Category: News & Trends

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Is There Such a Thing as Too Technology Heavy?

Yes there is a situation where you can work to make your website so technology heavy that you get bogged down and lose the ability to be nimble or become prone to service outages or hostage to your programmer.

I have one large client whose site I occasionally webmaster who has had this happen to him. It crept up on him slowly, but now the tech bloat is really coming back to bite him. big time. The issue is that now his site is so dynamic in nature, pulls in fields from his database from many elements that  he is spending more time fixing things than he is spending growing his business. Right now his administrative control panel is down, broken when his developer added an interface to feed registrations to populate a store shopping cart. Then the developer broke the look and feel of the site when he set up a new password login. It is one problem after another.

Now if his database tied to his computer server in his business office has a hiccup, his website is impacted. It has become so sensitive and the problems now so fierce that he almost has had to set up a cot for his developer. All this for about 30 visitors a day to his website!

This is a situation where you don’t have to have everything fed into your website from a database. For a business this size they just don’t need this type of technological interface, in fact it is overkill.

At this point due to the nature of the problems, now the client is considering scrapping his entire site and all the technology that he has paid to be created and going back to a static site with an off-site place for certain transactions to keep the main site separate from the more dynamic problems. It is a shame that the client did not receive good guidance from the programmer to help scale his needs to his traffic and has ended up throwing money out the window. Technology is a good thing, but don’t let it drive your website before you really need it.

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AdWords Beta Interface Broken But Has Possibilities

I am so sick of beta applications being released that really should still be in the developer’s sand box and the Google AdWords new beta interface is one of them.

I have to say that the new interface has tremendous new conveniences for power uses such as myself, but will terrorize do-it-yourself account managers as it is overwhelmingly complicated. For me, as a professional account manager, the ease of use and ability to customize the interface, as well as the ability to make changes all on one page is very welcome.

But the problem with the screen size and horizontal scroll bars is a real deal breaker for the new beta. Who wants to have to scroll to the right and then back and forth? Hey, you can get a repetitive stress injury doing this! Man, I just don’t want to be out for carpel tunnel syndrome surgery in the near future because of the AdWords beta.

AdWords says that the new interface has been designed for 1024 resolution screens, but it is not. I run a 1280 resolution (width) and I have about 4 inches of scroll bar on my screen. This is a HUGE problem. Please AdWords resolving this issue should be fast tracked so more people can use the interface.

So if you’re thinking of trying out the AdWords beta interface, if you don’t have a 1600 resolution screen size don’t get it. Thank goodness they have a revert back to the old interface button for now. So for real power users the beta is a “don’t go there” choice.

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IE 8 Upgrade It’s a One Way Trip

If you have Vista like I do, you may want to know that upgrading your browser to IE 8 is a one way trip. You cannot uninstall it and go back to IE 7. I found this out the hard way.

I have really liked IE 7. I like the clean polished interface. When I clicked install IE 8 just the other day when I received other Windows updates, I did not realize the ramifications for doing so. As I am designing a new client site, and not many people have IE 8 right now, I need to be able to test my site on the mainstream popular browsers. After a few days with IE 8, I decided I wanted to go back to IE 7.

You cannot uninstall the program nor re-install IE 7 over it. In fact if you try as I did, you will receive a message that IE 7 is not compatible with your system. So if you need access to IE 7 here’s a super work around that I have found IE Tester.

I downloaded the application and wow, what a great tool. I can view my site URL in IE 5, 6, 7, and even 8. What a life saver.

So here’s my tip, if you are a regular web surfer, get IE 8 as it is more secure, — sure looks a lot like Firefox. If you are a web designer, be careful about installing IE 8. Now that you know it is a one way trip, make a careful decision. If you do upgrade, make sure to download IE Tester it is an excellent tool and allows for your testing on multiple Internet Explorer versions.

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Hot AdWords Tip on Title Character Count and Keyword Insertion

This just in from a chat conversation with a Googler at AdWords! (This note was also posted at the Webmaster World forum for professionals.)

I challenged AdWords customer support about a competitors ad that showed 26 characters in the title of the AdWords ad and was told by a specific Googler with the initials P. A. that “If you use keyword insertion in your ad text, the ad title may show more than 25 characters.” He verified this with a supervisor when I stated that I would post this on my blog and at Webmaster World.

This is news to me and I have been managing AdWords for over six years and this use of additional characters is not reflected in any of their training information.

To clarify even further the Googler stated that there is no guarantee that AdWords will show beyond the limit for the title but they may choose to show a keyword with 26 or 27 characters automatically. The he stated, “The keyword insertion issue is just a by product of our automated systems. In no way are we giving some advertisers more ad text characters.” Hmm, but they are!

In my case the title I wanted was Virtual Assistant Training which is 26 characters. Entering a title in the AdWords control panel allowed Virtual Assistant Trainin – which makes no sense. I am now setting up dynamic ad groups for keywords that fit these parameters for my clients.

Interesting that the Google rules state 25 characters max or less if you use double byte, but never state that they will show more. You can do a search on Google.com to see the 26 word title for two of my client’s competitors using the query Virtual Assistant Training. You will see two competitors showing the 26 character title.

I just wanted to pass this on to you so that you could leverage this new information for your benefit too.