From the category archives:

Web Design

Newspaper Pay Wall Alternatives

August 30, 2009
Newspaper Pay Wall Alternative

Newspaper website paywalls are a bad idea, here’s a better idea. Reward your readers rather than punishing them.

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Why You Need A Great Call To Action

August 18, 2009

If your site isn’t converting like you think it should be, try looking at your call to action.

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Google Page Speed Bitch Slaps YSlow

June 5, 2009

Google’s Page Speed is a fantastic app that should be in every developers toolbox. Until today, we had to rely on Yahoo’s YSlow to try to make better decisions about how to optimize our pages. YSlow was good when it was our only option, but now compared to Page Speed it just looks like a half-finished firebug addon.

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Get More Visitors From Google & Yahoo Search

April 7, 2009

What percentage of your visits are coming from search queries? Would you like more? When they find you, do they bounce away just as quickly?

If you want more people to find your site via search engines, you have to do a better job packaging your content. If you want them to stay, you need to make sure the important stuff is “front-loaded”.

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Forcing Your Customers To Register

March 29, 2009

I understand that newspaper sites are in turmoil. I understand they need to generate more revenue. I don’t understand some of they ways they try to accomplish it.
Many of the McClatchy newspaper sites set a threshold for the number of pages a visitor can view before forcing them to register. Some sites have that number [...]

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If You Don't Pay Attention To The Ads, We'll Make Them Even Bigger!

March 12, 2009

I spend many hours every day working in the online newspaper world. The print side of the business is in serious decline all over the country, which is putting more pressure on online to make more money.
Since you did such a good job of ignoring banner ads, we made them flash. Still, you ignored them, [...]

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Optimizing Your Navigational Links

March 8, 2009

Last week I heard from one of the McClatchy markets who were updating their navigation. They wanted to see if they could make some changes that would be more search friendly. It seemed like a perfect opportunity to cover a lot of ground relating to one simple question.
Most McClatchy sites, and in fact, most newspaper [...]

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Why I Altered My WordPress Code To Disable NoFollow

February 3, 2009

This morning I changed line 148 in the /wp-includes/comment-template.php removing the rel=nofollow tag.
This comes from a desire to let people who contribute thoughtful comments at my site to get some love back from me.  The decision is also partly due to the great filtering that Askimet does sniffing out blatent spam.
I am a fan of [...]

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Do You Need A Site Redesign?

January 29, 2009

I had an interesting talk this afternoon with the Innovation and Product Development guy at one of the McClatchy markets. He wants to do a site redesign. He wanted my input.
A complete redesign is a big project. It means a minimum of 4 months of hard work, and what does it get you? Let’s think [...]

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Top 5 Things For A New Website Owner To Do

January 20, 2009

Everyone needs to be on the web. Even if it’s a one page site that just lists the address and phone number of your brick and mortar store. Hopefully, you want to do a bit more that just a page with your address and phone number on it.
Small business owners need a checklist they can [...]

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