August 31,
2005
In This Issue:
1. Selling Good Design
2. In the News - Dashes/Underscores, Yahoo Site
Submit, Battelle excerpts
3. More News Headlines
4. This Week's Q&A - Keep old site or start
over?
5. Wrapping It Up
_________________
Selling Good Design
I'm not a very good salesperson. I know it. It's
why I don't do sales. But part of my job is selling,
since I do meet regularly with prospects and clients
looking for someone to help fill their web development
and marketing needs. I do just fine with that.
But I also have to sell a bit to existing clients,
as in "Here's the design I recommend we use
for your new site...." And this is where
I occasionally fall flat.
I think the problem is the word "design."
I think most business owners hear the word and
start to think of colors and graphics and things
that move or swirl or somehow "catch"
your attention. Note: something that swirls or
moves on a web site is, four times out of five,
actually something that "diverts" your
attention from where it should be.
"Design", for me, and I hope for all
the other designers reading this, is not about
those things -- at least not directly. Sure, good
design uses colors correctly and often involves
graphic elements, no argument there. But good
design gets out of the way. It's like a referee
or umpire in pro sports -- you know they've done
a good job when you never notice them. Here are
a couple sites I think are beautifully designed,
maybe you agree?
OnlineClassical.com
http://www.onlineclassical.com/
Grapefruit
http://www.grapefruit.ro/en/
One is fairly colorful; the other isn't. But I
think both are designed well. Do you? Or do I
need to become a better salesman?
_________________
In The News
Dashes or Underscores
Google's Matt Cutts answers a fairly common question
about web site file names, but a question I don't
recall ever addressing here in Net Gains. Should
you use dashes or underscores when naming web
pages?
Dashes
or Underscores
Yahoo Site Submit
Yahoo has recently expanded its site submission
options. Now, it's anyone's guess how effective
any of this is, and we generally preach that there's
no need to submit a site to Yahoo, Google, and
the other good crawler-based search engines, but
this is interesting.
http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request
Check out the second paragraph there - you can
supply a text file that lists URLs. You can give
them your entire site map, essentially. As they
say, your mileage may vary in terms of having
success from this, but it may be worth a try if
you have pages that the crawlers can't seem to
find. What have you got to lose?
Battelle book excerpts
John Battelle has posted three more excerpts from
his upcoming book, The Search.
The Search: Expanding
Beyond Search
The Search: More
on Perfect Search
The Search: Google
Goes Public
_________________
More News Headlines
Here are a few news headlines worth your time
to read. These are just some of the headlines
we've posted to OWTweb.com in recent days.
Google
takes ad sales to print
August 31, 2005 - News.com
Google is expanding its lucrative Internet advertising
network into the print world in a bold attempt
to capture traditional ad dollars.
What
is RSS, and why should you care?
August 30, 2005 - Search Engine Watch
Google's
grand ambitions
August 29, 2005 - Business Week
Its lips are sealed, but its moves rattle everyone
from Microsoft to eBay.
When
content isn't king in SEO
August 29, 2005 - ClickZ.com
More headlines: http://www.owtweb.com/news/
_________________
This Week's Q&A
Matt,
We have a web site that's a couple years old and
has basically been left out there and ignored
for a while now. It doesn't get much traffic anymore
and doesn't rank well in Google and other search
engines. We want to resurrect at least the idea
behind the web site, but would it be better to
start from scratch with a brand new domain or
should we try to freshen up the existing site
that people have been ignoring for a while now?
Thank you,
Jill
Hi Jill --
I think the first thing to do is check if the
existing site is still in the search engine indexes.
Just put the URL in and see what comes back. If
your site appears in the SERPs, it's still in
the index. The next thing would be to find out
about any inbound links from other sites. Do you
know if you had any? Go to our RESOURCES page
on owtweb.com and click the "Link Popularity
Checker" link, which will show you how many
inbound links various search engines think you
have.
The point I'm getting at here is this: Even if
you've ignored the existing site for a while now,
it may still be indexed by the search engines
and may still have links from other sites. Those
two things give it an advantage over starting
a new site with a new domain, so I'd suggest using
what you have and developing a new site with the
existing URL.
(Have a question? Email questions@owtweb.com)
_________________
Wrapping it Up
No newsletter next week, so I'll see you in two
weeks. Meanwhile, we all love The Onion, right?
Funny search-related satire:
Google
Announces Plan to Destroy All Information It Can't
Index
Thanks for reading,
Matt McGee
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