August 9th, 2009
In my opinion, ugly sites can perform very well, and there are a number of factors that can contribute to that:
First, ugly sites are often sites that were originally built back in the 1990s by some business owner who had no web design sense or technical knowledge but wanted to promote his business online.
Full post: Do Ugly Sites Perform Better? »
August 8th, 2009
So I have — er, had — this client. Let’s call him Mr. X. I didn’t design his website originally; I inherited him from a colleague who had designed it and was hosting it, and who wanted to get out of the business altogether. The colleague had Mr. X’s domain registered in his own account, and he transferred the domain to me. So I was hosting Mr. X’s site (at a very reasonable cost), and a couple of times Mr. X contacted me to make minor updates to his site, which I did. Other than billing him quarterly for his hosting and annually for his domain renewal, and those couple of minor updates, I didn’t have any other contact with Mr. X.
Next thing I know, Mr. X calls me to tell me that he’s hired someone else to develop a new site for him,
Full post: Client Shoots Self in Foot »
August 7th, 2009
Once again, I’m trying to help a client track down and gain control of their domain. A couple of years ago, they hired someone to develop their web site for them. He registered their domain in his name, and he apparently renewed it a year ago. But now he’s disappeared and they can’t locate him. None of their contact info for him reaches him. Their domain is on the verge of expiring, but they can’t find the previous developer to get him to renew it, nor can they renew it themselves.
Full post: Your Domain is a Valuable Business Asset — Treat It Like One »
August 5th, 2009
One of my clients (who has a very successful and busy site) recently asked me about selling text links on his site. He had been approached by someone (apparently a link broker) who was wanting to place a collection of links in the footer, sitewide. My client was asking me about format and location, but I didn’t even address those questions. I told him that before he decided to proceed down that path, he needed to know about Google’s stance on paid links and the nofollow tag.
Full post: Links, Google and Advertising »
November 16th, 2008
Copyright law seems to be poorly misunderstood by a great many people. I’m not an attorney, and I’m particularly not a copyright or intellectual property attorney, but I believe I have an informed layman’s understanding of copyright matters. Knowing the basics of copyright law and the legal issues surrounding the use of copyrighted material can help one stay out of trouble. I’ve had two recent copyright issues that might be helpful to discuss.
Full post: Copyright and Copywrong »
November 5th, 2008
Official-looking e-mails appear to be from prominent registrars — they’re really attempts to steal your domains
Both eNom and Network Solutions, two very large registrars that handle millions of domain registrations, are the target of a major phishing attack. It is believed that the perpetrators’ purpose is to acquire the login details for victims’ domain registrar accounts and thereby steal or otherwise compromise their domain registrations.
Phishing warning posted on Network Solutions home page
Full post: Watch Out for Domain Registrar Phishing Attacks »
November 4th, 2008
A good many of my clients are Realtors, and a good many Realtors throw away money on ineffective pay-per-click advertising because they haven’t taken the time to educate themselves on the tremendous opportunity afforded by this type of advertising. Pay-per-click advertising (a la Google AdWords) offers a type of advertising that has never before been available in the history of the world: Individualized mass-market advertising.
A Realtor may be an expert at marketing and selling real estate — but that Realtor may not be an expert at writing AdWords advertising copy or managing an online pay-per-click campaign. Pay-per-click is an easy way to get targeted traffic to your web site without waiting for the long-term results of organic search engine optimization. It’s also an easy way to throw away lots of money without seeing any return.
We’ve put together a few tips to help you fine-tune your PPC advertising to help you get the most bang for your buck. This article focuses primarily on real estate PPC advertising, but the concepts are applicable to most any type of service or product.
Full post: Maximize Your Return in Your Pay-Per-Click Real Estate Advertising »
November 4th, 2008
I voted. Had to hold my nose on some of my choices, but I did it. This would have been a good year to have NOTA as a choice.
Unbeknownst to me, my precinct moved since the last time I voted. I went to where I used to vote, but there was nothing there. Then I drove around aimlessly for a bit until I spotted the blue “Precinct 30″ sign.
Here in Punta Gorda, we use old-fashioned pieces of paper and have to color in little ovals with a pen. I hate that — I never could color inside the lines. Also, I officially have middle-aged eyes, and I forgot to bring my reading glasses with me, so I had to squint painfully at the printing on the ballot to read it.
The election workers were, as always, pleasant and helpful. Around here, they’re always old, too. When I get old maybe I’ll have time to work elections.
October 29th, 2008
Just in the past few days I’ve responded to several e-mails from clients asking my advice regarding e-mails that they’ve received from NetBiz. Here’s my take on NetBiz:
I’m not a fan of NetBiz. They’re not necessarily a scam, but they do seem to be at least somewhat misleading in how they represent themselves.
Full post: NetBiz sez: “Get onto the first page of Google….” »
October 27th, 2008
Tonight we’re enjoying our first fire of the season in our fireplace. It’s quite a cheery little blaze.
The only thing is, since we live in south Florida, it’s really not cool enough yet for a fire. We had to open all the windows and turn on the ceiling fan to get the living room cool enough to have a fire.
Full post: The Web: The Rules Are Different Here »
July 29th, 2008
So I have a client I’m developing a website for. The client has been great to work with, and we’ve made good progress on the new site. But there was a problem: The client kept complaining that he couldn’t reach his site — he was getting “not found” error messages. He told me that he could, at one point, get to the site without the “www” — which was particularly strange because one of the first things I do on a new site is implement a 301 permanent redirect from the non-www to the www version of the URL.
Full post: Search vs. Direct Navigation »
July 24th, 2008
I received a well-written, but completely absurd, spam e-mail yesterday. It started out by saying:
“I was looking at websites under the keyword face lift cape coral and came across your site tropicalwebworks.com. I see that you’re ranked #1 on page 18 in google.
I am not sure if you are aware of why you’re ranked this low but more importantly how easily correctable this is.”
July 17th, 2008
WordPress version 2.6 just came out. I installed it from scratch on a new blog (Fix My Knee, a chronicle of my many knee surgeries). The installation went beautifully, and I liked the new Admin interface.
Full post: WordPress Upgrade »
April 10th, 2008
This month I, along with thousands of other eBay affiliates, have been busy little bees converting all of our eBay affiliate links to use the new eBay IDs and format, thanks to eBay’s announcement that they were leaving Commission Junction and taking their affiliate program in-house.
Full post: Ebay and Linkbaiting »
March 28th, 2008
It’s very satisfying to spend a great deal of time developing a new site from scratch for a client, taking pains to ensure that the site is search-engine friendly, and then to see that site do well in the search engines after launch.
But it’s also surprisingly satisfying to spend a few hours optimizing a small site for a new client, and then to see, almost immediately, improvements in that site’s performance in the search engines.
Full post: Minor SEO Changes, Major SEO Effect on a Minor Site »
March 14th, 2008
Apparently I’m part of a small minority of web developers who believe that the developer has a level of professional responsibility toward the client, regardless of whether the client knows, understands, or requests same.
Full post: Ethics and Web Design – The Professional Responsibility of the Web Designer »
March 12th, 2008
Daily newspapers have been fighting decreasing readership and falling subscriptions for at least a couple of decades now. More and more, newspapers are putting their content online. For that I salute them.
But the web is now about 15 years old, and I wonder why so many newspapers still don’t manage to get some of the basic things right. Full post: The News Online: Usability is Lacking »
March 6th, 2008
A page that’s about everything isn’t about anything.
Read my explanation here.
January 12th, 2008
Sometimes, one of my clients wants or needs a blog. And the question always arises, should they use one of the free hosted blogging platforms, such as Typepad or Blogger or a hosted blog at WordPress.com, or should they download the WordPress software from WordPress.org and host it on their own site?
Full post: WordPress vs. Blogger »
January 11th, 2008
“We had to destroy the village in order to save it, sir!”
That was basically the response of Network Solutions when it was caught with its hand in the cookie jar, registering domains for themselves that people had looked up in their whois registry. NetSol basically defended their contemptible practice by saying, “In order to prevent domain registration abuse, we’re committing domain registration abuse.”
Full post: Network Solutions Caught Front Running »