Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Online Marketing Consultant

I would never qualify myself as a graphic designer. I dabble, I delve, but never full on design. I am by nature a coder and a usability specialist. I can look at an interface and say what I would change about it, but I cannot always design the interface from the ground up. If you’re like me and you have the skills to produce, but just can’t quite get that pesky interface to come together, try using TemplateMonster. It works great if you need a site ASAP or if you have a client who wants a full site, but is working on an extremely tight time frame and budget.

I know what some of you are going to say - Jeff, isn’t that cheating? Isn’t the client going to want something completely original? Well, some clients will accept a template and some won’t. What you should tell them is that this is a template and it will get them off the ground with a great looking site until they can always hire a graphic designer later or if you have any relationships with graphic designers, you can always refer them to one, but this basic template will get you up in running much quicker than an original design.

Want to know what you are getting for Christmas? Amazon will tell you. I recently told a few of my relatives what I would like for Christmas via my Amazon Wishlist. Today, I checked it and found a few items missing. What happened? Well, the Amazon wishlist defaults to “Unpurchased” items, however, when I went to the “Purchased” tab it shows me the missing items.

I guess you can figure out the rest from there. I’m not 100% sure who bought me what, but it appears that you can use your Amazon wishlist as a way to get an extra secret peak into Santa’s bag.

How should Amazon handle this?
Well assuming they are going to try and keep things “under wraps”, they should allow a user (Gifter) to purchase an item at any time and also keep it on the list for the original person (Giftee). If another Gifter arrives and wants to purchase the item, it should tell them “This gift has already been purchased for Jeff. Do you still want to purchase it?” And allow the Gifter to decide at that point. Although this still allows for me to run through my list of items and try to “purchase” them, it adds an additional layer on top of the Wishlist. Or maybe Amazon just doesn’t care since they make money either way
Any other ideas? Post your thoughts in the comments.

It’s easy to bash the State of Michigan: cold winters, rain, Detroit, rain, cold…it goes on and on. However, today is a day without bashing as the University of Michigan, MSU and Wayne State University have combined to create a research partnership which will share researchers, labs, and information between the three. Hopefully this will boost the Michigan economy which has been, shall I say, less than exemplary in previous years. It may also help to reverse a steady brain drain on the Michigan economy due to over reliance on the auto industry.

Personal Note: This is pretty much the reason I left Michigan. If Detroit were half as cool as Chicago, I probably would have stayed.

With this addition, as well as Google’s new Ann Arbor office at least Ann Arbor won’t be hurting. Now if we can just get those auto makers out of bed with the oil cartels and start making cars US customers want to buy, we’ll be all set.

You may have noticed in recent months that Google has added some “Additional Links” below some search criteria (try this one or this one). From everything I can find online, this is automatic and only occurs if the following conditions are met:

1. You are a high ranking site, specifically #1 for that search term.
2. You have an identifiable architecture as defined by Google.
3. You have at least 4 sections that rank well (PR5 or higher) within your site for that search term as well.

I think this is both good and bad. Good because it provides instant navigation within the site so the user only has to search for the highest level of term “Adidas” instead of “Adidas Performance”, which cuts down on time for the user, but also processing on Google’s side. Bad because Google is dumb. Take the illustration below for example:

Google has obviously indexed the right site and knows categories within it, but take a look the first additional result. Somehow I think that’s wrong, based on the url alone. That is most likely a problem with the way Google indexes Flash, but needs to be remedied somehow. So far, I have not found any online utility to protest the additional results or petition Google to update them. I assume you could go through the regular channels, but those are not always the fastest.

Also, where is the EXPRESSFASHION.com webmaster during all of this? Certainly you can go on brand alone, but don’t you want your users to be presented with the best experience possible, everywhere?

Let me know what you think in the comments.

This is a bit of a rant, but I just wanted to vent in regards to all of the holiday iPod stuff I have been seeing lately. Don’t be fooled by their savvy marketing people, Apple and their demon seed known as iPod will tear your holiday dreams asunder within four (two in my case) short lived years. So let’s break down the economics of that:

New iPod: $350
Accessories: at least $100 (carrying case, car adapter, nicer earbuds, etc.)
Total: $450
Total/year: about $110

I think I’ll go out and buy a cheapy mp3 player each year and then at the end of the year, SMASH IT! That will give me far more satisfaction than plunking down another $450 to replace my current iPod which died after two years.

Get some quality control Apple!

/end rant

Just a quick plug to a great new utility I found, Resizr. It’s a quick online utility that allows you to resize images quickly and easily without having to use Photoshop or other software. Fantastic!

Update:
Forget Resizr, QuickThumbnail is the new hotness! Lots more resizing abilities: percentage, fixed, and standard. Now that’s resizing!

An article published today in the Detroit Free Press says that Mayor Daley’s promises of greening up the city have not gone quite to plan:

But five years after Daley pledged to buy one-fifth of the city’s electricity from renewable sources by the end of 2006, Chicago’s energy mix isn’t so green. Nearly all of the megawatts powering City Hall and other government buildings still are coming from nuclear and coal plants.

Whoops! Did I say 1/5th? I meant, 1/5th of 1%

Anywho, at least they are getting rid of the blue bag program, which I thought was ridiculous from the first time I heard it, and instating a new drop off and bin program for many parts of the city. It’s not Shangra-La yet, but it’s getting better.

This weekend, my girlfriend and I visited a few different bars and restaurants in the Lincoln Square and North Center areas on the North Side of Chicago and there was one common theme throughout all of them: they were all really empty.

I understand that this was a big travel weekend and Chicago has a lot of transplants that head back to Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, etc for the long holiday weekend, but I was thinking…how much business is lost over this weekend because customers either don’t know you are open or are too engrained in their routine to head over to your restaurant/bar?

There are a lot of different ways to let them know your physical business is open (an OPEN sign would help :)), but what about those looking online. Here are a few strategies to ensure you don’t lose customers online:

1. Make sure you are listed in all the local search listings: Google Local, Yahoo Local, MSN Local. Since many of the big search engine listings are incorporating local listings into their search results.
2. Make sure you have a page on your website for each holiday you cater towards: “Christmas Parties at My Restaurant”, “Super Bowl Parties at The Bar”, “Looking for a Romantic Dinner on Valentine’s Day?”. And then do some link building of your own - maybe your brother has a website he can put a link on, or your buddy’s personal page, or even set up a myspace page that only links to your site. Anything is better than nothing.
3. Set up PPC (Pay-per-click) advertising just for the week or two before a big holiday, since most people won’t make plans/purchase until then anyway. You can set up a deal promotion that they can only redeem during that period to create a sense of urgency and bring more people through the door. Also, by adding a promotion, even if it’s your regular discount, you can directly measure the performance of these PPC campaigns, which is often difficult with print or other advertising.
4. And finally, mail or email campaigns. Nothing says “I care about my customers” like sending them a personalized letter or postcard letting them know about your upcoming holiday promotions, or just a short email letting them know your holiday hours. If you are a small mom and pop operation, this will work wonders, I guarantee it!

So there’s your start to bringing in more holiday traffic than you ever did before. Need some help setting this stuff up? Drop me an email or contact me over the phone. I’d love to see what I can do for your business.

You must be trying to get whitelisted, because nobody really cares about RFC compliancy unless you are a spammer or trying to get whitelisted. For the average user, RFC compliancy is a non-issue.

I compose the email, I send the email, the email is received. Done and done.

For the spammer email marketer, RFC compliancy is very important. It means that your email message complies with the rules and regulations set forth in the RFC 2822. RFC 2822 is a very long document, which I can boil down to a few points that are relevant to email marketers:

1. Don’t mess with To:, From:, CC:, BCC:, Subject: lines. Big no-no. The recipient has to know where this message came from and that you are indeed the sender. No cloaking or other nastiness.
2. You must specify your real address. If you are a company, this has to be the company address. If you are an individual working as a company, same deal.
3. You must give them, your recipients, a method to unsubscribe, whether it’s phone, fax, email, web page, or smoke signal and it has to be “relatively” easy to complete the process, which means no jumping through 25 hoops to get off a mailing list.

Got it? Now go play nice with the children.

In another of my recent articles, I mentioned that Microsoft is missing out of the search market bigtime. This week, CIO magazine published an article talking about Microsoft’s plans for Web 2.0 and how they are not that far behind.

It talks about how using distributed computing and managing Web 2.0 services will divide IT managers time and efforts over multiple services and cause more headaches than it will solve. To quote from the article:

“[CIOs] feel like cost and complexity weigh them down,” says Ballmer. “I want to make sure we’re eliminating that cost and complexity and letting them focus on taking advantage of new innovations and things that can add value to the company.”

Steve Ballmer? Selling less cost and complexity? When has Microsoft ever sold anything less than overly complicated? True, it’s easy to hop on the Microsoft bashing train, but they have less than a stellar record for ease of use and costs that are too high for the average consumer. This is especially true in a distributed Web 2.0 world, where I can download Ubuntu, OpenOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird and have a home office up and running in little time and no cost.

So what exactly is Microsoft not doing in the Web 2.0 world? Well for one thing, they are asleep at the wheel in terms of development. Yahoo and Google are busy buying up start ups left and right like Flickr (Y), Writely (G), iRows (G), etc. etc. and building their online office suite overnight with distributed development that is light on its feet and easy to upgrade, instead of huge sluggish development cycles like the Big M. Microsoft did launch Office Live earlier this year, but that requires a Live account and for the user to have purchased Microsoft Office. Well let me run right out and drop $149 on something that I will only use at most 50% of the features, when Google and Yahoo are providing free online utilities to do exactly what I need.

But if Microsoft is working on all cylinders, you can expect to see full integration of web and desktop in Windows Vista, where a user can create a document on their home PC, save it online, and edit it later from work or another computer all with no limited hassle. This can already be done with Google’s apps and several other online office suites, such as Zoho. We’ll just have to wait and see if Redmond is so clever.