Archive for December, 2010

You’re Wasting Your Time Online (Isn’t SubWay Hiring?)

You’ve got to be freaking kidding me.

This morning, as I perused my e-mail over the first java of the day, I reviewed the notifications of visitor posts to my various WordPress-powered sites and sub-domains. As usual, there was a blend of both genuine comments and crap – spam comments that may have been posted manually, but were likely generated by some spammy software.

Normally, I just delete these outright, but occasionally, perhaps because of some bizarre mental defect, I actually check out the linked sites. I figure it may provide some insight into the type of marketer who considers posting spam on a moderated blog to be both an effective marketing strategy, and a good use of their time.

Anyhow, back to the case in point. Some genius going as “Jan”, posted this comment in response to my “Lis Sowerbutts’ BOGUS SBI! Scam Review” post…

“Remarkable post on the blog man, I absolutely like the look and also the feel of this excellent blog page. You write realistically well, you have got to be a aware guy. Will surely come back. Btw if you’re serious about your weight, here are good tips to follow.”

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Radio Silence and Web Site Usability

It’s been a while since my last post here at No-BS-Marketing – a little disappointing, as I really wanted to be a little more on the ball delivering great content on a consistent basis. Oh well… the best laid plans of mice and men.

Or something like that.

So… the reason for my lapse?

A dramatic redesign of UltimateFatBurner.com (both the index page and content templates needed to be redone).

Frankly, I’ve known this has had to be done for a long time. It was just that it is such a HUGE and tedious (and currently ongoing) task, I decided procrastination was the best course of action. ;-)

However, things came to a “head” late this past summer. A friend of mine referred his daughter – a bright, university bound 19-year old – to the site when she had some questions about “trimming down.” She found herself so overwhelmed with the amount of information, she was unable to use the site at all.

When my friend reported this back to me, I knew procrastination was no longer an option. A redesign, painful as it may be, was the only course of action.

Since this is an Internet marketing web site, and since “usability” (a term coined by Jakob Nielsen) is the key to having your visitors interact effectively with your site – ultimately increasing revenue regardless of your monetization model – let’s talk about some of the reasons for the redesign, and why it absolutely needed to be done…

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