yahoo 10 years ago - share the laugh with me

Internet has gone long way over last years. Great way to experience it and look back is to use Internet Archive and it’s Wayback machine. It’s not new service but it’s worth to come back to it from time to time.

You can see your website evolving over the years. You can see one of the big famous ones - how they looked like 10 years ago. Take a look at yahoo website to have some laugh. That’s how it looked like in October 1996.

Also - if you want to check out the site that might be totally rewamped and changed and you want to check its content back in the past - this is your place. It doesn’t have all the possible days but has surprisingly lots of them, for great many sites. It claims to archive 55 billions of pages from 1996 till now.

Do you maybe know website that went even longer way from 1996? Share it here! Long live Internet! Long live Internet archive!

AOL scandal - how to use it

I will not speak about moral, technical or security aspect of this weird event. The bottom-line is that data on searches of more than 600 thousands of AOL users were made to public. These searches represent nice statistically significant sample of people search behavior on the net. Data that otherwise are kept as big business value by search companies.

There are no personal data there (great for poor AOL users ;-), but there is quite extensive information on user behavior. You have there all chain of searches with information on whether and what had these people actually clicked. See random example of this data here:
http://www.dontdelete.com/randusersearch.asp?Submit=Submit

You can use one of the services that were made quickly available (like http://www.dontdelete.com/) and put there keyword related to your business and company. You can see what chain of searches were people doing and what they were finding. Valuable data to understand people behavior.

Big thanks to crete_geek for adding very good search engine url (This one here at AskTheBrain gives you interesting info, like which searches did people not click on a result for. It's also very fast unlike the others.)

How to link to your site in your off-line materials?

Most of the companies when their online presence matures start to have pretty complex sites. As soon as they describe in complete way your company offerings and info to all key audiences (customers from various segments, investors, job seekers, media, etc) the site gets more and more difficult to find the right information quickly.

If this happens to you - you need to decide on what kind of web addresses to present in their off-line materials. Url of company homepage is less and less reasonable. You need to be more specific - build marketing url. Address that is easy to type in and memorize and leads directly to relevant page. Couple of ideas on how to approach marcom url and their pros and cons follow below:

build keyword into your domains
You add keyword within domain, right before your company.com name. Example: autos.yahoo.com. It has couple of advantages. The address is easy to read and short, it’s usually pretty easy to memorize. The main disadvantage is that if misspelled - visitors are out of your site. They don’t see your company message but rather nasty browser message about wrong domain.

add keyword after your domain
Example: www.apple.com/ipod. Pros: address is still pretty easy, when customers misspells something, there is good chance that she stays within the site. Cons: more difficult to say (on radio or voice-over in ad), you need to communicate “/” between domain and keyword.

promo code
I’ve seen it on ibm.com site but they abandoned it some time ago. On the company homepage you prominently present entry box with message “Enter your promo code here”. Customer that enters promo code are redirected to promo page. Pros: very short to communicate in ads, Cons: not everyone is used to it, might be confusing for customers, entry box can be missed.

My personal favorite (and I think most popular out there) is the keyword after company domain (the apple example). Do you know other approaches? You see other pros and cons of the ones above? Your comments are welcome!

Which countries click on banners?

We do have banner campaigns spanning across all European websites of my company. They are done centrally from one place - same image, same text (just translated), same message. What kind of differences in clicks on the banners would you expect from the countries?

I was really surprised to see how different results are - it can be as big as between 0,2% for one country and almost 2% for the others. It seems like there are two sources of these differences:

• internet adoption in the country - especially for countries early on the path to use Internet - Serbia, Bulgaria, Africa (all countries but South Africa), Ukraine and some others.
  
• cultural implications - more difficult to judge and measure - things like:


• attitude toward marketing and advertising. Some countries (e.g. eastern Europe ones - Hungary, Poland, Czech) don't trust advertising and therefore are not assuming that banners lead to relevant countries. This results in lower clickthrough
• how focused people are - some countries don't mind distractions and are more eager to choose different path by clicking banners (I've seen it in Turkey).

The differences of ClickThrough for same banners can be really astonishing. You see others factors? Don't agree with my remarks? commentsents welcome!

Is worldwide equal to US?

Many of the top global companies are of US origin. When these corporation grow, globalize and start to earn more and more money from international operation - they start to question themselves. What should be the content of it's corporate.com website. There are three approaches out there:

• international traffic can be ignored - this means that www.ibm.com, www.microsoft.com are actually US websites. This creates lots of confusion for customers. My company has website for Middle East as whole covering 10 countries there. We've checked traffic coming from one of these countries - from United Arab Emirates. It turned out that 20 (twenty) times more people from UAE visit US side instead of ME one which has information relevant to them.
• company.com is worldwide bridge page - check out www.borland.com or www.bmw.com. When you enter these site you are upfront asked for the country you are coming from. This is much better solution especially if you give option to remember your choice. This way you make sure that people sites that are relevant for them.
• company.com is truly worldwide site - this is most popular with big companies of international (especially European) origin. Check out www.nokia.com or www.siemens.com. This solution I like most. You will find your relevant information there and wherever you access information that are country dependent - you will need to decide - which country you are interested in.

Lets keep in mind global traffic that might be misled. Especially from small countries where people might not be sure which company site is relevant for them.

best online flight booking website

I fly quite often and need good online booking engine. I've tried couple of them and finally settled with Expedia (http://www.expedia.com/) Expedia offers really well thought out experience for choosing the best flight available.

It has all the basics that every booking engine should have:

• it remembers your departure airport - as you usually start from same place in your travel
• it proposes reasonable dates for the trip - why it's so difficult for most of the sites to place good default dates. It's much easier to update some dates than type them from scratch.
• it has flight search featured prominently on the homepage - quick and easy to search
  it allows you to order by price but also via flight duration and time of arrival/departures

It has couple of useful options that others can only dream of:

• it helps with misspelled airport names - do you always know how to spell Ljubljana when you need to go to this City in Slovenia?
• it can advice that there are better offers when flying day before or after
• it can advice if there is possibility to fly to nearby airport instead
• it has (unfortunatelly US only) opportunity to search for best prices of flight when your dates are flexible - you can say - I want to go from place A to place B, when I should go so I get best offer

It's really showcase of great user experience. Expedia has such good experience that I usually have better visibility for flight options there than professional travel agents.

It has all it needs for occasional traveler. Just some ideas for improvements for frequent travelers:

• would be great to have more details on the fare rules for advanced users (how flexible is the ticket, what's the booking class)
• would be great to know what airline operates the flight for code shared flights - so I can avoid getting flights by Tyrolean Airlines even if book Austrian Air. ;-)
• would be great to have possibility to search using parameters of frequent flier program. So one can limit the search to airlines that are members of certain programs.

You can also find information on online flight booking website review on my sister blog on WordPress.

Do you use Expedia? Do you maybe use other online engine that offers even better experience? Your comments are very welcome!

google trends

I'd like to share with you interesting service that google made available for use recently. It's still in google lab but it's working very well already.

Check out: www.google.com/trends

It allows you to see popularity of search keywords over time in Google. It can be one keyword but can be also multiple keyword. Do you want to check popularity of your favorite beer brands, cars, pop stars? This is good place where you can quickly start. See screenshot here comparing bmw (blue on the chart) with audi (red).

For more serious usage - it allows you to compare various ways on how people search for your products and services. Are people searching in singular form, or plural - are they search for notebook, notebooks or maybe laptop or laptops... This can help you to decide on how to name your products on your website and also on what keyword to buy in your SEM campaign. Enjoy!

Site reviews

One of my ideas on the content of this blog and on the way to help improve web experience is to do reviews of the websites. I plan to pick major company websites from various industries (automotive, food, home appliances, banking) and write review from perspective of customers.

These websites are way too often created from perspective of the company rather than from perspective of the customers and visitors. Such visitor feedback might be very useful for owners of such sites.

If you want to have your own website reviewed - please drop me note. I don't promise anything but will try to pass you feedback as well.

Web 2.0 - what’s hype, what’s real?

I suggest you read this great analysis of Web 2.0 and what it means. It’s from November 05 but it’s really well thought-out so it’s still very valid now.

The users/visitors rules - they are in charge - deciding what’s the web should look like, what should the content be. Blogs were always like this and they are mainstream now. It’s Web 2.0 guys!

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog on webdesign and webmarketing. I've decided to share my thoughts related to good and bad practices on the web. I do it professionally - I work in one of the worldwide leading technology corporations managing its internet organization for Europe.

I'd like to use my blog to propagate good practices and wise usage of Internet for companies. Companies invest huge dollars to present itself on the web. Way too often it's done without asking basic questions - why do we do it? What our customers needs online from us? What people to do on our sites? How we want the people to perceive us?

It was way too often clear that websites are created just for sake of having them as everybody else does. Within my blog I'd like to share ideas and tools on how to use the web so it's worthy for companies and its customers. Stay tuned!