a small ecommerce website and it’s generating customer interest and steady sales. I was to set up a small business account, but in my personal life I have a lot of debt and so I’m finding it hard to find a bank who will help me. It’s frustrating because if I can get some finance to expand the site, I can earn enough money to pay off my credit cards, etc, but it seems like I’m in a bit of a Catch-22 situation. What would you advise?

Also i’d like to secure some funding but where do i go to help with that as i am finding business link unhelpful ?? BTW i’m based in north east england.

From Nana

I feel your pain Nana, I hear stories like this every day at Actinic. There is nothing more frustrating than a growing business being held back by funding. The good news is there are alternative strategies than the bank. If you have a merchant account and good trading history there are companies that will lend money based on future transactions, i.e they take  a percentage from each transaction until the loan is paid off. This can be been seen as a high interest option but its designed for successful ecommerce businesses that need a cash injection, its also fairly low risk. Another alternative is to investigate drop ship options, this can be a nice way of lowering your initial cash outlay while continuing to grow the business, although margins are obviously lower.

Question: Equity for design work

I am in the process of setting up a online retailing business and I am doing everything on a zero budget. I was wondering what your panellists think about giving away equity to have a website built? Good or bad idea in general? From Warren

Sorry Warren, this is a terrible idea for lots of reasons. Right now this equity is worth exactly zero, you have no trading history, its worthless. Sorry if this sounds harsh but its true. Also unless you’ve found an unbelievable niche most ecommerce stores take 2 to 3 years to get enough runway to make equity worth anything at all, of course this advice is assuming your not building the next Groupon. There are lots of low cost or free options available for building ecommerce sites, but if your serious about making a dent in the world this always needs cash.

Photo: Some rights reserved by bondidwhat

Question: Going Freelance

I am working at a place that has literally hundreds of clients so I’m always worked off my feet. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the work, but sometimes it feels like I’m slogging my guts out to make other people rich. So I’m tempted to go freelance, and if that means giving up having a steady income then so be it – I can survive the odd cash flow crisis because I don’t have a particularly expensive lifestyle. But forgetting the money, I wonder if the grass is really greener on the other side? In other words, is the stress of being a freelancer actually worse than the stress of working for a big company. I understand this is a broad question, but I wondered if the panellists could share their personal views of this.

Thats a great question. Despite the economy I’ve really seen 2011 as the year of the contractor. So many friends and former colleagues have gone down this route this year its staggering. I don’t know if the grass is really any greener, I think that depends a lot on your existing set up, but the harsh realities of contracting really shouldn’t be underestimated. For every success I could easily quote a horror story, but a lot of the time problems are down to the way people approach self employment and nothing to do with the actual process of doing the work.

An insanely talented friend recently told me that it doesn’t matter how good you think you are, when you are contracting there is always someone better and usually cheaper. Loosing the company safety blanket is a big jump, but I would encourage you, I love the entrepreneurial spirit. Good luck!

Question: Chasing Payment

I’ve got a few slow payers for my web design business, and from what I can gather it’s not due to them having cashflow problems, more a case of “F-u, I won’t pay you until I have to.” So I’d like to start charging people interest on late payments. Is this a standard practice? And if so, do you think this is a good idea or one that will probably backfire?

Absolutely! You are totally within your rights to charge interest on late payments. Its important you detail this within your terms and conditions. Generally the Bank of England base rate is used as a reference rate for outstanding debt, or you can specify a contract rate.

BusinessLink have a useful tool that might help.

Question: Working from home

I’m a freelance web designer in the UK who works from home and am doing my taxes for the first time. Where can I find guidance as to what kinds of things I can claim for as costs?

The best £250 I ever spent was on a local accountant that walked me though this process. Generally speaking a percentage of utility bills, petrol and equipment cost is acceptable.

Photo: Some rights reserved by bondidwhat

Question: VAT

I’m leaving work and setting up on my own. Rather than trade under my own name, I want to create a company name to trade under, although it’ll be just me for the time being. But does that mean I have to register for VAT. How do I go about that, and how is that charged?

From: Ste

Hi Ste,

VAT rules in the UK are pretty simple, if not a little laborious to complete. If you are turning over more than £70k then yes you absolutely have to register. Its also in your advantage to do this early within your freelance career as you can claim the VAT paid out while you are setting up, having done this myself for a startup I am involved in its a huge help.

Take a look at the VAT wizard on the Business Link site, its surprisingly helpful

Question: Grants

Are there any grants available for hiring new employees that we could apply for? I run a small (7-person) agency and we’re thinking of expanding to 10. We’d be willing to take, for example, young or disabled developers, and quite frankly, we wondered if there would be any financial incentives for doing so?

I’ve just gone through this with my business having had similar thoughts, the short answer is not really. However all is not lost, depending on your location there are a few relocation and employment grants with the promise of additional funding when the governments “Enterprise Zones” are finally established.

Many local development authorities also have grants for research and innovation that are explicitly linked to job creation. I warn you the paperwork and red tape is typical for something like this but if you have the stomach for it it could be worth investigating.

Question: Invoicing

I’m a freelancer and like to work on a lot of different projects to keep things interesting. Which invoicing software would you guys recommend? I’ve heard good things about FreshBooks but are there any other companies that are worth trying?

From: Olivia

I like Freshbooks, I also like Mike McDerment the founder even more, hes a great speaker and the Freshbooks story is really inspiring. I’m also not surprised you’ve heard of it as this product has been targeted at the developer community like an Exocet missile, Mike speaks at web events and they have done a great job marketing wise. However I do think there are better products on the market.

My biggest gripe with Freshbooks is the lack of scalability, it does invoicing really well but as soon as your business grows I think a lot of people out grow it. If this concerns you then take a look at products such as Kashflow or Free Agent.

Photo: Some rights reserved by bondidwhat

In a Nutshell

Viewbix allows you to overlay any video hosted on YouTube or Facebook to create an interactive video.

In Detail

All of the activity within Viewbix is done via their web interface. The design is simplistic, but it flows cleanly from step to step.

Each Interactive Video takes 3 steps to produce:

1. Select a YouTube, Facebook or Vimeo video. Once the video URL has been added, you give the video a title which appears in a coloured bar above the video and then add the details to enable the Button feature that appears in the top-right corner.
2. Step 2 is the App element, essentially this is a piece of information (static or dynamic) that can be accessed while the video is playing. Items such as text, images, an RSS feed or a Twitter feed can all be added.
3. Sharing is the final step, this gives you the URL or iFrame code to embed the resulting output into your own site.

To show an example, I’ve taken an example video from the Great-save.com YouTube channel and added to it a Viewbix interactive layer:

Standard YouTube video

Viewbix version of the YouTube video, with their interactive layer

Overall

The end result of using Viewbix is quick and easy video commerce – the call to action to buy the product featured is extremely prominent – something that you cannot do on YouTube (yet). Everything about Viewbix is simple, the user interface right through to the resulting video. This may put more advanced users off of using Viewbix, but I think for a lot of people this will be a perfect way of combining video with links/calls to action in a free and simple to use solution.

The Details

• www.viewbix.com
• Viewbix on Twitter

In their own words:

“Your personal box office

Stubmatic is an online box office service for venues, promoters, theatres and anyone with tickets to sell. We help you sell tickets online and provide all the tools to promote, sell and track sales. 
We don’t charge any booking fees (but you can!)

Video Review

What makes Stubmatic interesting?

Recommendation is always the best form of flattery, so I was keen to check out Stubmatic, an online ticket sales platform after my friend Carl Crawley sent me a Skype IM raving about it. As it happens I found it to be a bit of a mixed bag.

The Good

Ticketing sales is a difficult science, trust me, my company has built and adapted our e-commerce solution for this purpose – its never been ideal as selling tickets v’s product is a little like chalk and cheese. This is where Stubmatic really wins, they understand the core essence of what it takes to sell tickets, its the little details that matter. Also, this is the only thing Stubmatic does, its simple, it sticks to its core message.

I really like the way Stubmatic walks you through the ticket selling process, the information it requires is simple to understand and the nitty gritty of ticket sales is presented in an easy to digest way. There are some real time savers here as well, each venue you enter is saved for future use, re entering data is a real gripe of mine and its great to see thought has gone into it.

Stubmatic has some serious competition both large and small, but they seem to have carved out a great niche with the web developer market, this will undoubtedly be down to their API which allows you to access all the ticket data via XML / jSON. A quick tweet to mention I was reviewing Submatic resulted in a flood of comments from a very techy audience.

The Bad

In the video review I talk about how I love simple apps, this is a blessing and a curse for Stubmatic, yes it stays true to its core message but it does so at a cost. To start with the UI needs a radical overhaul, @Wez tweeted

@benjamindyer Have found @stubmatic to be easy to use and 100% reliable. Needs a visual facelift though.

I have to agree with him, its looking tired and while I might not care if I was accessing this data via the API the “Box Office” feature is seriously lacking in fairy dust, as this is the front end sales page its really quite poor.

Also the promotional features are somewhat lacking, there is a MySpace widget which I guess would be handy if you had a time machine and planned on selling tickets in 2005. There are so many routes to market and channels that this needs addressing, and badly. Clearly Stubmatic know this as there is a little disclaimer at the bottom of the page promising better features in the future.

However my biggest gripe comes with the payment options, or lack of them to be precise. There is no real payment integration to speak of, PayPal is an option (it must be a level 1 integration) but if you plan on doing any sort of volume you’ll want to avoid those fees like the plague. No matter how simple Stubmatic is this is a fundamental oversight and probably keeps this solution locked into the micro to small business arena.

According to crunchbase Submatic received some seed funding in 2007, I hope its been a success for its founders as it does need some attention. However, I don’t want to close this review on a bad note, I did really like Submatic and I believe it is completely appropriate for a sector of the market – I urge you to check it out, its a good solution

Stubmatic offers a range of plans starting at free for 1 event and 10 tickets all the way to 60 events and 10,000 tickets priced at $99 per month.

The Details:

• Stubmatic.com 
• @stubmatic