Web-attractiveness isn’t necessarily good design

Reading through the LinkedIn Groups a question grabbed my attention. It was a lady who was obsessed with setting up a series of fancy designed monetized blogs. As well as wavering on which kind of blogging platform to use, she was very concerned about the design, as well as keen to start making money. Unfortunately [...]

The importance of interaction

When you’re dealing with social media, one of the most important things to consider is interaction. Interaction is when your readers, audience, fans, friends or whatever are compelled to respond to your social networking activities. This will happen when you post up something that is worth commenting on, full of value, beneficial and helpful, entertaining [...]

It’s not good to make your website flashy

I saw a question on LinkedIn that asked how to optimise a website’s homepage that consisted purely of Flash. Flash is a programme that provides animation with images and graphics for websites, and you probably have come across many examples (I did the other day with a digital marketing firm) where you are greeted with a little ‘show’ of [...]

How WordPress.com can help businesses in the short-term

I read blogging blogs that exalt the virtues of WordPress and what a fantastic platform it is to create a blog. But what they are mainly talking about is WordPress.org, the sophisticated version that is independently hosted, and can perform in total synchrony with your website, or even become your whole website! But its problem [...]

Ineffectual landing pages are a waste of time

This sweeping statement has arisen because I see so many examples! In fact this covers two kinds of landing pages, since it refers to the webpage the visitor first lands on when visiting a website.  This can actually be any page on your website, not necessarily the index or homepage. This is because it may [...]

Why you shouldn’t neglect your blog

All the excitement of creating or building a blog, the newness of it all, can be quite short lived. Many would-be writers avidly start their blog with great gusto and go through the settings and themes to get the ‘look’ they want, vowing to contribute posts regularly every week. But the reality is different. My boss asked me to design [...]

How to perform a marketing follow-on

Last year I responded to my husband’s request for a metal watering can for his birthday.  That’s OK, it’s easy to go to Google, type in ‘metal watering cans’ and choose a website from the links that came up. Having been thoroughly annoyed by all the inadequate links, including the sponsored ones in the shaded areas of the [...]

Twitter isn’t just a gossip engine

Twitter isn’t just about sending your followers chatty messages constrained to 140 characters, or valuable tips that can be shared. You can use it like a search engine too, or a method of exposing your complaint and getting results! Like a search engine: I have seen many questions put out on Twitter. If you have [...]

What is a search engine spider?

An internet spider is a robot that crawls around the world wide web. They are also sometimes called crawlers. They use an algorithmic programme that follows links throughout the net searching for new content. This then fetches the new webpages and adds them to the search engine indexes. Google is a crawler-based search engine, as [...]

What use has social media for small businesses?

I’ve just got back from giving a talk about social networking to a group of home businesses. This kind of business is not usually on Chantal’s agenda, as she sees them as not having enough money or commitment, but I see them as embryonic enterprises for the future, as you never know which one will [...]