| LED Digest 2350: What's Important in Web Design? |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Registration from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. February 19, 2007 Issue no. 2350 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ===================== <Moderator Comment> ~ Question of the Week... --== Creating Annoying Email? ==-- ~ Bob Sheridan "[I want to force] a webpage to open [from an email] even when the delete option is selected..." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Web Log Analysis Software ==-- ~ Leslie S. Osborne "I recommend checking out the Nihuo Web Log Analyzer." ~ Shaun Johnston "Fast Stats Log Analyzer is astonishing." --== Down on Designers ==-- ~ Peggy Deras "I'd be interested to know what others think my criteria should be if I were doing a web site today?" --== Harvester-Proof Email ==-- ~ Will Bontrager "While reading your post, Veronica, something clicked. A real forehead-slapper." --== Domain Parking & Valuation ==-- ~ David Spahr "It appears that domain names are being analyzed using 'semantic technology'..." --== The Newsletter Archive ==-- ~ Cayley Vos "Why not get some potential link popularity from an aggregator site?" <Moderator Comment> ========== NEW =================================== <Moderator Comment> Greetings LEDer, Peggy Deras posts the question of the week to the "Down on Designers" thread (find it below, 4 posts down). Here it is: ---------------------- "I chose Grant to design my site because he was the web designer whose creations loaded fastest, in a time when dial-up was still an issue. That was my top criteria. Fortunately for me, he was also a good web designer, and his work has stood the test of time in a fast moving web world. "I'd be interested to know what others think my criteria should be if I were doing a web site today?" ---------------------- What Web design criteria are essential? What criteria are important? And what elements are "nice to have" but not a high priority? Here's to a productive and successful week. Best wishes, Adam --------------------- From: Bob Sheridan Subject: A Question for an Expert - Annoying Email Hello everyone, I hope one of the email experts reading this post can tell me how to do this: To send an email that automatically opens a webpage when the recipient clicks on it, to (1) look at it, or (2) to delete it. I know it can be done based on annoying email I sometimes receive from Asian pr0n sites. Normal email can be deleted without it "opening a website" but when clicking one of the Asian pr0n site emails, it automatically opens the website, forcing you to look at it "before" it will let you delete the email entry. My company is a sponsor (I do the webpage) of the Accounting Information System Educators Association www.aiseducators.org. I need to send email announcing the June 2007 conference in Estes Park, Colorado to over 300 University Professors. I am worried that my email will be deleted inadvertently. However, if I can duplicate the technique of "forcing a webpage to open even when the delete option is selected", the conference announcement will have a better chance of being read, since the recipient will see it on the webpage - no matter what. If you need to see a "sample" of the Asian email that works this way I can forward it to you. Thanks in advance for your help! Bob Sheridan www.restaurantplus.com Restaurant Management Software & Point of Sale Systems ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Leslie S Osborne Subject: Analytics > Can anyone recommend web log analysis software, > to analyse my raw server log files. At the moment the > software needs to be free... - Niall Kennedy, LED Digest 2347 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1744/55/ I recommend checking out the Nihuo Web Log Analyzer. There is a fully functional free trial available at www.loganalyzer.net/. It reads log files and does not reside on the website or require you to put anything on your site pages. If you like the analyzer after the trial it's available at what I think is a reasonable cost. I haven't compared analyzer programs for a while but when I found this program I thought it was a decent substitute for WebTrends and minus the pain in the neck that so many other analyzer programs seem to have. The learning curve, I felt, was relatively low too. Leslie S. Osborne, Producer / Director TK Productions Premiere LLC http://www.lesliesosborne.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Shaun Johnston Subject: Analytics Fast Stats Log Analyzer, available at www.mach5.com, is astonishing. Very very fast, and generates tons of useful data, including reports on visits per every parameter. It also has a dynamic mapping of connections between pages with visits per route that is remarkable. It appears to have a free version but the minimum full featured version is $100. I recommend this very highly. You can set it to analyze current log files via ftp. It's what I use to check up on my Web Ceo web metrics, which appears to be inaccurate. I won't trust web metrics now, unless I have something like this, that I trust, to check up on it. Shaun Johnston -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Peggy Deras Subject: Designers > ... while my clients may know their business better than > me, I know website design better than they do. Therefore, > it behooves us as professional website designers to keep > the communication between us and our clients waaaaay open. - Kathy Wilson, LED Digest 2347 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1744/55/ I never realized how similar our professions (web site design and kitchen design) were, until I read this post by Kathy Wilson. Even having my web site designed (by Grant Crowell in 2002) didn't teach me this. Odd. People who hire me to help design their kitchens have a bit better understanding of the process that is needed because they USE their kitchens every day, and are familiar with the elements that make up a kitchen. What makes their future kitchen similar to a web site, is that they can't see it, touch it, experience it. So... They are usually as clueless about what it takes to make a good new kitchen as your clients are about what it takes to put together a good web site. Most can't see the forest for the trees... including me, when I went through it. I think the web site designer who illustrates the process, so that it can be understood, has a real leg up on the competition. I also maintain my own web site and have NOT messed it up (yet). I open the Source file in Notepad. I then copy and paste Grant's html and make the needed changes / additions in the same format. I then save the .txt file as .htm and look it over carefully to be sure I haven't made a mistake. Then I FTP it to my site. I have even added entire pages this way. I do not know html and really don't need to know it to do this. I chose Grant to design my site because he was the web designer whose creations loaded fastest, in a time when dial-up was still an issue. That was my top criteria. Fortunately for me, he was also a good web designer, and his work has stood the test of time in a fast moving web world. I'd be interested to know what others think my criteria should be if I were doing a web site today? Also, in my industry, there is one company: http://www.kitchens.com/Websites/default.asp, that gets most of the business of designing industry web sites just because they make it soooo template-easy for their clients. Their sites are very cookie cutter similar and not well done at all. I know, I saw a lot of them while editing our category on DMOZ (one of my best learning experiences). You'd think an entire industry based on creative design could do better. Oh well, so much the better for me. Peggy Deras www.kitchenartworks.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Will Bontrager Subject: Harvest-proof email > Clicking on the link from my gmail inbox simply > produced a blank page that never finished loading, > and no opportunity to send an email. - Veronica Yuill, LED Digest 2349 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1747/55/ That blank page for some browsers has had my attention from the start, which is one of the main reasons the system remained in beta. (The other is that I felt it should be exposed to real-world use before passing to the next level.) While reading your post, Veronica, something clicked. A real forehead- slapper. Instead of opening the email program before the page loads, why not open it afterward! So the code was tweaked to do that. IE6 on XP, which previously displayed a blank page, now displays all the content of the web page and only then launches the email program. The tweak may have corrected the problem you were having, Veronica. Please give it another try. http://flow-to.com/email/w.u1171228517w.mth If it still doesn't work, let me know which operating system and browser you're using. Without that information, there is little opportunity to correct the specific issues. If your browser opens an email program when normal mailto: links are clicked, it should also open it when the harvest-proof email link is clicked. At this writing, I've heard of only the one AOL problem (David Spahr, LED Digest 2348). If others with AOL Internet have tested the link and found it to be problematic, let me ask that you test it again. Thank you. Thank you for the kind support, folks. This is, indeed, a wonderful community. Will Bontrager Form: http://willmaster.com/contact.shtml Email: http://flow-to.com/email/w.u1171228517w.mth -------- new post - new topic -------- From: David Spahr Subject: Domains - Google and dashes Following Adam's recommendation about Google domain parking I picked up the following text: ---------------------- "AdSense for domains delivers targeted, conceptually related advertisements to parked domain pages by using Google's semantic technology to analyze and understand the meaning of the domain names." Source: http://www.google.com/domainpark/ ---------------------- It appears that domain names are being analyzed using "semantic technology" within their algorithms. How? It's hard to know, but from this I think we can see that domain names are being looked at with an eye toward understanding their meaning. I think this reopens the question about dashes to make words in domain names as opposed to character string names. I wonder if Google can pick a word out of a character string? I'm not saying I know but I myself am certainly going to stick with the concept of word domains. David Spahr http://www.stereoviews.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Cayley Vos Subject: Newsletter archive > ... basically they give you an IMAP email account at their > domain and you pile all that newsletter content into it for > them! I'm still scratching me head trying to figure out how > they think this is okay? Make sure your newsletters aren't > archived too... - Adam Audette, LED Digest 2346 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1743/55/ Personally i would consider submitting old newsletters to the newsletterarchive *IF* they provided regular unrestricted links sans nofollow tags. After a newsletter has been sent it has almost no value, and most sites simply erase them. Why not get some potential link popularity from an aggregator site? It's also possible you would receive additional exposure & direct clicks that you never would have received without the newsletter archive. Cayley Vos, Principal SEO website development www.netpaths.net <Moderator Comment> That's true, Cayley, for a lot of newsletters companies seem to publish (junk) or for call-to-action campaigns, and etc. But for most businesses I recommend email newsletters should be of enough value that the content, when archived online, both adds value for visitors and creates spiderable data for search engines. Getting a few links from www.newsletterarchive.org probaby doesn't outweigh the chance that their duplicated archive will garner better search results than your original content. And, if they eventually plan on supporting the site with ads (contextual or otherwise), you're giving away revenues, too. Finally, having branded content on this kind of independent site creates a loss of control, so (theoretically) their bad decisions could have an impact on your brand. For businesses without an archiving plan I agree that it probably doesn't hurt, but you're still sort of at the mercy of the webmaster. Probably better to have a syndication policy or use a Creative Commons license ( http://creativecommons.org ). -Adam ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains The Archives: http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/126/120/ Subscribe: http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/52/77/ Unsubscribe, Change Email, or Hold / Resume Delivery: http://www.led-digest.com/content/category/4/17/86/ (c) Copyright 1995-2007 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The universe is made of stories, not atoms." - Muriel Rukeyser |
