Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
This is one of the biggest and best list of free PC games that I have ever seen. This site could waste your entire week!
You should never steal other peoples bandwidth by linking to images on their website. If you are allowed to use their images on your site the correct way to do it is to copy the image to your site and then put it into your web page.
There have been several occasions where I have found people through my visitor logs who have taken a picture on my site and placed it into their site, myspace page, etc. It’s usually not a big deal and I don’t mind people using my pictures for personal pages, what I object to is them using my bandwidth. Every time someone loads a picture from your site the amount of data that is transferred from my space to their computer is counted against my allotted bandwidth for the month. So someone who has a picture from my site on theirs is “stealing” my bandwidth. Most of the time it’s just a small amount and is not missed, but it’s the principal of the thing to me. Of course if the site is getting millions of visitors or if thousands of people took a picture it could add up to a large chunk (or all) of my allowance, so what I usually do it to rename the picture and change the link to it on my site. Then what the other person has on their site is a box with a little red “x” in it, but other things can go wrong.
What brings all of this to mind is a story about John McCain’s myspace page where some “designer” (who is probably no longer employed there) used a free myspace template for his page. There is nothing wrong there except they gave the designer no credit, which he asked for, what’s worse they used his images which he said not to do and worse yet they linked to the images on the designers site. So rather than just deleting them he changed them. His interesting comments then appeared instantly on McCain’s page. They were taken down pretty fast, but on the Internet once something is out there it will never go away. See for yourself.
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So you are designing your site and you want to be found on the search engines for certain keywords. You are not going to be found for these words if they are not in your headlines and main content. So what keywords do you choose? You want them to be relevant to your site, but you also want words that will bring some kind of action from your visitors. That could be to make a purchase, click on an ad, sign up for a newsletter, or maybe request more information. Why would you pick keywords that don’t do anything for you?
The time to pick keywords it before you start to write your content. Nothing sounds more artificial that when an author tries to stuff keywords into some text that’s already written. So you want to pick keywords and then write content around them, but what keywords should you pick? That is a million dollar question and it’s been my experience that single keywords are generally less effective than a multi word keyword that more closely relates to what you have to offer. Finding visitors for “pants” probably won’t work nearly as well for you as “men’s dress pants” or even “men’s dress pants Pittsburgh PA”. Longer strings of keywords in addition to possibly being more effective towards your end goal tend to be much less competitive on the search engines so it’s much easier to get to the top. Common misspellings can be good, too (mens dress pants) as many people will type these in. This can be true if you are looking to optimize your site for the search engines to find you or if you are want to buy keywords for a marketing campaign.
Here’s a good post by Jake Matthews called “The Most Overlooked & Affordable Keyword Research Method” that may help you get started.
I am always on the lookout for good sites with Photoshop and The Gimp tutorials. I love playing around with the tricks that I find and when I post a link to them here on my blog they are always very popular posts.
Todays site is called PhotoshopCAFE and they offer free Photoshop training. Just a quick look at their page told me that they had lessons for quite a few cool effects and the more I dug into the site the more that I found. There were even some video lessons. I highly recommend this site. Feel free to let me know what you think.
I recently ran into the “Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki” which lists the blogs of the biggest companies on the planet. I thought that I would have a look at them and see what I could learn from “The Big Boys”. McDonalds had some good posts on ethical/animal rights issues that I read, Kodak had some interesting photo tours and MTV didn’t even load (I tried Firefox and IE7 perhaps it’s something in my security settings). Some of them don’t even seem like a blog, just a brochure page on their site.
Overall there doesn’t seem to be much there. Even though my interests are pretty wide, I didn’t find one that I will subscribe to. I have not looked at them all yet, but I’ll keep going and let you know what I find.
What I am getting out of this so far is that this is why individuals and smaller companies can have an advantage in this arena. They are not necessarily constrained by political correctness or layers of legal staff who tell the blogger how to think which makes their blogs very bland. I’m not saying that you should go out and slander someone, what I’m saying that smaller companies have the flexibility to say what they really mean, say it while it’s still relevant and can take the immediate response from their readers that the Internet offers and make good use of it on their blogs.
There are many small companies blogs that just may as well be another static page on their site, but the best are the ones that invite interaction and comments from their visitors.
So the answer is yes, your business should have a blog, but only if you are willing to maintain it on a (semi) regular basis. Of course you have to be willing to say what’s on your mind in your blog and listen to your readers even if you don’t like what they have to say (maybe especially if you don’t like what they have to say).
Provide your readers with some interesting content and you can beat the “Big Boys” at their own blog. Have a look for yourself and let me know what you think.
Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and they release the audio files back onto the net (through a podcast, catalog, and bit torrents). They are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project, and operate almost exclusively through Internet communications.
One of my favorite sites to visit is Web Designs From Scratch. Their view of the web has always been close to mine and I have often looked to this site for inspiration.
There was a recent post called “Web 2.0 how-to design style guide” and even though I hate the name Web 2.0 and would love it if it went away this guide is a wonderful explanation of what is going on in the web design business today on the Web. This is mostly about design style and not too much about what Web 2.0 is really about (user interactivity), but the lesson they have here, as always, is very good.
I wrote a post a while back called “How Does Your Site Look On A Phone?” where I talked about how your site can be completely distorted by such a small screen. I don’t do it much, but I have been thinking about using a phone to browse the Internet and was wondering just what I would do with it.
I don’t think it’s mostly the cost that’s keeping me away, but that’s part of it. I don’t really know anyone who uses their phone for much more that getting directions or checking their e-mail. Many times sitting at my laptop typing I think that the keys on it are about as small as I could go and how I plod along just putting names and numbers into my phone.
I read somewhere that when people have to drill down in your site, that is, click on a link to find what they are looking for, for every level that they have to click you lose about half of your visitors. Because the navigation is more difficult on a phone those numbers may be worse.
I was reading an article on the Washington Post site By Sam Diaz that made me think of this. There are tons of phones capable of Internet access out there, so if you can think of a killer application that visitors can use easily you may be on your way to the top. What top? The very top.
In the past few weeks I have had a couple of people ask me the question “How secure is a wireless network?” I have also seen a couple of posts on Craigslist asking about this. It turns out that most wireless networks are not very secure I just browsed my own wireless utility and found that there were five different networks (besides my own) that I could see from my computer. Two of them had no security at all. Even though I didn’t try I’ll bet that not only could I use their networks and I could probably get into their computers, too. If I had all of the tools handy to me that the bad guys have I’m sure that I could cause some real trouble just by driving down any street with my laptop on.
It turns out there are some simple steps to make your network more secure. Usually when someone asks me I just point them to this post on Daily Wireless. It answers the questions that I had and some that I didn’t even know that I had. It also tells you why these steps are necessary.
I like to tell my clients that to help your site attract more visitors and to improve your search engine rankings that you need to continuously add good new content. The big question then is just what makes good content?
I feel that most of it should be directly related to your site and what you are trying to promote. Most all of my posts are directly related to my main site theme which is website design and promotion. As time goes by I am trying to post in that category as opposed to the general Internet information one. I do allow myself the joy of also putting some fun stuff on my site in the category of my Friday Just For Fun Stuff. It’s a nice diversion, but I limit it to mostly just Fridays because it is just a diversion and I don’t want it to take away from the primary theme of my site.
Jason Lee Miller writes for WebProNews which is a site covering technology and business. He wrote an article called “20 Tips for Writing Good Copy” and he explains well what can be considered good content that will help you add content that is something that your visitors will read and enjoy, not just filler for between the keywords.
