It doesn’t matter what information you’re trying to put across on your website if your readers can’t find their way about easily enough. Website usability is big business. Just ask Dr Jakob Nielsen, who has made a career out of this very issue. But you don’t have to pay through the nose for scientific studies [...]

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This week I’m concentrating on a series of posts about Effective Web Design. Part 1 offers strategic questions to ask yourself when eyeing up the work your competitors are doing. There are a myriad websites out there. New ones crop up every second and it is getting harder to get your message across, especially if [...]

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A new pay for post blogging/advertising service is out called ReviewMe, and so I decided to give it a test drive. The post here is a sponsored post, meaning that I am getting paid a small amount to talk about the service. But there is no better way to learn how a service operates than [...]

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Knowing your readers, and what they like is essential if you want to customise your blog content to their needs. One of the best indicators of what works and what doesn’t is of course – by tracking page traffic. To do this you have to pick one of the many many site metric trackers out [...]

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If you’re one of those people that thinks laterally, loves mindmaps, stores tons of notes all over the place and would like to get organized, you might consider Tinderbox by the folks at Eastgate if you haven’t done so already. I’ve been using the application —which is currently only available for Mac but Window’s version [...]

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If you’re thinking about placing background music on your site, stop right now. Along with large animated GIFs, this has to be one of the tackiest things you can do with your site. SEOMoz has a list of reasons you can bring to your clients should you ever get asked to do this. Among my [...]

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Leaving an effective voice message is an important part of conducting business. Failing to do so may result in your call not being returned, or even worse, annoying the other party. Here’s a step by step walkthrough on how to give an effective voicemail: Say your name when you pick it up. Don’t assume the [...]

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In case you hadn’t noticed, registrations began on Tuesday for .mobi top level domain names for mobile wireless devices and cell phones. Names are available on a first-come first-serve basis, though many common domain names have already been awarded to wireless companies and trademarked names. The .mobi domain is managed by Mobile Top Level Domain, [...]

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While the benefits of RSS become immediately obvious to some of us, the general internet population, don’t use it. In many cases, it’s not so much that they haven’t heard about it, it’s that they just don’t really see the point of it all. The Moleskin has a good set of tips aimed at teaching [...]

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Professional bloggers like Darren Rowse reflects here on a few security tips he has for keeping your blog safe from hackers, after his friend just recently got hacked. Update your Blog Software Keep an Eye on Dead Blogs Backup your Blog Protect Your Passwords Choose Your Host Carefully Especially for bloggers like him who write [...]

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Quick Online Tips has a timely reminder: make sure you update your domain contact address in time before someone else grabs it. I have to admit that I managed to lose a website I’d been running for three years because of this. Events conspired but it was basically my own fault: I happened to be [...]

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Need more visitors to your site, but don’t know where to start? SEOMoz website has come up with a list of 21 tips that will help you do just that.  Here’s a summary of some of the less obvious ones which I found useful. Write Title Tags with Two Audiences in Mind First and foremost, [...]

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If you’re keen on simplistic minimalist weblog design, you might want to check out Plaintxt.org, a website dedicated to, well yes, minimalist WordPress themes. Although Scott’s designs might not be as fancy or colourful as some of the myriad themes out on le internet, they’re extremely light and fast-loading. What’s more, they’re also pretty easy [...]

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Never check your email first or last thing each day, reckons LifeDev, because it slows you down and affects the way you work. I can see how useful adopting this tip would actually be because I tend to suffer from stacks of email each day! I also, like many people who work with a computer, [...]

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Eric Giguere has some excellent advice for getting relevant AdSense ads that particularly relevant to bloggers. He includes two examples that show how just one word can result in different ads being rendered. Sometimes all it takes is one word or phrase to trigger different ads. Although Eric’s suggestion that you should change the URL [...]

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