Web Development Email Marketing Ecommerce

In the past I’ve made the case for using wikis for online marketing.

Perusing Amazon.com recently I saw that there were already over 7500 product wikis contributed by Amazon customers. Cool! (Unfortunately not a single one of their wikis is indexed in Google because of the search engine unfriendly way they’ve implemented wikis on their site. Indeed, I couldn’t even find a way to link to their wikis from here, because links like this one expire and stop working after a while.)

It made me wonder how many other e-commerce sites were embracing wikis as a way to augment their product information and encourage customer participation in the site. I??haven’t heard of any other online retailers doing this.

Know of any etailers experimenting with wikis?

There is the ShopWiki website, which is not an online retailer but a site targeted to online retail. ShopWiki was founded by Kevin Ryan and Dwight Merriman (DoubleClick’s former CEO and former CTO, respectively). There is some good stuff in ShopWiki. For example, if you are looking to buy a compound bow, there is great buying guide as well as an explanation of how a compound bow works, type of material used in its manufacture, etc. (Unfortunately, like with Amazon’s wikis, ShopWiki’s wikis — including their buying guide on the compound bow — aren’t making it into Google. Fewer than 72 wiki pages are indexed).

Not strictly an online retail wiki, yet it overlaps partially with the ShopWiki is wikiHow, a how-to manual launched by the dotcom eHow. I am unclear why eHow started a separate wiki rather than folding it into eHow.com. I think they should have just opened up their eHow site for user contributions.

I think a wiki is especially suited to applications such as buyers guides, encyclopedias, glossaries, manuals, travel guides, etc when you want to elicit user contributions without making visible a lot of back-and-forth discussion. The real value is in the final product, not in the discussion that got to that point. That is where a wiki really shines.

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The other day when I was on whitepages.co.nz I kept getting this tasteless banner ad:

Not only did I find the ad irritating and gross, I thought less of the White Pages brand after I saw it. It is an animated GIF banner, where the piece of poo actually flies across the ad from left to right and then hits the spinning fan, making the whole banner go brown. Nice.

Whoever at the White Pages approved that banner ad for publication should be fired.

I have also seen plenty of ads placed in email campaigns that hurt the brand. Here’s an ad in an internet.com newsletter that cheapened the JupiterMedia brand while simultaneously flagging the email for spam filters (the Alt tag associated with this banner ad was “Work From Home” — a terrible thing to say in an email campaign if you want your campaign delivered):

It always amazes me how email ads get approved when it’s so obvious that they are going to cause the campaign’s deliverability to tank. Like this one:

Some people think email marketing is horribly expensive. If only they knew about VerticalResponse. We give you the power to create, send, and track your email campaign, right from your web browser — for less than 1c an email! NO set-up fees, NO contracts, NO hidden charges. And it’s easy, too! See for yourself by creating your own test mailing — FREE. Get started today!

Some big no-no phrases in the above email ad, including: “no hidden charges” and “see for yourself”.

In short, your website and your email campaigns are a reflection of your brand. The advertising you accept for display on your site and in your emails is also a reflection of your brand. So think carefully before you take on an advertiser or accept a creative that isn’t “on message.”

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“We saw an overall increase of over 300% in our search engine traffic within the first 60 days of implementation. We are extremely pleased with our initial results and look forward to expanding our relationship with Netconcepts.”

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DMNews.com has relaunched with a new design and a new back-end, both done by us at Netconcepts. On their blog, DM News’ founder and publisher Adrian Courtenay talks about the relaunch and gives us such glowing praise that I feel myself blushing!

A few new features worth noting:

• The entire archives have been opened up. No more passwords required!
• Articles support both comments and trackbacks.
• Deep links to old articles have been maintained through 301 redirects.
• The site now offers RSS feeds. Not just one main RSS feed, but every category has an RSS feed.

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Even though I’ve received dozens of requests for site gradings, this month I’ve decided to pick a site that didn’t ask for it. Why? Because this month I’m going to air some poor, unsuspecting black-hat SEO’s dirty laundry in order that you might learn from their mistakes and indiscretions, rather than subject a loyal Practical eCommerce reader to potential intense and unwanted scrutiny by search engine reps reading this article. There are so many sites out there committing search engine sins, it was really hard to settle on one.

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CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) offers many more benefits beyond that of streamlined web pages with table-less layouts and precise positioning (no more transparent 1-pixel spacer GIFs!), mentioned in my previous post. Indeed, that’s just scratching the surface of CSS.

Here are some more clever things you can do with CSS to get your website really humming:

• Reorder your content to sit above your top and left navigation in the HTML. That will boost the keyword prominence on your pages, which is good for SEO. Then use CSS to get the page to still display as you want. CSS Zen Garden is a great example of this in action… for example, notice how the HTML doesn’t change between this layout with left-side nav and this one with right-side nav; it’s only the CSS that’s changing.
• If you must use graphical navigation or headings instead of text-based, then use the CSS “image replacement” technique to substitute in a text link or heading tag, respectively, when the CSS is not loaded (as is the case when the search engine spiders come to visit). For example, northland.edu uses this technique well. Currently, this is much more effective for SEO than Alt attributes.

  Many of the image replacement techniques physically move the text off the screen (text-indent: -9999em; left:-9999em;display:none, etc). This isn’t desirable as search engines are starting to examine external CSS files more closely to look for spam. There are a few image replacement techniques that don’t do this type of hiding and are still accessible, namely The Leahy/Langridge Method, The Gilder/Levin Method and The “Shea Enhancement”. Each of these methods have their pluses and minuses, which the Mezzoblue article outlines quite well. (Thanks to our CSS guru Darren for this last bit of advice.)

• Learn to code in “CSS shorthand.” With shorthand, hex codes for colors, margins, box dimensions and borders can all be abbreviated, for instance. More about this here. The efficiency of CSS shorthand translates into not only a speedier download for your customers, but also compact and tidy code that’s easier to maintain.
• Make code that “degrades gracefully” (or, as they prefer to say now in geek circles, “enhances progressively”). Creating a separate “low-bandwidth version” or “printer friendly version” or “mobile version” of your site will sound ludicrous in years to come (heck, I think it sounds ludicrous NOW!), because CSS makes such a thing unnecessary. Check out how gracefully gotomedia.com degrades on a cell phone or PDA, for instance.
• Correct for browser incompatibility snafus with browser-specific CSS. Does something look awry in your page layout when loading your site with the Safari browser, for instance? Internet Explorer doesn’t always play nice with the other browsers. Until the days where all the browsers follow all the same standards to the letter, browser-specific stylesheets are a useful crutch.
• Separate the presentation layer from the content layer as much as possible and move it into an external stylesheet (in other words, a separate .CSS file). That way it gets cached by the web browser and doesn’t have to reload with each new page.
• Plan for site-wide changes. Things change — colors, sidebars, ads, copyright dates, etc. Utilize CSS files and/or server-side includes to make future site-wide updates as painless as possible.
• Make use of the cascading nature of CSS. Most of the styles you define will be used site-wide. Some will only be for one particular page. Then there will be occasions where you’ll want to “cascade” styles, and have certain sections of your site adopt a particular look/layout/theme that overrides or branches off from the site-wide styles. Clever use of cascading styles can lead to very efficient and elegant code.

  Warning! Geek speek ahead:

Be careful of overriding previously declared statements. And also be aware that specificity is important in the cascade. Declare all your tag styles first then declare your id and class selectors down the doc. That way the cascade works and can be overwritten with new selectors. (Thanks again to our CSS guru Darren for this last bit of advice.)

CSS coders: the Web Developer Firefox extension is an awesome tool for coding, debugging, and tweaking style sheets. You can display the stylesheet and the rendered page simultaneously side-by-side and then interactively edit the CSS, immediately viewing the effect of the change on the rendered page. And it makes identifying errors (be they validation, CSS, or JavaScript) a piece-of-cake. Did I mention the plugin is free?

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Data now out from Nielsen//NetRatings shows that the top five most popular shopping search terms for April were all brick-and-mortar retailers:

1. “home depot”
2. “walmart”
3. “target”
4. “sears”
5. “best buy”

SearchEngineWatch Blog then arrived at the conclusion that:

These are people who likely have done their research and are now looking for physical/local stores to buy what it is they want.

I disagree. I think most Americans already know where their local Home Depot is. Instead, these searchers are looking to buy online. Some will opt for in-store pickup (which both Sears and Best Buy offer). Some may be on the hunt for product information, buyer’s guides, or the current circular with the week’s in-store specials.

I believe brick-and-mortar brands dominate shopping-related searches because those are the brands that are the most pervasive/popular/trusted in the marketplace. Their online shops offer a safe and familiar place to buy online.

A huge number of Internet users are searching for “home depot” when they could be typing in homedepot.com directly into their browser’s Location bar. Why is this? I imagine that for many people, typing in “home depot” into the Google Toolbar or into the search box on their Start Page is just easier or most comfortable. Perhaps some, like myself, even configured their Google Toolbar to display the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, to go straight to the first search result.

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Twelve months after its website redesign, House of Travel saw its onsite sales grow six-fold - results that can be measured in increased traffic to the site and in keyword ranking.

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