by Darren on May 14, 2012
I’ve worked with a few different companies over the years and have had the ‘pleasure’ of using a variety of different web platforms for their CMS (content management systems) and ecommerce offerings.
It still amazes me how far behind the pace some of these platforms are in terms of usability and SEO (search engine optimisation).
Some of them are so bad that it would almost be funny if they were not costing the businesses using them a lot of money!
A Bad Platform Is…
- One that makes updating content a headache and only doable by a technical person
- One that reproduces your entire website on a separate live domain which is freely accessible by humans and search engines
- One which uses horrible url’s full of meaningless querystrings (?id=xxx&page=1234…)
- One which will only let you adjust page title and meta tags on ‘top – level’ pages
- One which uses such a convoluted way of performing 301 redirects that it makes adding in manual ones virtually impossible
- One which the stock answer from the developers is ‘No’ to every change request (or even worse ‘Well, it’s on our schedule and we hope to be getting to it within the next 3 – 4 months…’)
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by Darren on February 18, 2012
With the available pool of unregistered domain names getting ever smaller a lot of new businesses end up going with longer names or decide to use one of the newer domain name extensions.
I’ve already covered why you should stick with the most commonplace extensions, and having a long domain name has its own set of drawbacks including looking spammy and being difficult for customers to remember and type in.
One of Google’s internal website quality guidelines specifically mentioned long domains with lots of hyphens as a signal that a website may be spammy or low value so it’s best to avoid them.
What option do you have then?
Well, why not consider buying a premium domain name?
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by Darren on February 14, 2012
Forced Registration Is Bad
One question that gets asked regularly is should you make customers register for an account on your website before making a purchase?
There have been lots of studies and testing into this and the outcomes are pretty conclusive, yet so many sites still get it wrong!
The short answer is that in most cases you should not force potential customers to register before making a purchase, here are the reasons why:
1. Long Forms Turn People Off
Just like in the real world, when someone is confronted with a form asking for lots of details most people are turned off.
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I’ve worked with a few different companies over the years and have had the ‘pleasure’ of using a variety of different web platforms for their CMS (content management systems) and ecommerce offerings.
