Viewing Archive for: January 2009

Why You Should Focus on Widgets, Gadgets and Social Nets in Tough Times

In these tough economic times, the smartest companies are using everything–including sticks and rocks–to get the attention of prospects and customers. The most potent weapons in their marketing arsenals include Web 2.0 tools and services, social networking, mobile apps, desktop widgets and gadgets, based on a recent Forrester Research study. Their main objectives are to improve customer service (73 percent) and acquire new customers (71 percent). Help your boss or client tighten their... 

Web Monitors Uncover Top 100 Blogs and Platforms

Pingdom, a service that monitors Web sites and servers on the Internet, looked at the top 100 blogs on Technorati to find out which blogging platform is used most often. Pingdom distinguishes between blogs that are self-hosted and blogging-service hosted. The top two self-hosted platforms are Wordpress (27 percent) and Moveable Type (12 percent). The top two platforms that sit on a service are Typepad (16 percent) and Blogsmith (14 percent). When hosted and self-hosted are combined, the top two blogging... 

Roundup: Even More Sites Where You can Find Images Free and Clear

I wrote about using Flickr a while ago as a good source of images that you can use free and with few or no copyright limitations. Lately, I’ve been organizing my database of  places to find free and unrestricted images. Keep in mind that “free” often requires your giving the source credit and a link back to the image provider’s site. No, this list does not include every site in the universe. If you have some favorites, please add them as a comment and I’ll add them... 

9 Useful Tools for Analyzing Web Design

We all understand how important it is to know just how site visitors navigate a site, what they click on, where they come from, where they go when they leave the site and similar indicators of behavior. These are the factors on which great Web designs are built. I’ve pulled together a list of sites I think will help you understand how a Web site looks and works to optimize design and copy. You can also think of these sites as services you can sell to your clients: In your initial pitch provide... 

Why Web Designers and Web Writers Should Talk

I often write about Web design, although I’m not a designer. Oh sure, I can muck around with Macromedia’s Dreamweaver, HTML, Adobe Photoshop and other tools of the trade, but I didn’t get a degree in graphics design. Mine was in mass communication. Most of what I know about Web design comes from working with some very good designers over the years and a goodly amount of my studying on the side. I’ve learned to speak the designer’s lingo and I so respect the work they... 

Package Your Content Vertically and Horizontally

Most companies—small and big alike—put their Web site content into silos with products in one silo, services in another silo, white papers in still another silo and so on. It may make sense to do it that way, but it doesn’t go far enough to play into the way site visitors search for info. It’s too much to expect most people to hop, skip and jump from one silo to the next to mentally assemble the information they’re looking for. Think about also creating content packages around a key product,... 

Read this Article about Headlines Now if you Know What’s Good for You

You can learn an awful lot about how to write compelling headlines from studying your junk mail. I get a lot of it because of a dead relative. Naw, I don’t mean the poor guy is sending me junk mail from the great beyond. He passed away and his mail is being forwarded to my house. He was a good-hearted man who gave money to just about every charity that came begging. He also belonged to a number of civic organizations, subscribed to a variety of magazines and bought stuff from catalogs. His... 

Here’s What’s on My Apple iPhone Today

On the side, I write for a few blogs, one of which is AppCraver, an Apple iPhone applications review site. With each review I do, I get smarter about which apps are truly useful to people like you and me. Here’s what’s been on my iPhone lately: Bringing in the reads and feeds The best news app I’ve come across is Mobile News Network. It’s AP news that you can configure in a variety of ways: top news, local news, sports, business, politics and on and on. The interface is super... 

New Searchable Scanned Docs and a Common Screw Up

I mention Google so often that many people must think I’m getting paid by the company. Just for the record, they don’t pay me. I just can’t help myself–Google is always doing cool things. Recently, Google said it is now able to use optical character recognition to index scanned documents stored as Adobe PDFs. Previously, the company rarely scanned docs because it couldn’t be sure of the search results. According to Google’s blog: While we’ve indexed documents...