Warmest Greetings,
:: Saturday, August 31, 2002 ::
And then the Avatars rolled out...Jill Whalen joined and I figured out how to work the private message thingy...
When you launch a new Forum, you either sacrifice a goat to the Sun God, or you gather your craziest friends and supporters and jump into the boiling pot of water naked. We chose the latter. That's Phil (the technical genius behind the scenes) over there, with the binoculors.
Last night it seems as though everyone sent their Avatars up to the server. Those are images of one's choice. In the case of the Moderators, they put up little pics of themselves. As you can tell, the guys hate having their pics taken. The women, at least, will smile. Ok, except Adrian. He smiled for the camera. Everyone is so wonderful and perfect. A true community.
The Cre8asite Forum even attracted (and I think Phil bribed her) Jill Whalen, who will handle beginining SEO questions. You may know her of HighRankings.com fame. If you don't, come meet her at the forum. You'll soon see why I'm thrilled to pieces she's joined us.
There's quite a crew over there running, maintaining, developing and moderating the Forum. It covers search engines, search engine optimization, user interface, usability, spam/scam protection, and web development. We all strive for integrity, honesty, good business practices, ethics and accurate information - but we don't all agree on what all that actually is!
If you want to learn about any of these topics, please join us. We're being creative over there, and our hope is to make everyone's education, including our own (we just THINK we know it all) lots of fun.
Kim
:: posted by Kimberly Krause on 8/31/2002 04:29:08 PM
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:: Friday, August 30, 2002 ::
What Happens When You Put Programmers, SEO Marketers and Developers from the US and UK Together?
Cre8asite Forum - Usability : User Interface : Website Design : Search Engine Optimization & Marketing
Cre8pc has launched a new forum. If you know everything, well. You don't, ok? This one isn't as new as you think. Read on...
History of the Cre8asite Forum
What began in 1998 on a whim is now a Forum operated and run on 2 continents....
This forum is the third incarnation of what was once known as the Cre8pc Web Promotion Club, a community of people interested in building Internet-based businesses that are user and search engine friendly.
In September 1998 Kim Krause, of Cre8pc.com, launched the Cre8pc Club hosted by Yahoo! Clubs. A few months later one of the club members, Carol Daly of CreativeThought.com, launched her own Home and Small Business Club in Yahoo!. Carol focused on business plans, startups, and the business angle, while Kim handled the web design and search engine optimization side. Together they moderated each others' Clubs until they got so large (combined total of 5000 members) that they brought aboard Bill Slawski of DelawareIntercorp.com to help them handle hecklers, spam posts and allow people to take breaks from 24/7 message monitoring. Kim added co-moderators Judi Stifel of VanityPenworks.com and member Kalei Awana who works for several Web sites to co-moderate her Club as well.
We had a Mission
Being a single mom with no budget to run a business but who needed to support a home and two children, Kim understood only too well the need for budget tools, utilities and software. Carol Daly started with nothing also. Together they figured out what worked, tested new tools, and shared their findings with individuals wanting to work from home, or startup a business on a budget. Everyone grew together, both moderators and club members. Successes were shared with new people and a huge community was born. That network still exists and is booming, with Carol and Kim still working for low fees and promoting online businesses. We targeted those who wanted desperately to learn, who believed in themselves and needed strong, unbiased, honest support. Word spread. The Clubs flourished. To this day Kim and Carol have never met each other or so much as spoken on the phone.
Dumped into Groups
When Yahoo! suddenly moved their Clubs to Yahoo! Groups, many changes occurred including the loss of most members who enjoyed the conveniences of Clubs. Carol went on to form new Groups on her own and pursue more online business endeavors. Kim moved her Club to Groups December 28, 2001 and changed the name to the Cre8asite Group.
The Birth of the Cre8asite Forum
In June of 2002 Kim "met" Phil Craven in the MarketPositionTalk Forum. They became friends while debating the issue of what SPAM is, and although they didn't agree on things, Phil stopped by Kim's Cre8asite Club, liked the scenery and joined up. Before long his expertise with Google PageRank proved to be helpful to members and his programming skills allowed him to help Kim take the Forum into a more professional environment devoid of Yahoo! Group ads, and Yahoo! virus problems.
Gotta Raft?
Phil Craven, from the UK, was happily welcomed by popular Club member, Adrian Lee, also of the UK. With Kim and Bill in the US, they built a raft and began piling on other members and friends from other Forums to help build a new, unique Forum. If you don't understand British humor, that's ok. They don't always understand Americans either. Perhaps someone from an Asian country or "Down Under" in Australia will join us and set us all straight, once and for all. Our moderators come from everywhere and bring with them a wide mix of experience in all things related to Web site development.
Dancing To A Different Beat
It's not enough to build a Website. It has to be tested. It has to earn its keep. It must be found by people. Since there are so many ways to do all of this, with some being better, more ethical, easier or harder to do than others, we bring it all to the table here. We've attracted such popular SEO professionals as Jill Whalen and Ammon Johns to our discussions, and we strive to let everyone ask questions, share knowledge, inquire on techniques and test designs in our Forums. We like to comment on the ridiculous. Heck, we think we know it all. And nobody can tell us differently.
Join us at Cre8asite Forum - Usability : User Interface : Website Design : Search Engine Optimization & Marketing
:: posted by Kimberly Krause on 8/30/2002 11:01:56 AM
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:: Thursday, August 29, 2002 ::
Tell me more about the 36 year cookie, please...
Google sets a cookie on our computers that lives for 36 years?
So says Daniel Brandt, who hates Google and set up a website to complain about it (but when I last checked, his website was down.)
"When you search for something at Google, it saves your search terms and associates them with a cookie that is set to live on your machine for 36 years. Brandt fears that law enforcement officials could muscle Google into divulging all the terms you've ever searched for. Those terms could be "a window into your state of mind," and are therefore a clear violation of your privacy, he says."
I test Web sites because I'm a Quality Assurance Engineer and an SEO consultant. One of my latest clients has a medical Web site devoted to the penis and other parts of the male and female sexual anatomy. I need to run searches on the keyword "penis" periodically in Google and other search portals. Should I be worried?
Read more about Google's detractor here in Meet Mr. Anti-Google
A crusading webmaster says the popular search engine's page-ranking algorithm is "undemocratic."
:: posted by Kimberly Krause on 8/29/2002 01:18:57 PM
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Time to Raise My Fees, and It's Your Fault
SearchDay #344 - Why Search Engines Fail. By Chris Sherman, Associate Editor, Search Engine Watch Search Day, ran an article today based on private white papers from 2 companies about search engine usability and reporting. The findings are fascinating and worth studying. While I need more time to study it myself, this stood out:
This really jumped out at me: "- Only 1 in 20 visitors will scroll to the second page of search results."
So, this changes my thinking a bit. We try so hard to get engines to rank our pages high via SEO tactics and tricks that many feel are deceptive, but when you read something like this, is it any wonder? I was blaming the engines for bringing back poor results and forcing us to jump through hoops in our code to rank higher, but if users themselves are too lazy to click past the first 20 or so displayed results, then we're dealing with another problem - one that is NOT the engines fault after all.
Go to the URL and get yourself today's issue. If you perform SEO services, this article is further proof why our assistance and services are necessary!
:: posted by Kimberly Krause on 8/29/2002 10:27:23 AM
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:: Wednesday, August 28, 2002 ::
You Be The GateKeeper, I'll Be the Spider
"When you look at the footprint of thousands of these pages, they are easy for search engine spiders to detect. Most doorway, gateway or bridge pages are orphaned. This means that they have no links pointing to them, but they have links pointing from them," points out Edward Lewis in his Avoiding the Pitfalls of Doorways, Gateways and Bridge Pages
There's some great stuff in this article for those new to SEO, plus it backs up what we in SEO actually do, and why we warn against certain methods of trying to achieve higher rank.
I recommend taking this article and study it along with the information offered in Fantomaster's latest newsletter (01.2002-08-20 fantomNews™ issue 015) in an article written by Mike Grehan called "Serial: Search Engine Myth-Busters - Birds of a Feather - "Intro: In the second article of the "Myth-Busters" series, Mike Grehan takes shrewd cold look at link popularity as a major concept of search engine optimization."
It doesn't hurt to understand algorithms before you go out and play Gatekeeper.
Resources:
Edward Lewis of the SEO Consultants Directory
Mike Grehran Search Engine Report
Fantomaster Fantomaster website
Fantomaster newsletter (highly recommended!) - newsletter
:: posted by Kimberly Krause on 8/28/2002 10:11:11 AM
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Using people
When I was learning about dating and boys, and then dating and men, the one practice my girlfriends and I wept over was "He's just using me." It got to be so that we could spot a "user" a mile or two away, and it was surprisingly easier to zero in and finger a "User" when you weren't the one being "used". Breakups were because someone was a "user" and someone didn't like being "used". Heck, the cruelest thing a person could say to another is "You're just a USER!!!"
So, now I build and review Web sites, and as Quality Assurance Engineer for online software applications with web front ends, my job is to be a "stupid user". I'm an advocate for users. I play the role of users with Netscape 3.0 who refuse to upgrade, or the online shopper who just wants to buy something in less than 25 clicks.
I constantly remind programmers that people have to use this thing they're developing, and I point out how users will or can break it, get lost in it, or will simply leave it because it doesn't do what marketers promised it would do. I know that companies sell software before the ink is dry on the business and functional requirements documentation, and I know that those requirements have to be met during testing and if not, it either goes back to the programmers and testers or rolls out to customers who will use it, test it, break it and write angry letters to Usenet groups, or forums about "that stupid company that made another stupid product that doesn't work".
With the Internet, everyone's a "user".
What do couples fight over and break up for now?
:: posted by Kimberly Krause on 8/28/2002 08:39:49 AM
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:: Tuesday, August 27, 2002 ::
Copywriting SEO hint
Think Journalism. (I majored in it before having to drop out of college...) When you write in the "pyramid" style, the most important information (keywords) go at the top and the least important, vital information goes at the bottom. In a news story, the first sentence is often quite long, and contains just about everything you need to know in one quick shot. This is because people don't read every word. They scan pages of text (news). Same thing with web pages and content. You can always tell a web design newbie because they write endlessly about something that could be summed up in one paragraph. Writing copy for a web page is very similar to writing news copy.
:: posted by Kimberly Krause on 8/27/2002 10:07:50 AM
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:: Monday, August 26, 2002 ::
It completes me.
It just wouldn't be a Blog without links. So here's something I'm working on.
Resources
:: posted by Kimberly Krause on 8/26/2002 11:11:58 AM
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