Best of 2008 (So Far) - Website Design, Part 2

What are the most important factors to consider when designing (or redesigning) a website? Where should you start? How can you ensure that your site works well on mobile devices as well as conventional browsers? Which tools can help make your efforts more productive and effective?

Get the answers to these questions and more in the pieces below, some of the best articles and blog posts from the past year.

The 4 Essential Elements of Web Design by Spinfield

Designer Jason Nester offers highly practical advice (i.e. Flash, widgets and Web 2.0 colors need not apply) about the most critical factors in site design. It's heartening that he refers to SEO as "probably THE most essential element of Web design."

Why Web Design Matters by SEO Book

SEO expert Peter Da Vanzo serves up his take on the 10 most important factors, beginning with "Purpose—Know Your Audience," which should be the starting point for ANY marketing activity. Clarity, branding and speed are also among the elements on this excellent pre-site redesign list.

10 Great Web Sites by BtoB magazine

A group of industry experts including Hoa Loranger from the Nielsen Norman Group, Alan Webber of Forrester Research and Dana Todd from Newsforce tell you what they like, and don't like, about 10 popular websites. Among their picks for great sites are the U.S. Postal Service, Adobe and Formway Furniture.

10 killer websites worth watching by iMedia Connection

In the same manner as the post above, here editor Nanette Marcus asks five experts including Ryan Buchanan from eROI, Doug Schumacher of Basement and David Friedman of Razorfish each to describe what's unique and what could be improved about two websites they think stand out from the crowd.

Custom 404 page and SEO: 10 things a Good 404 Error Page Should Contain by SeoblogR

Polish blogger Pawel Szulencki may not have absolutely perfect English ("No ads - they just stand in the way to deliver the right message to the user"), but he does have an outstanding list of items here to include on custom 404 error pages including a search box, links to the most important pages of your site, a link to the sitemap, and "a short message explaining why a user is seeing this web page...You should also apology for any inconveniences that caused. Dont blame the user for visiting your error page."

Is your website ready for a handheld world? by iMedia Connection

Consultant and author Robert Moskowitz asked Will Park from IntoMobile, Chris Spiek of Awecomm Technologies and Marty Dickinson from HereNextYear.com about designing websites for mobile devices. What are the most critical design factors to keep in mind? Do you need a .mobi domain? This article answers those questions and more.

16 Web Based Handy Web Designer Tools by Online Marketing Blog

Blogger Thomson Chemmanoor shares some of his favorite website design and development tools for tasks such as analyzing page load time, validating CSS files, finding broken links, generating rounded corner and gradients, and more.

Previous posts in this series:

Best of 2008 (So Far) - SEO Guidance, Part 1
Best of 2008 (So Far) - SEO Guidance, Part 2
Best of 2008 (So Far) - Search Engine Marketing, Part 1
Best of 2008 (So Far) - Cool Web Tools, Part 1
Best of 2008 (So Far) - Social Media Optimization, Part 1
Best of 2008 (So Far) - Blogging for Business, Part 1
Best of 2008 (So Far) - Web Marketing Research, Part 1
Best of 2008 (So Far) - Website Design, Part 1
Best of 2008 (So Far) - SEO Link Building
Best of 2008 (So Far) - Search Engine Marketing, Part 2
Best of 2008 (So Far) - Social Media Optimization, Part 2
Best of 2008 (So Far) - SEO Guidance, Part 3
Best of 2008 (So Far) - Cool Web Tools, Part 2
Best of 2008 (So Far) - Blogging for Business, Part 2
Best of 2008 (So Far) - Web Marketing Research, Part 2

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Contact Mike Bannan : mike@digitalrdm.com

Comments

Anonymous said…

Thank u r information

1:02 AM

All Time Greats

Getting More Out of Each Click with "Post-Click Marketing"

With the economy now officially in a recession (as if we didn't know that), marketers are under increasing pressure to do more with less. On the interactive marketing side, few marketers will get budget increases enabling them to drive more clicks. The challenge, then, is to maximize marketing productivity—to get more leads out of the same number of clicks. This is the first of two posts that will look at how to improve conversion rates to get more value from each click. One answer to this challenge is provided by "post-click marketing," a.k.a. lead automation management vendors. While the specifics of each service vary, all of them essentially: automate the process of extracting visitor IP information from your log files; match the IP address to an organization; filter out ISPs; and map the company name to one or more external databases to provide additional information (company size, industry, key contacts etc.). The better services also use geo-location filte...

Best of 2007: Articles and Blog Posts on SEM

Search engine marketing (SEM) is one of the fastest-growing categories in all of advertising, because it is both measurable and logical: present your ads when people are searching for what you're selling. A well-crafted search marketing program can provide not only broad brand exposure at a very reasonable cost (with CPMs of $10 or less), but also high-ROI lead generation. As with any other type of advertising, however, a poorly-designed campaign will be a disappointing waste of money. In addition to best practices in search engine marketing , the following articles and blog posts were among the best of 2007 at providing helpful guidance for creating and managing effective search marketing programs. Five Common Paid Search Mistakes That Can Sink Your Campaign by Search Engine Guide Blogger Jennifer Laycock explains how common mistakes such as "ego bidding," writing a single ad for all keywords, and directing all of your traffic to a single landing page can limit the res...

Marketing Automation: Bringing a Gun to a Knife Fight

This content has been moved to Marketing Automation: Like Bringing a Gun to a Knife Fight on the Webbiquity blog. ***** technorati tags: b2b marketing lead nurturing marketing-automation software demand-generation software Steve Woods Eloqua hosted-email-services email-service-providers ESP Constant Contact VerticalResponse ExactTarget shorten sales cycles del.icio.us tags: b2b marketing lead nurturing marketing-automation software demand-generation software Steve Woods Eloqua hosted-email-services email-service-providers ESP Constant Contact VerticalResponse ExactTarget shorten sales cycles icerocket tags: b2b marketing lead nurturing marketing-automation software demand-generation software Steve Woods Eloqua hosted-email-services email-service-providers ESP Constant Contact VerticalResponse ExactTarget shorten sales cycles Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

The 8 Layers of a B2B Web Marketing Plan

One way to think about designing a B2B technology web marketing plan is as a series of layers, like an onion. At the core is SEO—simply making your website "findable" through organic search to buyers who are looking for what you offer. Working out from the center are concentric layers of additional investment and sophistication. Small companies and start-ups with modest budgets will focus most of their efforts on the inner layers or rings, which are primarily designed for lead generation. As the company and its marketing budget grow, efforts can be expanded to the outer layers, which are aimed more at branding but support lead generation efforts. Ideally, a company eventually reaches the outer layer where pure branding activities (such as print advertising) help to maximize the effectiveness of lead generation programs (such as SEM) near the center of the circle. This diagram shows how different types of web marketing programs can be prioritized in order to maximize the retur...

Best of 2008: Social Media Optimization, Part 2

This content has been moved to Best of 2008: Social Media Marketing on the Webbiquity blog. ***** technorati tags: best free tools for monitoring social buzz social media marketing Six Pixels of Separation Mitch Joel Techrigy SM2 Key Web Data Chris Lang Google social bookmarking HubSpot Catie Foertsch Kate Morris TopRank Online Marketing Blog Jessica Cameron-Ruud Duct Tape Marketing John Jantsch CircleUp Traffic Travis del.icio.us tags: best free tools for monitoring social buzz social media marketing Six Pixels of Separation Mitch Joel Techrigy SM2 Key Web Data Chris Lang Google social bookmarking HubSpot Catie Foertsch Kate Morris TopRank Online Marketing Blog Jessica Cameron-Ruud Duct Tape Marketing John Jantsch CircleUp Traffic Travis icerocket tags: best free tools for monitoring social buzz social media marketing Six Pixels of Separation Mitch Joel Techrigy SM2 Key Web Data Chris Lang Google social bookmarking HubSpot Catie Foe...

Marketo Releases Marketo Lead Management 3.0

Marketing automation software vendor Marketo today announced the launch of its Marketo Lead Management 3.0 software suite. With more than 200 new features, the release is the most significant since the product's initial launch in early 2008. Promising deeper support for a "conversational model of marketing," the new release provides 75 user interface enhancements as well as new features including: More fine-grained control over segmentation, targeting, and triggering; "Progressive profiling" on forms (i.e. additional profile is requested as a prospect moves through an interactive process); Native integration with Salesforce.com ; Web visitor profiling; and Automated duplicate lead removal. Pricing starts at $1,500 per month and the company now has more than 150 midmarket and enterprise customers. Marketo competes with products such as Eloqua , Silverpop Engage B2B (formerly Vtrenz), and Manticore in the marketing automation / demand generation sp...

The Best Web Marketing of 2008

Which types of online advertising provide the highest ROI? Who's really clicking on your PPC ads? Why do PPC costs keep rising? How can you convert more clickers into buyers? Are Web 2.0 technologies now mainstream? Learn these answers and more from this collection of blog posts and articles, some of the best reporting on online research topics so far this year. Online Marketers See High ROI from SEO by Marketing Pilgrim Blogger, SEO expert and PR pro Janet Meiners reports on an MarketingSherpa study detailing the growth in paid search and organic search engine optimization. Read her post to discover which types of online advertising get a thumbs up—and which are losing favor with interactive marketers. Who's really clicking? by iMedia Connection Sandeep Krishnamurthy , Professor of Marketing and E-Commerce at the University of Washington, paints a bleak picture of the future of PPC advertising—then gets blasted for it in the Comments by some fairly high-profile...

SEO Link Building of 2008

Unless you are optimizing only for some extremely niche keywords, off-page optimization—building links from other websites to yours—is a critical and significant factor for SEO success. The blog posts cited here, some of the best of 2008 on the topic of link building, provide guidance on how and where to obtain valuable external links. They also offer advice on ineffective tactics and "bad neighborhoods" to avoid. Local Search Ranking Presentation - SMX LoMo 2008 by Website Promotion Is Not Voodoo Will Scott , president of Search Influence, shares his presentation from the San Francisco for SMX Local Mobile event. His deck actually covers the organic search marketinging basics—keywords, content and links. But his section on "where to get links" is particularly helpful for anyone seeking to optimize local search results. 8 Directory Submission Red Flags by Small Business Search Marketing Matt McGee offers advice on what to avoid when obtaining links throu...

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