Many companies develop expensive advertising and marketing programs designed to drive traffic to their Website. But too often they loose their focus. They forget a simple rule: the Website must be content-focused.
Eight tips to improve your Site:
Clearly articulate your goals and understand user demographics
Establish a site personality
Create content for each demographic personas (don't write for you!)
Post photos, diagrams, video, podcast, e-books and all kind of content that tells your story
Push content at least via email and RSS
Offer multiple ways for visitors to express interest
ChatRoulette.com is a new website that brings you face-to-face, via webcam, with an endless stream of random strangers all over the world. With each click of the mouse visitor is transported into a stranger’s life.
The site has only three months, but its population is exploding: 300 users in December; 10,000 in February; over 50,000 today. Big media are covering it up this phenomenon, and even comedian John Stewart made this week a clip about it (above).
Site's founder is unknown; web searches lead back to a Netherlands-based anonimity service. The site is hosted by servers in German and can operate without too much advertising. When writing this post it had a dating service linked.
Some say ChatRoulette.com is fun for dating and very addictive; others see there just a pornographic gate. The NYT has written about it.
The reality is that it's the Internet unfiltered, and nudity and exhibtionists are hard to avoid.
In my view, it is a very dangerous place for children, since perverts can behave anonymously. Remember the old problems of MySpace? ChatRoulette.com, as it is now, without any access restriction and no organization taking responsability for it, is a serious threat for kids under 18.
I have noticed that many graphic designers pride themselves on their ability to "think outside the box". They like to keep themselves entertained by doing something new and interesting on every project.
To be graphically creative is great, but when designing landing pages and web platforms the main goal is to be effective and clear. In other words, the key is to increase the conversion rates and have a fully call-to-action page.
Therefore graphic artists need to follow a minimalist and Zen-style visual aesthetic that focuses on conversion.
The more common visual transgressions found on landing pages are the use of dark, wild or fully-saturated bright color backgrounds, as well as text and headlines with very large fonts in high-contrast colors (and even emphasized by the use of edging effects, drop shadows, color transitions and fades.)
Once Google has acquired (for $133 million) video encoding company ON2 Technologies and its V8 video codec, the internet community speculates what the search engine might do.
Will it open source and push for its mainstream adoption by making it the default codec for YouTube videos?
That's many people desire, including the team of Amigot Interactive. We don't like the to live under Adobe's Flash' dominance.
Last week the folks of The Free Software Foundation (FSF) published an open letter to Google demanding to kill Adobe's Flash y service to the free world.
"Just think what you can achieve by releasing the VP8 codec under an irrevocable royalty-free license and pushing it out to users on YouTube? You can end the web's dependence on patent-encumbered video formats and proprietary software (Flash)."
"You have the leverage to make such free formats a global standard."
"Patented video codecs have already done untold harm to the web and its users, and this will continue until we stop it." (...) "Until we move to free formats, the threat of patent lawsuits and licensing fees hangs over every software developer, video creator, hardware maker, web site and corporation --including you."
"Now it's your turn. We'll know if you do otherwise that your interest is not user freedom on the web, but Google's dominance."
Trying to make web apps and developments compatible for all the browsers (Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera...) is a nightmare. But worse comes when dealing with the Microsoft family of Explorers (IE6, 7 and 8), many times incompatible among themselves.
Well, Google has said now "enough is enough" and has decided to kill IE6 support on March 6. It means that some features on YouTube and on Orkut won't work in older browsers.
The solution for the users is simple: upgrade your Explorer browser. Problem is that is requires to buy a legitimate Windows license. So what to do? Use Firefox, Chrome o Safari... but not all the versions!
Once again, Google sets the internet browsing standards and deems anything below IE7, Firefox 3.0, Chrome 4.0, and Safari 3.0 as an "older browser".
Microsoft, on the other hand, has stated that it wants to see IE6 disappear as much as anyone else, though refuses to force anyone to upgrade.
So far, IE8 is the most popular browser, although IE6 is still used by about 20 percent of surfers worldwide, according to NetApplications.
As Google says, "surfing the Web on an old browser can be a lot like running a steam engine along the tracks of a bullet train-it may still work, but it doesn't take advantage of the speed and security of the new technology."
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