How to built a google friendly and simple website

Mohd Farid Awang (2010932779) EMBA, Dungun

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Abstract Terengganu is well known of its delicious taste of original recipe spices (rempah). There were many types of Terengganu spices can be find in the market especially in Pasar Payang, Terengganu. The most popular is Rempah Gulai Kawah. Most of the spices are homemade and some being upgraded and manufactured in proper manufacturing environment. All of these spices manufacturer or producer has their own loyal customers consist of traders and restaurants and they are mostly located in Terengganu. Therefore, the competition between all spices manufacturer and producer in Terengganu is very tough due to small target market. They were not successful in exploring more market due to highly dependence in traditional way of doing business, which is trading in bulk offline and lack of exposure to bigger market (online). Therefore, it is the best way forward and action for SMEs in spices business to go online and start looking for new potential market. Terengganu have only 1.2 million populations compared to a 17.5 million Internet users in Malaysia. In addition, spices is consider a must have cooking menus in every family in Malaysia. Based on this fact alone, the prospect from internet customer is huge and very demanding. This project will focus on generating simple, easy to maintain and less expensive website for SMEs in spices to go online and start generating sales through e-commerce and market their spices more effectively via interactive, informative and friendly website. In addition, the website will also offer Management Information System for customer database, question and shopping cart. Introduction Payang Resources (PR) is one of the manufacturers of Terengganu spices in Terengganu. The company own by madam Faridah Muhammad. Established on 23rd December 2000 and operated at Kampu Alur Jambu, Wakaf Tengah, Kuala Terengganu. Mdm Faridah heritage a 50 years family’s recipe of making Terengganu’s spices. Before the establishment, the company operated under her father personal name, without a formal formation of company. “Rempah Pak Leh Cap Bunga Safron” is their unregistered brand and very popular in Pasar Payang. In 2009, mdm Faridah want to register the brand, unfortunately “Cap Bunga Safron” is taken already. Therefore, PR has registered own new brand named “Payang”. Due to overwhelming demand, on September 2009, PR invested a big chunk of money to acquire a heavy-duty machine called Instagrind model cwf 900 ultrafine powders pulverize. This machine could produce 1500kg of spices per day, which is 70 times more compare to traditional way. From that day, PR is gradually evolved from homemade spices SME to a proper manufacturer SME. The production floor is getting smoother and the process flow is improving day after day. In 2010, PR made a massive breakthrough by successfully certified halal by JAKIM for 31 products. The achievement made them the one and only manufacturer with such capacity certified Halal JAKIM in east cost. Basically, PR has reached a certain standard in term of production and certification compare to others spices producers in Terengganu. However, on target market; PR still competing face-to-face competition because they still focusing on the same target market. Based on the 5 porter of competitiveness, PR is at losing side because the customers and suppliers have a high bargaining power. The reason why PR was not able to do outreach promotion activities to other states is due to limitation on budget and unavailability of competent and knowledgeable staff. Therefore, go online is the best and effective marketing strategy for the company to do. Its not required big capital and potential customers will able to communicate direct with the PR’s owners.


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Background study The background study will cover two areas. First is on developing a company’s website and second on developing customer database. Developing a website The process of developing the website for PR is starting with a selection of domain name. “Domains have and will continue to go up in value faster than any other commodity ever known to man” -Bill Gates. A domain name makes up the address of your site and can end in .com, .com.my, .my, .net, .org, .info, .us, .biz, and more, which we call the Domain Extensions. The shorter the extension is the better such as .com and .my. Each country can have their own domain extension, such as ".com.my & .my" is a domain for Malaysia, ".cn" is for China and ".jp" for Japan. Therefore, before applying any domain name, the company needs to decide a domain extensions based on the target customers, if it's worldwide, .com is the best choice for the company, and if it’s for Malaysia, .my is the best domain extension. The domain’s name must be short, easy to remember, spell and related directly with company’s products offered. This is very important in order to make Internet viewers attracted to the company’s website and remember them easily. The second step is to have a hosting to park the website. In the web, user can have a free hosting and paid hosting. According to www.whywebhosting.com, the main differences between free vs. paid hosting is it may be free cost wise, but you pay for it with banner ads on the top and/or bottom of your website at all times that you have no control over the content of those ads along with totally annoying pop-up ads. On top of that, usually free hosting have a sever limitations on storage capacity and bandwidth and such definitely affected e-commerce capabilities. In addition, the customer service that is very critical for online business such as in the event of being hacked, free hosting will not entertain their free client at 24/7. This will Jeopardy Company’s image to the potential customer. A paid web hosting provider usually offer website templates, website builder, search traffic builder, secure billing systems, webmail setup and friendly control panel to have a good control of the website. The paid hosting provider will also have a 24/7 support and have a much better server to store company’s data and websites. The third decision is to select the best webpage design application or platform available in the web. The application must be simple and easy to manage by the entrepreneur. Besides that, it is better to pick the most used application in web design because this will help and push the website to be friendlier to search engine such as google.com and yahoo.com. According to a world-renowned Internet entrepreneur Derek Gehl, the best application to build a website is using WordPress. “Although there are quite a few good solutions available, I personally prefer WordPress because it is mature, stable platform that can be easily customized with very little technical skills.. and its free!” (Derek Gehl, The Star Feb 2012). In addition, Google love WordPress and it is easier to get good ranking on Google if a website is built on WordPress. According to Matt Mullenweg (wordpress.com), 14.7% of the top million websites in the world are built on WordPress and 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress. Based on statistics by pringdom.com, 27 from top 100 blogs is using WordPress as their web platform.


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The next step is to start compile all information needed, related and interesting features about the company to be install and view in the website. What types of information can be referring to similar manufacturer such as www.babas.com. The basic information of the company; background, history, list of products, contact number and email, company’s pictures, testimonials and Halal certificate is compulsory to be install and view in the website to convince potential customer of the company’s solidity, capability and originality. All information and data key-in in the website have to be friendly to search engine such as Google or Yahoo. In order to make it friendly and easy to be search, the wordings used have to be the most popular in the World Wide Web. The easiest way to check is by comparing all the possible search wordings is by using Google Trends. Below is the result of comparing the words “rempah, resipi, masakan, rempah asli”.

Based on the Google Trends for the past 12 months, the most popular word is resipi, followed by masakan and rempah. Meanwhile, The most Internet users from subregion and city searching for these words is Putrajaya. Therefore, the company’s website should contain more of these two words. This results also indicates that most


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Internet users will search this two word when they want to look for recipe and spices in the webs. Beside indication on wording, Google Trends also give guidance to where Payang Resources should focus more in term of marketing area.

The final step is setting up the website. The color is the critical parts of the website because people only took 4 second to decide either to continue surfing the website or change to another website. Based on the research by Harald Wenreich, from 59,00 page views, 10,163 page views (17%) is lasting less than 4 seconds. In such brief "visits," users clearly bounced right out without truly "using" the page. Beside color, the other setup is also important such as layout, appearance and themes. Payang Resources can refer to www.babas.com for ideas and best design. Besides comparing with similar companies, it is the best to refer more tips in www.webdosanddonts.com for more Do’s and Dont’s in building a website. For the purpose of utilizing e-commerce, the company needs to have a Paygate to receive payment from customers such as Paypall, Maybank2U and CIMBClicks. In order to accept order, Payang Resources needs to have order forms and details of the customer. For the beginning stage of setting up websites, simple forms will be good enough. Developing Customer Database The term “customer database” is very general term. In fact, any software companies use to keep track of customer data can be referred to as a customer database. Small businesses have many options for creating a customer database. They can simply build their own customer database in Excel or Microsoft Word. Larger company often find it more compelling to use a more sophisticated database software often known as a customer relationship management system. Customer database for online business is not just a list with details of customers, it is also included the question, answer and status of any enquiry by every each customers. “Every company's greatest assets are its customers, because without customers there is no company” a word of wisdom from Micahel LeBoeuf. For a company which is new to online business and marketing, the most important things to do is, immediately to start record, compile, sort and store the customer database properly. Potential customers may send an e-mail to the business owner asking some question about the company or the products. The company has to give a prompt and quality reply as soon as possible and store the customer data and question in proper record system. The type of sentence used and choosing of words is very important in order to avoid misunderstanding and create a clear communications. The company needs to remember : when the customer happy and enjoy a good service and respond from


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the company, any good feedback will be share and communicate through out many webs online and thousands of people will read it. However, if the feedback is unfavorable, millions of people will share it online. Therefore, the basic management theory should be applied that is “Do It Right At First Time”. By having a database of customers, Payang Resources will be able to do database marketing, which is very substantial to online marketing strategy. Unlike mass marketing, database marketing focuses on targeting only the people most likely to respond to your message. The company may build personalized greeting cards, emails or postcards congratulating them in their birthday and thanking them for their business, with a special offer to drive future business. MIS Proposal Develop website To decide on the domain name and extension, the best approach is by searching the possible names via google.com. Below is two trial for the wording rempah and menjual rempah via Google in order to see what website is appeared at the first page of Google. Based on that, it is better to pick rempah as a domain name because it is a norm for Internet users search for that word in order to search for spices in Malaysia. After checking with the www.internet-webhosting.com, the domain for www.rempah.my is still available. Therefore Payang Resources decided to buy the domain, which is simple, easy to remember, and portrays company’s products and activities. The main target customer is an Internet user in Malaysia. For the hosting of the website, Payang Resources decided to host with www.internet-webshosting.com due to the good reputation, experience, 24/7 customer service and the hosting itself located in Malaysia which will help to push a traffics. The detail order from internet-webhosting is as follows; Date: 03-‐8-‐2012 Email: [email protected] Hello Mohd Farid Awang, The following hosting order has been processed, and your account is now active. ============================================= Hosting Ordered/Order Status: ============================================= Your plan is: Linux-‐Business-‐Plan Your domain name is: rempah.my Your IP address is: 202.75.41.68 Your login username is: remphmy1 Your login password is: rem56748 Your Hosting Start Date : 03-‐8-‐2012 Your Hosting Next Renew Date : 03-‐8-‐2013

RM100 – 1 year Hosting RM90 – 1 year domain (rempah.my)


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Guarantee by hosting provider

Below screenshot is the interesting and user-friendly control panel to manage Payang Resources websites and come together with a free adds-on application and tools such as webmail, WordPress, softaculous, tools, database and backup utilities. This is very critical to make sure the website will be in good storage and manage by professionals. With the current spyware, virus and hackers, the paid hosting is the best solution.

The company will apply wordpress as a platform to build websites. It is easy, stable, free and most popular platforms in the world. The fact that google love wordpress is the main reason why Payang Resources decided to use wordpress. When the website is hard to find and search via search engine such as Google as No 1 search engine in


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the world, the website can be consider a failure. With low traffic and hits, it will not able to attract many potential customers which resulted unsuccessful of e-commerce activities. Below is the screenshot of setting up wordpress as Payang Resources platform - Access to Wordpress

As mention before, color mix in the website will make people stay more than 4 second and start to surf and explore more on the particular website. For Payang Resources, the color will be red, black and brown. The theme applied is Grisaille 1.3.1, a free theme. The appearance need to change a bit by amending the Html code. The theme have a mobile support features such as a responsive layout and auto adjustable photos for mobile browsing. Most internet users used handheld gadget


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such as Ipad to surf web and by applying the theme as below, the viewer will feel comfortable and easy surfing.

Normal view Mobile View

The website contents are introduction of the company, contact section, halal certificate awarded to the company by JAKIM, pictures if PR’s factory and products, recipes to cook spices from Payang and list of products offered by the company. All this information is crucial and very important in order to introduce the company to the internet users, create a relationship, prove of the quality and capability and sharing the recipe as a main attraction to potential customers. The resipi and masakan is the most popular search word in Google, therefore Payang Resources need to post more threat and sharing more on any recipes with the customers. The recipes have to include the Payang’s spices as a main ingredient. This approach will increase traffic and hits to rempah.my. A basic payment method is also included in the website. Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, conducted an analysis to see if there are any correlations between page speed versus numerous performance indicators such as satisfaction, revenue generated per user, and


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clicking speed. The report showed that a less than 2-second increase of delays in page responsiveness reduced user satisfaction by -3.8%, lost revenue per user of -4.3% and a reduced clicks by -4.3%. Based on Bing findings, Payang Resources need to avoid delay in loading their website. Therefore, every graphics in the website need to be resize, avoid playing video and music and reduce the comments section to minimum. Rempah.my background is an image without a background (transparent). therefore the loading is faster and smooth. In addition, all bullets, boxes and lines are using Html coding. In normal streamyx Internet connection, the loading time for rempah.my is less than 2 seconds. Developing Customer Database When Payang Resouces purchase a hosting with www.internet-webshosting.com, one of the free software is HESK : Help Desk Software. The software is act as a desktop for customers to ask question and making order. It is simple software, easy to use and user friendly. Its can record all question and enquiry send and every question will have unique reference number or ticket number. Every respond and question is group under the same ticket number; therefore it is easy to trace back any unsolved matters and issue arise. It is also have an auto-responder features by sending email to customers saying that the email is well received and will be revert back in 24 hours. These features will make customers feel appreciated. In addition, the systems also allowed administrator to generate report according to type of question, status, customer names and others. Below is the front page of HESK. Customer will click submit a ticket to post any question to Payang Resources.

Picture 1.0 on next page is the ticket form. Customers have to fill their name, email, priority, topic of their question, details of their question and a anti-spam number. When customer submits a ticket, HESK will immediately send a notification to Payang’s admin and send an auto-reply to customer. The sample is as below: Auto-reply to customer


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Auto-notification to Payang’s staff

Picture 1.0


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Below is HESK desktop. Users easily could do sorting by tracking ID, customer name, subject, status and last replier. By doing so, the company could easily track the ticket status and take necessary action. All customers’ details are store in HESK system.

Additional : Developing basic e-commerce For the initial stage, Payang Resources will have a simple payment instruction for customers to follow. When customers click a beli rempah, the page showing the payment process will appeare.


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Future suggestion The first thing need to do by the company is to start promoting their website. How attractive their website is not going to help company’s sales if no one knows the existence of their website. For offline strategy, the company might publish some advertisement at specific location, which mention earlier based on Google Trends. For online strategy, Payang Resources need to post as many as they can in forums, facebook and others. The more they do posting, the better rating they will have. Latest search via google for “resepi masakan” (as two most popular words), there were 7.9 million link available in online and rempah.my is at page 5. This is consider good consider rempah.my is a new website. Second step is to start developing a proper shopping cart for Payang Resources products. They have to start shoots quality pictures of their products and finalise all the price plus delivery charges. Presta Shop is the best alternative for the company as a platform for developing Shopping Cart. Its free, have an interactive menu, auto invoicing, built in e-commerce engine, multi-currency setting and can be customize. For the way forward, Payang Resources need to concentrate on improving delivery by appointing more agents and train more staff. Delivery is critical in online business. Next is, Payang Resources may venture into OEM business and slowly start to develop their own Customer relationship management system. Conclusion As a conclusion, Payang Resources may able to cater more market segments and successfully attracts more prospective online buyers by applying correct strategy and tools. Payang Resources have to continuously active online and offline. These will make the company recognizable and searchable via google or yahoo, which will make rempah.my located in the first page of search results. References Harald Weinreich, Hartmut Obendorf, Eelco Herder, and Matthias Mayer: "Not Quite the Average: An Empirical Study of Web Use," in the ACM Transactions on the Web, vol. 2, no. 1 (February 2008), article #5. Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for October 1, 1997 “How Users Read on the Web” http://en.support.wordpress.com/getting-more-views-and-traffic The Star, “All about online business”, Mac, 2012 http://www.derekgehl.com/7-things-i-love-about-wordpress/ The effect of colour in developing website : http://www.edb.utexas.edu/minliu/multimedia/The%20Effect%20of%20Color.pdf

How to built a google friendly and simple website

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