What do you think are the worst mistakes in website design today?

I'm a firm believer that one of the best ways to learn effective digital marketing is to review examples of good practice in digital marketing from other companies - like this example of good practice in landing pages. But we can also learn a lot from mistakes that are commonly made. I hope the Smart Insights blog can help marketers avoid the time,money and stress involved with these mistakes by getting digital marketing right first time or fixing problems which mean missed opportunities. So what are the worst mistakes? Well, last week I gave a choice of 10 and you kindly gave me your view on the worst. This is what you thought:

Well we've got a clear winner which is the main customer journeys / next steps unclear.…

Alert about new Google Webmaster Tools notification

Value: [rating=5] Our commentary: The use of Adobe Flash has long been a debate between agencies & / or internal teams. On one hand you have the creative team who promise that they can deliver a better designed & more interactive website if they use flash. While on the other hand you have people tasked with growing traffic through natural search which would say "it is impossible to rank with a flash website as Google will ignore it". Both are right... to a point. It has always been difficult to really drive natural search with a pure flash website, the fact there tends to be only one URL (your homepage) link building becomes very difficult as one example. Equally though, up until the last couple of years it was easier to create better designed and more interactive websites in flash. You end up in a place…
We"€™ve seen a lot of changes on the internet landscape and how people interact with content within it, mobile and tablet PC's being obvious examples. On top of that there's changing web standards, influenced by that changing technology. Things like HTML5 and CSS3 - as Mashable note, "more and more users are now able to take advantage of the latest and greatest features on the web". It"€™s tougher for SME's to stay on top or ahead of the game, but not impossible. It's also important than businesses do in order to remain competitive. Here's Mashable's 2010/2011 for design trends for SME's - summarised below: Drop the Flash - More and more sites and web developers are moving away from Flash-only solutions in lieu of video, animation and navigation.What does your audience need and value? Flash is not even accessible on most mobile devices, though great for rich applications,…
So, you're maybe launching a new campaign, maybe a product launch, something like that. You've limited budget and time, do you create a micro-site, a new Facebook fan page or section within your current site? I've faced this dilemma before and I came across this article from Guy Kawasaki, which I feel offers some valuable perspective from somebody like him, so I wanted…

5 B2B Social CRM case studies to learn from

Value: [rating=4] Our commentary : The hunger for information on how to apply social CRM in 2009 and 2010 is shown at the start of this post. It's helpful since it features 5 mainly B2B mini social CRM case studies - often a good way to learn! I'm not so keen on the definition of Social CRM in the link below though - this definition of social CRM scopes it better I think. The scope is scary = CRM. Marketing implications : This post could be helpful if you want to know more about how you could harness social CRM and some of the software tools you could use to support it. Recommended link: Social CRM case studies…

One in four page views are on Facebook in the US

Hitwise has reported that visits to Facebook accounted for over 10% of US Internet traffic in the week ending November 13, 2010, year-on-year that's a whopping 63.5% up from the same period in 2009. Of course, both Google and You Tube show Growth as well, but nothing like Facebook - this is on top of Facebook reaching it's other milestone this year when it overtook Google in the US to become the most-visited website of the week (March 13, 2010). But what's really interesting here is that content consumption via Facebook has also increased: Nearly one in four page views in the US took place on Facebook in that same…
Success seems such an easy thing to measure in email marketing. Even the lowliest of campaign software should report "opens" and clicks. And many marketers have access to more-important post-click metrics, like sales, downloads, page impressions, donations etc. Most arguments around email metrics concern which numbers are best suited to campaign analysis. But there are two less-discussed issues which are equally important. First, when an email performs particularly well (or badly), we attribute that success (or failure) to far fewer factors than might actually be the case. Which means we risk drawing the wrong conclusions and making inappropriate changes in future campaigns. Second, we forget that the typical measures of success we use aren't actually that good at measuring the true impacts of our emails. In this article, I'll explain each problem in more depth and suggest solutions that will improve the usefulness of your email marketing analysis.

Attributing success

Assuming the audience is relatively unchanged, peaks…

How important is it and how well are you using it?

Marketing impact: [rating=5] Our commentary:  Now well into its third year, blended (or Universal) search is now a widely accepted & expected part of search result pages. But is it really important? Has it improved user experience? Are businesses using it to to improve performance & engage potential customers? First and foremost for those who are unaware of the term blended search let me explain. Search Engines for the last 3 years (at least) have refined their search results pages to enable different types of content to be displayed within the results. More often than not this will be, news, video or images. Universal results can however include products, twitter / Facebook, forum discussions, maps & more. A good example, shown in the image to the right (each…

How can you tailor them for your business?

Marketing Importance: [rating=4] Our commentary In case your wondering what Site Links are, they are the additional blue links to deeper pages in the site listed under the main domain name, often displayed for a brand search. See Smart Insights Google Site Links

The Google reason behind Sitelinks

This article has to be mainly based on speculation and reverse engineering the sites that do have SiteLinks since Google don't explicitly explain Sitelinks. To understand sitelinks you should start with the official Google explanation on Google site Links although all they really say is that they are created automatically! Note that Google now enables you to selectively switch off some Sitelinks within its Webmaster tools facility

Google engineer Matt Cutts gives a little…

Dan Zarella - the social media scientist - suggests that as social media marketers, there are lessons that we can learn from hypnosis and suggestion - though personally I'd be more likely to take this as a bit of light entertainment and genuinely fascinate our "subjects", over trying to hypnotise them :-)  There are one or two good (ethical) points - share your ideas on hypnotising in marketing, in the comments!

1. Suggestibility

This is a measure of how inclined a person is to act a suggestion of another person. Research indicates shown that there's a connections between how hypnotizeable a person is and how easily they react to suggestions. Zarella suggest that in social media, once we understand the level of engagement - the people who respond to joining email lists, who ReTweet links, or respond with social…