Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility

Stanford has done their homework and

compiled 10 guidelines for building the credibility of a web site. These guidelines are based on three years of research that included over 4,500 people.

This is part of the Web Credibility Project.

Web Entropy

Web entropy: the process by which a web site slowly but inexorably deteriorates to a state of greater disorder. Although this has not been proven, it is thought that web entropy increases as a square of the size of the site.

CiviCRM

The Open Source Solution for the Civic Sector CiviCRM is the first open source and freely downloadable constituent relationship management solution. CiviCRM is web-based, open source, internationalized, and designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups.

Joomla - PHP based CMS

Joomla is notable for a wealth of plug-ins and a good interface.

Drupal: PHP based CMS

Drupal.org is the official website of Drupal, an open source content management platform. Equipped with a powerful blend of features, Drupal can support a variety of websites ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven websites.

Informe - free online communities

free web 2.0 online communities from non-native english speakers: "Our project is powered by world's most popular forum engine, PhpBB, and we are not only providing you with the best PhpBB forum hosting service available, but also enhance the platform with ourself-developed mods available only on informe."

Download the Alexa Toolbar

System Requirements for this useful seo target marketing tool: Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer 6.0 or newer -- currently no alternatives for Firefox or Mac users.

SEO With Google Sitemaps

SEO campaign management and web site development tips:

Until Google Sitemaps was released in the summer of 2005, optimizing a site for Google was a guessing game at best...Sitemaps provide you with a way to tell Google valuable information about your website.

Essential List on Firefox Extensions for Webmaster - lifehack.org

Essential List on Firefox Extensions for Webmaster - lifehack.org

Search Marketing Blogs » Online Marketing Blog

Search Marketing Blogs » Online Marketing Blog is

a collection of over 380 blogs covering search marketing with a few that venture into blogging, social media and new media public relations. This list is an output of my own RSS reader and it will update (add/remove) as I update the list of blogs and feeds that I track.

SEO Campaign Management is Essential

As any web developer knows, it's essential to optimize your site for the search engines. But good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isn't a one-time event. You need to watch your keywords to ensure you are optimizing your site for the keywords that your customers are actually typing into Google and Yahoo, not the ones you think they are using. You need to monitor the traffic to your site, and look closely to see how specific keywords are driving traffic to specific pages. This ongoing effort help you uncover the changes and updates you need to maintain -- or better yet, improve -- your web site's performance. That's why comprehensive SEO Campaign Management is so essential to your web site's success.

WordTracker: Free Keyword Suggestion Tool

Use this free tool from WordTracker to search for related keywords, and see how many searches each keyword or phrase gets.

Creating an Effective Home Page

From the article:

At the heart of every site redesign are two questions: What should be on the home page? What is the home page's purpose? Answers vary based on your business model, breadth of products/services, and customers. In general, a home page should answer the following questions:

• What does your company do?
• What is your company's breadth of products/services?
• What are the top categories/products/services I'm likely to be interested in? What's new on the site, or what promotions are running?
• How do I quickly get to the categories I want to browse?

Although no one home page can fit all, here's a checklist to figure out what should be on your home page.

WONDERPORT is a portal of portals.

Examples of Portals

My list of the major web portals, with comments. Let's start with my favorites:

Google Directory: Very simple, no ads. Maximum useability, and the focus is on searching, Google's strong suit.

Dmoz/Open Directory Project: Open source web directory -- no ads!

The big commercial portals incorporate lots of ads while directing you to their own web properties when possible. All of these portals also let you customize them by creating an account.

AOL: The home page of the AOL empire; projects a freindly feeling, almost like a comic book.

Lycos The home page of the Lycos empire. Uses a navigation header and sidebar to frame featured content

MSN The home page of the Microsoft empire. The most crowded; almost a content or news site.

Netscape The original. Influenced by Yahoo! and AOL, but much more dense.

Yahoo! Incorporates many Yahoo! web services, and ads, without overwhelming the content. A good mix of commerce and useability.

Web Portals Defined

What is a web portal, and what makes a good one? Here's the definition from the Webopedia:

Commonly referred to as simply a portal, a Web site or service that offers a broad array of resources and services, such as e-mail, forums, search engines, and on-line shopping malls. The first Web portals were online services, such as AOL, that provided access to the Web, but by now most of the traditional search engines have transformed themselves into Web portals to attract and keep a larger audience.

And here's the definition from Neil:

A portal site leads you to other web resources and sites, by organizing the destinations -- a launch pad. Many companies with a collection of web properties tie them together through their portal page. The major portals offer customization (e.g., my.yahoo.com); other portals select information based on a topic.

Neil Johnson talks about web design, based on his work at Cadent Technologies Corp.