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The Biggest Web Design Mistakes of 2004
This article reviewes the top 10 mistakes / misconceptions in web design in the past year.

An interesting interview with Steve Krug reviewes vis view to Common Sense Web Design

Copywriting & Bidding Tips to Improve Your Overture Campaign Results
Mary O’Brian of Overture gives some tips for writing copy for OV ads vs Google - Apparently successful campaigns in OV cannot be made just by copying your Adwords copy to the OV ads.

Overture allows 40 characters for the title, 190 characters for the description. It’s a bit more room than a Google ad, so you don’t have to write copy that’s quite so punchy.

Unlike Google searchers, people who search on Overture tend to respond to fact-oriented, non-salesy content, O’Brien says. They don’t like overt calls to action such as “click here,” or “buy now.” Save those for the landing page, not the ad itself.

Instead, focus on your value proposition: “We have the largest selection of XYZ in an easy-to-follow format” or “Check out our site for free downloadable white papers on topics such as…”

A new Firefox SEO Extension I’ve ran across should come handy making some of the optimization process easier.

Current SEOpen features are all accessed through right-clicking an open area on a web page; they include:

• Yahoo Backlinks
• Google Backlinks
• Google Cache
• Link Analyzer
• Keyword Density
• Page Size Checker
• HTML Validator
• HTTP Header Viewer
• PageRank Check

SEOpen Close-UpPlanned Features:

• Wayback Machine
• Yahoo Cache
• Check robots.txt
• Number of pages in Google index
• Number of pages in Yahoo
• Options Menu to select which features to make available via right-click

FontList
It’s usually very hard to get a nice overview of all your installed fonts. With FontList, you can easily create a HTML file showing all your fonts in your web browser. FontList lets you change the sample text, exclude seldom used fonts from the list and change the path for the HTML file. FontList then opens up your web browser to show you all your fonts.

Conventional wisdom says 97 percent of Google searchers don’t click past the first three pages (or 30 results). With about three-quarters of the active online population in America using search engines, according to Nielsen/NetRatings (.pdf), and 40 percent of shoppers choosing Google to locate stores and comparison shop, the difference between a high and low ranking can literally be the difference between a thriving online business and Chapter 11.

This got me wondering: How much is it worth to a company’s bottom line to place near the top of Google’s search rankings?

A recent study conducted by OneUpWeb among their clients. The study analyzed Web sites entering Google’s first, second, or third SERP for the first time in 2004. Of the 114 search terms tracked using the company’s ROI Trax analytics tool, 56 were three-word terms; 50 were two words; 7 were four-word terms; and one a single-word term. Brand name keywords were not tracked.

In the first month a site appears on Google’s first SERP, its conversion rates rise 142 percent, according to the study. The second month, conversion rates nearly doubled (194 percent) compared to the month prior to entering the top SERP. In terms of unique visitors, the average site appearing in Google’s top natural SERP could expect a 337 percent increase in traffic in its first month and a 627 percent increase in the second month.

“The important thing to note is that when a company first gets listed on Google’s first page, the traffic in the first two months goes up almost exponentially, and conversion rates also improve strongly,” said Rachel North, Oneupweb’s marketing director. “It draws a more qualified customer that converts more frequently.”

For sites that make their initial appearance on Google’s second and third SERP, the study found the number of unique visitors to the site increased 517 percent in the first month and 942 percent the next (compared to the month before the site first appeared on either the second or third page).

Because sites ranking below page three don’t generally convert, the study didn’t chart conversion rate increase for a site appearing on Google’s second or third SERP. “While conversion rates tripled from the first to the second month, the rates are very low (300 percent of nothing is still nothing),” the study concludes.

Sending Email from your PHP Applications

The following article from developer.com gives a great walkthrough / how-to do so in a very simple way.

Are there some tricks to speed up Firefox?

There are indeed a number of different adjustments you can make to Firefox that can improve its performance, the first and most important of which is to always make sure that you have the very latest version on your system. Pop over to get Firefox and download it right now.

Done?

Good. Now, enter the URL about:config and then type in “network.http” to the browser’s “filter” function to identify the following entries:

network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

If your Firefox is set up like mine, the first two will be set to “false”. Change them to “true” and then enter a value like 20 for maxrequests.

These will make the browser use your network connection more efficiently (or, depending on your perspective, more aggressively) which should visibly speed up rendering pages in the browser.

There’s a lot more you can learn if you pop over to Mozillazine’s Firefox Tuning discussion, if you really want to fine-tune your Web browsing experience.

A new article posted at A List Apart describes the use of JavaScript to better your site’s precence as well as being able to change it’s outlook without having to create 3 different versions of the same content page, and in place, risk being panelized for duplicate content…

Trying to earn back some of it’s lost market share the AOL owned ICQ has a vew version (ICQ 5 5.02).

Some of the main changes to the program:

• Push to Talk - This feature(VoIP based) allows the user to transmit a voice message at the push of a button to one user or to a whole group, upon the persons’ approval. It is somewhat similar to some of the features that so far were offered by the cellular companies alone.
• The Extra platform - Feature advanced customization, improved emoticons and games, as seen on AOL.
• SMS - The SMS feature was improved. It now allows one to send the same message to several recipients. It also allows one to forward all received IM messages to any supported cellular phone as a SMS message.
• Firewall improvements - For those who know ICQ you probably know that it was lacking the support for the different firewalls and in a lot of times will block certain options. The new version fixed this problem.

Note: The only problem I found was that the problem attemps to add it’s own toolbar to the different browsers. To block this from happening for those who already use a different toolbar, it has to be done during the installation.

All in all, it seems pretty good, I am excited, try it out: ICQ 5 | Download

An interesting article titled 29 Points to Creating an Effective Press Release. PR on the web seems huge these days, and I keep seeing a lot of very good feedback from people using it. This linked article suggests some good points for writing such a Press Release.

Found on: ThreadWatch

A member at WebmasterWorld asked you one can remove his pages from Yahoo index. Tim, the local Yahoo rep. posted a url with a solution:

• create a “robots.txt” file on your web site to prevent our crawler from indexing your site
• add a “noindex” meta tag to your documents
• remove the original document from your web site
• host the document on a secure section of your web site (HTTPS or login)

He also added later on that:

We do provide a removal service. Just click no at the bottom of the page linked above and you get a form to fill out with the information. There is actually also a legal page about copyright violations etc in the help section too that has legal contact information via phone, fax and email.