The last post looked at one of my favorite bugbears, "Under Construction" pages.  This week, we look at senseless navigation.

Senseless navigation

What do I mean by senseless navigation?  Well, it comes mainly in 2 categories in my opinion.

1. Illogical menu selections
2. Pages too deep

Illogical menu selections

I have seen some very confusing sites in my surfing.  Under "Illogical menu selections" I lump non-standard approaches to content presentation.  Where do most people expect to find phone numbers, email address, and physical addresses?  Either in the footer or on a page accessed by choosing "Contact" or "Contact us".  Now some may argue that putting it under "About" or "About us" makes perfect sense and I sympathise with them.  To a point.  Yes, contact information IS "about the company", but that is not where it has been displayed for years.  And why make visitors scroll past all your self-serving back-slapping to get to your contact info anyway?   They want contact info to contact you!  Why make them play 20 guesses looking for it?

Other silly menus have been products listed under a tab called "Services" when the company provides both products and services.  Yes, it seems logical now that it's

You’re rushing to catch at flight at the airport.  You’re already late seeing as the cat threw up on your spiffy Armani suit as you prepared to walk out the door.  Late and stressing you glance at your watch; yes, you can make it!  You turn onto the last street before the airport… and grind to a halt.  There, standing in the middle of the road is a road worker with a Stop/Go sign in is hand – the road, YOUR road, is under construction!  Frustrating huh?

So are web pages that boldly proclaim “Under construction”.  What were the designers thinking?  There’s an SEO saying, “Content is king”.  More correctly, “GREAT content is king”.  Garbage content is a pauper and “Under construction” is the lowest of paupers.

Those who have read my blogs will see I’ve ranted about this topic before.  So why regurgitate it again?  I had the misfortune of visiting a site last week, that had not 1, not 2, not even 3 or 4 “Under construction” pages, but FIVE!  Why would I ever want to “check back soon…” as the content urged me?  On the rare occasions I have returned to a site with these pages I,

"So, how much traffic did you get from <insert source here>?"  "Ummm, not sure..."  

Well, how much traffic did you get to your site?"  "Ummm, not sure..."

"OK, how about sales?  Did your website produce any sales?" (You guessed it!)  "Ummm, not sure..."

Sound familiar?  Heard those questions before?  The crux of it is what you did based on those questions.  Did you just soldier on, put your head in the sand like an ostrich, or actually take a long hard look at your whole website and how you track campaigns?

Why sites don't perform

1. No one knows they're there!  Yes. I know that sounds simplistic, but, if you're on page 3 or worse you are, to all intents and purposes, invisible.

2. Bad navigation on site.  I see it all the time, even on professionally designed sites.  You can't find anything; important stuff hidden behind 2-3 mouse clicks.

3. Lots of flash.  Yep, Google supposedly can read content in flash, or is close to.  But do you want to alienate 10's of millions of Apple mobile users?

4. Poorly optimized graphics.  You can get browsers to re-size that 4Mb 3000px x 1800px image if you're too lazy

Obviously, the hopeful among us (and probably a bunch of the pessimists too!!) will answer, "YES!!".  One thing for sure, we'd all like it to be... in fact we'd all have preferred 2011 or 2010 to have been that year.

So are there really any economic indicators that are showing the economy is recovering?  There was a rise in IT salaries this year, though not huge, however the whole IT sector is pretty healthy, despite the fact that so many companies are abandoning the USA and sending jobs to India, Asia and Latin America.  Whilst this cheap labor seems a boon to the bottom line, consumers are likely to vote with their feet when an American alternative appears.  This is why we don't outsource.

Overall, most hiring managers appear to have a similar mindset to last year.  Approximately 1/4 (23%) of employers plan new hires for 2010, down 1% from 2011.  However,Matt Ferguson, CEO of CareerBuilder, says that, historically, their surveys have shown that employers are more conservative in their predictions than actual hiring, so he expects 2012 to outperform hiring in 2011.

Gallup reports that Americans' economic confidence is at a seven-month high. The National Federation of Independent

Just over a year ago, we got our hands on 2 great pieces of software - Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced Link Manager.  At that time we wrote quite a substantial review on what we found as initial reactions to this software. 

We have now been using AWR for just over a year and we are still as happy with the help it gives us as we were when we first reviewed this wonderful piece of SEO software.  AWR automates the incredibly important, but time consuming task of checking the rankings of the website we administer.  If we had to break it down to some bullet point of "Why we love AWR", it would go like this.

1. Time management.

AWR frees up valuable time to be able to move onto cash producing tasks such as marketing, client meetings and actual design work.  A huge part of any SEO program is actually knowing where a website sits or ranks among its competitors.  My Mom had a great saying on her Skype for years... "How do you know what you don't know, if you don't know what you don't know?"  And that's my point.  If you don't know where

I've just flown back in from New Zealand yesterday, after a successful pleasure and business trip there.  Because the Internet knows no borders, it's very simple for me to work for clients in any country, and that was part of the reason for the trip to NZ - to visit existing, and cultivate new, clients.  To this end, I had my trusty WD passport HD with me, so I could still access important documents.  There ends the good news!

The passwords document I had lovingly created many months ago had not been updated, due to my own failure to do so.  So I couldn't access the backends of many of my clients sites, nor get to them via FTP either!  Fortunately I didn't really need to, so there was no real drama, but there could have been.

So my "life saving tip for computer users" is to back up, back up, back up!  I run 4 copies of all my important documents.  I have them stored in 2 separate places on my computer's HD, on a network HD (these are cheap and a great way to get a little "remote" with your back ups), and a 4th copy on a

Google first launched its Apps program back in 2007 as an alternative for businesses to the traditional Office suite of tools.  Whilst most businesses will be more than catered for with the free version, there is a Premier version that gives tech support and more email storage for a paltry $50 per year per user.  Plus, in April this year, Google added the ability for businesses to pay just $5 per app per user per month.

Who's using Google Apps?

According to Google, 3 million plus businesses and 30 million plus private persons are signed up for it.  That's a powerful user base to allow Google to go even further, because you know many of those will be paying customers = more revenue!  Their impact on small and medium-sized businesses has caused Microsoft to release its Office 365 recently in the hope it will offset the inroads GA has been making on MS's core customer base.

The 5 reasons GA is transforming business

1. Cost effective cloud storage.  Businesses can get the tools they need when they need them without investing in large amounts of space or applications.  These apps don't need any software or hardware, and require only

One of the most common questions I'm asked is, "Is meta data still useful?"  To which my answer is an ambiguous, "No!"  Let me qualify that a bit...

For SEO (search engine optimization) purposes, yes, they truly are dead.  At least from Google's point of view.  And, I would say, the other 2 biggies in search - Yahoo and Bing - would be right behind Google (albeit a long way behind!).  Have a look at the video below from the head of Google's Webspam team, Matt Cutts (you can also look at his blog here).  He is VERY definite about Google not caring less about how many hours you've spent crafting beautiful meta tags.

That said, if you picked it up from the video, the description meta tag is still worth using, if only to entice potential visitors to your site.  It's the one we spend the most time on to get right.  As Matt said, this is the one that, if it seems to state really well what the page is about, that Google will display as the snippet in an organic search result.  This can be very important to give the potential visitor a taste of what

Maybe you, like me, remember the "good old days" of marketing on the Internet.  The late 80's and early 90's were very much the wild, wild west of having an online presence.  Clunky websites with little pizzazz, zero visitor interactivity, and the same information you'd find on the company's brochures.  In short, their website was just a brochure - and usually done with way less class than the original!

In a report from earlier this year, Forrester Research Inc from Cambridge, MA, USA, identified 5 critical trends for 2011 and forward in e-Commerce.

1. The growth of multi-channel monster.

An increasing number of retailers are now multi-channelling their marketing efforts and seeing more of their sales through their web divisions than previously. This tendency for the web channel to outstrip the physical retail store has been going on for years.  But much of this growth is coming at really critical times, like Christmas. In another study, Forrester conducted in December 2010, 49% of online shoppers agreed with the statement: "I shopped at stores less because I bought online instead" when thinking of thier Thanksgiving experiences (Source: Forrester and Bizrate Insights Holiday Flash Survey.).
And there is nothing to show that

I am often met with fear and trepidation when I ask clients to give me some content for their website.  "I can't write!" I hear very commonly.  The good news is you don't have to - we can do it for you!  So, what, we're experts on every subject?  Hardly!  But we do know some good questions to ask, and this allows us to write great articles about any subject that you give us the information on.  Here's a brief idea on the sort of things we can ask to jog you into giving us facts we can then weave into content.

• When did you start your business and why?
• What's your USP (Unique Selling Point)?
• What are your <insert number> major products/services?
• Who are your staff?  Tell us about their background (better still have them write it).
• What concerns do customers in your industry have?  How does <insert company name> help them overcome those worries?

When writing articles, be they ordinary website articles or blogs, think of the potential reader, and then think WIIFM - what's in it for me?  Let's face it, we all WANT!  And, generally, we want new, improved, more depth, etc.  We don't want yesterday's