
Design


Update the Copyright Year on Your Website
First of all, Happy New Year! With the new year comes some annual maintenance that every webmaster should be conscious of. Here's a quick tip from my list of annual website maintenance.
How Paging Improves or Worsens Your Website
Having read Duncan's post about Information Architecture, I thought I would write a short follow-up about an important means of navigation and IA: the paging navigator. Providing a well thought out paging navigator can immensely increase the value of your website for both search engines and users. What follows is a selection of different popular paging navigators and a short evaluation.
Microsoft Forces Me to Hate Internet Explorer
I found a quote recently that really embodies my sentiments about Microsoft's Internet Explorer: "If IE6 were a person, I'd punch that person in the face." Whose famous words are these? Mine. That's right, this is something that I--the World's Best SEO--actually said to a client last week, in response to an email he sent me. Here's the backstory...
Applying On-Site SEO to Website Templates (Or Why Separation of Code and Content is a Good Thing)
There are lots of people who would class themselves as a developer and would say they can code in any given language. Often the difference between a good developer and a great developer isn't anything to do with the program, how well it works, and how few bugs there are. The great developers make programs that work but they make them in a way that isolates the various components from each other...
Let's Talk Landing Pages
Chapter 4 of Web Design for ROI is all about landing pages, and it's the best and most valuable chapter thus far. The chapter starts off with this little gem of a quote: Enter the custom landing page. It's a web site's stand-in for ambassador, concierge, and superstar salesperson rolled into one. It's been carefully crafted to meet, ...
Web Design for ROI: Chapter 3, Managing for ROI
In an earlier post I had mentioned that I started reading Web Design for ROI by Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus (check out their website for more information on the book). Today I thought I'd share some tidbits from chapter 3, Managing for ROI. ...
URLs & Domains Made Fun and Interesting
I'm actually serious with the title here. This session was great. Honestly, I've been to more informative sessions here at SMX West than I've been to since Pubcon 2006, where I knew nothing about SEO and everything I heard was new. Unraveling URLs & Demystifying Domains had some good speakers who each provided...
Designing to Make Customers
Consider one of the most compelling and confusing parts of online economies -- once someone finds your website, what exactly will they choose to do with it? With a little clever planning the answer is: whatever you want them to.Let's say you've have visitors flocking to your website. They're looking everywhere, at all your pages. Now what? You need to create a clear Action Pa...
Which Do YOU Need: Traffic or Customers?
Doing business on the Internet means you have an unlimited audience -- it also means you have many competitors. Thankfully you also have numerous options to build your personal path to success on the web. They fall into two rough groups: Traffic and Customers.Building TrafficTraffic is all the people that ...
17 New Rules for Successful E-Commerce Websites
E-commerce has, for the most part, evolved far beyond the late 1990's cliches of hair-wrenching, sanity-shattering slogs through yet another "clever" designer's take on how shopping on the web should be. Standards prevailed, usability won out, and we're now free to spend our collective $107 million (Census.gov e-commerce sta...