The digital screen on my bathroom scale has been on the fritz more and more every day, and I finally decided to do something about it today. I've owned different wearable devices over the past 7 years to monitor my health and daily activity, but I didn't yet have a smart bathroom scale to monitor my BMI or other health factors. Today was the day I would finally get one.
I contemplated buying one off Amazon.com but decided that I'd rather compare models ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Many small businesses, not just retail jewelers, are caught in a tight monthly financial cycle. Those businesses teeter on financial ruin because the only thing needed to send them over the edge is a bad week of sales, unexpected loss of the star salesperson, tax penalties, medical bills, or the wrong choices of inventory. Each of these could be an unrecoverable setback.
According to the Jewelers Board of Trade, there was a total of VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
MySpace used to be a fun social network. You had complete freedom to change your profile any way you wanted by adding music, changing colors, and customizing your background. Anyone with a working knowledge of HTML could customize the look of their page and turn it into their online bastion of delight. I remember when being on social media was nothing more than a fun competition of making your profile page look better than your friend's profile, then tease each other about it. ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Can you learn from someone else's mistakes? That's exactly what I hope you'll get out of this Friday Flop Fix. This week, I'm venturing over to Tupelo, MS in search of a retail jeweler that might be making a mistake with their online presence.
This is the result I saw when searching for "jewelers tupelo ms" in Google:
Don't want to read? This week you can also watch the video recording of this review here!
This is the #FridayFlopFix website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. This week I've randomly chosen Santa Clarita, CA as the city to search for my review candidate. When I searched Google for the phrase "jewelers Santa Clarita, CA," I saw these three Google business listings:
A few weeks ago, I published a Nugget showing the recent trends in search engine organic usage. I've been tracking those statistics since 2010, and now I have enough information to compare mobile organic visits to desktop organic visits.
There's a trending website design idea that has its place, but that place is certainly not on your home page. Today, I'll explain what this website design trend is, what's good and bad about it, and how to use it.
Infinity Scrolling
Social media websites have changed the way we interact with website. Before Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, everyone thought that the internet was made up of individual web pages. But social networks g... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the last Daily Golden Nugget where I'll dive deeply into specific keyword phrases I collected during the 2015 Holiday Season. I've presented a lot of information over the last 30 days and I could spend another month sifting through it, but this stuff does get boring after a while when there's no specific goal in mind. That's an important thing to remember; it's best to perform your keyword research when you have a specific goal in mind. Every time I grind through keyword data, I seem to lose an... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Welcome to the #ThrowbackThursday edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Today, I'm jumping back to one of my early posts about location based services and checking-in on Facebook.
It was all the rage during the summer of 2010 to have a check-in app on your smartphone check-in everywhere. Gowalla, Foursquare, Whrrl, and Loopt were competing heavily when Facebook tried getting into the game. Facebook's initial eff... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
During my internet travels over the last few days, I came across the website for Goodman's Jewelers in Madison, WI. It caught my attention and I immediately decided to use it for today's #FridayFlopFix review. I hope to make a few suggestions that will help them improve how they use their site, and give you a few ideas on what to avoid on your own site. Let's dig in...
Mobile websites are important, but a growing trend of mobile website design has me a little worried that websites are accidentally turning back the clock to a time of poor usability.
Splash Pages
The splash page was a very popular type of website home page design prior to 2010. A splash page was supposed to welcome a visitor to your site with a pretty image or an animation, and sometimes even music. Typically, there was a big arrow or the words "enter site" lik... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It all started six years ago; that's right, we're celebrating the jWAG's 6th anniversary today with the ambitious and philanthropic mission to surface our research about the internet and how the jewelry industry could best use technology to improve their business.
When my business partner and I launched the Jeweler Website Advisory Group (jWAG), we never expected it to blossom into the resource that is now referenced by so many people, even outside the jewe... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The year 2015 is about to come to a close, but before it does, I'm venturing out on a limb to give you my forecast insights for 2016. This year, I'm referring to these as "insights" and not necessarily as "predictions" because these things are what I already see happening in a small way, and steadily growing. They are in no particular order...
Social Media Change with the Young Generation
The current teenage generation is struggling to hide from their parents online. Many of them want nothing to do with Facebook because the grown-... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I recently did a comparison of the total user sessions between November 2014 and 2015 including a breakdown of usage on mobile, desktops, and tablets.
I'm continuing my analysis of the same data as measured across retail jeweler websites; this time I'm comparing the increase or decrease of new users between November 2014 and 2015.<... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. The goal of these weekly reviews is to evaluate a random retail jeweler's website against website design methods, SEO strategies, usability, and technology trends. I use Google Chrome in incognito mode to find every review candidate with a basic local search phrase. I also try to capture my first impressions in these reviews and write them during my initial pass through the website.
Once a week, usually on Friday, I write a website review for a randomly chosen retail jewelry store. This week the review is being moved to Wednesday.
For this week's review, I'm searching for "jewelers in Sedona, AZ" using Google Chrome in incognito mode. The results I saw during last week's review were formatted for a smartphone. This week the results are formatted for a desktop browser again. Oddities like that are usual... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the weekly website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each Friday, I work through these reviews to help you understand the good and bad ways a retail jewelry store website works. I look for good and bad website design, content, photography, usability, and search engine optimization in hopes that we can all learn something new.
Each week, I use Google Chrome in incognito mode to search for review candidates. Incognito mode allows me to hide potentially personalized search results ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The 2015 Las Vegas jewelry shows came to a close one month ago today. On the morning of June 1, 2015, I was on the search for designers who would be willing to work with retail jewelers the way I explained in this pre-Vegas post here..
A quick recap from that Nugget:
Don't rely on your inventory management software to tell you what to buy.
Shortly before leaving for the JCK show in Las Vegas this year, I was reading through The Retail Jeweler magazine and reviewing the monthly column I submitted. Magazines editorial deadlines are always more than a month, sometimes two months, ahead of the publication date and I needed to refresh my memory of what I had written.
While flipping through the magazine, I found an ad for The EDGE software. The ad touted that they were voted #1 ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's officially been one month since Google Mobilegeddon on April 21, 2015. I've been eagerly following the blogs and new channels of several companies that are tracking the results, and they all seem mixed.
Google started showing mobile friendly websites in search results earlier than April 21st. Reports from Search Engine Land stated that the mobilegeddon rollout seemed to be slo... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Over the past 5 years, many retail jewelry store owners have asked my opinion about a jewelry designer before deciding to buy into a new line. I always find these questions interesting because they are asking my opinion as a data analyst, rather than a current trends watcher.
You see, you can easily track the popularity of a jewelry designer based on the number of people who search Google for their name or product name. G... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
You can read that article yourself, but in brief, the 6 theories posed were:
People are disappointed... Which I guess means all of us in the jewelry industry are wondering when our industry will rebound from the recession like... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
When I first opened my business in 1994 as a computer consultant, the drivers of new technology were a lot different. In the mid 90s, it was typical to first buy a computer before figuring out what software you could use on it. Many of my customers wanted their own programs written, too. Those were the days of DOS and Windows 3.1, and the options for software were limited to what you could find in your local Egghead Software store, or you ha... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
For as long as the World Wide Web has been around, there has been competition over the most popular web browser. Many web browsers have joined the extinct software list, or at least become endangered as technology changes.
This is the Friday website review where I dissect a random retail jeweler's website to find the good and bad that we can all learn from. Although I write about website design, search engine optimization, and online marketing every day, sometimes all that stuff doesn't make any sense unless you see exactly how it applies to a real website.
That's why I dedicate one day every week to these reviews of randomly selected jewelry stores.
Normally I ask someone on my team to give me a random city name, but this week's review c... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
"...articles are easy to follow and seem to have information one can use right away." -Ann, Gallery 4, Hamden CT
"...serious kudos to you. We love your straight talk, pertinent information and plain language. I don't know how many industries have something of jWAG's caliber available, but I learn from the emails every day. Really, really nice work, and very appreciated." -Cheryl Herrick, Global Pathways Jewelry
Don't want to read? This week you can also watch the video recording of this review 
Last week, Rob Bates, News Director for JCK wrote an interesting article with 
