Ignoring The Basics In The Rush To Embrace Web 2.0

With the immense hype surrounding web 2.0 are many companies ignoring the basic principles of creating websites?

More often than not, the web agency or web designer is at fault by trying to create something which is impressive to look at and, in an effort to embrace the web 2.0 ethos, has features that probably only 1% of site visitors will use. This can often result in having a badly designed website that is difficult to navigate and probably results in your customers moving on to the next website.

Lots of websites which use customisable features fall into this category where over 90% of the users will never use these ‘great’ features available to them. The development time for the extra features are often relected in higher costs for the client - resulting in very little ROI, if any. 

Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen held a presentation on this, highlighting some of the facts about our headlong rush towards Web 2.0. He warned that the desire to make webpages more dynamic often meant users were badly served.

E-Gain like many other web agencies use good practices include making a site easy to use, integrate good search tools where necessary, use jargon free text, usability testing and consideration to the design even before the first line of code is written.

Always ask yourself if you really need those extra features built into your website, and will the majority of your website visitors use or benefit from it?

Add comment June 24th, 2008

Websites Continue to Take a Larger Share of the Retail Pie

With the credit crunch biting hard, economic slowdown and falling retail sales it is encouraging to read today that online retail continues to grow, with this years online retail spend expecting to grow by 32% compared to offline retail sales which expect to see a minimal growth of 1.2% according to the European and UK internet consultancy group Verdict Research.

Online retail is currently worth around £20bn, an estimated 7% of overall retail spend and by 2012 Verdict forecast that this figure will rise to 14% or around £45bn.

With shoppers increasingly turning to the internet as an effective means of seeking out bargains and low-priced products, will an online retail presence become the difference between commercial success or failure? And will online apathy lead to a retail sales disaster?

1 comment June 19th, 2008

SEO and TLD’s

THere is an interesting post over at Search Engine Journal by Ann Smarty regarding ‘How Much Is a Top Level Domain SEO Worth?’

A wide range of comments have been received and it is interesting to read other peoples perspectives on domain usage from an SEO perspective, particularly with the American (primarily .com etc) vs other parts of the world (.com & localised domain usage).

Domain usage is an often under-used part of SEO, particularly the usage of localised vs global domains, and I would recommmend that any up and coming SEO spends some time understanding the nuances of domain usage from an SEO perspective.

To read Anns full post, click here

Add comment June 8th, 2008

Search Engine Usage stats by country

I recently had to do a load of search engine usage research for a potential new client opportunity. Such information seems hard to come by, so for others in the same predicament I have added these to the blog in the hope that other marketeers, may be able to utilise this in some form.
Google as predicted has pretty much market dominance across the ten countries profiled, however the surprising statistic was that Yahoo came below both MSN and Yandex in terms of percentage (as a total/number of countries - it should also be added that Yandex only appears in one country - however it accounts for 45% of internet searches). Visually this could be represented as follows:

Total usage for profiled countries:

Google: 73%
Yahoo: 4%
MSN: 5%
Yandex: 5%

These figures were obtained as below from the following data, for the following countries, UK, France, Germany, Holland, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Italy, Bulgaria and Russia:

Add comment June 3rd, 2008

People who have shaped search marketing…Your views?

This year has been a bumper year for search, particularly SEO. In particular as we have mentioned a number of times before some of the people who have shaped the search marketing industry, so further to this E-Gain are asking for your feedback as to who has shaped search as we know it whether the UK search engine marketing industry or the US search marketing industry - we’re not fussy in that respect.

So feel free to give us some feedback. Whether you think its the usual suspects ie Danny Sullivan, Ralph Wilson or even Matt Cutts, or perhaps some of the new kids on the block (so to speak) such as Rand Fishkin, Jon Myers, Vanessa Fox or Andrew Girdwood. Or perhaps one from left field, maybe Lisa Dietliefsen or Kevin Lee. The floor is yours…

2 comments June 1st, 2008