Magento is Changing...

A while back, I made a review about Magento shopping carts.  Well, it’s been 2 years and a few things have changed and a few things have stayed the same…

I had quite a few gripes against Magento shopping cart the last time I used it and I still do, but my list has shortened, but also grown.  For the Mom & Pop DIY shopping cart, Magento may be out of your league, unless you know a programmer or can figure out PHP.  On the backend, Magento is still not a user-friendly shopping cart.  However, on the front-end, Magento is one of the best shopping carts you’ll find and that’s the important part.

Security and Magento
One of the big gripes I had about Magento 3 years ago were security issues.  Thankfully, many of those issues have been resolved.  With proper hosting and data collection, Magento cart is about as secure as any shopping cart online and that’s a big improvement.  But, you need to know what you can and can not do, in order to keep Magento shopping cart PCI-DSS compliant.  The good new is, many of those issues can be solved by choosing a hosting company that’s PCI-DSS compliant.

One big fail for Magento is AVS reporting in the admin section. By default, there’s no AVS results when an order is processed and that’s HUGE! AVS results let you know if the shipping or billing address matches that of the card used for the online transaction.  Without that information, fraud is a real concern. There are ways to incorporate AVS into Magento, but as of the latest build, (1.5 CE) there is no method to show AVS for one of the more popular card processing companies and that’s a HUGE oversight!

Magento Hosting
Good luck!  Almost any server can ‘host’ Magento Shopping cart, but many are underpowered.  Think of Magento as a 2,000 lb rock.  Think of the $9 a month hosting as a car. Yes, a car will move a 2,000 lb rock, but not for long and not at anything approaching a good speed.  You need both horsepower and torque and just like in the world of cars, you’re going to pay a premium for something that will provide your with good results. I think a fair minimum price per month, for reliable Magento hosting is $25 a month and that’s if you have only a few products and only a few visitors. You’ll get what you pay for, to a point and then there’s other factors to consider as well.  Magento hosting can be a nightmare. I’ve been through about 6 hosting companies so far, I’ll post result on those in the coming weeks.

Layered Navigation
If you don’t have layered navigation, you’re behind. Magento uses layered navigation out of the box and does it well, with a little configuration.

the ASUS 1201N

I really did like my Acer One. It was the coolest little netbook I used, until now. The Asus 1201N is a little pricey for a netbook, but it’s a huge difference from the netbooks of yesterday…

Dual Core on a Netbook? I know, it sounds crazy, but yes. The Atom 330 processor is a dual core processor and while it won’t blow your hair back, it sure takes the Asus 1201N out of the realm of netbook and into the world of laptop. And it does it with style and a level of processing you don’t see in netbooks. I’m loving it!

12.1 inch screen. At only 2 inches larger than the Aspire One, it would seem the Asus 1201N wouldn’t be the much of a differnce, but it’s a huge difference – mucho! My math is rusty, but that’s about a 45% increase in screen area. It’s big enough for most uses, but small enough to be very portable.

Battery life if pretty good on the Asus 1201N even though I’ve read a lot about it being less than great, it’s better than the Aspire One battery life – that’s for sure. I am getting 3hrs+ on the battery alone and it’s good enough for me.

64bit operating systems run great on the Asus 1201N. So far, I’ve used several 64bit OS on this thing: Kubuntu, Ubuntu and Windows 7. I would normally write a how to install the OS on a netbook, but this thing is just like installing an OS on any other machine. It’s straightforward and not confusing at all. If you install Windows 7 Home Premium 64b OS, your COA number will work. You may have to call to authenticate, like I did, but it does work. You will need a 64b copy of Win7 Home Premium however. Installing from a USB took about 22 minutes – fast.

Streaming Video. This thing streams video very well, but not perfect. Despite the Nvidia ION and 4GB of RAM on a WIN7-64 OS, I can not get good performance from NetFlix streaming HD video. Regular video quality is rather good though. I don’t know if the limitation is Silverlight or not, but HD streaming video from Netlix stutters. YouTube HD looks great though, so I think the weakness is either the NetFlix codec or SilverLight.

4GB RAM. The Asus 1201N comes with 2GB of RAM, but it’s easy to upgrade to 4GB. Even thought the FFSB is only 533, the Nvidia ION can use a 800 connection to the RAM, so use 800 RAM instead of  533. You’ll be glad you did. AAnd spend the extra $15 to get the lowest latency possible.

It’s hot! Yes, the exhaust on the ASUS 1201N can be warm, to almost hot, particularly when watching streaming videos. It does get warmer at the exhaust than any other netbook or laptop I’ve used, but it’s only hot at the exhaust port and I can live with that. It won’t burn you, but you will notice it.

Overall Performance: Excellent. If you were expecting laptop performance, you’re going to be disappointed. But only a little. I’m really impressed with how much the ASUS 1201N can do. I was looking for something along the lines of the Aspire One in performance with a larger screen, but instead ended up with near laptop performance, with netbook size and weight.

Be careful when ordering. I ordered 3 Asus 1201N netbooks before I finally got the right one. That’s right, I was sent the wrong computer 3 times, by 3 different companies. Each time, I was sent the ASUS 1201PN which is a single core, single thread processor. Read the fine print and don’t be fooled.

Reflective, glass and metal: $40 product image

Product photography is an area I’ve been working with for a while and have learned a lot about what and why to shoot an item, in a particular way, not only for aesthetic reasons, but also tested placement principles to increase conversions.

For good product images, you can expect to pay $15-20 per finished image. At this price, your pictures should be suitable for web and most print ad applications. However, this price is for items which are easy to photograph. Outdoor shoots are more expensive as are items which are difficult to photograph: glass, metals, transparent and reflective materials.

The DIY product photography for web copy is going to run about $3000 in initial cost (camera, lens, lighting, for a minimum setup and that’s assuming you already have the graphic computer and software. Then you have to take all the pictures, process and photoshop the product pictures and then your product images are ready for the web or print.

It’s often less expensive to hire a product photographer to take all your product images than to do everything yourself. Many product photographers will give you a daily rate, which runs around $1000 and will return you anywhere from 50 to 80 quality images, ready to use. Of course, finding and getting the products to the photographer can be task in and of itself. Thankfully, a lot of product photographers work via UPS or FedEx and return the items to you when the shoots are complete. Expect a turn around anywhere from 8 to 14 days, depending on the products, number of items,distance, etc. Be sure to use a bonded and insured photographer if shipping your items for photographing.

Where to find a product photographer? Well, they’re not easy to find, as it turns out. I’ve used a few photographers, mainly portrait, wedding and event photographers and I guess static objects just weren’t their medium. Product photography is meticulous and calculated where most photography captures the moment, product photographers create the moment. It takes a different kind of photographer to create a moment rather than capture one. With FedEx, you can use the same people Tiffany’s uses to shoot their million dollar jewelry, of course, they’re just a little higher than the $20 per image companies.

…if the product photographer has to iron clothes, they charge extra

A good example of a less expensive product photograph $10 image

There are product photographers who aren’t as expensive, but their work isn’t as striking as the more expensive photographer, but they turn out a very nice product at a very reasonable price, usually $10 – 14 per image (40 image minimum is standard). These images are not really suitable for gloss print publications, but they’re great for web, fliers, newsprint and television.

Keep in mind the garbage-in-garbage-out for product photography. If you send a pair of scuffed up shoes, your images won’t be as good. Photoshop and hiding flaws can only do so well in high resolution photographs.

For help finding a reputable drop-ship product photographer, check out.

Product Shooters
1019 3rd Ave South
Nashville, TN
615-259-9822

ASPDotNetStoreFront SWF Image Viewer Popup

SWF Image Viewer Demo (this is a live site, so if you order something, you will be charged!)

If you are using ASPDotNetStoreFront for your shopping cart, then you know how the popup image viewer looks and to me, it doesn’t look all that great. After working with ASPDNSF for some time, I am finally starting to ‘get it’ and I thought I would share some of my secrets for working with this shopping cart.

You’re going to need a little working knowledge of ASPDNSF to do this, so if you’re not comfortable doing this yourself, contact me and I can set this up for your site. The code provided below does work, but is not as complete as it could be… (I can’t give away all my secrets). If you need help setting this up and would like the complete package (including SWF viewer), I charge a flat rate of $250 to set this up and it comes with everything you’ll need, plus a few extra tweaks you’re not going to find in this guide.

First of all, you’re going to need a SWF for making a gallery page. I used Zoomify Design as it’s inexpensive, simple to use and works very well. Zoomify Design costs $29 and it’s worth every penny to me. I am going to assume you know how to use Zoomify and if you don’t, read the documentation. It’s pretty easy and once you get it set up, it’s easy to make the files for your call to a SWF popup image viewer.

Create a flash directory to store your files on your server. I created my flash folder inside the root of the website, but you can choose almost any location, as long as the folder is readable.

You’re going to need to have a custom product.xml package. You can just copy one of existing product.XML packages for your products. I used product.SimpleProduct.xml.config Be sure and give your XML a new name, I use product.Flash.xml.config

Edit the XML package and look for this line of code in your XML package. It will appear in several place and it’s best to edit them all.

<xsl:value-of select=”aspdnsf:LookupProductImage(ProductID, ImageFilenameOverride, SKU, ‘medium’, 0, $AltText)” disable-output-escaping=”yes” />

Comment out the code so it looks like:

<!–<xsl:value-of select=”aspdnsf:LookupProductImage(ProductID, ImageFilenameOverride, SKU, ‘medium’, 0, $AltText)” disable-output-escaping=”yes” />–>

It’s better to comment it out, in case you make a mistake, it will be easier to fix. Right below the code you just commented out, place this bit of code to call the SWF.

<a href=”flash/{ProductID}/viewer.htm” target=”_blank”><img src=”images/product/medium/{ProductID}.jpg” /><br /> <center>Multi Image Viewer</center></a>

The areas in red are the only changes you will need to make a change to the code to make it work. Change the href path to reflect the location of the folder and the name of the htm file that calls the swf within the product folder. The {ProductID} pulls the dynamic file name for each image so leave that in tact. This code can be modified to suit your needs. Now upload the product.XML file into your XML folder on your webserver.

Choose the item you want to use the SWF multi image viewer. Each product has a unique user ID number and that’s what you’re going to name the folder that contains the SWF viewer and image files. Process the images per the directions for Zoomify and upload the folder into the flash folder on the website. (eg: upload the folder 2345 to the /flash directory on your website.

Go to your edit product page and choose the XML package you created for the item and you’re done. Be sure and check out the new page to make sure it looks the way you want and everything is working. A few lines of code, a little preperation and you’ve turned your vanilla ASPDNSF image viewer into a powerful and dynamic image viewing system that’s going to increase sales and make your customers very happy.

Here is a working example on a live site.

If you would like to have me do this for you and give you the complete package, with everything ready to go, contact me and I will try and get back with you as soon as possible. Please leave a phone number and a good time to contact you.

In the last few years, the ultra portable notebook market has really taken off.  The ultra portable notebooks rest firmly somewhere between a PDA and a full size (full power) notebook we all know and love.  Until very recently, the Ultra portable notebooks have been little more than glorified PDAs with a computing power on par with high end cellphones.   Combined with small screens, low power and micro storage , the ultra portable ‘sub notebook’ wasn’t ready for the mainstream and was the realm of the micro Linux tech communities and people who built their own computers.  Thanks to some recent additions to the sub notebook market, the new ultra portables are ready for the masses.

One of the greatest features of these ultra portable notebooks (sub notebooks) is the SSD (Solid State Drive).  Not only are SSDs much lighter than their spinning cousins, SSD drives aren’t prone to failure from shock like standard platter hard drives.  There are no moving parts in a SSD, so those little bumps aren’t going to scratch and damage the solid state drive like the standard hard drive.  Solid state drives also use about 5% of the power of the standard HDD and this means a big boost in battery life. The problem with the SSD is the cost, these things are expensive and because of the limitations, most ultraportables have store capacities as low as 2GB.

The real attraction to the ultra portable notebook market is the ultra portability.  You’ve seen pictures on the net, but until you have one in your hands, you won’t believe how small they really are.  I mean small!  These are smaller than most books and will fit easily into a purse.  How’s that for portability!

Ultra Portable : The New Beginning

In the uber competitive laptop market, Asus came in under the radar not too long ago with the Asus EEE PC 700 series.  A small ‘sub notebook’, the Asus EEE PC was fitted with with a diminutive  7″ screen, miniature keyboard and the power to match.  It was a really cool mini laptop, but with a 900mhz CPU, 512MB RAM and a 2GB SDD, the Asus EEE PC just doesn’t have the horsepower that consumers need in a laptop, even if the laptop is tiny.

Asus EEE PC 900 Series

Now this is what I’m talking about, 8.9″ LCD finally made viewing the ultra portable laptops a little easier.  Storage increased from a ridiculous 2GB to an acceptable 12GB model.  But what I was really missing from the EEE PC series was the Intel Atom processors.  The Asus EEE PC still didn’t have enough ‘umph’ to make it much more than a PDA and could not handle the pressure of mainstream computing needs.  The Asus EEE PC 900 series still used the 900mhz processors.  With the lack of CPU, the Asus 900 series was still little more than a internet device and not really functional for speedy application use.  And even though the screen got bigger, the Asus EEE PC 900 series still had a tiny keyboard that’s hard to use.

Acer Aspire One

Finally, something better! The Acer Aspire One picked up where Asus left off.  Using the best features of the EEE PC, Acer’s Aspire One starts with the 8.9″ screen, which at 1024 width, is wide enough for all websites and allows enough screen to do some real work.  And that’s about where the similarities end to the Asus EEE PC.  Asus fell behind with the 900mhz processor, but Acer jumped in the market with an Intel Atom 1.6GHz CPU in the base model of the Acer Apire One.  This is HUGE!  You can actually run graphics programs with large files and not have a crash.  Another area where Acer must have been listening to the Asus crowd is the keyboard.  Asus users had been complaining about the tiny keyboards since the 700 and the 900 had the same keyboard size – ugh!  One of the features many users of the Aspire One like the most, seems to be the bigger keyboard.  Rather than the tiny keyboard of the EEE PC, the Aspire One’s keyboard is a 95% keyboard.  That means, the keys are more like a real keyboard and you can ‘touch type’ a lot easier.

Asus EEE PC vs. Acer Aspire One

CPU:  Acer Aspire One beat the Asus EEE PC 900 by a mile!
Acer Aspire 1 = 1.6GHz Intel Atom
Asus EEE PC 900 =  900mhz

Screen: Acer Aspire One beat the Asus EEE PC 900, but it was close.  The Crystal Brite screen on the Aspire One made Acer the winner:
Acer Aspire 8.9″ with Crystal Brite
Asus 8.9″

Storeage*: Asus EEE PC 900 beats the Acer Aspire One, but only in the SSD models
Acer Aspire One 8GB SSD
Asus EEE PC 12GB

Additional Storeage: Acer Aspire One beats the Asus EEE PC 900
Acer Aspire One: 3 USB and 2 SDHC slots
Asus EEE PC 900: 2 USB 1 SD slot

Looks: The Acer Aspire One looks and feels better than the Asus EEE PC 900
Acer Aspire One : Solid feel and nice looking.
Asus EEE PC 900: If it didn’t show fingerprints so bad, it would have been a tie.

Layout:  Acer Aspire owns Asus EEE PC 900
This one isn’t really fair.  The Acer Aspire one is 24mm wider than the Asus EEE PC 900.  While that’s only about the width of my thumb, Acer made the most of it by using a larger keyboard layout which make typing much easier.  Also, the Acer Aspire has the additional USB and SDHC slots and that’s something you don’t want to under estimate with the small SSD in these.

Overall, I choose the Acer Aspire One.  It has more power, bigger keyboard, more storage options and a great desin.  After you get yours, be sure and check around the forums for all the tweaks, mods and accesories that are going to make the Acer Aspire One the next ultrportable to beat in 2009!

Aspire One Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz Mini-Notebook – Seashell White Intel Atom N270 1.60GHz 512MB DDR2 533 SDRAM and 8GB Solid-State Drive 8.9″ WSVGA LCD Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 Fast Ethernet 802.11b/g Linux AspireOne

High gas prices got you down?  Take advantage of high gas prices and shop online.  With gas hitting record highs, the economy slowing down and everyone pinching pennies, it’s time to position your online store to take advantage of high gas prices.

Save Money: Shop Online

If you don’t think $4 a gallon gas is hurting your customers, think again.  But rather than looking at high gas prices as a negative, it’s time to make some lemon aide!  Shopping online can actually save your customers a lot of money, so use it!  Even when you figure in the cost of shipping, it’s probably cheaper for your customers to shop online than it is for them to drive to your store.  And if you offer free shipping, it’s easier than ever to shop online!

Save Energy : Shop Online

You may be thinking this rather obvious approach is easily seen by your customers, but it’s never a bad idea to state the obvious.  I remember seeing “Vegetarian Bread” at the grocery store the other day.  Only one bread maker was marked as vegetarian, but I bet there were more than a few breads on the isle that were suitable for vegetarians, however only one brand used this marketing approach, which seemed to work as their space was almost empty.  Saving energy is a selling point, so use it!

When the mailman delivers your customer’s package, they didn’t drive all that way to deliver one package.  The truck is loaded with items that are going to other houses.  This is energy efficient product ‘car pooling’.  It saves energy, natural resources and if your mail truck is like the one that delivers to my house, it’s also ‘green’.

The Online Store

Yes, the online store is not only saving money, energy and the planet, it’s a way to keep your store open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  And with an online store, you’re not serving just your local customers, you’ll be serving customers all over the globe!  As energy prices get higher, more and more people are shopping online to save moeny and time.

eCommerce : Online Store

If you don’t already have an online store, it’s time to get one.  Most online stores pay for themselves within a few months and can really add a great source of revenue to your business.  And if you don’t have time to manage your online store, we can manage your site for you. Give us a call or fill out the contact form and we can get you started with online sales and jump start your business for much less than you think.

When you finally choose to have a website, the first thing you think about is the domain name. Everyone does this. But before you rush into a frenzy to grab the next million dollar domain, take the time to make the right hosting choices. There are a million and one hosting companies online and while it would be nice toi say they’re all good, it just isn’t true. Some hosting companies are worthless and will hurt your web presence. Choose the wrong host and you could be losing visitors and customers. Get the right host and you can set your site on cruise control.

Host Reliability – Up Time

Number 1 question should be how much downtime does a host have. Believe me, when your site is down because of the hosting company, you will not like it. I’ve tried hosting companies where my site was down 4 days in a row and that is HUGE! Most major hosting companies today have excellent up-time, but make sure you’re using a major hosting company – one of the big boys. I now use two different hosting companies for my clients and both have exceptional uptime.

All in One and One for All

Whoever you choose to host your website, buy your domain with them too. The few dollars you may save today are not going to be worth the hassle when it comes time to renew. Trust me on this, a user name and password you use once a year or less is pretty easy to forget. It’s not a lot of fun even trying to remember the password you haven’t used in a year and now you can’t even remember your first pet’s name. Integrate your hosting company and your domain hosting, even if it does cost a few dollars more. has good rates and a really easy to work with domain managing system.

It’s tough to beat GoDaddy.com for inexpensive hosting and domain registration. If you are looking to host a simple website and that’s it, GoDaddy.com is probably your best choice

Linux or Windows

Unlike operating systems, Linux dominates the world of web hosting. If your website is going to be some simple HTML and not a lot of fancy-shmansy gadgets, it doesn’t really matter which web host platform you choose. But when you need internet hosting for your web application, it matters. Internet hosting for web applications are usually platform specific and something you need to know. I prefer Linux web hosting servers, but I have to say, I am very impressed with the new Windows web servers. I really boils down to preference or what your web application requires.

Additional Web Host Features

Storage and bandwidth are always a big concern for websites. Right now, GoDaddy.com has web host plan with 300GB of storage and and 3,000 GB of bandwidth transfer for $4.29 a month. Do you have any idea what that kind of storage and bandwidth cost 10 years ago – sheesh! 3,000 GB of transfer is huge and at that price, it’s just a fantastic bargain. Another excellent value is BlueHost
web hosting. This company offers unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth for less than $10 a month.

Bottom Line Web Hosting

As far as I am concerned, there are only 2 web hosting companies I use: BlueHost.com and GoDaddy.com Almost every other hosting company I have used has either suffered from too much down time, had horrible customer support and/or had reliability issues. After being online for over 13 years and even running my own hosting company, I’ve seen companies come and go and GoDaddy and BlueHost are the best at what they do.

Enjoy

BlueHost Web Hosting – $6.95/mo!

Magento - Open Source Cart

After first discovering Magento a few weeks ago, I was really looking forward to spending some time exploring this shopping cart. When I finally had enough time to really look into the cart, I was excited by what I saw. Very clean layouts and a nice user interface, I couldn’t wait to get down and dirty.

Magento PABP PCI-DSS Compliant?

While searching for PCI-DSS shopping carts, I ran across Magento eCommerce shopping cart. What really got my attention was open source. I love open source software. And an open source shopping cart with PCI-DSS compliance – I nearly fainted. But alas, Magento is NOT PCI-DSS compliant. But I read a thread at their forum that Magento was pursuing PCI-DSS compliance testing. Maybe they would be compliant in the future – I hope. But at this time, the lack of PCI-DSS compliance is a major obstacle Magento needs to overcome to big a big player in the ecommerce shopping cart future.

Installing Magento

Magento’s documentation could use some work. Installation instructions do not come with the download and the directions for installing Magento on their website are not accurate or complete. It took me a while to get Magento to install. I had to download a patch that was several months old, which I felt should have been included in the install. But maybe they’re busy with PCI-DSS compliance testing, so I gave them some slack. You’re going to have to wade through the forum to get complete directions for installing and that is a bit of a pain. I have to CHMOD a lot of files and folders to get the cart to install and then I had to do more CHMOD to get the administrator backend to function, a problem that many others seemed to have from reading the forum. Many of the CHMODs were not in the install directions and had to be discovered by searching the forums for people who had similar problems with installing Magento. Overall, the install is fairly easy, but if you’re not comfortable with creating SQL databases and changing file permissions, get someone to install it for you.

Search Engine Optimization

Magento is ready to go for SEO. The cart makes SEO as simple as any cart I’ve used and that’s a major plus. You have complete control over the product URLs and that’s amazing. And it’s not an file edit, you can change the URL in Magento’s administrator access panels. One of my current favorite shopping carts, which costs over $1295 has nothing on Magento’s SEO abilities. Dare I say, Magento has ‘the best’ SEO capability of any shopping cart I have ever used. Yes, I dare say it. With Magento, SEO is both easy and powerful. Magento has the easiest and most powerful SEO control in the administrator panel of any shopping cart I have ever used. And remember, this is ‘out of the box’ no customization needed. Brilliant SEO Magento.

Features and Style

Well, I have to say, it sure looks like Magento did a great job on designing a default storefront. Of course, it’s basic, but it’s not ugly and that’s a major step up from any open source shopping cart I’ve used. Magento gets extra credit and a gold star for default buttons and colors that are stylish, easy to read and made finding the next step to purchase easy. I was really impressed, they spent some time building a piece of software that was appealing to the customer and they did a fantastic job. On the backend, the administrator side, the layout and design are fairly intuitive and thanks to JS, you have everything at your finger tips… so to speak. The template system is promoted by Magento as being easy to use, but I haven’t tested it yet as most shopping carts are customizable as long as you understand the system.

Adding Attributes and Options in Magento

I couldn’t seem to figure out how to add attributes, and three days after starting this review of Magento, I still don’t know how to add products and attributes. It’s really bery confusing and I even watched the demo videos. Yes, Magento has instructional videos! To be fair, I haven’t had a lot of time to play with the cart, but after several hours, I can’t get products to have size and color options – grrrrr!!!  Maybe once I figure it out, I will feel differently.

Magento – Give Us Security !

One of the biggest reasons I’ve stopped playing with Magento is what I consider a SERIOUS SECURITY FLAW! I tried processing a few test orders, just to see how it went and I noticed, in the admin back end, you don’t have the customer’s IP available. I’ve never used a shopping cart that did not include the IP of the customer. I won’t process an order with a bad IP. Getting orders to a address in the US and find out the IP is from Ghana… Why Magento does not include the customer’s IP baffles me. I think it would be fairly easy to add IP to the orders and read in the forum that adding the IP was being looked into, but the thread was a year old and obviously, the issue hadn’t been addressed.

Magento – More to Come

I’m not finished with my review for Magento, but I have to figure out how to add attributes before I can continue with a complete review.  So far, Magento looks really good, but fails miserably is some areas. However, despite the IP problem and the attribute issue with Magento, I can’t wait to explore this shopping cart more. The wealth of features and abilities may make the shortcomings worth the hurdles.

Magento Shopping Cart Review Part 2 Coming Very Soon!

All the search engine optimization in the world isn’t going to get you to the top of the search engine results page if you don’t have the content. You may get there for a little while using less than ethical methods, but you will find your rank will drop , maybe to never rise again.

Have Good Content

The number one thing web masters and managers can do to increase SERP is to have good content. Again, to get the best results in a search engine result page, you need to have quality content. How do so many people miss this? After more than 10 years working online, this is still the number one reason web sites do not perform.

I was contacted to work on a site where the owners were not happy with their search engine results page ranking. It took about 2 seconds for me to figure out why the flash landing page wasn’t getting results in search engines. The whole site was Flash – everything. And if that were not bad enough, there was not title, no keywords and no description. Wow.

But what if your content is solid? What can you do then?

Get Better Results without Changing Content

The Title Tag – Judging a Book by the Cover
Of all the ‘mistakes’ I see people make, the title is one that still makes me scratch my head. I’m sure your business name is important to you, but unless you have built brand recognition, the average internet user could care less about your website’s name. Don’t make this mistake when choosing your page’s title. While many feel header tags aren’t as important as they once were, the title tag (<title>) still remains on of the most powerful header tags you can use.

Bad: Jimmy Joe’s Discount Online
Better: Discount Taxidermy by Jimmy Joe
Best: Discount Rodent Taxidermy and Exterminators – Jimmy Joe’s Charleston, SC

Remember, your page title is what will show in search engine results. The first title isn’t effective. Who knows what Jimmy Joes does. The second title, while maybe not appealing, is better. And the third title is the best. Not only do you know what Jimmy Joes does, you know where he’s located and that’s important. Be descriptive and specif when writing your titles. Visitors aren’t looking for mystery, they’re looking for answers.

To Describe or not Describe, that is the Question

The description meta tag (<meta description>)has kind of lost its position of glory it once had, but it can still be a valuable tool for search engine results. If you’re using a description, you have to make sure it matches your content. Having the same description for every single page on your website isn’t going to help your rankings and there’s some debate about whether it will actually hurt your site’s rank. In most search engines, the meta description is what you will see below the title in the search engine result page. This is important, your description needs to be informative and relevant.

Jimmy Joe’s description might be something like: We kill and stuff Rodents. Please visit Jimmy Joe’s for all your rodent infestation and axidermy needs. Conveniently located in Charleston, SC

Combined with the title, the search engine Result might look something like

Discount Rodent Taxidermy and Exterminators – Jimmy Joe’s Charleston, SC
We kill and stuff Rodents. Please visit Jimmy Joe’s for all your rodent infestation and taxidermy needs. Conveniently located in Charleston, SC

Well, if you ever needed to have you rodents stuffed and mounted, Jimmy Joe might be your man!

There are a few ‘tricks’ you can use with the descriptions that will help you gain a slight edge on your competition. Be brief, use 20 to 30 words in your description at most. Write in complete sentences. You do not separate with commas in the description. Use key phrases.

Valid Keywords – Don’t Spam

Keep your keywords short. Between 5 and 8 relative keywords are all you want in you meta keywords. And please, make sure the keywords are actually in the content. If you use too many keywords, some search engines may actually rank your page lower for ‘spamming keywords’. There’s a find line between too many and too few.

Jimmy Joe’s keywords: (rodents, taxidermy, exterminators, Charleston sc, infestation)

Those would be some good keywords for Jimmy Joe’s website – descriptive, succinct and accurate.

It’s all Gravy

Getting a good result in search engines takes time. There are methods you can use to speed up the process, but make sure you’re not using a method that will result in your page ranking even lower or possibly even being banned from a search engine. Just remember, good content, accurate description, relative keywords and a good title. If you follow those simple little rules, you will go a long way to the number one spot on the search engine results page.

Honestly, I have never really known exactly what web 2.0 was. I’ve seen some great definitions and a few flashy pages, but when it comes to an OED definition, for what web 2.0 actually “is”… you would think a politician wrote it.

Web 2.0 – Where Do We Go From Here?

OK, I do actually have an idea about what web 2.0 is or was. Think rounded corners, gradient colors, simple backgrounds and Ajax functions. Web 2.0 was supposed to be interactive and give the end user more benefits and choices. Web 2.0 also marked the great leap in bandwidth. The average user went from a 56kbps connection to a 1mbps. This had a huge impact on both users and the way the internet is seen. But Web 2.0 has fallen short on many of it’s promises and totally ignored the newest medium of the internet.

Web 2.0 – A Story of Conflicting Technology

Another great feature of the web 2.0 was user interfaces. Ajax is changing the way users interact with the web. This is both a positive and a negative in my opinion. While the use of javascript has increased, the percentage of users who are using javascript have decreased – interesting.  While web developers were churning out the latest smooth flowing Ajax applications,  technology, in the form of the Firefox browser, gave users the freedom to choose to use javascript or not.  So, while Web 2.0 was using more and more javascript, users were not as likely to be able to use these new pages. That’s quite a conundrum.  Many web pages that required javascript fell into the trap of thinking their content would be good enough to catch users with graphics and interaction. Many web sites saw a drop in visitors. Not only was javascript required to use the pages, navigation became clumsy and non-linear.  Users were lost in navigation and struggled to find content. This wasn’t supposed to be the result of Web 2.0

Web 2.0 also saw the first real web enabled mobile devices. Users were able to connect to the internet using their cell phones, but cell phones have very limited viewing areas, slower downloads and a very limited screen size. Many websites had rebuilt their websites to be “user friendly”, but what about cell phone browsers? Many phone browsers couldn’t handle the increased width of pages or the Ajax functions. Instead, cell phone users were left with slow loadings, difficult to navigate and error pages. Was this what Web 2.0 was supposed to be?

Flash content saw a dramatic rise with Web 2.0  Any SEO person will tell you, Flash and search engine optimization do not play well together. Search engines can not see the content and Flash and that’s really a shame. Flash is an excellent methods for delivering information to users in a fixed medium. But often, Flash websites have missed the point of using Flash. Flash should be used sparingly, not as a website platform. Sure, big names can get away with using only Flash, but they have built brand recognition. The little guys have suffered from over using Flash content and found their sites suffering the wrath of Google SERP.

Web 3.0 or 2.0 SP1 – Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back

Before we start thinking about Web 3.0, we should really look long and hard at what Web 2.0 failed to deliver: a predictable, cross platform  user experience. Web 2.0 focused on features rather than usability and uniform performance across browsers. Where Web 1.0 was HTML and a little javascript, Web 2.0 relied heavily upon javascript, Ajax, Active-X plugins and highly specialized applications. Web 2.0 focused on technology rather than users. Have you ever clicked the back button in your browser when navigating Ajax pages – uggh!

Getting Ready for Web 3.0

Before web designers and programmers begin to think about Web 3.0, they must learn from the mistakes of Web 2.0  Web pages need to work for all browsers, operating systems and screens. Cell phones are an important market that must be addressed. Cell phone users need to be able to view your web pages and they need to be easy to navigate. Don’t rely on javascript. Content is king and so many of the Ajax pages render nothing, confusing results or even worse, a page telling you to turn on cookies and javascript.

Web 2.0 – The Aftermath

Faster connections, more users and less compatibility seems to be the big result of the Web 2.0 movement. I love all the new functions that javascript allows, but Ajax has been over utilized for many users and new mediums. Cellphones, PDAs and small form factor computers are becoming more and more popular. Screen resolutions have gotten bigger and smaller at the same time. Website that cater to the widescreen LCD and the cellphone screen while maintaining a site that still works without javascript are the real winners from Web 2.0

Web 3.0 – Back to the Basics

The good thing about all the problems that occurred with Web 2.0 is they’re all fixable using Web 1.0 methods.  .htaccess can be used to redirect screen resolutions to the proper pages. CSS is a very effective method to achieve most of the goals people are now using Ajax to make (with a few notable exceptions).  Many times, web sites are using Ajax when CSS would accomplish the same goals have a greater compatability across browsers and still render in cell phones and browsers without javascript enabled.  Web 3.0 needs to be about usability and content and not about new features, Flash and landing pages. With a few simple changes to , Web 3.0 could be the next greatest internet revolution and the users will be the ones seeing the benefits.