Today I found a fascinating article discussing the use of people images on your web site. It seems that where your model is looking can have a profound impact on where your visitor looks:
How a Pretty Face Can Push Visitors Away
Especially interesting is the “heat map” which tracks a visitors eye movements on a page - they compared a model looking at you and a model looking at the advertised product… guess which one performed better? Have a look.
If you blog on a regular basis, you may occasionally face the problem of wanting to post, but not knowing what to write about. Check out this list of blog topic suggestions from Chris Brogan. Pick a topic, or maybe it will kickstart your creativity and make you think of one on your own. I guess I’m working on #9!
Most of my ideas for blog entries come from my daily work of being a web developer. I like to share the techniques I find, especially the quick fixes that can give a big bang for your buck. Plus it’s nice to have a quick reference for the times I need to repeat a task… just do a quick search and I have the answer.
Other ideas come from the RSS feeds I have on the site and those I have delivered by FeedBlitz… when I find a site or article that’s particularly useful, I post about it. Probably my biggest source of fodder from RSS is via LifeHacker - they have tons of useful info for technology and life.
So, I guess all you need to do is look around, and write something about which you’re passionate. It’s likely if you’re interested, others will find it interesting, too.
One way to personalize your web site is to provide a favicon - the little icon that shows in the address bar of the browser when a visitor is on your page. You may have noticed ours… the blue diamond with a magnifying glass in it (a sign of our site to come!!). I made this by taking an image and running it through an online program which creates the required favicon.ico file. Then I uploaded it to our web site and presto! The favorite icon image appears. It’s one of those small details which can help make your site stand out from the crowd.
Here’s a great site which does a fantastic job of creating an icon from an image:
You can also draw one from scratch, if that’s your thing. Just make sure to click the “Download” link when you have something you like. Then upload it to your website (make sure it’s named favicon.ico) and you should be all set!
One of the things I found on WebsiteGrader was a section which said my incoming links were possibly being diluted, because some of the links were for www.websitecleanup.com and some were for plain old websitecleanup.com (without the www). The problem is, the search engines don’t know the difference, so the total incoming links appear to be lower than they really are. The solution is to automatically switch the non-www links into www links. I did a little research and found it’s very easy to do! All you have to do is add three lines to your .htaccess file. This is what I added for our site:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^websitecleanup\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.websitecleanup.com/$1 [R=301,L]
That’s it! We’re up and running, and now all of our inbound links will be counted properly. If you want this installed on your site, please contact us. Thanks!
If you’ve been wondering how your efforts at search engine optimization (SEO) are going, try this site:
They analyze your site and give you a score (compared to other sites they tested) and also tips on how to improve your search engine rankings. Very nice!!
Recently I found this great article about easily selecting just a piece of an image, using the wonderful, free image editor called GIMP. Sometimes you want to use just part of a picture, so here’s a way to easily select an irregularly-shaped object:
Removing Backgrounds Quickly In The GIMP
Nice!
Here’s a really nice shopping cart plugin for WordPress:
As with all shopping carts, it takes a bit of time to learn how all of the features work, and a bit of customization to make it look the way you want. You can get the cart for free, or you can upgrade to the Gold version, which gives you access to payment gateways and a couple of other features. Also with the Gold version you can add modules for member-only sites and grid view - a nice way to display your products. The Gold version costs $15 for a personal site and $250 for a business site, which is very reasonable considering the development time you’ll save by using a plugin.
Here's another great WordPress plugin which adds social bookmarking icons to each post.
You can pick which sites you want to appear, and also sort them into your preferred order. Very nice!
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