Smiling Faces Bring Life to Your Website

Nov 162009
 

Maybe it’s just me, but when I review websites I find I always seem to have a soft spot for websites with smiling faces. Last week I was asked to check out this Denver photo booth rentals website, and the first thing that catches my eye is the smiling faces. Maybe it’s the; see someone else smile, I smile factor. Regardless of why, this site nailed the essence of what they are trying to sell with smiling pictures.

It’s Not Really About the Booth

The website rents photo booths. Is that what they are really selling though? If you go to their home page, Denver Photo Booth Rentals, you will find 12 pictures, and only one of them is the actually photo booth. Continue reading »

Google Webmaster Tools Now Has Keyword Significance

Nov 142009
 

Google’s Webmaster Tools Dashboard now comes complete with a keyword significance chart graphing your keywords. They rank the keywords found on your site by count, and in their words should “reflect the subject matter of your site”.

The list displays only one word keyword phrases, and appears to go as low as three characters. It noticed BWI on this site without a problem. I’m just wondering why usability isn’t over design for this site.

The unfortunate part about this new feature is the fact that when you download the list in CSV format, numeric values are not show along with the keywords. It’s just a list of words, but at least they are prioritized order.

Continue reading »

Giving the Real Estate Market a Little Margin

Nov 142009
 

I was asked today to take a look at Jimmy Reno’s Texas Hill Country Real Estate website. My first impression in one word, margin. The site loses its top margin after navigating to a few pages. Frames, tables, and no defined margin often leads to little quirks like this. So I thought I would do a quick little post today to show how to give an entire page a margin.

When navigating Texas Hill Country Real Estate using the left menu you will quickly find out the site uses frames. The left menu was left static, and the right did all of the changing. When you return to the home page though, frames are removed, and so is the margin. Yuck. Continue reading »

Content May Be King but its Kingdom is Just as Powerful

Nov 132009
 

Doing a little SEO work for a client, I was quickly reminded that all parts of a website need careful tending because they can all drive in traffic. A mere day after my clients  added descriptive alt attributes to their images, Google search traffic started coming in for some of the text found in the attributes. If that’s not a reason to validate your HTML, nothing is. Here is how I do images now: Images are In Charge of Your Linking Title.

It’s a Team Thing

In the case of getting more visitors to your site from search engines understand that every facet of your website could play a large roll in your traffic. Your content could be generating traffic, but your meta descriptions, alt attributes, and many other factors could play just as significant part. Continue reading »

Kids Captured and Released Swine Flu

Nov 112009
 

Am I a carrier of the Swine Flu? Could be. My whole family got something nasty with the known symptoms. We managed to stay home the entire time, since Thursday last week. This is not something you want to spread, even if it isn’t the swiner. Note to moms getting ready to send you kids back to school. If they have a fever today, do not send to school tomorrow.

Anyhow, I was lucky enough to snap a picture of the nasty little guy, and I thought I would share it with you. Just like my youngest shared it with the family! Continue reading »

Evil Auto Loading Flash Videos

Nov 102009
 

Music, videos, script, and anything that has to do something after page load is a burden on users. When is enough enough? When people started figuring out how to add music to websites it took off like crazy. Then people figured out that users might already be listening to music, heard lots of complaints about it, and they stopped. At least most of them.

Well now there is a new technology, and it’s called video. Want proof that history often repeats itself? Just look around for websites that automatically load video now. The numbers are insane, and apparently these people have no clue, or have completely forgotten the lesson learned from adding auto loading music. Users don’t want auto playing extras! Continue reading »

FriendFeed Group for BWI

Nov 092009
 

A fan of FriendFeed, I decided to create my own group where other webmaster can post their own website tips. The group is easy to find, http://friendfeed.com/bwi, and anyone with a FriedFeed account is welcome to post their website design tips there. Hopefully we can make this a busy stream of great tips for site design.

If you have yet to try FriendFeed, you should give it a try. It makes sharing your activities super easy. Continue reading »

Menu Stacking, This Menu is Not For You

Nov 072009
 

So what is menu stacking you ask. Menu stacking is the design concept of having one horizontal menu stacked on top of another. These separate menus often address different target groups or needs, and can run anywhere from just two menus to eight. I say eight only because I have actually caught a website doing this. There is no real limit to the confusion though, and it is not uncommon to find sites with at least three menus stacked on top of each other.

Menu stacking is a bad idea, and reflects poor planning in regards to site hierarchy along with the poor planning for visitors needs. Continue reading »

Easy Way to Make Sure Google Likes Your Blog Post Descriptions

Nov 052009
 

I’ve recently wrote a couple of posts about writing post descriptions, A Blog Description Google Seems to Like and Your Description Sucks. If you read those, you should know by now that a custom description doesn’t always get used by Google. Sometimes Google just doesn’t care for your description, and uses the content it feels is best for the snippet they display.

Well, here is an easy way to make sure Google is using your description, use Google Alerts. Continue reading »

Tags Show What Visitors Like

Nov 042009
 

If you are a blogger, know that post tags could be your best friend when it comes to identifying what your readers want more of. Some of you may initially be thinking that is what tag clouds do, but it’s not. Tag clouds show what the blogger likes, not what the readers like. Having a tag cloud, in my book, is like asking someone to pick a card out of a deck that is manipulated to force a known pick.

Having a list of tags that do not indicate popularity by size or order, offer insight to what your readers really want to see more of. On this site it  appears that you want to see more usability tips, web design tips, and Google. The tags have spoken. Continue reading »

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