b2b in All of B2B Knowledge Base & Discussion Board

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  - 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’.

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  - April 4, 2008

What? Del.icio.us? What kind of url/company name is that? Well, it’s both a company name and a url, and Del.icio.us is one of the more popular social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking is sharing of website links publicly or through your network. Del.icio.us and many other services also allow you to tag the link with keywords and a short description or comment. You can decide per link whether it is shared with others and every keyword has a RSS feed tied to it so people can subscribe to your link feed (and to your del.icio.us profile page). Del.icio.us is valuable as a content provider, link network, research tool, and seo tool.

Original Post - April 2, 2008

Pownce, similar to Twitter, allows you to send short messages to your friends or colleagues or to your Pownce profile page. Pownce has additional functionality to send files, links and events. You can also sub-divide your colleage or friends list into different groups to send different things to different groups. However, unlike Twitter, Pownce does not (as of yet) have functionality to update from your phone by text messaging. They do have a bare-bones mobile site which is ok. Pownce also does not integrate into your website or blog to show your “pownces”.

Original Post  - March 27, 2008

Since I’ve seen it covered in the news quite a bit lately, and many other vendors integrate with it, I wanted to do an overview of Twitter, which is a micro-blogging tool. According to Wikipedia, micro-blogging is:

Original Post  - March 25, 2008

Do you need a quick and dirty social network right now? CrowdVine offers a free social network with basic features that takes just a couple of minutes to create. CrowdVine’s networks are centered on allowing network members to connect and communicate. Everything on the network exists to facilitate this communication - profiles, comments, blog posts, and profile questions, all of which are featured on the homepage.

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  - Oct 30, 2007

You’ve seen those flashy (pun intended) sites covered in animation and sound. Sure they seem slick and sophisticated, but do those really work in the B2B environment? Let’s take a look at some of the issues:

• According to Adobe (the maker of Flash), 99% of Internet viewers have Flash installed.
• Flash content is not accessible by search engine crawlers, making it invisible to search engines (doesn’t help SEO).

Original Post  - Oct 16, 2007

You may be wondering if all these tips for redesigning your website to be customer-centric work.

A month ago we redesigned the flagship website (a B2B publication) at the publishing company where I work. The redesign focused on increasing the amount of content that is updated more frequently, offering more content (including blogs and video), and making it easier for readers to find what they’re looking for (by following good usability practices).