Archive for January, 2009

Nothing shouts “dilettante blogger” more than bad spelling. It may be because you are not cautious enough or because you type on a PDA like me today, but you should protect your online reputation. Do yourself two favors:

1. Install a spelling checker in your browsing environment: Use the built-in Firefox or Opera 10 (still in Alpha stage) spell checker, install ieSpell with Internet Explorer or even the Google toolbar (for its built-in spell checker, again).


2. Choose one category of your web site and spell check some of your posts starting wih the most popular ones.

It is quite important to track the exact status of your server. It has been proven again to me last Saturday. During a few hours, OVH which is hosting my web sites had a bad connection with the rest of the world (some users could go through, most couldn’t reach the web site).

The first visible consequence is small dip in the visits as shown by Google Analytics. But it is not very visible (about 10%). Most importantly, the visitors who could get through were not able to visit conveniently and the Google Adsense earnings dropped by 30% on this same day.

Two lessons:

1. Be sure to have a reliable web service (not only the machine, but also its connection) to deliver a pleasant visiting experience to your web site.
2. Web site performance has a direct impact on your earnings. In this case 1/2 of visitors seeing a slow web site reduced ads revenue by 30%. A little web page optimization could be welcome, too.

Inspiration does not always come easy. On those days when you sit in front of your screen with no idea to blog about, you will appreciate to have a simple list of issues to write about. So, always keep with you this list. Any time you think about something nice to write about, just write down the potential title and drop a few keywords to guide you the day you will hit te dreaded writer’s block.

In my case, the list is on a Palm PDA always in my pocket.

Who doesn’t want to use free images for her web site? Unfortunately, it’s far from easy. This is what is explained in “The Finer Points of Finding Free Images” (by James Dempsey).

It’s right that HTML and CSS gave a lot of flexibility to the web designer. One of the possibilities offered is to opt for non-underlined web links. This is also easy to abuse this: Most Internet users do not easily recognize an HTML link if it is not underlined.

So, make sure that you choose the right color or the adequate underlining option (dotted, plain, etc.) but go to your CSS file and underline your links. This is specially important if your site targets a wide audience and non-experts.

It is easy to start a new web site. But there is one thing that your visitors will notice quickly (even without telling you about it): Keeping one of the default templates will render your blog or web site totally identical to its neighbours (or should I say, its twins). This is simultaneously a way to say “I don’t care about the result” and to fail in respect for your visitors.

Take time to change the template, to input some personality into it, as far as possible. For example, with WordPress, it is easy to go and visit le répertoire de thème WordPress.
Prenez le temps de changer de modèle et de le personnaliser autant que possible. Par exemple, pour WordPress, il est facile d’aller faire un tour sur the WordPress theme directory. The easier because the link is appearing at the bottom of each “Appearance” page in the adminstration panel or WordPress dashboard.

Better (but a little tougher), you can go to the extremes of developping your own theme. This is what I did recently with YLovePhoto.com which was the target of a full rebuild with a custom template I created. Start from one existing template, transform it, warp it, take inspiration but be sure to keep a clear objective of where you want to go in order to preserve usability.

Even better, take time to provide an announcement message and a guided tour to allow your visitors to navigate faster in the new landscape you are setting around them. Like I did here (click on the image to go to the message itself):

Explore the new site look and its prominent features described here

Sometimes, you are looking for the best possible web hosting solution (amongst a plethoric offer). LifeHacker.com asked the question to its many readers to reach a consensus list of top 6 web hosting:

• DreamHost
• Blue Host
• NearlyFreeSpeech.NET
• 1&1
• GoDaddy
• HostGator
• A Small Orange

Even if most may not be advertising heavily in your country, remember that they are all available from everywhere in the world.

What? Didn’t you know? 99% of Internet users are expecting an easy way to find the home page of your webs ite from any plage in the site itself. This home page is the point where they are used to navigate easily. They want to be able to get back there any time they’re lost.

On all the pages of your site, you have two possibilities:

1. either clicking on the logo of your site or your company will lead them back to the home page (this has quickly become de-facto standard),
2. or there is a link easy to find at the top of the page (preferably top left) showing “Home”

And why not both?

PS: Obviously, I immediately applied this idea in the recent correction of this web site. The front page (home page) is more easily accessible (at last?) from the logo at the upper left corner and from the language choice at the top of all pages.

With the new year, let’s see a few things to start the year well:

• A little change of looks and colours
• Removal of the constraint to log before writing a comment
• Creation of a favicon and a simple logo for the pages
• Also, I checked my Google Adsense revenues of 2008. No month has been under $370 and I always stayed under $600 (even in December, it seems that recession is with us). Naturally, Roumazeilles.net was the most powerful with more than 800k visits during the year 2008. We’ll see if 2009 allows the new web sites to grow at the same level or better.

And, of course, I wish you a happy new year.