My heart sank.

Clicking through to the whole post, though, the picture became clearer. A couple that had no complaints about the actual service had lost a pair of sunglasses. They thought that they left them in the car, but the car company couldn’t locate them. So they went on to TripAdvisor and wrote a bitchy review.

Really? You lose one of the two uninsurable travel items somewhere and assume it’s the car hire company’s fault and slag them off on the Internet?

Stay classy.

Accountability in advertising

It is no wonder that TripAdvisor has recently been pulled up for claiming that you can trust their reviews. Which is a pretty damning indictment of a company whose value is in providing … trustworthy reviews.

The Advertising Standards Authority looked into complaints about TripAdvisor’s use of phrases that included, ‘real reviews’ and ‘trusted advice’ from ‘real travellers’, as well as ‘honest travel reviews’ and ‘reviews you can trust’.

The review-monger responded that the ASA’s view was ‘highly technical’, which it doesn’t seem to be at all. If the reviews aren’t trustworthy, then you can’t claim that they are. I wish more companies would be technically honest about what their products and services actually do.

I imagine most of the reviews on TripAdvisor are real and honest. But the problem is that whatever they claim about their monitoring of suspicious activity, it seems reviews are still unverified. I could go on the website right now and write a cruel story about a hotel I have never even heard of, never mind stayed at. And it would be published. This gaping hole allows disgruntled, blackmailing customers, malicious competitors and any number of the Internet’s trolls to have a pop at anyone they choose.

Reviews count. They are important social proof. So is there a way to make them fairer than an open, lightly moderated forum, and yet still scalable?

A convenient partnership

Checkatrade are one of our clients (they don’t know that I’m writing this). They host a directory of tradespeople, about whom they publish customer feedback, or reviews. But their model is different.

When it comes to the reviewers and the reviewed, TripAdvisor are impartial. They make their money from third parties: advertisers and affiliates. As long as the traffic keeps coming to the website – and a negative headline on the first page of Google is going to help – then there is fuel for advertising dollars.

Checkatrade, on the other hand, make their money from the reviewed party. Tradespeople pay to be first vetted by the company (and not every business makes the grade), and then monitored by customer feedback. So the reviewed party are the paying members.

One thing that the members certainly cannot buy is good feedback. Their customers go onto the Checkatrade website and submit reviews of their work, good or bad. Each review is linked to a job that the member has completed – submitted (though not published) with real names – to rule out fictional reviews.

Still, what happens if a customer is in a vindictive mood? Because Checkatrade want happy members, they do everything that they can to ensure that the feedback is fair. This involves many measures, including moderation, speaking to the customer, opportunity for negotiation between the parties over issues raised, and a right to reply from the tradesperson.

Does this stack the odds against the consumer, the reviewer? Actually, no. Members are valuable to Checkatrade but what is valuable to the members is consumers trusting and using the directory. If the review system is not kept fair, then people will stop using the service. The three parties need each other – and that keeps the system in balance.

TripAdvisor, on the other hand, needs traffic. It is not in bed with either the reviewer or the reviewed. If hotel owners feel that TripAdvisor doesn’t care about them, it’s because it doesn’t.

There are other differences, but this seems to be the obvious point of departure. If the review site, the reviewer and the reviewed all depend on each other more closely, then I suspect that a natural balance is achieved more easily.

As for those critical reviews on TripAdvisor, I do think that genuine bad service should be exposed. But I’m more in favour of rewarding the good stuff. The next time you are delighted by a service or enjoy reading an article, make sure you shout about it one way or another, even if you’re an introvert.

The would-you-rather that Fluent encounters repeatedly with clients is: would you rather have some sales or more enquiries? Usually the question relates to the hiding of key information. Tell prospects everything and they might not buy. Conceal something vital and they’ll have to get in touch.

For example, in the hunt for more bookings, one hospitality client is being tempted to remove the availability calendar. The reasoning is twofold: first, that an empty calendar might scare people away; and second, that forcing an enquiry form request gives the company an opportunity to sell alternative dates or holidays if the original dates are not going to work out.

Sellers gotta sell

The first point is pretty compelling. An empty calendar is negative social proof. It drains confidence from the consumer. What do other people know about this place that I don’t?

However, if you’ve got no bookings, it’s probably not your calendar to blame. Make people want your product enough, through rich descriptions, compelling marketing and social proof, like positive reviews – and the empty calendar won’t matter. It might even be seen as a stroke of good luck – we found this gem before anyone else did.

The second point is more convincing. It is similar to the argument for concealing price. It gives prospects a reason to get in touch with you. Instead of a few sales, you can get many enquiries. Some of our clients feel that this puts them in control of the sales funnel – instead of people just bouncing off their website, they get to talk to potential sales. They can explain the benefits that justify the price in person. Or offer alternative dates. They can put on their sales hat, roll up their sleeves, and do everything within their power to convert each lead.

Which is my idea of hell.

I hate being sold to. I just turned down a better phone contract from a company because of their hideous sales technique. I would rather pay to keep my dignity and be afforded, calmly, the space to make my own decision.

It’s no surprise then that I also hate having to sell. But there are plenty of other people who are good at it. Who love it. Perhaps for them, creating some intrigue and drumming up enquiries is the way to go.

User experience and the long-term

I do wonder, though, if some of the businesses keen on getting direct enquiries don’t trust their own websites. If they suspect that prospects are slipping through the net, and that the only way they can know for sure is to talk to the leads in person.

Obviously that doesn’t scale so well. But also – you’ve got to create a website for your company that you trust. Take time to craft a compelling sales message with all the information that users need to make a decision up front. Create an easy, useful, delightful user experience. That is, after all, what our hospitality client said himself:

When I look for places to stay I find it really frustrating when they don’t show when they are full because I have to complete so many enquiry forms and then try to keep track of who have replied.

Exactly. Doesn’t helpfulness and clarity make people’s lives easier and make them more likely to buy from you? You may not get all those enquiries, but you’ll get some bookings, and, crucially, you’re playing a longer-term game of building trust with your users.

It’s do unto others – with UX. Create the experience for users that you would like to have yourself.

Have cake, eat cake

Surrendering to a helpful user experience doesn’t have to mean being in the dark about what is happening on your website. You can measure specific behaviours in analytics to see how people are using your site –what they look at before buying, or at what point they turn away.

And there is a middle way with sales versus enquiries. Why not be as useful and informative as possible up front but provide an opportunity for enquiry as well? Under the calendar put ‘get in touch if you’d like to know about cancellations’. Under the price put ‘call us to find out what discounts we are running this month’.

At Fluent we lean towards fashioning the most useful user experience: to create a strong, trustworthy image online for our clients. Having said that, if they are salespeople, and like nothing more than a hot lead on the end of the phone … we don’t stand in their way.

Of course, there are much more significant questions for us all to consider anyway. How can we worry about our websites when there are such vital decisions to be made as: crushed to oblivion by a rhinoceros or tickled to death by monkeys?

Here’s why.

I wanted people to be able to try before they buy – to sample the difference strategic thinking about content can make up front. Give me something to work on for an hour, and I’ll do it for free.

And we had some fun. I met Pitchup, champions of the staycation, who are merrily tearing up the camping and caravanning industry. SweetBar won an award for having a ‘clear, easy to read website’ after I had made (a small part of it) clear and easy to read. Picture Mix also got in touch – an exciting startup with potential to change the way that we think in a profoundly helpful way.

When I think about it, all three of these connections also involved mutual friends.

Most other enquirers just wanted a freebie. Many of their projects were interesting (only two were slightly unethical) but they were never going to buy. Like eating the free cheese sample in the supermarket, not because there’s a remote chance you’ll purchase Cornish yarg, but because you forgot to have breakfast. Really, I can haz another cube?

And that’s fair enough. I was glad to be able to help even in a small way. But one hour’s work is not going to help a project succeed in the longer term – for that, businesses need to grasp the nettle and invest some time and money and their best thinking into content strategy.

It’s not that the free hour offer didn’t lead to more work. 47% of free samples led to, or were part of, further projects. But these were mostly one-offs, ranging in size from tiny to small. I suspect most of these clients would have approached me anyway –the free hour was a handy way to discount the job.

So I’ve learned, unsurprisingly, that ‘free’ appeals to people with little money to spend, and that the best new work often comes via mutual connections.

That’s why the offer has gone. But let me make a new one: if you are serious about getting your web project to succeed and want to find out more about how improving your content over time will make that happen, let’s talk about it. Completely free.

What’s more, the talks were condensed into 5 minutes each – slavishly tied to 20-second slides so that there was no room at all for expansion. That meant we cut straight to the chase of the good stuff, and the less interesting ones were over quickly. Actually, it was a gratifying way to hear the content about content.

It also meant that we heard about 11 varied subjects in an hour, from Open Source CMS to specific copy production models and from case studies to the importance of context. I did the student thing and took notes (I have a lot to learn).

London content strategy meet up January 2012 – lightning talk summaries

Mags Hanley talked about content strategy for very small business, with an example from a client who runs a website business on her own. The crucial question is what content will make her money, and bring people into using the site? She had to be aware of the three main audiences using the website: the consumers, advertisers, and the owner herself – as she is the editor and publisher. It’s important to think tactically as well as strategically.

Tom Bamford gave a little walkthrough of semantic content. We’ve all seen the mess that is a copy from Word into a rich text editor. Content creators need a distraction-free basic toolbar and a decent grasp of semantic markup so they don’t make it even worse. Always customise your rich text editor. Then they’ll make content that reads well, to humans as well as Google, and which is more accessible.

David Farbey pointed out that 90% of corporate company content is offline. Some of that will inevitably inform what ends up on the website. A strategy is needed not just for the website content but for all the content. The problem is that people work in silos and they don’t read style guides. Get people working together, sharing content, get the tech writers involved. Oh, and you’ll need a sponsor within the company to make this happen.

Steve Parks’s subject was Open Source CMS and its use in enterprise. Open source’s popularity has grown. For it to work, it’s got to be about collaboration, collaboration, collaboration. He gave a great example of Sony using a Drupal system for an artists’ website. When Warner copied the code Sony was at first hacked off. But when Warner improved it, and shared it back with Sony, they got married and had beautiful babies. All this does mean that open source developers need to approach what they do as a professional service.

Rick Yagodich emphasised the importance of context to meaning – it is the third musketeer along with content and presentation (structure). Marketers know this. They talk about segmentation. But digital takes things out of context again. Deal with your customers, contextualize for them, and for your message at the word level.

Magus were the evening’s sponsor, and Simon Lande gamely stepped up for a lightning talk to pitch their product, ActiveStandards, which cleverly tracks errors in website content.

Francois Jordaan played Eeyore. His final slide was a car half submerged in a flood. Content strategy is a great idea he said, but still mostly doomed to fail. Most companies are not ready to become publishers when it comes to the web. And training them is hard. Content is going wrong for human reasons, which we have the least power and remit to solve. We could get better at spotting lost causes at least. Has anyone seen my tail?

Joanna Pieters lifted the mood again by sharing her model for ensuring the best copy makes it to a website in the prominent position it deserves. Fraudulent copy is the copy that look good but take attention away from the best stuff. Her ‘benefits checker’ model creates practical statements for a user persona – first factual and then emotional. All copy is checked for its ability to make these statements true.

Jonny Rose charted the shift to talking about ‘experiences’ when it comes to content. This is about people as much as content. And we’re lucky to have lots of data to measure. Put this together and your CMS can start to read people. For example, drawing from peoples’ social media output to give them what they want, and pushing relevant stuff to people. Next thing you know your CMS goes bad and won’t let you back through the pod bay doors. No, wait, he didn’t say that last bit.

Michael Alves said never be content with your content. It should inform and entertain. Make it interesting fer Chrissakes! Do this, in this order: analyse, strategise, categorise, structure, create, review, approve, publish, update, archive. People don’t read advertising – they read what’s interesting to them.

Peter Springett reminded us with a twinkle in his eye that CEOs know content is important, but want to know how much it costs. It boils down to value. How are we going to deliver value? One way is to make the publishing process repeatable and reuse content. Top tip for making the most of original content is to capture and store source materials whenever you research and create content. Archive everything. That way you can get loads of articles from one piece of research. Another way to deliver value is to seek out the talent. Audit your intelligence in the business. And remember, metrics are everything. Speak the language of a CEO.

There you have it. An compact evening reduced further to a blog post. If you were there – what struck you out of the lightning talks?

So here I am, on a page featuring the particulars my house, faced with Tweet and Facebook ‘Like’ buttons.

My first thought is: I’m not putting the link on Twitter. Mainly because my followers include hundreds of people to whom my house is completely irrelevant. Why would people I’ve connected with, loosely speaking for professional reasons, want to see inside my house? That would be a bit weird.

Facebook though – that’s mostly my real friends. Or at least people I have really met and who have probably been inside my house at some point. It’s nice to throw up the odd conversation starter on Facebook, so I click the button.

Within an hour two of my wife’s distant friends text her about how tidy our kitchen looks. When she picks the kids up from school another parent is concerned that we are going to remove our son from her child’s class. I get a message on Facebook from a friend I’ve not seen for some time, asking where we are moving to. Others comment on the post.

All this is fine – but a bit strange. It feels like we are not in control of the conversation about our moving plans. I’m not so bothered about people scrutinising the pictures and the price (you can’t afford to be too precious when your underpants are visible on Google Streetview) – although I know others who would be. But I probably wouldn’t do it again.

It turns out my house sale is not something I actually want to share via social media.

The sharing buttons are there for other users too, not just vendors. But, more generally, as we pursue fans and followers across sundry social media platforms are we forgetting to ask the question: why on earth would anyone want to share this anyway?

Do people really want to share your thing?

There are still things that people want to keep quiet. Britons selling houses might be one example. We don’t want people to know that we want to move. Nor how much our houses are worth. Nor what colour our bed sheets (or pants) are.

People like to share trivial personal news, funny items, coupons and offers, and interesting articles. After that there is such a thing as too much information, and a whole slew of content that is too boring or pointless to share.

Are all social platforms equal?

I shared my house on Facebook but not Twitter because I use those two platforms differently. I don’t really use Google+.

Which social networks would be best for your users to share items from your website? Do you know how they are using the different networks? Has anyone yet found a good reason for a business to be on Facebook?

Do people really want to share every part of your site?

It must be a fallacy that the more social media buttons you put on your pages the more people will share your content. Apparently the main way of sharing content is still cutting and pasting the URL, rather than clicking a button. That suggests that offering more ways to share is not the most effective way to get people to do so. They’ll share (or ignore) the content that they want to, regardless.

I dislike the sight of a rack of social media buttons on every page of a website, and also the hassle of having to edit auto-sharing options, such as a formulated tweet. Others in the office distrust those auto-share widgets from a privacy point of view, because they are unsure what is being tracked.

Let’s keep the user experience healthy and exercise some restraint. More importantly, let’s try to understand what and why our customers want to share and on which platforms.

When might users want to share?

Also, at what point in a process might your customers want to share? One of my favourite sharing examples is when the Wiggle website invited me, just after I had submitted a review of a product I bought from them, to share the review on Facebook. One little click of a button pushed the work I had just done out to a whole new audience without any further effort on my part. (Yes, that’s the writer talking).

Most of this understanding, like my experiment with the estate agent, comes through giving it a go and seeing what happens. Overall, it is not a given that it is better for people to share your stuff and follow you on social media. Ask anyone who has had their fingers burnt by a miscalculated Groupon deal. But if you do want to encourage sharing of your content, the key is not the buttons but creating content that people want to share in the first place.

Of course, once I had talked about it, I found that not everyone in the room was quite as corporate a type as I had assumed. Even those who were quickly pointed out that it’s all the same thing really, because at any one time they are only working with a small set of people, trying to sell something to the next person in the chain.

So what is it like doing content strategy for smaller companies? New article follows the video and slides.

Budgets are squeezed and projects are little

I’m sure everyone would say that money is short. Seriously, in three years, I am yet to work on a single project with enough money apportioned for a thorough job on the content.

Our clients vary from a one-off-website-in-three-days to businesses with employee numbers in three figures who pay for continual development. From a content point of view, it is rare that a project would entail more than two week’s work.

No one buys content strategy

We talk about content strategy in our sales pitch because it shows an intelligent and ordered approach to projects. But we don’t write it into proposals because no one will pay for it as a discrete set of items.

Clients will, however, pay for design, because they have an opinion on colours and fonts and don’t know how to implement them. They will pay for development because they have no idea how that works. Same with SEO. Many clients will also buy blogs, blogging help and copywriting. All of these things act as Trojan horses for sneaking content work through the gates.

It should be said, that with longer-term clients, they begin to trust us and like what we do, so content strategy is less of a snake-oil concept. (Although take a moment to appreciate the initial topsy-turvy world where SEO is paid for hand over fist and content strategy is suspected as a con).

They may or may not have content

Some want to lift the iceberg, and put every bit of corporate marketing that they’ve ever produced on the website somewhere. But a problem that is just as common is a client having little or no content at all. This is a bit disturbing, especially when combined with a small budget and short timescale, but it’s also a fine opportunity to shape all of the content from its inception, and have a lot of input into the final substance of the application.

Doing a bit of everything

My job title is Content Strategist, although sometimes in the office I’m simply called Microcopy Man. I do a healthy amount of copywriting, and have to look at everything I do, including social media and mailing, through the lens of user experience, information architecture and marketing. To clients I’m a content expert, so that turns into consulting as well.

Smaller businesses are simply not loaded with people creating content, never mind content that is any good. Working at this level means being prepared to fill in gaps and make content happen, even if that means taking the photos or inventing the business model.

Nowhere to hide

That’s a rather negative way to say that your mistakes will be noticed and you can’t hide from the client. So good relationships from the outset are vital, and depend on constant communication. A content strategy of some sort is essential to relationships too, even if it’s basic, even if it’s not billable. Having on paper a record of what is needed and who is responsible gives you a schedule and language to deliver the project smoothly.

Satisfyingly hands on

All of this means that I get to create, and my work brings a little sunshine to those corners of the web in which it appears. It means I get to educate, to train, to see clients learn how to blog well, or start to take more care with their content. It means that I get to work closely with a fun team, doing a variety of jobs for a high turnover of projects.

Doing content strategy for small businesses is challenging, and sometimes I feel like there is not much of a roadmap for what I’m doing. But ultimately it is satisfying, and I love it when a great website comes together.

• Create once, publish everywhere
• Content creators need help
• What customers want: to accomplish tasks, quickly
• The best content supports business goals
• Sharing: marginalia and pay fences
• Even the smallest word can change the course of the future
• Nail the names and message

The post contains some links to slides, video and notes from the conference if you want to find out more.

The follow up November Event, taking place Wednesday 16 November in the same venue, picks up some of the conversations that were firing at the conference, and hopefully turns up the heat under them:

1. Kate Kenyon – Content strategy, content management tools, and the happy ending
2. Gabriel Smy – Content strategy for small businesses (yes, that’s me)
3. George Webster – What content strategy can learn from Hollywood
4. Anne Caborn – Digital governance and risk: a comparison with the NHS

My own short talk will be a summary of what I’m learning doing content strategy for smaller projects and smaller companies. It’s great to have some theory about how content strategy fits into the overall picture, but when you’ve got a tiny budget and few days to deliver a website what can you really do to make sure that content gets to shine?

Expect crafty shortcuts and random animals.

I have a friend who switched political parties when he realised that basically, his people were in the other one. The people at these content strategy events are basically sound and amazing – down to earth, creative, at times ingenious but always pragmatic. My kind of people.

So I’m looking forward to hanging out with them on Wednesday, and chipping in my tuppeny-worth. Hope to see you there too.

And, in nearly all cases, that’s been happening.

According to Google’s recent update, my faith in this simple approach will now be rewarded even more. The ‘Panda’ algorithm change earlier this year was designed to assess website quality. Later, Google said: ‘Our site quality algorithms are aimed at helping people find “high-quality” sites by reducing the rankings of low-quality content.’

Google will never disclose exactly how they are attempting to discern “high-quality” – an element so ambiguous it comes with its own set of speech marks – but they do provide a telling list of questions to provide guidance. A bit like Eastern mysticism, the questions will lead us, trembling, towards an unknowable higher state…

The list of questions is worth bookmarking, and there are common themes to pull out of the list. If I had to sum up what Google is looking for in online content, this is what I’d say:

Authoritative and trustworthy

Authority and trust permeate the list, which is tricky, because you can’t just turn up one day and proclaim that you are either (well you could, but no one would believe you). To become authoritative and trustworthy, you need to write strongly and accurately, provide information that checks out, on a website with an experience that doesn’t leave users anxious or confused. You need to make a name for yourself with reliable content over time, and care about the subject.

Original and useful

These two go together like Jedward or Brangelina. I bang the usefulness drum all the time, because if your website is not useful, people simply don’t stick around. But useful alone is not enough – your content must also be original. In other words, it must be more useful than the other websites showing up on the same search results page.

It might be in more depth or take an unusual slant on the subject. It might provide unique information, be comprehensive, or be presented in a more compelling way. Whatever it is, you must avoid your content being too short, unsubstantial or unspecific.

And ‘original’ has another application: Google likes content that is original on the site, that is, not duplicated among your pages. Repetition is not necessarily a good thing when it comes to SEO.

Well written

Well duh. Of course it should be well written. But if that’s the case why do so many businesses spend so little on quality, error-free writing?

Good writing is not something abstract and hard to pin down. In fact the Google questions nail it. They talk about quality control, and eliminating spelling, stylistic and factual errors. They mention the role of editing, attention to detail, producing a print level standard of writing.

Hint: if you’re mass-producing copy through a large number of creators (and probably paying them very little), then you haven’t got a hope. I like this question: ‘Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail?’ Well, are they?

Not annoying

There is a strand in the reasoning of Google that is best summed up as: don’t piss people off. Write content for readers, not to get them. Tricking them to your site undermines your trustworthiness. Bye-bye. Don’t produce content that is likely to draw complaint (which is not the same as controversy). And guess what? Excessive adverts annoy people.

All of which is hardly surprising, and yet people still get a glimpse in their eye when a spammer tries to flog them peripheral SEO services to pimp up their search performance.

Of course it’s important how you structure your site, what you do with the metadata and keywords. But these are lesser considerations compared with creating core content that is authoritative, original, useful, well-written and doesn’t drive people mad.

In Google’s own words: ‘focus on delivering the best possible experience for users.’

Or, as Socrates said: ‘endeavour to be what you desire to appear.’

Talk about naïve.

The worst example I found was the home delivery information page on the Homebase website. It was long, ugly, and featured 33 mistakes. The gravest of the lot was this bad boy:

…have your order delivered to your workplace, a neighbors’s, etc.

Neighbors’s? To combine a localisation fail (UK English, anyone?), a grammar fail (apostrophe rage!) and a syntactical fail (neighbour’s workplace? Why would I want it delivered there?) in one single word is a miraculous feat. One could say Herculean, if Hercules had been really, really stupid.

There were also asterisks that linked to nothing, commas and full stops awry or missing, and three different notations for time (6.00pm, 6pm, 6 pm). That’s without touching the inconsistent person (‘you’, ‘the customer’), the Americanisms (‘neighorhood’) and the internal jargon (‘delivery lead time’). And the fact that the whole page took 1,493 words to explain how a delivery would work.

Several spellchecks later…

But that was years ago; back when businesses were trying to work out how to get their systems and information onto the web. Of course mistakes were being made, and things being overlooked. In some ways it must have been easy for web copy in a massive outfit like Homebase to slip through the cracks.

So what’s the same page like today?

The good news is that someone has worked on it. The am/pm denotations have been cleaned up and it is now written in UK English. A few words have been shaved off (still 1,377 words long though) and the punctuation reined in.

But the fact that someone has worked on the page makes the extant mistakes even worse. The very first line begins: ‘We’ll deliver it all for from only £5.95…’ (my emphasis). And the second paragraph is word-for-word the same nonsensical sentence from the old page:

Please note that your order is made up of a combination of items / delivery services, deliveries may be made separately.

How does this happen? Someone has looked at the page and implemented changes. Why are there still big, obvious mistakes?

I don’t run a colossal retail business. So when I ask this question, I genuinely want to know: when you’re Homebase, how hard is it to eradicate mistakes in your web copy?

Spelling mistakes cost money

The point is that mistakes look sloppy. They erode trust. In the case of a large corporation like Homebase, they say to the customer: we simply don’t care enough about you to provide you with clear, thoughtful information. We’re not even going to proofread it properly. Enough people buy from us anyway – who cares if you can’t work out what our delivery terms are?

How many businesses can afford to take this attitude? If you’re not as big as Homebase, mistakes may hurt you a lot more. Instead of taking it for sloppiness, people will think your spelling mistakes are the sign of an amateur. It was the moment that I spotted the word ‘Sreenplay’ on a film poster that I realised it was not the real thing.

And let’s not just talk in the vague terms of trust and professionalism. One online retailer doubled its revenue by correcting a single error on its website. The BBC story claims: ‘when there are underlying concerns about fraud and safety, then getting the basics right is essential.’

We need to know, on an unfamiliar website, that it is secure and reliable before we will buy anything through it. Spelling mistakes do not give us that reassurance. Spelling mistakes put a business in the same company as spam emails about enlarged organs and updates from that guy on Facebook who quit school a bit too early.

A few years into this work and I am not surprised by mistakes any more. Nor do I think it is merely a basic consideration that you write your copy properly. Rather, I think it’s a fundamental, strategic and essential one.

Photo: adapted from a photo by iirraa on Flickr

The shopkeeper started asking me questions. What kind of goat’s cheese? Is it with other food, after dinner – what’s the menu? When are you eating it, tonight, or in a few days?

When I walked in there I had a fair idea what I wanted. Within seconds of conversation, I realised that I had a lot to learn about selecting cheese. I also had a much better picture of what would work. After a short while, I was asking the man behind the counter for recommendations.

Compare that to a supermarket: limited range, pre-packed, potluck within safe parameters. Ask a shelf-stacker for advice and you’ll get bemusement and a shrug if you’re lucky.

Another question-asker, the Flower House, create stunning bouquets. Go in there with a budget and they’ll ask what main flower you’d like to design around, how many colours you want in there, what the occasion is, all the while giving advice and telling you how to carry flowers on a bicycle without ruining them.

Come to think of it, I chose my mechanic because he asks me questions too. He explains exactly what’s wrong, finds out what our car usage is going to be like over the next few months, asks whether we would prefer to spread costs or sort it all now; use cheap parts that will need replacing sooner or expensive ones that should see us through.

I drive out of my way to go there, even though there’s an authorised garage just up the road. That’s the authorised garage who take the keys on the front desk, make all the decisions themselves and hand them back with a vastly more expensive bill a few days later.

Incisive questions show expertise and build trust

You could see questions as an annoyance. You could take them as a slight on your intelligence. But I know when someone asks me a question that often they care about solving my unique problem (creating a memorable cheeseboard), serving my unique need (how I use the car), or delighting my unique wife (with a one-off bouquet).

There is a time and place for I know what I want just hand it over. But don’t believe the myth that a tailored service costs more. Not so. The cheese and flowers are cheaper in the supermarket but they are nowhere near as good. When it comes to the garage, the personalised work saves me a small fortune.

I was reminded of this the other day when our web company quoted five times as much as any one else for a contract (we have since discovered). The client got back to us with ‘why are you so expensive?’ We answered with a barrage of questions about what they wanted to do and why, and how they expected to work it. We even questioned some of their numbers.

We got the gig. They didn’t even contact any of the others. They offered us more money than we had asked for.

I guess we knew what we were talking about, and didn’t want them to waste their money. That’s a valuable trait when you find it in other places, so that’s what we aim to do ourselves.

Ask enough insightful questions and you begin to attract trust.

There is many a time a cheap, even free, website will do. But not always. And if you are a business who can’t afford to squander cash and want to find a trustworthy website company who know their stuff and can build something that works just for you, that’s what we’re about.

But you’ll have to put up with a tonne of questions first.