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 »
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.
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 »
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.
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 »
What are better visitors? Well, that all depends. What do you want your visitors to do? This month I have been working on increasing the average page views per visitor. So for me, right now, a better visitor would be one that generates more page views. I feel that this is currently a weak spot on my site, so I am doing whatever it takes to improve it. Continue reading »
The title says it all here. Trying to reduce my sites overall bounce rate this month I found working on the homepage could be one of the biggest helpers. What did I do? I reduced the size of my introduction message, which brought the blog posts up. The end result? A 11.25% decrease in bounced visitors. Continue reading »
You can always find what’s popular on this site now by visiting this page: Popular Posts. It lists the top blog posts and pages found on this site based on the number of unique visitors during the current month. Popular Posts is located under Archives in the left menu.
For this month a total of 431 of my posts and pages were read by two or more visitors.
The owners of www.ofertasdeadsl.net, are trying to provide a simple site with basic information about getting ADSL services. The have a basic layout listing some providers by cost and speed, and also have a few details about the services. What they really need, I think, is a side by side comparison. I also think they need your help in site layout.
One of the biggest problems I personally have in designing a site is when a client has little content to begin with. I warn clients ahead of time about this concern. In fact, after ten plus years of building sites, I finally made it a personal policy to note even take a client until I am conviced they are ready to go with real direction, real content, and a true understanding what it is they want their site to do. I’ll help them get there, but I won’t start working on the site until I know it’s time.
So the owners of www.ofertasdeadsl.net think they are. The have some content, they have some details, and they believe their message is clear. What I thought would be a nice experiment is to put their site up to one of my new favorite sites, Thinkature.com. What I have done is created a whiteboard environment using Thinkatures service in regards to ofertasdeadsl.net.
Let’s see if we can help this site out by working on the whiteboard. I have made the page open to anyone so login or an account is not required. All you have to do is visit the link, give a username (as a chat name), and make any edits you would do.
Can the readers of Best Web Image help improve this site? I hope so!
Here is the link to their whiteboard: http://thinkature.com/workspace/camp185/OfertasDeADSL.net
Last week I took on a quest to look at 1,000 blogs and websites. I was looking for that special something that draws me into a site, and actually read some of their content. Well I found something, and to no surprise to some, it was images.
What I found after looking at all those sites is the power of the image. I’m sure that most of you have heard “An image is worth a 1,000 words”, and that fact is important here. On the web most people scan for content. We read headers only, we skim text at best, and we look for lists. One of the best methods to quickly gain information is to scan images. They provide massive amounts of information in seconds.
While on my quest of 1,000 blogs I also came across many websites, and the fact stayed the same. Images get you to look. The screen shot you see here is from a skin cream manufacturer. They used a basic shopping cart software to host their site. I could have easily skipped over this site without paying much attention, but the image draws attention. They also had images of their products on the home page, something I would also strongly suggest if you run an online store.
Well their were all sorts of images that got me to look a little deeper, and on all sorts of different kind of site layouts. A few keys I found were:
This doesn’t work for everyone’s layout though, like mine for instance. I do plan on adding something though to get that walker by to look though. The image draws you in.
Here are two other things I noticed. Images with animals almost always got me to look. This might be just a personality thing though, so don’t go designing a site with animals all over it just because I like to see pictures of them. I don’t consider myself a big animal fanatic, so I do wonder what the connection is, and if others have noticed this.
The other thing I saw, and it really started to bug me was YouTube videos. I saw a ton of blogs with YouTube videos. Videos are great, but they come at a price. The video screen shot takes longer to load than the rest of the site. When I looked at all those sites the video at first seemed like a good idea. Then I turned, and started thinking, “another stupid video”, then it turned into “done looking at that site” the second I saw it had a video. I do not have a problem with YouTube videos, but I am thinking you might want to be careful where you place it.
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