Archive for November 2008

There’s always lots in the news about the high street shopping frenzy in the lead up to Christmas. We’ve all seen reports from Oxford Street in London showing the throngs of buyers.

When it comes to the Internet, there may not be a crowded shopping street but there’s still a frenzy, don’t you worry. The biggest pre-christmas shopping day is called Cyber Monday, and this year it falls on December 1st.

As a website owner, and someone who might want to sell products through your webeden.co.uk website, its important that you are fully prepared for this opportunity.

To start with, if you’re advertising your website on Google or elsewhere make sure you account has plenty of budget – you don’t want your campaigns going offline because the daily cap is set too low.

Second, make sure you have your biggest and best sellers displayed prominently on your site. You know which products sell best, you need to make it as easy as possible for visitors to find and then buy those products on your website.

Last, make sure you give your customers some peace of mind about shipping times. Online shoppers want to be sure that their gifts will arrive before Xmas day, so you need be upfront about delivery dates and order deadlines.

The most exciting thing about this whole event is that you, having used the WebEden Website Builder, are in a great position to take advantage of the online shopping rush.

What other things are you doing to prepare? Leave us a comment with your best tips and we’ll make sure to pass them on.

There’s an interesting story over on Domain Name Wire today about a record breaking domain name sale which happened through the Sedo. Sedo is a secondary marketplace where you can buy or sell domain names. Its called ‘secondary’ because these are domain names that have already been registered, and their current owners are looking to sell them on at a profit.

Perhaps the best known sale of a domain on the secondary market was sex.com which generated $12m back in 2006. Prior to that, the heady days of the dotcom boom brought about the sale of business.com for a whopping $7.5m.

This time its the domain name Internet.eu, which went for $26,250, which makes it one of the top ten public .eu domain sales ever. There’s a perception that .eu domain names are worth a lot less than .com, .net or .org, and less too than country domains such as .uk. Still, considering the previous owner probably bought the domain for less than £50, that’s quite a big profit!

All this highlights the importance of choosing the right domain name. Its important to make sure you find something that’s easy to remember, but which is also relevant to you or your business. I’m bound to mention that you can get a free domain name with many of our website builder packages. This means that your WebEden website can appear as your domain name, rather than yourname.webeden.co.uk. Check out our domain name search to find one that’s relevant to you.

Of course if you’ve already got one, then its easy to transfer your domain name in. Just click on the transfer tab, enter your domain name and press transfer. You’ll need to change the IPSTAG to GANDI too.

Do you already own a great domain name? Why not make us envious and let us know what it is and how much you think its worth?

OK, who here hasn’t heard of YouTube? Come on, there must be someone? No?! Well what did I expect! The truth is, YouTube, and a whole range of other less well known video websites have been an Internet phenomenon of the last couple of years. We’ve all been emailed a link to a funny clip, or watched a ‘best bit’ from a television programme on there.

And an enterprising few of you have probably had a go at uploading a video yourself. Whether you’ve recorded something from the television, or added a clip from your own camera or camera phone, the process of getting short movies onto YouTube is very easy.

Thanks to the clever thinking of a few people, the power of television now exists on a website.

But did you know that you can have exactly the same videos that you see on YouTube, embedded into your webeden.co.uk website?

We’ve made it really easy. To get a YouTube video onto your webeden.co.uk website, just go to the ‘Insert’ Menu, and choose ‘Insert Object’. At the top of the list you can choose ‘Video – YouTube’. Use the editor button to link to the YouTube URL of the video. (The URL of the video can be found to the right of the video on YouTube.) Once you’ve got the video onto your webeden.co.uk website, you can drag and drop it anywhere you like, just like a normal image. You can set the video to Autoplay, hide away the controls, keep the aspect ratio when you’re resizing it, and so much more.

This feature is available on all our packages, even the free website builder!

But why would you want to put a video on your website? Well, for exactly the same reason that you yourself have watched a video on YouTube. Lets face it, we all find short movies entertaining – we’re so used to reading text on a website, it provides an exciting break from the norm. So if you want to engage the visitors to your website, and get them to stay on your website longer, then its a great idea to add a YouTube video clip.

What should be in your video? Well, ultimately you need to add something that’s relevant to your website. If you’re selling products, then what about a video demonstration of the product being used? If you’ve got a hotel then show short videos of the rooms, or the views.

Reasearch has been shown that where video exists alongside a product, sales of that product go up.

Have any of you already added some video to your website? Leave us a message below with a link to your website, and we can showcase it as an example – and let other people learn from your YouTube skills!

27.1.09 Update. If you want to find out how to add YouTube videos to your own website, then watch our how to add YouTube Video tutorial now!

Have you seen the changes in the Google’s results pages? From today, as reported on the BBC, Google have added a couple of little buttons by the each result within the organic (left hand side) results. These buttons allow you to customize the results you get by either promoting a particular website to the top of the results, or by excluding it altogether. There’s also the option to add specific websites to the search results.

The next time you perform the same search, the personalized version will show up instead of the ‘generic’ one. These results are tailored just for you – they will only affect what you see, and not what anyone else sees. Google are calling this their ‘searchWiki’.

Cedric Dupont, Google’s product manager told the BBC that this change is ‘Revolutionary’.

Its all part of the movement on the web for users to be more participatory in their web experience. This movement includes stuff like social media (Facebook, Myspace, and webeden.co.uk too), which is all part of what has been called User Generated Content. Another label that’s been bandied around is ‘Web 2.0’.

The problem of course is that most people will ignore it entirely, and just a few very active people will use it all the time. I suppose that’s not really a problem, but we should wary of a web experience being shaped by just a few very active people.

The searchWiki also lets users write comments about a particular site, which will show up in a dialogue ballon next to that website in the results page, the next time they return for a further search. Other people using the searchWiki can also look at the comments in order to find out more about the website before they visit it.

What do you think? Can you be bothered to change the search engine results pages and push websites up and down? Or have you got too much other stuff to do?! Ether way, let us know by leaving a comment.

We’re putting together an advisory document on pay per click advertising on search engines. If anyone out there has specific questions they would like answered please let us know and we’ll make sure we get them answered.

Thanks 

Tara. X