Getting Subscribers is Easy for a Blog

Apr 302010
 

First, may I say, getting subscribers is not easy. It takes work, regardless if you are managing a blog or not. If you are running a blog, a subscriber count could be the easiest thing to improve though.

When it comes to numbers for this site, I have three major goals that I try to accomplish. I try to get more unique visitors, I look for ways to keep them engaged longer (more pageviews per session), and I try to get more subscribers. I have the goals broken down in easy steps that I believe I can accomplish, and try to keep the three in sync.

Continue reading »

How to Manage those Long Lists

Apr 292010
 

Here is an easy one. Everyone loves lists right? Well, where I work numbered lists are a daily occurrence, and those lists are often more than 10 items long. What makes them even crazier, being one that prefers notepad to make edits, is when a client asks me to update “number 8″ with new content. Trying to figure out which one is which, referencing only <li> can be a pain. Continue reading »

Content is Crap – Bells and Whistles are Everything

Apr 282010
 

Content is crap, and bells and whistles are everything.

Thinking more and more about how people use the web, and how reading (more than a couple of sentences) has simply become a thing of the past. I wonder how valuable content really is unless it’s simply screaming look at me!

Take this half a million dollar hunk of clay for example. It’s a monument at the Cesar Chavez Park in the city of San Jose, CA. Continue reading »

Google Webmaster Tools Adds Graphs

Apr 202010
 

Those of you that use Google Webmaster Tools, good news! They are now graphing top search queries, revealing clickthrough ratios.

webmastertools

Looking at my old road rage site, MonkeyMeter.com, I found my best keyword was really “road terms”, and not road rage, though I get more hits for road rage type searches. When Google users search road terms, 7 out of 10 of them will visit my site. That’s a number I like to see. Continue reading »

Usability Testing Reveals Scrolling Content OK

Apr 192010
 

Doing some testing on a news feed that automatically scrolls, results point to…let it scroll. A large client of mine has a scrolling news feed on their portal, and there were a few that thought the scrolling should just go. Here is what I found.

Watching Users

Watching users use it, there appeared to be no problems at all, as long as the had the option to control the scroll. A looping feed with no control resulted in frustration for the user, and actually, frustration for the guy watching them, me. Without the control the feed took nearly a minute to reload. Continue reading »

Flying Fingers Gives Me Contest Idea

Apr 162010
 

So who is up for helping me run a contest? Who would like to be in a website building race? Racing to make my deadline yesterday, got me wondering how fast some of you are at coding. I would love to know how fast a page could be developed based on a Word Doc, something I was doing at the time I thought of the idea.

We could make certain rules, like no tables for layout, formatting must be done with a CSS file, and the code must pass W3C validation. You could use any software or service offered online to help you build the page, we just want to see results, and we want the fast. Continue reading »

The Intranet Enhancement List

Apr 132010
 

After just making one new portal go live very early yesterday morning, I added the finishing touches to my teams project plan for enhancing yet another portal. This one is a big deal. It’s the main portal for the company, and it averages over 150,000 page views a day.

What does a large company with such a busy intranet find important? Below are some of the key items we are going after. Continue reading »

More Important Stuff on the Left

Apr 112010
 

Last week I posted, Keep the Important Stuff on the Left. It was a quick post about how Jakob Nielson has new data that supports old, about how the important things like site navigation should really be on the left.
I know many would argue this, and I myself, could list a handful of blogs (some of my favorites) that contradict this. That’s why I thought we should take a look at what the kings and queens of the Internet are doing today. I give you the top 5, according to Alexa: Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo, and Live. Continue reading »

Dreaming About Heading Tags and Tables

Apr 072010
 

You know spend a lot of time building websites when your dreams involve heading tags, tables, and DIVs. Last night I dreamt that I blew a fuse in a meeting when I saw the speaker explaining how to use heading tags, and they did it wrong.

I felt embarrassed immediately afterwards because I knew it was nothing to get mad about. Right after that, I woke up and thought to myself…why does the IT department make us use tables? Tables mayhem on my clients site, has lead to heading tags not even being used at all! Continue reading »

Keep the Important Stuff on the Left

Apr 062010
 

Jakob Nielsen released a new report to day: Horizontal Attention Leans Left. His findings indicate that web users spend 69% of their time on the left hand side of the page.

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