November 24, 2009
I’ve been using a service called StumbleUpon for some time now, and to be honest, it’s one of the most useful web resources I’ve found for quite some time.
It’s a free web-browser extension which acts as an intelligent browsing tool for discovering and sharing web sites; basically when you sign up you select a load of categories which you’re interested in, and when you hit the Stumble! button in your web browser, it randomly selects a web page which someone else has suggested.
I find this tool really useful if I have a few minutes of downtime, or I need a 5-minute break between tasks. Often for me, it brings up a web design or development website, a light-hearted YouTube video, or a website concentrating on environmental technologies.
The other great thing is, being completely random, you never see the same site twice.
9 times out of 10, the site it brings up is useful, and I often bookmark it and refer to it later when I have more time. I’ve lost count of how many useful sites I’ve StumbledUpon!
Got to www.stumbleupon.com and get it downloaded!
November 5, 2009
I recently spoke to a local business person, who asked me why her website was getting no visits, and didn’t appear anywhere within Google’s pages when searching for her business type in North Yorkshire.
I asked her a number of questions, including the age of her website, and how often she updated the content.
Her answers were surprising, but not untypical!
It turned out that her website was over 10 years old – she had been quick to catch onto the advertising potential for a website early on, but had not continued with that innovation. So her website not only looked old, but also used old content, photos, and more importantly used web technology which was well out of date.
I told her (as I tell everyone) that a website has an ultimate life-span of only three or four years. There are a number of reasons for this, including:
- Technology used to build websites changes (HTML and XHTML standards)
- Design ‘fashion’ changes regularly
- Text content and photos need to be changed to keep the website ‘fresh’ for its users
- New technologies which are used to add ‘bling’ to websites are created regularly (AJAX and Jquery being two recent technologies)
- Search Engines regularly change the algorithms they use to list websites – this is done to keep listings fresh, to prevent ‘cheating’ and to prevent companies for hogging the top rankings.
This particular client hadn’t known about any of the above, and had thought that once her website was running, it would bring in business without any effort or maintenance. With websites, this is very rarely the case!
From a human point of view, if a business has a website which looks old, this reflects on the business itself. Often these days, a company’s website is the first point of contact for potential customers. If they see a website which looks old, or perhaps doesn’t work properly, they may decide not to use the services of that company. This is certainly true for the 20 to 40-something age group who have become used to websites and have expectations about how they should look and work.
The upshot is this: if you wish to get business through your website, then it is critical that you keep it up to date, and consider budgeting to have a new website developed every 2 – 4 years. Then you can be sure that you’re making the best of design and technology.
