Author: Stan Shinn

Stan is a seasoned digital strategist professional with broad Fortune 1000 and financial services sector experience. His specializations include accessibility, digital strategy and product roadmaps, large-scale digital projects, complex web redesigns, and enterprise website governance. Stan is also a published author and active innovator.

Optimize for IE? Better not!

Firefox

Microsoft's IE browser continues to lose market share. According to OneStat, as of July 2006, the most popular browsers in the USA are:

  1. Microsoft IE
    79.78%
  2. Mozilla Firefox
    15.82%
  3. Apple Safari
    3.28%
  4. Opera
    0.81%
  5. Netscape
    0.20%

Firefox continues to gain usage at a rapid clip -- Firefox increased total market share by 1.14 percent since May 2006 alone.

Read full article.

Dynamic Headlines in Google Adwords

An undocumented feature to a pressing business problem:

Did you ever want to make the search phrase appear as the headline of your adwords advert? Well, you should, because it usually increases the click through rate.

Check out this how-to for creating dynamic headlines in Google AdWords.

Technology Cheat Sheets

Quick reference guides from TechCheatSheets.com on topics such as:

ajax apache asp color css dotnet firefox google htaccess html javascript linux mod_rewrite mysql networking php postgresql prototype python quicksilver rails regex ruby scriptaculous security subversion symfony thunderbird vbscript vim webapp windows wordpress

Get them from TechCheatSheets.com

Impact of Ranking #1 on Google

A recent post by Chris Smith mentions the difference between being in first and being in second on Google for a keyword. In his case, the difference in traffic was as much as 60%!

I can tell you that our site receives approximately 30k of visits on average per day from Google, just from keyword searches for Term X. There’s typically one or two Sponsored Links just above us on the SERP, and a few Sponsored Links on the right side column, too.

When we dropped to second slot on the SERP for Term X, we lost approx 18k of visits per day. So, there it is: the difference between the number one slot and the number two slot for a major keyword term comes to about a 60% change in visits!

Read more at Natural Search Blog.

Creating Landing Pages with WordPress

A how-to on using WordPress to create microsites:

Landing sites are well known from the eCommerce world - ever experience you searched google for »cheap colgate toothpaste« and found an online reseller, and the site you landed on from google was exactly about colgate toothpaste? What if we grabbed the google search string from the visitor, and made the front page listing a mix of related posts to what he searched for and the newest posts?

Read more at WordPress: Creating landing sites

Fixed or Liquid?

Is it best to have a fixed width web site, or one that dynamically resizes? This just in:

Rothman argues that since screen resolutions have stopped growing for the most part, fixed is the way to go.

Read full article at Monkey Bites