Website Magazine

Amazon Video Widgets; Great Idea, Poor Execution

PetePrestipino — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:02:00 GMT

Amazon recently launched "Your Video Widget" which enables Web publishers to earn referral fees from products links that are added to videos. Any topic, from product demonstrations to personal videos can be added. Publishers simply select products to display in their video and determine when the product information pops up. Publishers can add as many products to the widgets as they want but are restricted to displaying no more than two products within ten seconds of each other. One of...

7Search PPC Network Gets Upgrades

PetePrestipino — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:11:00 GMT

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising network 7Search.com announced the release of three pretty important enhancements to its platform. PPC advertisers using the service now have conversion tracking capabilities (helpful to measure the accuracy of third-party analytics systems), geo-targeting (only on the country-level however) and Click-Free™, a direct navigation advertising offering. 7Search is the first major PPC advertising search engine to offer direct navigation traffic. "Online advertisers...

Browser Usage Market Share - Firefox 3

PetePrestipino — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:40:00 GMT

Net Applications Global Internet Usage Market Share study (say that ten times fast) tracked the release of the Firefox 3 release by the hour and monitored the well-promoted (yet poorly executed in my opinion due to downtime) Mozilla Download day and the results that followed in relation to usage market share for browsers. Net Applications states that Firefox made some "excellent gains in usage market share the last 2 months, which would imply a spoke in new users of FF3". See the chart below....

Flash Is Now SEO Friendly? Hurray!

PetePrestipino — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:45:00 GMT

Adobe announced last night that they are providing "optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines." Can you hear every Web designer from Atlanta to Alaska cheering? The development will offer Yahoo! and Google the ability to provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs (rich internet applications) and other...

Sometrics Social Analytics For Developers

PetePrestipino — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:33:00 GMT

Sometrics, an analytics and ad serving solution for social application developers announced that 1,000 developers are now using its analytics tools. From the announcement: Sometrics delivers social intelligence – a deep understanding of who’s doing what within social networking websites and applications, and a way for developers to use that information to boost traffic and make more money. Some developers participating in Sometrics’ beta test have reported 200 percent growth in...

JangoMail Visual Overlay: Email Click Tracking

PetePrestipino — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:27:00 GMT

Email marketing provider JangoMail announced a new reporting feature that aims to improve email marketing campaigns. The new Visual Overlay for Click Tracking feature allows email marketers to view click tracking statistics graphically superimposed on top of sent email campaigns. At a glance, email marketers can now see exactly how each link in a message is performing. "With JangoMail's latest enhancement, the Visual Overlay for Click Tracking, we are able to view click tracking results...

Google PPA Now Performics - Official

PetePrestipino — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:25:00 GMT

Remember not too long ago when all those Internet advertising and affiliate networks were up in arms about Google buying DoubleClick and its Performics affiliate network? I sure do, and it looks like zero day is fast approaching. Google will begin consolidating its offerings, essentially phasing out the AdWords pay-per-action beta in the last week of August 2008. But don't worry, Google's got a better alternative (of course they do!). For advertisers, Google is pushing advertisers towards...

Yahoo Sells Domains for $34.95?

PetePrestipino — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:22:00 GMT

Starting this Wednesday (tomorrow), users who have registered domain names with Yahoo's small business site will see their annual fee for the service jump $9.95 to $34.95. Website Magazine's very own senior editor Mike Phillips has a few domains registered with Yahoo Small Business and will have to pay three and a half times more than other domain owners (a $25 price increase). If you're looking for a less expensive alternative, be like a Yahoo Executive and jump ship - head on over to any of...

Comparison Shopping Survey: Your Opinion Counts

PetePrestipino — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:33:00 GMT

Comparison shopping online already transformed retailing, but how has it affected you? Whether you’re leading the charge as an active merchant, or you find it’s a big bore, your opinion counts. As a valued subscriber of Website Magazine, you are invited to answer a survey that should take no more than 5 minutes to complete. Your responses will help us gauge the impact of comparison shopping online on web professionals like you. The data collected will be available in the August edition of...

The Domain (and SEO) Industry Are Forever Changed

PetePrestipino — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:31:00 GMT

ICANN has formally accepted a proposal that will allow companies to purchase new top-level domain names (TLD's) ending in virtually any extension they choose. Readers, this is the biggest news in the domain name industry in a long, long time. Read about how the domain and SEO industries are forever changed thanks to this development.

Wix Flash Web Sites - SEO Friendly?

PetePrestipino — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:16:00 GMT

If you're looking to create flash websites or widgets, then recently launched online application Wix may be worth looking into (especially if programming and design are not your strengths). Wix is essentially an online editing platform that enables users to design web content such as audio, video, images, music and text and publish it anywhere in virtually any format - as standalone websites or social networks and weblogs. Users can do an amazing amount of things with the solution; for...

Domain News; GoDaddy, Dot TK, ICANN

PetePrestipino — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:13:00 GMT

The domain name industry is certainly heating up; here are a few announcements from yesterday and today: The GoDaddy Group, which operates GoDaddy.com, Wild West Domains, and Blue Razor have crossed a major milestone - 30 million domains registered. According to RegistrarStats.com, GoDaddy.com has around 26 million domains registered and Wild West Domains, its reseller program, counts over 3 million domains. Dot TK, the registry for .TK domain names, today announced the launch of its free...

Google Webmaster Tools API

PetePrestipino — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:09:00 GMT

Google is releasing an API for its Webmaster Tools. The API provides the ability to manage sites (retrieve, add, verify, and remove websites) and work with sitemaps (retrieve, add, remove). This will be immensely useful for those web professionals that need to update multiple sites on a regular basis. Although the current API offers a limited subset of all the functionality (the ability to retrieve queries on the data - links, crawl errors, etc.) that the online Webmaster Tools provides, you...

SQL Injection Detection and Defense

PetePrestipino — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Microsoft has released tools to help website developers in their defense against SQL injection on sites that use ASP and ASP.Net technologies. The tools include URLScan 3.0 (which is in beta release) and Microsoft Source Code Analyzer for SQL Injection (MSCASI), available as a Community Technology Preview. Hewlett Packard has also developed a free scanner which can identify whether sites are susceptible to SQL injection dubbed Scrawlr. Developed to help battle recent SQL injection attacks...

Vidense: Profiting From Video

PetePrestipino — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:47:00 GMT

Online advertising network Vidsense has surpassed 20,000 websites in its network, lending some credence to the opportunity in profiting from video. "Not only are we the largest online video network," says Vidsense EVP Scott Messick, "but with clickthrough rates 7-10 times greater than traditional online ad units, we're also far and away the best performing online video network for both our advertisers and our publishers." While that 7-10 times CTR might be a little bullish, Vidsense...