Can’t believe it’s that time again – the week’s are rushing past! Here’s the round up of the best blog posts/articles I’ve read this week…

Search Engines

Microsoft launched a new search engine called Bing - available to microsoft employees now, and to the rest of us oiks shortly. Just can’t wait? Take a look at Greg Sterling’s Bing v Google head to head.

Meanwhile over at Google, they’ve been working on a new communications tool called Wave. Google describe it as:

 ”…equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.”

SEO

Approaching international SEO is always tricky – SharkSEO has outlined 3 approaches to site structure for international SEO and the pros and cons of each – essential reading. 

Over at SEOmoz Rob Ousby looks at how to increase clicks on your organic listings via some careful crafting of the snippet which the search engines display in their results – SEO meets marketing – love it! 

Social Media

Is Social Media the marketing end-all? Doug  deGrood at Advertising Age isn’t convinced. An excellent opinion piece and well worth a read.

Marketing

I’m a massive fan of Malcolm Gladwell writer of Blink and The Tipping Point (incidentally if you haven’t already, do read his books). His latest article in the New Yorker explores How David Beats Goliath - i.e. how the underdog can win – even against the odds. It is a long article, but well worth a read.  

PPC

The pros and cons of bidding on clients own brand names is always up for debate. Over at Search Engine Journal, Brian Carter illustrates the value of brand PPC, giving a compelling argument backed up with some interesting stats, which might make you think again.

Aaaannnnd Finally, Friday’s Funny

This week I’ve been somewhat preoccupied with grammar and punctuation, hence this cartoon really tickled me (NB there’s a naughty swear word in the cartoon, so don’t click the link if you’re offended by such things). 

Hat tip to Ciaran for this. 

Have a lovely weekend

Image credit joyosity

Well hello there!

Despite being on annual leave, I’m still taking some time out of my daytime television watching to bring you the weekly round up. Now, that’s commitment

So here’s the round up of the best blog posts/articles I’ve read this week…

Events / Conferences

This week saw SMX London, which sadly I couldn’t attend. Fortunately Kevin from seoptimise pulled together 41 top tips which he took away from the event, and Molly at Distilled pulled together a round up identifying the four key themes which ran through the event - nice work!

SEO

Link building is a key part of any SEO project and over at Search Engine Guide, Diane Aull is keen to remind you not to overlook your own internal linking and navigation. Wise words indeed.

Struggling to get your head around URL rewrites and 301 redirects? Fear not, dear hearts, over at SEOmoz, Jen’s  fantastic post will set you straight.

Social Media

Thinking about venturing into Social Media? Be good boys and girls and plan properly - Lisa at Outspoken Media has written a fabulous post on creating a social media plan - you’d do well to heed her advice.

Web Design & Usability

Bamboozled by web design jargon? Pop over to Smashing magazine’s site and sneak a peak at their glossary… then bookmark it so you can refer to it again (and again, and again, and again).

PPC

Still confused about quality score? It’s something I get asked about a lot. See Jon Myers’ post on Search Cowboys - he explains all and provides a potted PPC history lesson.

Aaaannnnd Finally, Friday’s Funny

Erm, well perhaps this is only funny if you watch Lost. If you don’t watch Lost, then you should – if only because you could then appreciate the brilliance of this little gem from Robert Brockway via Cracked.

Have a lovely weekend

 

Is there something I’ve missed? Hit up the comments…

 

A friend recently asked for some advice on how to go about creating an online store. There are a lot of e-commerce solutions out there, which can make choosing the right one difficult. 

However, before you rush off and research a load of options, make sure you can answer the following questions - 

 

1. How many products is the site going to sell? How will these products be organised?

It’s important to have a clear idea of how you want to organise the products on your site, and indeed how many products you want to sell; as many e-commerce solutions are priced based on the number of products you want the solution to handle.

Ordinarily, we’d recommend creating a wireframe for the site, prior to selecting an e-commerce solution. A wireframe is a simple visual representation of the site and how the pages relate to one another.

For example, lets imagine that we are planning to launch a website selling socks. It’s conceivable that you’d have four top level categories:

Men’s

Women’s

Children’s

Baby’s

Then within each of these top categories you will have further sub-categories – e.g.

Children’s – Boys

Children’s – Girls

Again, from here you may have further categories e.g.

Children’s – Girls – Knee Socks

or

Children’s – Girls – Ankle Socks

Clearly it will take time to get all of this down on paper, but once you’ve planned your site out, it will be much easier to implement, and of course, you will have a much clearer idea about the sort of e-commerce system you are going to need.

2. Are the number of products for sale likely to change frequently? How regularly are you going to have to edit and update the site?

If you are going to regularly add and/or delete products, then you’ll be well advised to look for a solution will allow you to update yourself, rather than a fixed solution which can only be amended by the e-commerce provider.

3. What expertise is available to you? Do you have or know anyone  with the technical abillity to help out? Do you need a system that can be used with little or no trainning?

Any e-commerce solution will require some training to use . However, work to your strengths – if the person who will be responsible for managing the system is not particularly technical, make sure you select a user friendly, intuitive solution.

4. How much control do you want over the look and feel of the site?

Some e-commerce solutions allow only very limited customisation – as such you may find that you do have as much say in how your site and the products you sell are presented. If you have a particular look and feel in mind – make sure the solution which you select is fully-customisable.

 5. What payment methods do you want to use?

There are many different payment options available – these are often referred to as Payment Gateways. Your choice of payment method is very important, because you are asking your users to submit sensitive financial information – they need to be able to trust the payment gateway. Therefore using well known, trusted and established companies can be of benefit. As such we would also recommend offering more than one payment method, so your customers have a choice. 

 6. SEO considerations

Fortunately most e-commerce solutions generate search (and indeed user) friendly urls -  e.g. www.sockz.co.uk/childrens-socks/girls/knee-socks.html rather than www.sockz.co.uk/product3/category1/sub5.html – but make sure your chosen solution generates search friendly urls; you’ll be saving yourself a lot of heartache in the future.

For a Web Designer it is often hard to search through sites and turn off your critical goggles.  As someone actively involved in the world of Art and Design I regularly look at number of artists’ and gallery’s websites and I am often amazed at how many creative people / agencies sell themselves short when it comes to their online representation.

With this in mind I thought I would give a couple examples where I think the artist/ agency’s web site has pretty much got it right.

DeborahCavenaugh.com is an excellent example of a site that showcases the artist’s creative style and offering well.

As soon as you land on this site the artist’s, unique illustrative style is immediately and efficiently communicated. One could argue that the site is a little hectic, however I would argue the consistent layout of menus and generous provision of information allows an interested visitor to delve deeper into the site without feeling confused or lost. 

Ideally from an SEO point of view the menu items should be in text format rather than pictures, and the web page is very image heavy which adversely affects the load time. On a standard  broadband connection (1-4mb) the page takes around 10 seconds to load. Clearly we would not recommend this!

That said, most of the page does load long before the 10 seconds, so you would hope it would retain the visitor’s interest.

All in all, I think this is a very attractively presented site that gets across as much information as possible in a friendly way. I think I would try and optimise the load time on the main landing pages and assess which images are necessary and take out the ones that are not.

www.20×200.com is an online gallery that represents a number of artists.

The idea of an Online Gallery is something that has been around for a while. However, in my experience a lot of  online galleries are actually designed to make money from the artists - be it through a monthly fee, one off payment or tiered membership scheme – rather than focusing on making it easy for visitors to browse and purchase.

With this in mind coming across 20×200 was a breath of fresh air. The simple layout and navigation allows visitors to browse the site with ease. It also seems in tune with user habits – for example there’s a text link to the homepage rather relying on a rollover on the logo that links to the home page.

The main problem an online gallery faces is how to show a  large amount of work by numeroous artists without overwhelming the visitor. This is where I think 20×200 do really well.

Once you click on the ‘browse’ link in the menu you arrive on a page which is set by default to show all art work starting with the most recent in the cheapest range ($20). You then have several more options, to refine your search – date, artist and tag.

My main criticism of the site is that when you click to view an enargement and more information about a picture you are interested in, you appear to hit a dead-end.

The only way to get to the page you were on before is by clicking the back button or by clicking the ‘browse’ link in the menu (which takes you back to the default browse page).  A button to return you to your search results would much improve user experience.

Additionally, there are a lot of links that take you off of the site. Whilst I’m supportive of this, personally I would prefer it if the links that left the site opened in a new window rather than the existing window. I’d then be able to easily switch back to the page I was referred from without hitting the browser’s back button ad nauseum.  

Overall however, the simple and easy to use navigation allows the user an easy and enjoyable experience and makes this one of the best online galleries I have seen.

In looking at both these sites you may begin to notice that the themes that I highlight in terms of good web design refer to usability rather than more traditional ‘design’ elements like colours and graphics used. For me, good web design is about consistency and good navigation not pretty pictures. I bet you never thought you’d hear a designer talk like that!