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 offline […]

When people visit your site, they need to know where am I, what can I do here, and what’s in it for me? These tips can help.
1. Branding
Your logo and tagline should be easily found on your site. Just from looking at the logo and tagline, I should have a clue what your business is. […]

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 […]

One of the crucial things I cover in my Web 101 for Business seminars is an overview of the development process for building a Web site from scratch. (Those of you used to project management life cycles will recognize the basic Plan > Develop > Test > Implement > Evaluate project cycle.) In the seminar, […]

Someone asked me the other day if I was a “Webmaster.” Ah, the flood of memories that invoked.
Way back when I started working on the “Information Superhighway” (circa 1994, or as archaeologists might one day refer to it, “the Netscape Era”), the term Webmaster was in common use. At first it referred to that frustrated […]

If you haven’t already done so, you might read Part One of this topic.
As we’ve seen, the pyramid site model might be a good place to start, but it breaks down pretty fast. Some other circumstances in which the traditional pyramid doesn’t work:

Syndicated content: advanced Web content tools (such as this blog) can display content […]

Traditional Web site organization is like a pyramid: the Home Page is the top point of entry, and the Home Page links to the next level down (main category navigation), and each main category page links to the next level down, and so on depending on how deep the site is. And the granularity of […]

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 about […]

I’ve been on a lot of Flash-only sites lately, and I continue to be annoyed at the experience. After typing the URL, I get “Please Wait…” or the even-less-polite “Loading content.” Now, I haven’t even seen a logo or anything yet, so I have no idea if the wait will be worth my while — […]

It’s time to start thinking clearly about when, how, and whether to put dates on your Web pages. You know, the snippets (usually at the bottom of a page) like “Page last updated: June 2, 2005 17:51:06 EST“?
On its own, this statement is pretty useless. Remember, Web pages tend to stay out there forever. […]