20+ Great Greasemonkey Scripts for Improving Your Facebook Experience

Facebook is the social network of choice for millions of people, but like any site out there, we all have our own list of improvements we’d like to see. Luckily the Greasemonkey script community feels the same way and has come up with hundreds of scripts to improve your user experience. 

The scripts allow you to change colors, remove ads, automate repetitive tasks in applications and a whole slew of other improvements. Try out these more than 20 great scripts to use Facebook the way you want to.  Read the entire article:  Click on the link below or paste it in your browser.

http://mashable.com/2008/12/25/facebook-greasemonkey-scripts/

What Prevents Most Businesses from Using Ezine Marketing

 What Prevents Most Businesses from Using Ezine Marketing by Chris Esposito

Who should be using ezines to market their products or services? The answer is every single business owner in America. We all know that ezines provide an enormous list of marketing benefits.

First of all, they provide inexpensive and immediate delivery to a client. Second, ezines give you a perfect chance to establish yourself as an expert in your field. Third, they keep your product or service at the forefront of your clients’ mind and attention. Fourth, ezines are a great platform to request referrals and provide special discount offers.

So, what do these benefits of ezines mean in terms of actual results? It means that a business that advertises through ezine marketing will build a strong relationship with their customers. This will lead not only to a lower attrition rate, but it will also lead to more frequent purchases from your client base. In addition, your ezine marketing will lead to more referrals if done properly.

So, why do so few businesses advertize with ezines? The short answer is fear. But, we can’t just leave it at that. What are business owners so afraid of? And, if we can determine the specific nature of the fear, can’t we find ways to overcome it? To answer the question, let’s first start by looking at the issue of fear a little more closely.

It turns out that most business owners who don’t use ezine newsletters as a way to market their product are afraid of one of two things. Most are afraid that they will be pestering their clients. And, second, some business owners are actually afraid that they will somehow do it incorrectly and lead to a reduction of clients.

The good news is that we can address each of these fears and provide simple, rational solutions to overcome the obstacle and get started immediately with proper marketing. So, let’s break them down one at a time.

1. Fear of doing it incorrectly.

For the business owners who are afraid that their ezine will somehow be done incorrectly and actually reduce the customer base, there is some very good news – your ezine doesn’t have to be perfect. Far from it, actually.

This is the same fear that prevents people from starting most marketing systems. It seems overwhelming, and you’re afraid that an imperfect marketing piece is going to be counter-productive. But, the truth is that you can absolutely create effective marketing pieces, ezines especially, without being a professional marketer.

For the marketing professionals who are competing with other professionals in their field, then maybe it is more important that their sales letters, ezines, etc. are as close to perfect as possible. But, you are not competing with them. For the most part, you are competing with the other small business owner in your area, and he probably isn’t even producing an ezine anyway.

Remember that nobody knows more about your product or service than you do. So, it should be relatively easy to throw an ezine together that discusses events and information in your field. An imperfect marketing piece is still going to be effective if it increases your referrals and improves your overall relationship with your clients. Maybe, if you had the perfect ezine, you could absolutely maximize your return on your investment (ROI). But, an imperfect ezine will still be effective even if it’s not fully maximizing the ROI. Isn’t some improvement better than none at all?

2. Fear of pestering your clients.

Nobody wants to be a nuisance, especially not to paying customers. But, there are two simple ways to ensure your ezine will be a welcomed guest instead of a pest. First, only send your ezine to customers who have agreed to receive it. Second, and maybe most important, always provide useful content in your ezine.

So, what is useful content? Make sure your articles are helpful in some way to your customers. You’re not writing a technical paper for colleagues in your industry. You’re writing a fun, interesting article that is in some way useful to your customers. You should know better than anyone what your customer wants or needs.

If you’re not sure what your customers want, then an ezine is a perfect way to find out! Simply insert a survey into your ezine, so your customers can tell you what they want or what they would change about your product. Problem solved. It’s not brain surgery.

Once you know what your customers want, you can then write articles on that topic and provide special bonus coupons and offers within the body of your ezine. Your clients will love you for it. They will actually be excited to open your ezine and read it.

So, don’t make it too technical. Keep it fun and interesting. There’s enough stress in the world, so don’t bog your clients down with technical papers about things they won’t understand. In fact, insert a few jokes or comical stories. If it gets your ezine opened and read, it is worth it.

Overall, the key to overcoming your fear is to simply dive right in. If you are a business owner who knows that ezines are important, the key is to dive right in and systemize it. Churn out your ezine on a regular basis. Don’t worry about perfection. Instead, just write for your customers – they will appreciate it.

If you are in the ezine marketing business, understanding this fear of business owners will help you assist those clients who need to start their ezine marketing but who have resisted for so long. If you can help these business owners overcome their fears, you will be the one they turn to for help when they need answers about their ezine system.

Chris Esposito is an owner builder loan specialist, using ezines as a staple of his marketing system. It has been such a success that he now assists other business owners with building and refining their own niche marketing systems. Visit http://www.ownerbuilder101.com or call (877) 876-3688.
Article Source: U Publish Articles

Google Snippets Explained

A Google Snippet

A Google snippet is the short text that appears under the search results on the search page.  A well written snippet can attract qualified viewers/customers to your site. 

How the Snippets Are Selected

The link text is taken directly from the <TITLE> tag of the web pageHTML.

The 2-line description snippet is usually taken directly from the Description Meta tag.

In cases where a suitable Description Meta tag is not provided, or it does not include the keywords searched for in the query, Google may use the description for the site provided in the Google Directory / DMOZ or snippets of text from within the main content on the page.  When the latter is done, the result is typically a blurb that doesn’t typically do the best describing your website’s business/service.  You want to control what the snippet says in order to attract qualified visitors to your site.

The Google snippets’ sitelinks, the links located under the snippet text- are usually the most popular links as determined by visitor usage.

Below is an article taken from the Official Webmaster Google Blog:

Thursday, September 27, 2007 at 6:46 PM

Written by Raj Krishnan, Snippets Team

The quality of your snippet — the short text preview we display for each web result — can have a direct impact on the chances of your site being clicked (i.e. the amount of traffic Google sends your way). We use a number of strategies for selecting snippets, and you can control one of them by writing an informative meta description for each URL. 

<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”informative description here”>

Why does Google care about meta descriptions?
We want snippets to accurately represent the web result. We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL’s content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics. Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don’t achieve this goal and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular, non-meta description, snippet. And it’s worth noting that while accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won’t affect your ranking within search results.

Snippet showing quality meta description

Snippet showing lower-quality meta description

What are some good meta description strategies?
Differentiate the descriptions for different pages
Using identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site isn’t very helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. In these cases we’re less likely to display the boilerplate text. Create descriptions that accurately describe each specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and consider using page-level descriptions everywhere else. You should obviously prioritize parts of your site if you don’t have time to create a description for every single page; at the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your homepage and popular pages.

Include clearly tagged facts in the description
The meta description doesn’t just have to be in sentence format; it’s also a great place to include structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise. Similarly, product pages might have the key bits of information — price, age, manufacturer — scattered throughout a page, making it unlikely that a snippet will capture all of this information. Meta descriptions can bring all this data together. For example, consider the following meta description for the 7th Harry Potter Book, taken from a major product aggregator.

Not as desirable:

<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”[domain name redacted]
: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7): Books: J. K. Rowling,Mary GrandPré by J. K. Rowling,Mary GrandPré”>

There are a number of reasons this meta description wouldn’t work well as a snippet on our search results page:

• The title of the book is complete duplication of information already in the page title.
• Information within the description itself is duplicated (J. K. Rowling, Mary GrandPré are each listed twice).
• None of the information in the description is clearly identified; who is Mary GrandPré?
• The missing spacing and overuse of colons makes the description hard to read.

All of this means that the average person viewing a Google results page — who might spend under a second scanning any given snippet — is likely to skip this result. As an alternative, consider the meta description below.

Much nicer:

<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”Author: J. K. Rowling, Illustrator: Mary GrandPré, Category: Books, Price: $17.99, Length: 784 pages”>

What’s changed? No duplication, more information, and everything is clearly tagged and separated. No real additional work is required to generate something of this quality: the price and length are the only new data, and they are already displayed on the site.

Programmatically generate descriptions
For some sites, like news media sources, generating an accurate and unique description for each page is easy: since each article is hand-written, it takes minimal effort to also add a one-sentence description. For larger database-driven sites, like product aggregators, hand-written descriptions are more difficult. In the latter case, though, programmatic generation of the descriptions can be appropriate and is encouraged — just make sure that your descriptions are not “spammy.” Good descriptions are human-readable and diverse, as we talked about in the first point above. The page-specific data we mentioned in the second point is a good candidate for programmatic generation.

Use quality descriptions
Finally, make sure your descriptions are… descriptive. It’s easy to become lax on the quality of the meta descriptions, since they’re not directly visible in the UI for your site’s visitors. But meta descriptions might be displayed in Google search results — if the description is high enough quality. A little extra work on your meta descriptions can go a long way towards showing a relevant snippet in search results. That’s likely to improve the quality and quantity of your user traffic.

Google Announces Basic SEO Guide…Free!

Being in the internet marketing business, Harp’s web services go beyond designing a good looking, intuitive and effective website for our B2B and B2C clients.  It is the supreme wish of each and every one of our client’s to improve their search engine ranking as well.  Recently, Google announced the release of a 22page PDF ‘Basic SEO Starter Guide’ geared towards business owners and webmasters alike.

Included in this easy-to-read guide:  

• Page Titles
• Description Meta Tag
• URL Structure
• Site Navigation
• Creating Quality Content
• Anchor Text
• Heading Tags (H1s, H2s, etc.)
• Image Optimization
• Robots.txt
• Rel=”nofollow”
• Website Promotion
• Webmaster Tools
• Analytics
• Helpful Resources

As Google puts it:

~Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. We plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current.

So, the next time we get the question, “I’m new to SEO, how do I improve my site?”, we can say, “Well, here’s a list of best practices that we use inside Google that you might want to check out.”

 

The Art of Ranking…Part 3/3

Boost your Link Popularity

 

In part one of The Art of Ranking, I reviewed submitting articles to Article Directories online to increase your back links (inbound links) and ultimately, improve your website’s page ranking in search engines.  Part 2 covered the subject of Press Releases and PR distribution sites to do the same.  In Part 3, below, I discuss another effective way to get your site out there and in turn, create the much needed inbound links!

 

Website Directories

Once your new or revamped website is launched, you can submit your URL to website directories, thus creating many new inbound links.  Although this can be a time consuming and daunting task, it is worth the work.  To start, research existing directories that are relevant to your industry.  They may have different rules for submission so you will have to take the time to familiarize yourself with those.  Keep a list of directories that you have submitted to, thus avoiding duplicate submission, saving time and the possibility of getting expelled from the directory for double submission.  Plan to submit to from 5 to 25 directories a day…being careful not to do it all at once.  The search engines can tell when you go from a few links to a few hundred quickly and do not look favorably on that. Although dmoz and Yahoo are the big two to get listed in, there are many others including niche directories.  Following is just a partial list of free directories you can consider:

• dmoz
• vlib.org
• Open Directory Project
• World Site Index
• info-listings

Where there is free, there is also paid.  Here is just a small sampling of paid directories to consider:

• Yahoo!
• elib.org
• This Is Your Year
• WhatUSeek
• Business.com

 

Don’t forget to search for directories specifically for your industry.  The industry-niche directories are valuable for creating relevant inbound links which carry more weight than an ordinary inbound link.

 

Learn more at www.harpinteractive.com

Internet Retailers Conference & Exhibition Review

Recently, I was among the thousands who attended June’s week-long Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition (IRCE) at Chicago’s McCormick Place West.   Packed with workshops, seminars and exhibits and a few decent meals, it was an overall good event.  Harp experienced this conference from the unique perspective of a supplier of interactive and e-commerce marketing solutions, (most attending were e-commerce businesses).  In the ever changing world of e-commerce & Internet technologies, it’s great to find a venue encompassing all aspects of e-commerce and Internet marketing.  Although the conference wasn’t specifically focused on marketing…any aspect of e-commerce that we can incorporate, benefiting our clients and improving their bottom line, is relevant, and adds to Harp’s continued marketing successes.

 

A highlight of the conference for me was the day-long workshops focused on new marketing opportunities with mobile marketing.  Mobile marketing is emerging in the United States and becoming more mainstream every day.  Though it still has a long way to go, it was interesting to hear how some e-tailers were successfully employing Mobile Commerce (m-commerce).  Not just for teens, the mobile Internet attracts a mature and high-income audience with nearly half of mobile Internet users over the age of 35 with incomes of over 75K.  Currently, 3.8 million US mobile Internet users access shopping/auction sites over their phones each month. Harp has the capabilities to create mobile-friendly versions of client’s websites and value-added, cross platform marketing experiences for both B2B and B2C clients.

 

Another interesting workshop focused on social media marketing…it’s viral, inexpensive and can, when cleverly developed and deployed, result in exponential exposure and ultimately sales.  There were many clever examples of how e-tailers had successfully utilized social media campaigns on Facebook, MySpace and not to be overlooked…various niche blogs.

 

Other workshops included tips and best practices on email marketing, website design, search engine optimization (SEO), widgets, store platforms, web 2.0, virtual reality, video, creating personas and much more. 

 

The only criticism I had is that not all of the conference speakers were, naturally, engaging.  The best speakers were not only animated and dynamic but provided web tools and URLs for those tools.

 

Harp Advertising & Interactive prides itself on staying on the cutting edge of internet marketing and found the Internet Retailer Conference to time well spent overall.

The Art of Ranking…Part 2/3

Boost your Link Popularity

 

In Part One of The Art of Ranking, I discussed the importance of inbound links to elevate your ranking in search engines, and focused specifically on publishing articles in Article Directories such as isnare.com and articlesnatch.com.  Publishing is an excellent place to start, but there is more you can do.  

 

Free PR is the Bonus!

Whatever your business, weather its B2B or B2C or eCommerce, another effective tool for improving your website’s page rank among search engines is to write and submit press releases.  Remember, the object is to increase your inbound links from relevant websites…so write about something happening in your business, industry or area of expertise. 

Submitting a press release to any of the many press release publication websites is a simple way to increase your inbound links.  Press releases are not only posted on the web site you submit to, but are also picked up by other related web sites. This means that each press release you write and submit can provide a large number of new back links (inbound links) for your website and improve your page rank.  Not to mention the PR!

For example, PRWeb.com is an online news and press release distributor used by more than 40,000 organizations of all sizes to increase the visibility of their news, improve their search engine rankings and drive traffic to their website. What more could you ask for?  This is a great way to get your news published on top sites like Google News & Yahoo! News as well as to journalists.  PRWeb also allows you to track your results.  If you are in the retail industry, consider running a sweepstake.  Write up a press release and watch the traffic flock to your site!  You will also benefit from improved page ranking.  PRWeb provides templates for press releases allowing novice writers to jump right in.  Also, look into the many other press release sites available.  Here are just a few:

PRBuzz.com

ClickPress.com

Express-Press-Release.com

Free-Press-Release-Center.info

NewswireToday.com

PR.Com

 

A good resource for locating PR websites is Avangate.com.  It supplies the top 50 public relations websites, details if they are paid or free and provides links to the actual press release submission pages.  The list is also ordered by Google Pagerank.  There are many lists of PR websites available, and it all takes time but is worth the work.  Again, as in article writing, if writing press releases isn’t your forte, you can always hire this task out to a copywriter.  There are also many press release templates and “how to” guides available on the internet.    You can also investigate press release submission software which will automatically submit your press release to hundreds if not thousands of websites and search engines.    Vocus.com, a Public Relations On-Demand Software is an example that says it will: improve productivity, save time, and build valuable relationships by directly distributing their press release to thousands of journalists, media outlets, and major search engines for maximum visibility.  See how this all-in-one management solution can help you power up your PR performance and get the results you want. 

Happy writing!

 

Learn more at www.harpinteractive.com

 

 

Blogging to Drive Traffic

Capturing that elusive Social Media Market

Although many e-tailers and businesses alike are anxious to leverage the power of social media to steer traffic to their websites, social media marketing remains an elusive marketing tool.  Usually, when speaking of social media, Facebook and MySpace come to mind…the strongest social networks out there by far!  But viral marketing can, and should, also include any and all places where people meet!  When considering a social media marketing program, be careful…there are best practices, dos and don’ts as in any marketing industry.  Rule number one…the marketing has to be relevant to the site and the audience!  Done correctly though, social media can boost your traffic, growth and e-sales immensely! 

Below is just one example of how a clever jewelry store took advantage of the bloggosphere to boost traffic to its fledgling internet site with a “blogging contest”. 

Inviting the Bloggosphere

One start up online jewelry store, Goldsmith Jewelry, successfully created and launched a blogging contest, the results of which increased traffic generated by search engines by as much as 400% to their site.  This was mainly due to the result of about 100 blog posts which were generated by the contest.  By capturing the bloggers, they were not only able to generate traffic at a low cost, but to generate relevant, qualified traffic.   

The Buzz Factor

So just how did Goldsmith create buzz in all the right places?  Through a little ingenuity and some elbow grease!  Here’s what they did:  As a run-up promotion to Valentine’s Day, the jewelry store offered a pair of diamond earrings, valued at $1,500 as the prize to anyone who blogged about Goldsmith Jewelers.  The blog could be positive, negative or indifferent…all entries were eligible as long as they met the criteria of blogging about Goldsmith and mentioned the contest.  The company contacted scores of bloggers working through blog search tools.  They contacted close to 1000 bloggers via email which culminated in a result of of 75 entries received directly.  Here’s the viral part…another 2,000 unique visitors were referred directly to the site by the postings on the blogs that entered the contest.

Not only did this create awareness and traffic, it also generated close to 300 new inbound links which, if you’ve been paying attention, are extremely significant in determining page rank by search engines. 

Social media marketing and networking are definitely a marketing strategy that you should consider, and the best part about it…there is relatively little expense involved! 

If you wish to launch a social media marketing campaign, please contact Harp Interactive for more information and a quote. Call 630.691.9500 or email diane@harpinteractive.com

eMail Marketing Tips

Ease, Frequency & Relevance

As quoted in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide: 

It’s long been a practice to place the request for a web site visitor’s e-mail address on the home page, and most retailers who offer e-mail programs do so.  Only 5% of the Top 500 companies offering e-mail programs failed to put the registration box on the home page. 

Although you should always include a call to opt-in to your e-mail program on the home page, it’s not enough to leave it at that.  As more consumers land on your site through search engines, chances are increasing that they’ll land on a spot inside your site.  The best programs promote e-mail programs on every page, ensuring they’ll be able to offer the chance to sign up to consumers searching for products.  Not only should marketers liberally sprinkle prominent email invitations throughout their websites, they should also promote their e-mail programs above the fold on the home page.

Leading retail companies clearly understand the value of e-mail marketing and are optimizing their programs for best results.

Quick Tips on Email Marketing:

Use an eye-catching call out for email sign up.  It helps to “design” this call out with special copy and graphic treatment.

Provide an Incentive to sign up.  Offer the viewer value for sign up…what will the user get?

Place the sign up box above the fold on the home page.  This is the section of the website that you don’t have to scroll to see.

Place email sign up on every page.  Most successful retail companies offer the email sign up on the home page, but a lot neglect to offer it on every page of the website.

Allow your email recipients to control the type and timing of the e-mails they receive. (Relevance is the number one reason why consumers hit the unsubscribe button.)

Determine Frequency:  The number two reason why subscribers hit the unsubscribe button…they get emails from a company too often.  According to eMail Labs:

Both email and postal direct marketers run the risk of alienating recipients by contacting them too frequently, leading to a condition called “list fatigue.”

Send a trigger welcome email upon sign up offering a welcome promotion.

Send the first email after the welcome within three weeks.

Test subject line (studies have found that personalized subject lines can improve open rates).  Test subject lines with and without offers in them.  The most accurate way to test is to conduct an A/B split test.

Test offers, formats, creative and timing…separately.

Include a sale, discount or free shipping offer in every e mail you send (e-Commerce sites).

Provide an opt-out preference-center page.  Send your customers who have clicked on the unsubscribe link to a preference page which provides the option to receive email less often, or to receive different kinds of messages.  Always offer the complete unsubscribe option.  Test the opt-out process to see if/how it works from the users perspective.

Appoint a Human to monitor email.  Monitor all email mailboxes associated with your program to watch for misdirected opt-outs, complaints and comments. Especially,  the email address you use to send your messages from. Even if it specifies not to reply to the message with opt-outs or comments, or how easy your feedback or unsubscribe process is, they’re going to hit “reply” instead. Someone must monitor that mailbox to catch and route personal replies.

Clean your list:  Periodically, remove the inactive addresses from your list.  But first, identify the in-actives who haven’t opened or clicked through on any of your emails in X amount of time (at least 6 months).  Create a special email to them inviting them to unsubscribe, receive email less frequently or to take advantage of a special promotion.  After a week to two, go back in and delete addresses that did not respond.

If you are interested in starting or refining an an email marketing campaign, or simply want further information, please contact Harp Interactive at 630-691-9500:  Harp Interactive is a full service online/offline marketing agency implementing savvy email marketing tactics, e-Mail design, tracking and testing for B2B and B2C clients.  Give us a call at 630.691.9500 to find out more, or send an email to diane@harpinteractive.com.

www.harpinteractive.com

www.harpadvertising.com

Quick e-commerce Web Design Tips

The Short List:

Incorporate a perpetual cart: A perpetual cart is just what you think…a shopping cart that is “perpetually” apparent on every page and every view.  It stays with you at all times.  An excellent example of a perpetual cart can be found at www.collectiblestoday.com.  Collectibles Today incorporates a cart three times on their page.  Because the page is long and the user has to scroll, the use of a perpetual cart ensures that the shoppers see their cart wherever they are on the page.

Use “C” navigation: This means navigation on the top, left and bottom of a page.   “C” navigation provides an expected, user friendly and intuitive way to navigate a site, thereby increasing conversion.

Buy Now:  This seems obvious but is a missed opportunity many times.  Ask for the order and ask for it over and over on any product page!  Adding the word “now” dramatically increases response rates.  Use the color red for this call to action.  Let the customers know you want their order!

3 Column Architecture:  A 3 column format provides the best functionality and user friendly layout.  The left hand column is used for navigation, center column for text and photos and the right hand column is used for specific promotions.  The right hand column is the last place people will look before leaving a page, therefore it is a great place to put promotions to guide the shopper back into the site, often with a “click here now” call to action.

Search:  The best place to incorporate the search function is the upper right hand corner of the page.  Offer a refined search function which can include:  Search by price, favorites, newly added, highest priced, lowest priced.

eMail sign up: Incorporate an email sign up for promotions.  Have this on every single product page in your site.  Use an icon by the email sign up for quick visual location.  You can also get people to sign up via a promotion such as a sweep-stake or give away.

Top Products & Pricing on Home Page:  List your top products right on the homepage with pricing and a buy now link. 

Text/Graphics:  A couple of points regarding text and graphics on your homepage.  Remember that shoppers are in a hurry and usually don’t stop to read the text, therefore don’t use alot of text.  People see pictures but not usually the text.  When you do use text – keep it live vs. graphic or it won’t be picked up by search engines.  If your website has a “hero” or feature shot which rotates out, don’t rotate the shot too fast.  This can be annoying and casue people to flea before shopping.  If you are running promotions, feature the promotion in your “hero” shot section.

Navigation: Entire volumes can and should be written about navigation alone.  Navigation has been proven to be responsible for 40% to 60% of your website’s success.  Therefore getting it right is critical.  Don’t reverse navigation out to white.  Use live text for navigation (seo).  Have no more than 100 links on any page and no more than 25 links in the left hand navigation.  The shopper should be able to get to a specific product in as little as one click.  Rollover or drop down navigation can be incorporated, as well as detailed prime and subnavigation in the left column.  Offer general category navigation in the center under the hero shot, e.g. “top sellers, newly arrived, for him, for her, etc.”

If you would like to have your site critiqued for free, please send your “URL” to diane@harpinteractive.com with a short message and request for free web site critique.

Article by:  Diane Rayfield www.harpinteractive.com