The Web Design Success Blog
Helping Your Business Succeed on the Web
The problem with unique top level domains (tld)
With all of the new top level domains (tld) out there many people are tempted to purchase more and more unique names. You can get .xyz, .link, .healthcare and .guru. Unfortunately, web users are so used to using .com that they assume that everything ends with .com. This can be a nightmare for businesses...
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SmarterMail Receiving Slowly
After wondering why SmarterMail was receiving so slowly after restarting the MailService, I came across this answer. The ASP.net performance counters were becoming corrupt. After chasing this little change for 3.5 hours, here is the simple fix (try at your own risk, your mileage may vary): cd \windows\system32 lodctr...
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Custom URL or Vanity URL for Facebook Pages
Facebook Custom Address URLHow to add a custom "vanity url" to your facebook Pages page. Here is how Facebook describes Page usernames: “Usernames allow public entities to easily promote your presence on Facebook with a short URL. This username can be used in your marketing communications, company website and business...
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Achieving better web usability and quicker navigation
Website UsabilityEliminating questions allows you to achieve better web usability and quicker navigation making your site much more effective. Today you can do almost anything in a minute or less, more specifically when it comes to the web, it is important to create web sites so that they can be quickly navigated....
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2011 Website Browser Statistics
Browser Stats 2011Firefox loses ground while Chrome and mobile gain percentage points. IE remains constant. Browser statistics for the beginning of 2011 show that IE has remained at a consistent 61% market share. Firefox fell the most in 2011 losing 5.86% over 2010. Chrome surges again with a 2.65% increase over 2010....
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Fixing a Raid 5 Degraded Array After a Failed Disk
Raid 5Failed hard drive on a Dell PowerEdge server placed Raid 5 on a PERC 4/di in a degraded state. Here are the steps to rebuild the Raid array on a Dell PowerEdge. We had a harddrive crash on one of our Dell PowerEdge servers this week. Fortunately, we had no downtime because it only took one drive out...
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PageRank is Dead. Long Live mozRank
PageRank replaced by mozRankPageRank is dead. Really. It's not coming back. Thankfully we have mozRank. PageRank is not Rankings I want to make sure that you don't think that PageRank is how well your page ranks for a given keyword set. PageRank was Google's original idea of how to give weight or a numerical value to...
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2010 Website Browser Statistics
Browser Stats 2010Browser statistics for 2010 show that IE loses 6% of its market share. Firefox stays constant with a slight increase at 24.87%. Chrome increases 3% and Safari increase 2.75%. Internet Explorer (IE) users have been shifting toward the newer versions of IE 8. We have seen a decrease of 8% in IE 6 users...
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Free SEO Report - Review
Free SEO ReportA quick review of Shoemoney's "Free SEO Report". I've been a big Shoemoney follower for a long time, but when I read about his latest adventure I was suprised because I had already used the service - Free SEO Report, without knowing that he was behind it. Here is a quick review: The report contains...
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Most Useful Seach Engine Optimization Information
Search Engine Optimization InformationFor those of you in the web site design business, what document, guideline, book, whatever, did you find most useful for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Here is some quick advice: Always follow the Google webmaster guidelines Make sure you use a unique and descriptive title tag Make sure you...
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nbsp Error in Ajax Calls (Mootools) in Google Chrome
Mootools & NBSP; Entity Error FixedHow to fix 'nbsp' not defined error in Google Chrome. I have fought with this problem for a long time and finally found a "correct" answer. If you have problems using MooTools in Chrome and get "Entity 'nbsp' not defined. Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error." I have a great answer...
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Don't Make These Mistakes in Your Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) MistakesToo many companies fail in these incorrect assumptions about SEO when dealing with search engine optimization to get first page results. Rand Fishkin mentioned these two ways companies often incorrectly approach SEO. The biggest mistakes I see around SEO is that they consider it two ways, both of which...
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Why Your Tried-and-True Older Content is Losing You Traffic
Removing Dates in Google SERPsAround March of this year we saw decreased Google traffic coming to tried-and-true content that had brought us solid traffic for years. Things continued to decrease and we decided to investigate the cause. It appears that Google's use of dates in the SERPs had a markedly negative impact on our clickthrough...
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Online E-commerce done correctly
E-commerceOnline e-commerce done correctly. I was very impressed with Utrecht Art's confirmation page (and a few other nice things about the way they do their online shopping experience. Provide promo code on their site. (and had it prepopulate the promo code once you get to the checkout page) Best sellers...
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Search Engine Usage for 2010
2010 Search Engine StatisticsSearch engine usage and statistics for July 2010. The Nielsen Company reported their findings for July 2010. Here are their top results. Search Engine Percentage Google 64.2% Yahoo 14.3% Bing 13.6% AOL 1.9% Google has dropped almost another full percentage point...
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Accept Credit Cards Online
FreeAuthNet - Free Authorize.Net AccountHow to accept credit cards online without a machine (by using a merchant gateway account from Authorize.net with free setup) and not using PayPal. First off you need to know that I get hundreds of calls a year trying to convince me to switch credit card processors (or switch merchant gateways)...
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Long Tail of Search Statistics
Long Tail of SearchUnique search strings accounted for more traffic than all search strings that more than 100 people searched for combined (including keyword sets that had thousands of searches). To help explain this topic in more detail we will use this sample data. Keyword Set Number of Times Keyword Set was...
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21 Things That Best Converting Websites Know That You Don't
Increase Conversion RatesTakeaways from Bryan Eisenberg's talk at SES London 2010. So what do the best converting websites have in common? Communicate unique value proposition – You have 7 seconds to persuade (or 8-10 seconds if you have really, really good content). Establish credibility on every landing page. Make...
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Four Step Formula to Be Successful at Multivariate Testing
Multivariate Testing - MVTMuiltvariate testing we help quickly increase conversions. Here are the four simple steps to implement multivariate testing. We recently wrote a from the ground up, multivariate testing package to use with all of our upcoming websites. We've always believed in testing, testing, testing, and the iterative...
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Do You Know These Tips to Quickly Improve Landing Page Conversion Rates
Landing Page ConversionsIncrease landing page conversions with these simple tips. Increasing conversions is a big topic lately. Here are some more great ideas from ioninteractive for increasing conversions on your landing pages for this year. Keep your Organic and PPC landing pages separate. Targeted traffic from PPC have...
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6 Ways Your Website Usability is Discouraging Conversions
Usability and ConversionsSix ways to increase usability and conversions. There are many ways that you can increase conversions. Here is a list of usability items to fix that will help increase conversions. Visitors can't find what they want. Provide an easy navigation as well as a search function for your site. Then make...
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Simple Steps to Increase Landing Page ROI
Landing Page ConversionsEasy and simple steps to increase landing page conversions and ROI. You've brought people to your site through great SEO or PPC, but now what. What can you do to help make sure that those people buy? Here are some simple ideas from EMC to increase landing page conversions. Include an image along...
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How to Build Effective Websites 101
Effective Websites 101Many small companies are making a wise choice and investing in professionally designed websites that raise the company's level of professionalism, exposure, and sales. I have had people come to my saddle shop and they were surprised to see that we are just a a small shop because the website made us...
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Case Study - One page checkout process vs multi-page
One Page E-Commerce CheckoutComparing the single (one page) checkout process to a multiple page process and conversion rates. There was an excellent study done on the Vancouver 2010 olympic online store to compare conversion rates of a one page, two page, and four page checkout proccess. The single page checkout process was the...
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How to Determine if Your Website is Successful
Successful Website MetricsMaking sure that you pick the correct metric to measure is extremely important to having a truly successful website. Recently on SEOmoz's whiteboard friday they discussed how to keep clients happy. Much of the conversation focused around knowing what determines success. A point that I thought was extremely...
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