Web Services and Tools

A software developer has run 10,000 items through the more popular posting portals such as Digg, del.icio.us, etc. and collected some interesting results regarding the popularity of a post and the time of day, and day of the week, it was posted. The blog post and findings are here.

While the post and findings are targeted with a overly high US focus, this article is useful for those that see a high US readership. It would very valuable to see what other regions around the globe have an impact on the popularity of posting. Perhaps this will be addressed in future tests.

Enjoy.

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Like many people that use the Internet, we have all typed in those three well known letters that proceed every URL. But most probably, we never give a second thought to what they really stand for or their true meaning.

Unfortunately, many web site owners do not give much thought to these three letters and this is reflected in their message.

Just for the record, WWW translates to “World Wide Web”.

When crawling the web, I am constantly amazed at how many people still present a message on their web site to target a localized audience. Forgetting completely that the rest of the world has access to the same message and at some point will stumble upon their web site.

Here are some easy steps to keep in mind to ensure that your site communicates a World Wide or global message:

1. Think outside your Box

When developing your content, think about the type of visitors you expect to have on your web site. But then take that a step further and think about those people, who are not in your local area, that also may visit. What might bring them to your site?

2. Talk to ALL members of your audience

Even if your product isn’t for those outside your local area, let those people from outside the region know that you have thought of them and perhaps post a link or two to similar web sites that cater to their region. For example, if you are offering localized computer support, you might want to put a small blurb stating that you currently do not offer service outside of your city … or to International customers. Your visitors will appreciate this as you have saved them time and answered that burning question, “Can I get this where I live?”.

3. Determine your visitors location

There are many free scripts out there that will allow you to determine your visitors physical location on the planet by their IP address, or that of their ISP. By determining their location, you can create and direct visitors to specific web pages based upon their location. These pages would then have a message tailored for them.

4. Communicate your plans

Many times, you may want to start small and grow to cater to a global market. If this is the case, let your visitors know your plans for the future and when certain aspects of your growth are planned to happen. This will bring them back to your site and allows you the time to develop your global markets differently.

5. Think about the language

Most people who use the Internet today can read English, but there are a large number of people whose native language is not English. It is therefore important that you write your content in a simple form and not use complicated terms and sentence structure. Even within English, there are words that are spelled differently, or sentences that are structured differently based on if you are from the UK, US or even Australia.

Some have asked if it is necessary to translate their web sites into a variety of languages for global users. My answer to this is “only if this make good business sense”. If you will be seeing large amounts of revenue out of China, hire a native Chinese person to translate and manage support emails in Chinese to accommodate these visitors. But, if you are a small site owner, the workload of involved does not add much benefit.

Keeping these few simple steps in mind will demonstrate that your web site is truly part of the World Wide Web.

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Google has reportedly reached out to Yahoo to thwart Microsoft’s unsolicited $44.6 billion bid. And in case that doesn’t work Google has already started working policymakers. Simply put, the games have begun (Techmeme). Get ready for the FUD fest folks.

This is how the article on ZDNet started out with the latest news on this hot topic.

This got me to thinking back a long time ago when the Internet was just starting to become a popular topic for the normal folks. And dear old Microsoft thought it would be a good idea to launch a competitor to the Internet. The result … it failed miserably.

The next monopoly move made by Microsoft was to embed Internet Explorer into the Operating system. A move that was very much opposed by a company called Netscape. And again, thank goodness for that because we wouldn’t have such a nice array of browsers that actually perform properly and securely. I also do not think that IE would be nearly the quality product it is today if it weren’t for the competition.

So keeping these past events in mind, I would whole heartedly support a move by Google to … once again … make an attempt to keep Microsoft honest and out of the monopoly game.

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One of the most difficult aspects of running a business online is developing credibility within the Web community. It is even more difficult to maintain credibility once you have invested your valuable time in building online credibility.

Most of us tend to jump directly to the step of persuading potential customers to buy from us when we haven’t yet developed any credibility. We felt it valuable to list a few basic attributes for developing credibility online. But first, let’s understand what we mean by credibility by understanding the aspects of a credible person.

A credible person is defined as someone who is expert in a particular topic or area. That person is understood as someone who is experienced, qualified, intelligent, and skilled. But just possessing these aspects does not complete the definition. A credible person is also considered as someone who is trustworthy, honest, fair, unselfish, and caring.

So, how do we apply this to running an online business?

Step 1 - Good communication

The most important part of building your credibility is by keeping an open line of communication available to prospective customers. Having a blog advertised from your home page is a great way of showing your visitors what has been going on prior to their visit and keeping them up to date on events as they take place.

For those that are selling products or services, an effective means of communicating is by making it clear to your visitors their options for contacting you. Perhaps by providing a telephone number on the front page of your web site, in addition to the normal methods of communication, such as a contact email address or an online form. Provide as many options for your customers to contact you as you can possibly deliver.

A good example of this is what our company does with our Domain and Web Hosting site. The support text and phone number on the home page are clickable, which takes the visitors to a page where they can view all of the methods for communicating with us. We also tell our visitors how long each one of those methods will take for us to respond to their question.

Step 2 - Clearly define the rules

Make sure the visitor is aware of what information they need to provide you. This is especially true if you are asking people to register as a member or provide you with personal details. Tell them what information is required, and if possible, why it is required. What are you going to do with their personal information after they click ’submit’? Are there any conditions to their membership? Is membership or registration free? Are there paid membership programs available? What do they get for each level of membership or registration?

These little bits of data should be communicated directly on the registration page. It is also recommended to offer a page with Terms and Conditions of membership and offer a button for the visitor to Agree, or Not Agree to your terms.

Step 3 - Provide USEFUL feedback

When your visitor registers, send them some feedback. Let them know what has just happened on your system and what is about to happen next. Will you be getting in contact with them again? How often and why?

Again, the blog is also a good source of communicating new developments with in your web site. Enhance the ability of your blog by ensuring that you have a news feed included so that visitors can subscribe to your updates via email or a news reader.

One area most of us neglect is when we delete or move content. How many times have you searched for something on the Internet, and based on the search results you found a page that looked as if it was going to answer your question. But when you clicked on the link you received an uninformative Error 404 page. Frustrating wasn’t it.

Most hosting services allow you to create a customized Error page for several different types of error messages. Have a look at the error logs of your web site and determine what pages people have been looking for that are no longer there. Then develop a more intelligent Error response page with the same file name to properly direct those visitors to more valuable content.

Step 4 - Under commit, Over deliver

Very simply put, if you state it on your web site, just do it. I don’t know how many times I have gone to a web site and found what I thought was a great new idea only to find a message under the keywords I have searched for “Coming December 2007″ or ” Available January 28″. The date is February and the content they promised still isn’t there. It really destroys the credibility of those organizations that do not keep their web site content updated.

If you are going to come out with something new, keep it to yourself until it is ready. It will be a much bigger hit when you launch a tangible product or service rather than some form of “vapor ware”.

When your customer do register, give them something for free. You can also state the freebie prior to their signing up as an incentive. But make them feel like they are getting something valuable by using your product or service.

Step 5 - Don’t give your customers a reason to regret you

It can not be avoided, there will always be some conflict with one of your customers. When there is, you should treat the customer as if they are correct and you will do everything in your power to meet their request. Communicate this immediately or as soon as humanly possible. This puts them at ease and allows you to get on researching the problem in detail.

When researching the problem, ask yourself some questions such as; Was there any point where clear communication was not made with the customer? Where was the problem? Has it happened before and is there a potential for it happening again? Are we completely faultless in this situation?

The toughest part about this process is not asking the questions, but providing an honest answer to yourself regarding the situation. I won’t tell you to always give in to the customer, or that the customer is always right. We know better. But the way you react to the problem and handle the situation WILL impact your business. Each of us must determine, in each situation, how our reaction to a problem will effect our online future.

In conclusion, build your credibility before persuading your visitors to be your customers. Communication is the most important element to developing in the early stages and maintaining credibility during the relationship with your customers. Communicate as often as appropriate. Protect your credibility like you would your own baby, because once you lose it, it can be impossible to recover. Use your credibility to gain commitment without having to argue your case.

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Every once in a while, we stumble on those less desirable people that lurk on the Internet looking for new ways to take advantage of the system. Today, we would like to offer a warning to our users about one such dishonest group of people that call themselves, www.webdesignvalidation.com.

They offer you to submit you contact details and your web site information for a chance to win a new design for your site. We entered one of our sites into their contest at the beginning of the year with the chance to win a newly designed web site using Web 2.0 technologies. We thought, “Hey that’s a good idea. Let’s see how good they are so we can recommend this to our readers”.

So we complied with their rules. We put up a badge on our web site that let’s people click through to their site and vote for our site. Pretty simple … or so we thought.

They sent us a notice that on the 19th, our submitted site had been approved for submission as a “Non-Web 2.0 site”. Good news! On the 20th, they notified us that they were offering more rewards for their users. And a small note that said “a 3-plan membership was added in order to create a profile”. We weren’t sure what that meant. Nothing ever stated in the rules about a membership but we had already joined and been approved so we mistakenly assumed we were already members. But nothing was said about changes to the rules since we had joined.

On the 21st, another email about 3 new rewards. They were the same rewards as mentioned the day before. There was another mention of membership but again it was not obvious. “We have updated our awards for your category and added 3 membership options”. Ok, so what. Are we supposed to do something? No call to action in the email … no reference to rules changes for those already entered in January’s contest. We’re good to go.

But, out of caution, we decided to logon to the site and see how our submitted site was fairing in the ratings. Good news again, our submitted site was in first place with plenty of margin over the second place person. No worries then.

On January 31, we heard from one of our loyal fans that the badge on the homepage of our site was taking them to an error page (Error 404, page not found). We thought that was odd so we checked it out. Sure enough, no voting page. So we went to the home page at WDV and there was a notice that their system was down for scheduled maintenance and would be back online on February 1. Ok, we can wait.

On Feb 1 we received this little gem in our email exactly as quoted:

Wait a minute … we already have a user account. And to prove it they have addressed us as “Dear Member”. Now they are telling us that they have upgraded the site and we have to create an account again. What happened to our old account? What happened to our first place rating?

So we checked …. no account, no first place rating, all of the old pages resulted in “Page not found” errors. We sent an email asking what was going on. The following email was received the same day (copied exactly with spelling errors included):

Obviously, we did not hesitate to contact them.

It is amazing the methods that some people will use in order to build a contact list. While we did not loose any money on this, we do apologize as we did ask some of you to cast your vote for the site we submitted to understand how this was going to work. But we were most put out by the fact that they promised something to the web community, and then changed the rules to seemingly avoid delivering on the promise.

If this is how they treat their members, I am certainly not going to give them money as a registered member to be treated this badly. Obviously not a lot of gray matter exists in the heads of the people over at WDV.

We want to offer our sincere appreciation for your effort and we apologize for this inconvenience. Now we know that the people at WDV are not desirable business partners. We warn our customers not to use their service.

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Editor’s note: This article isn’t really about a Web Service or Tool, but deals with one of the more human aspects of trying to start your own online business.

These days, it is so easy to get down about your own personal situation. With so many of us out of work, or worried about losing our current jobs, on top of the day to day challenges we all face, it is easy to give into that nagging negativity signal in our heads.

We all know that simply repeating to ourselves the phrase “I’m going to be positive and have a good attitude” just doesn’t quite remove the negativity. Sometimes the motivational posters or that great quote posted up next to your computer may help, but they don’t keep you motivated. You have to work at staying positive and motivated every day. It’s not easy. You have to take deliberate action to have a positive attitude. You can’t just think about being positive, you have to act!

7 Methods to Keeping a Positive Attitude:

1. Misery Loves Company

As most of us have trouble keeping a positive attitude, one of the biggest mistakes we all make at times is sharing our troubles with others in a similar situation. Before long, the conversation turns in to story after story of negativity. If you find yourself involved in one of these “pity parties”, politely excuse yourself. These sessions are a waste of time and energy and are not at all productive. Avoid misery.

2. Poison People

Another type of person to be avoided is the person that tells you how all of your ideas are horse hockey. These people are usually negative most of the time and quick to complain about the slightest thing. You can not remove these people from your life, as much as you would like to, but they should be avoided or taken in small doses. Especially at times when your positive attitude meter is running low.

3. Spending Time with Friends, Family

When I am feeling a bit negative, the best medicine for me is to spend some time with my kids. You may not have children, so spending some time with a family member or a good friend, who is prone to being positive, is beneficial. If you are not near a family member or friend, go to the park or simply get out and go for a walk and watch other people. Getting your mind off of yourself and onto someone else is great for generating a more positive attitude. It doesn’t necessarily solve your immediate problems, but it puts you in a more positive state of mind for tackling your issues in a more productive manner.

4. Read something that Motivates you

There are plenty of motivational books out there these days. For some of us, we may just have a good story that motivates us in a similar way. Take a few minutes or an hour out to immerse yourself in a book that motivates you and puts you in a more positive state of mind.

5. Learn something new, Become an Expert

Find a topic that you have always been interested in and learn about it. Get onto Google, search for a few terms, go to those web pages, learn about it and become an expert on it. The effort will give you a great feeling of accomplishment, generating a more positive attitude and motivating you to continue towards your goals.

6. Exercise

Get out of the house (or office). Go for a walk. Go to the gym. Just get some exercise and sweat a little bit. Burn off the excess energy that is feeding your negative attitude. Personally, this has always helped me to become more positive.

7. Reward yourself

These days, getting praise for a job well done is almost non-existent. So go on, you did a great job. Go get something nice for yourself. Not food, a beer or a bottle of whiskey, but a tangible item that you can set on your desk or computer that reminds you that “you are doing a good job”.

Summary

I hope this information helps those that read it. We all go through periods of negativity that can really damage any progress we have made so far. Book mark this page and save it for later. If things really get tough, leave me a comment … always glad to help.

Personal note: My method for motivating myself was to write this blog post. Not only is this helping me to gain a more positive attitude, it is motivating me to do a few new things I have not yet thought of before.

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Finding a tool that let’s you polish up your photos for the web is not an easy task. Some photo editing tools are so feature packed, they become a little too difficult to use for the average computer user. So we went searching for online photo editing tools to see what was available and we’ve found three products that we think meet the needs of most.

The tools are Picnik, Splashup and Snipshot. All three allow you to upload a photo from your computer or from the Internet. Both Picnik and Snipshot also have a Premium upgrade that gives you far more photo enhancing effects to choose from than just the standard freebie package. Here is our brief take on each of the tools.

Picnik

Registration for a free account was extremely easy and didn’t take you through the email validation process that is common today. There are more photo effects available to the free user than with Snipshot, and the premium upgrade is the least expensive of the tools at $24.95 for one year, or about $2 per month.

Splashup

This was our favorite because it opened up a familiar application window when we were ready to get started with our photo editing. Registration was very simple with no email verification. And all of the effects are available with your free registration, but there are not as many effects as Picnik offers to premium subscribers. There was no Premium membership option available for this tool.

Snipshot

There was no registration required for us to upload a photo and add some effects. However, the effects available to the free user are very limited. The good news is the premium membership is the most expensive at $9 per month, the good news being that you only needed to buy a month premium membership at a time instead of a full year.

We recommend you to try out all three and make the choice for yourself.

Happy photo editing!

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If you are just starting out in your online business venture, or you have been running your own site for a while, Google Webmaster Tools should be the one tool that you have in your arsenal of website analytics tools.

This website tool will let you analyze all of your web sites and help you to understand how Google sees your site as it exists today. Based on the information here, you can fine tune your web site to present it in the manner you desire.

To get started, you should visit the site and add one of your web sites to the list. You will then need to verify that you are the site owner. This verification is done in one of two ways; adding a specially named file to the root directory of your web site, or adding a meta tag into the HEAD section of your home page. If you have your own domain name, either option is easy. If you are running a blog on a site like Blogger, Wordpress or Typepad, you will need to edit the template file that contains your HEAD tag information. In Wordpress this is done by going into the dashboard for your blog, clicking ‘Presentation’, ‘Theme editor’, and editing the ‘header.php’ file. Just find the line that says BODY and insert the tag Google gives you just above this line.

Now you’re ready. When you visit the Webmaster Tools site again, you are greeted with the Dashboard. From here you can add and delete sites, manage site maps, and click through to more detailed reports about how your site is indexed. Once you select the site that you want more detail on, you are given a number of options to choose from; Diagnostics, Statistic, Links, Sitemaps, and Tools.

The Diagnostics are will tell you what problems Google encountered while crawling your website. These problems could include HTTP errors, pages that weren’t found or restricted, or just simply URLs that could not be reached. If you have pages optimized for mobile devices, you can view any issues with those pages as well. Google has recently added a Content Analysis option to his page as well to identify any issues they found with Page Titles or Meta descriptions or non-indexable content. Who says Google doesn’t care about Meta data?

In the Statistics area, Google will show you when your site was included in the search results, terms that returned your site and the position your site placed in that particular search on average. This is very valuable for determining what keywords your site is linked associated with.

This area will also show you Google’s take on your site. This is probably the most powerful part of the tool. You can see what words are used in links back to your site, the keywords Google has identified on your site, and the list of keywords on other sites that link to you. This is all very important to determining your Google Page Rank. You can see what your Google Page Rank is from the Crawl Stats link under Statistics. This will not be a number, but will be a subjective result based on Google Analysis.

Statistics will also show you your indexing stats link the pages indexed, names of sites that link to you, the cached page of your site, etc.

The Links area is pretty cool because it will show you a list of your web pages that other web sites have linked to. From there, you can drill down and see the exact URL of the pages that link to that page. You can also see how the internal page linking for your website is understood by Google.

In the Sitemaps area, you can manage and submit a sitemap for each of your web sites. This really helps Google in indexing your site, but is not a requirement. You can generate a Google Sitemap from the XML Sitemaps web site automatically, and then upload the files to your server. This might not be possible for bloggers use free blogging tools, but the Sitemaps tool is only an option and not a requirement for using Webmaster Tools.

The last area is the Tools section. Here, there are various tools that Google provides to help analyze the different aspects of your web site that are important to a crawler like the robots.txt file, your preferred domain reference, the geographic target of your web site, and more.

Each of tools and sections described come with online help and very clear descriptions of what each tool is doing and how to use it. The tools are easy to use and will help you learn a lot about how Google sees your web site and what you can do to help it place better in the search results.

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We’ve just run across this wonderful new tool from COLOURlovers.

Getting the perfect color or color scheme for your web site, or graphic can be difficult. The most difficult part is remembering those cryptic hex codes or RGB codes for your favorite color.

So the folks at COLOURlovers created a color picker tool. But the best part is this tool is free, and they’re making the code available to put on your website.

As we are always scouring the web looking for useful Web Tools for our visitors, we will be putting this on our site. But we thought we should let our visitors know they have the option to get a hold of this tool as well to benefit their web design efforts.

You can get the code here.

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On-Page SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of placing your selected keywords in the right places on your web pages. It also involves optimizing your website’s page titles, headings, content, and URLs to improve search engine rankings.

In this post, we’ll take a look at each of these areas and how you can optimize these areas to help position your web site higher in search engine rankings.

Page Title Attributes

The attributes that we will examine in this section are the main title of your web page (the text displayed at the very top of the browser window), the description and the meta keywords. These attributes are set in the <HEAD> section of each web page in the following tags:

<title>Your Web Page Title</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Your web site description”>
<meta name=keywords” content=”Your selected keywords”>

Although these are not that important to the Google search bots, they do help other web search engines and directories determine the value of your content. If these other search engines and directories value your content, this will also help boost your Google page rankings.

The Title is the most important attribute there is for two reasons. First, the title is the one piece of information that describes what the page is about. It is the default title your browser and book-marking sites will automatically use when people save your site for future use. Second, it is what search engines use to determine what your website is all about. Compared to everything else on your page, the title gets the most weight from the search engines.

The description is an abstract or a summary of your web page. It is crucial that the important words and terms about your site be crafted into the description. Another use of the description is that currently Yahoo! (and possibly other engines) use this description when your site is returned on a given search term, and it has to show a small summary of your site below the title.

The meta-keywords provide a set of key terms or words that describe your web page. Originally, the keywords element was a key element towards determining the context of a web page. It was a quick way for the search engine to understand what a web page was about. But, as people started abusing this feature by stuffing words into the meta-keywords element that had nothing to do with the web page’s content, the importance of the meta-keywords element has been greatly reduced. Although this information is still a contributing factor, search engines no longer look at this information as the definitive way to understand web page context.

Headings

Similar to how newspapers and magazines use headings and sub-headings to help readers, websites can use heading tags ( <h1>, <h2>, etc.) in their HTML. These tags not only help human readers segment the content, they also help search engine spiders better understand the content on a web page and determine what is most important. It is generally a good idea to use heading tags to help the search engines understand what the web page is about.The Item in the <h1> tag is usually the headline of the Web Page. The lower ranked headings ( <h2, <h3> and so on …) are used in the same manner as you might identify outline levels of a document. For instance, the title of this post is a <h3> tag while the sub-titles, like the one at the top of this section on headings, is a <h4>.

Identifying Images

Images are a great way to enhance a website from the visitor’s perspective. But search engine crawlers cannot see these images, even though they understand that an image exists because of the HTML tag in which it is contained. If you have lots of images on your website that contain textual content within the image itself, this text will not be seen by the crawlers.

HTML helps address this issue by allowing you to specify the textual content for an image using the “alt” attribute within the <img> tag. The alt attribute allows web pages to assign specific text as the “alternative” content for images for visitors or web crawlers that cannot view the images. This alt attribute also adds weight to determining the content on your web pages.

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