blog posts

The weather is unseasonably warm here at CommonPlaces HQ, and Spring is on everyone’s mind. With the season of renewal beginning in just two days, you may be planning a little Spring Cleaning at home or in the office. If so, consider this: When was the last time you cleaned up your website? Sometimes the little things that it takes to keep a site up-to-date get put off and tend to pile up. Here are eight tips for giving your website a Spring Cleaning.

Does you website say what you want it to say?
Take this opportunity to read through the text of your site and determine if it still says what you want it to say. Perhaps your company has changed over the past year – whether it’s a new direction, new product offerings, or a new slogan. Make sure that your site copy still portrays you as accurately as it did a year ago (or the the last time you assessed it).

Is your contact information correct? What about your ‘Team’ page?
Has your phone number changed? Are you still at the same address? Sounds obvious, but it is easy to forget that stuff way down in the site footer. What about your ‘Team’ page, if you have one? Are you still displaying former employees? Do you have new hires that you need to add to this page? Finally, update the copyright year in your footer. Again, it’s easy to forget, but users may see “2007″ and think your site is out-of-date or no longer relevant.

Are there any broken links on your site?
Broken links are never a good thing. They tend to cause frustration, and can even make you seem less credible. So take a little time to click through your site and see if everything is in order. Also, check your analytics program to see if users are hitting your 404 (Page Not Found) page. Are there external links out there pointing to pages that no longer exist? Contact the webmaster if possible, or set up a redirect from the defunct address to a relevant, current page.

Does your navigation and site hierarchy make sense?
Look at your site with an objective eye, and ask yourself if your site structure will help your visitors, or hinder them. Seek out the opinions of your friends, or ideally, people who are unfamiliar with your site. Where are they getting lost or confused? You can also search the Web (or your local bookstore) for Web Usability resources, and give your site a self-test. Are you violating any major usability rules?

Does you site display and function correctly in all browsers?
Your website may look fine in your Safari browser, but how do your IE6 users experience it? There are a couple things you can do to test this. First, download a bunch of browsers. You can get the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome, and Opera for free. To test older versions and/or different operating systems, you’ll have to try another approach. There are some services on the Web that will give you a snapshot of what your site looks like in different broswer/operating system environments. The best (free) one I’ve seen is Adobe BrowserLabs.

What about mobile browsers?
If your website is a couple years old, mobile may not have been a top concern when your site was being developed. Today, it is. People will be visiting your website from their iPhones, BlackBerries, and other mobile devices. Trust me. Is your website still functional on these platforms? How does it look? Remember, these devices cannot render Flash meda. Is your website still navigable without Flash? Testing these platforms is a little bit tougher than testing multiple browsers. Search around to see if you can find simulators online. In the case of the iPhone, however, you won’t find a reliable simulator for the PC. If all else fails, enlist the help of your tech-conscious friends (or acquaintances), or consider heading to the store to try out some of these phones.

What can you learn from your analytics data?
I mentioned site analytics above as a helpful tool for identifying 404s. Hopefully you have some sort of website analytics system in place. If you do, then there are other helpful bits of information to be had. For example, where are people leaving your site? If you see, for example, that one page in particular has a high exit rate, dedicate some time to working on this – users are either getting confused, frustrated, or just plain turned off by the content of this page. Conversely, what pages lead to the most conversions? What are you doing right on these pages?

When was the last time you checked out the competition?
Since you’re evaluating your own site, this might also be the perfect time to check out the competition. What are they doing on their sites? What do you like? What do you dislike? Also, investigate which websites are linking to your competition. Can you obtain a link on these sites as well?

I hope these suggestions help you become more successful in the coming year. Good luck, and happy Spring!

If anyone tells you that email marketing is dead, don’t believe them. Email marketing is still alive and well, and continues to deliver repeatable and trackable results, even in 2010. In a recent study by Vertical Response, 74% of small business owners responded that they would like to increase their email marketing efforts in 2010. So if you’re thinking about taking your email marketing efforts to the next level (or if you’re just getting started), you’re certainly not alone.

To a great extent, the success of your future email campaigns depends upon your choice of email marketing software. There are many good email solutions out there, but that is not to say that they are all the same, or that your decision should be taken lightly. When you sit down to evaluate the myriad options available, keep the following considerations in mind.

Ease of List Maintenance
It’s not an exaggeration to say that your email marketing efforts are only as good as the quality of your email list. For this reason, you’ll want an email solution that makes it easy to manage and grow that list. This means easy to use import functionality, and custom fields to store your data exactly as you collect it. Some email solutions offer custom subscription forms that you can paste into your site. Another consideration is finding email software that integrates with your CRM, if you use one. This can mean one-step customer management, saving you time.

One other note: While it won’t make your list grow, you will want to find an email marketing solution that manages unsubscribes and bounces without you having to worry about it.

Theme Builder / WYSIWYG Editor
If you’re proficient with HTML and CSS, and want to build your emails this way, then you can skip this requirement. But if you’re not, you should look for an email program that provides a simply, easy-to-use WYSIWYG (“What you see is what you get”) editor. More specifically, you’ll want to find an email solution that translates the look you design for your emails into CSS that can be displayed by different email clients. Programs such as Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, Gmail, and others all have particular requirements for what can be displayed in an email. A good email marketing program will accommodate this specific needs.

Reporting
Like Web marketing, email marketing success depends upon complete, reliable tracking and reporting. With an email solution that tracks opens and clicks, you can assess the strength of your Subject lines, and the content of your emails. If you see that the second link in your emails tends to be the most clicked, you will want to put your main call to action in this position. If your open rates are below average, your Subject lines may be leaving something to be desired.

Price/Rate Structures
Price will obviously be one of your considerations in choosing an email marketing offering. But when you make your decision, consider not only the price today, but how that price will change over time if your email list grows. Growth is a major goal of almost any email marketing effort, so make sure that you allow for that growth. When you investigate price structures, assume your list will grow at the rate you want it to; in other words, assume your own success.

Targeted Sub-lists
Depending upon the size of your email list, and the extent of your email campaigns, you may want to find an email marketing program that allows you to create targeted sub-lists from your main email list. For example, if your company had a special offer for customers located in the Northeast, you could filter your list geographically, and send an alert to only these customers. The limit of how you can target your emails depends on the quality of your data. You could theoretically filter by location, age, gender, interests, or even past purchasing history.

Personalization
If you want to send personalized emails to your email list (for example, emails that begin “Hello John,” or “Hello Sarah”), personalization will be an important piece of functionality that you’ll be looking for. Many email programs offer this, and basically it allows you to put placeholders in your email that will be replaced by data from your email list. Think Mail Merge for your emails. Again, if this is something you’ll want to do in the future, look for it in the solutions you evaluate.

Inbox Previews
In the Theme Builder section above, I mentioned that different email clients will display your emails differently. While you could send test emails to a bunch of different addresses to test this yourself, it is far easier to find an email marketing program that offers previews of how your emails will look in these different clients. At a glance you will see how your emails will look in your customers’ inboxes, including how much of your email appears in the Inbox preview pane, and how much of your content is “below the fold.”

Depending upon your goals, there may be additional requirements you’re looking for in your email marketing solution. What appears above is by no means an exhaustive list of requirements. But it is a good place to start in your search. Good luck!

CommonPlaces is thrilled to announce that Michelle Lauer has been selected by the Drupal community to present “Views Examples: Using Arguments and Relationships” at DrupalCon San Francisco, which will be held from April 19-21. You can read our press release here.

In her session, Michelle will share a repeatable strategy for using arguments and relationships with Drupal Views to display specific subsets of content. Here’s the session description, from the DrupalCon SF site:

Views are a powerful way to display specific subsets of your content. From a simple list of all nodes in a single content type to a complex collection of related information, each step will be explained so you can easily repeat the strategy in your own views.

• Systematic way to create ALL views in the GUI
• What are arguments and how to use them
• What are relationships and how to use them
• Discussion of CCK node reference
• Why you should export your Views to code

Are you planning to build multiple websites for your business? Before you do, read out free, 9-page white paper, “When to Use a Multi-Site Architecture,” to learn more about the significant savings that multi-site can deliver. If your goals require multiple websites, a multi-site solution could cut your development and maintenance costs in half.

Here’s an excerpt from the white paper:

“More often than not, one website can deliver everything an organization needs, and help them achieve all of their goals.

Fortunately, you can.“

Download the rest.

Before you start asking what I have against these two mega-sites, rest assured, the answer is nothing. Both are valuable marketing tools, as countless companies have discovered. But if you read online marketing and social media blogs regularly, you’re probably getting tired of hearing about Twitter and Facebook. Both sites have large user bases, so they’re good places to start (they do get mentioned often for a reason). But ask yourself this: Are these the only two websites you visit on the Web? Chances are they’re not the only two sites your customers are visiting, either.

Note the most important word in the title – “Beyond.” I’m in no way advising you to give up your marketing efforts of Facebook and Twitter. But if you feel like branching out in your Web presence, try some of the suggestions below. I tried to include an example with each of how you might use it to your advantage. Hopefully these examples will provide you with the inspiration you need to get started.

Social Bookmarking Sites (Digg, Reddit, etc.)

On sites like Digg.com and Reddit.com, people submit web pages that they think are interesting, informative, or entertaining, and other users give them an ‘up’ or ‘down’ rating. The voting component is why it’s called social bookmarking. If you have content on your site that you think would be valuable to others (perhaps an informative blog post), share it on these sites. It only takes a couple minutes to submit a page.

There are even social bookmarking sites out there centered on a specific topic (here’s a list). As as example, your blog post on New Property Tax Laws may not have enough of a general appeal to be successful on Digg, but on Tip’d, a social site for finance and money news, it might be a big hit.

Flickr.com

If you don’t know, Flickr is a photo sharing site, owned by Yahoo!. It’s also the 21st most visited site in the US, according to Alexa. If you’re wondering what you can do on a photo sharing site to market your business, the answer is pretty simple: share photos!

As an example, let’s say you owned an antique car restoration business. Take twenty minutes to create a Flickr account, and post pictures of some of the beautiful cars you’ve restored. Add some new photos every once in a while. Now, when people interested in car restoration search the Web, maybe they will come across one of your pictures. Not only will you deliver the message that you do great work, but also that you are genuinely passionate about your work, and sincerely care about the final product — not just the bottom line.

YouTube.com

Everyone knows YouTube. It’s the third most visited website in the world (after Google and Facebook). The tactics you can employ on YouTube are similar to those discussed with Flickr above. The main difference is that video offers many more possibilities than photos. With video, you can share customer testimonials, virtual tours, tutorials…the list could go on and on.

Rather than provide a hypothetical example in this case, I thought it would be better to share an example from real life – The Home Depot. This home improvement giant has created a robust YouTube channel, offering over 100 videos offering advice and instruction on painting, gardening, carpentry, and other home-related topics. Once they’ve inspired you to undertake a couple of these projects, guess where you’ll be going to buy the necessary supplies?

Review Sites (Google Maps, Yelp, etc.)

Chances are pretty good that people are talking about your business online. Ideally, they’re talking about your business a lot. But the bigger your business gets, the more likely it is that you will, at some point in time, receive a negative review. Unfortunately, even the best customer service can’t ensure 100% satisfaction – there is just no pleasing some people.

While you can’t control what people say about you on Google Maps, or Yelp, or UrbanSpoon, you can make some efforts to manage your reputation on these sites. In the case of a positive review, respond with a kind thank you. In the case of negative feedback, respond with an apology, and an effort to make it up to the offended party. I wouldn’t recommend responding to every review you receive, but a few responses here and there might go a long way towards keeping your reputation clean (and perhaps discouraging people from posting negative reviews!).

If a negative review is truly inaccurate, contact the site on which is appears, and request that it be removed. There are no guarantees, but some business owners have been able to get grossly unjust reviews removed from certain sites. It’s worth a shot!

Have other ideas on how to break out of the Twitter/Facebook rut? Share them in the comments!

Slightly overdue, here is the second half of my two-part series on Delivering Video Content on Your Website. Part 1, “How Do I Get Video On My Website?”, can be seen here.

After reading Part 1, “How Do I Get Video On My Website?”, you may have concluded that a content delivery network (CDN) is the right choice. If so, the next challenge is finding the right CDN for your needs. Remember, a CDN offers hosting and delivery of video files so that your network isn’t burdened by these large resources. Your site hosting solution may not be able to keep up with user demand to stream and download large video files, but a CDN will.

Selecting the appropriate CDN for your website is far too individual of a decision to make any sweeping suggestions. But as you make your decision, keep these considerations in mind:

Price
Obviously price will be high on anyone’s list of considerations, but this list wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t include it. Investigate the price structures that different CDNs offer, and assess which will be the most cost effective. How much data will you need per month? Will your usage stay fairly consistent from month to month, or will it vary greatly? It’s important that you have a pretty clear picture of what your data needs will be before you can identify the best-priced solution.

Delivery Method
Again, the better understanding you have of your video needs, the easier it will be to select the right CDN. In this case, you should know how your videos will be delivered. Will they be viewable as streaming media? Will users be able to download them? Do you record live video of events that will need to be streamed as it’s happening?

User Experience
Another top consideration on anyone’s list should be how the user will experience your CDN of choice. Is the video player attractive? Easy to use? Does it fit with the style of your site? It may sound superficial but these are important considerations. The last thing you want for your website is a video experience that looks out of place.

Security
Are your videos private? Depending upon how sensitive or confidential your video content is, the security features of your CDN may be important to you. Does the CDN you’re evaluating have multiple layers of security surrounding your videos? Does this CDN encrypt your videos as they’re transmitted across the Internet? If not, your video data could be intercepted and viewed by unauthorized individuals.

Statistics/Reporting
Are you a sucker for good Web traffic statistics? If so, you’ll want to find a CDN that provides adequate tracking tools, so that you’ll know who’s watching what (and maybe when, and where). More than once in this blog I’ve talked about the value of complete site analytics data. Strong reporting tools in your CDN might provide you with the information you need to tackle the competition and “wow” your users.

Here at CommonPlaces, we’re pleased to welcome Michael Fairbrother to the team as a Chief Operating Officer. He comes to us with over two decades of experience in the technology sector. In his career he has advanced from Software Engineer, Consultant, Chief Architect, to most recently Vice President of Software Engineering. His industry background includes mobile-technology, marketing management software, and privacy technology projects. Michael has the technical depth, and the product and business instincts to successfully lead and deliver value to CommonPlaces’ clients.

You can read the full press release on Michael’s hire here.

Consider this a pseudo-WebMD page for diagnosing your broken Drupal Website.

The Symptoms

• Is your Drupal Website “broke”?  Missing functionality?  Crashing?
• Do you have a looming launch date that keeps you awake at night?
• Is your business poised to lose more than revenue due to an ‘unlaunchable’ application?
• Are your stakeholders demanding a plan to get it back on track – NOW?

If your Web application is experiencing performance issues, lacking critical functionality, or is stalled altogether, you’re not alone.  Accepted IT project success rates hover around 20-30% success, based on the most optimistic interviews.  The bottom line is that 7 out of 10 IT projects “fail” in some respect.

Rise above the statistics.  The CommonPlaces Rescue (CPR) program provides a fast, unique service to help you quickly “breathe new life” into your stalled projects.

The Causes
Although each project is different, the most common reasons for a Drupal project going awry include:

• Drupal Core is out of date or compromised: Drupal Core is the heart of your application – you need to maintain the latest version and ensure that the core code has not been compromised (hacked) in any way.  Even small code change to core can cripple your site (and your budget) going forward, ultimately resulting in dangerous security risks.

• Insufficient Architecture/File System: Development is often begun with one set of expectations, and business needs evolve to accommodate new or long term goals.   Fact is, your site should be built to scale from the beginning.  It’s always much easier (and more cost effective) to build-in or build-for the future from the beginning.  You usually won’t find these issues until something breaks or something can’t be done – and its extremely expensive to retro-fit your site to make it work.

• Modules Matter: If Drupal core is the heart, the modules are the muscle behind your Web application.  They are one of the reasons you chose Drupal in the first place and critical to the success of your project.  However, since they are not part of Drupal core releases they may or may not have optimized code/functionality.  You need to know if your modules are implemented correctly and are following Drupal Best Practices to be portable, upgradable and secure.

• Inexperience: Some developers and outsourced firms are phenomenal at implementing Drupal for social publishing and communities.  But when it comes to extending your Drupal with complex custom modules, multiple e-Commerce workflows, or integration with 3rd party applications such as data mining or content delivery networks (CDN) for streaming video – you usually need a team of experienced Drupal Rock Stars to pull it off.   Trusting your business to inexperienced teams usually costs much more than money in the long run.

Treatment
The CommonPlaces Rescue (CPR) program helps enterprise clients and start-up ventures to quickly get their Drupal-based applications working the right way to get your project online and market-ready in record time.

We’ll work with you and your team to triage your current site, prioritize and implement immediate fixes, and close high security risks.   You’ll receive a detailed Road Map of what needs to be done, and when, to get your site launched and profitable – and isn’t that why you started this project in the first place?

For a friendly and knowledgeable consultation, call Ben Bassi at 603-329-6760, ext. 101 to discuss your “symptoms” and discuss similar CPR cases – it always helps to hear that others have been in your shoes – and they turned their projects around with CPR.  Or request more CPR program information in our contact form.

Hope your Drupal Website is feeling better and off-to-market soon!

Sherrin Bull

If you’re looking for new and successful ways of engaging your audience online, you’ve likely considered adding video to your website. In many cases, video can be a great way to entertain, inform, or generally engage site visitors. But how do you get video on your website? Because of the size of video files, and the resources needed to stream videos online, the situation is not as simple as adding pictures or other content to your site.

The first option is to host the video files yourself. If you don’t plan on having a lot of videos, or if you don’t have a huge number of site visitors, this option may make the most sense. But keep in mind that video resources will put a strain on your current hosting solution. If adding video puts you over the data limit of your hosting, or if your servers can’t keep up with user demand, it’s time to pursue other video solutions.

The next solution is to upload your videos to a free site such as YouTube (or hundreds of other sites like Vimeo, Metacafe etc.). There are obvious benefits to this choice. First and foremost, these sites are free to use. They are also fast. When was the last time you couldn’t access a YouTube video because the server was bogged down? These sites make it very easy to upload video files, and to post them on your site with the provided embed code.

But there are downsides to the “YouTube solution.” For one, anyone on the Internet can search and view YouTube videos. If any level of privacy or restricted access is required for your videos, this will immediately rule out YouTube as an option. Some people may also want a more custom video experience on their site. Rather than a YouTube video player, they may feel that a branded player would appear more professional. This concern is entirely valid, and will also rule out the YouTube route.

If your videos are too resource-demanding to host yourself, and not intended for public viewing (or if you just don’t like the thought of a YouTube-branded player on your site) the final option is uploading your videos to a content delivery network (CDN). CDNs exist to do exactly what you need them to – host large video files, and deliver them through a network designed for fast download times, and seamless media streaming.

The benefits of using a CDN? You don’t have to worry about hosting your videos, and your users get a smooth video experience. The drawbacks? Well there’s one main drawback – price. Using a CDN is undeniably the most costly approach, but for an enterprise-level video experience, it is indispensable. All of the large news and entertainment sites on the Web are using CDNs to host and deliver their video content.

Once you decide to use a content delivery network for your online video, the next question is: Which CDN should I use? There are a wide range of choices, and the “right” solution depends heavily on your needs. Fortunately, you can check back here next week, for Part 2 of this blog, “How to Choose a Content Delivery Network”.

In the meantime, if you’d like to speak with the Web professionals at CommonPlaces about your online video needs, feel free to contact us here.

What’s the goal of your website? To sell a product? To gain registered users? To solicit donations? Regardless of your goal, a great way to succeed on the Web is to think of your website as your online salesperson. Whenever you are making a decision on design, site structure, content, or copy, keep this concept of a salesperson in your mind, because really, your website is your salesperson on the Web. It’s your website, not you, that interacts with customers, and drives sales (or conversions) online. So make your website the best salesperson it can be by following these time-tested guidelines:

Welcome your users. In a retail setting, would you ignore customers when they walked through the door? Or would you offer a friendly welcome, give them some information about how your store is arranged, and tell them where they can get more help if they need it? The latter is clearly the more successful approach. On your website, this approach can be accomplished in a number of ways: welcoming copy on your home page should assure visitors that they’ve come to the right place; a clear site structure, with predictable navigation, will give them a clear picture of the layout of your site; and a prominent help or contact feature will make it clear where your visitors can seek assistance if they need it.

Build trust. Once you’ve welcomed your visitors, you should attempt to build a relationship of trust with them. This might be accomplished by providing testimonials from past customers, or by providing them with a helpful service or resource. You can also build trust by using language that sounds helpful rather than “salesy.” Most importantly, don’t lie. With the Web at their fingertips, your visitors will not be easily fooled. If you’re not willing to give them factual information, someone else will.

Establish yourself as an expert People like to make educated decisions. If you establish yourself as someone who is an expert, and as someone trustworthy (see above), many of your visitors will be inclined to defer to your expertise. So provide your visitors with a wealth of information (remember, keep it helpful rather then salesy) to help them make their decision.

Believe in your product. To some extent, the last two tips require a leap of faith. More specifically, they ask you to provide objective information about yourself and your product, and this requires a certain amount of faith in your product. But if you don’t believe in your product, your problems extend much further than web design. Don’t underestimate the perceptiveness of your visitors – long-term success is impossible if you’re selling a solution you don’t believe in.

Understand your customer. Every good salesperson knows that to be successful, you need to know your customer, including their goals, motivations, and concerns. One way to learn more is to have conversations with your customers online and offline. Take what you learn and build it into your site. Maintain a prominent place on your site where your users can leave feedback. Lastly, use your web analytics software to ascertain more about your users’ behavior. Do a significant number of people go directly from your Products page to the Help page? Maybe you need more text on that page explaining what users should be doing there, or how they can move forward.

It’s not about you – it’s about them Countless successful salespeople have trained themselves to replace the I’s and we’s in their dialogue with you’s. People are self-focused, and would rather hear you talk about them than about you and your product. On your website, don’t talk about how amazing your solution is – tell your visitors how it will help them.

Guide visitors to the desired choice/action/solution. Now that your visitor has been sufficiently informed, and their concerns have been addressed, they should be ready to take the desired action on your site, whether this is a sign-up, a purchase, a submitted contact/lead form, or some other conversion. All you need to do now is make it as easy as possible for them to do so. As obvious as this sounds, some websites make it downright difficult on their users. Don’t make the same mistake! Make the steps of your shopping cart, user registration or contact form very clear and easy to understand. Challenge yourself to make the process easy enough for a four year old to navigate.

Lastly, take rejection in stride. Every great salesperson does. If your latest strategy, product, or marketing campaign isn’t the hit you thought it would be, learn from it and move on.

Good luck!

There is a great case study available on Acquia.com that details the development decisions that were made for the family of Lifetime Network sites, all of which were built in Drupal. If you’re interested in issues of Drupal scalability, and how a Drupal site can be built to handle 50 million page views a month, and large spikes in traffic, it is definitely worth a read.

myLifetime.com was, at the time of this case study’s writing, the 500th most visited website on the Internet. It is very excited to see Drupal handling this level of traffic so seamlessly. As the authors of this study point out, Drupal does not come out of the box with this level of capability, but because Drupal provides a very flexible architecture, developers were able to make the choices that would best suit the Lifetime Digital sites. These choices included multiple databases, extensive caching, and having Drupal 5 and Drupal 6 sites cooperate as necessary.

You can read the case study here.

Let me begin by saying that Adobe Flash is very far from falling out of use. Conservative estimates say 95% of Web users have Adobe Flash Player installed. The number of websites that employ Flash is harder to estimate, but most would put the number between 25% and 50%. And as this website so succinctly indicates, Flash is still alive and well.

All that being said, I do believe that the use of Flash on the Web is about to decline, if it hasn’t already (again, very difficult to estimate). Here are a few reasons why I believe the presence and importance of Flash on the Web will decline over the next several years:

Last Wednesday, the Apple iPad joined the growing list of devices that do not support Flash. The long list of mobile devices that do not display Flash should concern Adobe. If people are forced to choose between the mobile Web and Flash, mobile will win every time.

The use of Flash, especially in 100% Flash sites, can have a limiting effect on a site’s success in search engines. Many people will try to convince you that search engines can handle Flash without an issue, and in fact, search engines have made great strides in “reading” Flash files. But Google and others engines were built to crawl Web text. If Flash animations limit the amount of text that appears on your webpages, I think that you may be hurting yourself from an SEO perspective.

Flash is prohibitive to regular site updates, especially if site administrators are not technically savvy. Static content is growing increasingly less acceptable on the Web. Users now expect regularly updated content on the sites they visit, and a static site limits how you can engage your visitors. Compared to text, or even HTML, Flash files are difficult to update, and will limit what site owners can do on their own site.

HTML5 is definitely a hot word on the Web right now. This next standard for HTML may not be fully accepted and standardized for years, but already it is promising to step on the toes of Flash with its increased emphasis on embedded media. YouTube, for example, is now offering some videos in HTML5 format in addition to the traditional Flash. As another example, Google recently circumvented Apple’s ban of Google Voice in the App Store by building an online HTML5 application that iPhone users could access through the Web. As mentioned, the iPhone does not support Flash, so the choice of HTML5 was a critical one.

Flash doesn’t fit into the W3C’s plans. The World Wide Web Consortium was founded in 1994 by Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee to maintain standard practices for Web publishing. This organization commands quite a bit of respect, and was instrumental in instituting the separation of content, design, and functionality (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) on the Web. Flash doesn’t fit very neatly into this model, and you have to jump through a few hoops to insert Flash into a web page and maintain its W3C validity.

Adobe Flash stands in direct opposition to the open source model, which is gaining momentum on the Web. Open source has developed a strong following, and it seems like it will continue to gain force for the foreseeable future. Flash, as a proprietary, paid software, simply does not fit into the philosophy.

Flash violates traditional usability rules. As the Web gets more competitive, usability is the means to stand out from the crowd. And an important part of usability is obeying accepted standards of use. For example, Web users, and computer users in general, are accustomed to using the right-click menu for certain functions. Flash does not allow this. People also rely on navigating with the Back button of the browser, which is not possible in full-Flash sites.

In conclusion, I didn’t mean for this post to be a rant against Flash, or a directive never to use it on the Web. Rather, I simply see all of these factors predicting the decline of Flash’s use in the coming years. Only time will tell if I am right or wrong.

Almost daily we help people evaluate Open Source resources for use in their projects. We’ve found that there are a lot of myths and misconceptions out there that make reaching a decision harder than it should be.

To help even more people out there, CommonPlaces has developed a new, concise 9-page white paper titled “Using Open Source for Your Website.” It highlights the benefits and responsibilities of using open source software for your next Web project. You can download it for free, here.

For anyone that reads this blog regularly, it will come as no surprise that we are big proponents of open source software, and use it to develop our clients’ web applications. More specifically, we develop most of our Web projects in the Drupal CMS. We’ve spoken at length about the strengths of Drupal, here and in other places, but for many of our potential clients, the biggest obstacle to overcome is choosing open source over more traditional proprietary solutions. For those not familiar with open source, the entire model can seem very different at first, and in many ways, it is.

We created this white paper to help people who are weighing the benefits and drawbacks of open source software, and hopefully help them reach the right decision for their needs, regardless of whether they end up choosing open source or a proprietary solution. While we believe strongly in the open source model, we do recognize that it may not be right for all people in all cases. Download our white paper to learn more.

Download “Using Open Source for Your Website” for Free, Here

Life has trained us to believe that anything worth getting must cost money. But in the world of citations and local search, this just isn’t true. You really CAN get something for nothing.

If you aren’t familiar with the term, “citations” are online references to your business and its location (address, phone number, etc.). The term exists because many people believe these “citations” are more valuable than links in optimizing for local search. People started talking about citations a couple years ago, after David Mihm wrote an very influential post on the subject, which you can read here. For now, the least you need to know is that citations are not always links, and links are not always citations.

But let’s back up a bit. If you own a small, local business, you may feel intimidated by the size and scope of the Web, and you may feel as if you are at a disadvantage going up against major corporations. And to some extent, Google agrees. That’s why they built local search into their results pages. If you type “books boston ma” into Google, you’ll see something like this at the top of the page:

Although in this case we included a geographic location (Boston, MA) in our search query, in some cases Google will return local results even without this identifier. “Pizza”, for example, will return pizza places near you (or at least near where Google thinks you are). So in this way, even if a local pizza shop will never show up in the regular search results (hard to compete with Domino’s and Pizza Hut, after all), they will still have a place on the first Google search results page.

While the pizza place down the block will likely never get to the top Google result, getting to the top of the local results is a much more manageable goal. This brings us back to citations. Citations (along with geographic location) are the primary means Google uses to select the businesses that will appear in local search results. Where can you get citations out on the Web? Here are a few ideas:

• Directories of local businesses (chamber of commerce sites, tourism info sites, etc.)
• Yellow pages sites and other business directories
• Yelp.com and other business review websites
• Search engines. Make sure you are listed in Google LBC, Yahoo Local, and in other search engines’ local business listings.
• Social media profiles (Twitter, Facebook, et al.)
• Industry directories (like a directory of plumbers or wedding planners)
• Your own site! Include your address and contact info on every page (perhaps in the site footer).

Make sure that your business information is consistent (identical) in all of these places. Even if you are already listed in some of these places, you will need to edit your info if it is not consistent. Just remember this: Google has made all of their money by returning accurate search results. If they see inconsistencies in your information, they simply will not risk listing you over a business with consistent details across the Web.

On most of the websites listed above, a citation will cost you nothing but a few minutes of your time. Yet their value is very real, and the potential gain is substantial. If an Internet search isn’t the very first thing that someone does when they need to find a local mechanic, florist or bike shop, you can bet that it will be near the top of most people’s lists. Fortunately, Google has been kind enough to provide your small business with the opportunity to appear on the first page of search results for people in your area. You should take advantage of it.

As you get settled back into your normal routine after the holidays, it may be time to review your site’s search engine optimization health. It’s always a good idea to review these basic aspects of your site every now and then just to make sure your site is as optimized as possible. SEO is no longer the knowledge of the few; the basic concepts have made their way into many people’s vocabularies, and almost every industry, even the least technical, have become highly competitive.

So let’s get started.

Check your title tags. Let’s start from the top…literally. The <title> tag determines the text that appears in the title bar at the top of the browser window. For example, this blog post has a title of, “New Year’s SEO Review >> CommonPlaces Gazebo”. This title should accomplish three goals: 1) Tell visitors where they are, 2) Entice search engine visitors (this is the page title displayed in search engines, after all), and 3) Contain the keywords for which you are optimizing your site.

Are your URLs readable? Does the URLs on your site look like http://www.greatshirts.com/shirts/yellow-t-shirt, or so they look like this: http://www.greatshirts.com/product?id=1vsfg42353. With the first URL, you have valuable keywords in place if someone is looking for a yellow t-shirt. Also, your users will know what they will be seeing before the even see it, giving them added confidence in clicking through to your page.

Are you using the keywords your customers use? This tip sounds obvious, but many people violate this rule without even realizing it. It is critical to optimize your site to target the keywords your customers are using. For example, you may have optimized your site for “automobile repairs” but the fact is, the vast majority of people will enter the search query “car repair”. Use Google tools such as the AdWords Keyword Tool and Google Trends to research the most popular keywords in your field.

Is your site’s content well-organized? Is your site easy for users to navigate? As a general rule of thumb, if users can’t figure out how to navigate through your sites, search engine spiders won’t either, and will either miss content, or give up halfway through. Map out your site on paper, and develop a clear hierarchy for organizing content. Ask others to try out your site, and see if it makes sense to them.

Check for broken links. Links on your site that go to 404 (“Not Found”) pages are never a good thing. Not only does it represent a dead-end for search engines spiders, but it means potential frustration for your users as well. Use an online tool such as Dead-Links.com to scan your site and identify any broken links that may exist.

Do you have a sitemap? A sitemap most often takes the form of an XML document in the root directory of your site which tells search engine spiders how your site is structured and which pages they should be looking for. Some question the effectiveness or necessity of sitemaps, but considering they take very little time to create, they are easy to justify, and definitely cannot hurt. Ultimately, if they made no difference, why would Google provide an interface for identifying them in Google Webmaster Tools?

Review your meta data. The most common attributes of the <meta> tag that you will use are “keywords” and “description”. You can use the description attribute to provide the text snippet that appears in search results. The keywords attribute is a little more controversial, but personally I place it in a similar category as sitemaps; that is, it might help, and it couldn’t hurt. Provide a few (not thirty) keywords that capture the message of the page in question.

Check the your web analytics (You have analytics, right??). Web analytics are a critical part of SEO success. They will clearly show the success or failure of any changes you make to your site. These stats will also be helpful in identifying potential dead-ends in navigation where visitors leave your site. There is really no limit to the amount of information analytics software can provide to the diligent researcher.

“The Cloud” has become a major buzzword over the last year or two, and cloud computing promises to play an important role on the Internet and in business over the next few years. If you’re still a little confused by all the buzz, here are some helpful resources to take you from Cloud-confused to Cloud-conscious.

• If you’re completely new to the concept of cloud computing, this video from Common Craft is the best place to start. With a simple style, Common Craft does a great job explaining things in plain English. Check out their site for videos on a host of other topics.
• No quest for knowledge would be complete without a trip to Wikipedia. Start here for a basic overview of cloud computing.
• ">This article from InfoWorld is also a great overview of cloud computing technologies. It explains SaaS, PaaS, and lots of other pesky acronyms.
• Computing in the Clouds – The Cloud concept in a nutshell. This is yet another friendly introduction to cloud computing.
• “7 Things You Should Know About Cloud”, a two-page PDF resource from EDUCAUSE.
• This Cloud Computing blog is a great source of current information in the Cloud world, offering informative articles such as “Cloud Security 101 – What are the risks? Benefits?” and “Cloud Computing as a Necessity”.
• IBM offers a small library of Cloud resources on their site. Included in this library is recent news, multimedia, white papers, case studies and product demos.
• Lastly, here is the section of Amazon’s site dedicated to their Cloud services. You will notice Amazon’s name pop up repeatedly in the any discussions regarding the Cloud. Amazon is a major player in the Cloud world, and this link will take you to a wealth of information on their services.

Happy New Year, everyone! What better time is there than New Years to set resolutions and make predictions about what’s to come? For a blog post this week, I thought I would make some predictions about the future of online marketing and how it may change over the next five to ten years. It will be an exciting time, to be sure, but will also present a unique set of challenges. Here are my predictions, along with some advice as it is applicable.

Online Marketing Will Become More Like, Well, Marketing.
Perhaps the biggest trend in SEO over the last decade was to make it continually harder for people to “cheat” or “game” the system. Google’s emphasis over the past ten years was to deliver the best content for a given query, not the best-optimized content. This trend will continue in the years to come, to the point where Google simply cannot be fooled.

What does this mean? It means that to get to the first page of search results, you’ll have to earn it by delivering quality content, driving traffic to your site, and building a following. Marketing 1.0 just may be the key to success on the Web 3.0

The Major Players on the Web Will Become Even More Established.
Sites like Google, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, and Wikipedia aren’t going anywhere. In fact, they’ll become only more established in the years to come, as they continue to receive massive traffic and gain brand loyalty.

In many cases, up-and-comers will have to take an “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” approach, and work with these established players. This may mean opening an Amazon store, or building a Facebook application. It will definitely mean optimizing your site for the Google search engine. Even Wikipedia presents unique opportunities, as this great article from WordStream can attest.

The Search Engine Will Provide Much More to the User.
Google doesn’t just return search results anymore. They are continually trying to return information that the user might be interested in. This might mean maps, business reviews, weather data, or sports results. For example, here’s the search result page (SERP) for “New England Patriots”:

No need to go any further if you’re looking for the score, or the team’s next scheduled game. But Google isn’t the only one trying this. Bing refers to itself as a “decision engine,” attempting to provide all sorts of valuable info to the searcher. This trend will continue in the search engines of the next decade. More and more often, users will stop at the search engine result, finding what they need before clicking through to your site.

To get a better idea of what’s to come, try out a Google prototype called Google Squared. You’ll find that it’s pulling a large amount of content from each of the websites in the results, and displaying it in one matrix. In this model, it will become even more critical to format your content in a way that is easy for Google to process and scrape. If users can’t find what they’re looking for in the results page, they may not bother clicking through to your site.

Web Applications Will Become More and More Popular, at the Expense of Traditional Web Browsers.
Today, many organizations are reaping the benefits of the “mobile app” craze. As people become more accustomed to using these apps on their mobile devices, I believe this trend will extend to the desktop/laptop world (in fact, the line between mobile device and laptop is likely to become blurry). The result will be more time spent using the Web within the context of a specific application, and less time spent in traditional browsers like Firefox or IE. My advice on this one? Start building applications or risk getting left behind. A website, though a necessity, is no longer enough.

One Final Note
I’ve already used the word “Google” nine times in this post. Pay close attention to Google. It doesn’t take psychic ability to know that they may have the single biggest influence on the course of the Internet in the decade to come.

Data security was in the news in a big way last week. First, major news outlets reported Thursday morning that Iraqi insurgents were using $30, off-the-shelf software to hack into the video feed created by U.S. spy planes flying over the country. Apparently the data these planes were capturing was being sent back to the base via an “unprotected communications link.”

Then Thursday night, an unknown group of hackers took over Twitter.com, replacing the familiar Twitter home page with a page touting the “Iranian Cyber Army.” Twitter quickly rectified the problem, later reporting that their DNS records were compromised by the attackers.

Though both the U.S. military and Twitter claim to have resolved any vulnerabilities that led to these problems, both groups faced major embarrassment in light of these attacks. This begs the question; Is your site secure? There is no doubt that there are very talented hackers out there who can exploit almost any vulnerability, no matter how small. What are you doing to ensure your site is safe from attack?

CommonPlaces offers a wide range of security services, ranging from security scans to test the integrity of your applications, code reviews to assess the quality of your code, remediation planning to mitigate your existing issues, and actually resolving the issues themselves. The security scan solutions we offer our clients are best-in-class, identifying both syntactical and business logic flaws, and offering an unlimited number of scans for the length of your subscription. Lastly, we build secure Web applications, always following best practices for coding.

If you would like to learn more about our security offerings, please contact us today. Our security experts can work with you to determine the right solution for your individual needs.

Yes, Google announced today that every user, signed in or not, will be receiving personalized results based on their search history. Users still have the right to opt-out of this service, but realistically speaking, very few people will do so (it turns out most people don’t care about search results nearly as much as we do – go figure!). Personalized search stands to deliver better results that are more, well, personal. Some are raising privacy objections, but Google is going to keep all of your search history regardless, so they might as well put it to good use.

Sounds like good news, right? Well, not necessarily for SEOs. Here are some of the ramifications of personalized Google search results:

• Potentially bigger delays from action to results. As any good SEO professional knows, results don’t happen overnight. The changes we experiment with can take weeks to deliver a measurable change in your search rankings. With personalized search, a site may need even more time to build up momentum. Personalized search has the potential to represent a vicious cycle – users will click on the top results because they’re at the top, and these results will continue to be at the top because users clicked on them.
• A steeper climb for new sites. I see personalized search representing an even bigger hurdle for new sites. Google already values older domains because it believes (rightly so, in most cases) that these sites are more dependable and authoritative. So new sites were always at a disadvantage in this regard. But now those older sites have time and user clicks on their side – meaning a steeper climb for new sites.
• Sites are more accountable for user experience. This is perhaps the most positive result of personalized search. Sites will need to impress users, and give them the information they’re looking for, to stay at the top of the SERPs. If users stop turning to your site, Google should start to devalue you.
• Increased importance of Marketing 1.0. That brings me to my final point. To my mind, the most important lesson in all this is that we can’t forget our Marketing 1.0 principles (branding, experience, etc.). They are as important as ever. Stated simply, Google does not like people manipulating their rankings. For that reason, they employ some of the brightest minds in the world to continually improve upon the “integrity” of their rankings. SEO is important, don’t get me wrong. But don’t place all of your eggs in Google’s basket.

The marketing experts at CommonPlaces have great insight into what makes online businesses successful. To talk to them, contact us here.

Building online word of mouth isn’t easy; don’t let anyone convince you that it is. Word of mouth, online or offline, takes time and effort. But when you succeed, you’ll be rewarded with the best and most cost-effective form of marketing out there. If you have a successful business, you know the power of word of mouth. Here are six tips for building WOM online.

Give them something for nothing. Everybody loves getting something for free. People love it so much, they will even tell their friends about it. Whether it’s offering people an informative white paper, or a free sandwich, if you give them something for nothing, they will start talking about you.

Hold a contest. Another thing people love is competition, and most of all, winning. Perhaps you can have your customers submit videos or essays, and give a prize to the best. Or you could do a random drawing from your Facebook fans or Twitter followers. Get creative. The prize doesn’t necessarily have to be a big-ticket item, but it doesn’t hurt, either. A free car wash will draw in a few people; a free iPod will draw in more.

Do something extraordinary. Doing something that will get people talking doesn’t have to be hard. It just means you have to do the unexpected. A great example of this comes from Hyundai. A couple months ago, there was a viral video going around of a large SUV that inexplicably runs over a small car in a gym parking lot. When Hyundai saw that the crushed car was theirs, they found the owner and presented him with a brand new Hyundai. This sort of thing doesn’t happen everyday, and it got people talking…for far less than the cost of a TV spot.

Provide exceptional customer service. Good customer service gets people talking, mostly because so few businesses do it well. Your customers want you to give them a good product at a good price, but good customer service is what will get them writing reviews and tweeting about your business.

Build a community. This basically means giving your customers an experience online that they will want to share. If your product is a cool new gadget or a beautiful work of art, it’s easy to get people excited about your business. If your product is something like WD40, you’ll need to get a bit more creative. See how WD40 did it.

Facebook and Twitter are tools, not solutions. This one isn’t really a way to build online word of mouth so much as it’s a warning. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that all you need to do is set up a Twitter account and Facebook page and do some occasional posting. These sites are tools (very powerful tools), but they are not a solution in and of themselves. As with offline marketing, you still need to be creative.