Welcome to the Escape Blog

We noted in November that we hadn’t got it right with V.7 of our web site (created in 2004) - hence V.8 on it’s way.

This great article at Marketing Experiments has some advice on how to get it right.

"It is likely that 80% of your visitors are hoping to achieve one of two
or three things on your site. Figure out what these two or three things
are, and give them plenty of space. As for the 20% you won’t please,
don’t stress about it. Please 80% is pretty good."

My Previous post outlined how to drive traffic and mentioned a point about relevant copy.

This study at iMedia (directed by WebMetricsGuru) covers a study on a sales page for copy.

What is shows is that - more is more

Another tool at Sitening that we occasionally use states: "Having at least 300 words of original content per page enables search engines to better understand your page, and increases the chances of someone finding your page."

The key words in that sentence (in our opinion) being "original content"

We are often asked how to make the search engines (especially Google) like a web site and draw in traffic - get up the rankings etc. Now, you could ask Google itself - always a good place to start. Then you start talking to web ‘experts’, designers and people who get traffic and they all have their opinion.

The non-technical Escape answer follows two simple rules:

1. Content is King! A pretty web site is great, but if it doesn’t say anything of any relevance it is not going to do you any good. Think of the following phrase: “The Complete Solutions Provider”. Out of context it means nothing: If you sell Apples - talk about apples!
2. Accessible and Compliance - this basically means your web site is built to certain recognised standards. Doesn’t mean to say you are pandering to regulation, it means you are creating a web site that speaks the same language as the rest of the (regulated) internet.

Now, we don’t mean to simplify things but if that’s all you concentrated on - that chances are, you will get more traffic. It’s what we’ve been concentrating on and we are getting some great results.

“On average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out
of 10 will read the rest. This is the secret to the power of the
headline, and why it so highly determines the effectiveness of the
entire piece.”

Another great post from Copyblogger

More than half of government and council websites contain errors and cause problems for disabled people, research shows.

Some 60% of UK government websites contain HTML errors, according to a study by the University of Southampton.

Adam Field, from the university’s School of Electronics and Computer Science, conducted the survey and commented:

"It is a very unfortunate statistic. It should be better. It is not something that is difficult to improve upon."

Mr Field also pointed out disabled people were likely to
require government services and, therefore, had even more reason to
want to use government websites.

He also explained that even if a website looked fine and was
error-free, it did not mean that it would work with all browsers and
for all users and may not always be accessible for visually impaired
people.

Source BBC

A link from Threadwatch pointed me to this set of latest figures for search engine usage at John Battelle.

“Year-over-year, Google and Ask showed strong search query gain of
29.4% and 27.9%, respectively, while the other search providers in the
top five declined. On a sequential basis, Google and Ask also showed
the highest growth at 8.3% and 14.6% respectively.”

A lot of talk about web 2.0 at the moment. In this article, the BBC argue the case.

Michael Arrington, author of the Web 2.0 blog
TechCrunch, sees it as the "inevitable evolution of the web from a
read-mostly medium to a read-write, or two-way medium".

Whether we like it or not, believe in the new phrase, or not: The Web is definitely changing. At The Escape, we have seen a massive shift in the past year or so of developments in creating better web sites from a client-perspective. Not just prettiness - but delivery as a marketing tool.

We are creating great new products that we utilise on a different scale, including our click logger (Firefox required) and our (licenced) stats package.

The more we know, the more we can learn!

"For those who may not be familiar with the technique, article marketing
involves submitting short articles to directories such as Ezine Articles,
with permission for others to republish your work on their blog,
website or in their email newsletter. In return, you get one or more
links back to the site of your choice."

A great post here by Brian Clark over at Copy Blogger - my new favourite blog. Only found it a couple of days ago so still trawling through all the great ideas. Why not go for a visit?

"People spend millions of dollars developing
these websites," says Randolph Bias, who teaches at the School of
Information at the University of Texas at Austin.

Companies would benefit if they tested their sites more before launching them, he says.

Great report By Edward C. Baig, USA TODAY

Other findings from the report:

• Individuals read Web pages in an "F" pattern.
  They’re more inclined to read longer sentences at the top of a page and
  less and less as they scroll down. That makes the first two words of a
  sentence very important.
• "People are extremely good at screening out
  things and focusing in on a small number of salient page elements,"
  says Jakob Nielsen, a principal at the firm.
• Surfers connect well with images of people
  looking directly at them. It helps if the person in the photo is
  attractive, but not too good looking.
• Photos of people who are clearly professional models are a turnoff. "The person has to be approachable," Pernice Coyne says.
• Images in the middle of a page can present an obstacle course.
• People respond to pictures that provide useful information, not just decoration.
• Consumers will peek at ads in search engines
  as a "secondary thing," Nielsen says, since they usually have specific
  product targets in mind.

Finding new was to advertise your product is getting harder and harder. There is much talk about Buzz Marketing and finding new ways of creating buzz.

Apple seems to have found a new and innovative way, according to MIT Advertising Lab.

Create and ad that is visible from space and Google Earth!