August 11, 2010

Funny proofreading errors

Filed under: Internet Marketing 101, Tips for a good website, Web design/Internet Marketing — Tags: — Carolyn Griswold @ 11:43 am

I just got back from a long road trip. While traveling, I noticed a few proofreading errors in marketing materials that were worthy of a Jay Leno spot.

1. A truck stop billboard ad said. “EAT HERE! (Get Gas Later).”

2. A road service billboard ad: “24-HOUR TOE SERVICE!”

3. A menu at a major hotel chain restaurant offered “A side of fires“. The embarrassed server reported that it was the 2nd printing with the error–when they changed the menu they missed it again!

The moral of this post: Remember to take the extra time to proofread your marketing copy to make sure you mean what you say and say what you mean.

Anyone else have any funny proofreading errors? Feel free to comment.

June 4, 2010

Top ten considerations for web design

Filed under: Tips for a good website, Uncategorized, Web Design, Web design/Internet Marketing — Carolyn Griswold @ 4:45 pm

This week, I saw a LinkedIn discussion that asked “What do you think are top 10 considerations for web design?”

Interesting question.  The first response I saw said “usability, usability, usability”. I agree with this response…but I think there are at least 10 things that make a site usable, usable, usable.  So I’ll try to focus my list on what makes your site visitors want to use, use, and use your site again.

1. Beauty.

First your site has to be beautiful, or at least look professional, because if it’s not, people will leave it before you have a chance to show them all the other elements that make your site worthy of their time.

2. Navigation.

It must have logical navigation that is easy for users to follow.  You must lead them through your site; help them find the nugget of information they seek, by providing clear, simple navigation.

3. Well-written content.

Never underestimate the power of a well-written phrase to draw people in, to coax them to delve deeper.  Follow that phrase with clearly written content that’s organized and written to be understood by your site visitors.  Write first for your visitors, not for your cronies or for search bots.

4. Match content to design.

Use the content to help define the design. A serious subject should look serious.  A fun product should have a fun website.

5. Composition.

Use a writing style that is conducive to online viewing, scanning and reading.  Use short paragraphs with headings, bullets and graphics to draw the eye easily to specific ideas.  And give the user’s eyes a break with a healthy dose of white space.

6. Demographics.

Know your market.  Choose your colors, your styles, and your language depending on who will visit your site. Are they old, young, adventurous or sedate?  Are they likely to be using a ten-year old home computer or the latest smartphone  or IPad to browse your site?   Use  typography, color and design that will appeal to your users.

7. Style commitment.

Define  your styles and stick with ‘em. Maintain a cohesive design.  Whether you use a jazzy heading font with a high contrast color scheme or a traditional type with monochromatic scheme.  Commit to it.

8.  Accessibility.

Don’t discriminate.  Make your site usable to all folks, bots and beings.   Although it’s not always necessary to comply with  Section 508 standards, it’s a good idea to understand what your web pages will sound like using a screen reader.   And it’s wise to use text that the user can size to their preference — even if it does make your site design look a little funky.   Validate your code so you won’t trip up miscellaneous bots, browsers and other beings who might be perusing the web.

9. Optimize for search engines.

Use best practices for SEO.  Write code that doesn’t obstruct or deter the searchbots.  Write unique and relevant keyword rich titles and headings for each and every page.

10. Create a call to action.

Understand the goal of the website.  Is it to sell? To inform? To communicate?  Define the goal and then make it easy and safe for people to complete that task.

May 12, 2010

Three web design mistakes that can hurt SEO

Filed under: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Web Design, Web design/Internet Marketing, Website Maintenance — Carolyn Griswold @ 7:34 am

You just started your business.  Your marketing budget is limited and you know you need a website, so you opt to use one of the many low-cost tools available to build your own website or you have your  daughter, (son, nephew or sister-in-law, name the friend or relative) who “knows the computer” do it for you.   You work your way through this uncharted territory and you manage to get your website up and running and it even looks pretty good.

Job well done! But as time passes,  you begin to wonder why it doesn’t rank better on the search engines.  Many techniques factor into good search engine optimization (SEO) but novice website designers or do-it-yourself business owners often make three big mistakes that can hurt their SEO.

  1. Search engines can’t read an image.  Overuse of images. If you have website pages that are made up entirely of images or if you have blocks of text that are made of images you’re preventing search engines from reading the text on your pages. If search engines can’t read your page, they don’t know how to index your page. I usually see this mistake made by those with some graphic design experience.  They may know how to create a beautiful layout but they haven’t learned the HTML/CSS code to transition that layout to the web correctly so they opt to insert the image into the web page instead of taking the time to code the page correctly.
  2. Search engines can’t read an image – the sequel.  Underuse of image alt tags. Each image used in a web page should use a descriptive alt tag. If alt tags are not used, search engines are not able to discern what the image signifies, so they ignore it. For example, say you’re Joe and you sell bicycles.  You’ve  created a fantastic logo that clearly identifies you as Joe’s Bicycle Sales & Service. You put it on you web pages and it looks beautiful but you fail to use the alt tag.  Now when search engines crawl your site they’re not able to discern what the logo says.  However, if you have used the alt tag correctly, the search engines will read the alt tag that says “Joe’s Bicycle Sales & Service” and because you’ve provided that information, the search engine will have more information available to index your website.If you’re building your website using a do-it-yourself tool, you should see a field called alt or image description in the tool.   If you’re coding, you’re image code should look something like this:

    <img src=”logo.jpg” alt=”Joe’s Bicycle Sales and Service” />

  3. If you wrote a book you, would you title it “Book”?  Title tags and meta descriptions not used at all or used ineffectively. Just like a book or magazine article, every web page should have a unique title. In addition each web page should also have a unique meta description that accurately describes the content on that page – think of the meta description as the book synopsis often found on back or inside jacket of the book. In an html document both the <title> and <meta description> tags are within the <head> of the document which, as you might expect since it’s called the head, is toward the top of the document.  So when search engines crawl the page the title and meta description tags are among the first indexable information they come across and search engines expect the tags to describe the content on the page because that is what the tags were designed to do.

    But too often, inexperienced or lazy web designers use a title tag like “home” instead of “Joe’s Bicycle Sales | Yourtown, Your state”. Or on the page that shows products the title tag says something like “products” instead of “Bicycles – Raleigh, Schwinn, Trek, bikes for all ages”.  And the meta descriptions are either ignored entirely and left blank, or the same generic information is duplicated on each page.

    The title tag is the information the web browser shows at the very top of the browser screen–above the toolbar and url address field.  You generally want to limit your title descriptions to less than 60 characters. The meta description tag is not viewable on a web page (unless you view source) but search engines sometimes use the meta description you provide on your html page as the description in your search engine listing.  Limit your meta descriptions to about 160 characters.

So if you’re not satisfied with your search engine rank, check to make sure that you haven’t overused images in your design; that you have described all your images with alt tags and that you’ve written unique title and meta descriptions for each page on your website.

April 13, 2010

Manage your domain name and beware of domain renewal scams

Filed under: Internet Marketing 101, Internet Scams, Web design/Internet Marketing — Carolyn Griswold @ 5:53 pm

You own your domain name and it’s an important part of branding your business.  Some businesses are even named after their domain name–think Google, Yahoo, and yes, even cgwebhelp.  So it’s important that you have control of your domain.  You should know where it’s registered, when it will be due for renewal and how the process of renewal works.  And you should watch out for domain transfer scams.  Here’s a couple of scams that I  see regularly.

Domain Registry of America

This company may be a legitimate domain registry service, but their methods for obtaining customers is so unethical, I certainly wouldn’t want to do business with them.  Their technique for obtaining new customers?  They send an invoice.  Well it’s not really an invoice–it’s a solicitation to transfer the domain.  If you look very closely at the fine print, you will read that by sending payment you are authorizing them to transfer your domain to their registry service.  So the unsuspecting person sends them the $35 (which is likely more than their current registry charges to renew a domain) and unwittingly starts the process of transferring the domain.

Chinese Domains

This one arrives by email and suggests that your trademark is about to be infringed upon unless you swiftly purchase your domain with the .cn extension, as in yourdomain.cn.  This might be of benefit if you have a market in China or you anticipate developing a market in China, but most of the folks I’ve known who have received this solicitation have no intention of marketing to China.  For more information on this scam see http://professionalwebservices.blogspot.com/2007/10/chinese-domain-name-scams-from-china.html.

Know Where Your Domain is Registered

If your domain is important to your branding, and it most likely is, you should always know the following:

  1. Where is it located?  GoDaddy, Register, Network Solutions, Enom, OpenSRS, or one of the many other registry services available.
  2. Know how to access the information  and keep it updated with current contact information.
  3. Know when it is due to expire and the process for payment.  If it’s set for auto- renewal, make sure you keep a current credit card and contact information on file with the registry service.  If they can’t  charge your card because it’s expired, and the e-mail address on file is outdated, you’ll likely lose the domain name.

  • Share on Facebook

    Share

  • Recent Posts

  • FYI: News & Information

  • news & tips archives

  • Pages