There are many things about designing web sites that have changed from the beginning of cyber time and many things that haven’t. I try to point out a well done site every week in my Favorite Site Design category.
The truth is that while the look of well done websites has gotten cleaner, easier to read and interact with, the main goal of a website is still to please the visitor. It doesn’t matter whether you are trying to sell, entertain or educate them, you need to offer something that is pleasing to the eye of most human visitors, as well as, offering something that interests them.
Business Week has a nice article on what to do when designing a site today and I noticed it’s almost the same good advice that worked well ten years ago.
I’m a T-Mobile customer and have been for quite a while now. When I was shopping for a new smartphone I went to quite a few stores and spoke to many salespeople. When I finally found Ian Hoover at the Mall at Robinson store (lower level) I knew that I had the right guy.
Ian answered all of my questions right away and corrected the misconceptions that I got from some of the other people. He convinced me right away that he knew what he was talking about and he was more interested in helping me get what I needed than what he wanted to sell me. He also didn’t pressure me when I told him it would be at least a week before I was ready to buy.
Being a good salesperson Ian also let me know about some of the things that T-Mobile would be introducing in the future that I might want to check out. One of them was called T-Mobile HopSpot @Home.
It seems very cool. You get a router/modem and they port your current phone number to it. Then you get unlimited VOIP Internet US calling for $10 a month. All I do is to keep my DSL which I would do anyway. I think it’s a great idea since I plan to keep my home phone and I will probably try it, but I’m not ordering on the Internet. I’m going back to visit Ian.
I probably will still advise not using Flash for making the navigation for your pages, but Google is starting to look at your Flash pages with new eyes.
They still probably won’t see your site like your human visitors do, but it looks like things are getting better for them being able to know what’s on your page.
I believe that even though I don’t use much Flash anything that helps people find exactly what they are looking for is a good thing.
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 Lucy Blackmore.
Lucy is an artist and crafty person living in the Harrogate UK. Her site is a blog and it’s designed in way that lets you know exactly what she’s in to.
The site really shows off her paintings well, which is exactly what it’s purpose is. There are only a couple of links to her site pages and they stand out right at the top. I also like the date and comment tags that look like tabs on the sides, a very nice touch.
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Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
In the spirit of the 4th of July holiday (Independence Day) here in the US and all of the “Green” incentives going on these days I give you way to cook your meal without the air poluting charcoal. There are quite a few to choose from.
I know that I could write better titles for these posts. When I scan through my past postings I know it right away.
What I usually do when I write my posts is to write the title first and then start on the post. Sometimes I change the title later, but not very often. Then once I’m done writing my post I read it over and make any changes to the wording spelling, etc., but I rarely go back and change the title.
Search engines consider titles very important when deciding where and how high to rank your page for any particular keyword search so it also is important for your titles to really say something about what your article or post is about.
Recently I found this post on Wordpreneur called “Is Your Title Compelling?” I’m going to try out some of these suggestions and you can decide for yourself if it helps or not. I invite you to let me know what you think and to visit Wordpreneur and
Read Is Your Title Compelling?
I recently read where a TV station in Philadelphia (CBS 3) is launching a revenue sharing partnership with local blogs and social media websites.
This is a great way to promote your content. Paying them is probably even more than they need to do. Just giving them help promoting their content would probably have been enough, unlike Viacom who is suing Google and everyone else that they can think of. My take on this is that Viacom is shooting themselves in the foot and will regret it.
Congrats CBS3 In Philly. Hey Pittsburgh media outlets, I can probably be bought!
Yesterday I got an email from a pool company in Virginia. They wanted to exchange links with me.
“Please consider adding our link to your site on your page: http://lillicotch.com/Blog/2008/02/28/add-additional-income-to-your-site/”
For those of you who don’t have blogs, when you allow visitors to post on your site you will get blog spam. Some of the posts will attract more than others and this page is one of my worst for spammers. So what I’m guessing here is that this pool company hired an “SEO company” to help them with search engine rankings and that company probably first tried to post an ad as acomment on this page and then when my spam filter stopped it they tried this email.
Have a look at my page that they wanted a link from. There was nothing about swimming pools on it, in fact, I can’t think of any page on my site that has anything to say about swimming pools except this one.
I also went to visit the pool site and it looked fine. All about swimming pools. Then at the very bottom of the page there was a link to “Resources”. This was a link to page after page of completely unrelated links (a link farm). While this may have been an effective and acceptable form of promotion in 1996 it won’t help you at all today and may actually hurt your rankings. At the very least it looks your site look cheap and spammy.
Of course they probably never actually visited my site, but how much more simple would it have been for them to find any post of mine that they had some interest in and to write a short relevant comment? If the comment was related to my post I would have allowed it along with a link to their site and I probably wouldn’t have noticed or cared that it was a swimming pool site. Not only that one way links tend to be much more valued than link exchanges anyway.
If you want to know the right way to get traffic to your site there’s a good interview with Google’s Matt Cutts on the USA Today’s site. Anyone want to trade links?
It is a pretty much undisputed truth these days that getting inbound links to your site will move you up the search engine rankings. It’s also true that higher ranking sites pointing to yours will help more than lower ranking ones.
I can’t even guess how many times that I have heard people say that I’m not going to bother trying to get links from “them” because they are too new and won’t be worth anything. That may be true if you are planning to close down your site tomorrow, but do you think that these sites will always be new and low ranking?
You may be able to look into the future and see which of these will grow and which ones won’t, but I’m willing to bet if you could do that you would be retired, living on a tropical island somewhere and probably not reading this blog.
I believe a couple of things. First that unless your link is on a link farm page or some kind of spammer/scraper site that all inbound links will help your rankings right now. Is is also much easier to get new sites to mention you, especially if you offer them something (your help, advice, encouragement or just a friendly word).
High ranking sites are just not in the habit of giving away free mentions. Just try to get Yahoo, Cnet, WSJ, etc. to link to you and you will see what I mean. Newer smaller sites will be much more receptive and some of them won’t always be smaller. They will grow and so will the value of their links to your site.
If you would like to read more there’s a post on the Search Engine Watch site by Justilien Gaspard that I recommend called…
Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
You may know that I’m a big movie fan and I see way too many for my own good. I recently found the /Film site (SlashFilm) and thoroughly enjoyed it all.
Their site is set up as a blog and they have a category called “Cool Stuff” that’s just, well, cool. I think it’s a really wonderful way to spend a Friday instead of working (tell your boss I said it’s OK).
