Website Design and Promotion

International Buy Nothing Day

Today is International Buy Nothing Day.

From Adbuster's website:

For 24 hours millions of people around the world do not participate-- in the doomsday economy, the marketing mind-games, and the frantic consumer-binge that's become our culture. We pause. We make a small choice not to shop. We shrink our footprint and gain some calm. Together we say: enough is enough. And we help build this movement to rethink our unsustainable course.

I encourage you all to participate by going the whole day without making a purchase.

I have always loved this day. We need be be reminded of the excess and waste that we all participate in. To focus our consciousness here for one day is only a tiny step, albeit an important one. So stay home, go for  walk in the park, put off making those necessary purchases, and reflect upon how you can avoid making unnecessary purchases...

By the way, one of my favorite Adbuster TV ads is the one for Buy Nothing Day which can be viewed here. 

Cool Blog: Musings of an Eco-Entrepreneur

Was reading a very cool blog today--Musings of an Eco-Entrepreneur--authored by  Shea Gunther.  Shea's been writing on a range of marketing/business/Internet/global/eco-entreprenueral/ topics.

Check it out here.

Tips for Consultants

Michael McLaughlin's got a useful article in which he gives his 11 principles for a great websites for consultants. Can't say I disagree with any of them — not too different from what we've been preaching here.

Some of his points include:

• provide valuable, relevant content and your clients will keep reading and return again
• go easy on jargon and buzzwords — keep the copy simple
• add some personality to your site
• make it easy to navigate
• keep the content fresh

Follow these and the other guidelines and your socially responsible business' web presence will be a success.

Factors Involved in Search Engine Rankings

One of the best and most comprensive reviews that I have ever seen on the factors involved in search engine ranking can be found at SEOmoz.org. 103 factors were ranked by 13 search engine specialists in terms of their significance to search engine rankings.

The factors were grouped in the following 5 categories:

• In-Document Factors Affecting Ranking (31)

• Site Factors Affecting the Value of Hosted Documents (23)

• Factors Affecting the Value of a Link (25)

• URL, Technical, Hosting & Server Side Factors (12)

• Detrimental Ranking Factors (12)

On a scale of 1-5 with 5 being the most important, here is the summary of the 10 most important factors in the 5 categories:

Title Tag - 4.57
Anchor Text of Links - 4.46
Keyword Use in Document Text - 4.38
Accessibility of Document - 4.3
Links to Document from Site-Internal Pages - 4.15
Primary Subject Matter of Site - 4.00
External Links to Linking Pages - 3.92
Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community - 3.77
Global Link Popularity of Site - 3.69
Keyword Spamming - 3.69

Definitely worth a read if you are a socially responsible business who cares about your search engine rankings. However, no need to worry if this sounds too advanced for you. Having quality copy on your site with key words that your visitors search for is still one of the best ways to keep your rankings up in the search engines.

Do pay attention to your title tags (the tag visible at the top of your browser window for each of your web pages) though as they do seem to be of high importance. Paying attention to link anchor text as well would be a good idea (for an explanation of link anchor text see this post on how to use link anchor text to increase your rankings in the search engines).

Socially Responsible Gift Giving

Treehugger has just come out with their Holiday Gift Guide. For the socially/environmentally conscious, there's a wide range of ideas from clothes to food and drink and plenty in between. Lots of organic, recycled, and generally eco-friendly products to look through.

And remember to think about how to not use regular wrapping paper. It's usually non-recyclable. Think reduce and re-use first. How about wrapping a gift within a gift? e.g., wrap a CD (such as Jack Johnson's amazing "In Between Dreams" which made Treehugger's list for all the great work he does, not to mention he's a very talented musician!) inside a scarf (organic cotton, of course). Or, re-use old calendar pages, etc.

Images on Your Website

Ever notice how some web pages take forever to load? Often, especially if the page was created by someone without much/any web development experience, it's because the images haven't been optimized for the web. I always laugh when I see an in-house designed site, with corporate bios, the small headshots are around 1MB each! That's ridiculous for on-screen presentation. Those images should be around 10-20KB each. It's so easy to optimize for the web in Photoshop. Just take your image, choose jpeg or gif format, and basically set the "quality" as low as possible while keeping the image looking as good as it should. That's a pretty simplified explanation, but, really, it's not that difficult.

A quick note on the difference between jpeg and gif format: In general, jpegs are used for photos or images with gradients/shadows. Gifs are meant for line drawings. Keep that rule of thumb in mind and you should get good quality images without the huge file sizes.