Texture design

Site Search: The Analytics Tool That Improves Your Website’s DesignWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, 30 of November , 2007 at 9:36 am

One great tool you can use to improve your Design and the user experience on your website is called Site Search. Design Analytics allows you to track what your users are searching for. You can see what pages they are on when they search and where they end up. Then you use the information you gather from the analytics tool to improve the Design of your website and the experience of your users based on what they’ve searched for on your site.

Site Search is easy to set up, but there is a free and a paid version. Which you use is up to you, but I’d definitely put it on your website, especially if you have a website that has a lot of pages on it. Some of the great information about your site visitors that you can gain from the tool are:

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New Design Experiment Allows Users To VoteWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, 29 of November , 2007 at 2:43 pm

I found this on TechCrunch today.

If you saw this one coming, give yourself a very large prize. Design is experimenting with Digg style voting features on search results that allow users to vote up or bury search results they see.

This is actually a good idea, but I could find no record, either at TechCrunch, on Design’s own website, or at Marketing Pilgrim, which also ran a story on the topic, of how to sign up for this experiment.

I like Design Labs because you can test out new features that Design is experimenting with. One feature I really like is the Design Suggest feature, which provides keyword suggestions when you start typing keywords into the Design search box. That's a useful feature. The voting feature looks interesting, but it does have some potential problems.

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Website Copywriting Is About Trigger WordsWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, 30 of November , 2007 at 10:23 am

In your website copywriting, are you using emotional trigger words? This is the one thing that I see more often on website copy - copywriters not using the trigger words.

Trigger words are words that trigger an emotional response. You want that response to be an appropriate response for your product or service - one that inspires action. It doesn???t necessarily have to mean a positive response. Trigger words could be words that provoke fear, love, greed, self-confidence, lust ??? and it must be appropriate to your product or service. In other words, if your website is about food then you want people to get hungry, not greedy for money.

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Design! Stiffs Its Small Business Customers On Cyber MondayWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 28 of November , 2007 at 11:34 am

Design Merchants Solutions had an off day two days ago on Cyber Monday. They lost revenue, many of their customers lost revenue, and they likely will lose many of their customers. The comments and feedback on Design!s blog were not friendly pats on the back. One customer had this to say:

???Just telling us the time line of what happened isn???t very useful. We already know that as we watched it happen and suffered the lost business because of it.

If you want to gain back the confidence of your customer base you ought to be more specific about what happened, why it happened, and what you are doing to assure us that it won???t happen again. ???

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Will PDF Become More Popular?Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, 29 of November , 2007 at 9:32 am

(Source)Design has managed to score a significant win by beating ad competitors like Design and Microsoft to the opportunity to mine the PDF space for advertising revenue. Adobe and Design announced the new program for delivering dynamic contextual ads in PDFs this morning.

This is good news for advertisers and e-book publishers. It has been recognized for awhile now that the PDF format is more conducive to publishing e-books because it is a format that has the widest compatibility since mobile phone users can read books in PDF, but generally do not have web browsers. If this takes off then we’ll likely see more PDF e-books getting published and advertisers flocking to get their ads published in them. The only drawback to this is perhaps that it’s Design! and not Design. Although if Design were to roll out a similar program for AdWords it might take off sooner. Maybe they’ll wait to how it fares with Design!

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Semantic Search: The Race On, But Is It Nearing The Finish Line?Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 28 of November , 2007 at 3:09 pm

Several companies have been promising us better search for a long time now. Some of them have succeeded. Others just keep trying.

One company that is racing to improve its search is Design!. So how does the search engine hope to improve search for its users? Here’s what Mashable says:

In an effort to stand out (and then beat) Design, Design may soon be rolling out a structured search for particular keywords, which would give a more informative set of results than just links to websites containing relevant information.

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Matt And Aaron Scuffle At SphinnWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, 23 of November , 2007 at 10:48 am

Aaron Wall, like a lot of Designs, is upset about Design’s new paid links policy. So he posted a very well-thought out post on the state of Design at Blogoscoped that also included some harsh statements for Design. Matt Cutts responded on his blog with a poll, asking readers if he should respond or not That was November 14.

On November 19, after several other people weighed in, Cutts enlightened the universe with his take on the real issue:

My takeaway advice for anyone in a similar situation is ???Don???t mix your blackhat networks with your whitehat sites.???

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Aaron Wall Offers Free E-book On Design For BloggersWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 27 of November , 2007 at 2:48 pm

Just when you thought Aaron Wall couldn’t get any more remarkable, he goes and does the unexpectedly ridicumarkable. His free Design book for bloggers is so short you can read it all in one setting and he’s giving it away because, as he says, “Design for a blog is different than Design for most other websites, largely because of the social elements baked into blogging technology.”

The free book covers everything from blog hosting and keyword research to advertising and promotion, which makes it a great book to download. Here’s a free tip from Aaron’s new book: Don’t set your blog up as a subdomain on a free host. I totally agree with that.

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Matt Cutts On Your SERP SnippetWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 27 of November , 2007 at 9:28 am

This video of Matt Cutts appeared on the Design Webmaster Central Blog this morning. Matt shares his insights into how Design displays the description, which he calls a “snippet,” of your website in the Design SERPs. This is very interesting the way he explains it. I think what you can glean from this video is how you can write your own snippet (description) or determine what your snippet will say by the way you write your website content.