Your Web Site Is A Wonderland: What Picassos Art Taught Me About Persuasive Design
Whenever singer John Mayer sings his romantic song, “Your Body is a Wonderland”, I can’t help but think of web sites and usability. As a usability consultant, I see the devotion to his lover, and the time he spent uncovering every detail of her being, as the way most web site designers think we approach their web sites. When the lyrics arrive at “Take all your big plans; And break ’em; This is bound to be a while”, I start giggling. It makes me think of Amazon.com. I’ll explain why.
Risky SEO Techniques With Non-Spam Intent
There are high risk techniques that, when employed without the intention of gaming search results, provide solutions for some difficult-to-rank pages. Alan Webb, of ABAKUS Internet Marketing, writes that, “there is unlikely to ever be a full consensus on what is or is not an acceptable search engine optimization technique. What you need to do is simply to ask yourself, am I trying to dupe Google here?”
Starting An Online Business : Things to Learn and Remember
Since 96% of all online businesses fail, you should be careful, driven, smart, and adventurous when starting an online business. Obviously when starting an online business, avoiding mistakes is key to your success because online mistakes cost serious money and waste lots of valuable time. Unfortunately you don’t have a time machine to use to go back and “undo” the mistakes that you might make.
Debunking Search Engine Optimization Mythology
I just got out of a meeting with a company interested in contracting our search engine optimization services. And once again, I heard the two most common big myths about web site optimization:
Content Management : A Process, Not a Series of Projects
When something is new, we need to approach it in an exploratory manner. We need to experiment and try things out. And so it has been with the Web. That period is now over. We need to move from seeing our websites as a series of projects, to managing them as a well-planned process.
Website Submission: Just the Facts
Search Engine Traffic Breakdown
Over 90% of US search engine traffic is driven by Yahoo! or Google owned search technology – source: Search Engine Watch. Additionally Ask Jeeves owns around 5% of the traffic. You may hear the names of many other search engines, but most of them are powered by the above search engines in one way or another. For example, Yahoo! owns Inktomi, AltaVista, and AllTheWeb. All three of those search engines are powered from the same database as Yahoo! Search. A few meta search engines also drive a decent amount of traffic.
Intelliseek Launches BlogPulse.com
Joining Technorati and Daypop, Intelliseek has launched BlogPulse.com, a search engine designed to seek out blogs. Intelliseek’s offering is designed to help users search the heavily populated blog world.
Hot Banana And SitePosition Partner For CMS Search Optimization
Content management-generated web pages are often absent from search engine results pages. A number of pages that are created in automated format lack certain attributes that play large roles in search engine rankings.
Google Launches Google Blog
Following on the heels of the Blogger.com facelift, Google has launched a blog of its own. Promising “insight into the news, technology, and culture of Google,” the search engine intends to use the blog to keep people posted on the “latest word direct from the Googleplex”.
Two Safari’s
Look carefully at the image below. You see two Safari icons in the Dock (one third from the left, the other next to the app/doc divider), and also two Safari browsers open, both on the same site and page, but displaying very differently. The Font preferences are also shown, and this is what makes them different.