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December 14th, 2009

Five reasons why this is the only online SEO marketing blog entry you will ever need to read

Today's guest author is a prolific columnist and consultant about SEO strategies and author of the e-book Nine Thousand, Eight Hundred Seventy Six Ways To Put Your Site In Front Of People Who Have No Use Of Your Services, available soon from Churnumout Press.

It happens to the best of us: We get stuck in the marketing doldrums. To break yourself out of your marketing doldrums, you should do some kind of search engine optimization that you haven't done before. Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your site for the benefit of being found through search engines. One of the best ways of learning about breaking out of marketing doldrums through search engine optimization (or SEO, as the experts call it – and now you can be one too!) is to read a numbered list, for which there is an example below.

  1. Read a numbered list of SEO strategies, of which this is one.
  2. Break yourself out of your marketing doldrums, for example by doing some kind of SEO you haven't done before.
  3. Try a new SEO strategy, because it may break you out of your marketing doldrums.
  4. There may be things you haven't tried before in the realm of SEO, so study numbered lists of them for ideas. For example, this one. Many people find this useful for breaking themselves out of their marketing doldrums.
  5. Many SEO experts recommend experimenting with new SEO strategies. Such things are available online, helpfully itemized in numbered lists.

Do you often find, after skimming to the end of a blog about online marketing full of useless factoids gleaned through lazy research from Wikipedia, a pointless and awkwardly-phrased leading question meant to invite conversation in a hollow attempt at fostering traffic and precious advertising revenue? Tell us about it by using the commenting form to comment!

Posted in: advertising, Web | 1 Comment »

October 19th, 2009

Why can't we figure out what Google Wave is good for?

Google Wave is… something. What it is, exactly, few people have been able to agree on. Google's own PR about Google Wave is a frustratingly imbalanced information overload, their publicity effort centering around an 80 minute video of the developer preview at Google I/O, earlier this year, entirely burying their slick, short product demos.

Apple can routinely, in 80 minutes, tout its sales figures, announce three revolutionary consumer products, demo them, preview yet another devastatingly witty TV commercial starring an affable PC and bemused Mac, and have a surprise musical guest run through a number or two. Even Microsoft's execs can put on a reasonably tight show when announcing new products. So how does Google's new product announcement compare? It's thorough and boring. It's unrehearsed, heavily padded by presentation failures, presenter fumbles, and an excruciatingly long introduction by one of Google's research unit executives.

The Wave video is a fine tech conference presentation. But it's a lousy public product demonstration, and it's the entirety of Google's sales pitch. Sales pitches, product sheets, whitepapers, short demonstrations of single features are all missing from Wave's PR. In their place is a long video of people fumbling with their demo equipment. I watched it in 20 minute chunks, because if this is The Future, The Future is awkward.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in: google, hacking, Web | Comments Off

March 4th, 2009

Widget Cart needs beta testers

Widget Cart is a WordPress plugin that adds ecommerce to any WordPress website with widgets enabled. You can add a shopping cart to your new or current website as easily as adding any other blog widget. "Add to Cart" buttons can be inserted anywhere in any post or page; the cart sits among your other WordPress widgets where users can change the quantities on the items they order before checking out at PayPal.

It only needs a WordPress- based website, widgets enabled, and your PayPal account to receive and handle orders.

The project is in its final stages and needs testers. The plugin is more or less feature-complete according to my tasklist, which means upgrading it to a final release will (hopefully) not require any more effort by the testers than replacing the plugin files.

Widget Cart will be available for public download and submitted to the WordPress plugin directory when I'm satisfied that it works properly and has sufficent documentation. For now I want to be able to notify anybody affected by updates.

Widget Cart is GPL'd. I will never require registration or payment for downloads and documentation. It was heavily influenced by QuickShop, which is designed to serve slightly different purposes; if Widget Cart interests you but you're using a checkout system other than PayPal I encourage you to try it instead.

If you'd like to participate, comment on this post and I'll contact you by email. Comments are screened and I will withhold publication at your request.

Posted in: hacking, Uncategorized, Web, wordpress | Comments Off

January 18th, 2009

More new bigger typography

Jason Kottke recently redesigned his popular website, getting rid of the yellows, playing with some funny decoration positioning tricks and changing the typography, making everything considerably larger. The new specified default font size is 16px, roughly the same size as the text you're reading now and on sites like Wilson Miner's. Score another one for aging web users whose vision is getting worse with time.

About namedrops his font of choice: "Whitney by Hoefler & Frere-Jones." This comes through in the design: Whitney is the first font specified in the stylesheet, followed by Myriad Pro, Helvetica, Helvetica Neue, Arial, and then falling back on whatever the designated sans-serif may be.

The site's unlikely to look like it does on Jason's computer for more than a couple thousand people, possibly dozens of whom visit his site regularly. For most Mac users and a rare few Windows users, Myriad Pro will be used, followed by Helvetica (for many Windows users and the Mac users still using versions of OS X more than four years old), Helvetica Neue (It's a rare computer that would have Helvetica Neue installed but not Helvetica or Myriad), Arial (for the remaining Windows users and the Linux users with the Microsoft Core Fonts package installed).

So he's using some odd font specification rules: The circumstances under which a computer would have Helvetica Neue but not Helvetica are rare at best, and Verdana strikes me as being a closer match to Whitney than Arial is (although the metrics are probably less alike). Linux is accommodated in the breach, but there was room for him to specify Liberation Sans (for something Helvetica-ish) or Vera Sans (for something Arial-ish).

Posted in: graphics, Web | Comments Off

January 7th, 2009

Some steps towards Joompress

JoomPress is a mythical synthesis of  WordPress and Joomla. It combines the beauty and ease of use of WordPress's admininistration features with the robustness of Joomla's document/information management model. This ain't happening for a variety of reasons, not least because you can't whipstitch two animals together and expect the result to walk, but maybe that's better investigated another time.

An easier goal is to combine WordPress and Joomla output, because WordPress is pretty weak about content organization and Joomla's blogging ability is nonexistent. Letting the CMS tool do the CMSing and the blog tool do the blogging is appealing and practical in theory. In corporate websites it would allow a strong firewall between the people doing document management and the people writing the PR releases. Before rerigging cloudiness entirely in WordPress, I tried a JoomPress hybrid, to run a WordPress blog behind a Joomla front-end. The trial got far enough along to convince me that somebody could make it work. If others want to try, the notes are below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in: hacking, Web | 1 Comment »

January 4th, 2009

Cloudiness uses very large words

This site's redesign is largely the product of bashing stylesheets over a post-New Year's weekend. No real design strategy aside from wanting something less dry than the old version. About all I could say about the size of the text has already been said better in Wilson Miner's Relative Readability (and the rantier, nuts-and-bolts 100e2r by Oliver Reichenstein). I'll add only that now I'm old and feeble enough to require bifocals I'll cheer on anything that claims whacking huge typography will become a fashionable design trend.

Aside from that, I've been wanting to bring color into the site in some form, and the old version of the site had lain dormant for long enough that moving the furniture around and giving cloudiness a fresh coat of paint might be what it needs to get me engaged in it again.

The nuts-and-bolts version of the cloudiness redesign will be in a pending post. As I write this not all the fitting's been trimmed, nor all the bolts yet tightened.

Posted in: Introspection, Web | Comments Off

June 2nd, 2008

553 words about 140 characters

Plurk.com logo

Plurk is the latest buzz-grabber in the highly competitive revenueless industry of text-ish IM-ish Web 2.0 communication systems. Like Twitter, it's used to post messages. Like Twitter, posts are limited to 140 characters. Unlike Twitter, Plurk's trying too hard to give you things to do.

The beauty of Twitter is its minimalism: You post and you read posts. You could endlessly groom your friend and follow lists, marking favorites and directing messages to get the attention of people cooler than you, but only if that's your thing. The Twitter experience is essentially unchanged whether Twitter's accessed in a web browser, IM client, telephone or third-party application: You post and you read posts.

Plurk is Twitter maximalized, its social implications not only laid bare but automated and tallied on your behalf:

You post and read posts and collect posts and collect friends and form cliques and accumulate karma and fans. Karma is a product of your prolix and socializing skills: The more friends you have, the more you and your friends post, the higher your karma. By generating one innocuous post and connecting to two people, each of whom have posted twice, My profile shows 0.80 karma points and a prominent link about how to accumulate more. In Plurk, each post is a fractional drop in your karmic pool, affecting your ranking regardless of whether you're blithering or entertaining, bad or good.

Posts on Plurk (I really haven't got the nerve to say 'Plurks') are no better or worse than posts on Twitter. Topics orbit around banality: needing coffee, Twitter's downtime, and the need for hookups of any variety. In Twitter, you can be a voyeur and learn how uninteresting everybody else is, which is comforting when your own posts amount to needing coffee, more uptime, and a hookup. In Plork, the dullness is commoditized, and roping more people in increases your karma. It's a messaging service hybridized with strategy gaming and multi-level marketing. Those who type fastest and befriend quickest are profiled on the ironically titled 'Interesting Plurkers' page.

Posts are spread across a timeline, an added layer of presentation that's awfully spiffy but prevents the rapid digestion of updates from my friends. Twitter puts things in a stack: I can get in, see if there's anything important, and get out again. Twitter's stickiness is specifically in its lack of tenacity. I keep going back because there's no effort to make any visit last longer than I want it to. I get to keep up with a couple dozen acquaintances at a very low personal cost.

The timeline doesn't make Plurk better than Twitter either — this is something possible with Twitter data for whomever feels sufficiently motivated. Twitter's popularity and public API has fostered a rich ecology of third-party trackers, standalone applications, visualizers, and rankers. None of them are part of the Twitter UI, and don't impose themselves upon you; you seek 'em out. Twitter can be used as something in service to another goal, while Plurk is firmly oriented around self-aggrandizement and popularity management. It could be used like Twitter, but that's practically working against its design, whereas Twitter is content to sit there with a blank form and your latest messages in a pile. Twitter doesn't have a decapitated dog as its mascot either.

Posted in: Web | Comments Off