I’m Just Sharing

Let’s hope that this post actually goes through. Over the last four days, I’ve been having serious problems with my host, 1&1. All of my sites have been down more often than up, and I have no doubt that people have been visiting, not getting through, and moving on. I wonder how much money that’s cost me over the last four days.

The thing is, 1&1 is a large hosting company. They offer a bunch of services, but I’ve noticed over the last year outages here and there, but haven’t worried all that much because they’ve been short. This time, though,… well, it’s four days after all. I called four or five times, and on the last call I asked them why they didn’t just move my account to one of their other working servers. The person on the other end said she’d put through a formal request; I can’t believe they had to wait for me to suggest it, and I’m still not sure they did it. At least twice they asked for an email address and said they’d be sending some information as to their progress; never received a thing.

Obviously it’s working right now, but I’m not sure if it’s a permanent fix or a fluke. However, for the first time in 3 years, I’m thinking about moving my account elsewhere. At least this time they did back up all my information; three years ago I lost almost everything when the host I was using at the time totally crashed without any warning at all. It took awhile to recover all the posts for my blog, and luckily I’d backed up all the pages to my business site.

So, along with my friend Kelvin, we’re looking into some new hosts, just in case this is just a fluke and I only get a few more of these posts out. No sir, things aren’t supposed to be like this.

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I have previously talked about my short ebooks Using Your Website As A Marketing Tool, and I’m just mentioning it again here because that’s what marketers are supposed to do. Well, that, plus I have something else to say on the general subject.

One of the things I wrote in the book was that having a website is a great way to promote your business. At the same time, since your website is going to give people an impression of what you’re about, your professionalism as well as what you do, you don’t want to present something that shows your business in a bad light. This is especially true if your business is supposed to be about making someone else look good.

Without mentioning names, I present this site for review. I pick this site because it’s a marketing firm that wants to promote itself to very large companies to handle all their advertising needs. I don’t know how the quality of what they do ends up being, but their own website is going to kill them if they use it as an example to their potential clients.

So, what’s wrong with this site? Let’s do some deconstructing.

The first page says very little about the company. If you’re into marketing, you want to say something more than “I’m a marketing site; contact me”. Unless people know your name to begin with, this won’t get it done. You’re certainly not going to be found on any search engines. The design is flawed also. First, it’s too compressed; designing websites for 13″ monitors in today’s world just isn’t getting it done. Second, there’s too many colors, and for a site this minimal that’s a problem. Just how many different colors of yellow are there anyway? How many different font colors are there? At least the menu looks like, and though I’m not crazy about the colors, at least they’re somewhat peaceful.

Next is the About page, and it’s not all that bad. You can tell there’s some creativity with the company, and it’s still kind of laid back. And yet, there is a gripe. On the first page, everything was left justified. Suddenly, on the second page, it’s right justified, and the image size has changed. Frankly, it messes with the eyes initially; I’m not sure if that’s a marketing trick or just bad web design; you let me know.

Next is the Services page. Notice now that you have two columns of information; that’s three pages for the same site, and the design has changed for the third time, assaulting the visual senses. Continuity has a big place in making people feel comfortable while they’re looking at your site. The list of services is interesting and basic enough, but the blurb on pricing isn’t needed. Sometimes you don’t have to answer questions no one has really asked.

Th next page is the Examples page. Once again, a change in what the page looks like, but at least this time the format fits more of what one might expect. There are 8 examples of websites they’ve done. However, there are problems with these. Some of the sites are horribly done; one of the sites on this page you can’t even get to by clicking on it; one of the sites is actually a purchased template, which means it wasn’t created by this company; one of the sites looks really good, but what you see now isn’t what it originally looked like (I know this because I’m the one who did the website review and told the owner what needed to be corrected). Out of the 8 sites here, only one actually looks very good, and that’s the first site, and based on the review of all the other sites, one can’t guarantee that they did the work on this site themselves (outsourcing sites is fine, but then don’t represent it as your work). And even the first site isn’t properly optimized (no meta information; no H1 tags; no keyword phrases, etc); who’s going to find this site?

The next page is called Word Soup; catchy in its own way, but it’s a two-column page that we’ve actually seen before giving some definitions of terminology used in the marketing business. On the previous page we finally didn’t see an image, but now we’re back to the same image we saw on the Services page. The Word Soup, then “island Patrols”, makes no sense as two separate entities, and neither did putting it in two columns. The message is skewed to be confusing; is this the type of marketing you’d like to see for your business?

Next is the Web Design page; oh my! There’s, well, nothing there except the menus. Is this a work in progress? Now you’re not sure overall, but since I know (yes, I know this person; very nice guy, very creative, but, well, the visual work speaks for itself) I can tell you that this is NOT a work in progress. If the Examples page didn’t drive you away, this page would. I don’t have to tell you why it looks horrible; it should be here at all without something to look at.

Next is the Contact page, and now I’m going to deviate a little bit before giving my gripe of what I see here. I don’t typically believe in contact pages. Sure, on the blog there’s a tab above that gives some information and a way to contact me, but this is a blog. On my main business site you see my contact information on the first page. Almost every single page of mine has contact information on it. The only pages that don’t are a couple of my product pages. I want people to easily be able to reach me, and they can either click on the link and send me an email, or pick up the phone and call me. But that’s not all. On my SEO website, on each page I have the same time. You can click on the name and send me an emali or you can call the phone number to reach me. I don’t make people go to one specific page to figure out how to find me; be out front and make it easy for people.

Now, for this site I’m talking about, the template for the information is fine, but notice in the little box where you’ve given information on how to contact them if you decide to go a different route that the email address is incomplete, and the beginning doesn’t make any sense either. It’s not the name of the person or it’s not “info”, which is pretty common, or it’s not defined in any other way such that it makes sense. If you’re not from this area, it makes absolutely no sense, and even being from this area it doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense because it doesn’t say anything. Remember, this is a marketing company whose job it is to put you in the best light possible; if they can’t do for themselves, how makes you think they’ll do something better for you? Oh, and by the way, though I hate Contact pages themselves, when is the last time you saw a link to one and then saw other links still following it?

The next page is the Testimonials page; do you see any?

The final page is the Links page, and I always love having a links page that stands out. Some people don’t believe in links pages because they say you’re sending people away from you, but I tend to believe that if you can set something up where you can tell people who might be interested in you where they can find other information along the same lines as your business, share links to services you yourself have used, or showcase other business partners or associations that you have some affiliation with, that it’s a good thing, especially if they link back to you. However, on this site, the links are truncated, and you’re left with a lot of open space to the right; what’s up with that? I know what they were trying to do, which is to fill out the length of the page so that the menu on the left didn’t look so forlorn, but a big part of this, which encapsulates the entire site, is that the content in the middle continually starts way too high. You never want the content of your site sitting next to your logo; if that’s the case, why have a logo to begin with? What business correspondence have you ever received or sent out where the text of the message is sitting at the very top next to the logo? If, on all the pages, the context was dropped down to the level of the menu, it would start looking a lot better. Then again, a lot better still wouldn’t improve this site all that much, I hate to say.

Okay, I’ve just done a total deconstruction of a website. This, by the way, is the second website; the original website was much worse, to as bad and with as many mistakes this one has, it is an improvement. Still, for the business you purport to be in, it’s a terrible representation. It’s these types of things people need to look at when they’re designing their websites, and one of the reasons why I’ve actually been spending some of my time over the last couple of days trying to figure out why the template of this blog seems to sometimes show itself oddly in some people’s IE browsers. It’s not an across the board thing, but it’s bothersome to me that it doesn’t look proper in all browsers (it looks great in Firefox, but since they’re only the number two browser in the world I need to figure out number one). I didn’t create this template, though, so it’s taking me much longer to figure out, but I’ll get there.

In the meantime, I’d like you to take a look at your own site to see if it’s representing you the way you’d like it to. Now, if you’d like a website reviewed by me I offer you two options. One, if you allow me to write about it here, I’ll review three pages for you for a super discounted price, but of course you’ll have to write me first. To do that, you still have to go to this page and see the rates I charge to do website reviews, or any other work, and then either click on “Contact SEO Xcellence” to send me an email or pick up the phone and call that number and ask me how much I’d charge for a review and allowing me to put it on this site.

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I read about this new search engine called Cuil (pronounced “cool”) in the New York Times and decided to go over and take a look. It was created by someone who used to work for Google, so it’s someone who should know something about search engines, right?

The first thing you notice is its black background, the antithesis of Google. The print is white and light blue, and it’s main logo is a light gray with one letter a light blue. So, it’s clean like Google.

I decided to start with a safe one by putting in a search term that my main business comes up as number one on Google. What you get back are 11 blocks of websites with the words of the particular page that Cuil has brought for you to review. A logo also comes up, but I realized pretty quickly that the logo isn’t necessarily the business. I figure I know which site it has decided is number one, but after that I’m not sure if you go across or down in determining who’s number two. Not that it mattered for me, as my site didn’t appear until page 3, which means it feels that, for my search term (for which I’m also number one on Yahoo and MSN) doesn’t qualify until 23-33. Oh well, stinks to be me here, doesn’t it? Oh yeah; my logo didn’t come up either, but there is a logo associated with my site.

I decided to try another of my search terms that I know my main site is in the top 5 on Google for. It does come up on the first page, but oddly enough it’s not the same page that Google highlights, and the logo, once again, isn’t for my business, or for the item it’s actually linked to, which is my book. And the logo is too small to even identify what it’s for; very odd indeed. For kicks and giggles, I decided to go to the second page to see if I had another page listed. I didn’t, but what I noticed is that the logos that were on the first page are present on the second page, so maybe those logos are for advertising purposes of some sort; I’m missing it.

As a final test, I put the name of this blog into its search engine with quotation marks; surely it would come up, right? Well, in a way it did, but not how I’d have thought. The name of the blog comes up, on the first page, but as a link off my main business site. It was also on the second page, once again off the links page of my main business site. At least this time it picked up my logo from that site. On page three it finally had a link to a post off this blog; but it’s still not on my site, but on another site that, oddly enough, wouldn’t come up when I clicked on the link. And I saw the name as being listed on my business blog, along with other blog links.

So, what’s my overall take on Cuil? Well, it’s pretty fast, and since it’s searching over 120 billion pages (so it says), I guess that’s impressive. The search itself probably needs to be drastically refined, as, with further tests, it seems that putting something in quotation marks doesn’t actually help refine the search for the term. From a SEO perspective, at the moment it would be difficult to figure out how to optimize your site for Cuil. I do believe some people would like how it shows the information on some of the pages, but if it’s not taking people to the pages they need, then the information is useless.

I hope Cuil improves with time. For now, Google has nothing to worry about.

I think we all saw this one coming. Scrabulous, the highly popular yet copyright infringing game on Facebook, has been abruptly pulled without notice, freaking out over 500,000 people who had made it a daily, sometimes every single minute, fun waste of time. Yeah, I played, and enjoyed myself also, and I’m sad to see it go.

I thought the creators of the game, Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla from India, were greedy when, earlier this year, Hasbro, the owners of Scrabble, made them an offer that, in my mind, was generous, especially since it was a stolen idea. Instead, the countered, wanting more than $11 million; that wasn’t happening. So, Hasbro developed their own game for Facebook, then lowered the boom and demanded that Facebook pull Scrabulous, and they did.

So, now I’ll probably move over to the legitimate version of the game on the site, though I’m not sure if I’ll immediately head over there or wait a couple of days before switching. I have to think about it. I can waste a lot of time playing there, but these days, I’m sitting in a hotel room during the week with a terrible internet connection, and because of that it keeps making me sign in, even during my interactions on the site, and that’s irritating as sin. But we’ll see.

Goodbye, Scrabulous; it’s been a wonderful ride.

How did this one slip under the radar? Time Warner Cable has discontinued its newsgroup services as of June 23rd of this year. They cite it’s because of low subscriber usage, but anyone who believes that needs to buy swampland from me to build their houses on.

I discovered newsgroups pretty much after I got online over 10 years ago. It was the logical follow up to the old bulletin board system, and I liked it a lot. Took me a few years more to learn that I could access music and movie files through the newsgroups, and thus I’ve been able to circumvent the paid subscription services, which I enjoyed, even if I couldn’t specifically ask for content that I might really want.

In my mind, the truth is that the bandwidth that went into downloading these services, thereby bypassing Time Warner, who now offers its own music and movie services, wasn’t worth the cost anymore. That, plus there were some pretty unsavory groups out there that, a couple of weeks ago, many internet service providers agreed to stop allowing usage of, probably made this decision a no-brainer for the Time Warner people.

My only gripe is that they could have given some notice. It didn’t show up in any of their online newsletters, and it didn’t show up in the bills along with all the other junk they usually send. This one didn’t even make the newspapers or online news, and I’m surprised I haven’t read about it on any other blog up to now.

Okay, fine, I’ll take my ball and go play elsewhere; maybe. We’ll see; sniff!

Or so says the people above, who run a site called “How Much Is My Blog Worth”. This time, unlike when I posted about being rich, you have to answer 19 questions as honestly as you possibly can so it will give you an estimate of what your blog is worth. I’ll own up to having some difficulty figuring out a couple of things, as I’m not quite tracking everything as well as I probably should be doing right now, but I got through it, and what’s above is what it came up with.

Of course, I’m not in Alvin Phang territory, but it gives me something to shoot for. And, as a point of comparison, you can check this price against the widget to the right, down a little bit, telling you how much the other site says my blog is worth in real time.

Not sure if the Geico commercials are all across the country, but they’re definitely here in New York. I have to admit that I believe the people who came up with the concepts of the gecko and the cavemen weren’t paid nearly enough. I’ve enjoyed the gecko from the first time I saw him, and then when they brought out the cavemen, I’ve watched with rapt attention every step of the way.

However, the cavemen have something the gecko doesn’t; that would be a website geared towards how they live their life amongst the rest of us. And it, also, is one of the most entertaining and creative things I’ve seen in a long time.

When they first started it, they were using it to promote an upcoming party the cavemen were about to have. Now they have about five different scenarios set up, including the latest thing that’s also been in the commercials, the different dances the cavemen can do.

It’s all interactive; you go to the site, Caveman’s Crib, then decide among one of the five choices it gives you below the flash image, though you can also move around the image and find things to click on there. Then you go into their environment, their apartment or other places, and you find things to click on where you can look at their life. You also get to move around their surroundings if you can figure things out. There’s a lot to see, and every once in awhile one of the cavemen will pop up and either give you an update on something, or chastise you for being a bit too personal (being in the bathroom while the caveman is taking a shower was weird; at least he doesn’t come out).

Overall, it’s just a lot of fun. If you’ve heard of them, you’ll enjoy yourself; even if you haven’t heard of them, I think you’ll enjoy yourself also. Check it out.

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Time for something a little different. My friend Aussie Sire has created a little online game room that he calls Blogsire’s Game Palace. It’s a place where you can basically play a bunch of different types of little online games, some you’re familiar with, some you’re not, just to basically waste time and try to get into the top ten for your own bragging rights.

I have to admit that I don’t play a lot of games outside poker and chess, but there’s something fascinating about some of these games, and I have to admit that I like the spirit of competition. Thus far I’ve played three of the games, making sure I was in the top 10 before moving on. After all, who doesn’t like seeing their name in lights.

So, if you’ve got some time to waste and want to just noodle around for awhile, give it a quick look, and have a bit of fun.

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To me, the best way to track the traffic to all my sites is by using Google Analytics. It’s pretty easy to use if you’ve created your own sites. All you have to do is sign up, drop in the code they give you somewhere on each of the pages on your site (or only those you want to track), and you’re good to go.

As an example, I’m going to take a look at one day’s worth of traffic, instead of an entire month. On June 6th, I wrote my second rant against New York state and those stupid internet taxes. I guess it was a passionate enough topic for once because it got over 140 readers; that’s my best day ever for a blog post.

Google Analytics tells me how many visitors I got on that day for all my posts, though I can select just one to see the information on it. It tells me how many page views total, as well as an average of how many pages people read on average, the bounce rate (how many people left my site after the initial visit without checking anything else out), the average time spent on the site, and the percentage of new visits.

It then gives you an overview of visitors, which, for one day, doesn’t really tell me much, and a map overlay, which is really intriguing because you can break it down into countries, then states, and even cities. The folks in Cali seemed to love me on that day. Then you can see the traffic overview and the top 5 pages that were visited on that day, or that time period.

Of course, it goes deeper, as that was only the main page, but I just wanted to give you a flavor of the types of stats you can get. If you’re running an Adwords campaign you can use Analytics to track it for you also. And the visitor numbers are way more accurate and realistic than those numbers your host will give you.

All in all, I believe this is something people should be using, even though I also use Site Meter. This has so much more for you, and it’s free; can’t beat that!

Firefox is my favorite browser, as I mentioned in my post about Error Doctor. Now it’s in testing for the next release, Firefox 3, and I can hardly wait.

The main improvement that I’m looking for is how it handles memory. For all its good qualities, it uses a lot of RAM, which, when you’re doing as many things as I tend to do at once, really starts slowing down other things. I’ll admit that I’m not quite sure how virtual memory works, but Firefox can eat it up the longer you have the browser running. It got so bad for me that I had to turn off pre-caching of sites just to free up some of that memory.

So, just that one feature would be enough for me. But there are a few more things coming that I like. There will be more security against bad sites, those sites that will drop malware and other nasty things on a flyby. You’ll also be able to close your browser and have open right back up to everything you just closed out if you wish; I love that idea, because I’ve often had to shut it down for some reason or another, and forgot to bookmark some pages I’d wanted to read. Something else it will do that I don’t have an issue with but others do is that if you have to close the browser in the middle of a download, it will pick that download back up when it’s opened again; that’s actually pretty great.

Of course, I won’t be happy if all the extensions I presently use won’t work with it, but I hear most of the developers are scrambling to get them all working, and that would be a good thing. Oh yeah, it’s supposed to be faster than Firefox 2, and no one ever complains about more speed, do they?

So yeah, I’m ready for Firefox 3. I will not be a tester, though, so anyone else who’d like to do it can, as the beta is available already. I hope you have a good experience with it; I’ll wait until the real thing is ready.