Monday, May 12th, 2008
By default, should audio be on at a web site?
Go to a website Better Homes and Gardens Landscaping Software page and the first thing that happens is you hear a voice begin to describe the product. Your heart my give a jump because it is unexpected - especially if your volume is turned up high.
Is this good business practice? In most cases, it is [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Technology by Ricki Steigerwald
Tuesday, January 1st, 2008
Check your copyrights.
It’s the first of the year. It is time to update the copyrights on your blogs and other dynamic websites.
No Comments » - Posted in Technology by Ricki Steigerwald
Thursday, November 15th, 2007
Optimizing an Image for the Web
You have a photograph you want to put on your website or blog, however, the file is too big and you need to shrink the photograph to fit on your page. How can you get this accomplished without spending hundreds of dollars on sophisticated software such as Adobe Photoshop?
Try GIMP, a free, open source photo [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Technology by Ricki Steigerwald
Friday, October 26th, 2007
Does your website work without the “www”?
One of the first checks I do when I am about to meet with a prospective client is try and access the client’s website with www in front of the domain name - and without.
In most cases, it works with and without. If all or part of the site does not load, it usually [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Sales, Marketing & Growth by Ricki Steigerwald
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007
Web writing is different from printed writing
If you are alike me, you mostly scan web content rather than reading it word-for-word.
Jakob Nielsen has a great newsletter article about web writing. Click on the “writing for the web” under Mea Culpa for great words of wisdom.
No Comments » - Posted in Sales, Marketing & Growth by Ricki Steigerwald
Wednesday, April 18th, 2007
The Best Format for Electronic Media
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the format that is best for printed material.
MarketingSherpa released an updated posting about what works best for electronic media. The posting is based upon a reply from one of their readers about a great source for research done on this topic.
The Wichita State University Software Usability Research [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Sales, Marketing & Growth by Ricki Steigerwald
Thursday, March 29th, 2007
Do you need the www?
Did you know that to a search engine www.officeanimation.com is different from officeanimation.com? They treat each domain separately and this can work against your page ranking. For example, you might use officeanimation.com to traverse your site, but people who link to your site use www.officeanimation.com. To a search engine, those links in are ranked separately [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Sales, Marketing & Growth by Ricki Steigerwald
Monday, February 19th, 2007
Two kinds of sitemaps
Your website should have two kinds of sitemaps: user-friendly index of pages and a search-engine sitemap.
The user-friendly index of pages is for your visitors to find information quickly. It is also used by search engines to find pages on your site. These site maps increase the weight of your pages on search engines [...]
