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Original Post  - Nov 15, 2007

You have your website optimized for usability, customer-centric design and search engines. What else can you do to promote your website and get more traffic? Advertise. There are a lot of options now. What makes sense for your business?

Cheap Methods of Promotion

• One of the best ways to promote your website is just to include the link to your website in any communications you send out: emails, enewsletters, quotes, RFPs, brochures, etc.

Original Post  - Feb 28, 2008

B2B enewsletters are a great way to promote your company and website, by periodically sending valuable information to your customers and potential customers. Valuable information will help you provide good customer support and keep your products and brand top-of-mind. There are two important parts to measuring the effectiveness of your B2B enewsletters: who your audience is, and what they’re reading and looking at within your enewsletter.

Original Post  - Mar 31, 2008

One of the enduring myths involving CDNs is that paid service providers are for suckers. Free options in online media distribution markets are making compelling, though in most respects short sighted arguments for using their services. Many free providers advanced their list of features to attract more of the business market away from paid service. YouTube, for example, is releasing in June an additional

Original Post  - Mar 04, 2008

eNewsletters can be a great way to drive traffic to your website and keep your brand in your customers’ minds. Once you have an enewsletter vendor and an audience of people who have given you permission to send them information, you need to put together content for your enewsletter. In order to be most effective, you’ll need to send out an enewsletter at least monthly, preferably more often. What types of content are valuable to your customers (and potential customers)?

Original Post  - Jan 08, 2008

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) firms will tell you that you need to have keyword-optimized pages on your website in order to appear in Google’s search results for those keywords. Customer-centric design requires that your website be designed with your customer foremost in-mind. Can these co-exist? Can you have the best of both worlds?

Yes and no. Search engines put a good deal of weight on how often content is updated on the site and for each of the keywords in question. Keeping keyword-optimized pages updated can be (and usually is) a full-time job. Have you ever been on a keywords-optimized site as a customer who is trying to find something? Often it is difficult to wade through all the content written only for the search engines.

Original Post  - Dec 13, 2007

It’s now been 2.5 months since the redesign of our flagship publication website. In B2B Website Usability - Does It Work? I reported:

The average weekly visits have increased 34%, average weekly page views have increased 23% and average weekly visitors have increased 36%.

Original Post  - Nov 08, 2007

Too often I come across websites or clients who want to get as much as they possibly can into the smallest possible space. They think that makes their site look trendy and up-to-date.

The problem is that the human mind processes text in a certain way - it actually uses the shapes of words and the contrast between white space and “ink” to figure out what’s going on. When you bring up a webpage, you actually scan it starting at the top left to right and then move down and then left to right again - very similar to how we read words on a sheet of paper.

Original Post  - Nov 06, 2007

Since I covered an example of a bad B2C website last week, let’s take a look at a couple of good B2C websites and what makes them good.

• L.L.Bean - This site has been one of my favorite consumer websites for several years. Why? Because I can always find what I’m looking for. If I need help there are multiple different ways to contact the company: email, phone, online chat which are clear from every single page. I can find products by their catalog number, by searching, by browsing (in multiple categories). Browsing allows the ability to narrow your choices by several different types of information (dependent on what you’re looking at) - for example, on

Original Post  - April 10, 2008

Similar to Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia allows you to save and share bookmarks with friends and colleagues. However, Ma.gnolia takes the social aspect to a new level and has a very easy-to-use intuitive design.

Ma.gnolia is truly a social place to trade bookmarks. You can find, join and start groups with similar interests, which share people, tags, and links. Tagging is an integral part to any social bookmarking site and ma.gnolia integrates tags throughout their website, presented in tag clouds so you can easily see what the group feels is important. Almost every page has a featured linker to provide you with both a new person to link up to and new content to look at. Ma.gnolia makes it very easy to find new people and to see what the community finds interesting.

Original Post  - April 7, 2008

I will be wrapping up the CDN segment today with a look at LimeLight Networks. Limelight’s technology is similar to other CDN’s available on the market. A bit too similar, as they just lost a big

Original Post  - April 1, 2008

In previous posts here and here I have discussed Content Delivery Networks in general. Today, I want to dig a bit deeper.

CacheFly is a price-point based Content Deliver Network provider that has positioned itself as the CDN of first consideration for small businesses and first time adopters. Their business strategy seems to reflect this on their website by openly promoting prices, something few other CDNs do. They seem to have aggressively positioned their services into the larger pool of start-ups, cost conscious companies, and focused industries who need fewer services. This could make them a good partner to consider for a B2B company looking to start out with a CDN.  I have a different opinion, which you can read under ‘Personal Take’.