I often advise my clients who have e-commerce operations to buy from themselves, and then try to return their order — it’s a visceral way to find out how bad (or good) their own customer service is. As I write this, I’m on hold with Adobe Customer Service, waiting for a manager to get online. [...]

People seem to expect Internet content and services to be free. We happily use the Internet to pay for tangible goods, such as a DVD or flowers, but if the thing we want is a service or information, we’re unwilling to pay. So we walk to the store to buy the newspaper, but if we [...]

I get a lot of initial calls and emails from people asking “what’s the price tag?” Problem is, we’re not buying paper towels here — for an effective Web site, the answer is, “it depends.” Every Web site project I’ve ever worked on is unique, and as a result, the price for each is different. [...]

In a social networking world, where your presence on MySpace and Facebook is almost as important as your own Web site, any redesign project needs to think outside the box. Granted, offsite factors have always been part of the business marketing mix. In case you can’t afford a few Super Bowl ads, online advertising and [...]

In the past few months, I’ve been working with a few clients whose domain names have expired — that is, the period of time they registered the name for ran out. If your domain expires: Your Web site goes dark (or more likely, is replaced with a page full of ads). The HTML files might [...]

A while back, a friend of mine pointed out that his Web site (which is very basic) gets a fair amount of new business for his family-owned printing company. The secret: there’s a snapshot photo of him and his wife on the Home Page, and many new customers comment that they saw their photo on [...]

[This is a working draft document, which I'll be editing occasionally as time permits and as technologies change; check back for changes.] PayPal’s basic ecommerce system allows vendors to sell online with very little setup, and with a decent fee schedule. Which raises the question: why would anyone use a traditional ecommerce system? First, some [...]

One of the biggest problems I see with Web sites has to do with user orientation. A business owner designing his site already knows what his business is and how the site is laid out — so he neglects to provide the most basic of information: where am I, and what can I do here? [...]

I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be presenting my “Web 101 for Business” seminar six times in 2006. After presenting the first seminar last month and stepping in as a last-minute presenter for a program in Burbank, I think it’s safe to say the program’s a hit. If you’re a small business owner or thinking [...]

There’s a substantial disconnect when businesses outsource their Web projects. Here’s the problem: in general, the agency is oriented towards discrete projects (y’know, where there’s a start and a finish), while any business is ongoing and ever-shifting. Maybe for initial designs and site redesigns this works, but quality Web sites are more organic than that [...]