Epopus Marketing Blog

Google Analytics--New and Improved!

2007-05-11T17:00:00.000-04:00

Wow. I hate to seem like such a slavish admirer of Google, but they just do great work. Google Analytics has just been given a major redesign/upgrade, and it is smoking! Much easier to read and interpret, it is even more focused on the needs of marketers and business owners. Is it as powerful as Omniture or HBX? No, but it's far easier for the average person to get actionable data from than either of those applications. Did I mention it's free?

If you've been wasting time pulling data out of the old version of GA to present it to a business owner or client in more "user-friendly" form, stop. Remind them how to sign into their GA account and have them take the tour, and then let them use it themselves. It's so intuitive and non-threatening, anybody can use it. Use that time you now spend moving numbers around in Excel to make some more money.

How Can I Tell Which Change Was an Improvement?

2007-05-10T09:35:00.000-04:00

If your conversion rate has been falling, and new keywords and creative aren't moving the needle, you probably need to improve your landing pages. Landing pages are the pages your prospects land on when they click on one of your ads online.

Unfortunately, most people don't put much effort into landing page optimization. One of the reasons is that without the right tools, doing meaningful A/B comparisons between 2 versions of a page has been impossible for all but the biggest companies.

For those willing to spend a bit of time at it, Google has now put a real-time testing tool into our hands, free of charge. It's called Google Optimizer, and you should give it a try.

2007-04-28T10:36:00.000-04:00

A colleague sent me a great article this morning, and it raises some very interesting possibilities. I struggle to help smaller etailers understand the difficulty of establishing a meaningful presence in organic (free) search engine results on Google, Yahoo, MSN and the like. You can do everything right with your site and still not make much headway because of the importance that search engines place on inbound links from "authority" sites. In other words, if you don't have popular, quality information sites linking to your site, customers won't find you in search engine results pages (SERPs).

It's very difficult for a small to medium size business to get inbound links from legitimate authority sites.

Here's what Jason Prescott says in Is Google Killing SEO?

Paid search listings could become more relevant than organic listings because of the emphasis on inbound links in search algorithms

He goes on to say:

Google's paid search algorithm acts almost like a rating system. Google will discover the most popular sites based on user preferences, allowing it to serve highly relevant results based on paid search landing pages. As a result, search engines will likely start serving more sponsored links, and the organic links will start to fade away.

Does this mean even small businesses must run large paid search campaigns with thousands of keywords to get found online? Not yet. The answer for many businesses may be to find a quality vertical search site for their industry. If your customer base is in a tight enough niche, this may be the best way to get quality traffic. If the vertical search site is also rich in quality information related to your business, then guess what--you've found the ultimate authority site to boost your organic search rankings.

Google PPA and the End of Affiliates

2007-03-24T17:45:00.000-04:00

The industry is abuzz with Google's 3/20 announcement of the limited launch of its "Pay Per Action" ads and what impact it will have. They allow the advertiser to designate any action as the conversion event they are willing to pay for.

In theory, instead of paying for $20,000 for hundreds of thousands of clicks every month, an advertiser would only pay for the clicks that resulted in a sale. If you're thinking that means you'll be able to get the same sales and only spend $1,000 with Google next month, think again.

It's still going to be an auction marketplace, and the cost per action will be a function of what the major players feel a conversion is worth to them. So instead of paying 50 cents for a click, you may be paying $50 for a sale. Or $500. If your bid is too low, your ad simply won't appear.

PPA ads will only be available in Google's AdSense network, not in search engine results pages. Here are some of the most likely impacts:

Affiliate marketing companies like Commission Junction are going to get hit hard, because this puts them in direct competition with Google.
Publishers will have to choose to place these ads, which shift some financial risk away from advertisers to publishers. This means that advertiser demand will drive adoption.
Google will continue its Borg-like advance towards eventual global advertising domination.

On the whole, this is good news for everyone who benefits from transparency in the advertising transaction. Traditional agencies and publishers focused on flat rate or CPM advertising will need to wrap their brains around this soon. Ignorant advertisers may mean bliss for now, but it won't last. If those advertisers figure it out without help from their agency or media companies, guess where they'll go with their advertising dollars?

Why Are You Redesigning Your Site?

2007-03-10T09:22:00.000-05:00

Most etailers begin thinking about a redesign when sales flatten and they run out of things they feel they can change on their site to boost conversion. The first thing most will think about is how they will update their site's appearance with a slicker, more professional look. Some get seduced by sexy Flash elements that move and make cool sounds as you mouse over them. Will making your site sexy increase conversions? Not likely.

The sexiness priority usually means that an owner's ego getting in the way of his or her good business sense. Let me say this again: Your website belongs to your customers, not you. It HAS to be about them, giving them what THEY, not you, deem most important.

Unfortunately, those pesky customers seem to want difficult things, like detailed, complete and well-written descriptions, or great photography. It's a lot easier to write a check for that cool Flash navigation.

I was thinking about the topic of best practices for writing online this morning (yes, I AM a geek), and decided to go look at what noted usability guru Jakob Nielsen had to say on the subject. Lo and behold, there is a column that is stunningly relevant to me and many etailers right now, titled "10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities". Jakob often says unpopular things, but the truth of his research has stood the test of time. Read this column.

Is Your Site Killing In-Store Sales?

2007-02-25T08:04:00.000-05:00

Here's something to give multichannel (web/online) merchants pause:

Year-over-year there's been nearly a 50% increase in consumers who report that a frustrating online experience would make them less likely to shop at that retailer's physical store.

The source for this is The 2006 Holiday Shopping: Online Customer Experience Survey, conducted by a company called Allurent. The survey also uncovered some wished-for site features:

The ability to click on an item to create a popup window with more details about the product including price, size, colors, inventory availability, etc. (74%)
The ability to click on an item and add it to your cart without leaving the page you're on (70%)
The ability to "feel" merchandise through better imagery, more product descriptions and details (68%)
The ability to enter all data related to your purchase on one page, rather than go through several checkout pages (64%)
The ability to mix/match product images on one page to determine whether they look good together (47%)

Looks like pretty basic stuff. Get it right, or frustrated shoppers may decide not to shop at your webstore or your physical store.

Stop Advertising, Start Marketing

2007-02-23T13:28:00.000-05:00

It's pretty common for retailers to think of advertising as "everything we do to get customers in the door". So, newspaper FSIs, direct mail, radio ads, paid search marketing, banner ads on websites, it's all "ADV", right?

Yes, but you need to expand your view of ways to get people in the door. Why? People ignore traditional advertising. Companies spend millions trying to create an impact with advertising (during the Super Bowl, for example), and what's the result? All too often, you remember the ad but not the advertiser. You might as well light your next TV ad by burning stacks of hundred dollar bills.

Even small companies now have the tools available to them to make an impact using new media, to generate awareness and the "viral" effect that happens when consumers pass your message along to other consumers. The most visible medium for this is video, posted somewhere like YouTube, but it could be a podcast, a blog, or a microsite. You can do it without a fancy ad agency or a 7-figure marketing budget.

Don't believe me? OK, take a look at this. Yes, it's hilarious, but you'll remember the store's USP and location after watching it.

The End of One Page For All

2007-02-18T21:42:00.000-05:00

Big news in SEO circles over the past week or so has been Google's launch of personalized search. For users who elect to sign into their Google account before they conduct a search, Google will provide personalized results.

SEO firms are wringing their hands because it is now officially impossible to make the claim that a client is "#1 on Google". Of course, the majority of those claims have always been distortions at best, and outright lies at worst. Now, however, it's literally impossible to say that any given site will appear for all users, because more and more users will in fact see something unique to themselves.

What to do? Two things. First, continue to provide excellent, useful content to your customers. Second, get serious about participating in the emerging world of "social media" through blogs, social networks and social search (take a look at chacha.com for example). Relevance in organic search will increasingly fall to those who make the effort to participate in the social internet.

Google Ad Quality Scoring to Change

2007-02-15T13:09:00.000-05:00

By the end of February, Google plans to change the way that it scores ad quality while making that scoring easier for advertisers to understand and react to. Google is adding a new quality score column to the advertiser's AdWords account interface to make it easier to prepare for the update. Advertisers will be allowed to activate the new column on their accounts this week so they can begin making plans for the new algorithm.

If some of your ads have been deactivated by Google previously, this update may re-activate those ads. Of course, if you responded to deactivation by raising your maximum bid level, this won't affect you.

Selecting an SEM Agency

2007-01-24T08:16:00.000-05:00

Many smaller ecommerce retailers struggle with whether to hire a full-time marketer to manage their pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, or hire an SEM agency to do it for them. There are arguments on both sides. Of course cost is a consideration. If you can hire quality staff for less than an agency will charge, building in-house expertise may be the way to go. If you decide to hire an agency, how do you find the right one?

Create a short list by combing through SEM-focused publications and associations. I like ClickZ, Multichannel Merchant, and Internet Retailer, and there are many more. SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization) membership indicates some seriousness of purpose and focus, but you can find great agencies who aren't members.

Once you have a list, look at each website. What do they say about their approach? Is there a focus on what they do for their clients, as opposed to how fast they are growing? What does their client list look like? Are they helping companies like yours? If not, are they willing to learn the idiosyncracies of your company and industry?

If these look good (and there really is no excuse for an SEM agency to have a poor website), then give them a call. After you've been impressed by their senior account exec (aka "the closer), ask to speak with the person who will actually be doing the work on your account. If that person doesn't listen and ask you good questions on the phone, then you need to keep looking.

Most SEM's offer some kind of whiz-bang tools to better manage an array of PPC campaigns more efficiently. Don't be sucked in by how cool their tools are, because using those tools effectively means someone on your staff needs to be a pretty fair search marketer themselves.

If the pitch is about how their technology gives them an inherent advantage in delivering higher conversion and lower cost over time, you still need to grill the people on your account. Ask them how many clients they manage. Will they be able to focus enough time on you? If you're getting a team of people, make sure you talk to the whole team. Technology alone is not enough. Smart people who care about your success are always going to be the key to a profitable relationship with an SEM agency.

5 Power Writing Tips

2007-01-17T17:22:00.000-05:00

Today we have a "guest post" by Daphne Gray-Grant, who produces the "Power Writing" newsletter that I recommend. If you're serious about improving your writing as a way to grow revenues, you need to read this.

Tip #52 – Five best lessons from 52 weeks of power writing

Today marks one year or 52 issues of Power Writing. I was going to say 'Happy birthday to me,' but a newsletter is pretty pointless without readers, so really, it's happy birthday to you -- my loyal, interesting and opinionated subscribers!

It's often said that you don't really learn something until you teach it (the standard advice for medical students is: see one, do one, teach one) and I've found that bit of practical wisdom applies to writing as well. Herewith, the five best lessons I've learned over the last 52 weeks. If you write, these lessons should apply to you, too:

1. Write every day

Writing is like exercise -- it depends on repetition. Just as you don't get to be an athlete by lying on your couch and eating Krispy Kremes, you don't get to be a writer by talking about it. You actually have to do it. That said, I'm not going to instruct you to write for hours every day; I know you don't have the time. In fact, I've become convinced that setting aside huge chunks of time for writing is the vampire's kiss of death. Writing tends to work best when you let the words accumulate gradually over time, the way snow collects on the ground. I used to write this newsletter all in one go. Now I do a little bit every day, writing or editing for a few minutes here or there, often between phone calls. The rhythm feels much more natural. It's easier and more fun, too.

2. Focus on stories and metaphors not information

How many email newsletters do you file away without reading? How many stories in your daily newspaper do you ignore? If you're like most people, you read only a small fraction of the words put in front of you. And I'm willing to bet that the articles you're most interested in are the ones that tell stories or take complicated ideas and show how they apply to you. Too many writers focus on facts. But we're all drowning in information. What we need is meaning. What we want is something interesting. If you aspire to be read, tell stories and use metaphors. Give your readers context -- don't just dump information.

3. Employ the power of mindmapping

I discovered mindmapping late in my writing life and I'm now like a reformed couch potato who's suddenly discovered the gym. I feel so good, I want you exercising too. And here's the really great news: with mindmapping you never have to break into a sweat! Mindmapping is a super-easy technique that will help you tap into the creative, imaginative, fun part of your brain. It makes writing ever so much easier. If you're a subscriber to this newsletter you should have received a fr'ee e-book on mindmapping when you signed up. If you somehow missed out, shoot me a quick email and I'll send it to you.

4. Don't be afraid to take a stand

I've given up predicting which columns I write will resonate with the most people. Ones I really like barely draw a peep, while columns I think are mediocre bring in a flood of ecstatic email. I've also noticed that the columns that draw the biggest, most enthusiastic response also tend to result in the most unsubscribes. I think this is because strong opinions will make some people dislike you. But they will also bring out the people who loooooove you. As mom always said: "You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs." Never fear breaking eggs.

5. Count on the kindness of strangers

This newsletter has given me the chance to connect with hundreds of fascinating people from around the world. I've received charming and heartbreaking emails and benefited from much support when I suffered from hackers, hard drive failures and even health problems. Writing is about connecting. I feel honoured to be able to do that with you.

Now did I hear someone ask about birthday presents? Well, I'd love a new iMac, of course, but if you'd really like to give me a meaningful gift, I'd be thrilled if you'd drop a quick email to two or three friends who want to write better, faster. Let them know about Power Writing and suggest they consider subscribing. They'll thank you, and so will I.

Reprinted with the permission of Daphne Gray-Grant, the Publication Coach. If you need to write better, faster, subscribe to her fr’ee weekly newsletter, Power Writing, at: www.publicationcoach.com and you will receive a short tip each week.

It's Time for Video

2007-01-16T16:15:00.000-05:00

The cover story of this month's issue of Internet Retailer is "Blending Video and Ecommerce". They quote some very encouraging stats, but the article could be half as long and still be just as valuable. And why doesn't a magazine like Internet Retailer have a better website?

Enough carping. I've said this before, and Bill Siwicki clearly agrees, that it's time for ecommerce retailers to start experimenting with video. For the furniture industry, it seems like a complete no-brainer.

Typical close rates in a brick and mortar furniture store are 25% to 30%. Furniture websites without national brands are fortunate to achieve close rates (conversion) of 1% to 2%. Certainly some of that difference is the effect of a salesperson demonstrating the product to the customer. Video allows retailers to deliver much of that experience to their online customers. What are you waiting for?

Do Retailers Need To Become Publishers?

2006-12-29T13:41:00.000-05:00

As online retail becomes more crowded and competitive, everybody is looking for an edge. Web 2.0 phenomena such as video, user-generated content and social media are getting a lot of attention and money because they promise that edge. Retailers are just starting to experiment with these, so of course there have already been some failures. Wal-Mart seems to have a particularly hard time figuring out how to use Web 2.0 without embarrassing themselves.

One ecommerce retailer, BabyUniverse, is transforming itself into a publisher in an effort to generate ad revenue and, no doubt, generate more sales to its store. In launching BabyTV.com, they are in effect running an internet TV station. Pregnant moms are a pretty good target audience for this--deeply engaged and seeking community. Etailer Buy.com has taken a more modest approach with its BuyTV, and it appears to be a successful marketing and conversion tool for them.

Are there useful lessons here for humble furniture retailers selling online? At the very least, it's worth keeping a close eye on these kinds of efforts. Understanding what's working, what's not, and why will help you decide when you should start experimenting too.

Better Copywriting in 10 Minutes!

2006-12-27T17:19:00.000-05:00

Just kidding. Writing well is hard. Copywriting, or writing with the intent to persuade someone to buy something, is a bit easier. Instead of a blank page, you at least have some features to start with. Taking a list of apparently random features and turning it into a persuasive story is the topic of countless books and correspondence courses. Don't have the next 6 months to devote to perfecting your craft? Here are some guidelines you can follow to get started:

Keep it simple.
This means short sentences written with short words. Even smart people understand short sentences better than long ones. Long, complicated sentences make eyes glaze over. Use a big word instead of a small one and you're likely to annoy or confuse. For a detailed look at the virtues of simplicity, read Can Your Customers Read What You Write?

Use active voice.
This goes with "keep it simple". Simplify a sentence by using an active verb; your copy will be stronger for it. Here's what I mean:
Passive Voice:

This table is distinguished by intricate hand-carved detail which is performed by skilled artisans.

Active Voice:

A skilled artisan carves each table base and chair back with intricate detail.

It's not Shakespeare, but it says more with fewer words. The verb "carves" creates a more vivid picture in your mind than the passive "is distinguished by" and "is performed by".

Verbs rule, adjectives drool
That may sound like something your 6 year-old would say, but it's true. It's also difficult. Nevertheless, action verbs will engage the reader far better than adjectives. Here's a great article on the topic called How Verbs Help You Convert from the GrokDotCom newsletter.

What's in it for me?
No, not you, the customer. If you're given 10 product features, think about which 3 of those are most likely to matter to the consumer. Manufacturers routinely list all kinds of features that consumers couldn't care less about. Effective selling means putting yourself in the customer's shoes. As Daphne Gray-Grant writes,

...when you’re writing copy, you need to get out of the “here’s what I want tell you” attitude and into the “what does my reader want to hear?” mentality. (read the rest of her article "How to Write Copy That People Actually Want to Read")

There is much, much more to writing persuasive copy than this. Write with these four rules in mind and your copywriting will be more effective, guaranteed. This is not to say that Mitch Speers is an exceptional copywriter who can tell you most everything you need to know about selling with words. However, in my experience, these are the areas where people have the most diffuculty.
Other Resources:

I've written on this topic before. You may want to read "Getting Emotional" and "Are You Speaking Your Customers' Language?" You'll also want to look at the links in the Recommended Resources section at the top of this page. Nearly all of them have good information about effective copywriting.

Read Seth Godin

2006-12-26T16:18:00.000-05:00

If you haven't read anything by Seth Godin, go now to changethis.com. He has great ideas and expresses them simply, without buzzwords or jargon. As soon as I read something of his (The Bootstrapper's Bible), I was hooked, and you will be too.

Should Your Customers Trust You?

2006-12-11T13:58:00.000-05:00

As ecommerce volume rises during the holidays, so does online fraud. It's a significant problem, and one that is beginning to affect smaller merchants more. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to build consumer confidence in retail ecommerce sites. I generally assume that a merchant has good fraud prevention processes in place, but that is not always true.

If you're not sure you're doing everything necessary to protect your customers and your business from fraud and theft, it's time to do an audit.

Here are some basics:

Don't store credit card numbers. After the order is processed, get rid of them.
Don't rely on automated approvals for payment. An experienced staffer will outperform most automated fraud prevention systems.
Consider getting 3rd-party verification of your fraud prevention measures, but don't be fooled into thinking that such verification, by itself, is all you need to do. I've seen merchants who pay for a "HackerSafe" badge on their website do nothing else to protect themselves. Bad idea.
Do you promote gift certificates? These are popular targets for fraud.
Does your site, webhost and shopping cart meet the latest Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard?
Is your shopping cart truly secure? Do you use the highest level of SSL encryption? Has your site and your local area network been scanned for vulnerabilities?

If you or someone in your company isn't very clear on answers to these kinds of questions, you could be vulnerable. Large retailers have staff and budget dedicated to fraud prevention, but even small retailers can protect themselves and their customers with the right preparation.

Resources:
Merchant Risk Council (a nonprofit antifraud group that represents about 100 online retailers.)
ScanAlert (Sells the HACKER SAFE® ecommerce security certification service)
Thawte (Sells authentication, encryption and certification authority services)

Google Website Optimizer

2006-12-08T12:47:00.000-05:00

Google is rolling out a new service called Website Optimizer that is designed to allow companies to perform real A/B or multivariate testing on their landing pages.

Why would you want to do that? It will allow you to know (not guess) whether a change to a page improves conversion or not. Sounds simple, but doing this in a statistically rigorous fashion on a website has required either buying special software, or services, or both. Now Google is offering it free. I've requested access (it's in invitation-only phase now) and am looking forward to trying it out with my clients.

For some good preliminary advice to testing newbies, take a look at Four Steps to More Effective Web Site Testing by conversion guru Bryan Eisenberg.

Also, I should mention that another free Google product that has shaken things up, Google Analytics, is now my standard recommendation to retailers in need of an analytics solution. It's not perfect, and it's not easy finding an expert to help you configure it. However, it delivers enterprise-class functionality for...free. Hard to beat that.

Wireframes & Gorillas

2006-12-01T09:52:00.000-05:00

At the beginning of a new website project, I like to build a "wireframe site". Often clients misunderstand the intent of the wireframe and want to jump right into what it looks like instead of how it's put together. Recently I sent this explanation of the wireframe concept to a client, and it appears to have done the trick.

A wireframe is like a woman's skeleton--it shows how the parts will fit together, but tells you very little about how pretty she is. We want to check the wireframe carefully to make sure we haven't given her a gorilla skeleton by mistake, before we get distracted by thinking about what color dress she should wear. Colors, shapes, fonts, images etc. are all to be ignored at this stage.

Once approved, the wireframe will serve as the functional template we'll use to clearly communicate what's to be done to designers and coders. We can show them how each page type needs to work without building out every single page.

Wireframes are a critical tool to help site owners to focus on structure, navigation and flow without being distracted by colors and images. They save a lot of expensive re-work later in the design & development process. Why do this? Here's what Richard Saul Wurman said in "Information Anxiety 2":

There are two parts to solving any problem: What you want to accomplish, and how you want to do it. Even the most creative people attack issues by leaping over what they want to do and going on to how they will do it. There are many "hows" but only one "what".... You must always ask the question, "What is?" before you ask the question, "How to?"

The Secret to Standing Out Online

2006-11-14T16:53:00.000-05:00

It's not actually a secret, but I'm amazed at how many retailers haven't gotten it yet.

Specialize.

The last thing any consumer needs is yet another full-line furniture website with 10,000 items. The last thing any prudent businessperson needs is the burden of trying to build a full-line furniture brand online without an 8-figure budget.

Do your due diligence, stake out your territory and then own it. Customers will respond.

If you're not sure where to start, give us a call. We can help.

Help Customers Help You

2006-10-31T12:15:00.000-05:00

I'm hearing much buzz recently about Dove's successful extension of their "Campaign for Real Beauty". Others have already enshrined this 75-second video called "Dove Evolution" as the most powerful use of Web 2.0 by a traditional advertiser ever, so I won't bore you with further adulation. Suffice it to say Dove will end up selling a lot more product for a lot of years as a result of this fairly modest effort.

Can you do something similar for your business?

Can you get people saying nice things about your company and your products?
Can you help people see your company as honest and open and transparent?
Can you create ways for consumers to prefer your store because of how you give them a feeling of being in control?

Yes, of course you can.

Reward customers with unexpected kindnesses. (we have some great ideas for this)
Reward repeat customers even more lavishly
Encourage customers to write testimonials, and let them know when theirs is published.
Add product reviews to your website, then actively solicit customers to write reviews.
Give your customers good information for free
If customers consistently cancel orders because you gloss over some key fact in your store (like shipping times), then make that policy clear, even if you feel it puts you in a poor light.

Notice none of these involve posting video on YouTube. They do, however, encourage customers to like you and share their positive feelings with others. That's the whole point of successfully leveraging customer voices in your marketing.

New Yahoo! Sponsored Search Platform

2006-10-18T10:41:00.000-04:00

After 8 years of using basically the same advertiser interface, Yahoo! is readying their roll-out of a comprehensively upgraded system (codename: Panama) for managing paid search advertising across the Yahoo! network.

8 years? That's an unbelievably long time in SEM. Well, better late than never, and the new features being introduced do in fact seem to be what we've been pleading with them to introduce for all these years.

These new features should make the Yahoo! Sponsord Search platform about as powerful and flexible as the Google AdWords system, which should earn them some more advertising dollars. Over the past couple of years I've moved most of my clients' Yahoo! ad spending to Google because I'd lost patience with Yahoo!'s terrible, clunky interface. The new system should make it much easier to optimize campaigns for better conversion.

Did Yahoo! do everything they could? Of course not. They can still amaze me with their cluelessness in marketing to advertisers. And did they build in features to make it easier for Yahoo! Merchant Solutions stores to manage their Yahoo! Sponsored Search campaigns? If they did, they aren't talking about it.

Beautiful CSS

2006-10-06T17:05:00.000-04:00

I envy talented designers for their ability to create useful beauty and make it look easy. Anybody who's attempted to create (or adapt) a good website design knows I'm right. Most people have not tried, and so have no idea how elusive beautiful website design really is.

I've also developed an appreciation for minimalist html code. Elegant simplicity requires a certain genius, but it is always delightful. Oh, and it doesn't break nearly as much, it's easier for search engines to index, and it loads faster.

So, what's got me thinking about good visual web design and minimalist code? A site I came across that's devoted to promoting the adoption of cascading style sheets, or CSS. CSS lets you control every aspect of the appearance of your website from a single page of code. Want to change all the fonts on your 1,000-page site? 15 seconds to edit and save your CSS file and you're done.

Every CSS booster I've come across has been focused on the structural benefits of CSS, mainly the ability to abolish tables as the primary layout crutch of legions of website builders. No tables? I can hear the yawns from here. zzzzzz....

This site, called css Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design, is devoted to showcasing what designers can really do with CSS. Some of it is quite breathtaking.

The Power of Supporting Words for SEO

2006-09-22T12:22:00.000-04:00

Came across a great blog entry on an SEO technique that you geeks will get excited about if you don't already use it. It even has a name that appeals to my inner geek on so many levels: "Latent Semantic Indexing". The blog author prefers to call it "Supporting Words", but any time I can slip a phrase like "Latent Semantic Indexing" into casual conversation, my day is pretty much made.

Here's the link to the blog entry:

Magic Words for Search Engine Optimization: Latent Semantic Indexing Demystified

This blog entry also includes some links to cool keyword analysis tools that are free.

Getting Emotional

2006-09-21T16:16:00.000-04:00

It's tough to get a consumer excited about a product when you aren't talking to them directly. This is why a brick and mortar furniture store typically converts 30% of foot traffic to buyers, and a typical online furniture store typically converts about 1% or less of site visitors.

Words, images and design must stand in for the salesperson on a website. If your copy consists of what the manufacturer (or more likely the rep) wrote about the product, people aren't going to be persuaded very often.

It's a lot like dealing with a warehouse worker brought up front to fill in because the salespeople are out golfing. He can probably recite some facts about the product he schleps all day, but he's not going to have any clue about what the customer is really interested in. In other words, she will learn about features, but not necessarily about the benefits that make those features valuable to her.

Anybody who's sold knows you want the customer to feel like she's "got to have it", which requires that she is emotionally committed to owning the product. So how do you get her to feel that way when you can't probe for motivations in person? Here's a great quote from a great book, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? by Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg:

Identifying and speaking to the emotional needs in your audience has very little to do with being emotive. It's not really about extravagant, flowery writing. It's not really about your ability to get your audience laughing or crying alongside you. Engaging people's emotions is not about escalating flamboyance.

So how DO you help your customers make a buying decision by appealing to their emotions? You focus on benefits to the consumer, not the features of the product. Benefits allow the consumer to relate to product features in ways that matter to her, and help her imagine her life with this new product in it. Here's a tip--if you can't think of a benefit to pair with a product feature in your copy, then don't mention the feature at all.

Websites Accessible to Blind Users?

2006-09-13T09:26:00.000-04:00

Interesting news article today in Advertising Age titled "Blind Advocate's Suit Against Target Allowed to Proceed". The article focused on the potential financial impact to companies with large, complex websites who may be forced to re-build their websites to make them accessible to text readers used by the blind.

I admit to indulging in a bit of schadenfreude on this topic. No, I'm not a selfless advocate of the visually handicapped, but I am an advocate of ecommerce site design that is easy to use, fast-loading, and easily searchable. That usually means a site rendered in html with little or no reliance on plugins like Flash for anything important.

I've not read the full complaint, but AdAge referred to the main knocks against Target being the lack of image alt tags and the inability to use the site with only a keyboard (as opposed to a mouse). These are basic, unsexy features of plain html. As long as html is the way we display pages on the internet, including things like descriptive image alt tags should be a complete no-brainer.

Designing your site to be effective at selling both sighted and blind customers should help you stay focused on things that search engines like to see as well, like descriptive links and good copy. It will likewise keep you from straying into unproductive activities like commissioning a Flash entry page to your site. Ugh.

I realize I sound like a Luddite steeped in the stern usability strictures of people like Jakob Nielsen, but only because they work. Technology will march on, making gee-whiz stuff easier to do, more stable, and more accessible. Just remember that gee-whiz for its own sake never sells more product.