Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
I had a great time looking at all of the old cars, forgetting about the price of gas and reminiscing. I think that I would prefer to drive a new car, but these are still fun to look at. Happy Friday.
Recently I had a very bad service experience with Comcast Cable. It was so bad that I dropped them and closed my account.
Then just the other day I get an email newsletter that was highlighting next months programming. I had never actually opted in to their newsletters (but didn’t opt out either) and usually just deleted them when they came. I’m still mad at them for their poor service so I wanted to unsubscribe. It turns out there is no way to stop their mail unless I logged in to my account and set my preferences to “no emails”.
As I said before I had closed my account so there was no place to login to change my email settings. I went through their site to try to find a way to contact an actual person who may be able to help. What a maze! I sent email and filled out forms anywhere I found them. I spent a good half an hour on this quest.
I did receive a couple of autoresponders telling me that my request was not clear and I should check out their FAQ section. I guess that saying “I am no longer a customer, stop sending me email” was just not very clear. Later in the day I did get a reply from what I think is a real person who told me they would forward my request to someone who would remove my email from their list. I’ll let you know what happens next month.
Besides venting here, my point of this post is that if you are sending out bulk email of any kind be sure it’s easy for your recipients to unsubscribe to your list. In fact while it’s fine to have FAQ’s and automatic service programs, it should never be hard to contact a real person in your company from anywhere in your site. If it is you could be probably are chasing away customers.
Everyone is constantly talking about what will be the next “Google Killer”. New search engines appear and older competitors are trying new ways to be more effective in locating and displaying what you are looking for.
Recently Microsoft has begun trying a new search theory called BrowseRank which relies more on human visitor elements by measuring and ranking how the visitor actually uses the site. Things like how long they stay and much more. This sounds like a good idea, although many people already don’t trust MicroSoft and there will be privacy concerns raised.
What I think about whether you should be concerned about this new algorithm is that you should learn about it, but not worry about it. By making a site that your human visitors can easily use and enjoy is always going to be the best method of making it more popular no matter which search engine or ranking method are used. I have written before about designing for your human visitors and that advice is still what I believe.
Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
Excit is an online game you lead a sprightly cross-hair cursor to the exit–without hurtling it off the edge of the spreadsheet game board–in order to advance to the next, progressively harder level. And each level of success you achieve provides a password you can use later to restart where you left off.
There has been quite a bit written and talked about lately about an “SEO Bubble” and how long that search engine optimization will remain viable. One of the best posts that I’ve read recently is on a blog called Conversation Marketing.
The issues that seem to be of the most concern is that SEO is pretty simple and that site owners will be doing it themselves, much more than will it go away. I don’t believe that SEO will go away, because if it’s done well it is one the best and most economical ways to bring customers to your site. Even with all of the phoney, fly by night “SEO Experts” out there, most people will learn the difference between good work and bad.
The main concern that has really benn there for quite a while now is that it will move “in house” and individual shops will not have any customers. My feeling here is that while SEO is simple, if done well it’s also quite a bit of hard work. Even is all of the site owners out there know everything about it (still a huge IF) there will be plenty that just would rather pay someone else to do the work well.
It’s starting to look like using social media is becoming important to businesses. In the past year I have been reading more and more that having a place on your site where users can freely interact is almost as important as having a site itself.
What that means is that if you are planning to grow your site it is no longer enough to throw your brochure on a couple of web pages and post it on line. You now need a place where your visitors can add their own feedback or share their views of your site in come way. A new study by the Center for Marketing Research at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth shows that the fastest growing companies are learning this and adding blogs, forums, wiki’s. etc. at a rapid pace.
This also means that you can’t just throw up your site and forget it. You need to add new content, as well as, monitor your social pages. You have to watch for undesirable posts, but you also need to know what your visitors are saying about you. What you are doing well and perhaps more importantly what you are not doing well.
One of my potential customers is a group who have concerns about how I write my sites. They were worried that because I write my sites from scratch that they wouldn’t be able to edit it themselves.
I believe that the opposite is true. When you design a site from scratch by hand your code is much less cluttered than what you get with the design programs. It’s straightforward and easy to read and follow. That does several good things for you.
I believe in helping my customers learn to do as much work on their site themselves that they want. I’m not the kind of designer who likes to keep things secret. I like to share information and will teach my customers (and you) anything that you want to learn from me.
More on these subjects:
When I first read about the users complaining about the new fee structure on Ebay back in February I thought that this could be something to watch.Most of the complaints seemed to be about the new fee structure which seemed to favor the big volume sellers over the smaller ones. Of course it’s their decision on how to run their business and it’s also their responsibility to maximize their profits for the shareholders. It seems to me that when you turn your back on the users who built your business in the first place you might just do more harm than good.
It seemed to quite down a bit and Ebay’s profits also seem to still be OK, but I’m hearing more and more about users abandoning them. I read something today about it in the Wall Street Journal and you know when the mainstream media starts to talk about it just about everyone knows. This kind of thing can also turn into a feeding frenzy and encourage more people to leave by pointing out the other options of smaller alternative sites. The more people who move to these sites the more they will sell and the more will move
One of the many questions that I ask myself about this business is whether I should give away free information to promote myself. I have written about this quite a bit and the answer I always seem to come up with is yes.
I usually talk about giving away electronic information that really costs you nothing, but today I read on the Wordpreneur site that it’s probably worth it to give away your printed information as well.
I have a page on my site with some of my favorite site designs that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of designs that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these site designs, they all look good and are clear and easy to use. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of the sites are not in English and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Fresh Air Home Cleaning.
With a company called Fresh Air you would expect a site that looks clean and bright. That’s what what you get with this site, plenty of white space and great clear pictures of blue skies and flowers. It looks like a “Green” company so using the green colors of their logo throughout works well and if it’s possible to look like Fresh Air, I think this site does.
They only have a few pages and there are links to all of them on the main navigation that are very clear and easy to find. My only comment would be that the links in the body of the page don’t stand out as links. They don’t look like links to begin with and the color change for the hover effect is barely noticeable. They do begin each link with a “»”, but I don’t think that’s enough.
Overall a very nice looking site.
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