Remember the popular New Wave song back in the 80’s titled “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Back then, the popularity of the music video was just talking off on MTV and it had a suprising appeal on consumers who bought records and cds. Video did a better job marketing music than what radio could ever do since video sold a packaged image as well as the music. Today is no different with the boom of popular online video outlets like YouTube. No doubt, video has stomped a major imprint in the internet industry.

I recently ran an uncontrolled marketing experiment on MySpace where I ran two ads (roughly sent to 1,000 MySpace pages):The first add was a simple, clickable banner advertising dvd sales for dance instructions:

The second was a clickable banner instructing viewers to come watch a video on a client’s MySpace page. It looked like this:

Notwithstanding the “call-to-action” comment of the video banner, the video banner had a 4-to-1 click rate over the dvd sales banner.

Video is a powerful tool, since it takes away the effort needed for people to understand and process information. Video packages the visual and verbal ideas of how a product/service operates or feels before the viewer interprets or reads too much into what’s being sold. Video ads for products and services convey a much clearer message to the audience than simple text. Something to think about.

False Statement: A beautiful web site will impress customers! Beautiful websites are rarely good business websites.  The term beautiful website design usually refers to a visually appealing site or graphically elaborate collection of web pages. Although a beautiful website design may also provide all the necessary text components to rank near the top of the search engine results pages, they rarely do. Why? Search engines can’t see any of the beautiful graphics (pictures and colors). Your human visitors may love all the beautiful pictures on your web pages, but search engines virtually (no pun intended) ignore them completely! Achieving a good balance between graphical presentation to impress your human visitors and great text information content to impress your search engine robot visitors, is not quite as simple as it first appears. With numerous “automated” web page design software packages and their beautiful web page templates, with “insert text here” designed into the page, almost anyone can produce a really beautiful website, which no one but their close friends will ever see. FrontPage HTML editor from Microsoft is a great example. You simply type your web page text content in your MS Word processor and save it as a beautiful web page! So simple that you can design a complete, beautiful website in a matter of hours. So what’s the problem? FrontPage web pages, like those produced by some other text editors, don’t follow the W3C HTML rules for writing web pages that are to be published on the www. They don’t validate and only achieve decent ranking results on the MSN search engine (big surprise). You don’t want your beautiful new business website to win a design award from this website! With so many graphic artists claiming to be expert website designers, business owners are often misled by these self-proclaimed, professional website designers. Beautiful website design templates are available from many sources. Some designers charge a small fee for allowing you to use their designs, some are free. If initial cost is your only priority, design a beautiful website yourself. You can save the money you would have spent having your beautiful website designed by a company who’s only concern is how great your website looks. There are many Millions of beautiful websites already indexed and ranked by the major search engines. Where do you think your beautiful template website will rank? According to Netcraft, there were 142,805,398 sites currently on the web in October 2007, with 7.6 million new sites added since last month. This is the largest growth in sites recorded. Your beautiful website competes for the attention of your customer as just one of those growing website statistics. False Statement: A beautiful website can also be a profitable business website! Too many business owners get talked into a beautiful website that does not represent or enhance their (online) business image. Designing a business website that is beautiful, functional and navigable will produce new customers and be profitable for years to come. When you ask your “friends” to critique your website design, you are asking them to tell you what it “looks like.” They will probably tell you it looks beautiful! While this may be a great boost to your ego, it may not do anything for your business image. Providing your website visitors with great information about your industry, new developments, history and your place in it, will attract both search engines and new customers. Writing good, truly beautiful web pages requires attention to providing specific, focused and topical information. A graphically beautiful web page can be designed to also appeal to the search engine spiders, but it takes some experience, time, talent and effort. This business site was designed to appeal to search engine robots and potential customers first and then tried to include enough visual design appeal to keep our visitors interested, while they read all the beautiful website design information. Good business information and good links to more high quality information is always a winning combination. Beautiful search results, can make any company website very beautifulIf YOUR company website were about a good SEO web site where do you suspect it would rank out of 20 million results pages? Then check the words find a good business site for about 400 million results pages? Or about designing a valid web site and see millions of search results pages. Do you know how to find a good SEO or a good website designer? Is your business site competing in a highly competitive market? If so, your beautiful, new, company website (that isn’t optimized ) may not rank high enough to even pay for itself, even if it was almost free.  Why design a beautiful SEO business website? Your small business website investment is designed to generate (new) revenue. If the major search engines can’t find, index and rank your beautiful web pages high enough to create search engine traffic (unsolicited visitors to your website), you wasted time and money designing, building and publishing a company website. There are billions of beautiful web pages already on the web, with millions more being added daily. The reality for many of these beautiful websites, will be to live in complete obscurity because they didn’t play by the rules. Important information has always been the focus of the World Wide Web. Although a good presentation will retain your website visitors’ attention, important, good information will bring them to your website in the first place. If you forget about the original purpose of the World Wide Web, you will soon forget how beautiful your new website looked, when you first published it. Your customers are actually trying to find business information sites when they look for good business information. Good SEO works.  We are not suggesting for a minute, that ugly websites are better websites. What we are suggesting, is the simple fact that unless your business involves artwork or graphic design, a beautiful website presentation is not the ONLY or MOST important design component. If you really want a stunningly beautiful website, we’re certainly willing and able to design it. However, we strongly suggest that you consider devoting the bulk of your website design budget toward designing a search engine friendly and user friendly website, as a design priority.  

Source: Click here

Just like music can set the mood for a stirring scene in a film.  Music can also set the mood for your MySpace Page.  Wimpy Player offers cool highly customizable Flash mp3 players that we can apply directly to your web page or your MySpace page. This mp3 player suits music artists and bands whom wish to make their music samples accessible to the public for listening, but not downloadable.

Click the play button on the player below to listen to some music.

Requirements for Wimpy MP3 Player

To use the Wimpy MP3 Player, you need a website on a Linux, Mac, Unix or Windows server that is running PHP or ASP. If you don’t know if your website host server runs PHP or ASP, please contact your Web hosting company.

If you do not have PHP, ASP or ColdFusion, you can still use Wimpy by creating XML playlists… either manually or by using the Playlister tool.

Wimpy MP3 Player also includes a JavaScript implementation, which does not require server-side processing.

PHP version: the Wimpy media players have been tested with PHP version 4.3, so PHP version 4.3 is recommended. It is possible to run it on earlier versions of PHP, but version 4.1 seems to be the lowest version you can use.

ASP version: the Wimpy media players have been tested on Windows XP Professional with IIS 5.1 and version 1.1 of the .NET Framework installed. The ASP code is based on VBscript, so Wimpy may work on Windows servers running earlier versions.

Bling! Bling!  Like squirrels to shiny objects or men to their tools, web surfers are attracted to flashy objects with controls.  Your audience wants to interact and participate with your web pages. 

Having a dynamic photo gallery is one way to get their attention.  The Adobe Flash-based product SlideShowPro, below, gives you the best bang for your buck. 

Click one of the pictures below to start a slideshow:

• You can offer your audience albums of pictures or movies. 
• The graphic user interface (GUI) is completely customizable and color match your site. 
• You as an administrator can upload photos and movies to a very user-friendly administrative area located on your site.

Software requirements

• GD Graphics Library and/or ImageMagick
• Linux, Unix, or Windows web server with Apache 1.3+. Windows server running IIS 5.0+ also acceptable.

This is our first blog.  Our mission on this page is to introduce you to new products in the market that will give your visitors a more pleasurable viewing experience when they visit your site(s).  Your goal as a business professional is to have your audience coming back to your site for more eye candy, information, art and interesting things. 

In this sense, we want to incorporate web-based tools that will give your viewers more control of their visual experiences (interactive experiences).  We will show you better photo galleries, interactive movies, user friendly stores and checkouts… you know what we mean.  We will also give you ideas on how to market your products online and/or manage your website on your own.

 However, we hope to learn as much from your comments than you from ours.