Improve Your Website!
Learn how having a clear objective, site wide consistency, and user testing can be your best friend. Follow BWI, and get daily tips to improve your website.
Learn how having a clear objective, site wide consistency, and user testing can be your best friend. Follow BWI, and get daily tips to improve your website.
Two months ago I added the Tweetmeme button to my blog. Two weeks after that, I wrote about how it appeared to be doubling my Twitter Traffic. In that post I started out by saying that I may be jumping the gun on this subject. Apparently, I did.
I saw this headline found on Yahoo today, and I can’t help but saying…Duh. Most kids don’t like to read. The article, “Is Blogging a Slog? Some Young People Think So” was about how researchers found out that young people don’t like to read long blogs or articles anymore. Like they ever did. Comically written in a nearly 1,000 word article, I guess the young people today will not be reading it.
To ensure that this post is short enough for everyone to read, I leave you this picture to do the talking.

Whether you have a new website or old, taking inventory of all of your content is an important step for ensuring easy navigation. Something I have repeated many times to clients, your website is a reflection of your planning. The clarity of the reflection largely depends on how you organize your content. Poor organization, often equals poor reflection.
Are you using Gravatar? I know some of the regulars to BWI are not. What is Gravatar? I’ve included a video at the bottom of this post to help explain.
A gravatar is a globally recognized avatar. Confused yet? It’s the picture of yourself when you comment on this blog. Don’t see a picture of yourself? That is because you don’t have a gravatar.
One of my favorite online tools I like to use is SEOCentro’s Meta Tag Analyzer. Simply type in your page URL, enter the captcha, and whamo, a ton of information.
The tool starts off by giving some basic heading status information, and also includes Google’ PageRank. It then lists all of the meta tags used, followed up by their score. They give a numeric score, 100 being best, for each tag based on several factors. I pride myself on achieving 100% for all of them. It’s actually an excellent tool for developing a great meta description tag.
Does your website have a primary call to action? I hope so. Getting your website to “do something” should be a goal for all website owners. Getting new visitors to see your call to action, or to even act on that call to action though, is the real trick to having a successful website.
Assuming you have a call to action on your website, are you tracking how often it gets clicked? A call to action on your website should be managed as if you were paying for every impression of it being there. You are after all, paying for it in several different ways.
Taking my first and last typing lessons back in 1980, I learned that we put two spaces after a period before starting a new sentence. Well, 1980 was a long time ago.
You could argue either way, one space or two, but it really doesn’t matter as long as your consistent. AP style indicates that you should just use one space after a sentence. I believe Chicago style says to use two. When writing online you should use just one space, and I have a very good reason for it.
My next door neighbor is one of those super IT tech guys, and told me I should post this to quickly help spread the word. He works for ZAG Technical Services, one of Silicon Valley’s leading IT companies.