I am heavy into marketing, and even more heavily into technology. You also might see some blog posts about modern art spring up here and there - so don't freak out.
I also blog at The Direct Marketing Voice, and throw around ideas as a Market Intelligence Analyst at QuantumDigital.
Here are a few examples of site issues that Google says might be slowing down your site:
- High Priority: Enable Keep-Alive and leverage browser caching.
- Medium Priority: Combine images into CSS sprites and minimize redirects.
- Low Priority: Minify JavaScript and remove query strings from static resources.
Visit google's expirimental speed tool to test your site:
In this day and age, when information flows freely and data capture requires the advanced skills of copy and paste, there’s no excuse not to use a CRM for your business. Price isn’t an issue – there are free and low cost systems out there that offer 80%-90% of the functionality of the top end systems. Here are a few options and some of the tradeoffs:
Salesforce.com. Salesforce is the 800 pound gorilla in the world of CRM, and for good reason. It offers an incredible amount of power, but that power comes at a price. Salesforce isn’t cheap (as much as $150/user/month), and it’s a bear to set up well. Out of the box, it’s okay, but it requires extensive configuration and expertise to make it sing. If you do set it up well, however, you will find that Salesforce can make a huge improvement in your business profitability.
I have to totally agree with Chris Penn on his recommendation that businesses of all sizes use a CRM - but not just for one aspect of the business. When you are considering a tool like Salesforce or Zoho CRM or Sugar CRM, think about the breadth of the tool. If you just adopt a software tool for a limited number of users in one department the usefulness of the tool is mitigated. As important as having a CRM is giving access to everyone in your corporate sphere. This may even mean considering ways to share a limited access version of your CRM for your partners and customers. Some information is meant to be shared - and it will hurt your brand if you implement yet another data silo.
If only the web streaming destination sites looked at how their streaming service could be applied in other niche areas, they could easily productize their general technology. Case in point: both ustream and justin.tv have good services if you want to broadcast a webcam to your family friends, or larger audience.
This is mostly for all you web developers out there who are always in search of the best free tools. Of course Google grants us alot of free tools that aren't on this list (like analytics), but the list does cover some cool web apps like mockingbird and kuler, which I've talked about before. I did not know about toggl (time tracking) and pingdom (page load testing).
http://www.webappers.com/2010/03/09/15-best-free-online-tools-for-web-design-development/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Webappers+(WebAppers)&utm_content=Google+Reader Especially cool is BrowserShots, which allows you to check your website's cross-browser compatibility.
I was on slideshare today and noticed a peculiar phenomenon - one that I have seen in the past but only on smaller blogs/websites. Essentially it was 1 particular ad, repeated several times in close proximity to one another. In my mind this is a complete waste of advertising spend. Well, maybe not a complete waste, but the fact that the left hand ad is repeated twice is very distracting visually, and it compels me NOT to look at the ad. A better effect would just to use the "skyscraper" ad format.
But at least Google is making money.
I'm not sure if this is for real, but Virgin Atlantic released an iphone app that supposedly assists flyers who are afraid to fly. See screenshot below. Is a computer device ever going to take the place of someone sitting next to you on the same flight telling you the same thing? Credibility goes to the human being who has a real story to tell. Not an iphone app.
