For several years, I banked with Commerce Bank. Last year, like many banks, Commerce had financial trouble and was acquired by TD Bank. From my perspective, the acquisition went smoothly. So smoothly, in fact, that I didn’t know about the changeover until I paid a visit to my local branch, where I found a completely different bank in its place. Nothing makes the heart skip like not finding your bank no longer exists.
Since the changeover, I’ve been happily visiting TD Bank online using the same bookmark I’ve had for the past several years. The bookmark originally pointed to commerceonline.com, and that’s how I’ve done my online banking since the day I first saved it. When TD Bank took over Commerce, the link continued to work.
Not what I expected to see when I clicked my online banking bookmark.
When I visited today, I got a big surprise: at first glance, I thought my bank’s website had been taken over by a domain squatter. Actually, in a sense, it turns out it had been taken over by a domain squatter. It was filled with ‘sponsored search results.’ After I recovered from shock, I realized that what had probably happened was that TD Bank, the new owner of Commerce Bank, had probably forgotten to renew the registration on the old domain, and so it fell into the hands of whomever has it now. The net effect is that when I use the my bookmark that has always taken me to my online banking login, I now land on a page not apparently controlled by Commerce or TD Bank, but one owned by some unknown entity.
This poses potential security problems. Let’s assume there are lots of people like me, people who long ago bookmarked the site and trust it to take them to their bank. Now, what if the new custodians of the domain decide to take advantage of this fact and masquerade as the bank? I’d be willing to bet a lot of people might accidentally give up their login and pin number before they realized what had happened. We’re all creatures of habit. How often do you really click the little security icon in your browser to verify a site’s identity?
This brings me to my point: guard your old domains. If you ever used them for anything important, it’s better to keep paying the $9/year to renew the domain than to let it fall into the hands of someone who might use them to take advantage of others.
And if you happened to once bank with Commerce Bank USA, I strongly suggest updating your bookmarks.
When was the last time you didn’t open an order confirmation email? Now, what about confirmations to various subscription services, Do you open them? If you’re like most people, you probably do.
Studies have shown that Transactional Emails, as they’re known, are opened and read about 75% of the time. In contrast, regular email newsletters have much, much lower open rates – typically 10% – 30%, and often in the single digits. It’s clear that if you’re looking to grab the readers attention, you’re much more likely to be able to do it with a transactional email. Their higher open rates also tend to garner higher click-through rates, multiplying the effect.
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A few days ago, I discussed site strategy with a prospective client who sells e-books. His concern was that sales from the site aren’t nearly what he’d like them to be and he wanted to know how to improve them. After we’d spoken for a few minutes, he asked whether I thought a complete site redesign was appropriate. I responded with a question that, from his reaction, seemed impertinent: How many visitors do you get each day?
To those just getting started in the online world, the question is usually surprising, and understandably so, because a site makeover just seems to be an obvious improvement. But the question of traffic is paramount, because without it you can change many things about a site and none of them will make the slightest bit of difference. Why? [read more…]
One of the biggest problems faced by any site trying to build readership is retention. Attracting visitors is hard work, and if you’re going to make the most of those efforts, you need to do something to keep readers coming back. Good content alone won’t do it.
“I don’t like to pay for the same real estate twice,” said George S. Patton, in the eponymously named 1970 film classic. (I don’t know if the real George S. Patton ever really said this, but it seems consistent with his persona.) It concisely describes what many site managers do: work hard to attract visitors but do nothing to retain them as regular readers.
Building repeat visitor traffic can be done in many ways. The first and most obvious way is to encourage users to bookmark your site. Unfortunately, this is the least effective method since people simply don’t bookmark sites the way they once did; even when they do there is no guarantee that they’ll remember to use the bookmark they’ve created. [read more…]
Yesterday, I wrote a post wherein I described my experiences crowdsourcing a new online list management application. One of the the highlights of that post was a relatively new service, called 99Designs, which provides an amazingly effective method of getting quality design work. After that post, I got a call from 99Design’s Jason Aiken, and we talked about my experiences.
During the call, we briefly touched on some of things I’ve found that have helped to make my experience with their site so productive, things I omitted from my original post because it was already on the longish side. Today I want to spend just a few minutes highlighting what I’ve learned and how they can help anyone to make the most of the experience. [read more…]
A few months ago, I met with a former colleague for some BBQ and shop talk. We’re 
both entrepreneurially minded, and during the course of the conversation I casually lamented the seeming lack of a good online tool for managing various lists, todos, projects, and so forth, all in one place. While, on the surface, they might seem entirely separate from one another, my feeling was that there was a strong common thread that ran between them, namely that they are all, at their core, lists of a kind, and that it should be possible to design an application that cleanly handles each of these needs.
Of course, I know that there are online apps out there that address each of these needs; but my complaints with all of them, to varying degrees, is that they fall short in some significant way, whether it be a rotten user interface, or functionality that is too limited for my needs. I also don’t like having to use multiple tools when one could do the job. I began to think that my needs weren’t very unusual, and that others might feel the same way, and that this might be the sort of thing that they would find useful, too. What really sealed the deal was that I felt that this was a tool I really wanted to use myself, and so I decided to begin building it. Thus, Lystie was born.
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One of the biggest problems in developing pay-per-click ad campaigns is knowing which keywords to target. The basic premise of building keyword lists is simple: The more keyword phrases you can target, the more traffic you can drive to your site. And by targeting some of the more obscure long tailish phrases, you can lower your per-click charges, since many of your competitors won’t take the time to do the research to identify them, thus keeping the bid prices low.
In short, building comprehensive lists of possible search phrases is among the most crucial elements of an PPC marketing campaign. It’s also an extremely time-consuming chore that screams for some form of automated assistance.
Today I learned of a Google product called Search Based Keyword Tool (SBKT) that does exactly that. Over at Occam’s Razor there is an extended description of the tool and how you can make the most of it. I can’t overstate how important this tool can be: If building keyword lists for AdWords campaigns is one of your concerns, this article is a must read.
Last night I upgraded my store to the latest version of Magento, version 1.2.1. Things went very smoothly, in part because of a few precautions I’ve begun to take during all Magento updates. First, because it can cause problems during the upgrade, I now redirect all web traffic to a maintenance page while performing the procedure since problems can occur otherwise arise. Another item I’ve made a standard practice during Magento upgrades is to delete the var/sessions and var/cache folders – whether Magento recommends it or not.
HTML Code displayed on Magento Front end
The only post-upgrade problem I encountered was that three custom product attributes would not render properly when viewing product pages. I’d previously created the three attributes in Magento – ASL signs, special features, and preview – to display additional product information about the product to my customers. For example, the Preview attribute is used to provide video or audio previews for some of our DVD or CD products. After the upgrade, instead of rendering the HTML code, as it had always done, Magento was instead displaying them as regular text.
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A few months ago I wrote a post describing some of the methods available for taking your blog content and automatically cross-posting it to Twitter. At that time, I suggested Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin as the best solution. I still love that plugin; in fact, it’s what I continue to use for this blog.