Internet Marketing Centricity

A Must Have Service for Website Design and Maintenance

For over one month, I observed an obvious typo on the home page of one of our SEO/web design competitors. I must admit, I enjoyed looking at their site every few days to see if they had discovered the error or not. Eventually, it was corrected. I'm not sure if they ever found the error or simply updated the copy and removed the error inadvertently.

Recently, I've been researching materials from one of the top web conversion firms in the country. These folks have written a number of books on how to persuade website visitors to become customers. Unfortunately, when I went to purchase an e-book from their site, I was dissuaded from purchasing because they had four text errors on their offer page. Talk about practicing what you preach!

Those two occurrences, within a short period of time, led Terrakon to sign-up for a service which finds those website text errors on your site that have been missed. TextTrust.com offers an online website spell checker that scans each page on your website and provides a detailed report of any spelling errors found.

It's a great service and I highly recommend signing-up. It currently costs $49.95 for one year of unlimited spell checks for a website which is currently 250 pages or less. Other pricing options exist for larger websites. TextTrust also offers a free trial where their spell checker robot will scan a subset of your site.

At Terrakon, we consistently preach that it is the small things you do or don't do versus the competition that can differentiate you enough to win the business. This is another great example of something small you can do that could have big benefits.

While this post may sound a little more commercial than most, we are not in any way affiliated with Text Trust. I just think they offer a great service that is badly needed by a lot of companies and I think you'll benefit from checking out their service.

Best,

Rob Reed
Terrakon - A search engine marketing firm.

Web Design Tool Shows What Others See on Your Website

Have you ever wondered what your website looks like to other people with different browsers, operation systems, screen sizes, etc.? There are literally thousands of combinations which makes it nearly impossible to design a website to appear properly in all combinations.

At the very least, you should be testing your new website with the "major" combinations of browsers, operating systems and screen sizes. Even tackling only the latest major players, however, is still very difficult for most organizations.

In steps BrowserCam. BrowserCam will check any website from a multitude of these combinations and take an image of the web page so you can see what it looks like from systems other than your own.

While there is a charge to use the system, they do offer a free trial for up to 24 hours and 200 screen shots. This will limit you to one screen size and a subset of the browser/operating system combinations. It seemed to have a few hiccups in the nearly 200 screen shots, but I still found it to be a website design worth checking out.

Rob Reed
Terrakon - a sales and internet marketing consulting firm

Finding People Who Steal Your Content

To the best of my knowledge, it's nearly impossible to prevent someone from copying/stealing the content from your site. It is possible, though, to find the culprits.

Copyscape offers a service that identifies other sites that are plagiarizing your content. Just enter the web page url from your site that you'd like to check and click "go."

Copyscape will return any pages that match significant parts or all of the content for the requested page.

The free version allows you to conduct 50 "searches" per month.

How to Avoid Email Harvesting from Evil Spambots

If you have a website, you are most likely familiar with "spambots." These are evil computer programs that troll websites looking for email addresses to harvest. The harvested email addresses are then used by the spam bot owners or sold to other spammers hawking "free software," "Viagra," and various "patches."

The spam bots identify email addresses by looking for specific characters (e.g. @ sign) or patterns on your website.

To deter the spambots, it seems a lot of companies have decided to eliminate email addresses all together on their websites - including the "contact us" pages. Instead, they've incorporated contact forms that ask us to complete a set of fields and then send the message.

Perhaps my mind could be improved on this, but I don't really care for websites that require you to complete a form to contact them.

It seems very impersonal (even more than support@site or info@site) and why should you give them your email address, if they choose not to provide their own? Trust is already difficult enough to earn on the web. To me, these impersonal contact forms where you're asked to "give up" personal info (e.g. name, email, etc.), without reciprocation, has a negative impact on building trust.

If you agree with this sentiment, here's how you can use email addresses on your website, but still deter the evil spambots. I've included a couple of the least technical strategies below:

...If you want to hide your addresses from spambots, you must understand how they work. Most spambots find addresses by looking for patterns of text that look like an email address. For example, email addresses always contain an @. Spambots therefore scan the text of a webpage to find any @s. If you eliminate the @ from addresses then most spambots won't be able to recognize that your addresses:

carol-at-example.com
carol(at)example.com
carol AT example DOT com

While this hides your address from spambots, visitors to your site will often still incorrectly demung your address, or not even recognize it is an email address, and therefore be unable to contact you.

A more sophisticated version of hiding your address, which still allows human users to see the addresses without any apparent munging, involves using ASCII character codes. ASCII character codes are like machine language for representing characters on a web page. For example, if you want to represent an @ you can either use the character itself, or you can use it's ASCII character code: @ (ampersand number-sign six four semi-colon).

If you use the ASCII code then human visitors to your site will see an @ because their browsers automatically translate the character code. However, most spambots currently do not recognize the codes and therefore ignore addresses created with them. The following addresses will all appear the same if they are included in the HTML of your site:

carol@example.com
carol@example.com
carol@example.com

Notice that the last address above uses an ASCII code not only to replace the @, but also the period (.). On the next page we'll show you even more advanced munging techniques, and provide an automatic address munging tool.

Click this link to learn more advanced techniques to hide email addresses from spammers or to learn about their program to help identify email harvesters.

Blog and Website Design: Helpful Link for Design Decisions

If you are creating or redesigning a blog or website, I highly recommend you visit the website for the Software Usability Research Laboratory for the Psychology Department at Wichita University. Their lab has conducted interesting research on website usability. According to their site, their research tries to answer questions like:

•   What's the best layout for a web page?
•   How can you optimize reading from PDA's and small screen interfaces?
•   Which online fonts are the best?
•   What makes an e-commerce site difficult to use?
•   Can individual personality or cognitive skills predict Internet behavior?

Enjoy...

How Wide Should You Make the Lines on Your Blog or Website?

If you are in the process of creating or redesigning a website or blog, one consideration you'll face is how many columns to use for your web pages. Part of your decision making process will be based on how wide you want your main content text. In other words, what line length should you use?

What line length do readers like best for online reading? What length helps them comprehend the information easier? What line length can they read fastest? Do they like short lined text like you find in newspapers - about 35 characters per line (cpl)? Or, do readers favor longer lined text of 95 cpl? Or, somewhere in between? And, should you even care?

Unfortunately, there is no definitive answer. Many studies have been conducted to answer this question, but there doesn't seem to be too much agreement based on the results of the studies. A fairly recent study by Wichita State University, entitled, "The Effects of Line Length on Online News," provides some interesting insights for line length and reader pace, comprehension and preference.

Overall, the longer line lengths (95 cpl) can be read faster by readers. Comprehension is about the same across different line lengths. And reader efficiency (pace x comprehension) is better for the 95 cpl - about the line length of the Marketing Centricity blog. Yes, I counted....

Another study, suggests margins have some impact as well.

Website Design: What Do Prospects Really See on Your Website?

How does your web site look to prospects? Do they see what you want them to see? Is it effective at getting them to take the action you want them to take?

While surfing the other day, I ran across a really interesting company that helps you truly identify what your prospects see when they visit your site. The company is called Eyetools. They have taken a technology originally developed at Stanford University and adapted the system to literally track what your eyes see when viewing a web page.