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This and That on a Crazy Friday
(Article Contributed By Marie, of Sex Story Text - Posted on August 06th, 2010)
Ack ... today is one of those days when my head is in about six different places all at once.
I've got a major meeting with a group of potential clients that I've got to prep for ... I've got a major piece of software to install for a client over the weekend and the vendor hasn't sent me the code yet and I'm stressing about that. I've got another meeting coming up later today to give another client a report on some software he wants to incorporate into his website and I'm in the middle of building out one of my own sites and updating another.
So I hope you don't mind but instead of looking at one thing in depth in today's column I'm going to go skipping over a whole bunch of things.
$6.00 is all it takes
So you're running a small or medium sized business selling adult products and you're really up with the times ... you've got all your data stored up in the cloud and nothing on your office computers. You've been told that it's the way to go ... your data will always be there for you to use ... but what if you can't access it?
What if you can't access it for days ... maybe weeks ... because someone who doesn't like you has launched a denial of service attack on your network? Maybe you're hoping that doing something like that would be way too hard for any of your competitors but that might not be the case.
At the DEFCON 2010 conference that was held in Las Vegas recently two security consultants revealed just how easy it was to take down someone's site. A client had hired them to test the defenses on their network of sites and with the help of just three virtual servers they signed up for on Amazon's EC2 cloud they took their client's site down in a matter of minutes.
The total cost to create all that havoc was just $6.00 and all they needed to sign up for those servers was a credit card and an email address. That's scary stuff.
Sneaky
Have you noticed that Google has changed the color behind the sponsored links that appear at the top of the search engine results pages? At one stage Google was using a light blue ... then for a while it was changed to yellow ... but now it has been changed again.
Over at ppcblog.com they did a little research and discovered that the color that Google is now using behind those top sponsored links is close to fbf0fa and, like I did when I first saw the color change, they noticed that the new color doesn't actually appear on some monitors.
On three of my monitors that are all hooked up to the one computer that color appears clearly on one ... faintly on the second ... and not at all on the third.
The guys at ppcblog.com then decided to see if that background color was compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and when they entered the values for the ad text color and the new background color they got a clear message that using those colors together was not compliant with the guidelines.
Of course when the color doesn't appear ... or is so faint that it's almost invisible ... it's not easy to differentiate between the sponsored links and the organic search results and you could be forgiven for thinking that a result where the color didn't appear would be to Google's advantage. But Google wouldn't do something sneaky like that now would it?
Repeating myself
Now I know that I've talked about this ad nauseum but it needs to be mentioned again ... and again ... and probably once every couple of months for the next century.
One of the things I had to do yesterday was to go through a bunch of sites built by another designer and look at what was going to be involved in moving them from one host to another. The clients who own these sites are tired of getting phone calls from people who are trying to access the sites and can't because the sites are hosted with a very unreliable hosting service.
As Steve and I went through one site after another looking to see if they were straight HTML or built on a CMS we couldn't help noticing that the text on every site was all about the business that owned the site.
'XYZ business is the leader ...' 'XYZ business does this ...' 'XYZ business is outstanding ...' and yada yada yada.
The text on every site made the same mistake ... it talked about the business in a way that was totally focused on the business and not on the person who might want to buy what the business was selling.
The focus was on the features ... it talked about 'us' and we' and it never mentioned 'you'.
What sort of text are you using on the sites you're building? Are you talking about how good the product is or are you talking about the benefits someone can enjoy when they buy the product you want to sell them? Are you talking in terms of 'us' and 'we' or are you talking in terms that will resonate with the person who is reading the text?
Good sales text is all about the benefits and not about the features. Learn that simple lesson and apply it to the text on your websites and you'll make more sales.
Looking for some quality text for your paysites? Sex Story Text provides quality written work for webmasters world-wide! Check out their website at http://www.sex-story-text.com.
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