Signatures are essential on business email. They provide your customer with your contact information. But some businesses turn their signature block into a billboard of advertising: awards won, credentials earned, specials offered — all dressed up in a rainbow of colored fonts bordered with inspiring quotes and exclamation points.

Why? In everyday business emails, you’re emailing someone you know. Your recipient isn’t a complete stranger: You’re emailing to follow up with a potential customer, confirm an appointment, send a proposal, thank someone for a referral, whatever.  You don’t need to “sell” her; you need to communicate with her.

Put your message into …

According to Rachel Metz of the Associated Press, the website Yelp! is planning to roll out a new feature that will allow business owners to respond to reviews posted by the websites users.

This new feature will address one of the concerns about Yelp! which I mentioned in my previous entry, “Yelp! Not Just Another Exclamation.”  While business owners will still be unable to take down reviews that they dislike, the new feature will at least allow them to contest or address negative reviews.

This feature will be especially important to companies that are new to …

Just because your visitor has arrived to a specific product page, it doesn’t mean he will add the product to the cart. The product detail page needs to continue the conversion effort that the landing page and the category page started.

On this page, visitors will explore your offer more closely.

In terms of the product, you want to provide:

• A large enough photo (or a link to enlarge)
• Alternative photos if applicable (different angles, colors, etc.)
• Main product features and benefits
• Product options or accessories
• Price, availability, or sale/discount options
• Customer testimonials
• Product warranty/support options

Out of the list above, the product photo may be the most …

Online store category pages are crucial in helping the visitor:

• focus on the items he is interested in
• choose what he wants to learn about next
• guide the visitor one step closer to making a buying decision

We are so used to category pages that we take them for granted… until they are not there. They act like filters, grouping items in ways that make sense to us. They show a list of items with something in common, basic information about the items, and ways to sort the list itself (by price, color, size, etc.).

Category pages answer the following questions:

• Did I choose the right …
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A landing page has the tough job of:

• keeping the visitor’s attention on the offer so he doesn’t immediately leave
• increasing or re-enforcing his interest after he has chosen to stay on the page
• guiding the visitor to take action.

Since every visitor is different, landing pages do indeed have a tough job. Their design has to be very well thought out for them to perform well.

Here are some guidelines to follow when designing a landing page:

1. Make sure it looks professional, credible, and industry appropriate. Your landing page might be the first impression a visitor has of your company. It needs to match …

I love the English language! Not only is it magically absorbent, it diligently recycles itself. Here are just three examples of words that morphed from what they meant into what they mean:

• The phrase dial the phone was once literal. There was an actual dial – a round perforated disk – on the face of the phone, which you pushed around with your finger. It was never speedy (especially for me, since where I grew up phone numbers included lots of 9’s). No one truly dials anymore, but we still use the phrase.

• And we still say CC, to mean …

The goal of the landing page is to move the visitor to take the primary desired action. Whether that action be signing up for a newsletter, purchasing a product, completing a survey—it needs to be a business decision driven by an online business strategy.

Business goals will differ from website to website, and landing pages will vary accordingly.

If your business goal is to:

1. Capture leads. Your landing page would contain a form that captures information from potential customers qualified by showing interest in your offer (free newsletter, free white paper, free tips via email, etc.). The desired action is to click on …

A landing page is a custom web page developed to meet, assist, and convert visitors into customers. Most landing pages appear when a potential customer clicks on an online ad or a search-engine result link. The page will typically display content that is a logical extension of the ad or link, and will be optimized to include specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines. They can also be customized to measure the effectiveness of different ads.

The key to a successful landing page is to make sure it creates a custom experience for the visitor. Your visitors should answer …

You invested on your website and are happy with the results. How long are you “done” for? The real answer is that a website is never done. You need to keep its content fresh on an on-going basis. But what about the larger overhauls? Assuming there have been no significant changes in your business or industry… how often should you re-design or re-build your website?

The answer will vary depending on what type of site you have. On average, though, we would recommend taking a serious look at your website every 18 - 24 months. Why?

Design trends change. As new technology …

This is a very interesting question, and one that is not as easy to answer as it might first seem.   What looks like a single question is in reality four.
1)     Is it possible to copy text from another website onto my own site?
2)     Is it legal for me to use text from another website on my own site?
3)     Is it ethical for me to use text from another website on my own site?
4)     Is it effective to copy text from another site onto my own site?
Is it possible to copy text from another site onto my own site?

The first question …