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VirtualHosting has published a list of lessons taken from eye-tracking studies over the years. As applied to web design, eye-tracking is a method of analyzing user interactions according to how information is oriented on the page. It’s especially vital in layouts which are complex but also expect users to focus on different elements in a specific order — this applies to advertising in particular.

Most of VirtualHosting’s list seemed straightforward, but a few points interested me:

Readers ignore banners

I guess it’s not that interesting, but I was happy to hear it. Apologies to bloggers who rely on banner ads for revenue. I will hopefully never be one of them.

Type size influences viewing behavior

One positive bi-product of the much-maligned “Web 2.0 look” is large section headers. They’re eye-catching and usually improve page scannability.

One-column formats perform better than multi-column

This can be sticky when developing news and magazine layouts. Seemingly, the trick is to give the illusion of simplicity, even though you’re presenting a ton of information. It’s also an issue of expectations — users who view NewYorkTimes.com each morning expect to be inundated with content in multiple columns, but they develop reading patterns to deal with it.

Clean, clear faces in images attract more eye fixation

I don’t know about faces, but I know the quality of photos provided by clients is often average at best, and the effect can be distracting and off-putting. I will publish an article about keeping your images clean and cropped in next few BeeDAYS.

Large blocks of text are avoided

Those big blocks definitely give me eye-fatigue. For the past couple years, I’ve been asking clients to provide me with bullet lists, photos, quotes and other concise content in place of large texty paragraphs that no one reads. The result is an infinitely more summarized, scannable page.

White space is good

This is one of the hardest issues for a client to understand, but if you gain their trust and use whitespace well, it’s one of the most gratifying.

Main credit goes to Darren Hoyt - thank you and virtualhosting.

* www.darrenhoyt.com 

Tags: WebSITES BeeM // 7 Comments »

I do see some big trends shaping small business this year that you should take note of. Here are my top 3 for 2008:

No. 3:
Green is the new black. Whether it was Al Gore winning an Oscar or Russia staking claim to the Arctic — now that takes chutzpah — it’s all too obvious that climate change is real. It is also an opportunity for you.

As Time Magazine recently put it: “Green investment by American venture-capital firms reached $2.6 billion in the first three quarters of 2007, the highest level ever recorded and nearly 50% more than the total for the whole of 2006.”

Meaning: Green start-ups searching for cash “have gone from a desert to drinking from a fire hose,” says Nancy Floyd, head of the alternative energy-focused venture capital firm Nth Power.

No. 2:
Work is what you do, not where you go. The ability to work anywhere at any time continues to radically change how we all do business, and not always for the better.

The good news is that the opportunity to outsource mundane tasks makes it very possible to work smarter, not harder.

No. 1:
It’s the economy, stupid! Like the old unofficial Bill Clinton campaign slogan, 2008 will be dominated by a slowing economy.

The subprime crisis is not only affecting homeowners and banks, but small businesses as well. Credit is getting tighter and businesses are spending less, resulting in a chain reaction of slow or no growth.

Combined with a presidential election, continued high gas prices and an unsettled international scene, the top trend this year is a cautionary economy. Plan accordingly.

* The Street & Business-Opportunities.biz

Tags: BeeMFacts // Add Comment »

Albert Einstein was an amazing physicist. He figured out so many universal principles and equations that he was way ahead of his fellow scientists at any point of time. But he is also remembered for another thing; a quality which made people call him a genius: his words.Here are 10 things out of the numerously wonderful things he had said; 10 golden lessons that you can put to use in your everyday life.

1. A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.

2. Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.

3. I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

4. The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

5. The value of a man should be seen in what he gives and not in what he is able to receive. Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.

6. There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.

7. When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking.

8. In order to be an immaculate member of a flock of sheep, one must above all be a sheep oneself.

9. You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.

10. The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.

* BSPCN.COM 

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The earliest documented records of civilizations bartering dates back over 9000 years to the Egyptians, but it is certain that Man bartered long before that. Barter is the oldest form of commerce and is still going strong, in fact with the recession strengthening more and more business owners are turning to organized barter to bolster their businesses.

It is a very simple concept - quite likely the major reason for its longevity and continued success. Barter is the exchange of goods and services for other goods and services. In essence a cashless transaction. An example is a restaurant that needs landscaping. The landscaping company does some work for the restaurant in exchange for some gift certificates. But what happens when the job is quite large and the landscape company does not want that many restaurant gift certificates, or none at all? Enter the barter exchange.

Continue reading Barter: An Old Concept That Continues To Help Business

* Thanks to Business-opportunities.biz

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William Beatty was writing for amateur scientists, but it’s pretty global:

The road to failure often contains:
1. Secrecy
2. The conviction that someone is about to steal your idea.
3. Focus on selling your idea to the government or a big corporation.
4. Loss of humility and focus on fame
5. Belief that scientists and businesses (the smart ones) will hail your discovery.

BeeM`Goods : SCIENCE HOBBYIST: Rules for unconventional researchers.

* Credits : Seth Godin!

Tags: BeeMFacts, Permission Marketing, Seth Godin // Add Comment »

What I want is a service (€10 a month seems OK) that hooks up to a small box in my bedroom. It would have a wi-fi hookup to the Net, a speaker and a clock display.

I tell it what time I want to wake up in the morning. I use the web to teach it which information I’m interested in.

Then, every morning, it starts my day with a perfectly selected piece of music (picked by a program director, not me, based on my preferences). Maybe it wakes me up with Hannah Barbera sound effects on Tuesdays… Then it follows it up with the information I want to start my day–custom weather, or pollen count, or school closings or the Google news reports on the ten things I’m covering. Hey, if there’s bad traffic or weather, it could even wake me up earlier.

If there’s a power blackout, it reboots and has the right time. It doesn’t worry about Daylight Savings (did you remember?) If I forget to press the “I’m up” button, it calls me on the telephone…

By the time I’m done shaving, I’ve heard what I want to hear, even if it’s just the right music for today.

Wouldn’t that be better than Casey Kasem or some shock jock?

If you build one, let me know. Thanks.

Credits: Seth Godin

Tags: Business Ideas, Permission Marketing, Seth Godin // Add Comment »

“It is not what you bring in that counts, it is what you keep when it’s over.” Jim Cathcart

1. To maximize revenues: 1) generate more gross revenue, 2) incur less
expense, and 3) reduce the work required to produce the revenue.
2. Plan with net revenue in mind, by doing a bottom-up budget. Add your least acceptable net revenue goal to your expenses to arrive at your gross revenue goal. Then set a stretch goal. Remember, with expenses set, everything over your target will go directly to the bottom line.
3. Consider all expenses: product costs, people costs, lost opportunity costs (what could have done instead?), direct costs, indirect costs, and more.
4. Ask, “what sponsors might be willing to pay this expense for us, or provide these resources to us at no cost?”
5. Break larger revenue goals into smaller pieces To raise one million dollars you can get: one million dollar donor, two half million donors, four quarter million donors, or even one million one dollar donors. Which is the best approach based on your situation, your skills and your resources?

Next 5 -> Tomorrow BeeM

Credits: Squidoo.com/netfusion

Tags: Seth Godin, Web Marketing // 1 Comment »

This is from a great book by Maria Veloso.

These steps are designed to make the task of writing web sales copy easy and each step takes the form of a question you need to answer.

1. What is the readers problem? Most products and services are designed to solve a problem, what is the problem you are solving.

2. Why hasn’t the problem been solved? Why does the problem exist, why might the reader not have a solution yet?

3. What is possible? What will their world be like when you solve their problem. Draw a picture of what is possible.

4. What is different now? Who are you and why is your solution different. This is where your USP (Unique Selling Proposition comes in.

5. What should you do now? Tell the reader what you want them to do. This is the call to action.

* BizInformer
* Business-opportunities.biz

Tags: Web Marketing // Add Comment »

The best businesses are the ones where everyone benefits.

Robocalling is not one of these.

Robocalling is phone spam, protected by a loophole that allows politicians to evade the do not call list. Now, some states are trying to ban it, or at least make it less efficient by requiring a human operator to ask you if you want to hear the recorded vitriol before they play it for you.

Robert E. Kaiser, who runs a company that spams millions, doesn’t seem to get the whole idea of permission marketing. He’s quoted in the Times as saying that he should be allowed to continue this because, “You might not think there would be a segment of the public that would want the calls, but there probably is.” Fortunately for those of us in need of more negative, anonymous phone harassment by computer (even though we’re on the do not call list), Robert is working late to ensure that we can
be sure we’ll get our fill.

Media rule of thumb: if people wouldn’t miss your ads/content/noise if it went away, you should find something else to sell to advertisers. Not because it is ethically wrong to annoy people just because you can, but because in a world with a bazillion channels, people will just ignore you if they choose to.

Credits: Seth Godin

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Even though he broke his foot dancing at his brother’s wedding one recent weekend, life is still good for Bert Jacobs.Jacobs is the 42-year-old co-founder of Life Is Good, a popular apparel brand based in Boston that is on track to break $100 million in sales this year. This is rarefied air for Jacobs, who a dozen years ago was selling T-shirts out of a battered van on the streets of Boston with his brother John, now 39.

From a single childlike drawing of a character they named Jake and their uplifting three-word slogan, the brothers have developed a fashion brand sold in 4,500 independent retail outlets in the United States and 27 other countries.

Since 1994, they have sold nearly 20 million Life is good T-shirts and now have a product line with more than 900 items, from hats to dog beds, and the company continues to grow 30 to 40 percent annually. There are now 93 independently owned Life is good retail shops selling only their merchandise, and the company plans to have a total of 200 by the end of 2009. With all that, Life is good has just 250 employees.

Read more.

* NyTIMES
* Business-opportunites.biz

Tags: Business Ideas // Add Comment »