Month: July 2006

GIMP is a full featured Photoshop competitors. Even better, it is cross-platform (Mac, Windows, Linux) and FREE! Explore books and tutorials on GIMP. There is even a portable version that runs on a USB stick.
Already an experienced Photoshop user, and you don't want to re-learn another tool? No worries, enter GIMPshop:

If you’ve never used Photoshop before, you may not appreciate my GIMPshop hack. What I’ve done is renamed and reorganized GIMP’s tools, options, windows, and menus to closely resemble Adobe Photoshop’s menu structure and naming conventions. Many of the menu options and even whole menus were recreated to faithfully reproduce a Photoshop-like experience. After running my GIMPshop hack, you’ll find that Photoshop and the GIMP are strikingly similar.

Longtime Photoshop users should feel very comfortable using GIMPshop.

Read more about GIMPshop.

Measurement of key elements on the page containing an in-bound link which, in combination, influence the link reputation for the target of the link. (Read more on this topic at SEMLogic)

I ran across this nice summary explaining the differences between A/B and Multivariate Testing:

A/B testing is trying 2 (or more) versions of a page component like a headline, image, button, etc. and seeing which one leads to the best increase in desired visitor behavior.

Multivariate testing is trying 2 (or more) versions of multiple page components at the same time - e.g. 2 headlines 3 images 5 buttons, etc. It's like running multiple A/B tests simultaneously.

A/B testing is a good way to have a simple "bake off" to decide which version is more effective towards a visitor goal like a purchase/conversion, lead submittal, registration, etc. It's also a good way to get started with testing before advancing to more complicated methods (and it's far better than not doing any testing at all!)

Multivariate testing tells you not only which versions of each component are "best", but reveals which components are more or less influencial towards one or more visitor goal. It tells you, for example, that a range of versions of the homepage image accounts for /- 30% in click-through to the next page, whereas the range of versions of headline accounts for only /- 4% in click-throughs (Why do you care? Next test you run you shouldn't bother with the headline... just focus on the image since it is more influential!)

You can roll your own A/B testing using homegrown software, and there are also several free/low cost PHP/ASP scripts that can do the job and get you up & running.

Tools and services that allow you to do A/B and Multivariate testing include:

• http://www.offermatica.com
• http://www.vertster.com
• http://www.sitelab.com
• http://www.memetrics.com
• http://www.sitespect.com
• http://www.widemile.com
• http://www.optimost.com

Read more about this topic at this forum discussion.

Search engines have different algorithms to determine search results. New research from Fortune Interactive explains some of the logic behind these Web page rankings.

Google's algorithm:

At Google, inbound links rank in the following order: quality, relevance, title keyword, anchor keyword, quantity. Further down the list, site factors such as title keyword, anchor keyword, body keyword, content relevance and title content weigh into the equation.

Yahoo's algorithm:

Yahoo places the most importance on inbound link quality. To a lesser degree than Google, it looks at inbound links for relevance, anchor keyword, title keyword and quantity. Further down in organic results priority are general site characteristics like title content, title keyword, anchor keyword, body keyword and content relevance.

MSN's algorithm:

Inbound links rank at the top of MSN's equation as well, but are ordered differently. Inbound links are looked at for quality, anchor keyword, relevance, and title keyword. Inbound link quantity is weighted, but not quite as heavily. The search engine then looks at title keyword, body keyword, anchor keyword, content relevance, and title content.

Read full article: To Each Search Engine Its Own Algorithms

This great article on user interface design highlights many of the design considerations one must consider when building an optimized web site. These principles are particularly applicable to landing page design, where the page layout is critical to driving conversion rates. Here is a table summary Digital Web Magazine's writeup of design tradeoffs one must consider.

Read article at Digital Web Magazine

I've always found it annoying that you can auto-hide the dock on the Mac, but not the menu bar. This new software does just that. Why use it?

Probably because it gives you extra space (it may not look like much, but it matters) and it looks so cool.. so minimalistic. Also if you're like me and don't use the spotlight menu item enough to justify the space it takes up in your menubar, menufela lets you get rid of it.

In addition to autohiding the menu, you can specify a hotkey to toggle the menubar on or off.

Get it at ninja kitten (what a name!).

Beyond the basics of creating meta tags and friendly, keyword-friendly URLs, what else can marketers do to improve their organic search rankings?

SEO can be incredibly stressful to manage because there's only so much you, the marketer, can control. Once you've made sure the site is optimized using best practices, including page structure, site structure, and keyword usage, along with external link campaigns, you're mainly thrust into a reactive mode.

Wagg's team coped with the algorithm changes by figuring no matter how engines change, spiders will always focus on seeking highly relevant content for searchers.

When in doubt, make more of your content highly relevant for the spiders.

Given that press releases and other content make their way onto the web, this group took the following tactic:

So the team began to optimize (tweak keywords in) every piece of content available in email and online, including:

- email newsletter articles
- email broadcast campaigns
- press releases
- affiliate-content
- eBay listings
- text links within and outside of the site

No piece of content was allowed to be "published" anywhere unless the optimization team had given it the OK from their standpoint.

Full article here at MarketingSherpa

Need to build a web site? These sites provide open source templates to help speed you on your way:

• OpenWebDesign.org
• TemplatesBox.com
• OSWD.org