Spending a little time checking out YouTube this morning, I came across an interesting link in their footer, YouTube on Your TV. I saw one of the methods supported was through a Wii game console. I have the Wii, so I cranked it up, and checked out my family videos. Neat, and YouTube’s site was ready to roll operating with the Opera Browser for Wii. My site however, is not. Continue reading »
Oct 202009
Oct 192009
I was studying one of my clients analytics today, and was please to see a such a low bounce on their Google traffic. They currently get about 2,000 visitors a month from Google with a bounce rate of just 23%. It appears I nailed it for this site in regards in targeting keywords. The reality is though, all I nailed was their name.
They Kind of Remember You
Doing a little more digging around, I did find that I ranked well for several of the keywords I was after. What really amazed me, and I simply had to take the time to count them all, was the number of ways people searched for this company. I guess most people just kind of remember who you are, or at least your company. I counted 274 different ways people searched for my clients site by company name in just one month, and that was just from Google. The company’s name was made of three words, and also includes an Inc. afterwards. Here is a list of the different ways I found people searching for my clients site by company name. Continue reading »
When I tell people that I build websites, a common reaction is, “Oh, I need a website.” Not much longer, the process of building a new website has begun, and sooner or later I ask the dreaded question, “Do you have a logo?” Those of you that have been building websites for a while now know the answer to this on. The normal response, “Can you do that?” My reaction? I guess so, if that is something you want to pay me to do. Continue reading »
Looking back at a years worth of data for this blog, and comparing it to the previous, I wanted to know what types of marketing worked best. It seems that the best thing that I can do for this site is to simply keep posting new content.
Looking at the Stats
After looking at the stats I saw many sources come and go. A few marketing methods appeared to work, but not at a level I was hoping or expecting. I have three sources of traffic, direct, referring, and search. When looking at Google’s analytics to do the comparison, make sure you don’t just click on Traffic Sources. Click on Traffic Sources, and then click on each source for their stats; Direct, Referring, Search. This will show percentage of growth based for each source. If you were to just click Traffic Sources the percentages are comparisons to total traffic growth, and it may mislead you. Continue reading »
For those of you that use Google Analytics for your website, you may have noticed the new addition to the view bar. It’s the Pivot function. This little button can work wonders. It is a fantastic tool for quickly seeing where your visitors are coming from, and to see what’s their favorite content from those sources.
Back in September I wrote this post: Targeting Sources for Better Visitors. That post was about getting more page views by tapping into the right audience. Using Google’s new pivot option, you could drastically improve your understanding of your audience. Continue reading »
Oct 142009
With all the wind in rain here in the San Francisco Bay area I was checking out my favorite weather site, Wunderground.com, to see how much rain we have had. For San Jose, we got a lot. At my house, I’m one of those folks with a weather station, we had 3.57 inches in less than one day. At my brothers house in Scotts Valley, they had over six inches in one day. I guess you could say, lots of puddles.
3D Radar
Anyhow, the reason for this post was to let you know about this cool new radar Wunderground is testing out. Besides seeing where the rain clouds are from up above, you can now see them in 3D. Check out this screenshot I took. Continue reading »
Oct 132009
A common occurrence and necessity is to spend more time working on the home page compared to other pages of a website. Many experts will tell you that you can’t forget your other content, and smartly so. Search engines like Google sees each page of your site uniquely, and your contact page could actually bring in more visitors than your home page. This is all often the case, but I wanted to know by how much.
So I did a little study using Google Analytics reports from ten different sites. The sites are completely random in industry, and in type. Continue reading »
Oct 122009
On the weekends I like to jot down ideas for future posts, but this weekend it just didn’t happen. I’ve been having fun with Spykee, a pretty cool little toy that I purchased from Woot for half it’s regular price.
What is Spykee?
Spykee is about a one foot high wireless remote controlled toy that has audio, video, and motion sensitivities. With a few clicks from my PC I can turn on Spykee from anywhere in the world and drive him around my house. The cat was its first face to face visitor, and ever since then I have had a blast driving it around.
Because it can hear and has speakers, you can virtually talk and see others through your PC and Spykee. One of it’s first runs I was showing it to my wife. She was downstairs, and I was upstairs. The whole time I was talking to her while driving it around. When she later came upstairs we talked about it, and she didn’t even realize she was talking through Skypee. She thought she was talking directly to me. Continue reading »
Last month I started doing some research on small business website, see what I found then: A Text File Website Could Be Better. Well I have continued that research into October, and already this month I have looked at nearly 500 small business websites. My initial conclusion? There are millions of small business website built around the year 2000, and they have not been updated since. Small business owners, this post is for you.
It’s Not the Year 2000 Anymore
Looking at website after website I started to see a common occurrence with small business websites. Updates are not very frequent, and layout upgrades appear to be non-existent. So what you say? Well mainly, it’s not the year 2000 anymore. The way websites appear, function, and perform are completely different today than they were back in 2000.
This is all about visitor expectations. Visitors are expecting more from a website than just a brochure site. They are also expecting a business website to be more professional in appearance. It’s time to delete the silly animated gifs or scrolling text. It’s time to make your content consistent in format, and it’s most definitely time to make sure everything works correctly on your website. In my previous post about this, A Text File Website Could Be Better, formatting is certainly a major issue. Continue reading »
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