Archive for the 'Web Development' Category

More reasons to avoid Flash

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

Over the years we’ve lamented the online popularity and over-reliance on Flash because of concerns relating to usability, navigability, indexability, measurability, portability, and so on. Now Steve Jobs has provided a litany of additional reasons that Flash is not supported by Apple products including the iPad, iPod, and iPhone. While some of our concerns make [...]

Length of sales cycle, your web site, and web analytics

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

The Google Retail Advertising Blog recently posted sales cycle statistics for a variety of consumer products. At the low end, shoppers took an average of 7 days to purchase pet supplies, while they took 16 days for electronics. The data did not include purchases larger than home appliances like cars or homes which presumably take [...]

Google browser size and visibility tool

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

Google Labs just rolled out a browser size tool to help you see how your website is seen by people with different screen sizes (more literally, browser winder sizes). This tool can tell you if an important elements of you page is showing up “above the fold” or if it remains hidden unless users scroll. [...]

Do you need a CMS?

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

Clients often ask if they need a Content Management System (CMS) to help manage website changes. In theory, these allow organizations to effectively manage their own site changes. This post will delve into the pros and cons of using a CMS. As their name implies, Content Management Systems are software packages that make website maintenance [...]

Improving web form conversion rates

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

You can drive all the traffic in the world to your website, but it’s a waste the visitors don’t convert. Form design is very often a significant contributor to poor conversion rates. While Key Principles and Specific Recommendations that follow are generally written for forms that solicit contact information from potential customers, they can also [...]

Adobe + Omniture, why?

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

Adobe is buying Omniture, a leading provider of web analytics and analysis provider.What does this mean for online marketers and our clients? This struck me as an odd combination until I started digging a little further into recent history of these companies and the direction of application development. Adobe makes software such as Acrobat, Dreamweaver, [...]

Miva Merchant and Google Analytics

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

Why reinvent the wheel? If you have an online store based on Miva Merchant, you’ll probably want to know where your buyers are coming from. Miva Merchant 5 does not include this capability by default, and it can take a good working knowledge of both Miva and Google Analytics to create your own solution. Or, [...]

Article Marketing Lives On – Part II: It’s All About The Title Stupid

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

A couple weeks ago we wrote a post on article marketing, providing a free directory list of the top 5 article marketing directories. The list isn’t long, because the fact of the matter is, there are lots of article directories out there that aren’t worth a dime. But the fact of the matter is, those [...]

Firebug can slow Firefox to a crawl

Friday, February 13th, 2009

Firebug is a great tool for analyzing and debugging HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and more. I love it. But I also hate it. As of Version 1.3.2, it stores information about almost every resource downloaded as you browse the web, regardless of whether or not you have Firebug turned on. For someone like me that averages [...]

800×600 is dead, almost

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

We were just revisiting an old client’s site, and we were struck by how narrow the design looks, having been designed to fit on 800 pixel screen widths. (My MacBook Pro’s “squat” 1440×900 screen definitely exaggerates this effect.) It used to be considered a best practice to design websites for 800×600 pixel displays. This width [...]