What is Web 2.0?
The term ‘Web 2.0′ was coined in 2004 by O’Reilly media to describe second-generation internet services that let people collaborate and share information in new ways, e.g. social networking sites such as MySpace, wikis (collective, open, anyone-can-edit knowledgebases), communication tools (this blog!), and folksonomies.
To be honest, web 2.0 is just a buzzword which has been over-hyped and ill-defined. However, it does point to something seismic. The internet is driving an unprecedented rate of cultural change. Take MySpace for instance. It currently has 75 million users, 240,000 new users per day, and 30 billion page views a month. So within 3 years MySpace can now claim to cover 1.2% of the world’s population. It’s kind of a UK size of country.
The reason I’m writing this blog is because Web 2.0 points to the fact that business is changing. We all know that business is about relationships (read the ultimate book on leveraging your personal network: Never Eat Alone). But up until now conventional marketing, even web marketing seems to have ignored the need to engage in a two-way relationship. In fairness, that has always been a limit of old media; it’s not much fun talking to a wall poster.
Until now websites have borrowed heavily from old-school marketers. They are like lost sheep bleating in a field, hoping someone is listening. The big hitters of this dot-com generation are not one-to-many old economy sites, they are many-to-many community sites (eBay is in effect a community site at heart).Where does this leave conventional businesses that are not engaged in meaningful dialogue with their customers and prospects? Dead or dying.
Long live the domain!
Or why you should register your domain for 10 years …
Sadly this isn’t a ploy for Webreality to make loads of cash from domain registrations … Talking with my friend Peter La Brow recently Peter mentioned the rumour that Google was weighting sites with longer domain registrations.
Google is in a constant battle against site spammers. Site spammers create pseudo-content sites in a bid to gain revenue from Adword Arbitrage (more on this later). But your site is less likely to be some flighty piece of spam if the domain has been registered for ten years.
The trouble with Google is that they’re pretty protective about how they weight sites, but a recent spate of patent applications has given us some clues. It appears that Google is looking at more than just the length of the registration. Google is scanning DNS records to further determine the legitmacy of a site, including:
- Who registered the domain
- Admin & technical addresses and contacts
- Address of name servers
- Stability of data (and host company) vs. high number of changes
So it pays to get a good reliable hosting company, and stick with them. It also pays to make sure you’re hosting company is not hosting lots of undesirable sites, that could negatively impact on your Google rankings.
What is AJAX?
Ajax is a collection of web technologies (Javascript, XML, XHTML and CSS) used to create a more interactive and real-time experience from websites. As web developers, we’re aiming to create web sites that function and respond in the same way as the conventional applications you use on your PC. A good example of this is Microsoft’s Outlook Web Access which is virtually identical to the standalone application. (Incidentally, if you have Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 you have everything you need to run OWA and Outlook Mobile Access - talk to my friend Tony Moffa at iConsult; he’ll sort it!).
In the old days, nothing happened until you hit the submit button, but with AJAX the server and browser can be communicating asynchronously to deliver a more immediate experience. At Kayak for example, when you begin to enter the airport name, possible suggestions immediately appear.
Writing about AJAX gives me the opportunity to remind Webreality clients that reWrite 2.0 is approaching release candidate 1. We hope to concluded the first implementation within the next week. The administration interface for reWrite 2.0 makes extensive use of AJAX technology, so that it will now be possible to see dynamic views of your entire site, and to drag-and-drop content in the same way you use Windows file explorer. More to follow!
Google Webmaster Tools
This month Google have launched some seriously useful Webmaster tools.
To get your site added, you’ll need to upload some html, or post a unique code in your template. If you’re a Webreality customer, we can help you do this.
Once you’ve done this, you’ll have immediate access to some great Google stats, including:
- when Google last crawled your site
- what errors the Googlebot encountered when crawling your site
- the stats page will also show query stats, crawl stats, page analysis, and index stats
The index stats page gives a shortcut to tools I’ve mentioned previously, including link: yourdomain.com and site:yourdomain.com.
Finally, there’s an easier way to upload Google sitemaps. Sitemaps give Google an exact inventory of your site’s content, and allow the Googlebot to navigate to all of the pages. In theory, if your site is semantically correct, and well structured, you shouldn’t need sitemaps. If you’re struggling though, I’d always throw in a sitemap for good measure.
You can auto-generate a sitemap at xml-sitemaps.com for free, and then upload away!
StumbleUpon
My thanks to Rod Bryans for introducing me to StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon installs on your browser toolbar (Explorer or Firefox). You set your account up with your range of interests, and then hit Stumble! to be randomly directed to a site you might be interested in. As you browse, you indicate thumbs-up or -down on each site, so in theory you get more and more sites served that match your interests.
I’ve got a feeling that applications like StumbleUpon, Digg, and Del.icio.us will increasingly filter web content for us, so the need to write interesting useful content becomes even more significant.
Webreality’s new site
We’ve finally relaunched the Webreality corporate site. It’s the third internal version we’ve prepared, but we’re finally there.
There isn’t a harder challenge for web designers. It’s the cobbler’s shoes syndrome. We’re always working flat-out on client sites, so don’t have the time to do our own. But we’re really pleased with this latest incarnation. We’ve stripped back the messaging to our core services, and have rolled out our new …grow visual language. We’re grateful to Chris Lee for his help in developing this language.
As always, client (or potential client!) feedback on this site would be a huge help.
Writing smart adwords
I’ve seen lots of adwords campaigns which have burnt up thousands of pounds, delivered lots of traffic, but precious few conversions. The writers of these campaigns have failed to realise that you have two contradictory aims with adwords:
1. To attract some people (those who will become customers)
2. To discourage some people (those who just browse but not buy)
Too many campaigns are vague and imprecise in content (another problem is poor keyword selection, see previous post).
Forget trying to cram in your entire marketing message into 95 characters. Instead go for really crisp, information-driven (e.g. price/date) offers. If you’re advertising a holiday, give us the destination, price, and date, and then you’ve got a fair chance that clickthroughs will be from people ready to buy.
First Webreality Blogger!
Congratulations to David Warr for being the first Webreality customer to leap into the blogosphere.
David runs a fantastic tea & coffee merchant in Jersey, and specialises in sourcing coffee from named estates using sustainable sources. His knowledge of tea and coffee and passion for justice will make his blog a must read. Enjoy!
Web-based project management
Blogging is an ideal tool for interactive communication, particularly in a team or community environment.
37 Signals is a web software developer who have developed this concept to its logical conclusion, and have produced a web-based project managment tool called Basecamp.
We’ve been trialling this in-house at Webreality, and we’ve never seen such an enthusiastic take-up from the team. Within 2 days, it’s transformed our standard working procedures, and is doing a great job of tracking all those lost hours.
Basecamp allows us to open projects to customers, so you’ll soon be able to see exactly how we’re spending our time, and also have one online site which hosts all the key documents for the project. Watch this space!
How to make money from Adwords
Adwords are those little sponsored links that appear on the right-side of your search results in Google. At 95 characters they are the haiku of the advertising world, but the beauty of them is that you don’t pay unless you clickthrough (hence pay per clickthrough =PPC).
The amount you pay for each clickthrough (cost per clickthrough = CPC), depends on how much your fellow advertisers are prepared to bid for a particular keyword. If you’re a New York Lawyer, and your bidding for “New York Lawyer” you’re likely to pay around $10 for each clickthrough. Ideally, you want to find a keyword that your competitors haven’t spotted yet.
One of the ways you can identify those terms, is by using Overture’s keyword selector tool (Overture is Yahoo’s Search Marketing arm). Simply enter your target keyword, and Overture will list related combinations, and give an indication of likely traffic. Incidentally, this is an ideal tool for developing content for your site, where you can identify possible Google-wins, and design content accordingly.
After writing the ad, and working out your keywords, you should then ensure you’ve got a mechanism for tracking conversions. Without conversion tracking it’s impossible to calculate the effectiveness of your campaign. Speak to your developer about embedding Google code (or 3rd party tracking software, e.g. Interspire’s Trackpoint).
Your goal is to produce a campaign where your cost per conversion is lower than your net margin. To achieve this you’ll need to do some trial and error working, testing the copy of your ad, your keyword selection, your ranking, and of course the effectiveness of the landing page (the site where the ad points to).