It is often hard to find an affordable website designer, especially if you are a small to medium sized business. Artist’s Cafe specializes in web sites for small businesses, designers, and entrepreneurs.They tout affordable rates in the $2-3k range, and advertise themselves as having very creative, passionate and artistic designers.

One issue will going with low-cost website designs firms, in my experience, is the number of design concepts the firm will produce for you. This firm says they provide 4 unique conceptual designs for every new client so they can choose from the options. Once the the client chooses a design direction, Artist’s Care will iterate 3 times through the design process to produce the desired outcome. I find this to be a refreshing and reasonable process for web design.

Learn more at http://www.artistscafe.com.

The remaining 46 search engines it tracks accounted for less than 2.0 percent.

An interesting study from ClickTale gives detailed behavioral patterns related to scrolling. Some takeaways:

When did above-the-fold design become important?

Web designers and usability professionals have debated the topic of web page scrolling since 1994. At the early days of the web, most users were unfamiliar with the concept of scrolling and it was not a natural thing for them to do. As a result, web designers would design web pages so that all the important content would be “Above the fold” or even worse, squeeze the entire page into the initial screen area. This practice of “squeezing” continues even today.

Nowadays, scrolling has become a natural practice in surfing the web. Scrolling is also associated with web 2.0 design because big, clear text and “spacious”, “clean” content implies longer web pages. Source

ClickTales’s research was based on data that collected from a subset of about 120,000 page-views dated November 2006 to December 2006 to analyze vertical scrolling behavior. General findings were:

• 91% of pages are long enough to require scrolling.
• The average location for the fold is between 430 and 860 pixels down on the page.
• 76% of people will scroll below the fold.
• 15-22% of people will reach the bottom of the page.

Based on this and other studies, ClickTale gave the following recommendations:

• Don’t try to squeeze your web page and make it more compact. There is little benefit in “squeezing” your pages since many visitors will scroll down below the fold to see your entire page.
• Since visitors will scroll all the way to the bottom of your web page, make life easier for them and divide your layout into sections for easy scanning.
• Minimize your written text and maximize images, visitors usually don’t read text - they scan web pages.
• Encourage your visitors to scroll down by using a “cut-off” layout. Source

Another article commenting on the ClickTale data had this to say:

As the ClickTale article suggests, people are scanning and skimming a page’s content regardless of its size. Web developers should back away from trying to squeeze content toward the top of a page in order to supposedly make it easy to scan. Using proper amounts of white space, headers and sub-headers, along with bolded text and bullet points increases a page’s scannability for all personality types.

When it comes to critical elements, like calls to action, you don’t want 5% of visitors not seeing it. Pages have more power when they stick to one main idea per page. And remember, copy should be long enough to cover the essentials but short enough to be interesting. A site will generally get better search rankings by having highly relevant links from page-to-page. So, there are advantages to leaning toward shorter pages, but don’t sacrifice clear page design and layout to squeeze a few pixels off of a page’s length.

So was there any difference at all? Yes:

But keep in mind, shorter pages did perform slightly better. “Almost identical percentages of page views (15%-20%) reach the page bottom regardless of page height.” While the data was fairly similar regardless of the page length, shorter pages were closer to the 20% range. source

Based on this, one might conclude that an all-above-the-fold page would perform 5% higher than a similar, have-to-scroll page. More importantly though, the essential selling points and call-to-action should be above the fold. If you can engage the user and sell them on continuing the process (whether it is buying a product, or taking the next step in a survey, or any desired behaviou) they will continue down the page.

A cool tip I’ve overlooked until recently. While you’re in GCal, press the q key to summon a single field to enter an event. Best of all, GCal understands natural language like “tomorrow at 2PM.” Not using Google Calendar? Get it at Google Calendar

Learn more at http://www.compucram.com.

First off, what is a landing page? By this, we’re not talking about a ‘homepage’ or main product page on your web site which people may randomly navigate to. Landing pages is a special term that refers to the pages people land on after clicking ads or search result link.

Designing a winning landing page should take the following points into consideration:

One Objective

Focus on one objective for each page and drive everything on the page to that single objective — usually an button with a clear call to action such as an “Apply Now” button.

Vertical Flow with a Single Column

Use a vertical flow through the center of the page, usually with a single column:

Sales pages should use a vertical flow through the center of the page. For commercial offer pages, vertical single-column body copy through the center of the page consistently performs better than other layouts and should always be tested. Left or right columns should be used to support movement toward the objective such as testimonials (to reduce anxiety at clicking the Order button). Source

Eliminate Distractions

You should eliminate elements that may distract eye path from the flow toward the objective. This means you should remove page elements such as photos and graphic images that do not drive the user towards the page’s call to action.

Use Eye-Catching Visuals

Use visual elements to draw attention toward the call to action. Visual elements can include size, motion, color, position, and shape.

Remove Off-Page Links

Avoid use of off-page links. Why?

Once visitors have left the page, their forward momentum is interrupted and must be re-established even if they do return.

How do you get around this?

Use passive pop-ups or launch new browser windows when needed to provide details or supplemental decision information. Source

Read more about landing page design techniques at Landing Page Confusion-How Does Having More Than One Objective to a Page Affect its Performance?

iContact is an affordable (prices that start at $9.95 per month) solution for anyone who wants to send out email newsletters. They sport an extremely easy to use interface, numerous templates, with surveying, autoresponder, and blogging capability.

They take care of managing bounces and unsubscribes for you (this is a big perk if you have ever tried to manage this yourself like I have). They also take care of the backend technical details like making sure your message gets to the inbox of your recipients through their ISP relations, feedback loops, and whitelist status, etc.

The company has over 15,000 customers and 100,000 users. The product is used primarily by small businesses but also has a number of Fortune 500 companies like Bank of America, Ford, Nissan, Super 8 Motel, and International Paper, and political campaigns like Barack Obama ‘08.

You can download their free Best Practice Whitepaper on email marketing to get a better feel for the benefits of their tool. You can also view a video overview to learn more about their iContact Email Newsletter Tool.

For those of you building widgets or doing data transforms using XML, check out the new XML Aficionado blog. Written by Alexander Falk (CEO of Altova - the makers of XMLSpy), the XML blog posts news on interesting new technologies, trends, gadgets, and software development tools. Falk’s passion about creating great developer tools exudes from his posts.

Read more at the XML Aficionado blog

In a long anticipated move, Google is now taking action to web sites who provide paid links. Google doesn’t penalize the relevancy of the site in search, but rather, hits the sites in their pocketbook by penalizing their page rank. If the site has low page rank, which is generally a requirement of paid link services like PayPerPost.com, then the site starts to lose out on advertising dollars.

Danny Sullivan wrote in detail about this new development in a post at Search Engine Land, entitled Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google.

“…Overall, the move takes Google into a new era of attacking paid links, allowing it more precise weapons than it has had in the past. For example, both the Stanford Daily and New Scientist are among several prominent sites that sell links. Google has not really been able to penalize such sites as that would hurt core relevancy. People expect them to show up.

By using PageRank decreases (something Google first experimented with in the SearchKing case in 2002), Google can hurt the perceived value of buying links from a particular site without harming core relevancy.”

Bottom line: if Pagerank is important to you, you need to carefully consider buying — or selling — paid links.