Here’s how to Pinterest and get traffic today:

• Get “invited”. This is nothing – click the “Invite me” link at the top, throw them an email, they email you in a couple of days and you’re in.
• Start a board.
• Post images on it. You do this by clicking ‘pin’ and entering the URL of your site, then clicking the slideshow to get the image you want and add a caption.
• Do this at peak hours. They notify you by email whenever your image gets ‘re-pinned’ or liked or whatever, so it’s easy to experiment.
• The site automatically includes the link to the page with the source page, so that’s all you do! Bask in the traffic and new sales!

We’ve seen ecommerce marketers who swear by it. The best hours seem to be late afternoon and early evening for your local area – when people are goofing off during those last two hours of the day at the office, or just getting home and unwinding after work.

It’s a good idea, if you have confidence in your online business, to put in features to allow customers to discuss and compare products. The article points to many good examples – for instance, when you shop for clothes, you take a friend and get their opinion. It’s funny how we take our best friend’s advice over, say, the Victoria’s Secret catalog, but it’s built into our human brains to trust our peers over the words of some stranger.

“Shoppers are looking for convenience foremost and the trading hours [in WA] have meant people don’t have opportunity to visit retail outlets,” he said.

Read more here; Retailers finding it tough to compete with online

Read more about our eCommerce websites

Frequently asked questions (eCommerce websites)

Among many fascinating points:

• Amazon would be the best goldmine for analytics data.
• Up to 10% of visitors click on ‘related’ links at the end of a blog posts.
• Some sites succeed by doing the opposite of ‘best practice’.
• A single Facebook ‘like’ button beats a constellation of little link-sharing buttons.
• Neither Twitter nor Facebook affect the ‘Google juice’ for a given link (more than the other).

Looking for a web designer in Sydney? Web Design Sydney
or perhaps a web designer in Perth? Web Designer Perth

Look, people, it’s this simple:

• You can opt out any time.
• You can get five computers with three web browsers on each and delte cookies and search as 15 different strangers if you’re that paranoid.
• Google is only collecting data and saving it to target marketing. That’s been the cornerstone of capitalism since the invention of money.
• All this data will consist of is your interests, and guess at your gender and age. It doesn’t steal your credit card or anything.
• Some of us (blog writers, for instance) have interests that aren’t going to make sense to a tracking algorithm anyway.

OK? Can everybody quit panicking?

When we hear “Basing a business model on revenue from nonexistent advertisers or customers”, all we see is the famous “Dot-Com Bubble”, which burst in the year 2000. Online entrepreneurs were done in, not by Y2K causing all our data to go kabloowie, but by unrealistic, lofty expectations of money that just doesn’t come through.

Now, the thing with appreciating the value of a digital product is one we all struggle against. “What, this web design costs more than that web design? They’re all the same, aren’t they?” Like the article says, people will accept that with wine. Or for an even simpler example, pie. If you get a half a pie from one seller and a whole pie from another at the same price, you can see which one’s the best value, right? With web design, people don’t see the value. There’s all this back-end code that goes into it. The user doesn’t know, they just see black text on a white background with some pictures and say, “Yeah, it looks all the same to me!”

• The US is going crazy about SOPA and PIPA, two anti-piracy bills that threaten web freedom. It got so extreme that the English Wikipedia blacked out for one day.
• The EU is going crazy about ACTA, a similar anti-piracy bill with similar restrictions.
• Twitter is censoring their content, because of copyright takedown notices. They can’t even fight this, there’s nothing they can do.
• On our own home turf, AU is going crazy over Clean Feed. Ours is the longest battle; it’s stalled but still pending. But Clean Feed is about content instead of copyright.
• There’s a group called “Reporters Without Borders” which publishes a list of most Internet-hostile countries. These are all countries that censor the Internet for some reason or another.

We could go like this all day. But all this is squeezing every other kind of news off the web. We’ll try to keep a sunbeam in our corner, though.

It’s easy for us web design folk to forget that to most users, half of what we say is gibberish. Apparently many people can only recall one brand name at a time. So “How do you surf the web?” becomes anything from search engine (Google), to browser (the big blue E), to service provider (AOL), to operating system (Windows). If they remember the name “Google” first, then the whole computer or phone or iPad becomes “Google”.

Remember, we’re not here to snark at those who don’t know as much as we do (quick, what brand of alternator is in your cars engine?), but to inspire developers to work to help users more.