Reading Time: < 1 minAt our Meetup yesterday, Jamie Howard of Hey Thunderbird gave us a great presentation about using metaphors in business. In fact, his entire presentation was about using the idea of property management (“renovations”, “foot-traffic”, “location”, etc) as it relates to digital marketing, and it was excellent! You can view his slides here. What really struck […]
Websites
Don’t break the back button
Reading Time: < 1 minOver the years, the “back” button on web browsers has consistently been shown to be one of the most-used features on a web browser. As time as gone on, though, websites have found increasingly creative ways to break that core functionality. The folks at the Baymard Institute have showed four design patterns that violate what […]
Google ranks pages, not sites
Reading Time: 2 minWhen you’re working to improve your rankings in Google, it’s easy to slip into the idea of trying to improve the rankings for your entire website at once. While there is a bit of benefit to that, generally speaking Google looks more closely at individual pages than they do at entire sites. In fact, most […]
Finding old versions of any site
Reading Time: 2 minFrom time to time, it can be useful (or even just fun) to find an old version of a website. Perhaps you need to grab some content from an old version of your site, or maybe you want to see how ESPN looked 15 years ago. If that’s what you need, there are a few […]
Obscurity is still your biggest threat
Reading Time: 2 minThere’s an old quote from Tim O’Reilly that I really love, and it seems to be getting better with age. Tim simply said: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy. While you can worry about people copying your content or stealing your ideas, your far bigger concern is having […]
Trust seals on your site may not be helping
Reading Time: < 1 minIn the past few years, Google has encouraged websites to work on ways to showcase their E-A-T: Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. There are a lot of ways to do this, and one option might be to add “trust seals” to your site — things like logos from the BBB. But do they help with E-A-T […]
The location changes, but the story stays the same
Reading Time: < 1 minThe world of marketing is moving faster than ever. If you’re reading this near the time when I published it, you’re likely considering how Clubhouse and TikTok fit into the world of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. If you’re reading this further in the future, those all have likely changed. This inspiration for this post actually […]
Full site editing is coming to WordPress
Reading Time: < 1 minEver since WordPress unveiled the drag-and-drop “Gutenberg” editor a few years ago, which I use on here (and my first post with it was three years ago today), there has been talk of when it might be extended to help edit your entire site. That time is coming very soon. As of today, you can […]
Your website should bring value to your users
Reading Time: < 1 minThe title seems obvious, but is often overlooked. We can get focused on other things that are indeed important, like speed, security and SEO, but at the end of the day it’s all about what kind of value your site brings to your users. Headline, headlines, text headline, headline The common issue we see is […]
I’ve been around since 1976
Reading Time: < 1 minWhen a visitor first arrives on your website, they want to know three basic things (sometimes known as “the grunt test“): What do you offer? How will it make my life better? What do I need to do to buy it? Something that isn’t on that initial list? The age of your company. That information […]