You are what you clikced on, or, you are what sites you visited… this website discovery visualization tool tells you what other sites people also visited. It’s sort of like Linkedin for websites.

Below are some of my finding. Try it out youself

• Yelp’s site network: VirginAmerica is also connected with Yelp - my biggest surprise! Maybe VirginAmerica is targeting at all food networks for advertising purposes, because people use food sites especially when they are traveling? Interesting!

• Twitter’s site network: it’s all the tools that people use around twitter. The power of having API? Or a sign of improvement that Twitter needs?

• Difference between Facebook and Linkedin site networks:

It’s fun to play around with it. Try it yourself!

Tags: advertising, Application programming interface, linkedin, On the Web, Online Communities, social network, Twitter, website discovery, Yelp

One true and beautful thing about working on the websites is that you can let your imagination fly and do a lot of possible crazy or cute things.  I was reading Nokia Lab’s articles and found one page interesting enough to share with you.

Business Case: Nokia Lab has a beta database that failed one time. The situation impacted a lot of users who were using that database. Of course, that was a very bad experience and definitely bad impact on Nokia’s brand.

How Nokia reacted to this: They published one article about the problem the next day explaining the cause of the problem and they apologized. The article’s title stated clearly “my deepest and most sincere apologies”.

How they communicated this out: let a sorry dog tell visitors how sincerely they apologized

Result: The comments on this page show a strong positive feedback. This is how you can handle a bad situation with creative idea and even turn it into a good experience. Well done!

Tags: communication, creative, design, nokia

Based on e-tailing’s annual survey, here are some recommendations for online merchants to optimize their website features to improve sales:

• Rethinking promotions

Merchants are creatively rethinking promotional strategies to get the sale immediately, as evidenced by limited-time-only promotions’ jump to 42% penetration (i.e., use by retailers) in 2008 from 18% in 2007.

The use of Online Outlets increased 14 percentage points in penetration. With 86% of merchants now deploying this tactic, a dedicated well-merchandised location to attract price-sensitive shoppers deserves attention.

Free shipping, not surprisingly, remains a promotional standard offered by more merchants in diverse manners that complement their business models, including an increase in conditional free shipping to a store (26% in 2008 vs. 15% in 2007).

• Refining search

Putting control in the hands of the customer, merchants are capitalizing on search usage and tools via onsite capabilities–from landing-page sorts to creative ways of finding product.

Keyword search is the standard-bearer, as 100% of the sites surveyed have the feature.

Beyond that, a majority of merchants are implementing in-depth refined search (85%), providing guided navigation (63%), and landing page sorts (77%) in part replacing advanced search (15% vs. 23%) as these newly tracked metrics provide fewer click-throughs to reach the desired product.

• Retooling content/information

The use of video and audio increased significantly from 2007 levels, with video penetration up to 62% from 45% in 2007, and use of audio reaching 61% penetration among surveyed e-tailers.

Customer education is paramount, and here too category-centric content elevates the shopping experience while interactive tools ensure customers make the right choice, according to e-tailing group.

• Reinventing community

“Share” is a new metric in the e-tailing group survey; merchants’ sharing strategies range from the old-fashioned to the new as they test various means throughout their sites.

Anticipate increased usage of sharing as shoppers become more comfortable with sharing and merchants understand the viral power of cost-effective community initiatives, e-tailing group said.

Original post is here

Tags: ecommerce, etailer, online merchants

To continue the theme of 2009 trends, I want to share some of the web design trends that interest me.

Out-of-the-box layouts: it’s an old trend. Being unique and innovation always win. The hard part of having a out-of-the-box layout is how the uniqueness of one particular design can be tied with the business success as well. You can have a great and very different design, which might not generate any business results (if it’s a business oriented website :).

More white space than ever: as people understand more about web layout, people should value the white space more. It’s the “breathing” space, that gives your own design enough space to express the main idea. It also gives customers enough space to navigate freely and comfortably.

Social design elements: more buttons or links (like Twitter, Dig, Facebook…) to help people share and communicate with friends within their existing page flow.

Speaking navigation: this technique helps to make the navigation more meaningful to users by explicitly explaining what one particular navigation section is about. In stead of having a navigation button as “works”, it can be “See what other projects we have done”.

Dynamic tabs: the more meaningful interaction with the user, the better a site can serve the user need. Once a user moves mouse over a tab, it expands to have more content/actions. It’s basically “interaction on-demand”.

Author icons: not sure since when, but having a real person’s image next to some content seems to be more trust worthy. And it also adds more social & human factors into the page.

When it comes to real one web site design, it’s the fun and challenge to put some or all of these things together to make it work.

See orginal post from SmashMagzine

Tags: design, trend

Here is the story that my friend just shared with me. It’s a story that teaches us about web marketing & cross channel marketing 101 in a different way:

Friday morning (assuming Friday is a good and imprtant day for ecommerce), around 9am. She got an email from OldNavy saying that there is a big sale with promo code. Great- she went ahead and clidked on the link in the email. Here is what she saw from OldNavy:

So, I went further and found out the other two stores Gap & BananaRepublic are also down:

Wow! That’s great - a great story to learn about web marketing 101: your development effort really needs to understand customer buying behavior, especially ecommerce sites. Your site simply shouldn’t be unavailable during a popular shopping time, no matter it’s scheduled site maintenance or just crunching high traffic holiday time.

and a great lesson about cross channel marketing: your Email campaign efforts should match/coordinate with your web channel efforts. Otherwise, it’s a waste of money and no performance will be generated from any campaign.

Update: and OldNavy, Gap and BananaRepublic should check out all these angry VOC from some deal forum

Tags: cross channel marketing, web marketing

When business gets crazy and serious, don’t forget to have some fun when ever you can. StumbleUpon had this cute error message page. It turned my bad experience (error message page) to a smile and a good story to tell my friends. What a small cute idea!

Tags: design, web marketing

What can I say about Google? There are too many things we could argue about this giant Internet company. This week, two new features from them really made me happy

1. the Gmail theme - Isn’t it nice that I can choose different skins for my Gmail. Some themes are dynamic, meaning they might change based on your location. I’m using the tea hour theme now. I’ll see if the sun goes down when it’s afternoon. Also see TechCrunch. Takeaway: sometime, one product wins, not only because of all the functional features that they provide, but also the little cute and emotional features that they bring to life.
2. the Google Mobile applications - I wanted so bad to use Google map from cell phone. Here it comes! I can use Google map on my cell phone the way I use it online! It made my travel a lot easier when I need to find directions on the way, when I try to find a restaurant to meet friends, when I want to know the traffic sitting in the car…it is helpful! Check it out yourself. Takeaway: when something is helpful, it will be a great feature quickly no matter what it takes.

Tags: gmail, google, mobile, web in general, web marketing

It’s intesreting to see how company’s logos have evolved to 3D in the Web 2.0 world.

The original post can be found here.

Tags: logo

It is very helpful to understand online best practices before creating anything new for your website.

Smashing Magazine created a series of interesting posts to share the best practices around different topics. Take a look for your next web project:

• Pricing tables
• Navigation menus
• Web forms
• Quotes
• Footers
• Pagination
• Tag clouds
• Shopping carts

Let me know if you have other best practices to share!

Tags: best practices

Here I am - back from my crazy two weeks of working on one online application project. It feels so good to finally open a page and start writing

And the topic has to be LinkedIn again. They simply have a lot of news and interesting stuff to pay attention to. Now they plan to launch its own ad network. Here are my thoughts:

• It is almost like a “why not” thing. The tricky part is the timing of getting ad network into its portofolio. Other social networks seem to do this in their early stages (MySpace, FaceBook…). LinkedIn takes a step by step approach, as they always do for their other features. They don’t push too many or too big things all at once. In stead, they chunk them out and digest piece by piece. This gives them time & resource to focus on and reduces the risk of getting wrong into any unclear directions.
• Don’t worry about money. Money comes not because you open your wallet or you invite them to come. Money follows people, idea and real value. Adding advertising to monetize your product / site is important. But if you do that only for the sake of doing that, money usually doesn’t flow in. In stead, focus on the value you create and the people you serve, money usually flows in itself.

Here are two articles on LinkedIn’s ad network news: one is from TechCrunch; the other is from Hitwise.

Lastly, this slide shows the profile of LinkedIn users:

Tags: ad networks, linkedin, social media, web marketing