Is bidding on keywords really worth the investment if your landing page isn't laid out well? If you're using paid search you quickly see how increasingly expensive it is to arrest someone's attention online. In this medium, you are no longer competing just against your peers in bidding on keywords. You're also having to compete for attention against organic search results, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Trying to cut through that noise costs more and more money. (Which is still the #1 reason for having great content on your website). Web usability research shows that you have a...

We recently taught a course for Montana State University around social media and the web. We had a class full of entrepreneurs who were looking to get more out of their online presence and a simple exercise proved quite helpful for getting the class inside the head of their target market. Definition: A persona includes an informal picture (written description usually) of your target market based on market research, demographics, and psychographics. In short, you start with the basics to "create" your ideal customer and finish up trying to understand their needs. (See Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs...

I'm always on the hunt for a good read.  With Digital Wax Works, we've been doing quite a bit of website design/redesign work and have been kicking around a couple ideas for web application designs in our labs exercises.  (In this space, we see an opportunity for creating software applications that run on a web server and allow users to access this from the web versus running software on their hard drive.)  There are literally hundreds of ideas that could work in this area and this is driving much of the rage that you hear around "cloud computing".Anyways,...

Ever notice when you visit some websites the cute little picture next to the URL?  That's known as a "favicon" (short for favorites icon), or sometimes a website icon, shortcut icon, url icon, or bookmark icon.  And having one is becoming increasingly important to the success of a website.  Here's a quick run-down of why you should schedule in some time to make sure your favicon is on par with your brand.Browser TabsThe advent of tabbed browsing several years ago made it possible to have several webpages open at once.  While writing this blog post for example, I have...