E-Mail Marketing: Conducting E-Mail Surveys
From: www.wilsonweb.com

"E-mail surveys may not work correctly when an HTML form is included in the e-mail message. Alternatives are to use an exclusively text survey that can be returned by reply e-mail or to offer a link to an online survey. Date: Aug 18, 2004, 12:58 PST"

E-Commerce: Starting an Internet Business with Your Eyes Open
From: www.wilsonweb.com

"All businesses, especially Internet businesses, are risky. Don't quit your day job until you actually see enough steady revenue to warrant it. Recommends Site Build It!, especially for beginners. Date: Aug 18, 2004, 11:18 PST"

Site Promotion: A Domain Name for Every Product?
From: www.wilsonweb.com

"Should every product have a landing page on its own domain name? Not if you have a website that is already well ranked, according to Andy Beal of KeywordRanking.com. Only if the product is much different than anything else on your site is a new domain name recommended. Date: Aug 11, 2004, 11:35 PST"

Site Design: Business Site Design Tips
From: www.wilsonweb.com

"Points to various sources of information on website design, as well as design wizards found at Site Build It! and Yahoo! Small Business Hosting. Date: Aug 4, 2004, 11:18 PST"

Site Design: 12 Website Design Decisions Your Business or Organization Will Need to Make Correctly
From: www.wilsonweb.com

"7,600-word article includes many tips and links to resources to help businesses and organizations know how to design or redesign a website that works. Twelve points help organize the steps involved. Date: Aug 2, 2004, 11:33 PST"


American Stock Exchange to Allocate Trading in Google Options
From: www.webpronews.com

"The American Stock Exchange (Amex) has announced it will allocate trading in Google Inc. options to AGS Specialist Partners. The Amex will provide full details of the options listing shortly."

24/7 Real Media Acquires Search Technology Company
From: www.webpronews.com

"24/7 Real Media today announced the acquisition of privately held Decide Interactive, a provider of paid search management and optimization technology and services headquartered in Australia."

Oneupweb Expands Proactive Agency Partner Program
From: www.webpronews.com

"Oneupweb, a Search Engine Optimization and marketing firm today expanded its Agency Partner Program."

RabbitLuck.com Wishes To Take On Traditional Search Engines
From: www.webpronews.com

"Rabbitluck.com's focus will be to deliver the absolute best advertising promotions and complete marketing solutions for gaming sites left out in the cold by the large search engines dropping adult and gaming listings from the directories"

Telefrog.com Launches B2B Search Portal for Telecommunication
From: www.webpronews.com

"Telefrog.com provides a quick easy to use reference for connecting B2B buyers and sellers from around the world."


NFL Game Tackles Competition
From: www.wired.com

"Madden NFL 2005 sells more than 1.3 million copies in its first week. Also: Viacom considers buying Midway Games & hellip;. China Mobile sanctions Go2joy mobile messaging unit & hellip;. and more."

Techies Praised for E-Vote Work
From: www.wired.com

"At a meeting of technologists developing new standards for e-voting systems, the head of the nation's new elections commission lauds computer scientists for the work they're doing on the nation's behalf. By Kim Zetter."

Google Stock's Wacky Debut
From: www.wired.com

"After a false start that makes the search giant's stock appear to soar, the company's IPO on the Nasdaq settles down to a more reasonable price, just north of $100 per share."

New Device: Flying Robot
From: www.wired.com

"Seiko Epson hopes the tiny robot will help in security, disaster and rescue, and space exploration. Also: Apple recalls batteries from its 15-inch PowerBook G4 laptops.... Sony unveils eight new flat-screen TVs.... and more."

Google Stock Gagging a Bit
From: www.wired.com

"The company lowers its estimated share price range and cuts the number of shares to be sold. Also: Digital Lifestyles Group creates a PC designed for teens.... BellSouth says new benefits for retirees will reduce its earnings.... and more."


Putting Forms on the Web
From: webword.com

" If you want to know how to properly design web forms, I strongly advise you to check out Ginny Redish's excellent Moving Forms to the Web (PDF format).

(Found via Croc o' Lyle)"

Money for usability 'repays bottom line'
From: webword.com

" Computer World -- "Improving the usability of an electronic device or software application could mean more to a business's profit or market share than recruiting an extra developer to get the innovation to market more quickly."

Good article. I'd like to make three points. First, as Fred Brooks clearly explains in The Mythical Man-Month you can't add developers to a project to get it done faster. Adding developers will actually slow down development, in most cases. Put another way, nine women can't have one baby in one month.

Second, instead of throwing usability testing at the problem, or adding extra developers, why not train existing developers on usability? Build usability into the culture of the company. Add usability methods to the development process instead of trying to slap usability testing on top of the process. (By the way, I'm writing an article about this for Boxes and Arrows. Should be in print in a few weeks if all goes well.)

Finally, nearly everything in this article agrees with my comments about putting profits before users. Usability certainly does help the bottom line, and that is the way to think about it. Usability should be a mechanism to drive profits. When you compare adding a developer to a project versus doing usability testing, usability testing will probably win in terms of return on investment (ROI). And in turn, in light of my comments above, usability training for developers is often a better investment than usability testing. In any event, this is all good stuff. Generates a great discussion, if you ask me.

Read the article...
"

How to Properly Format Dates: UPDATE
From: webword.com

" At the end of July I published an article on date formatting. As expected, I received quite a bit of email about this. It always makes me laugh that I get more email from readers on what I feel are less important issues, such as date formatting and using one or two spaces after a period. In any event, I want to share three comments I received.

First, a few users told me that the ISO data format is more "world appropriate" and less anglocentric than my suggested format. I think that is a good comment. However, I still think that my suggested format is easier to read, which is usually what matters most. Most people can read and use the format because most people can read English. Perhaps I am wrong. Maybe I am being an arrogant pig about date formats!

Second, I think that my suggested format could be changed for the better, in some cases. One reader made the suggestion to always pad with zeros if the date includes single digits. For example, 7-July-2004 would become 07-July-2004. This helps maintain column formats and better handles alignment issues, especially if only three characters are used for the month (July is Jul, August is Aug, September is Sep, and so on). You could always keep the lengh at 11 characters.

Lastly, one colleague told me that he always used a year-month-day format (like the ISO format) with his own file names and folders. He puts this date in front of all file names, with this format, to make sorting work. This really makes sense for some people who like to sort information chronologically. In fact, I will investigate using this approach with my own files and folders.
"

Keystroke Level Modeling as a Cost Justification Tool
From: webword.com

" TaskZ -- "Keystroke level modeling (Card, Moran & Newell, 1983) is one of a variety of cognitive modeling techniques that have been reported in the literature over the last two decades. Cognitive modeling, simply put, involves identifying and counting all the discrete human operations - physical (e.g., mouse click, keystroke), cognitive (e.g., read or speak a syllable of text, make a mental comparison) and perceptual (e.g. locate something on screen) - that a user must execute in order to most efficiently accomplish a specific task on a specific user interface design."

Read the article..."

Perfect Web Page?
From: webword.com

" What is the perfect web page? How many words should it include? How many images? How big should the images be? How many images should it include? What should the navigation be like? How many links should it have? How wide should the page be? How quickly should it download? What font(s) should be used? And so on and so forth...

Not one question above can be answered without understanding the audience; the users of the site. And, not one question above can be answered unless the goals of the organization are clear (e.g., profit). Design cannot happen in a vacuum. Too often people revamp a web site without thinking about users or profits. I know that this is obvious to many WebWord readers, but it is not obvious to a lot of other people.

p.s. Even with the right goals in mind, it is impossible to create a perfect web page. It can always be improved. ALWAYS. Even if the page is perfect for some users, it will not be perfect for all users. Folks, we're never done. The story never ends. We can always do better."