March 31, 2008 – 11:06 am
While attending a birthday party I overheard an interesting conversation between two of the participants. A man was telling, or trying to tell, a woman that you should avoid making things complicated. But in an attempt to say Eschew Obfuscation gave me my headline. He proved his point to me but confused the woman.
Keeping things [...]
Baby ducks are amazing! They are cute, fluffy, and — I assume — crunchy. According to Taco Bell commercials a duckling could only be better if it were covered in cheese.
Beyond tasteless jokes ducklings have an amazing ability, imprinting. Ducks will literally attach themselves to the first large object they see. If you wear white [...]
Continuing from the understanding customers post, today I am tackling a more complicated explanation of buying decisions.
The temperament description is a common introduction to the concept of how people engage information. However, companies like Future Now internally use a more complicated system — like the Meyers Briggs Type Indicator. MBTI splits each of the temperaments [...]
Continuing from Landing Page Types, I am going to cover customer types. Customers are more complicated than the landing pages, because there are many factors that create the mindset of each visitor.
I think the Eisenbergs have a reasonable approach to thinking about your customers. They use a modified Kiersey-Bates scale, separating people into four groups. [...]
I haven’t written about landing pages in a while so I will cover a basic issue — the primary types of landing pages.
Stand Alone.
Most people have experienced this type of landing page. This is the type that is frequently employed by e-books and lead generation sites. All of the information is given in one location [...]
March 13, 2008 – 12:17 pm
How do search queries come into existence?
For anyone following Eliot Spitzer a new phrase appeared this morning Ashley Alexandra Dupre. Ms. Dupre is the second most searched term for March 13th on Google. She is the intended result of 6 out of the top twenty searches. Think about that for a minute, a significant portion [...]
Michael Martinez paints an admittedly arrogant picture of Advanced SEO tactics. Certainly he has gotten his hands dirty in the search optimization business, but his advice is more like Zen gardening than in the trenches warfare.
Mr. Martinez’s guide to Advanced SEO:
Advanced SEO plans for a minimum of 12 months (or 4 seasons)
No problem there [...]
I know this is a major accusation but Google is spiraling further and further into a “keep them in the dark” business model.
On March 6th they announced that load time is going to be factored into Quality Score.
This means that if you are running dynamic content, third party tracking, any javascript, or off-page calls [...]
I want to give you a visual representation of how people build websites. There are some trends that you see when you start playing with people’s sites, they resemble a dog in some fashion. Here are some of the dogs out there and how to improve them.
Corgis - Plenty of content, spotty design.
Photo by: [...]