The internet has come a long way with online payment systems becoming more and more common on small-medium business websites. When selling products and services online

there are a few different options to make it easier for people to give you their money!

The first method, and most common is the shopping cart. iSonic Joomla Websites are designed using a cart system called Virtuemart. This a free to download Joomla extension that allows you to list as many or as few products as you like (our current largest record for a small business is 1600 products in over 50 categories, however we know of other sites that list over 80,000!).

With regards to payment, the possiblities are varied with the following options being the most common:

Paypal - Probably the most common payment gateway available on the internet. This system is very reliable and trusted accross the world. You can process credit cards with this system however it does push the payer to create a log in.

We all know testimonials kick butt when building crediblity with your potential clients, however because everyone knows this,

How can you stand out from the crowd and make your testimonial that little bit more special?

Here are a few ideas that will help:

Show off your work

Add some pictures. If you are a photographer - add images of your work. If you are a handy man - show photos of each renovation you have done beside the relating testimonial. Why not have a video walkthrough on a featured work you have done?

Prove it's a real person

Could you put up a photo of the person giving the testimonial as well as their name? How about adding their contact details and a note saying that these people are happy for you to contact them to find out more about the service you provided? Finally, could you capture them in a video saying how great you are?

In a nutshell, hosting is the service required to keep your website and email up and running on the internet 24/7. The most important aspects of hosting is your uptime (is your website up all of the time?) and service speed (is your website fast to load, and if it breaks is it quick to be fixed?).

Choosing the right hosting company

It is critical that your website is online ALL OF THE TIME! We all know you only get one chance at converting internet leads, and you don’t want to lose it because you didn't want to pay an extra few dollars a year on hosting. Additionally, if your hosting goes down, not only does your site disappear, but also your email access - which is definitely not a good thing!

The service needs to be local. Having Brisbane-based hosting is definitely a plus if you are a Brisbane business. The service provider needs to be local and easy to contact preferably by phone.

Having your hosting local will also reinforce to Google and other search engines that your business is local and hence better than the competing website that is located in Texas...

In the race to get as many visitors as possible to our website and e-mail marketing campaigns, it often boggles me why a lot of Brisbane's business people don't convert what they already have into leads and sales. A site getting 100 unique hits a month from the Brisbane area and converting 5% is a lot better than a site getting 5000 uniques from Indian call-centres with no conversion.

The question is how do you improve the conversion rate of your website.

Well there are a couple of things that you need to look at...

The first thing you should have is a method of tracking how many people are looking at your site, and more importantly how don't leave after seeing just one page (bounce rate) and even more importantly where they are going. All iSonic Joomla websites are integrated into the Google Analytics system however there are many systems out there that will allow you to do this. Having this type of tracking will better allow you to understand what your visitors are doing when they come to your site, and therefore what can be improved on.

Today we are going to cover a range of topics that will keep your website usable by both your users and you – the business owner.

When building a website in Joomla or from scratch there is a delicate balance, between being unique and grabbing, and then becoming so creative that you need training on how to navigate the site. Giving a manual out to everyone that wants to browse your website is not extremely viable... obviously.

The key is to have the buttons etc in the normal places. You want a menu along the top of the website which links to all the main areas of your websites – this is where people expect this to be. The contact us button should be at the right of this menu and easy to spot – this is where people expect this to be. If you have a site map, put it down the bottom of the page near the copyright – this is where you expect it to be. It is great to be creative, but keep within the boundaries of what people are used to using. Check out other Brisbane web sites and create a list of what works and what does not.