Posts Tagged ‘web design and marketing’

Why Yahoo Finance Beats Google Finance: Better Web Design and Marketing

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

yahoofinanceLast week we wrote about an opening that the now-partnered Yahoo and Bing search engines have in their struggle against industry leader Google. And if that wasn’t enough to convince every Web design and marketing professional that Yahoo and Bing should be taken seriously, The New York Times has just reported on an area where Yahoo trumps Google: in financial information.

The Times reports mentions a comScore study that found Yahoo Finance soundly beat Google Finance for 19 months in a row. Yahoo Finance pulls in 17.5 times the traffic as its Google counterpart. The report stated that in July, Yahoo’s business and finance page drew 21.9 million unique visitors from the United States; Google’s business and finance page only drew 1.2 million.

Yahoo’s success in this category can be seen as a great lesson in Web design and marketing. Yahoo audience group vice president James Pitaro says that Yahoo’s success can be attributed to Yahoo’s understanding of what users want to see when then visit a finance page. In the Times article, he mentions that their research found that users grew more anxious when they were bombarded with too much information. That’s why Yahoo developed a Web design and marketing strategy akin to the Apple model: they developed a clean and simple front page look. Google Finance Web design and marketing strategy, on the other hand, offers an array of numbers and charts—with the option for the user to add more charts if she so wishes. Here’s how the Times story puts it:

Yahoo understands that a free finance site prospers by drawing less from the world of mathematics and more from the world of entertainment, informing just enough to satisfy users without setting off an anxiety attack.

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Priming your Web Design & Marketing Tactics for a Great 2009

Friday, January 9th, 2009

Are your ready for a great 2009? Ok, we know that this upcoming year looks tough for most businesses. But we also know you’re probably not planning on just coasting through the year and simply hoping for the best. So here are a few basic web design & marketing maintenance tests you can quickly do to make sure that it’s primed for the new year.

1. Check your business’ information

How does your “about” page look? Successful businesses often change focus and direction. And when that happens, a change in web design & marketing is necessary. If you wrote your “about” page a couple of years ago, take another look at it. Does it still represent what you do? If not, update it.

2. Check your contact information

There’s a ton of stuff that a business has to deal with when it moves. Updating things like the phone number and address on a Webpage isn’t one of them. But it’s crucial to successful web design & marketing. Have you moved recently? Then make sure everything’s up do date. Test all your email addresses to make sure that they’re getting into the right inboxes.

Also, have you started Twittering? Have you joined any new social networking services? Now would be a good time to add all that new web design & marketing information to your Webpage.

3. Check your business’ email auto responders

If you’ve set up an email auto-response message a while back, it’s easy to forget what you wrote. Check it again and make sure that the web design & marketing message is still up to date.

4. Check the links on your Website

If your Website is a couple of years old, it may need some housecleaning. The easiest thing to check for prime to maintain excellent web design & marketing are the links. Do they all work? Are all the external sites you’ve linked to still there?

5. Make sure you’re on Google

Are your keywords still relevant? How are you ranking on Google for your targeted keywords? Is your Webpage optimized for Google searchers? If you’re not ranking on the first page for targeted keywords, there’s probably more web design & marketing search engine optimization you could be doing.

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