Welcome to my blog on web development! I write on topics ranging from design to writing web copy. If you like the looks of the articles I write be sure to get the rss feeds!
It's now official; we are running a web development studio.
Not much to say other than jquery is awesome and cgi isn't (although now that I know how to get tracebacks with cgitb it won't be half as bad).
Well, if you need any web work now you know who to contact :)
Permanent link Comments (View)Has it really been almost seven months since my last post? How time flies.
A lot has been happening. For starters I created a new site for all my game development endeavors called Arctic Paint.
Next up is SEOjo light! It's a small desktop program I wrote to help with on-page SEO. Try it out and if you have any feedback be sure to let me know!
Then there are a few more cool things coming up that I hope to be announcing soon.
Permanent link Comments (View)Decreasing the bounce rate on your e-comrice website (or on any website) can be difficult, but it's worth it. A bounce is a user who lands on your page and leaves without any further browsing. The higher the bounce rate, the less sales you get per visitor. That can mean the loss of lots of money!
On the e-store I work with about 4% of visitors that don't bounce turn into a $40 sale. So that means that if 60% of the visitors bounce, only 1.6% of total visitors will make a sale. While if I manage to lower the bounce rate to 30%, 2.8% of my total visitors will make a sale. So say for example I get 300 visits a day; at the 60% bounce rate I would make $192 a day, but at the 30% bounce rate I would make $336 a day! That's a $144 per day difference for decreasing your bounce rate by just 30%! At 1000 visitors a day the difference would be $480, and it keeps on going.
I read an introduction to a website that was three short sentences. The first sentence was a question, the second a very clear and short (in other words, excellent) description of the site, and the last one was a link to learn more. It was wonderfully done.
But I had to read the whole thing 2 or 3 times before I got what the site was about. Why? Because that first question I actually had to ponder. So my mind was working on an answer while I kept reading; and as a result I didn't process what the next two sentences said.
Morel of the story: when writing your webcopy don't ask anything thought provoking. Asking a question for your first sentence is a very good idea so long as the user doesn't have to think to answer it.
Permanent link Comments (View)Why do people see some things as complicated even if they aren't? What makes a user think to himself, "Oooo... no idea what that does but it looks too complicated - not worth the effort," about feature A and, "This looks interesting, might as well give it a try, it looks easy enough," about feature B - even if feature B is more complicated that A?
I recently had to ask myself all these questions. Here is what I found.
I had read that placing the phrase "how to" in your article headlines was good. Wanting to know if that was really true or not I decided to put it to the test for the month of July. So this past month I posted a bunch (ok... 3) of "How-To"s in hopes of getting to #1 for more common searches. I can't say that I've gotten to the #1 position on very many of them yet - mostly #3 to #7 on google - but I was pleased by the increase of traffic by people searching for "how to" topics.
For the month of July, out of 198 different queries people came to my site through, 31 of them had the phrase "how to" someplace in them! (Most of the time at the beginning) 6.39% doesn't sound like all that much until you look at it this way; for about every 16 people that come to your site through google, 1 of them will be searching for a How-To [1]. Putting the phrase "how to" in your title simply helps get you up higher on google for those searchers. How-To articles are also nice to have as they attract links quite well.
| [1] | I'm expecting this to go up in Augest as all of the how-to articles will be there already. UPDATE: for the month of October, over 90 queries out of 503 had the phrase "how to" in them. |
Recently I had some people come to my site searching for "what makes divs so great" (Yes, big brother is watching your moves! MUHAHAHA!) I didn't think any of my articles made that completely clear though - so here are 4 reasons why div tags are so great.
For the past week I have been on a very slow internet connection. Not because I want to but because it's my only option. Many times I will get upwards 1KB/sec! That's slow! Some pages won't even load - while others, relatively speaking, load blazing fast.
So I did a bit of research on why some pages load fast and why others not at all. This article covers what I found.
In the past I have talked about why clean web design is best but yesterday it occurred to me that some people might not know what "clean design" really means. So here are some things that characterize clean web design. If you want to make your website better, I recommend you make your design follow these!