twelveoaksgroup.net » web services

Mom and Pop CAN Go Virtual

Elizabeth — Mon, 03 Sep 2012 17:08:24 +0000

For small business owners the thought of a website can be a daunting idea. Limited time, skills or budget is enough to turn many away, and can be the demise of existing sites. Allow me to clear the air and bring a new perspective…

Fact: Today’s consumer turns to the internet before the phone book. We go there for reviews, pricing, hours of operation, contact info, latest happenings, buying, comparison, location, videos and pictures –to name a few. If a small business is able to address even some of these key issues with their website, they will inevitably reach new customers, save time spent on the phone, and have a leg up over competitors.

Fiction: Websites need to be updated all the time. Yeah, it’s great to keep potential customers in the loop about what’s happening with your business, but this info doesn’t have to be posted to your website. If site maintenance is of concern to you, you’re better off omitting time sensitive information to avoid outdated pages.

Fact: Sometimes less is more. If you don’t have the budget or skills to create a site with all the bells and whistles, that’s not a deal breaker. Websites should be clean, informative, and functional. Simplicity in many cases will provide the user with the information they need, and will allow them to take the next step by visiting your business in person.

For more information about how a website might benefit your small biz or to get pricing info, please contact Twelve Oaks Group. It maybe more affordable than you think!

Elizabeth

Elizabeth McPhail grew up learning about the trials, tribulations, and perks of small family-owned business. She creates and maintains websites and blogs, and in her spare time can be found on the water boating!

Are There Project Management Tools Available For Small Business?

Pam — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 12:55:00 +0000

Let’s ask that again. Do you know of any project management tools available for small business? I’m glad you asked. For those tech-savvy individuals within a small business, project management becomes a necessity to stay organized. Managing projects on time is the lifeblood of your company. But, are there project management tools out there that are cost effective, easy to use and scalable as your business grows? Let’s take a look.

Link to Full Comparison

For those of you that manage teams with an overabundance of spreadsheets to keep everyone organized and on track, I’m sure you have found that that method can become very cumbersome to manage, as well as possibly being the cause of projects not being completed at all. I’ve only see this method used successfully once. That took a lot of work and time — time you could be spent doing something much more critical to your operations.

I’ve tried multiple solutions in an effort to become more streamlined with keeping my web design and development teams on track, and here are 3 project management solutions that I have found to be helpful: Basecamp, Trello and Asana.

Basecamp

I’ve used Basecamp for many years and have even gone through several design updates with them. Just when I think that they can’t get any better, they come up with even a more useful update than they had previously.

Basecamp is the brain child of 37 Signals. The parent company has one of the greatest philosophies I’ve ever seen — “The basics are beautiful. We’ll never overlook what really matters: The basics. Great service, ease of use, honest pricing, and respect for our customer’s time, money, and trust.”

It’s so easy to set up your projects, assign To Dos, assign people, update files, move things around — and I could go on. Basecamp has a very attractive format that allows small businesses to know exactly where they are in any given project. Are there upcoming milestones that need to be met? How do I know if someone is late on a task? Hey, we forgot to put Joe Blow on the project; we need to add him.

Basecamp makes it easy to answer those questions — all at an affordable rate! They’ll even give you a 45-day trial period to check it out for free. This puts Basecamp at the top of our list for project management tools for small businesses.

Trello

While Basecamp may have come in at the top, it was a hard decision to make as to whether to stay with Trello or not. Trello makes collaboration with teams a breeze with their boards and cards to help a small business manage their projects — and it’s **free**. Grab a card and move it to a different list. Add labels in a second. Insert checklists, and much more.

Do you have a hot topic that you want read right now? Assign it its own color and label — you know, like Priority or Completed. And with options like sharing, printing and exporting, small businesses starting out have all they need to make project management a breeze.

So why the switch to Basecamp? For the web services teams at Twelve Oaks Group, the switch over was due to Basecamp having more options that would fit our needs. One big decider for us is that Basecamp is more customized to meet the needs for team communication where Trello is pretty much strictly a task management tool. Basecamp also allow you to receive a daily update as to updates that have taken place the previous day which allows us to just be much more effective for our clients.

Asana

Asana’s development team built Asana to be fast and versatile and to easily cover the simplest of small business projects to the extreme of very complex projects. Asana is composed of three window panes within one. The first pane shows your workspaces, as well as the projects within the current workspace.

The middle pane contains the name of the selected project and the list of tasks associated with that project. You can then expand that pane into a third pane that described the details of the particular task like who’s assigned to it, due date and comments.

Adding tasks is a piece of cake. You just start typing the name of the task in the appropriate row and there it is.

I used Asana some time back when they were newer and didn’t have as many options. They just didn’t seem to be as intuitive as I would have liked. It appears as though things have changed for the better. Still all in all, Asana does have the features to be great at what it does — and that is to serve you quickly and efficiently.

It doesn’t matter what Twelve Oaks uses. What matters is what is going to help you when it comes to managing your projects. The question we started out with was, “Is there project management tools for small business?” The question is yes. We have listed just three that happen to be those that Twelve Oaks has direct experience with, but there are others that may be more useful to you. The final choice is what are you going to use?

Still can’t decide which is best? Get additional information from our consulting team at (731) 337-4330. We’ll be glad to help you sort it all out.

Pam

Pam Lokker is a master writer and proficient virtual assistant, as well as being Co-owner of Borlok Virtual Assistants.

In addition, Pam is Customer Service and Content Manager for the Twelve Oaks Group.

Branding Your Small Biz

Elizabeth — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 17:51:27 +0000

Big-businesses can offer product or service with a “take it or leave it” attitude –small businesses however, are not afforded this luxury. The little guys –in an effort to stay in the game or grow—are often left to tweak the image of their product or service in different situations so that meaningful messages are conveyed to potential customers at all times. This creates a tricky situation for branding consistency. Below are a few things to keep in mind as you strive to brand and grow your business.

1) Potential customers need to have a clear understanding of what and who your business is before they will buy anything.

If your business is not self-explanatory, it’s important that you convey clear and concise messages about what you have to offer and the application of it –think elevator speech, and then where you’re going to publicize that info. If your business is self-explanatory, think about the image you’d like to convey to people and how you might set yourself apart from other businesses like yours.

2) Keep everyone on the same page.

It’s Important that businesses strive for consistency and cohesion with all publicized info. The way information is presented on Twitter, Facebook, and websites varies greatly, but because each of these platforms is so effective at relating to the customer on different levels, there is immense opportunity to enhance the image of your business. That being said, it’s important the customer doesn’t receive conflicting ideas. Social media admin need to have a clear understanding of what the short-term and long-term marketing objectives are and an overall understanding of how to put forth info and respond to comments in a way that aligns with the priorities and values of the business.

3) Maintain consistent logos, colors, and fonts.

While you may be a long way from the widely-recognized Swoosh, it’s important to remain consistent with these nuances. Some brand recognition is better than none. Brochures, business cards, website headers, etc. should all maintain the same look and color scheme.

Small-business is full of compromise. Next time you find yourself at a crossroads, weigh your options and stay mindful of your business branding. Would you like some hands-on assistance? See what Twelve Oaks Group has to offer.

Elizabeth

Why Google Apps Is An Excellent Collaboration Tool for Local Governments

Twelve Oaks Group — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 12:50:45 +0000

Cloud computing is beginning to catch fire in local governments due to the potential benefits that can be realized — everything from the possibilities of lowering IT-associated costs, to increasing flexibility and simplifying IT management. One other benefit that can be realized is the ease of collaboration which makes Google Apps for Government an excellent tool for local governments.

Why you might ask? There are actually 8 reasons. You ready to take a look

Versatile - According to Wikipedia, ” Google Apps is a service from Google providing independently customizable versions of several Google products under a custom domain name. It features several Web applications with similar functionality.”
Secure – Google data centers have been engineered by top-notch security experts & FISMA certified. Added in at no extra cost is best-in-class disaster recovery
Gmail – What could be easier for your agency than having 25GB storage for your Gmail, less spam, and 99.9% uptime. Email security is powered by Postini. In addition, Gmail has been designed to be a powerhouse resource for convenience and user-friendliness allowing you to work from wherever you are, work faster, and use text, voice and video chat to connect with those people you need to connect with.
Google Calendar - Your calendar is equipped to handle agenda management, scheduling, shared online calendars and mobile calendar syncing capabilities.
Google Docs – Do you need to work on a document or spreadsheet in partnership with someone in your agency? No problem. Work in real time without having to deal with attachments.
Google Sites - Would you like to have an intranet or team-managed site for your local government agency? Google Sites is secure AND it allows you to set up sites easily without having to deal with special coding.
Video – Using Google Apps Video gives you the freedom and ease of use to share your videos — securely. Provide support to agency training programs or use videos to add a personal touch to staff communications.
Open Records Compliance – In Tennessee (where we are) all levels of government are required to retain certain electronic communications as part of the Tennessee Open Records Act. If your local government is archiving e-mails, it should be, and Google Apps has easy and affordable options that comply with the Open Records Act.

Google Apps for Government provides reliability in cloud-based apps — AND it is certified by the U.S. government. Want to customize by adding more apps? Just check out the Google Apps Marketplace.

Google Apps for Government has every app to make your agency run like a lean, mean machine — cost effectively. Need further proof as to why Google Apps is an excellent collaboration tool for local governments? Check out Google Apps for Government and see the case studies, FAQ, the section on what voters have to say and more for yourself.

Twelve Oaks Group specializes in developing easy to manage online resources for Local Government and has multiple web services that may be of interest to you — or if you think of any questions about Google Apps for Government that you don’t have answers for, give us a call at (731) 337-4330. We’ll be glad to help you out.

Twelve Oaks Group

Tennessee-based Twelve Oak Group is unique in its approach to its customers. Each team member is committed to helping grow small business, making local government more accessible, and enhancing communities with their web design and consulting services expertise. We will not deviate from this approach!

Why Small Businesses Need to Set Up Visitor Tracking for Their Websites

Twelve Oaks Group — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 14:33:41 +0000

In order for small businesses to be competitive with the “big box” stores, it is wise for them to take advantage of different analytics tools and resources to know how their website is performing. Why do they need to set up visitor tracking? Let’s look.

According to Wikipedia, “Website visitor tracking (WVT) is the analysis of visitor behavior on a website.” In order to measure that, small businesses should look into which applications going to give you the best results.

What is website visitor tracking?

Visitor tracking (or management) refers to how many people come to your website, what pages they are looking at, what page do they come in on, as well as leave your site on, and much more.

Look at Twelve Oaks Group, for example. By looking at any one of the website tracking tools, we can determine how many visitors checked out our site on any given day, what country they were from and even what city they hail from, how many minutes they stayed on our site, did they access our site from a mobile device, and so much more. Just imagine checking out our content overview and discovering that 69.23% of visitors in the month of June so far entered our website through our Home page.

Why is visitor tracking useful to small businesses?

Visitor tracking is useful to you because the more information you can gain about your visitors, the closer you can get to satisfying their needs and requirements. What are they looking for? Website visitor management can give you a closer look at what their searching for, how many times they are searching for it and what you can do to tell them that you have the solution to what they want. This makes your content more compelling, your mailing list management for campaigns more effective, your products more visible and likely to be purchased, and your return on investment be higher. Wow! How great can that be?

In summary to this section, some questions you should want answers for regarding visitor tracking are:

Is your advertising and marketing working?
If you’re paying for ads on Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter or Pinterest, you need to know if those dollars are well spent: do visitors from these sources stay on your site? Are they finding what they need?
Is your site communicating effectively?
By looking at the pages visitors check out, can you determine if they’re finding what they need? What do you need to tweak as far as your content? Do you need to explain further?
What is your bounce rate? – A high percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page needs to be addressed. You need to get those visitors to venture deeper into your site.
Is your home page (or your most popular entrance pages) capturing the attention of visitors?

What are some WVT tools that Twelve Oaks Group uses?

We’re only going to mention 3 website visitor tracking tools right now — and these are used by Twelve Oaks Group now — yes, it’s okay to have more than one tool to get the answers to what you need to know.

Google Analytics

Invariably, the most well-known and most widely-used of the website tracking applications is Google Analytics. Offered by Google as a free service, Google Analytics (GA) provides a wide assortment of statistics that will tell you all your need to know about your website traffic. You can also upgrade to a premium version for a fee.

Get Clicky

Clicky is a real time web analytics service. That means that once you login, you can see what’s happening on your site — right now. Google Analytics has Real-Time also with the number of visitors on the site currently, the number of pageviews during each of the most recent 30 minutes, and the number of pageviews during each of the most recent 60 seconds.

Twelve Oaks uses Clicky as well for several options that GA does not have. Since Get Clicky only focuses on real time data as a default. There is access to comprehensive history; you just need to dig a little deeper on their site in order to pull out that information.

Lucky Orange

Lucky Orange records your visitor’s every click, mouse movement, scroll, and keypress.

Lucky Orange is unique in that it provides you real time analytics like GA and Get Clicky. In addition, there are three more features that you may want to know about. I’m only going to give you 3 bullet points per feature, so for sure you’ll want to go check everything out.

Live Chat Software

Chat box stays on the page and follows visitor as they browse your site for a seamless experience.
Can watch visitors screen while chatting with them
Add Customized Pre Chat Questions

Visitor Recordings & Live Sessions

Watch in real time or automatically records visitor browsing sessions
Watch every mouse movement, keypress, scroll, screen resize
Ability to chat with visitor while you watch them browse.

Heat Maps

Aggregate lots of click data to form beautiful heatmaps
Click heat maps
Mouse movement heat maps

Live Visitor Map

Watch a real time visitor map of all your website visitors
Animated with custom effects
Plot line between points for neat effect

So as a refresher, why do small businesses need to set up visitor tracking for their websites? It’s all for the better to see your visitors, my friends. You need to get a good overview of what they need, get feedback on your site’s performance and services and be able to be flexible so you can adapt quickly.

Do you need help setting up one or more analytic sites? The Twelve Oaks Group web services and consulting team can help you. Why not give us a call at (731) 337-4330.