Warmest Greetings,

New Cre8pc, New Blog, New Look  

:: Friday, February 27, 2004 ::

They're here!

I made a vow to rebuild Cre8pc and the Cre8pc Blog this year, and they're finished. Next, is a brand new site that will focus strictly on usability issues and my testing services. The site will be called UsabilityEffect.com.

My friends who host Cre8asiteForums for free are also going to host my new website. All I have to do is smile and send email hugs and I get all this free stuff! You can see the cute (funky sorta) holding page one of my friends made and stuck on the server by clicking UsabilityEffect.com

I had better hurry up and build the site...

Please tell me what's not working. They've been tested on my machines but there's nothing like user testing with a worldwide (captive, ha ha) audience.

I'll be back soon with some real news. Thanks for hanging in there with me! In the meantime, there's a new link on this blog called "More Resources". You can find lots of good information there.

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 2/27/2004 05:44:38 PM

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:: Monday, February 16, 2004 ::

This blog and the Cre8pc.com website are undergoing renovation and birthing a spin-off new website focused only on usability. See you soon!

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 2/16/2004 11:02:00 AM

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:: Wednesday, February 11, 2004 ::

How can a small business make use of online forums such as Cre8asiteForums? Ammon Johns (aka "Black Knight"), an Administrator and Moderator at Cre8asiteForums, decided to find out.

"The example to use was an obvious choice, because one member has really stood out in her willingness to ask questions, to seek improvements, to learn from peers, and to listen, adapt and share."

In Caissa - Cre8asite Example of the Year 2003, you can read the interview between Ammon and Caissa. She describes how her business started out, its struggles and setbacks, and triumphs. It's an inspirational read for anyone wondering if it's all worth it some days.

Some snips:

There we sat (with great products, including top chess software & e-books), but moving along with few sales and no clear direction on how to move forward. Because it was so inexpensive to run a site, and because we do our web work internally, we decided to continue with ChessCentral.com, though we saw many established chess sites folding up. By 2002, the world economy was stagnant and our business had come to a standstill. It was time to look at finances and make some hard decisions. If these results continued we would be out of business by year’s end. We had to make something happen, and fast!

We knew that e-commerce and the Internet was the best bet to increase sales, but how? An aggressive reading program took us to Internet marketing articles, SEO, usability and web design. Using this new knowledge we redesigned the ChessCentral.com web site. Needing more information and working in the dark, we came acrossCre8asite forums . And that’s when things started to click.

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It didn’t take long to learn that if you build it and they do come, they may not buy. Converting a visitor to a customer is all about building trust. Would you give your money or credit card number to someone you didn’t trust?


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You've indicated a good mix of marketing techniques there. You've added to the value of the deal on the software with the free e-books, you've promoted your specialist e-book technology by giving them a taster, and you've provided good CRM (Customer Relationship Management) into the bargain.

Those different things are all working together, each boosting the strength of each other, and overall, boosting your brand and credibility. A great example of the holistic approach. It is very nicely done.

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We had to find a way to let chess players know we were the chess experts. This is where Cre8asite came in again. After reading threads on how to become an expert in your field, one of the ideas, opening a forum, seemed like it would be perfect for us. Enter - The Chess Exchange.

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This forum has its origins in a Yahoo Club started to help small business people just finding their way on the web. So Caissa's story has some special significance here to many of us.

The forums cover a lot of different ground, from usability, to SEO to design to internet law, programming, blogging , graphic design. One of my favorite sections, though, is the web site hospital, where people bring their sites, and get constructive criticism from people with a wide range of skills and knowledge and experience.

I want to point out that Caissa asked lots of questions, started topics when she wanted to ask for others opinions, and worked hard to achieve some success.

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Congratulations Caissa and Chess Central!

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Hot Thread:

Becoming an Authority - Recovering from Florida/Austin by Webby of Abakus

"Localrank is essentially all about the inter connectivity of pre-florida SERPs for a given keyword. It is believed to be based upon the top 1000 pages of the old serps, although I suspect it is likely to be less. What this means is that the results of the top pre-Florida SERPS (old algorithm) get put through a new filter which then forms the basis for the current SERPs. The localrank is calculated, in layman’s terms, by the amount of incoming links a website has from websites that were previously ranked well in the old SERPS. In other words, are websites on your theme/keyword that were previously well ranked, linking to you?"

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 2/11/2004 12:23:46 PM

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:: Thursday, February 05, 2004 ::

Now is the time of the year when website owners suddenly remember to peek at their often ignored web page footers. Why? It's a new year and time to change the year. But, Information Architecture Specialist Jeff Lash has some interesting, creative ideas for footers and things that can go "below the fold" in More Than Just a Footer

"During countless usability tests, I have observed users who scroll to the bottom of the page when they are lost, only to be left helpless by the generic footer navigation."

SEO:

Jon Udell writes about Content-aware searching

"At InfoWorld’s 2002 CTO Forum, Google co-founder Sergey Brin threw cold water on the idea of instrumenting content for intelligent search. "I’d rather make progress by having computers understand what humans write," he said, "than by forcing humans to write in ways that computers can understand."

Brin’s pragmatic stance sharply opposes the idealistic view of the Web’s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, who continues to evangelize his vision of a Semantic Web full of carefully encoded content that we can precisely search and fluidly recombine. "


Um. The cottages went up LONG before Google arrived. For Google, many retailers eagerly jump through hoops

"Google, which is reported to be considering going public this year in what would be the most-watched tech IPO in years, has become so important to marketing strategies that a cottage industry of consultants has sprung up to help companies get better results."

Brace Yourselves:

"The battle has just escalated to a new level, with the announcement on Jan. 20 of cutting-edge technology that pops up not just ads but 2 MB, 30-second, full-motion videos that are designed to defeat today's widely-used pop-up blockers." says How Many Pop-ups Can a Pop-up Stopper Stop?

and Web commercials debut tomorrow

"Beginning tomorrow, more than a dozen Web sites, including MSN, ESPN, Lycos and iVillage, will run full-motion video commercials from Pepsi, AT&T, Honda, Vonage and Warner Brothers, in a six-week test that some analysts and online executives say could herald the start of a new era of Internet advertising.

The new ad technology, from Unicast, an advertising company based in New York, invisibly loads the commercial while unwitting users read a Web page, then displays the ad across the entire browser area when users click to a new page.

The company says the technology evades pop-up blockers, but the person can skip the ad by clicking a box."

To which Cre8asiteForums users say "Blech!"

"Unlike broadcast, the WWW is designed to route around disruption. Any attempt at disruption will ultimately fail."

Just a silly mistake:

Washington Post Forgets to Renew Domain

If you own a Blog:

NEW!

Free submissions. Thanks for the tip ResearchBuzz!

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 2/05/2004 02:16:50 PM

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:: Tuesday, February 03, 2004 ::

Since the day they were born, I've never liked link exchange schemes. If I link to a site it's because it pertains to my website somehow and I decide if it does. Bribery never works with me. But, once in awhile someone sends me something that makes me wonder if I'm judging these people to harshly. I got the following today. What do you think?

"I am creating a web directory, (name removed), and would like to include your website Cre8pc.com under the "spirituality/psychic" category."

Right. Okay then. ..

Keeping up with Search Engine Joneses:

Study Shows Web Searches Getting More Complex

"Nearly 33 percent of a sample of 2 million Web searchers monitored in the past two months used two-word queries and 26 percent used three-word queries. Nineteen percent searched using a single word, and searches using four to seven words made up 21 percent"

Pandia reports on FAST in Fast launches new enterprise search engine

"The Norwegian company has now launched a new "enterprise search solution" -- i.e. a search engine that let companies search their own databases more efficiently -- that should be of interest to all search oriented people."

Andy Beal, of KeywordRanking.com rocks with this interview. Microsoft's Robert Scoble Discusses Search Engine Technology

"Today search tools like X1 are most interesting because they index your hard drive and make it easy to search for email and files on your local drives. Microsoft Research has been working on a tool called "Stuff I've Seen" too, which is also quite interesting (both let you search email as well as files on your hard drive)."

Google now adds Blogger to its list of services and tools.

Yes, It's True Department:

An important matter for the US Government. US bans timed-honoured typeface

"In an internal memorandum distributed on Wednesday, the department declared "Courier New 12" - the font and size decreed for US diplomatic documents for years - to be obsolete and unacceptable after February 1."

Newly divorced? This site is for you. They Took Everything

Gives new meaning to the word "Exhibitionist", doesn't it? 143.6 million people saw Janet's breast during the SuperBowl's half-time show. AOL freaks.

Other stuff:

Jakob Nielsen has some things to say about surveys.

"A recent article in Harvard Business Review on "The One Number You Need" documented that the vast majority of customer-satisfaction insight comes from answers to a single question: 'How likely is it that you could recommend [X] to a friend or colleague?' In 13 of 14 case studies, this one question was as strong a predictor of customer loyalty as any longer survey."

New - Lessons Learned Marketing Wisdom Report (Note: This is a PDF).

Offered by Marketing Sherpa, it offers "99 best real-life stories and tips from marketing, advertising, and PR pros who reveal what they learned in 2003." I paged through it. There is, indeed, some inspiration stuff in there. Even better, it's free!

New - An upgraded toolbar from Blowsearch, a meta-search engine.

"ABC News provides BlowSearch Toolbar users with a streaming feed to stay on top of breaking news. Other major enhancements include a popup blocker that utilizes intelligent coding to block popup ads in the browser and a new cursor search tool that allows Internet users to search for any word on a web page by simply right-clicking the mouse."

New - 24/7 PPC Search Engine keyword bid management service by Bid Optima

"We manage bids manually; the human intelligence factor maximizes your ROI by micromanaging your keyword bids like no software possibly can. The essential human qualities of intuition, creativity and an ability to select the best option make our service special."

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 2/03/2004 05:08:29 PM

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:: Monday, February 02, 2004 ::

The first issue of Sucessful Sites made its debut and demand has already caused it to be a bi-montly pub rather than monthly, as originally planned. You can read the first issue online >>> Welcome to the Successful Sites Newsletter!

Published by Scottie Claiborne of Right Click Web Consulting, "Successful Sites was born from a need to address everything that makes a site great- usability, copywriting, design, marketing strategy, content and more. We will cover a wide variety of topics with easy-to-follow advice and strategies that you can apply to your own site."

The first article is written by expert Christine Churchill, founder of KeyRelevance, a search engine marketing firm. She writes Improve the Readability of Your Web Page

Sign up for Successful Sites is totally free!

Another handy usability resource is from FalkoWeb, where the emphasis is on research and usability. Sally Falkow writes a newsletter every month with interesting articles such as "E-Branding, What Is It?" and "Finding Your Site in the Haystack". These and other valuable articles are located here at FalkoWeb Newsletter. Sign up is free.

If you're an Orkutaholic (or Orkut "slut" as some people are now calling it, referring to the "Run out and grab every person you know to increase your friend count" thing), Cre8asiteForums started a new Community at Orkut called "Holistic Web Design". The mission is:

"Web sites should be built to be usable by visitors and indexed easily by search engines, while adding value to the site's owners by fulfilling business objectives.

This forum is intended to allow a cross pollination of ideas between usability and user experience engineers, information architects, search engine optimizers and marketers, interaction designers, captologists, accessibility experts, and site owners."

That's it for today. I'll have more tomorrow. You'll have to come back. (This is my version of those "Be Back in One Hour" signs you see on business doorways.)

In the meantime, we're still deciding if we even like Orkut here Social Networking for Business and if you're starting out and want a few shoulders to lean on, try On starting out and finding clients - Some ideas

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 2/02/2004 10:04:11 PM

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