Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
Every once in a while you run into something that looks too funny to pass up. I’ve read that most criminals get caught because the slip up and make a mistake in their plans. Obviously these guys never even had a clue let alone a plan!
Web TV & Video has posted ” 5 Dumb Criminal Videos – A Tribute to the Criminally Idiotic”. There are some true classics here.
Well it’s almost Labor Day here in the US and so it’s time to start thinking about Christmas. Or is it too late?
MediaPost’s Email Insider tracks all things related to email marketing and this year the emails with Christmas mentions have started already. They were seen this year as early as August 14.
If you are interested in what kind of email headlines and/or offers work the best or just about any kind of information about email marketing this blog is a wonderful resource. When I saw this post I started thinking that the middle of August is just too early to start talking about Christmas. I realize that many businesses need to plan for Christmas for a long time or even all year round, but there has to be a point when it just too far away to be promoting your Christmas offers to your customers.
Who knows maybe I’m wrong, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time. It seems that I say something like this every year and maybe Jan 2 is the best time to start promoting Christmas again.
I don’t liked underlined words unless they are links.
I think it confuses people.
For emphasis make your words bigger,change the color, font
or ALL CAPS or ANY COMBINATION.
People should be able to tell when they have left your site.
All of your pages should have the same “look”.
Email newsletters are getting harder and harder to get through. Skip the fancy scripts and tons of pictures. If you must use pictures make sure there is good alternate text.
Speaking of email, it may be more effective to make your lists smaller and to target more specific groups with specific ads rather than to “blast” everything to all of your names. It’s certainly worth testing.
That’s it for now. Feel free to let me know what you think.
I have a section of my site where I have a tutorial about starting a web site.
It’s a do-it-yourself kind of thing.
I am adding a new page called Who Are You Designing For?
I really like websites that use shadows well.
See my favorite sites.
png images make the best shadows because you can set the opacity.
IE6 doesn’t read this and shows your clear backgrounds as solid.
IE6 is currently used by about a third of visitors.
So the question becomes at what point is it worth putting any cool looking effect on a site if 50% of the visitors won’t see it or have it distorted. How about 30%? 20%?
In the end it’s the site’s owner that will decide.
I have a page on my site with some of my favorite new sites that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of things that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these sites, they all look good, and are clear and easy to use. They don’t use Flash at all or use it only when necessary and never for navigation. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of them are not in English and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called, Jimmy Oh – A photographer from Sweden.
You can tell at first glance this site is about an artist. It’s not a usual look the way the links are in his photos that hang on the wall, but it’s easy to tell their links.
The couch looks comfy and inviting.
This site would have worked just as well using CSS for navigation instead of the JavaScript that was used and would have been much more search engine friendly.
More…
Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
The Street View feature was added to Google Maps in May, and it shows a full 360-degree view of locations at the street level, captured by one of the many roving Chevy Cobalts equipped with rooftop cameras.
There have been several sites pop up that are dedicated to stupid and funny stuff people have found in the Street View images.
Some of the images have already been removed from Street View, but will live on in infamy on these sites.
StreetViewFun.com is the best one that I have found and here are a few of my favorites pictures.
Don’t grow pot on your window sill.
When you’ve gotta go
Dress for success.
Don’t sleep on the job.
More are added all of the time. Maybe you can find some yourself.
It seems that everyone has some kind of an email sig file.
Some just say their name and maybe a cute saying.
Some have a phone book on theirs.
I have always just put my site address on mine, but today I was reading this post on informationweek.com called “What Does Your E-Mail Signature Say About You?” by Mitch Wagner. After reading his post and the comments I have changed my sig file
from…
Jim Lillicotch
Visit
Lillicotch.com
to…
Cheers,
Jim Lillicotch
Lillicotch.com
For some cool stuff visit my blog
Lillicotch.com/Blog
Let’s see if it helps or not. What do you think?
I wrote the other day about a manager for your mailing lists. Here is another one. It’s called PHPList and is a free open source system for managing your email campaigns.
PHPList does much more than OpenNewsletter, but is also a bit more complicated to use.
It supports the double opt-in subscription mechanism, which means that your subscriber has to confirm their subscription before they are activated, which is a good thing.
The most important thing that PHPList offers is the ability to Set the Send Speed (Rate). Most shared web hosts will limit the amount of emails that you can send per day or per hour. Mine is 100 emails per hour. This limits the spammers from abusing these hosting companies and also keeps one user from sucking up all of the servers resources which can limit the other users. You can tell PHPList how many emails to send per day/hour and then forget about it.
As usual for my recommendations PHPList is free and open source so to try it out you have nothing to risk, but your time. It is also in the latest versions of Fantastico so if you have that it’s a simple install.
Last week I put up a post that looked like almost all of my other posts.
The person who’s site I linked to saw my comments on the trackback portion of his blog. A trackback is a link in your blog to someone else who is linking to you. It usually looks like a comment.
The visitor saw the trackback on his site, but when he visited my site he couldn’t find his link.
As you may know I usually link to the article that I am writing about at the very end of my post, like this
My questions are these. Do you think that this link is too hard or confusing for a new visitor (or any visitor for that matter)?
Should I change it or leave it the same?
If you don’t want to post here feel free to contact me directly. I would like to hear your thoughts.
I have written many times about good ways to help your site get found by the search engines. This post is about the bad ones.
I usually get my share of “Blog Spam”. That is, people or bots who post comments on my blog that usually have nothing to do with the content. These folks are just trying to get a link on my site to promote their sites. This also gets them more incoming links which improves their search engine “Page Rank“.
To combat this comment spam I use a product that plugs into my Word Press blog called “Spam Karma 2” . This is a wonderful FREE tool that filters almost all of the spam from my comments. I have also taken the added step of requiring all first time commenters to be manually approved by a moderator (yours truly). You may say that this sounds a bit heavy handed, but otherwise the only things that you would be reading here would be the kind of crap that probably fills your inbox right now.
I usually get the porn or sexual enhancement kind of garbage, but this week I started to see in my filter junk posts promoting what seemed to be legitimate sites. They all had one thing in common (besides not having anything to do with my post), an SEO company who I will not name or give any publicity to. You could tell that these posts were generated by a script (they were posted a second or two after the page loaded) so I tried to contact the site owners to see if they knew what was happening. A couple answered and they apparently had no idea what the company that they hired to promote their site was doing.
I also visited the offenders site and all that was there was page after page of nothing but links to their customers sites. A “Link Farm” no doubt promoted as a way to “help” their clients with search engine rankings. A strategy that hasn’t been effective since 1999.
The lesson that I get from this is to find out exactly what you are buying for SEO before you actually hire them. Find out who the company is and what their reputation is. Ask them point blank what they are going to do and how they are going to do it. SEO is not rocket science and there are no secret formulas, just hard work. So if they are not willing to share the details of what they are going to do find someone else. Also don’t judge them by their clients initial results because even these “black hat” strategies may work for a while, but in the end they will do much more harm than good.
On the seomoz.org site there is a great post called “Answer these Ten Questions Before You Charge for SEO Services”. It’s supposed to be for SEO sellers, but buyers could use this information as well.
