Starting out with my first website in 1996, I hadn’t realized that one of the most important pages that I had put on the site was a contact page. With a copy of “Learn HTML in 2 Weeks” at my side and a design that reflected my limited skills, I wasn’t aware of my limitations, […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Sipping on a cup of coffee on a Wednesday morning in the lounge of the local bowling alley last summer, surrounded by shop keepers and insurance salesmen and other small business owners, I hand out my business card. Most of these merchants have actual places I can visit, while all I have are pages they […]
I was casually chatting with a super-savvy Web 2.0 friend – we’ll call him Mac – about a website I work closely with. We’d spent the last year overhauling the strategy and the design of the site, though there are still several features waiting to be built, and the content growth is just at the […]
Recently, there was a thread in the High Rankings Forum asking whether SEO is an extra skill or a prerequisite for any website designer/developer. It was a great question that spurred a lot of conversation. It goes without saying that the average small-business owner in 2007 knows that they need a website. But do they […]
When Yahoo Local redesigned in August of this year, it largely eliminated the left column of detailed filters and refinement capabilities that were one of its best features, in my view. The statement from then Yahoo Local GM Jennifer Dulski (now CEO of Fatdoor) was that people weren’t really using them. What Yahoo did was […]
The time of year when we make resolutions is fast approaching. I’m not much of a resolution-maker myself, but I’m going to suggest that small business owners make one. Namely, it’s a suggestion that you resolve to fix up your web site and pay attention to things you might’ve ignored for too long. I know […]
Yell, which owns the yellow pages brand in the UK, has been fairly experimental with its site and product features, adding shopping search, classifieds, and mobile ahead of others and its American counterparts. It has also done several redesigns over the course of the past year in an effort to improve usability and stay current […]
For the past few years, I have been silently listening to and observing other search engine optimization (SEO) professionals speak and write about the topic of search-engine friendly web site design. I’m the one in the back with the black wig, sunglasses, mustache, and trench coat. All joking aside, I am genuinely interested in how […]
Google has added five new themes to iGoogle. Google Blogoscoped and Google Operating System both have posts on the new themes, which include a Solar System theme, an Autumn theme, a Hong Kong theme, a JR The Monster theme, and an Aja Tiger theme. Google China is also testing out a new home page according […]
Google doesn’t always do special logos for every holiday, but in the case of Halloween, it’s pretty consistent. Up today on the Google home page is the ninth consecutive Halloween logo it has run since 1999. Below, a look back at the past years, as well as this year’s animated logo from Yahoo and a […]
Last week, Judy’s Book joined the list of companies that have tried but stumbled or wiped out in local. The market’s complexity and business model challenges make it tough for most startups to succeed. Yet, paradoxically, consumers have clearly embraced the “local Internet” and are using it with increasing frequency to find local information online. […]
The YouTube Blog announced that new features are going to be launched in the upcoming months. One new feature is a new user interface for the video browsing page. You can preview the new page at this location. You will notice that if you mouse-over the video tab, it pops up categories for you to […]
If everyone else is pushing out the quick previews of the new Delicious, hey, we’ll add to the screenshot fodder for now. These are from an invite-only preview now out. There’s no set launch date for the public beta, but Delicious founder Joshua Schachter emailed those in the invite with, "While we still have a […]
The LocallyType blog noticed that Yahoo has updated their Yahoo UK home page. The new design has more clean space around the search box. The Yahoo content and services don’t truly begin until after the search box is displayed. I am told that the Yahoo UK home page looked more like the current Yahoo US […]
Yahoo is arguably the leader in local search, but others including Google, Microsoft and Yelp have been rapidly gaining. The search engine’s venerable Local site was in need of a refresh, which it has now received. With a redesign partly inspired by the Yahoo OurCity sites in India, the new Yahoo Local features a bolder […]
Google has launched a new home page for Korea that departs from Google’s “classic,” minimalist home page approach. The new look features animated product buttons below the search box and will become the default home page in the country, a move Google is comfortable with given the near universal presence of broadband.
Having a supposedly “search engine friendly” website isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In fact, it can be quite a disappointment. That’s because it’s not the same thing as being “search engine optimized.” I’ve seen the words “search engine friendly” bandied about quite a lot, particularly to market and sell blog platforms, shopping carts, […]
The Yahoo Video Team Blog announced that they have redesigned and cleaned up the Yahoo Video home page. The new page now sports a large search box at the top, plus the relocation of navigational elements.
SuperPages cleans up its act? What I mean by that is the new site design is a great deal cleaner and easier to navigate than the old site. Some awkward elements remain, such as old style “disambiguation” pages. But the new results pages are more user friendly and less cluttered. There are also more refinement […]
Citysearch, one of the more venerable names in local search, has relaunched its site with an updated look and other “new and improved” features, including video. Video is currently available for New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles and has prominent placement at the top of the home page. It’s an ad unit for local […]
How many U.S. small businesses have websites? Is it 30%, 40%, 50%? Answering that question gets quickly into debates over the definition of a “website.” For example, is a “landing page” or a “profile page” a website? Do the small business data provided by InfoUSA, Axciom, Localeze, TruelLocal (and now iBegin Source) constitute being online? […]
There’s a flurry of activity in the newly invigorated personalized homepage category. Within the past two weeks all the major competitors have made announcements. First, AOL launched MyNetscape, followed by the release of “universal video widgets” on Pageflakes. Then the new MyYahoo launched. Yesterday Netvibes unveiled “Coriander,” its next product release with new content modules. […]
Last week’s Small is Beautiful column asked, “What’s So Different About Being Small?” The answer? Time. Money. Knowledge. Those are the three biggest challenges a small business must overcome to achieve search marketing success, and the three things that make small business search marketing unique. Many small businesses have one or two of those, but […]
Video search service Searchforvideo has launched several new features today. From the press release: Searchforvideo 4.0 introduces a new website design across several popular video categories that simplifies finding popular online video clips from the world’s most trusted video publishers. The next generation site design is intended to promote brand name video content so video […]
Google Groups launched their beta design to the public last night. The new design change switched from an orange/yellow/white color scheme to a light blue and white color scheme. The new design also comes with some feature additions including: Pages. Create and contribute to shared web pages with simple drag, drops, cuts, pastes, and clicks […]
About a month ago, Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny and Google’s Matt Cutts traded a number of sharp barbs over design similarities in Yahoo and Google. Google copied Yahoo! No, Yahoo copied Google! Danny described the tiff in Google Copies Yahoo’s IE7 Page; Originality War Breaks Out!, writing “If I had time and desire, I’d sit here […]
Today, Kevin Rose announced the release of new Digg features. What most people covered in the release were all the cool additions, but no one really talked about the small changes that have drastically affected submitters. Before I dig into these small changes that affected submitters, here is a quick recap of the new features […]
The Google Finance home page has a new look this morning. All the details of what is new is currently at What’s new on Google Finance page. The new features include: Market Summary Sector summary Top movers Category pages Enhanced portfolios 40 years of historical stock data (launched a week or so ago) And more… […]
Google Blatantly Copies Yahoo!? from Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny makes a pretty damning case against Google for blatantly ripping off Yahoo’s Internet Explorer 7 promo copy. Yahoo offers a custom version of IE7 via a pitch page you’ll see here. Google appears to have launched its own pitch page yesterday, one that was amazingly similar in […]