Bad content, bad links, bad navigation, bad category pages… which is worst for business? In these examples, bad content takes the prize for costing the company the most money.
Link: Four Bad Web Designs (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
Don’t let this happen to you.
Same principles apply to business, too.
Q: What best practices should my organization follow to ensure our email reaches our supporters?
A: At NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference last month, I talked about the things that affect email delivery and the best practices required to avoid common delivery problems.
Recipient complaints are the single most important factor affecting email delivery. If recipients report your email as spam to their Internet Service Provider or email software, your organization’s communications may be rejected, diverted to the spam folder, or mangled by image suppression.
To keep your organization’s complaint rates low, it is critical to…
Continue reading at: Ask the Expert: What can we do to make sure our organization’s email gets delivered to our supporter’s inbox?
Try to use Flash only where it is needed. Many rich media sites such as Google’s YouTube use Flash for rich media but rely on HTML for content and navigation. You can too, by limiting Flash to on-page accents and rich media, not content and navigation. In addition to making your site Googlebot-friendly, this makes you site accessible to a larger audience, including, for example, blind people using screen readers, users of old or non-standard browsers, and those on limited low-bandwidth connections such as on a cell phone or PDA. As a bonus, your visitors can use bookmarks effectively, and can email links to your pages to their friends.
Link: Best uses of Flash
Words matter. They always have. They always will. On the Web, words matter even more. The right words.
…If you want to design a new website, the first thing you should decide on is the words. Not the graphical design, not the software. No. The words must come first. Once you get the words right, you are half-way there.
One of the best ways to get publicity and generate buzz is to get bloggers to write about what you’re doing. Boing Boing co-author Cory Doctorow provides some tips on making it easy for bloggers to point to you.
In business to business marketing, the case study is king…But when I stand back and look at case studies in general (not just mine!) from a ‘Bad Language’ perspective, I can see a number of problems:
- They are lifeless. You get little sense of person or place.
- They are formulaic: problem, solution, benefits.
- There is no story. No feeling of tension, suspense, progress.
- The results are hard to measure.
And more. Read what the author thinks is the problem and how to treat it.
Like blogging, there are many misperceptions about the productivity potential for Twitter. Those unfamiliar will often say, What’s up with: “My flight is leaving”. “We landed”. “Getting in cab. Etc?”. Trust me, there is a method to the MicroMedia madness as both an individual and a commercial communications tool.
There’s both a social/play and a social/communicate aspect to Twitter that makes it productive as a promotional tool for pointing to interesting things you’ve found on the web as well as a tool for building credibility and influence. On their own, such updates can be blasé and uninteresting. However, followed over time, you can gain insight into people you may end up hiring, getting hired by, working for, partnering with or simply socializing with.
It’s true that some people do use Twitter as if they’re trying to copy the most boring blog on the web. However, many others are sharing links to timely resources or things they’ve found on the web that they’d like to share/promote immediately as well as tidbits of personal/business information.
Read more for tips and resources on how to make Twitter work for you.
A 16 minute primer what Google Analytics could do for you. Same principles could be applied to any organization tracking website activity.
Links:
Best practices snippets on optimizing your web experience.
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Email Amy at butterfly@arosheaf.com
