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 Alternative Designs.
This site is very easy to look at and use. There is plenty of whitespace to let the important aspects stand out. I must admit that I would prefer a darker text color. Many designers these days care more about how the page looks rather than how easy it actually is to read. It’s a fine line to walk, but I prefer to weight readability heavier.
Overall this site is simple, easy to use and looks like fun. Exactly what you want in a site selling playground equipment.
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Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
This is the very definition of folding money. You might not have some of these currencies around, but you may also have some others that aren’t here. There are also some other great time wasters here.
I always like to get unusual and cool business cards. There is a school of thought that if you make your cards look too different than your competitors they will make you seem out of touch with your market. I disagree, I think that standing out is good. Anything that differentiates you from “them” will help keep you in the front of your customers minds.
Here’s a great list of some very cool business cards that I found on the [Re]Encoded dot Com site. There are some wonderful ideas here and I would appreciate getting any one of these. I know that I would save them and isn’t that the whole idea?
I have always been a believer that especially on the web the best way to grow your site is to give something away for free. I first noticed this very early on when many of the webs first sites gave away many different things to grow. The most successful ones gave away information. There were also sites trying to sell information, but these did not grow fast and seemed to fade away quickly.
Information can be the perfect product on the web. Once you create it or buy it you can sell it or give it away and then do it again and again. Storage (warehousing) is practically free and delivery costs are very low and getting lower all the time. I have kept this in mind when deciding how I was going to run my business. in fact, one of my most popular articles is called “Is It Worth It To Give Away Information?” and I have written several posts about this before. Here and here are just a couple.
What brings this back into my mind is a nice post on searchviews.com that I recommend
It’s is not my usual kind of post, but this drove me nuts all weekend.
I bought a new GE Adora washing machine for Christmas. I even bragged about how well this washing machine worked for me. I know, a guy and his washing machine, you probably hear it all the time.
This weekend the machine wouldn’t work correctly. The drain ran slowly and it kept shutting down because it was full of water. I tried and tried to figure out what was wrong, read the manual from cover to cover and even glanced at the other languages, but to no avail.
I am still under warranty, but you probably know the drill, call and make an appointment then sit at home and wait all day for the repair person to show up. Even if you are not paying for the call or missing work it’s still a huge hassle.
I don’t know why I didn’t Google the problem any sooner, but I finally did late Sunday night. The second result told me that the lint filter was clogged. It was a simple five minute job to remove the cover unscrew the filter, empty it out, and put everything back. I didn’t find any folding cash like some of the others that they helped (I found 6ยข), but I am overjoyed to have my machine working again.
How can a company like GE have a filter like this that will probably need cleaned once or twice a year and not tell you about it? They have to know it’s going to need it. Are they looking to sell service? It sure seems like bad publicity to me and I might not tell another person how much I like their machine.
I’ll also visit and recommend the Instructables website again and again. Thank you so much for your help. This is a great site with lots of free help for many things.
The moral of this tale for me is, which side of this story would you like your company to be on?
I know where I want my company to be.
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 Living Bird.
This site is all about birds. You can see that even from my thumbnail. The navigation is clear, easy to find and use.
The large photo of the bird is the primary focus and the site is done in earth tones which fits the theme very well.
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Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
Splume is one of the coolest games that I have played on line. It does require you to install the free Unity web player. This technology will let you play blazing fast 3D web games, right in your browser.
Here’s a list of some really great free open source software to replace many of the Windows programs that cost big bucks to buy.
This list appeared recently on makeuseof.com. I have written about some of these tools and others before, but there are cool new ones here. It’s also nice to have a list like this with all of these great free tools in one place.
I was reading an article from the Wall Street Journal on line the other day and it was about how you can find hidden deals on Ebay by searching for misspelled words. The idea being that if you searched for items that were listed, but misspelled that there would be fewer buyers looking for that item, so fewer bidders and a lower price.
While reading I thought that this could also be an effective strategy for site owners who are bidding for pay per click keywords on search engines. Here’s how:
- Site owners who want a particular search term will bid on it and very popular terms can be very expensive to get your ad somewhere near the top of the sponsored listings.
- Misspelled keywords are not nearly as popular so they won’t be nearly as expensive. Of course there won’t be as much traffic, but most likely the searchers will be looking for the same thing and there will be fewer or maybe no other advertisers.
- Since you don’t pay for these ads unless someone clicks on them it’s really not costly to experiment.
- There is the possibility that the searchers who are seeing your ads are looking for something other than what you have. That possibility exists no matter what keywords that you are buying and I don’t believe that misspellings will affect that much or at all. Writing a good descriptive ad of what you are promoting will cut down on you having to pay for people clicking on your ads who don’t want what you have.
The article on the WSJ also has links to sites to search for these misspellings if you are interested it trying this.
It seems that a person named Jason Gambert is trying to trademark the term “SEO”.
There is no reason to believe that he will be able to accomplish this, but I have seen some strange things come out of our courts.
