Estibot.com Blog » web development

I know how to make Firefox a better browser. Here’s how.

Esa — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 14:10:28 +0000

Firefox is a pretty good browser. So is Safari, although it’s far from being as stable as Firefox, especially when running Java applications. I have no experience with Chrome yet. There are some things however that irritate me greatly about these browsers. For us domainers, browsers are our most important tools. Our workflow depends on the stability, speed and security of web browsers and internet connection. I’m also a web developer and coder, and having a streamlined internet set-up is crucial for me.

My biggest gripe about Firefox is the incessant updates. I know I could turn those off, but on the other hand I need to keep my browser up-to-date, and if I switched the updates to manual, knowing myself I’d probably manually update it once every two years or so.

The updates are irritating because they occur when you start up the browser. It’s a nuisance when you’re you fire up your browser to do something real quick. And it happens often.

This irritation could be easily dealt with by having the updates occur only when you close the browser. This would be unlikely to bother you. It would just happen in the background and you wouldn’t be bothered by it. Alternatively, if you keep your browser on 24/7, you could set the updates to occur at a certain time of day, when you’re least likely to be actively using your browser. System administrators everywhere set up cron jobs to do server maintenance during the night, so it won’t affect performance when people are working. Why not adapt that to the mainstream?

I know, I know, it’s a relatively minor nuisance, but enough to inspire a blog post. I do have some other gripes about these browsers, too, but enough complaining

It’s all about usability, oui? Non?

Nobody Reads Your Blog Posts and They Don’t Click Your Ads Either

Esa — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 05:29:51 +0000

Visitors do not read your entries. They scan them. Visitors don’t look at ads. They are banner blind. They don’t even look at any real content that looks like an ad, even if it’s inside the main content element. These are all proven facts. Yet many bloggers and webmasters disregard these facts completely. So – here’s what you need to do in order to get your message through, and make those ads perform.

The first two paragraphs need to contain the most important information. Start every paragraph with one or two information carrying words. Users focus on the first two words and if those don’t entice them, they are less likely to even read the third word. Use bolding to highlight important information in your text. Visitors are more likely to scan the bold text.

Visitors generally ignore everything that looks like an ad. Even if you present some of your real, and important, content in any fancy formatting, visitors are likely to ignore it because it looks like a promotion. Visitors’ eyes focus on text; they scan the page first in a horizontal movement, then move down a bit, and do another horizontal movement. Finally, they scan the left side in a vertical movement.

The cure? Make ads look like content. It’s borderline unethical, but it just plain works. Outside of that – use the 3 design elements that are the most effective eye catchers:

Get the Domain Sales Machine – I personally promise you will not regret it.

An easy way to create fresh, search engine friendly, 100% automated content for your website: RSS News Aggregator

Finally, I’d like to announce a new tool on Estibot.com: Web Host Comparison tool.

So- what were the three eye-catching elements?

Cleavage
Faces
Plain text

The source I used for this blog post is website usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s report on eye tracking usability studies. You will do yourself a favor if you read Nielsen’s stuff. It’s amazing how many webmasters ignore basic usability rules.

New Free Tool: Domain List Generator with Overture scores

Esa — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 21:49:57 +0000

I saw this post on Jamie’s blog DotWeekly.com, and got inspired to write a tool for him that would save time and enhance his domaining workflow a little bit.

He explained how he used excel and notepad to turn search terms into domain names. Not a bad method, but with this new tool it’s fully automated and happens instantly:

Estibot Domain List Generator

It’s free for everyone to use, and it displays archived Overture scores, too.

While I’m at it, I’d like to remind you that the Estibot Minisite Domain Development and SEO services are in full motion and ready to take new orders. Minisites go for $99 a piece including great design, original high quality content and a link building package. Free hosting is also available. You can get HTML/CSS or Wordpress sites. The carefully constructed Super SEO package will improve your existing site rankings and costs only $47. Email us for more info.

So you wanna outsource?

Esa — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 22:08:32 +0000

Well, since I released the minisite and SEO services (see end of post) to Estibot members, I have received enough orders that I needed to get more capacity. So I started looking for outsourced web developers, and asked them how much they would charge for making a minisite.

As anyone who’s tried to outsource will tell you, finding a reliable provider can be a nightmare. Sure, they charge about one tenths per hour compared to Euro or American providers, but just like buying a really cheap tour guide in Morocco, there always appear extra costs and necessary expenses as if by magic. In web development outsourcing, this usually takes the form of billing an insane number of hours for a simple task.

Check out this offer I received, web design for a very reasonable $13.33 per hour from a web dev company in India:

Home page mockup and graphic design: 8 hrs
[I can do this in less than 1 hour myself]

Wordpress installation: 2 hr
[...um...takes me about 2 minutes]

Installation of wordrpess theme : 6 hrs
[...almost a whole day to install a Wordpress theme ]

5 inner pages : 4 hrs
[...with wordpress, it's a matter of minutes to feed in the content]

RSS aggregator : 2 hrs
[...again, this should take 5 minutes, it's a copy - paste procedure]

Contact form : 4 hrs
[...I can code a php contact form from scratch in 10 minutes]

Google search box : 6 hrs
[...this must come with a guarantee of 100 high-PPC clicks per day, yes?]

Google adsense : 8 hrs
[...OK, so one guy spends a day copy-pasting Adsense code to a few source files..]

Total : 40 hrs [...that's a full working week to get one very simple site done]

For one finished site the quote is total $533

Guys, I have to get my cut so how about $600 for a minisite? Anyone?

–

Anyway, the SEO services are ready for your use if you have existing websites that need a nudge in search engine rankings and traffic:

Estibot SEO / Link building / Directory Submission services:

Prices all inclusive.

Package “Social”:
25 manual reviews on SEO friendly social bookmarking sites $10

Package “Dir-50″:
Manual submission to 50 SEO friendly directories $15

Package “Dir-100″:
Manual submission to 100 SEO friendly directories $25

Package “Blog”:
Five unique blog posts/reviews on 5 separate blogs with links and deep links back to your site $20

Package “SEO Super”:
100 directory submission + 5 blog posts + 25 social bookmarking $47

Cheers

Esa