Posted by Angela | 0 Comments
The Vendor Client Relationship
In the current economy, do you ever feel like this is how your clients treat your business?
Read MorePosted by Eric Jackson | 1 Comment
FAIL: Five Ways to Perform Miserably on the Web
Most businesses and organizations that want a website have one. Unfortunately, many websites are hideous, unusable monstrosities. So why is that you may ask? There are myriad reasons for this sad state of affairs, too many to list here. Instead, we’ll just give you five of many. If you want more, or you simply want to talk about your website and how it can be fixed, email me at: ejackson@kbsweb.com.
#1 – Hire an amateur
Hiring an amateur to build your website is like asking your accountant to perform your root canal. Your accountant may do it for a very reasonable price, but the outcome isn’t going to please you. Again and again, new customers looking for the answer come to us, stunned that the kid down the street didn’t do a professional job. He didn’t do a good job for the same reason that I haven’t won the Masters. He has no experience and doesn’t practice. He’ll never help you get where you want to go.
#2 – Don’t define your goals and audience
If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. It’s not just a cliché; you must define your efforts to be successful. For example, let’s say you’re in the dog grooming business in Hendersonville, Tennessee. I’ll venture a guess that you want dog owners in Sumner County to find your website, probably using Google. Mildred Johnson and her poodle, residents of Albuquerque, New Mexico, are not in your target market. You don’t wish them ill; they’re just not driving to Tennessee to have Sparky’s nails trimmed. The Five P’s ring true again: prior planning prevents poor performance. A professional website development firm will point you in the right direction.
#3 – Write your own content
For reasons I can’t fathom, most website owners will attempt to assemble and write the content for their own website. Forget for a moment that they have zero ability and that they never write anything longer than a paragraph. That doesn’t seem to matter. Reason be damned; they’re going to write their own content…in three different styles…and in every verb tense they can conjure. Let’s get to the point here: people visit your website to read your content, not look at the design. The design needs to be pleasing; the content (text and photos) do the real work. Don’t write your own content unless you’re a professional writer.
#4 – “Frankenstein Design”
You’re familiar with Frankenstein, right? The large, beastly creature pieced together with spare parts in an attempt to create something resembling life? Web Frankensteins abound on the Internet. Held together with stitches, spit and tape, they’re ugly, ponderous and near useless. They suffer from a variety of maladies including poor graphic design, incompetent coding and bad hosting. The best thing you can do with a “Frankenstein Design” is put it down and build anew. Bolting on a new head will not help your plight. Yes, we realize you dumped a boat-load of cash into this monster, but it’s time for him to die.
#5 – Don’t promote your site
There is no better way to live in Internet obscurity than to build a site that no one can find. If you want to fail spectacularly, refuse to spend the money to get your site in front of the people who need you. Don’t put it on your business cards, brochures, promotional materials, advertising or signs. Tell no one, not your current customers or prospects. Whatever you do, don’t optimize your website for the search engines (SEO – Search Engine Optimization).
If you want to avoid these and other common mistakes, give me a shout. It’s what I do: ejackson@kbsweb.com
Read MorePosted by Angela | 0 Comments
Decode Your Teens’ Text-Speak With DTXTR
According to the New York Times, texting is on the rise more than ever. This statement is probably not surprising to any teens out there, or to anyone with a teenage son or daughter, but the numbers are more dramatic than you might think. The New York Times reported that the average number of text messages sent and received by teens at the end of 2008 was just over 2,000 a month!
A reason for its popularity may be the privacy texting provides. By typing the words, you can get a message to another person without saying it out loud for all to hear. Text messaging also allows one to say a lot in a few words because of all the abbreviations that have evolved.
With all of these secret texts going to and from your child, don’t you want to know what they are saying? LG has just created a de-texting device that will translate your child’s teen-text-talk into real English. It will successfully translate phrases like “gr8” into the English word “great” and the ever popular “LOL” into “Laughing Out Loud”. But those are easy. Who knew “TAH” meant “Take A Hike?”
The idea of a teen translator has been tossed around in jokes for years, but now it is finally a reality. Whether you really want to translate a phrase or you just want to see what is stored in the Glossary, you should try out LG’s new DTXTR for the sake of curiosity. What makes me ROFL about this new translation website is that LG claims it is “an educational site and credible resource.”
Read MorePosted by Jeremy Scott | 0 Comments
YouTube And Twitter Are Incredibly Popular, &...
Twitter is pretty popular. So is YouTube.
Also, the sky is blue, LeBron James is talented, and men like sports.
But beyond the stating of the obvious, those two articles linked to above have some staggering statistics. Even if you already knew Twitter and YouTube were huge, you probably still didn’t realize exactly how huge.
YouTube users are now uploading more than 24 hours of video every single minute. That means that in the time it took you to read this far through my article, another day’s worth of video has been posted. Holy cow. No wonder Google is losing over a million dollars a day on YouTube.
Twitter, on the other hand, may be breaking popularity records before our very eyes. In February, they had 9 million unique visitors. In March, it jumped to 19 million. Well, the April numbers are in, and Twitter has surged to 32 million unique visitors per month. That’s way more than an upward trend. Twitter has more visitors monthly now than the New York Times, Digg.com, or the popular business networking site LinkedIn (Twitter actually doubles LinkedIn’s 16 million monthly visitors).
Want to really have your mind blown? Consider this: Twitter’s numbers above don’t even factor people who use the service via their mobile device. And the convenience of “tweeting” from your phone is part of the site’s popularity. Who knows what their true popularity is when you factor that in… but I’d wager it’s a lot higher than you or I thought it was yesterday.
Read MorePosted by Jeremy Scott | 0 Comments
Google Uses Algorithm To Detect When Employees Are...
A new story from the Wall Street Journal today talks about how Google is using an algorithm to determine when certain employees might be about to quit. And to that I say… awesome!
Google is arguably the world’s leader in data analysis anyway–heck, that’s what their search engine is all about. So it should come as no surprise that the company applies the same approach to HR.
They analyze things like employment reviews, raises, history of promotions, and workload to help determine which employees might be dissatisfied–or might be about to be dissatisfied.
From the article:
Google’s algorithm helps the company “get inside people’s heads even before they know they might leave,” said Laszlo Bock, who runs human resources for the company.
This is very cool stuff. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Google has a ton of employees in many offices around the world. More data means that trends are easier to spot. For now, at least, this kind of thing is only really useful to exceedingly large companies… if it even works the way Google says it does. Me? I’ve seen what they can do analyzing billions of web pages for search, so I’m inclined to believe.
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