Pilipinas Kay Ganda Website Disaster Could Have Been Totally Avoided

I had the usual reaction over the new Department of Tourism campaign, about using a slogan that is not immediately recognizable to its target audience, blablabla, and that was the end of it.

My hair stood on its end though when I heard the news that the Pilipinas kay Ganda website URL, beautifulpilipinas.com, would lead to a porn site if you change one letter in the URL.

I was wondering why this mishap happened. Ok fine, I admit I'm indignant about it.

For us web developers who are also concerned about Usability and Search Engine Optimization, I believe URLs should be carefully chosen.  It represents yourself, organization, and in this case, your country.  New website names should be chosen :

1)  to immediately tell what the site is about
2)  for ease of use of the target users
3)  for easy finding of search engines or SEO

1)  Immediately tell what the site is about


I encourage anybody who wants to set up any webpage, whether a free blogspot account or a paid domain to carefully think over and list a bunch URLs.  Your URL or website name should clearly state what your website is all about.  For beautifulpilipinas, fine.  That passed that step.

2)  My next consideration, for usability:

• Is your chosen name easy to remember?  
• Is it short or at least an acceptable length?
• Did you put in dashes, underscores or numbers that might confuse your searchers?  Note that these are fine, as long as kept to a minimum and easy to remember.
• Are you using spellings that might confuse your searchers?
• Are there synonyms, same words with different meaning, that might confuse your users?

And the last 2 points is where things went awry.  Pilipinas, that stands for a country, can also stand for persons, the Pilipina. Westernize the words. Filipinas is also used to stand for our country, and course our women are more popularly called Filipina here and in other countries.

3.  Optimize for Search Engines  

To optimize your URL for search engines, it is as simple as following steps 1 and 2. But there are other things your web-developer should do in this step, and that could have avoided the disaster of the tourism website.

For the web developers-marketers part, we practice a standard procedure of searching out the potential URLs that can be used where we find:

-  related keywords being searched

-  how many searches have been done for the searched keywords in the past month or year

-  etc. etc.

This way, you can advice the client what may happen when using a particular URL, and let the client choose what suits the purpose.

Some people would prefer using the barely searched keyword, and is willing to take on the challenge of  getting people to visit. If people pick it up, then only you will be identified with that keyword.  Other people prefer to be safer, and will pick names with keywords already being searched.  

With this step alone, you will quickly see there are no searches for beautifulpilipinas.  Free advice:  Since the Philippines' tourism has been around for sometime you can think up and search for more words that people are actually using now when they want to visit or vacation in the Philippines.  Then you can think more of what words can be used for your taglines, etc.

Now search for beautifulfilipinas and you will see the obvious.  Lots of searches, and other keywords with searches are "beautiful filipina", "beautiful filipina women", and "dating filipina".  By now, even if you cannot imagine these could lead to a porn site, you will at least get that the country's synonym stands for its women as well.  And it is easy to read, what is being pertained to here is another kind of tourism industry that is not so wholesome as the Department of Tourism would prefer.
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Looking at it another way, the real winner in this situation is the website owner of  beautifulfilipinas.com because, by applying these simple steps mentioned above, now an entire country is looking at their homepage.  Lucky bastards.

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Your Website Never Gets Done, No.

I was introduced to do a business professor who immediately asked me the perennial, "So, what do you?"  ice breaker.

I said I help online businesses increase sales by puttering about the website, tinkering with copy, codes and stuff.

And upon learning I am a resident at some websites, he was quite surprised, "What else is left to do after a website is up?"

Hoo boy.  This business professor obviously knew his way only about brick and mortar stores.

Websites must be continually checked, tweaked, tested.  Yes, websites are living, growing beings.  And like people who become personable, a website has a lot of character-development to do.  If you are a person and you stop adapting or changing and remain "just the way you are,"  man, I can bet you'll be one helluva boring person.

It's the same thing with websites.  A product page may contain all the info you want to put in, but you have to continually check if the page is pleasing customers.  Are they buying?  What are they saying about why they didn't buy?  You note all the positive and less than positive things and continuously work on your web pages, until you get what customers like, earn their trust and buy from you.

Same thing with blogs.  If you put it up, put all the info you want to share,  then suddenly stopped updating, that wouldn't look very interesting now, would it?

So yes, resident online workers like us, we never run out of things to do in a website.  Especially if you keep testing which pages a customer likes, you have to continuously present different versions of a web page until you find one that customers really like.  (Me, I use the free but ever dependable Google Website Optimizer for this one.)  And besides pleaseing the customers, search engines, especially Google, like it when a website has a constant stream of activity.  It can see that the website is up and running and you get nicer search results when people look for your stuff online. 

Give your Website some TLC today.  Some simple ways:

• Look at your old copy, edit for changes.  I'm sure you have learned more about your business since you last put up your website.
• If you can, write some new stuff.  Doesn't have to be long.  Or if you can afford to shell out some, get a writer to add more to your content.
• If you are SEO-savvy, maybe you can look at your codes and see if there's anything you need to update.
• Add some pictures, even to your articles, not just the product pages.  Don't forget to tag for SEO :-)
• Try testing some of your pages with Google Website Optimizer.  Will definitely be worth your time.

Oh, and if you don't have it yet, it's never too late to add in Google Analytics. This will help you see the actual numbers of people coming in to your website.

Don't forget, keep your website activities regular to help your website be found in the searches, PLUS when people get to your website, they will like staying and availing of your products and/or services.

Some Basic Online Work Words that I Will be Discussing

Here are my most favorite topics about online work that I will be discussing time and time again.  If anything, I have started on some posts already.  This is posted for those who intend to learn more about working online.  This post will be expanded time and time again, depending on trends that will commonly crop up when you are an Online Filipino Worker.

SEO - is Search Engine Optimization. What you do on or for your website to be found when searched on Google and the other search engines.  This includes fixing the website to be easily scanned by search spiders, posting great content in the site, posting informative SEO articles in other websites, getting other sites to link to your website, etc. etc.

Web Usability - making your website easy to use for the internet user.  This involves:  putting simple and understandable information,  making choosing options easy, clear info what will happen when a user clicks this or encodes that, having the most important element, such as a button or table, in the right place easily seen by the user, etc.

Web Analytics - collection and analysis of all the data happening in your website.  Use the data to improve your users' experience and your sales or sign-ups.

Web Conversion - When your users convert/ do something in favor of your company's objective, such as buying, signing up as member, subscribing to your newsletter, etc.

Conversion Rate Optimization - All the efforts you do to increase the percentage of sales/ conversions vis-a-vis the number of visitors in your website.  To optimize conversions, you usually tweak your website's usability, copywriting, testing, analytics, etc.

Web Copywriting - Writing persuasive text in your web page that will make readers convert/ do something in favor of your website's objectives.

A/B Testing/  Multivariate Testing - Presenting to users different versions of 1 webpage to see which version leads to more conversions/ sale/ sign-ups/ etc. Testing which web page version is the most effective.

There are other virtual online work such as programming, admin tasks, customer service and the like, but I will focus more on the ones above as these are the main tasks I do.


Other words I will usually use:

If I say traffic, most likely I am not referring to the heavy volume of cars on the road, but the number of people that pass through the website.  These are the same people I refer to when I say, audience, users, readers, etc.

Copy is not nicking your classmates answers in the test, but the written text of a web page, advertisement, etc.


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Fastfood Websites: Drop the Fancy Flash!

It's year 2010 and websites are expected to load quickly.  If your websites are not loading quickly, you may be losing customers.


The family has been clamoring for lunch and we are all hungry.

I went over to visit the KFC delivery (Philippines) website and looked forward to eating their yummy chicken for lunch.


At the front page:  Waiting for Flash... waiting for flash... waiting for flash.  I have 4 files downloading so it may be affecting the speed of the flash.   Hmm....

I clicked menu hoping to find the food offers and prices.

Again,  waiting for Flash... waiting for flash... waiting for flash. Getting impatient here...

Waiting for Flash... waiting for flash... waiting for flash.

Hurgh!  All I wanted is the name of the food item and the price!  Not worth it.  Click X.

Website developers,  Usability workers:  Fastfood websites invite the interest of HUNGRY PEOPLE.  They want quicker results more than the usual.  Remove all elements that bog down speed, such as flash items. 

It's a simple matter of putting yourselves in the shoes of the user.

Free Usability Tip:  If you really want to include the pretty flash pages for a fastfood site:

• On your home page, list the most popular food items and the prices and put your phone number in big letters
• At the side, put a navigational menu to links that contain all your pretty pages. 
  

HURGHHH.
Sorry but I'm really hungry.

I've been checking the other fastfood delivery sites just now, may require another post.  HURGG!