» Archive for the ‘Web Tips & Trends’ Category
What Does Your Web Design Do For You
Saturday, July 12th, 2008There are so many websites on the internet nowadays, so if you want a great website that stands out from the crowd, you are going to have to have brilliant web design incorporated into it.
A website that is badly designed will be remembered for all the wrong reasons. If you want a website that is remembered for the right reasons, you are going to have to have a design that makes your website unique.
Your web design is the first thing that people notice when they arrive at your website. If you have an untidy website with bad graphics and terrible navigation, you are going to lose your readers and viewers right from the start. That is why web design is important in the process of creating a successful website. Whether it is a personal website or one that you intend to use for business purposes, it needs to be well designed and well maintained.
If you can grab the reader’s attention by graphics that are relevant and useful, text that is of a very high quality, colors and layouts that are easy on the eye, then you are half way there! Research has shown that more people buy from websites that are designed professionally and look trustworthy, rather than quickly made and with badly thought out designs.
So, you can see how important your web design really is now. There are many ways to improve your web design, both for free and by hiring someone else to do it for you. Which you choose will depend on your budget and your time frame. A busy web designer may not be able to fit you in for months.
How you layout your website is also very important. You may have lots of great content on your website that people would love to read, but what if they can’t find it? If you haven’t clearly and easily laid out your website in the web design process, your readers won’t be able to find any other pages. This could be disastrous if you are selling some kind of service or product.
All in all the web design aspect is only a small part of getting your website up and running, however, it is very important. When you are designing your website, remember to make it easy to navigate, concise and clear.
If you are not familiar with web design and all the aspects that go into creating a website, it may be worth your while looking for a professional web designer or a pre made template. Web designers come with different price tags all depending on where you get them from and what you need doing.
If you want a relatively simple design you will be looking at a fairly cheap price. If you are looking for a complex website with many features you can expect to pay a fair amount of money for it. A good designer will include you all throughout the process. You will be able to approve the website as many times as required.
Ready-made templates are great if you don’t have the budget for a professional designer and don’t have the time to learn how to create one from scratch. There are many free ones that you find on the Internet or ones that you can buy for a small amount of money.
source by: Daniel Millions-entireweb.com
15 Websites and,or Services I’d Actually Pay For
Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
15 Websites / Services I’d Actually Pay For Ryan lists fifteen websites/online services he would be willing to pay for, if they were not free. Worthy of note is the following in the list: Wordpress.org: The benefit of blogging with WP is so significant (SEO, functionality, flexibility) that it’s well worth paying for. I’d probably pay a $200 for an installation… which makes me realize how much I rely on the product.
This is an incredibly interesting line of thought and I am sure a lot of Web 2.0 companies/services would kill to have more user data and input on this. I strongly believe that revenue models and monetization techniques are the stuff that make or break a company in spite of the fantastic idea/concept that it might provide. In that spirit, here is my list of 12 things online (15 things were hard to find quickly) I am willing to pay for.
- GMail: Without a doubt my one most used tools online. I returned to GMail a few years ago and cannot imagine my life without it. Add other services such as Google Reader and Google (outside of google search, without which I would be completely lost, at least for a few days) is indispensable to me.
- WordPress: I would pay for it undoubtably, but I think the allure would be gone if I had to pay. Whenever I think WordPress, I think GPL and Open Source and I just cannot imagine the two apart.
- Firefox: This was a tough one. I would pay for it, but look at #2. I would however, be willing to pay for the Web Developer Toolbar extension, the colorpicker extension and a few others that I use everyday.
- Akismet: I do pay for Akismet. The service has caught 3,263,951 spam on this blog since I first installed it.
- SlickDeals: I am an addict. If I had to pay to be a member, within reason, I would pay for it.
- StatCounter: Their free service is great, but if they started charging for their basic service, the switching cost of years of accumulated data would force me to pay.
- Techmeme: Nominal, yearly charges would be fine by me, especially if it removed those sponsored posts. I use it too often.
- Skype: Again, nominal yearly charges would be acceptable for the basic PC to PC calling. I already keep my account topped off for when I call international phones once in a while.
- Craigslist: If I had to pay a small fee for the listings, if the charge was only initiated for items that are sold (which I understand would be hard to monitor), I would pay for it. Craigslist is a much better place to buy and sell everyday used items than eBay and I have made better deals via Craigslist than any other online selling venue.
- Woopra: I am getting addicted to the Woopra fever. As I have expressed in the past to JohnP, Elie and others, I would be willing to pay a reasonable fee for it.
- Various WordPress Plugins: I have paid and have dontated to the developers of various WordPress plugins that I find extremely useful and which have become completely indispensable after I have installed them and used them. They include OIOPublisher, Ozh’s Who Sees Ads, Mark’s Subscribe to Comments etc.
- Feedburner: Now another Google service but Feedburner reduces the traffic load from feed readers and I would have paid for the service if it were not free.
What would you be willing to pay for? If famous OSS programs were not OSS, would you pay for them? Does the cost of software make it less or more attractive (not the relative cost, but just the fact that it is not free)? Would you pay for Twitter? How about Flickr or Google Analytics? What if TechCrunch went to a registration model? Would it still be as popular? How much do you spend on personal online services every month today? Are online vendors sharing more of your wallet today than say, two years ago? Do you think this trend will continue to increase?
These are the kinds of things that keep me up at night.
source: http://weblogtoolscollection.com
Google Confirms Friend Connect
Monday, May 12th, 2008Google Confirms Friend Connect
As we reported on Friday, Google will be launching its own data portability effort called Friend Connect. It will be announcing more details about the preview later tonight, but in a press release this morning it confirms:
Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social — and now they can be, easily. With Google Friend Connect (see http://www.google.com/friendconnect following this evening’s Campfire One), any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming — picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.
Visitors to any site using Google Friend Connect will be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more.
Friend Connect will work with existing standards such as OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, as well as with data access APIs from Facebook, Google, and MySpace. The announcement comes on the heels of similar announcements from MySpace and Facebook (MySpace’s Data Availability andFacebook Connect). As Michael noted on Friday:
The reason these companies are rushing to get products out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to control user data over the long run. If users don’t have to put profile and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access that data.
Update: I was able to talk with Google engineering director David Glazer to get some more details. The point of Friend Connect, he says, is to “, give users a shortcut to connections they’ve built up somewhere else.” So if you go to a Website that is part of Friend Connect, you will be able to sign in under your Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, Orkut, or Plaxo IDs (you choose which one you want to sign in under, with more options coming). Then you authorize the site to go out and retrieve your friend’s list from that network. Any of those friends who also happen to be members of the site you are on will then show up and you can interact with them.
Friend Connect is geared at the Long Tail of small sites that don’t even have any user information. It allows them to tap into bigger sites and piggyback on their user sign-in and registration, list of friends, and interactions between those friends. It takes advantage of many existing standards, including Facebook’s (it is not an official partner, but it Google is taking advantage of its published APIs). Of the many standards emerging, Glazer thinks that OAuth is the way to do it right.
Glazer admits that Friend Connect is but one small step towards the larger goal of being able to connect to any friend on any application, on any site. But it is not there yet. For instance, it doesn’t work with Google’s Social Graph API, and many more social and identity networks still need to be connected.
The bigger downside of Friend Connect is that Websites using it cannot mash up the data with their own to make compelling new applications. Glazer confirmed that the data will be sent to third party sites via an iframe rather than directly through a set of APIs (as Michael speculated on Friday). However, Glazer also says that he wouldn’t be surprised if eventually Google or somebody else makes it possible for Websites to combine the Friend Connect data with their own.
Basically, what Friend Connect does is gather this data from big social networks in whatever way they make available and then presents it in a uniform way to third party sites. It also works as a pass-through between those third party sites and the big repositories of social data. This eliminates any programming hassles on the part of small Websites that want to tap into these social networks, but it also positions Google as the central switch connecting all of these different identity systems.
source: Techcrunch.com By Erick Schonfeld May 12, 2008
WordPress 2.5 release
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008WordPress "Code is Poetry"
On Saturday, March 29, 2008, WordPress 2.5 was released and this release took me by surprise. If you use WordPress then you realize how often plugins are updated and the core itself is so frequent you might as well look to the source before you reuse any code from a previous project because it will have since been outdated. One thing that really impressed me was the new user interface in the admin section which is now starting to look more of a polished over CMS system.
Either way you look at it WordPress is here to stay and will become even more prominent as a CMS and blogging software which remains free, designer and developer supported open source that is extended by people who use it the most. Our Content Management System is based on WordPress and these improvements benefit all of our customers.
Related Links:
The WordPress Podcast Video: Episode 39 Live from WordCamp Dallas
WordPress Version 2.5: http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.5
Download WordPress: http://wordpress.org/download/
Free WordPress Themes: http://www.wpthemesfree.com/
Plugins: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/
www.showinabox.tv
Craigslist Valuation: $80 Million in 2008 Revenue, Worth $5 Billion
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008As we prepare to release our SAI 25: World’s Most Valuable Startups list, we’re running through some final valuation numbers. One company that is a shoo-in for the list is Craigslist (yes, it has been around a while, but we’re defining "start-up" as private companies founded in recent memory that has yet to go public or sell out).
We’ve struggled to get formal business metrics for Craigslist, but ClickZ has summarized a recent report from Classified Intelligence that should help. CI estimates Craiglist’s numbers, but it has at least gone through the laborious process of counting listings, pageviews, etc.
So here are some metrics:
2007 Est. Revenue: $55 million
2008 Est Revenue: $81 million
Monthly Pageviews: 9 billion
Monthly Job Listings: 2 million
Monthly Ad Listings: 30 million
Employees: 25
Estimated Costs
Let’s assume that each of Craigslist’s 25 employees costs about $125,000 a year, all in. That’s probably high–Craigslist is run like a non-profit–but it should be in the ballpark. This adds up to about $3 million of salary and other HR costs. Let’s assume that Craigslist will grow this year, and let’s assume that it spends another few million on prosaic costs like rent, insurance, travel, etc. Total estimated 2008 operating expenses: $7.5 million.
On the "cost of sales" line, let’s assume that Craiglist spends a boatload on servers and bandwidth to keep the site running smoothly. Craigslist’s content is not at all bandwidth intensive–all light text, no computation or transactive processing like eBay or Google–so this should keep its costs well below those of other huge global sites. Let’s call it $50 million a year. (This is probably high–grateful for any help in refining).
Add all that together and use the CI revenue estimate, and you have a business with about $80 million in revenue and, say, $25 million in operating profit. Apply a 10X revenue multiple and/or 25X operating income multiple, and you would have a company worth about $750 million. But obviously Craigslist is worth a heck of a lot more than that.
Craigslist’s Real Value
Why is Craigslist worth more than meets the eye? Because it’s run like a non-profit. Craig Newmark and co. don’t give a damn about generating revenue or profit, and more power to them. But if Craig ever want to sell Craigslist, he’d probably want to get something closer to true value for it–which means we need to think about the company’s real earning power.
Let’s assume that, instead of charging for job ads in only 11 cities, Craigslist charged for all job ads (currently 2 million a month). Let’s assume that it also charged for another 5 million of the 30 million ads on the site each month. Let’s assume that Craigslist users were so horrified by the outrage of being charged even a de minimus listing fee that two thirds of these listers stormed off in a huff so that the 7 million of paid listings dropped to, say, 2.5 million a month. And let’s assume that Craigslist charged its standard $25 job listing fee for all of them.
What would that generate in revenue? $62.5 million per month, or $750 million a year.
Let’s further assume that this outrageous affront to a minority of users–$25 per listing!–would require huge customer service and processing costs, so that Craigslist’s overall cost base jumped to $250 million a year. Then we’d have a business with $750 million in revenue and $500 million of operating profit.
Let’s put very conservative revenue and operating profit multiples on that–say 7X revenue and 10X operating profit–and we’re conservatively looking at a business worth $5 billion.
Thoughts? Speak now or forever hold your peace.
Article Provided by: WebProNews
Seesmic Befriends (And Buys) Twitter Client Twhirl
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008List of reasons pretty comprehensive
Twhirl’s service will remain free to users, so onlookers need not look to their wallets. Loic Le Meur presumably did a little digging, however, as the Twitter client has been acquired by his video chat company, Seesmic.
Twhirl’s price remains unknown, but on all other subjects, Le Meur has been extremely forthcoming. Want to know why Seesmic purchased Twhirl, for example? Le Meur lists a total of 20 reasons. "[Twhirl creator] Marco Kaiser is super cool and it is all about people" catches the PR side; "[Twhirl] is the #1 and coolest Twitter client with more than 100,000 downloads and 7% of all tweets posted per day" should convince statisticians.
The addition of video to Twhirl will remain optional, so fans who fear change needn’t worry about that. Also, in terms of what else is to come, we appear to be getting a preview thanks to a conversation on TechCrunch. Le Meur has promised Gabe Rivera a button that will return users to the main timeline, and he should "eliminate delays by getting tweets via XMPP instead of polling," as well.
There are obviously some potential sticking points - Seesmic is still in alpha, and Twitter itself is notorious for suffering untimely outages. Yet on the whole, the deal looks like it could give quite a boost to microblogging.
Article Provided by: WebProNews
Streaming Media To Reach $70 Billion
Tuesday, April 8th, 200829% growth rate over next five years
Streaming video and music will bring in $70 billion in revenue over the next six years according to a new study from Insight Research," Streaming Media, IPTV, and Broadband Transport: Telecommunications Carriers and Entertainment Services 2008-2013."
This covers revenues generated from digital audio and video files over the Internet, an IPTV network and mobile devices. The files can be streamed on-de3mand or in real time, but cannot be stored locally.
Revenues will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 29 percent over the next five years. On-demand audio and video content along with their advertising revenue will drive this growth.
"The outlook for streaming media has never been brighter. Questions surrounding consumers’ willingness to pay for content have been dispelled by the popularity of satellite radio and iTunes," says Robert Rosenberg, Insight Research president.
"The forecasts that we present are conservative, and in-line with current performance. If, however, per-stream costs drop faster than anticipated, we have quicker acceptance of IPTV, or improvements in 3G delivery take place faster than expected, it could blow the doors off of our forecasts, propelling this industry into explosive growth," Rosenberg added.
Related Links:
www.showinabox.tv
Article Provided by: WebProNews
Craigslist: Little Ads, $81 Million In Revenue
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008Company could easily top $100 million if desired
The website devouring the classified industry could hit $100 million in revenue in 2009 with a couple of minor changes, with the old-line newspaper industry helplessly watching from the sidelines.
Though the powers that be at Craigslist, founder and customer service rep Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster, aren’t commenting on the story from industry analysts Classified Intelligence (CI), they are pulling in an appreciable amount of money on the famously minimalist site. They could do even better.
CI said in its report on Craigslist that the implementation of its $25 job listing fee in three more locations could boost the company’s revenue into nine-digit territory. Through assessment of Craigslist postings in January and March, CI pegs 2008 revenue for Craigslist at $81 million.
Take the job recruiting fee of $25 Craigslist charges in a handful of major metropolitan areas. Kick it up to $75 across the board (that’s the price in San Francisco), and revenue for 2009 should climb to $150 million for a company based in a Victorian-style house that looks like it saw much better days a half-century ago.
The customer service credo of Craigslist, and its modest appointments both in headquarters and in site design, stand in stark contrast to the glassy offices of the newspapers that bore the brunt of the no frills, no fee approach to classifieds that are a hallmark of the site. Craigslist looks like what it is, a site launched years ago as a personal project that never forgot its users.
Some feel like Craigslist should do more, namely the bombastic VP and general manager of eBay’s classifieds competitor, Kijiji, Jacob Aqraou. He doesn’t care for the dated look of Craigslist, or the English-only listings that have only branched out into other languages in recent months.
As CI noted, the sniping comes across as odd, since eBay happens to own a 25 percent stake in Craigslist. The competition is real, however, with Kijiji, Freecycle, and the Village Voice’s Backpage all trying to present themselves as a better classifieds option.
Although some may dispute Craigslist’s real impact on newspaper classified revenue, one publishing professional cited by CI called Craigslist a catalyst that forced newspapers to reconsider their business models.
There isn’t one cause for newspaper fortunes to be in decline. Craigslist is a popular target, especially since CI said in 2004 that San Francisco newspapers lost as much as $65 million in recruitment ad revenue alone due to the site.
Craigslist simply found a niche where demand existed, and they make as much money as they care to earn. One can imagine how much they would make if they tossed an AdSense ad unit into their templates. But to Newmark and company, such a prospect looks unfathomable.
Article Provided by: WebProNews
Google Goodness
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008Let’s just start out by saying a phrase I heard a while back, "Everything Google touches turns to gold". I find myself using Google services quite frequently and figured what a good blog post to describe all the great tools I have found and use. This is by no means a complete list but rather the ones that stood out to me and could help you become more popular, well I can’t promise that.
Analytics
Google Analytics has been re-designed to help you learn even more about where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site.
Docs
Create and share your work online
- Create, edit and upload quickly
- Access and edit from anywhere
- Share changes in real time
Gmail
Gmail is a new kind of webmail, built on the idea that email can be more intuitive, efficient, and useful.
Base
Simply describe your items on Base to make them as easy as possible for people to find when they search. You don’t even need a website to put your stuff online.
Adwords
Google’s advertising platform offering both cost-per-click and cost-per-impression pricing for advertisements served on Google.com and partner sites. Something I found recently was Audio Ads which seems like a great way to get radio exposure.
Orkut
Social networking and discussion site operated by Google.
Adsense
Google AdSense matches ads to your site’s content, and you earn money whenever your visitors click on them.
Calendar
Shared calendars, quickly add events and see your friends’ and family’s schedules right next to your own.
Video Upload Program
This new upcoming service seems intriguing, "Your work deserves to be seen. You’ve made a great video. Now who will watch it?". Just make sure you own the rights to it and pending their approval you could have your video on Google. If you are a big shot producer with 1,000 + hours of vide you can sign up for their "Premium Program".
OpenSocial
"OpenSocial defines a common API for social applications across multiple websites. Built from standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps with OpenSocial that access a social network’s friends and update feeds. By using a common API, developers can extend the reach of their applications more quickly, yielding more functionality for users."
Relating News :: OpenSocial Foundation launches with Google, Yahoo, MySpace
"According to Google’s statistics, OpenSocial applications are already used by over 200 million users across participating social networks like Engage.com, Friendster, LinkedIn, Six Apart, and more. Next Tuesday, hi5 will be joining the fold, and the OpenSocial Foundation itself should be up and running within the next 90 days."
The Future is Web Services, Not Web Sites
Friday, March 14th, 2008Remember The Graduate when Benjamin Braddock was advised to go into plastics. The clip is here. It seemed like a safe bet at the time - and it was.
Today the web maybe "the new plastics." It seems like every brand is building a new site or microsite. The Internet feels like Dubai. Some are big, ambitious projects. Others are smaller initiatives like a blog that a small group can manage themselves.
I don’t expect organizations to stop building sites anytime soon. However, the Picture-in-Picture Web (what some would call the web services promise of "Web 3.0") is coming on strong. And I believe most brand web sites may not matter in 2012 - unless they have satellites that make the mother ship stronger. The Attention Crash (or what Iconoculture calls "choice fatigue") is accelerating the pace of change. Fred Wilson has a similar point of view.
The leading players on the web all see the train coming. They are wisely creating APIs and turning themselves into plug-and-play services, not just big destinations. YouTube is just the latest to do so today. Amazon has S3. Google has OpenSocial and an extensive library of APIs. As does Microsoft. Facebook is allowing its applications to live outside the site. Twitter is an API first and (eventually) a business model second. Finally, the booming widget economy shows the promise of small content that can go anywhere.
These are the leaders. But everyone - including marketers - will need to think of their online brands not as sites but as portable services that can go anywhere and everywhere the consumer wants. Without such appendages, no brand will ever be able to break through the online clutter such unlimited choice offers.
source: MicroPersuasion.com
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