.COM And the Stealing of Millions?
Site Locates Sexual Offenders
New Site Locates Sexual Offenders
The site was created by National Coalition of Victims in Action called “Family Watchdog.” It was started in 2005 by Steve Roddel. Steve started the site because he was tired of hearing about missing children who had been killed by registered sex offenders.
It is a nicely done site with a local map search powered by Google. Sexual offenders show up as colour dots, the colures indicate the type of crime committed.
The site is free and shows registered sex offender’s location in 44 different states.
If you would like to learn more or give your opinions on this site click here
MSN Backs Down
MSN Search Responds
On Friday I posted in the GOS forum regarding Microsoft’s beating Google, their was also a lot of bloggers that posted about this in their blogs. It looks like Microsoft was surprised by all the attention and has responded on their blog.
“We are committed to building the world’s best search engine which helps you get your answers as quickly as possible – and we are excited to spend many years continuing to innovate on our customer’s behalf.”
“When you talk about basic web relevancy, our customers report that we’ve made some great progress over the past year, and I know that our research and engineering pipeline is overflowing with intriguing ideas that we will test and release as they’re ready.”
“…we won’t try to predict the progress of our competitors and so we won’t forecast when we might take the lead, but this is a long term game and we are committed to helping drive the next wave of innovation in search for our customers.”
Now they are saying they might take the lead. A big change from they will take the lead. Guess they got scared.
Good & Bad Website Design
:: Making The Most Of Your Internet Business ::
A website should give you new ways of marketing and selling your products and building relationships with your customers. But when I do a search for just about anything online I see a lot of web sites that are totally ineffective.
It seems that a lot of people forget that they are only one among tens of hundreds of thousands of the same type of businesses. In order to compete you have to stand out. But it seems that the only standing out a lot of these companies do is in all the things you should not do.
You web site should be powerful, emotional and should show the reader that his or her life would be more complete – better, easier, more productive, more profitable and happier – if they owned what it is you’re selling.
Your design needs to move the reader while your content grabs them, working together they should build confidence in both your business and products. You have two seconds to tell your visitor what you sell and what’s in it for them. If that aligns with what they want, they’ll spend more time on your site and that should lead to more sells.
It’s never about money
People buy for emotional reasons and justify it after the sell with logic. If your site builds enough confidence in your product or service then your reader will buy from you regardless of price.
How Not Too Make An Ugly Website
I thought the best thing to do was look around the web a name a couple things that a lot of people do that they should not. Maybe this will help others not make the same mistakes.
1. Never Ever have a “under Construction” on a website. All website are under construction all the time.
2. Stay with one style of font. I know there are a lot of styles that are really cool but the site will look a lot better if you only use one.
3. Use 2 font colours and no more. Again there are some really cool colours but trying to use them all does not help anyone.
4. Scrolling text. If someone is trying to read the text on your site and something keeps moving around in the corner of there eye it really makes it tough to stay focused.
5. Don’t use pop-up Windows. No one likes them and most people see them as unwanted ads, and close them without looking at them. That’s if they don’t already have some type of pop-up blocker installed.
6. Flash introduction. Everyone already knows that this does not work. It has been tested and users hate them. So do not use them.
7. Opening New Browser Windows. I hate when I finish looking at a site and find I have to close 20 windows. Do not open new windows.
These are only a couple things that make up a really bad designed website. The list could go on and on but I wanted to point out a couple.
Colors
The sad part is that color is often overlooked in the business of online marketing and design. Website sales can be greatly effected by changing colors of your current website. It is harder to read text on a monitor than it is on a piece of paper, because of this we have to be very careful of the colors we use.
All colours don’t effect all people in the same ways, however, there have been extensive studies done that show how colours effect the majority of people in the same ways. As with all rules, there are exceptions, but to ignore the power of colours would be to ignore an essential element of a good website design.
Another extremely important element to colours is not only the properties or emotions each colour conjures up in each of us, but also how combinations of colours make people feel. And to further complicate your perfect colour selection you also have to be concerned with the fact that people have to be able to read your content or the most beautiful colour in the world will be for nothing. No matter how important the content on your site may be to someone, if they can’t read it due to bad colour selection they will leave in search of another site to serve their needs.
Here are only a few colours and what emotions have been shown to be raised with each.
Green jealousy, good luck, and harmony
Blue calming, peaceful and builds trust
Red colour of action, anger, Love, impulse and impatient
Purple nobility, spirituality and creativity, passion
White pure colour, innocent and clean
Black serious, mysterious, mournful and lifeless
Yellow happy, cheerful and joy
Orange positive, enthusiastic and warmth
People believe you can even see colours in music, one thing is for sure though, they cause a physical and emotional reaction in each of us. Colors can cause headaches, sickness, relaxation, pleasure, tension, passion, peacefulness or irritation.
There are literally hundreds of sites dedicated to the research and insight into colors and the reactions they cause in the people viewing them. We’d suggest that you do as much research into this area of your website as you can stand as in the long run it will pay off in sales or return visits to your site.