Must Design

Burn Your Website Down
Websites are about to become an expensive tyranny. Tomorrow's e-commerce happens everyone and at any time on any device. Still demanding customers come to your website?  Crazy! 

Better to "burn your website" and all of the preconceived notions about what a website is and should be down today. Recreate your site as a fluid expression of content, community and commerce.

Here's how:

http://bit.ly/burn-down-website

7 Easy To Forget Simple Ideas
As you design your ecommerce store keep in mind these easy to forget but sure to make you more money online commerce tips:

* Sight Lines - visitor eyes go where your models eyes go so point them at something good.
* CTAs - don't be afraid to tell your customers what to do with Calls To Action.

* Email - email marketing is the ability to communicate with your tribe without asking permission from a middleman.
* Internal Search - tells you if your navigation is working and what customers are looking for so use data from internal search.

* 80:20 Rule -  a small set almost always controls a larger set online so find your 80:20 rules and design, merchandise and sell to them.

* Keywords - make sure you use keywords in your navigation and use a rewrite tool to show visitors one set of keys and spiders another.

* Community - create an ASK (for help) and listen more than you talk and online community will form.  

Japanese web designer Yugo Nakamura has created some cool sites. Great clean lines, white backgrounds, splashing of color, movement both real and implied reminds me of Haring, Warhol and de Kooning. #toogood #webdesgin

Canonical URLs Explained
The Yoast post provides an easy way to understand why rel=canonical is a powerful new SEO tag. Yoast has a dog in the hunt. They make a Magento plugin that easily writes the rel=canonical tag into a product page's head.

The explanation about WHY canonical URLs are so important is only half right. We have a million ways of expressing and sharing URLs these days. Without rel=canonical we end up duping content to distraction.

Here's the rub. All ecommerce sites dupe content. They must. When I was a Director of Ecommerce a single product accounted for 50% of our profits. You better believe I merchandised that product into every nook and cranny our site offered. I duped that product and it's content to distraction.

There are other ways to limit duplication including:

* Use of your Robots.txt file.
* Locking content behind a firewall.  

* Use of blockquotes & rel=canonical tags. 
* Rewrite duplicated content so it's not as duplicated (lol). 

We included our email output into a folder with a "no follow" line in our robots.txt. You may think such a move is enough. It isn't. Be sure NOT to drive links from spiderable content INTO that folder or you eliminate the effectiveness of the robots.txt.

In the end every ecom site worth it's salt MUST duplicate content. Rewriting sounds like a good strategy, but it isn't. Content = time and time = money when managing million dollar commercial sites. You will be duping content.

Best to use rel=canonical because it shows Google you aren't trying to STEAL anything. Reminds me of what a friend shared about the disavow tool (used to deny inbound links or signal they may be untrusted).

 My friend was using the disavow tool daily on his clients accounts. "So you are brown-nosing Google," I kidded him. "Exactly," was his answer. Rel=canonical tells Google you are TRYING to do the right thing and sometimes that is enough. 

Good News & Bad News
As a rare web marketer with more than ten years experience,  I created our first site FoundObjects.com in 1999 (gone now sadly), we want to confirm something every likely reader of our online marketing post already knows - the low hanging fruit is gone plucked by previous generations of pickers.

What to do now? Be something online and start today with these "be something now" tips. 

Best In Class From Conversion IQ
The other day I complained about "pretty picture' ecommerce sites that make conversion harder. So much of ecom is ditch digging. Ditch digging to make sure you have things such as:

* Email subscription form (prefer presence to popunders).
* Clearly ECOM - looks like a store with things to sell not content to read.
* Social (easy to find theirs and easy to contribute).
* Content Curation from social / comments / reviews (should feel like a party with people who share love / interests).

* Offers, deadlines and a sense of time (of the year today is Columbus Day for example).

These examples from Conversion IQ are closer to "ditch digging" ecommerce websites. Conversion either BUYING or into a list are easier, more clear and so these designs make more money than the pretty picture websites I shared last (http://sco.lt/4ijZIH ),