Lots of folks have an @gmail.com email address to take advantage of the above features, but did you know that you can funnel all of your business email through Gmail – for free?  That’s exactly what we do here at FPM and what I recommend to all of our clients.

By using Gmail for your business email addresses, you get all of your email accessible from anywhere, it’s backed up by the largest datacenter on the planet, and you will almost totally eliminate spam from your life.  Your address still stays as ‘yourname@yourcompany.com’ – so it still looks nice and professional.  You can stick to using Outlook or Mail.app if you like, or (as I’ve done) just use the online interface.  (If you’re on a Mac, use Fluid to make your email page an app on it’s own). If you use the online version to access your email, you can even get rid of the Gmail logo and insert your own, if you feel like it. Take a look at the screenshot of my emails:

To get started, just go to the Google Apps Standard Edition page and sign up. They have pretty good instructions, but you might need to get with your IT folks to get it going right.

So – happy emailing, and good luck!

We’re looking forward to it! Hope to see you there!

Here’s the list answer these questions and you’ll increase the effectiveness of your site exponentially:

• What is the goal of the site?
• In other words, when it’s working great, what specific outcomes will occur?
• Who are we trying to please? If it’s the boss, what does she want? Is impressing a certain kind of person important? Which kind?
• How many people on your team have to be involved? At what level?
• Who are we trying to reach? Is it everyone? Our customers? A certain kind of prospect?
• What are the sites that this group has demonstrated they enjoy interacting with?
• Are we trying to close sales?
• Are we telling a story?
• Are we earning permission to follow up?
• Are we hoping that people will watch or learn?
• Do we need people to spread the word using various social media tools?
• Are we building a tribe of people who will use the site to connect with each other?
• Do people find the site via word of mouth? Are they looking to answer a specific question?
• Is there ongoing news and updates that need to be presented to people?
• Is the site part of a larger suite of places online where people can find out about us, or is this our one sign post?
• Is that information high in bandwidth or just little bits of data?
• Do we want people to call us?
• How many times a month would we like people to come by? For how long?
• Who needs to update this site? How often?
• How often can we afford to overhaul this site?
• Does showing up in the search engines matter? If so, for what terms? At what cost? Will we be willing to compromise any of the things above in order to achieve this goal?
• Will the site need to be universally accessible? Do issues of disability or language or browser come into it?
• How much money do we have to spend? How much time?

And finally,

• Does the organization understand that ‘everything’ is not an option?

So, dear reader, this is why I don’t know: I DON’T CARE.
“But Steve” you say, “Why don’t you care?! Everybody tells me I SHOULD care! It’s essential to SEO!!”

So, let me explain…

Many moons ago, when the internet was young, and Google searches still had 5 or less “o’s” in the page list, there arose this thing called “Search Engine Optimization”.  The idea was that you could tweak things on a website (keywords, title tags, headings, bold text, etc) and, by so doing, you could increase your site’s ranking for those specific keywords.  Then Google said, “Hold on – just ’cause your site’s optimized doesn’t mean it’s actually good content!  We’re going to start checking on who links to your site, and consider that as a vote for your site.” Thus arose a whole cottage industry of shady SEO companies who engaged in link farms and link spamming (or “spamdexing”).  Essentially, they set up a bunch of dummy/copied sites to either link to each other link to a single site, or they bought and sold links to artificially increase the number of inbound links, thus increasing the number of “votes” as far as Google was concerned.  And, as you’ve already guessed, Google changed tactics to make it harder and harder for that kind of “SEO” to work. They even went so far as to ban companies and websites which used such tactics.

Google did all this, why?  To give you, the user, the absolute best and most relevant search results computerly possible.  They keep their algorithms super secret so nobody knows exactly how it’s done, but we’ve all experienced it -  you search for something and the site you get it THE site you were looking for.  Keep in mind, Google works hard – VERY hard – to keep those search results based on quality of content, not quality of SEO, and they’re constantly shutting down ways for SEOers to artificially increase the rank of websites.  So, at the end of the day, you get the right result.  So, we find ourselves in 2009, and Google is THE search engine on the planet.  Sure, there are others (Yahoo!, Bing (whatever kind of joke that is), Alexa, etc), but the one to pay attention to is Google – we all know that.  It’s become the stinking VERB for web searches, for goodness sake!!

Which brings me back to Alexa…

Guess how Alexa ranks sites. Do they independently index websites? Nope. Do they check for relevancy of content? Nein. It’s pretty much one thing: the Alexa toolbar.  What? You’ve never heard of the Alexa Toolbar? You’ve never installed it, either? Well, welcome to the rest of the world.  The only way Alexa ranks your site is by tracking people who have their toolbar installed and running when they visit a site.  Then, and only then, Alexa looks at the site, takes a pretty little screenshot of the site, and does some cursory checks on inbound links, etc.  Your rank increases based on nothing but the number of people WITH THE TOOLBAR who visit your site.  This would be fine if Alexa had pretty good penetration, but of the (estimated) 1,596,270,108 internet users worldwide, there have been a measly 10 million downloads of the toolbar since 1996.  And Alexa isn’t saying how many people actually USE the toolbar.  So, it’s based on 0.63% (at the most) of internet users in the world.  Wow.

So, “What’s your Alexa rank.” I don’t care, nor should you.  Alexa’s ranking is based on hardly any relevant data, and doesn’t have anything to do with quality or real world results.  (And don’t get me started on how easy it is to fake out Alexa). Let’s ask the question that really matters here: “What does Google have to say about your site?”  And the other question, “How much organic traffic am I getting to my site?”

I’ll save those for Part 2.  For now, don’t stress about Alexa, just focus on making your site a nicer place to be.

Happy reading!

So, there ya go.  Another example of how conventional wisdom is NOT web wisdom.  Be sure to do multivariate/A-B/user testing on your sites – even if you THINK they’re humming along just fine.  You never know what you might have missed.

…

WHAT?!!

Maybe I’m missing something here, but when I go to a website, I’m looking at the PRESENTATION, not the code.  Yeah yeah, good code is important, yadda yadda, but let’s take off our geekster hats for a minute and look at the real world of the web.  When someone comes to your website, and it doesn’t LOOK good, they’re gone – and gone waaaaaay before they have a chance to scroll down and see your W3C compliancy badges at the bottom of the page.

Let’s focus on good design that works.  That should be the focus of any site out there.  Is the design working for the site?  “Working” could mean driving sales, encouraging feedback, conveying information, or whatever the purpose of the site is.  Nobody cares what the markup is – it’s the presentation that matters.  Get the presentation where it ought to be, then go under the hood and tune the engine.  And if the only way to adjust the carbeurator is with a piece of wire, then more power to ya.