Gone are the days when visitors to your web site were using just a handful of browsers and all you had to do was make sure it worked in Internet Explorer and maybe a few others.  Today there are many more browser versions, each having their own nuances and quirks on how they display your site.  Visitors are also accessing your site from an ever-increasing variety of devices like phones, netbooks, tablets, iPads and other handheld devices.  So as a web site owner how can you possibly make sure all these visitors have the same experience when using your site?  The short answer is… you can’t.

The US Small Business Association and Google recently partnered to develop a series of videos focussed on helping local small businesses succeed online.  Each video describes how local businesses can use the internet to grow their business and provide great online experiences for their customers.  These videos are a great way to get yourself thinking about ways you can use the web to improve your business results.

The videos cover the following topics: 

• Establish your online presence
• Display imagery on your website
• Engage customers with a website
• Interact with you community using free marketing
• Promote using free online marketing
• Educate your customers using free marketing
• Grow with paid online advertising
• Measure results with web analytics
• Google and the Small Business Administration

You can checkout the videos here: http://www.google.com/help/places/partners/sba/index.html

A lot of time and money can go into creating and maintaining a good web site. As a business it makes sense to question whether the value delivered by your web site exceeds the cost of maintaining it.  But how can you measure the value delivered by your web site? The first step is to start collecting information about the activity of visitors to your site. Then use that data to measure the quantity and quality of visitors and if their behavior is consistent with your goals.   For example, if the goal of your site is to generate leads using a contact form then you can measure how many visitors look at the form, how many complete it and ultimately what percentage of those become customers. This process is known as "web analytics" and  can help you make much more informed decisions when investing in your web site.

I bet you're thinking "web analytics sounds great but it must be expensive and complicated "?