Website Design and Internet Marketing Blog

Sitegeist: The Blog of Splat Productions

Tuesday, January 24th, 2012

Using Custom Type in Your Website via @font-face

Using custom typography in website design has long been a Holy Grail for designers. Over the past few years, several third party methods have evolved which allow developers to include unique type families to their work, including sIFR, FLIR and Cufon. While all these methods have their unique strengths and weaknesses, they all likewise share the inherent status of being “workarounds” for a lack of native custom typeface support in an HTML environment.

Enter @font-face

With the advent of CSS 3.0, support for non-machine resident fonts became part of the working standard for website design. No longer consigned to the limitations of third party solutions, designers and developers can now (theoretically) purchase unique fonts for their work, license those fonts for web use and — voila! — create sites as typographically rich as any piece of print design. Of course theory and reality are always where the “rubber hits the road” in website design and the @font-face rule is no exception. We recently had the chance to integrate a custom typeface into one of our sites. In this post I’ll outline the challenges we faced and how these were overcome.

(more…)

How to Market A Product Based On Ease of Use: Google Takes Jerry Seinfeld’s Advice In Order To Ensure “Success” of Local Search Products

The Once Upon a Time of Google Local Search Products

Last week, I wrote about recently announced changes to Google Place pages. Because that news was breaking just as I was writing, I thought I’d follow up this week with an update in the aftermath of these announced changes…

It turns out that last week’s changes seem to be part of a larger strategy on Google’s part to renew focus on its local products. This week’s big news involved further elaborations on the Place page changes as well as the big announcement that their local advertising product “Boost” had been reworked and renamed. Boost’s successor is now called “AdWords Express.”

(more…)

What’s In a Title Tag?

(In this article, I talk about the importance of HTML Title tags for Search Engine Optimization. It’s one of a recurring theme of posts I’ve written in an effort to introduce the fundamentals of SEO…) One of the missions we take seriously here at Splat is the commitment we feel to client education. “Knowledge is Power,” we like to think. (When we’re subject to the laziness of talking in cliches…) More than that, though, knowledge also bridges gaps in understanding. And that helps us better explain our services and why they cost what they cost. Search Engine Optimization is often regarded as an arcane black art by new clients of ours. When we begin any new client relationship, then, we make an effort to give an overview of what SEO entails and some of its fundamentals. One easy-to-grasp principle is the significance of the HTML Title Tag. (more…)

Local Search Gets Even More Confusing

Confusion Reigns in the World of Local Search

When a recent article by a noted industry search marketing journalist is titled, “New Data Show What a Complex Mess Local Is,” you know that those of us trying to sell local search services to our clients are in for a bumpy ride. Truth be told, though, trying to explain and sell the value of local search work has always been tough. Most folks don’t really get how local results differ from pure organic results and — when you start blathering on about the importance of internet yellow page sites, 3rd party review sites, citations, etc — you get a whole lot of shoulder shrugging going on.

However confusing local might be though, it’s not going away. In fact, its getting more popular. In a report that’s getting a lot of airtime this week, the Local Search Association published a report with many notable findings, all suggesting the continued pull of local search. For instance:

Internet Yellow Pages sites and other local portals showed, overall, a 15% increase in volume in 2010, over the previous year.
Local searches from mobile devices increased a significant 34%. All the trends here clearly indicate a critical relationship between local search and mobile.
Local search content makes up 13% of all generalized queries across the major search engines. In a related commentary, Greg Sterling notes those figures translate to 2.2 billion queries a month on Google alone.

Yet, despite the increasing importance of local search and its unquestionable relevance to local businesses, the landscape of local is constantly shifting. Consider Google and Bing, for instance. Just a few months back Bing announced the complete revamping of its local pages, now called Bing Business Portal. Bing sees an opportunity to capitalize on some of the peculiarities and shortcomings of Google Place. Google, on the other hand, just this week announced a pretty significant overhaul to the layout of Place pages, including the following: (note that these findings are courtesy of either the Google Local Blog itself or Mike Bluementhal’s local search blog…)

The revised Place page layout decreases the emphasis placed on the 3rd Party review sites. Basically, this seems to be an effort to streamline SERPs and page layouts but it also, conveniently, allows Google to place greater emphasis on its own social reviews at the expense of everyone else’s.
Google has added a very prominent red button to its Place pages, encouraging visitors to review the business in question and, additionally, has eliminated non-Google review snippets.
Finally, 3rd party review numbers are also no longer aggregated into a “total number of reviews” figure in search results.

All of this adds up to a recurring fundamental paradox about local search and the average small business’ need for it…

That paradox is: It is really tough to explain to a client why they should see value in spending money on a coordinated local search strategy while – at the same time – the constantly shifting and messed-up landscape of local search means clients need those services more than ever.

From this mess of trends and changes, here are a few takeaway thoughts about the challenges and changes happening in the local landscape:

Don’t put your faith in Google alone. This week’s changes alone should convince folks that the wizards behind the curtains at Google have some sort of grand plan to increase market share in local search. (Surprise, surprise…) But Google’s ambition is not necessarily their customers’ gain. The sometimes haphazard changes to Places and its well-documented glitchiness might spell perilous times for those who take an approach which is too Google centric. Plus…
There are plenty of other reasons to pursue a multifaceted approach to local search. One of the most interesting findings in the LSA study is that search queries conducted through Internet Yellow Pages – though making up a lower percentage of total local search volume – nevertheless seem to represent better lead prospects, i.e., prospects who are more focused and likely to buy soon. Add to this to the aggregated value that citations from 3rd Party directories have for local search pages, as well as the influence of onsite optimization efforts and other factors, and you have a very compelling argument to conduct a multifaceted approach towards your local search efforts.

If anyone out there has any other thoughts about all of this, leave a comment. We’d love to hear from you…

1 COMMENT →

Wednesday, April 27th, 2011

How Much Should a Website Cost?

(This post is written from the standpoint of my efforts marketing our firm’s services… It’s intended to offer straight-ahead advice to clients considering hiring a website designer to either design a new site or redesign an existing one…) A few months back, I wrote a post here called “Why Your Website Might Cost $5000 or $50,00 and Other Details You Probably Don’t Want to Think Too Much About…” I wrote that piece because, at the time, I was encountering a lot of misunderstanding from prospective clients that were trying to compare a design proposal with one firm vs. that of another. In the absence of a lot of specific knowledge about our craft, I sensed that folks were making decisions based on a lack of misinformation and, basically, the proposal that had the lowest figure associated with it, won that client’s business. Consider this post Part Two of that original article. It’s amazing that I know so little about the way websites are priced. Silly me, we’ve always priced ours pretty straightforwardly. Basically, we give you a proposal outlining a scope, you sign it, pay us a deposit and — when it’s launched – you pay us the balance. (These days, we’ve been a little more flexible about payment and sometimes amortize the payments over a period of months.) Little did I know, though, that that’s not what other folks are doing out there. In my travels through Proposalland, I’ve come across a couple of practices I think our clients and sales prospects should be wary of. Two, in particular, stand out:

Do you own your website or are you merely renting it? One recent sales prospect I spoke with was considering having us redesign their site and breathlessly explained that they were “in a hurry” because their agreement with their current designer was ending soon and, once it ended, their website was going away. I wondered why that might be and, after a brief discussion, I realized that these folks had entered into a contract with their last design firm which stipulated that the actual content rights were retained by the designer! Unbelievably enough, this is not the first time I’ve run into this. We would never do this to our clients. Frankly, once we’ve designed a website for a client; it is theirs. If they ever want to pack up and take it to another web host or hire someone else to alter it (which they never do) that’s their business. You’re paying for your website. You should own it.
Are your “hosting charges” costing you more than a few bucks a month? They shouldn’t. Hosting these days is cheap. REAL cheap. I ran into another sales prospect recently who initially balked at the ballpark figure I gave him for design charges. When comparing us to his existing firm, he noted how much “less expensive” they were and, in the same sentence, indicated that he paid for “everything” through them, including hosting. My curiosity aroused, I asked how much those hosting charges were. They were close to fifty dollars a month for a simple brochure site. They should be about $10 a month. When I pointed this out and noted that they had been paying this vendor $50 a month for five years running, suddenly my pricing seemed more competitive.

There’s something about pricing schemes that make things seem a lot less expensive than they really are which really appeals to folks. In the end, though, these schemes are like everything else which seem too good to be true. They are.

2 COMMENTS →

Sunday, April 17th, 2011

When Did “Click Here” Become a Naughty Call-to-Action?

I have to get something off my chest. For as long as we’ve been designing websites and online advertising, I’ve come across what seems to be a time-worn bias against using the expression “click here” as a call-to-action. This phobia mystifies me. Recently, I was creating an Adwords ad for a graphic design client of ours. Following yet another tried-and-true best practice of embedding a call-to-action within the teeny-weeny copy parameters, it occurred to me that

Click Here for Creativity

would be a nifty, alliterative phrase that might induce click-throughs. No sooner than the expression leapt from my keyboard and I hit the “Save” button, though, did my Adwords control panel turn ominously red and I was informed that I had “violated Google’s editorial guidelines” by so bluntly asking for the very thing that every Adwords ad is hoping the reader will do. Consulting the equivalent of Google’s style guidelines, I learned that Google gives it blessing to euphemisms like “Visit Us Now,” or “Buy One Today,” all phrases which more indirectly attempt to elicit the same response I was bold enough to ask for directly. Where did this whole phobia begin and why are we saddled with it? All this got me to thinking about other forms of direct response advertising. Imagine if the same little bit of editorial caprice that online advertisers are subject to were applied to direct mail or television ads. On a direct mail piece, for instance, maybe the call-to-action

Call Us Now at 1-800-777-1234!

might be perceived as, well, just too pushy. Instead, a less direct approach might be mandated, like

If You Like What We’re Selling, Think of Some Way to Contact Us. We’d Love to Hear From You!

I think you get the source of my frustration here. How ironic that a form of advertising known both in industry parlance as “Pay Per Click” doesn’t let us use that signature noun in the copy we write…