The Escape Blog...

So, you are eleven years old and you want a bigger bedroom. You go to your parents and plead with them and your dad says, ‘You can have a new bedroom if you can find the money’

Do you:

1. Huff off back to your Play Station muttering, ‘It’s so unfair’?
2. Or do you create a web site competition to try and raise £30,000 to pay for a loft extension?

If you are Basingstoke Schoolboy, Connor Swain, you do the latter with prizeladder.co.uk

This follows hot the heels from 21 year-old Alex Tew, who created the, now world-famous, Million Dollar Home Page. Initially started to pay for his college tuition, Alex ended selling all of the pixels on his homepage, making the full $1 million.

More and more adults are now using the internet. A recent study from the National Statistics showed that 64 per cent of adults in the UK acccessed the internet in one month in 2005.

Of these people, in a three month perioid, 61 per cent had bought or ordered goods, tickets or services online.

92 per cent had used a search engine.

This growth is really becoming evident, especially with the first Christmas retail period where TV advertising was openly encouraging online purchases from major stores. It’s no secret that whilst online sales were booming, the high street was dead. It is as if 2005 saw the acceptance of this way of buying and it can only get bigger from here on in.

For all of us that run commercial web sites this poses two issues:

1. We need to spread our net to get more people to Find Us through the mass of web pages available. This will only be achieved through better web content, well built (accessible) web sites and strong Search Engine Optimisation.
2. We need to make the holes in our net smaller - become more specific. Forget about the mass of people using the internet and focus on the fact that your core audience is also getting bigger.

"Sun has gone from the 99th to the 6th most popular server company,
largely because it has embraced authenticity and transparency in its
communication initiatives."

You may hear us talk about Blogs. You may agree with us, you may not. You are, for instance, reading ours at this very second.
Sally Falkow’s article about Sun, with interviews from Jonathan Schwartz, President and COO of Sun Microsystems, seems to allow us a glimpse into what can happen when you embrace these technologies.

"Schwartz said that this window into the company and the direct
interaction with its employees is what builds the trust factor. And he
emphasised that authenticity and transparency are keys to blogging
success."

We still have places on our Free Seminar next week that may give you some practical solutions on how you can apply these same techniques to your business using a Blog.

A study from Science Journal Nature.com claims that visitors to web sites can make snap decisions on whether they like it in just 50 milliseconds.

One key point that caught our eye was the comment from Marc Caudron of Pod1.

"For a typical commercial website,
60% of traffic comes from search engines such as Google. This makes a user’s first
impression even more critical. You’ll get a list of
sites, click the top one, and then either say ‘I’ve engaged’ and give
it a few more seconds, or just go back to Google.

Engaging people with your web site is becoming more and more key with increased competition and better user searching. This is effectively increasing the choice for all users, including your customers.

Is your web site worth choosing?

• Does it look Attractive?
• Is it Authentic?
• Is it Specific?
  
• Does it answer questions?

Not sure and want some advice?

How good are you at spotting fake e-mails?

Phishing is a real problem, we all need to get wiser to spot the fakes.

If you want to know more about e-mail, phishing, and on the other side of that coin, How to market using E-Mail, you may be interested in our Seminar running in March.