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Friday, January 22, 2010

Lesson 2 Vocab 53 - White Hat

by Matthew A Perosi
Throughout this entire lesson I mentioned several times that there are methods that should be avoided. The entire industry calls these bad methods "Black Hat SEO."

Even though this is a long lesson on vocabulary, I gave examples of several good jewelry SEO ideas. All these good methods are referred to as "White Hat SEO."

As long as you stick to White Hat search engine optimization techniques you should be able to quickly elevate your website to higher and higher ranking. ...
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AT: 01/22/2010 03:27:24 PM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, January 22, 2010

Lesson 2 Vocab 51 - Usability

by Matthew A Perosi
Websites should no longer be designed to only appease your own personal likes and style. Large interactive websites should instead be designed with "human computer interaction" in mind.

You need to make sure the website design and layout is innately easy to understand with a high degree of friendliness. This type of design takes longer to implement, and requires the talents of website designers who have experience analyzing how and why visitors click on things.

This entire design method and the philosophy of worrying about how jewelry website visitors click is known as "Usability."

Even the more experienced usability expert could not design a perfectly accurate website for you on their first try. Every customer group, from every area of the United States or other parts of the world will respond differently...
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AT: 01/22/2010 03:24:51 PM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, November 13, 2009

Should you have one person do the site, or should you split the work up by areas of expertise?

by Matthew A Perosi
As with all areas of business, you should assign specific tasks to the people with the appropriate skill set. You should have a designer work on "designing" your website and a programmer to "program" your website. These are two different types of people. The creative designer thinks with one side of their brain and the logical programmer thinks with the scientific side of their brain. Please be skeptical of anyone who says they are both a designer and a programmer as it is extremely infrequent to meet someone who was born with the gift of a balanced creativeness and logical thinking.

On the other hand, someone can learn to be creative after years of experience, and someone can learn how to be a programmer after years of working hard. A programmer can learn to design, but it's akin to painting by numbers. A designer can l...
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AT: 11/13/2009 08:27:33 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, November 13, 2009

What are the most challenging aspects of putting a site together?

by Matthew A Perosi
The most challenging aspect of building a website for a jewelry store would be the design. I have seen many people waste their time trying to figure out the best design for their website. Months of wasted time. Technology and website usefulness changes with every season; yes every 3 months. If you start designing you website today with one concept in mind you will find yourself out of date if it takes more than 3 months to launch the site.

Don't get wrapped up in the design aspect. Ask your website designer to suggest pre-made templates that can we tweaked, or go online and search for "jewelry website templates" to find your own. Just pick one and move on. In 6 seasons you will need to change it anyway.

The second challenging aspect with creating a website is the technology you build your website with. Do not ...
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AT: 11/13/2009 08:25:32 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, November 13, 2009

How much time and effort should go into designing a site?

by Matthew A Perosi
The design of a website is important in that you want to make sure it is customer friendly. A website owner will experience several stages of understanding, just like grades in school. First Grade would be the jewelry store owner who is setting up their first website. They want to design it themselves, usually modeling it after another website they have seen. Imagine a child in a store pointing to a a toy saying "I want that!" The child does not have a true understanding if the toy is good for them or not. The child wants something fun to play with whereas the parent wants to make sure it's fun and educational.

The jewelry business is a very visual business. Thoughts of fire and brilliance abound all the time. Jewelry store owners usually want to control what their website looks like, down to the location of that ver...
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AT: 11/13/2009 08:23:19 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, November 13, 2009

How much should jewelers budget for a good web site?

by Matthew A Perosi
"Good" is a relative term. Some people view "good" as visually pleasing but being nice looking can only get you so far in business. As internet users become more savvy there has been a shift from what we call "eye candy" to something more "functional." The iPhone has provided a general education to almost everyone who is at least the slightest bit technologically aware. This awareness is of the iPhone "App," as in the commercials that claim "yeah, we have an App for that." Combine this with users of online social networks are increasingly more familiar with online interactive websites.

Online customers are not impressed with websites that simply display information, or have flashy graphics. Direct online interaction is what users are craving. Give your website users some way to directly interact with you and they will be...
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AT: 11/13/2009 08:20:30 AM   0 COMMENTS
Saturday, November 07, 2009

Jewelry Website Templates

by Matthew A Perosi
There are many website template companies out there today. Many of the templates actually come from only one or two main suppliers, but there are hundreds of resellers.

Here's an example of a reseller:
http://templates.psiprime.com/

What you'll find there is a collection of thousands of templates that you can buy for about $62. Those templates are available for anyone to purchase when they are venturing out on their own to create a website without help from a design or programming firm.

But they are only templates, in that you have PhotoShop files and HTML pages available in the template. But there is still a lot of work to create a website.

You would need to know web programming and how to use Dreamweaver, and you need to know...
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AT: 11/07/2009 05:54:06 PM   0 COMMENTS
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