Before I give you my list, take a look at the graphic below that show how this site is growing and creeping up on some of the other big dogs.

#1 Pinterest Badge

A must have plugin that adds a Pinterest badge for linking your blog to your pinterest profile and showing your number of followers.  Pinterest badge is a fully customisable pinterest badge plugin for wordpress.

It adds a widget to your blog that will display a list of your latest pinned images from your pinterest profile or page. It also displays the number of people who have followed you in pinterest along with the follow button.

DOWNLOAD  | MORE INFO

#2 Pinterest Pin It Button For Images

Add a “Pin It” button over your images, so users can add it to Pinterest easily.  Don’t like the “Pin It” button underneath your post? Want to be able to add images directly to Pinterest by just clicking on the image? Your problems are over!  Have the user just hover the mouse over the image they want to pin and watch your visits grow!

The description goes automatically as the name of the post, and so does the link of the post.  Just enable the plugin. No need for any configuration!

DOWNLOAD  | MORE INFO

#3 Pinterest “Pin It” Button

Add a Pinterest “Pin It” Button to your site to let your visitors easily pin your awesome content!

“Pin It” Button Features:

• Specify image to pin or let the reader select
• Add horizontal or vertical pin count
• Display or hide on any post, page or category
• Custom CSS for aligning just right
• Includes widget and full shortcode support

DOWNLOAD  | MORE INFO

The bottom line is you want to make it easy for people to do business with you and having a phone number + someone to answer it 24 hours a day will help demonstrate that you are the best at what you do. Having a phone number also instills trust and peace of mind to your current and potential clients.

Improving site conversion?

Could something so simple as adding a phone number to the main page of your website really improve conversion? Could those ten digits get people to sign up for newletters, buy a product or hire you?

KISSmetrics.com did an A/B test wherein website had a phone number on test A and had no phone number on test B. Visitors that saw test A with the phone number signed up for product sign ups 56 percent of the time whereas visitors that saw test B with no phone number had a 46 percent sign up rate.

The company notes that the test was flawed in that the goal was to test with the number prominently placed and highly visible rather than the nearly 12 point font on the side of the page, but the results show a trend that a phone number increased the conversion rate of the tested site.

The KISSmetrics hypothesis before testing was that “by having a visible phone number on their home page, the trust factor would increase and therefore sign ups would too,” a belief they feel was proven at least minimally by the testing.

The bottom line

Our belief regarding this test is that although a slight uptick in conversions, should the phone number be more obvious, the feeling of trust would, in fact, improve by adding a layer of accountability.

In five to ten years, this same study analyzing sites that offer or don’t offer social media contact links will likely produce similar results.

Consumers that shop in person have the ability to demand to see a manager, but websites with no number has no layer of accountability and consumers don’t trust that the company is even in America or not run by scammers.

The bottom line is that a phone number is the minimal amount of contact information that should be placed on a page not only for conversion but as a service to visitors.

Websites that are selling products and services should make a phone number obvious and not hidden on a bio page or underneath a long contact form not only as a service to consumers, but because offering another layer of accountability and offering to answer the phone if someone needs you is a great way to improve conversions.

Click here to read the full KISSmetrics study.

Questions to Ask a Web Designer before you hire them.

The following is a list of questions to ask your website development partner.  The purpose of this line of questioning is to identify any potential red flags before it is too late.  The website development industry is littered with failed projects.  The best way to become one of the statistics is to do your homework up front.

Remember the goal of a website project is to have the following three elements match up as closely as possible:

1. What you think you are buying
2. What your website designer thinks they are selling
3. What your website designer actually builds

The biggest single key to success in a website project is allocating the time to go through the planning and discovery process.  This process will help you narrow the gap between #1 and #2 above.  The second key is to police the process to verify that #3 above (the end product) matches #1 and #2 above.  Finding a company or individual who has extensive experience in doing this will help a lot.  Here are some questions that will help you find that company.

Setup Pricing Questions

• Do you have a standard, published way to estimate website projects?  What is it?
• Can you give me a line item breakdown of your setup fee / initial development estimate?
• How much of the total price is for graphic design work?
• How much of the total price is for functionality (software) development (includes training)?
• How much of the total price is for content (preparation and loading)?

Ongoing Pricing Questions

• Can you give me a breakdown of the total cost of ownership I will have the website?
• How much am I paying for hosting?
• How much am I paying for software licensing, maintenance, and support?  Is is a flat fee or hourly?
• How much I am paying for ongoing content changes?  Is is a flat fee or hourly?

Experience Questions

• Do you have a documented, repeatable process to plan and build websites?  Give me a written overview of the process?
• Have you built websites like the one you are proposing to build for me?
• Can you provide 5 website addresses of website you built like the one you are proposing to build for me?
• Can you provide 5 references from companies you have built website for?
• How many software driven websites have you developed?
• Can you give me a list of at least 20 websites you have built?
• How will I report and track issues / trouble tickets?
• What are your office hours?  How can I get issues resolved after hours?
• If you (the primary contact) decides to not do website development anymore, who will support my website?

Software Questions

• Who owns the Intellectual Property rights to the software in my website?

10 Must Ask Questions

1. How will I be charged?  By the hour or by the project?
2. Can you provide a detailed breakdown of what I am paying for?
3. Are there any future costs once the website design is completed?
4. Will I have the easy ability to edit my website? If not, how much will edits cost?
5. Will I own the website?
6. Will I own the domain name?
7. Will I have all the access information to all accounts related to the website?
8. What information am I responsible for giving you?
9. How long will it take?
10. Can I have 3 clients that you have designed websites for?

Let’s put this to bed once and for all, folks: There’s no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty.” At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.

There are some penalties that are related to the idea of having the same content as another site—for example, if you’re scraping content from other sites and republishing it, or if you republish content without adding any additional value. These tactics are clearly outlined (and discouraged) in our Webmaster Guidelines:

• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Avoid… “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

(Note that while scraping content from others is discouraged, having others scrape you is a different story; check out this post if you’re worried about being scraped.)

But most site owners whom I hear worrying about duplicate content aren’t talking about scraping or domain farms; they’re talking about things like having multiple URLs on the same domain that point to the same content. Like www.example.com/skates.asp?color=black&brand=riedell and www.example.com/skates.asp?brand=riedell&color=black. Having this type of duplicate content on your site can potentially affect your site’s performance, but it doesn’t cause penalties. From our article on duplicate content:

Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don’t follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.

This type of non-malicious duplication is fairly common, especially since many CMSs don’t handle this well by default. So when people say that having this type of duplicate content can affect your site, it’s not because you’re likely to be penalized; it’s simply due to the way that web sites and search engines work.

Most search engines strive for a certain level of variety; they want to show you ten different results on a search results page, not ten different URLs that all have the same content. To this end, Google tries to filter out duplicate documents so that users experience less redundancy. You can find details in this blog post, which states:

1. When we detect duplicate content, such as through variations caused by URL parameters, we group the duplicate URLs into one cluster.
2. We select what we think is the “best” URL to represent the cluster in search results.
3. We then consolidate properties of the URLs in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the representative URL.

Here’s how this could affect you as a webmaster:

• In step 2, Google’s idea of what the “best” URL is might not be the same as your idea. If you want to have control over whether www.example.com/skates.asp?color=black&brand=riedell or www.example.com/skates.asp?brand=riedell&color=black gets shown in our search results, you may want to take action to mitigate your duplication. One way of letting us know which URL you prefer is by including the preferred URL in your Sitemap.
• In step 3, if we aren’t able to detect all the duplicates of a particular page, we won’t be able to consolidate all of their properties. This may dilute the strength of that content’s ranking signals by splitting them across multiple URLs.

In most cases Google does a good job of handling this type of duplication. However, you may also want to consider content that’s being duplicated across domains. In particular, deciding to build a site whose purpose inherently involves content duplication is something you should think twice about if your business model is going to rely on search traffic, unless you can add a lot of additional value for users. For example, we sometimes hear from Amazon.com affiliates who are having a hard time ranking for content that originates solely from Amazon. Is this because Google wants to stop them from trying to sell Everyone Poops? No; it’s because how the heck are they going to outrank Amazon if they’re providing the exact same listing? Amazon has a lot of online business authority (most likely more than a typical Amazon affiliate site does), and the average Google search user probably wants the original information on Amazon, unless the affiliate site has added a significant amount of additional value.

Lastly, consider the effect that duplication can have on your site’s bandwidth. Duplicated content can lead to inefficient crawling: when Googlebot discovers ten URLs on your site, it has to crawl each of those URLs before it knows whether they contain the same content (and thus before we can group them as described above). The more time and resources that Googlebot spends crawling duplicate content across multiple URLs, the less time it has to get to the rest of your content.

In summary: Having duplicate content can affect your site in a variety of ways; but unless you’ve been duplicating deliberately, it’s unlikely that one of those ways will be a penalty. This means that:

• You typically don’t need to submit a reconsideration request when you’re cleaning up innocently duplicated content.
• If you’re a webmaster of beginner-to-intermediate savviness, you probably don’t need to put too much energy into worrying about duplicate content, since most search engines have ways of handling it.
• You can help your fellow webmasters by not perpetuating the myth of duplicate content penalties! The remedies for duplicate content are entirely within your control. Here are some good places to start.

Posted by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Graphics

What are the essential traits of great Web sites? After you visit a site and find yourself staying awhile, what makes you stay? A sense of humor helps. Flashy graphics are nice. But the fundamental traits that make a site work are more elusive. This article will break down the essential characteristics of great Web sites into some easily followed rules of thumb.

Most of these guidelines are just plain common sense, which seems to be a scarce commodity on the Web. The sexy proprietary page-layout and text markup features provided by Netscape and Explorer as they leapfrog each other have seduced many a webmaster into jazzing up their pages, only to be forced to put “you must use Netscape/Explorer to view these pages” at the bottom. This could be rephrased to say “these pages look awful without Netscape or Explorer.” Stick with standard HTML (currently HTML 4) (1) and your pages will look good on all browsers that support it.

Overall, we’ve found that companies either get the Web or they don’t. Your Web site should reflect the culture of the Web, which we call the “Gift Economy.” (Witness Netscape and Microsoft.) Very few sites (5%) can charge for admission or require membership, and many people avoid sites with these barriers. Give away something valuable: information, software, advice, humor, and people will flock to your site.

Site Guidelines

Here are the Web site guidelines that we follow at internet.com.

Web sites should:

Provide credible, original content in as many forms as possible.

Original content is the most important trait of a great Web site. Sites that provide only links to other sites are essentially meta-lists (although Yahoo seems to be doing well :), while sites that have some information that’s useful to the user stand out and will be revisited. A recent check of webreference.com’s statistics confirms this, our content providers account for 62% of WebReference.com’s total impressions. Content is King.

Provide valuable, timely information to the user, not lots of data.

Web sites should be updated regularly. Stale Web sites say “been there, done that.” For the information to be valuable it should be well-edited. For external links include only the best sites with concise descriptions. For internal content be like a magazine editor, don’t rush to publish mediocre or incomplete articles. Typos are unacceptible. [sic]

Share everything you learn

Great Web sites share everything they learn and hear (that’s relevant of course) with their users. Give behind the scenes accounts of your latest site features, go open source, start a newsletter, and you’ll get more than you give.

Custom-tailor the information to user preferences.

One of the Web’s strengths is the volume of information available. That is also one of its weaknesses. Sites that offer customization features (Mylook, Slashdot.org) allow the user to filter the content they see. The future of the Web are “one-to-one” Web sites. These automated, database-driven sites adapt the content, advertising, and even the look to individual users. Technologies such as Web Objects and Cold Fusion allow webmasters to create dynamic, interactive, and adaptive Web sites.A good example of a one-to-one Web site is c|net. c|net started with two in-house proprietary content delivery systems: Prism and Dream (2). Prism, or Presentation of Real-time Interactive Service Material, was the site management and page generation engine behind the pages of c|net. CNET has since developed a more sophisticated page-delivery system, Story Server, which powers CNET and the newer spinoff sites of shareware.com, search.com, and news.com. Story Server, marketed by Vignette, is a database-driven, template-based Web site publishing system, which we (internet.com) are transitioning to for our sites (internetnews.com is the first site to be converted to Story Server).

Template-based database publishing systems are much more efficient and consistent for publishers, give users a richer more targeted experience, and when coupled with ad software, give advertisers higher clickthroughs. Story Server stores content and graphic elements in a Sybase database, and as visitors request a page the content is “poured” on the fly into design templates.

Dream, or Delivery of Real-time Enhanced Messages, is the advertising content delivery system c|net started using in December 1995. Dream dynamically creates ad pages based on individual visitor characteristics, including hardware platform, browser type, host service, and domain. c|net’s 1,000,000+ registered users receive even more specialized attention, their age, salary, and other demographics are utilized when delivering ads. CNET is now using Accipiter to deliver their ads, which has excellent targeting features. Many of the larger Web sites on the Web are using these specialized Web publishing systems, like Vignette and Autonomy.

Be responsive on a 56 Kbps modem (the typical Web user).

Use graphics sparingly to convey information. Each graphic takes another trip to the server. Consolidate neighboring graphics or use CSS’d text or table cells with background colors to speed display. WebMonkey has a policy “use graphics for graphics and text for text, not graphic text.” Size graphics to fit in a typical user’s window (a maximum of 465 to 532 pixels wide [i.e., the default Netscape screen to a printed page], or for max screen space viewable on all platforms use a max of 580 pixel wide tables to fit on Mac screens). It’s easy to see if a site’s been designed on only a PC, the page is too wide on a Mac, typically 620-640 pixel wide tables fit a PC’s monitor but are too wide to display on a 14-15″ Mac monitor.Break up your tables vertically for a cascading load to appear more responsive (we use this technique on our front page). One huge table takes much longer to display content than stacked smaller tables which display one at a time. Microsoft’s IE5 has a FIXED table width feature that speeds table display, unfortunately this is proprietary and does not work on Netscape’s browser.

Optimize graphic file size for Web display (a maximum of 20 KB per graphic). Utilize page display speedups such as the WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes for images. Use JPEGs where possible and appropriate (continuous-toned images) and minimize the color palette of GIFs to optimize file size. Provide text alternatives to graphics for low-bandwidth users, the blind, and for speed. ALTernate text tags for images should be functional, not descriptive. If the graphic has no function, use ALT=”" (i.e., <IMG SRC=”pics/splash.jpg” ALT=”">).

Optimize your HTML by removing excess spaces, comments, tags and commentary, especially on your home page, to minimize file size and download time. Products like Antimony Software’s Mizer and VSE’s HTML Turbo automate this process by removing excess characters and HTML to optimize your HTML and JavaScript. I manually tune our home page for minimize file size (typically 14-15K for the HTML page), but these products can help even file-size obsessed webmasters like myself. These products are drag and drop, and should be used as the last step before you upload your page (the files are harder to read after many of the returns are removed). After optimization your pages will appear to snap onto the screen.

Be easy to read.

Make your pages as easy to read as possible. Black text on a white background (as this page is set up) is the easiest to read. I’ve seen some nearly impossible to read pages that use backgrounds the same shade as the text (dark text on a dark background and vice versa). If you use a background, stick with the lighter shades and let the text stay black. Use a wide and short (we use 700 X 16 pixels) background graphic that’s non-interlaced and under 1K or <BODY BGCOLOR=”#ffffff”>. HTML 4.0 now includes style sheets that can control page, link, and text color attributes site-wide, and make maintenance easy.

Be interactive; good interactivity engages the user and makes your site memorable.

After original content, the second most important trait a Web site should have is interactivity. The Web is an interactive hypermedia communications medium that your Web site should reflect. Sites that involve the user and have a sense of fun or adventure will get more hits, and can charge more for ad space.Another advantage of interactivity is self-generating content. By allowing your visitors to interact with your site they actually create content for you. Script-driven user surveys and forums allow visitors to share information with others and can help shape your site to better serve their needs. Forum or chat software is a great way to do this. A great example of a user-driven site is Slashdot, a news site for nerds which posts short stories submitted by users, and allows users to easily append comments to each story.

Be well-organized

Balance the number of levels (the degree of hyperization) with page length to minimize scrolling and display time.Sun Microsystems found that users equate poor organization with poor site design in their extensive usability study of their home page. They also found that users don’t want to scroll. However, the hits on Discovery Channel Online increased by 40% after they went from non-scrolling design to a scrolling design. It depends on your application. Designing pages so important content is “above the fold” is a good idea, though some sites take this maxim to an extreme and cram everything into a cramped mess. Where possible, size your pages important content to fit into the typical user’s screen (465 pixels wide by 340 pixels high for a 15″ monitor). Web pages should be at most two 8.5 x 11 pages in length. I’ve seen many examples of huge 100K+ one page sites.

Part of having a well-organized site is providing multiple ways of easy navigation (3). Supply both text and graphics for buttons. Users feel more comfortable if you maintain a consistent look and feel throughout your site.

Use an appropriate metaphor (like Zima’s fridge or Ragu’s Mama Cuchino Kitchen).

Using a good graphic metaphor for your interface makes the user feel more comfortable navigating your site. Good metaphors, like using a fridge as a gateway to the world of Zima, can elevate a merely good site to a great site.

Match customer profiles with Net demographics (now about 50/50 educated males/females).

Fill a niche.

Dominate a subject area; become the site for that subject.

Don’t duplicate a list when you can point to it. Leverage other people’s work to reduce your workload. Let others who specialize in a particular topic keep their list up to date for you. On the other hand, don’t make lists that point to lists ad infinitum, seek out the meat of the site and point directly to the article or resource. Many sites on the Web are just lists that someone else has already done.

Have a secure and automated server

Usage statistics, what’s new, what’s old (tours, outline), autoresponders, bad URL checkers, and search engines are some of the tools webmasters should utilize.Tracking

Part of Web marketing is gauging the effect your pages have on the public. Sophisticated site usage tools such as I/Count, SiteTrack, WebTrends, and Interse Market Focus allow site developers and their clients to easily see the popularity of different pages, stay duration, where they come from and where they go, and even the path they take through your site. Include a what’s new area to give frequent visitors a way to see what has changed since their last visit.

Automation

Maintaining a large Web site can be a daunting experience. Use automation tools where possible for site maintenance. Use local spiders such as MOMspider and LinkBot to help check for old URLs. Where you choose to link will affect how fast your links will fail. The deeper into a site you link, the more likely it is to change. Don’t move popular pages in your site unnecessarily, you’ll break the links to your pages. If you do move them, provide a “this page has moved” page. Many orphaned links are a sign of webmaster neglect.

Searching

Let users search your site with search tools such as SWISH and Excite for Web Servers. Offer an overview of your site with a TOC or site map.

Security

Security is often the last item addressed on even larger commercial sites. Allowing adventurous users to sniff around your files (especially your server configuration files) is not a good policy, but amazingly only 20% of current Web sites are secure.

Build it, and they will come?

A common misconception companies new to the Web have is that if they put up a page, people will visit it. In order to have a popular site, you’ve got to offer something to the user: information, interactivity, fun, freebies, something more than an 800 number.

Original content is important. Users may come to your site once, but to keep them coming back you’ve got to have fresh original content.

Sites that offer freebees get noticed. Free software, services, databases or electronic newsletters will attract users like a magnet. SGI has a FREE LUNCH area where you can download free software, computer games, graphics, and video.

Conclusions

The Web is an interactive, dynamic, and rapidly changing new communications medium that your Web site should reflect. Well-organized, edited, and timely original content set in an attractive, interactive, and consistent format are some traits of great Web sites.

By Andrew B. King

Text

Background does not interrupt the text

Text is big enough to read, but not too big

The hierarchy of information is perfectly clear

Columns of text are narrower than in a book to make reading easier on the screen

Navigation

Navigation buttons and bars are easy to understand and use

Navigation is consistent throughout web site

Navigation buttons and bars provide the visitor with a clue as to where they are, what page of the site they are currently on

Frames, if used, are not obtrusive

A large site has an index or site map

Links

Link colors coordinate with page colors

Links are underlined so they are instantly clear to the visitor

Graphics

Buttons are not big and dorky

Every graphic has an alt label

Every graphic link has a matching text link

Graphics and backgrounds use browser-safe colors

Animated graphics turn off by themselves

General Design

Pages download quickly

First page and home page fit into 800 x 600 pixel space

All of the other pages have the immediate visual impact within 800 x 600 pixels

Good use of graphic elements (photos, subheads, pull quotes) to break up large areas of text

Every web page in the site looks like it belongs to the same site; there are repetitive elements that carry throughout the pages