Have u seen professional corporate event sites by big multinationals? Well, though these deals might be fronted by big marketing and event companies, some of which are actually designed and developed by us! One of our potential clients just spoke to me today and wanted to see some sample of works that we have outsourced from other event companies. Well, instead of emailing him privately, why not just post this samples up on our blog for everybody’s benefit?

Attached is this article are some samples of websites and electronic direct mailers (EDM) that we have done for one of our clients (our client is an event management firm)….

Just a special note, for the sending of EDMs, it is better to levarage on a professional E-Marketing Software, iike iMessage.to, instead of sending it yourself. One of our customers bought a desktop emarketing program and due to careless sending got his domain name and ip blacklisted from major ISPs!

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Recently, one of our clients complained about receiving a large amounts of unwanted mails (SPAMS). After some preliminary checking, we realised that our client has, against our advise, put his email address back on to his contact us page.

This is one of the things that we should NEVER do unless we are prepared for the onslaught of unregistered mails.

Out in the internet, professional spammers actually run spiders that crawl through each and every webpage to extract out email addresses to run their email campaigns from Viagra to Nigerian Scams to Imitation Watches.

To protect our email addresses from being illegally harvested, we should never leave it on the contact us page. Instead, we should encourage our customers to contact us directly through the contact us form.

Article on Email Harvesting

Once every several months, there comes an article that really puts the internet landscape into perspective. Recently, wired came up with just that article on Long Tail Economics. Read about it to understand the importance of variety in Long Tail Economics.

The Long Tail

Most of the time, our customers are confused about the kind of website they need. Internet and web technologies has progressed at such a very rapid and bewildering pace that it can get really confusing. There are many, many, many ways to use the web. Thankfully, based on our experience 90% of our clients, can be satisfied with a set of standard solutions.

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Clients will occasionally ask me for tips about getting their site listed on the first page of google. Well, all I can say is that, being listed on the first page is no easy feat. Definitely a simple 5 page website will not qualify you to be listed on the first page of google. A website has to undergo Search Engine Optimisation before it can significantly increase its rankings. In fact, if the website is totally new, Google will have no way of knowing of its existence!

However, if you are keen to have you site listed in google, you can volunteer the url of your site at:

http://www.google.com/addurl/

Google will take note of it… in its next crawl and indexing. From then on, minimally your site will be listed along with the millions of hits. To work up the ranking of a site, you have to take note of the following:

• listing of keyords in your meta-tags
• keyword density in your website
• no of pages (generally sites with a high volume of content are preferred… as such blogs and cms systems are good ways to easily build up the content of a site…)
• incoming links from authoritative sites

Well, the listing above is just a very brief introduction of some things to take note of in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Good luck and have fun!

As explained in the prior article on “Secret of Creating Beautiful Database Driven Websites”, the development of a Database Driven Site is split into 2 segments:

• Construction of a full static front end prototype (Web Designer)
• Implementing the necessary codes to fulfil the functionality (Software Developer)

Each segment of the project is handled by different personals.

This ensures that design decisions are made based solely on its aesthetic merit and will not be baised towards easier implementation by our developers.

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For the sake of all the other non-IT geeks around, I shall explain a little on what is a Database Driven Website. A lot of websites around in our world are mainly static. This means that the content does not change. However, some websites require their content to be updated constantly. These websites can be selling items online and has a constant need to add/remove items.

Such websites are database driven. This means… that all the products and the relevant information are stored neatly in a database (works on the same principle as an excel sheet). When a particular page is rendered, the information is retrieved from the database and rendered neatly in to a template kind of page before presenting to the customer.
So what is the secret?

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What better way to learn how to be successful then to read and learn from other people’s experience? Well lately, one of my friends emailed me an interesting article about how an online shoe seller, zappos.com, brought in the millions.

Here lies their success story…..

Lacing up a few million

I was reading “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson. For all those intent on starting an internet business, I strongly recommend it as a worthwhile read. In a particular portion of the book, the author expounded on the importance of recommendations:

We are leaving the Information Age and entering the Recommendation Age….. Recommendations serve as shortcuts through the thicket of information, just as my wine shop owner shorcuts me to obscure French wines to enjoy with pasta.

Chris Anderson

I reflected on my own shopping experience and was overwhelmed by the truth of the system. Indeed, my book purchase is strongly modelled after Amazon’s review ratings. Generally, I will not consider any books by Amazon.

However, one of the biggest problems about is in getting the relevant reviews. On our side, I suggest the using incentives to quickly build up your reviews. It is really logical. Going back to your website to do a review after they have bought the product takes time. It is only right that we as store owners actually “pay back” with a small token of appreciation.

For it to be convenient, the incentive should be able to fit nicely into an envelope. Possible incentives are:

• book vouchers
• cinema tickets
• dining vouchers
• key chains (with logo)
• .. you get the idea…

Recently, something interesting happened. We were asked to revamp an existing website, ICG Training. Frankly, I found the design of their current website pretty good. I was really not sure if we could do something better. But still, we just put our brain juices together and tried to come out with something….

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