Improve Your Site and Win More Customers
Most often, even successful websites can be improved to increase performance. Let alone their less successful brethren. How do you improve your already functioning website smartly?
Beat Habits That Interfere With Work Performance
We’ve all have bad habits we need to kick. But we don’t because we are comfortable in them. They are easy and changing is hard. But more times than not, changing the bad habit will actually make life easier for you in the long run. You know this. We all do.
But today is the day to kick some of these bad habits. Why? Because they are interfering with your work performance. They are creating roadblocks for you either mentally or physically, or sometimes even both. You know it and I know it.
1 Wiki, Best of Both Worlds
Back in November, Andy McAfee shared a great wiki case study from Avenue A | Razorfish. They adapted MediaWiki to meet their needs. Leveraging open source, a great approach for a company that builds custom Intranets.
But Jeff Walker of Atlassian Confluence, a commercial wiki vendor, disagrees:
Microsoft’s Digg-Like Site
Microsoft has been running in beta in some foreign markets a website called MSN Reporter that copies many features from the popular Digg website. On MSN Reporter, users share and rate news, rating them up or down with giant “Kicken!” and “Dumpen!” buttons (translated as “Kick it” and “Dump it”).
Latest WordPress Bugfixes
If you upgraded to or installed the new WordPress version 2.1 that was released last month, you’ll be interested in a major bugfix released today:
[…] Version 2.1.1 includes about 30 bug fixes, mostly minor things around encoding, XML-RPC, the object cache, and HTML code. It’s available for immediate download on our download page.
Hiring an Ideas Guy
As more and more content is created there are more publishers than there are good ideas, which means publishers are hungry to spread the few good ideas that exist. What separates a profitable channel from a money loser is typically two things: ideas and execution.
Because I have been posting about a more diverse set of topics sometimes outside of SEO I get asked lots of business strategy questions.
Just A Little Less Firefox In January
The New Year started for the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox browser as it did for a lot of people, with a little bit of an unsteady step backwards.
DirectRevenue Slapped (Lightly) By FTC
Adware distributor DirectRevenue owes the Federal Trade Commission $1.5 million in ill-gotten profits after settling charges they used unfair and deceptive methods to download adware on consumers’ computers, and made it difficult to remove. Critics of the settlement say that’s only a fraction of what the company made.
The settlement prohibits future downloads of DirectRevenue’s adware without consumers’ express consent, and requires the company to provide "a reasonable and effective" way for consumers to locate and remove the adware from their computers.
Google Images Regains Details, Keeps Warnings
About a month ago, Google Image Search started displaying its results a little differently; the makeover yielded a cleaner, but less informative, look. There was a low-level outcry from users, and now things are back to the way they were. That’s all good and well, and an important feature seems to have made it through the shuffle intact.
How Not to Make the Digg Homepage
Here’s a surefire way of ensuring your site won’t make it to the Digg social news frontpage: