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Low down on Banner Ads

September 6th, 2011

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There are many ways to advertise online. One of the more common types is displaying advertising. Displays ads are graphical, banner-like images that appear on web pages and within emails. Display ads are so popular because they allow you to visually impress upon your potential customers the value of your service or product. Display ads have been the standard for companies with strong brand recognition for many years. They can be helpful to raised awareness. Display ads accounts for billions of dollars in the web economy.

There are a few drawbacks to the banner ads. First, they are sold on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions). This can be a drawback because unless you have strong brand awareness or are using very finely tuned target marketing, your ad may appear out if place. For companies like Microsoft it does not matter where their ad shows up. We all know their company. If you were selling tea and your ad showed up on a fishing web site it will seem very out of place. Luckily for advertisers this method is being phased out. Most companies are moving to a CPC (cost per click) pricing scheme.

Banner Ad Formats

Leaderboard Ad – These are placed at the top of a web page and should have a very strong brand message in them. The size is usually 728px wide and 90px tall.
Rectangle Ad – These ads can be placed in the content of the page or they can be popups. They should place an emphasis on strong call to action.
Skyscraper Ad – These ads are placed along the right side of the page and are much longer in size. They are becoming very popular..

Knowing where your ad will be placed is very important in determining what message you will display.

There are a few keys to designing a good ad:

The file size should be less than 40KB.
When you have animations in the ad keep it to 3-4 slides that take 15 seconds or less to complete.
The font should be 16pts at a minimum.

Techniques

Targeting – When setting up your banner ad you should make sure you work with a vendor that allows you to target specific user demographics like locations, gender, education, interests, etc. You need to find a balance between no targeting and targeting too much. The more you target your ad the more expensive it will be.
Budgeting – You should have a strict budget for your ads. This will enable you to obtain more value from your ad. It is a good idea to have at least monthly budgets if not daily budgets because this allows advertisers to throttle the traffic and distribute the traffic throughout the monthly.
Bidding – When dealing with pay per click you will be bidding on the position of your ad in search engines. You need to be careful with this since it can become very expensive. Bidding for the first spot is not recommended. You are better off bidding for the second or third spot, which will keep the cost reasonable. Your main goal is to have a bidding strategy that will generate the highest ROI. If you focus on obtaining the first position, you will be spending a lot on users who are just looking and nor serious buyers. You want to keep a close eye on your bidding and adjust it as needed.

Avoid SEO Death

September 4th, 2011

cerullo

There are so many tactics to help get your web site higher in the search engine ranking. There are also tactics out there that can get you blocked from Google or other search engines. These tactics are called "Black Hat SEO". You want to make sure you stay away from them. Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms, or by a manual site review.

Obtaining links from link brokers
Links to sites known for spam
Frequent server downtime or site inaccessiblity
Excessive repeating of keywords
Hidden text – This is when you hide text by changing its color to match the background of the page. This way the average users can not see the text but the search engines can.
Cloaking – This is when a different page is displayed depending on who is coming to the site. If a user comes they get your home page and if a search engine is indexing your site another page comes up.

Google+

August 15th, 2011

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In the age of social networking no one wants to be left out especially Google. Until now there has been no competition for Facebook. Google has developed Google+ or sometimes called Google Plus. Google+, a social network operated by Google, launched on June 28th, 2011 with integrations across a number of Google products. This site is Facebook’s first real competitor. Currently Google+ is in a public trail state. Google likes to open its new products up to public testing but limit it to a certain amount of users. They used this same method when they first started Gmail. Within a few hours Google+ reached its limit of testers. Currently no one else can create Google+ account until Google opens it back up to the public. Google+ wants to move social media from a platform that facilitates conversation and content sharing to a mechanism that can deliver much deeper social experiences.

Google+ will be interesting to watch to see how it competes with Facebook. Google does have the advantage here since it can learn from the mistakes that Facebook has made. Google also plans to integrate Google+ analytics data into its Google Analytics system. This will be a huge benefit to businesses.

So what does Google+ do? Much the same as what Facebook does with just different names and interface. Google+ already has an application for the IPhone and android phones.

Circles

One key element of Google+ is a focus on targeted sharing within subsets of your social group, which Google calls “Circles”. Circles are simply small groups of people that you can share with, each with names like friends, family, classmates and co-workers. These are similar to Facebook’s “lists” you can create containing your friends.

Photos/Multimedia

Google+ has a section specifically for viewing, managing and editing multimedia. The photo tab takes a user to all of the photos they have shared, as well as the ones they are tagged in. Google+ includes an image editor, privacy options and sharing features. Facebook does not have an image editor.

Hangouts

“Hangouts,” is Google’s new group chat feature. Instead of directly asking a friend to join a group chat, users instead click “start a hangout” and they’re instantly in a video chat room. At the same time, a message goes out to their social circles, letting them know that their friend is “hanging out.” Friends can then join the hangout as long as they have been placed in a circle that was invited by the person who created the Hangout.

Google Search Results

Google has begun integrating Google+ into search results with public Google+ posts now appearing in Social Search. Whenever a user publicly shares a link on Google+, an annotation will show up under that link when it appears in a friend’s search results. Social Search integration is only the beginning for Google’s plans for combining its search engine and social network. Google intends to have real-time search with Google+ data and will launch a search engine for Google+ posts.

Games

Google+ has not released its game line yet. Just like Facebook it will have games users can play online. Unlike Facebook the games will not automatically appear in everyone’s news feeds. They are turned off by default.

Sparks

Sparks is Google+’s online sharing engine. You put in a list of things you are interested in. Then you will have a constant feed of articles and videos related to these topics that you easily share with your circles.

Time will tell where Google+ goes. So far it has received lots of great reviews. Google has the advantage because you can integrate email, social media, office applications and much more in one system, where Facebook is not tied to any other applications. With all this I wonder if we really need another social media giant. Most people can’t keep up with Facebook let alone another social media site. If Google+ takes hold which it looks like it will this will add another layer on to businesses to maintain more social media sites.

Web Browsers – What is the difference?

August 15th, 2011

cerullo

Did you know there are many web browsers out there and they are all different? Each one has its pros and cons and is more suited for different types of users. There is a lot more to browsers than just displaying web pages. There certain pieces of software or web sites that only work in certain browsers. This has gotten better over the years but is still a problem today.

Statistics show that Internet Explorer still is the top browser but FireFox and Google Chrome are fast creeping into Internet Explorer’s market.

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer (IE) is developed by Microsoft. It is shipped on all PC computers in the US. This is why it is the most commonly used browser around. This browser integrates nicely with all MS Office products which other browsers do not do as well. There are many web sites that are coded in a certain way (Active X scripting) that only work in IE. This is why many users and companies want/make everyone use IE.

The downside to IE is that it is the most popular browser so all the hackers target it. They know that this has the widest market share so if they make viruses that work in IE, so they get the most impact of their virus. Viruses can come from security holes in IE, popup windows or even just going to a web page that has a virus in its code. I have seen web pages that have one line of code that is only activated when someone comes to their web site using IE.

The new Internet Explorer 9, adds hardware acceleration for graphics-intensive sites and a privacy tool to prevent tracking of your Web activities by marketing sites.

FireFox

Firefox is developed by Mozilla. This browser can be downloaded – http://mozilla.com. FireFox has the second largest market share in the browser world. It really replaced Netscape many years ago. At times FireFox pushes Microsoft to change its ways and adhere to web standards. It has been good competition for Microsoft. FireFox does not have all the bells and whistles that IE has like the favorites down the side or the scripting capabilities on the developer side.

The huge benefit to FireFox is that it does not get the viruses that IE does. It also takes up less resources on your computer. There are many plugins for FireFox. One of my favorites is the ability to sync your bookmarks on any computer you own. So my bookmarks on my desktop and laptops automatically sync up over the internet. I never lose them either. As a web developer Firefox has many add ins that make my job much easier.

Google Chrome

Google Chrome is a fairly new edition to the browser world by Google. Its popularity is making it a leader in the browser market. This browser can be downloaded – http://www.google.com/chrome/. The benefit to this browser is it is a slimmed down browser. It has very little user interface just like the Google search site. Chrome is designed to be fast in every possible way. It's fast to start up, fast to search and load web pages, and fast to run all your web apps. It does not have the virus attraction that IE has.

Another advantage to Chrome is – Have you ever had a web site crash your browser? With Chrome each web site runs separately so if a web site crashes it does not crash your entire browser and you lose everything you had open. Only the one tab where the web site crashed is lost.

Google's Chrome, which may be the fastest growing browser in history in terms of market share, is also the most frequently updated. It's already at version 10 after just two and a half years. Chrome offers syncing, but on top of this it adds some pretty useful features—its Instant feature starts displaying a page from your history before you even finish typing in the address box. And the browser comes with built-in viewers for Flash and PDF content, saving you from having to install separate plug-ins.

Safari

Safari is mostly used on MAC computers and mobile devices. Though Safari exist predominantly in Apple/Mac world, there's no reason Windows users can't use the unique extras it offers. Its "Reader" view cuts all the ads and unnecessary items off a page you just want to read the text on, and the Top Sites page offers a stunning 3D gallery view of your most frequently needed Web locations.

References on browser stats

DNN Monitoring Tools

July 28th, 2011

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With technology today people expect their web sites to never go down or have problems. When you are hosting web sites you need to make sure you know when there is a problem before anyone else does. Most of our client web sites are now using DotNetNuke. This adds a layer of potential problems or things that could go wrong. They are not just static HTML pages any more. They interact with a SQL database that must be functioning for the site to load properly. We have general alerts if there is something wrong with the servers but we need to know if individual web sites are having issues. I recently investigated a number of monitoring tools. There are so many tools out there. It all depends on what features you are looking for and you need to make sure they are not going to put any stress on your server. Some monitoring tools actually run on your server which can take away processing power and slow down the server. We did not want that. So I started looking for services that ran externally to our systems.

The keys I was looking for is some thing that would at least send an email alert that the site was down and when/if it came back up to send another message. Cost was concern, stress/bandwidth utilization on our servers and I need to be able to monitor many sites. If the system sent a text message that was a huge plus. I knew that would start costing us though.

I finally settled on two services I was going to test. They are both free services and really function the same way. They both send ping tests to see if the site is up every X minutes. The nice thing with this and DNN sites is that by hitting the site it keeps the site loaded in memory. This help increase response times for uses. Otherwise if the site is inactive for an amount of time the site unloads from memory and the next time a user comes to the site it will load slower.

PingAlive

Web site – http://pingalive.com

This is a free service to monitor your sites. You can have as many sites monitored as you choose. It has a very simple and easy to use interface. To set up a site all you need to do it type in the URL. The service will ping your site and if it does not respond in the desired amount of time an email alert is sent. Another email alert is sent when the site responds again. What I like about this service is the customizability. You can set the time between pings, the sensitivity, the email that you want the alerts to go to, and you can group the web sites. With our shop I wanted to be able to see the sties grouped by which server they are on. So I can easily see which server is having issues. I also like being able to say where alerts go to for each site. Some times the client wants to be alerted or different staff maintain different servers.

DNN Monitoring

Web site – http://dnnmonitor.com

DNNMonitor is very similar to PingAlive. It is also a free service that pings your web site to see if it is up. For me it did not have the customizability. You could not adjust the ping times or who the email alerts were sent to. It uses the email you registered with only. There also was no grouping in this service. This service works great and I think would be perfect for just a few sites. When you are managing many sites, the inability to group or change where the email alerts go to may be cumbersome.

Managing CSSApply list in DotNetNuke Telerik Editor

July 15th, 2011

Steve

One thing I have ran into in every site with the Telerik Editor is how to tweak it. The default installation does not work well. I wrote up a few things that I normally change and how to manage that troublesome CSSApply dropdown.

Managing the CSSApply Dropdown

Create a file called CustomEditor.css in the ~\Providers\HtmlEditorProviders\Telerik\Config folder. Add the CSS styles you want to have n the dropdown to this file.
Edit the ConfigDefault.xml – Add the following before the </configuration>
- <property name="CssFiles">~/Providers/HtmlEditorProviders/Telerik/Config/EditorCustom.css</property>
- <property name="CssClasses">Normal,comicsans,NormalRed,SubSubHead,SubHead,Head</property> *** substitute your style names
Edit the ToolsDefault.xml – Remove the styles between <classes>……</classes>

That is it. Now you have control over what your end users can use on your site.

Other items I change

By default when you press return in the editor it just puts a BR tag. Most of the time you want a P tag. You can easily change this in the ConfigDefault.xml file. Change this line to be FALSE -<property name="NewLineBr">TRUE</property>. Now pressing return will give you a P tag.

You can increase the file size upload limitation in the ConfiDefault.xml file. the default is 4MB for all types of files. You can also control the types of files that are allowed to be uploaded. I usually prevent bitmaps.

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