Month: November 2004

The market for domain names is unlike any other. The supply of domains is unlimited. They were running out of the .com domain name version. So they’ve started selling many other extensions. The selected TLDs are: .aero (for the air-transport industry), .biz (for businesses), .coop (for cooperatives), .info (for all uses), .museum (for museums), .name (for individuals), and .pro (for professions). They’re still selling like hot cakes. In a sense it’s like the ‘roll-your-own’ phenomenon. Anyone can make up a domain name and provided no one else has ‘bought’ it then they can pay for it and it exists.

There’s an interesting thread in the Cre8asite Forums that got me thinking more on domain names. Someone is frustrated that his boss wants to optimize a website for the search engines with no domain name at all. Well the boss isn’t as wrong as he seems on this question of domain names.

Why does everyone want one? I believe this stems largely from two popular misconceptions. The first is that a domain name is worth something. Well yes if the domain name is business.com or sex.com or man.com, perhaps that’s true. However the vast majority of domain names have value only to their creator.

The second misconception is that search engines place some value on domain names in ranking websites for keyword searches. Domain names probably have as much influence with the search engines as those keyword metatags. That influence is close to zero. Some people are convinced that their keyword-rich domain name was the factor that increased their search engine ranking. However rarely are tests done to see whether it was the domain name or the content or the backlinks text.

Domain names are important in bringing some visitors to company websites, but that requires a careful choice of company name in the first place. Even the experts often get the choice of their domain name wrong. A better approach is to choose your company name and your domain name so that you “own” that domain name on the Internet. In other words, typing that domain name without the extension in a search engine field will produce your website at the top of the list.

Few domain names pass that test. Most are really just a way of someone feeling a warm glow that they are getting their 15 minutes of fame. There are other and perhaps better ways. In Canada for example you can give recognition to the name of someone by dedicating a piece of the Trans Canada Trail. Dedicating 1 metre of the 18,078,000 metres of the trail to a given name costs $ 50 Canadian. That’s about what it costs to have your own personalized number plate for your automobile in some regions. Or for about the same cost, you can create your own domain name. It’s an interesting speculation as to which of these, Trail dedication, automobile “vanity plate” or domain name will give the best visibility.

There is a real war brewing in the Web browser world. Wars create victims in some of the most amazing ways. Here’s some thoughts about some of these victims.

Internet Explorer has been slowly losing market position, given the significant security concerns, sometimes expressed even by government agencies. The trend seems inevitable. For example, only 73% of visitors to the SMM website in September and October were using a version of Internet Explorer. The choice of Web browser can influence many other associated activities so it’s a lucrative market to enter. Even Google was rumoured to be considering its own Web browser although that has since been denied. The security concerns are tough for Microsoft to handle although the aversion to change of most users will slow any exodus.

The new kid on the block is Firefox 1.0, now just released with increasing hype and publicity. If significant numbers of potential customers are switching to a different Web browser, it is important that the company website works for them. As Firefox itself notes, many “blue-chip” websites may have been set up to work with Internet Explorer. Such websites will need to ‘upgrade’ to work for all customers.

Sometimes the changes are likely to be small. For example, as of today November 18th the website for Weightwatchers shows a Site Requirements page when viewed with Firefox. This suggests that cookies and javascript must be enabled, even when both are already enabled. The only way to view the website is with another Web browser. This irritation could be easily corrected once the Web designer realizes that potential customers may be coming via this new Web browser.

However there is a more fundamental and very much more important issue at play here.

Firefox and Internet Explorer are based on fundamentally opposing philosophies about Web design standards. Firefox assumes that Web design standards will be followed and is fairly unforgiving if they are not. The Internet Explorer browser does not itself always follow the standards. In some cases, Web designers have had to do patches to get a website that follows the standards to also display well in IE. So some websites that display reasonably in Internet Explorer may look very different when viewed with Firefox. For some unfortunately the Firefox result can be most unattractive.

This possibly didn’t matter when IE had 95% of the Web browser market. You might only be losing 1 in 20 of your customers because your website didn’t work. Now for some company websites, you may be dealing with a much higher proportion of potential customers lost. So more and more web designers will become aware of the standards and will try to make their websites compatible with the standards.

The Microsoft Internet Explorer philosophy is clearly set out in the IEblog. As you can read there,
We’ve had more than a few comments suggesting that … we cater to those people who don’t code their pages correctly, or people who otherwise didn’t do things the right way. These comments frequently go on to suggest that we (the IE team) should use our market position to force people to fix their broken stuff.
…
We feel it is vitally important for web sites and applications that worked with yesterday’s IE work with today’s IE, and continue to work with tomorrow’s IE. We feel this is a deeply held expectation by the millions of IE users.
There is the implicit assumption that it is all the non-Microsoft Web designers who have created this legacy of non-conforming websites. However Microsoft is partly to blame in devising a Web browser that does not conform with standards.

So who is the biggest victim now? Well of course Microsoft itself. If they are wise, there should be high-level strategic meetings to review their stance. What they’re saying is that anything that works with the current IE is acceptable? So what deviations from standards are acceptable? Do you have to set up some new “Loose Standards” to define what is now acceptable? They’re also saying this will be their position … for ever. You see the horns of the dilemma that Microsoft is on. It’s a tough position.

If the marketplace moves to more standards-compliant websites, what kind of pressures does that put on Microsoft?

In a thread at Cre8asite entitled, “How well do companies do web marketing?“, DianeV took me to task for creating the word “webmastering“. She was quite right. It isn’t in the dictionary, although you may be able to guess what meaning was intended if I substitute the phrase “Web mastery“. Clearly it’s the ability to use the Web (Internet) to achieve your goals.

Of course one of the most celebrated Forums on the web is the Webmaster World Forum. So is this skill practiced only by the type of people who visit such a Forum? I think not. The Internet is now the principal method of communication for a good slice of business activity. So, many people should be ‘Web masters’. It’s not just that guy in IT who looks after the website. It’s intriguing how that Cre8asite thread has developed. It today is in a discussion about why more marketing people don’t get involved in Web marketing.

Certainly marketing people need to be involved, but I think there is a much wider and more important group of people who need to be involved. I’ll take the population of business people involved in Manufacturing and Wholesale Products in the Province of Quebec in Canada as an example. Luckily there is an excellent database of such companies maintained by iCRIQ, an agency of the Quebec Government. Here’s a profile of the companies involved with respect to size.

Note that only 6% of companies have more than 100 employees. Presumably most of these companies are large enough to have marketing departments. 22% have between 21 and 100 employees. Perhaps say a quarter of these might have a marketing department. 72% of companies have 20 or less employees. Summarising, probably 7 out of 8 companies do not have a marketing department.

For these 7 out of 8 companies, it falls to the owner or a partner to be the masters of the Web. That’s the new reality and the new challenge. Interestingly the various Forums involved in Usability, SEM Web Design and related fields quite often get highly technical. However the biggest group needing help to become effective Web masters are all these company owners and senior managers.

Related: Webmaster, an obsolete concept

Tags: webmaster, Internet marketing

The following is a true, sad story. Congratulations are due to a new website owner involved in business communications. Unfortunately commiserations are also necessary too.

Yesterday one of the many spam e-mail messages I receive only had a 85% spam score as decided by my spam filter software, K9. Could this be a false negative? I hadn’t requested this e-mail message but I checked it out anyway.

It was a very well produced HTML message that was a very inviting invitation to visit a new website. The website came on line November 1st so this message on November 9 was very timely. The website home page when visited had a very similar look to the e-mail message, so I was somewhat impressed. So far, so good.

I’ll come back shortly to what I saw in the website. Later in the day I was searching in iCRIQ, a government database of manufacturing and service companies in Quebec. My search was on some products involved in business communications. I was most surprised to see that the search results now included banner ads. Even more surprising, by coincidence there was a banner ad for the company with the new website.

So first my congratulations to this website owner. So many website owners assume that their website will miraculously bring in sales leads. So many are also disappointed as time passes without results. This particular company realized that you’ve got to be proactive and do some other things as well to help boost the traffic. It will cost time, effort and possibly cash but the ROI (Return on Investment) on this Internet marketing will far outstrip the ROI for other marketing initiatives.

So why did I mention commiserations. Well it’s all to do with that website. You work hard to get visitors so, when they do arrive, they should have a positive experience that encourages them to contact the company. Unfortunately it’s all too easy to make an attractive website, but there are many more skills involved in making a website that generates sales. Let me just mention some of the problems in this case. In Quebec, visitors may be French-speaking or English-speaking. So there was a choice: ‘Français‘ or ‘English‘. I moved my mouse towards the English link but immediately saw only the words ‘Available Soon’. All this effort to get me here and then this let-down. Not a good way of introducing me to the company.

Not to worry, I’m persistent and also French-speaking. So I explored the French web pages. Again many problems surfaced. The biggest is that all the pages are in Frames. So here is outdated technology that will make it very unlikely that search engines will rank the web pages highly for relevant keywords. Human visitors will also have problems in bookmarking web pages or printing them. Then the Usability aspects of the website were not very effective. Visitors might well not know how to move around the website. The screen seemed somewhat cluttered and it was very unclear where to click to move on. Even in French, the Portfolio, an important tool to convince potential clients, was also ‘coming soon’.

Unfortunately this is a true story. This company knew that a website alone was not enough. They did not realize that those essential proactive web marketing activities will only be as effective as the associated website.

Well it’s not just the British who are not very enthusiastic about ***. I guess it’s probably true for most world citizens.

The *** I’m talking about here are those little asterisks that you find around forms on some web pages. Usually there’s a single asterisk, often incredibly tiny, that indicates an ‘Obligatory Field’. In other words, you must put an entry in this field. If you don’t, then a reminder web page comes up that informs you that unless you insert the missing items you cannot proceed beyond this point.

Of course, there’s no check on whether you have made a typo in what was typed. All that is necessary is some entry. So why bother? It’s a needless hassle for the web page visitor and doesn’t provide any guarantee that useful information is being provided. Of course if a financial transaction is involved, then some information is an absolute necessity. In this case, the * is appropriate and useful. However in all other cases, little is gained by making fields obligatory.

It’s that usual two way table again: what do you win versus what do you lose for each of two alternatives. With obligatory fields, you do get entries for each of those fields, but you may irritate someone who inadvertently forgets an item. They may decide not to proceed. Without obligatory fields, you may or may not get entries for all the fields, but you’ll never irritate someone who chooses not to complete an entry. Through this, you may well get more responses. In neither case is the data obviously more correct.

It’s easy to specify obligatory fields in forms throughout any website, so there may be a natural tendency to specify at least a small number. This is probably unnecessary and may cause lower response rates. Most people will fill in as correctly as they can what they regard as reasonable data. So why not go with what they naturally provide?

In short, let’s keep *** out of our web pages.

Washing Detergents seem to be sold more by what appears on the outside of the box, than by the attributes of what is in the box. It’s tough to do a real test of one powder versus another. Equally it’s becoming tough to know what is inside the Search Engine ‘box’.

Microsoft now seems to be confirming that it’s what’s on the box that counts. As noted, “The computer and software giant recently revealed that it was putting personalisation at the heart of its search strategy over the next few years.”

Google used to tout its relevancy with its famous PageRank concept as one of its major strengths. However it was the clean, simple search engine page that may well have been the key selling feature. Indeed the PageRank concept may have had within it the seeds of its own decay. When everyone knows that back-links are important to get noticed by Google, then everyone starts working on getting as many back-links as possible. As Yahoo! now gets into full swing, serious questions are being raised on whether Yahoo! is producing more relevant search results than Google. In other words, does ‘content’ beat out ‘back-links’ for relevancy.

The secrecy surrounding the search engines algorithms means that it’s tough to know what is the logic being used. So which logic is more likely to give more relevant search results? Relevancy has become that mysterious powder in the box. Relevancy must be adequate but the consumer has a great deal of difficulty in detecting that one is better than another. It’s going to be the packaging that actually sells the product.