I was working through a keyword strategy the other day, using one of the available tools, and was struck by the number of searches done with the phrase free website.  It was very substantial, leading me to believe that there was (and is) considerable interest in obtaining one.

You have to admire that optimism, at least at some level.

There is an old saying that pre-dates me, “The free lunch was never free, someone paid for it”.  Any time you get something for free, the entity that actually paid for it would like something in return.  Sometimes that something is just your continuing attention.  One of the smartest online marketers ever, Seth Godin, built an entire successful strategy around the idea called Permission Marketing.

I’m out in the Community quite a bit flogging my services as a web developer, and I have to admit I get quite  a few inquiries along those lines.  I’m serious, I literally get asked, “how can I get a free web site”?  Usually I tell them, and here is the thing; it takes work, usually a lot of work.  Whether you go with WordPress or other blog software, use a Site Builder provided by an ISP (Like Website Tonight, offered by GoDaddy), or go with a shareware template,  you will put a lot of time into this site, and frankly, your expectations better be modest, it won’t look like Amazon.com when you are done.  So somebody paid for that free website, and that someone is you.  I once heard a very smart man (I think he wants to remain anonymous, don’t you Neil?) make this pronouncement at a panel discussion “The only thing you really have to sell is your time”.  Your free website wound up costing you quite a bit.

So what to do?  My advice, if you are just starting out, in many markets you can go with a home-built blog or a Site Builder, but be realistic about what you will get for the time you spend.  In short, throw something up behind your new domain name that is not horrible in appearance, and very accurate in content.   Don’t let anyone tell you that your site will get ignored by search engines, my mechanic built his own site with an ISP-supplied  Site Builder.  When you type his top keyword phrase into Google, he comes up number two, between two giants in the industry.

So keep your first site simple and your expectations modest.  When you finally outgrow your starter site and need more, there is a starving developer who would like a word with you….

Last week I went to a lecture/luncheon sponsored by the San Diego Chapter of the American Marketing Association.  The Doubletree put out a fine Cobb salad, and Jesse Nichols of Google Analytics put out a fine lecture.  At the end of the lecture I asked Jesse if Google had any plans to automate page tagging.  It was clearly a question he’d heard before (a lot) and he had a good solid answer; No.  He cited liability issues and the like, but the fact is it’s just not a place where Google wants to be involved.

What am I talking about?

If you have ever set up a Google Analytics account, you know about this one.  Setting up the account is fast and easy, and you log out with visions of fascinating reports soon to come.  A week later you find out nothing is happening.  That’s when you do some poking around in your Analytics account and discover that the pages need to be “tagged”.  The tag is easy enough to get, you push the right button in your Analytics account, and Google gives it to you.  Now you just need to copy it out and paste it in to your web site pages.

Paste…..in.  What?  How?

Google is helpful about this “before your closing head tag, which looks like this </head>”.  Super.  You are pretty sure that this exercise even if you had some way of doing it will result in the destruction of your entire site.

That’s how somebody like me winds up plodding through your web site, inserting the tag, deleting previous versions of the same tag (really common to find a couple of those) and cleaning up the code.  I get paid, can’t argue with that, but it’s right up there with pulling weeds in the excitement category.

There is another answer.  A San Diego company called Tealium now offers Tealium IQ tag management software.  From one console, you can manage your various analytics tags (you do get three different reports, don’t you?), affiliate tags, advertising tags, etc.  Tealium does not do pricing on their website, so you can bet its not all that cheap, but if your website has multiple tags, and you pay a Developer to manage them, you might want to sit down and do some ROI math.

I’d love it if Tealium would  offer a freeware version that just managed a tag or two.  Every Mom and Pop web site on the planet needs it  Just a thought.

If you have not heard of the Google Panda update (some call it Farmer) you may have seen its effect.  Google rolled out Panda early this year, and the impact on search results was nearly immediate.  Unlike many Google updates, Panda is really a filter, that is, it filters data that Googlebot has already indexed.

Panda went after low-quality web pages.  Anyone who does a significant number of searches has seen these, the search result looks perfect, but when opened it gives up little gifts like “how to repair a watch band is a really good idea”.  Sometimes the content is auto-generated, sometimes it is simply copied (scraped) from legitimate sites.  Either way, the Visitor is usually left wondering “why did I bother to click on that”? Generating low-quality high keyword content pages had become somewhat of an art form when Google decided to take action.

In a very short period many high-ranking sites dropped far back in Google search results for targeted phrases.   For the owners of these sites it was a disaster.  Even months later many are struggling to recover, and they will probably never recover their investment in thousands of pages of fluff.

My point is that there is an opportunity here for many.  For site owners who never understood why their competitors got higher rankings, even thought they “did everything right” until they finally gave up trying, it might be that the playing field has been leveled.  Which means it is time to give the site a fresh look, perhaps tweaking the messaging and re-writing old pages,  making very sure that none of those pages got tagged as low-value content and improving the quality if they did.  It may work, it may not, in my mind it is worth the effort, and now is the time.

So, you’ve noticed lately that all of your favorite websites are now all scrunched up in the middle of your screen.  What happened?  I’m guessing you just got a new monitor, right?  And the only thing you could buy was one of those really wide ones?  Could be your issue.

Under intense pressure from the Movie Industry, just about all of the monitor manufacturers have begun manufacturing screens with a 16:9 aspect ratio to accomodate HD movies.  “Aspect Ratio” in this case refers to the width of the screen divided bythe height, usually expressed as an unresolved fraction.  So, most of our monitors used to have a ratio of 4:3, almost square.  At 16:9 they are much wider than they are tall.

But that’s not really our issue right now.  Our main concern is monitor resolution, i.e. how many pixels wide and how many pixels across the screen is.  Many of us went from an average width of about 1024 pixels width to around 1920 pixels width.

How does that affect a website? Most modern websites are designed to a fixed width, the most popular being a little under 1000 pixels across (let’s address so-called “liquid sites” at another date).  A website designed to this standard will take up 1000 pixels across, no matter what monitor it is on.  So, when you go from displaying the site on a monitor with horizontal resolution of 1024 to a monitor that offers 1920, the website will take up less of the total screen, and look smaller.

What to do?  Here are a couple of ideas:

• Get used to using the equipment, after awhile you will remember that you can have your browser open on just a corner of the screen, your email on another, a document on another.  You could learn to love it.
• Many browsers now come with a zoom capability, which is so much more useful that the traditional utility that just changed the font size and totally messed up the layout.  Look around for it and give it a try.  You might be ok with it, but understand that low-quality images might look a bit grainy when zoomed.
• Change the resolution of your monitor.  This will make everything larger.  Not really recommended, but you could do it.  See your manual (you kept that, right?)

It will be awhile before all of the old monitors go away, and designers/developers have a habit of designing to the lowest common denominator, so we are probably stuck with 1,ooo pixel resolution web sites for a little while at least.

In my profession, you listen to a lot of terrible stories about web development projects gone wrong.  My usual observation after another sad tale is “Well, I’m sure you explained it, and I’m sure the Developers thought they heard it, but somewhere in the middle there it didn’t happen”  This I know is obscure at best, so today I thought I would try to explain myself, using the story of Noah’s Ark as a vehicle.

To avoid a heavy religious reference, let’s refer to Noah as “Noah” and the other party as “Client”.  Right away this project has problems no one appreciates, as the Client jumps right in to the design phase, telling Noah how big the ark would be, what it would look like, and who/what would be going on board.  Noah really wants the contract, and goes right in to build without finishing the design. Skipping fact-finding and performance specification left several openings for mis-understanding, such as:

• Client didn’t have any idea if Noah actually knew what an Ark was in the first place.  Noah was cooperative because he wanted the work, not because he knew what was going on.
• Since Client assumed that Noah knew what an Ark was, Client also assumed that Noah knew that the ark had to FLOAT
• Client never took the opportunity to tell Noah that the schedule for the delivery was ship in place, with an epic flood on the Calendar.  Had Noah known this, he MIGHT have asked the right questions.

We can’t lay this all on Client.  Noah was afraid of losing the work by looking dumb in front of a potential Client, so he went along hoping he would figure out what an ark was during the project.  He never asked any questions, never completed the design, just went right to build.

Thus we come to the epic cartoon, with the rain starting to fall, Noah outside the ark looking up at the sky, and a voice coming down “Whattaya MEAN you need to write a change order?  How could you NOT KNOW it was supposed to FLOAT”?

Just because they say they understand doesn’t mean they do.  Always explain your need in as much detail as you can manage IN WRITING.  Get a response in writing.  Then talk about it.  A lot.  Until the real understanding happens.  Then you are ready to design.  Good Luck

I saw a great Seminar last week, sponsored by San Diego Ad Club.  Developer Jake Fields held forth on building web applications.  Jake did a great job of defining native apps, written in compiled languages such as Objective C or C++ and running directly on the mobile device’s operating system, web apps, basically web pages targeted to mobile devices, and hybrids, a combination of both.  He also talked about getting started and marketing the resulting products.  It was a well-rounded presentation.  There was one question I wish he had not answered, and it was mine.  In response to the ever popular “how much and how long for this?”, Jake told the crowd that they were looking at 3 months and $10,000.  In fairness, he went on to say that apps like the one Nike recently introduced probably went for over $1,000,000, but I know from my experience that what they heard was “I can get an app like Nike’s for $10,000 in under 90 days”!  Ouch.  Ouch, ouch ouch.  Nike probably spent twice that much time just figuring out what they wanted for basic performance to satisfy a set of goals they already had established.  Jake was right to answer the way he did, NOBODY wants to hear “Oh, it depends” and I’m certain that he has delivered at that price and in that time frame.  But I’m guessing that the Client already had a clean set of requirements and realistic expectations when the clock started.

If you have been involved with a website development in the last five years, you have probably heard of CSS, and you probably know that it has something to do with how the web site appears in your browser.  That’s true, and much more.  CSS allows us to manipulate where text appears on the page, as well as how it looks.  We can create complex navigation schemes with drop-down menus entirely in CSS (with just a bit o’ Javascript to take care of some browsers). In fact, we can remove the presentation entirely from the content, so that all you see on an HTML web page is, well, HTML (and Javascript if the page has any).  Why do we want to do this?  A really good reason is so we can have different style sheets for different user-agents (browsers, handhelds, printers etc.).  The HTML can be presented differently depending on the device.  We can even use CSS to hide elements from a device when the device can’t display them.

To really understand how this works, I can’t think of a better place to go than the CSS Zen Garden.  This website, launched quite  a few years ago now by leading CSS and HTML gurus, is an ongoing project for showcasing design using CSS.  Basically, the HTML for every project is the same. The submitting artist can only supply CSS and supporting background images.  Think it’s impossible to design like this?  Check it out:

http://www.csszengarden.com/

Be sure to click the links in the sidebar to see some of the recent designs.  You’ll see the text is the same for each design (you sometimes have to really look to find a particular piece of text).

Enjoy!