What's in this issue of Web Sight News:
Web Sight News
In this issue of Web Sight News from
Helen Schiller: Visit featured sight Green Mountain Organics, an e-commerce site powered by zen cart, the open source shopping cart system I use to develop online stores. Also, you may, as I have, enjoy reading the blogs selected for JavaMuseum's a + b = ba? [art + blog = blogart] exhibit. And finally we return to Thinking Strategically by looking at Page Titles. December is just a blink away and you can look forward to receiving a special Web Sight Shopping edition in time to find unique gifts online for the holidays, as well as next month's Web Sight News. Please Send this Newsletter to a Friend.
Featured Sight: Green Mountain Organics
Looking for natural living products? Visit Green Mountain Organics and you will find over 200 natural and organic products organized into six categories: Organic Herbals and Body Care, Organic Baby, Natural Child, Organic Adult, Natural Home
and Organic Lifestyle. For your shopping convenience, these categories contain sub categories; for example, Natural Child contains a selection of Organic Children's Clothing as well as Natural Wooden Toys etc.
 Green Mountain Organics is powered by zen cart and if you have been reading these issues of Web Sight News for several months you know that I can't say enough about zen cart! It is a feature rich open source shopping cart system with a wide developer and user base. It has an easy to use Admin Console or back door to the store for setting up products, adding shipping and payment options, looking through orders, configuring discounts, etc. And as you can see with Green Mountain Organics, I am able to customize the zen cart software so that the resulting store represents the personality and philosophy of the business owner. Contact me if you are interested in having me develop zen cart for your business!
 In my wanderings I found an exhibition curated by Java Museum to explore the use of blogging by artists. The exhibition launched this month as part of NewMediaFest 2007 in Cologne, Germany.
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According to Wikipedia, “blog” is defined like that
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[A blog (a portmanteau of web log) is a website where entries are written in chronological order and commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), audio (podcasting) and are part of a wider network of social media. Micro-blogging is another type of blogging which consists of blogs with very short posts.
As of September 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 106 million blogs.]
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 a+b=ba? presents the ways 26 artists from around the world use a blog for artistic purposes. As described by the curator: This show is an invitation to all interested people to get involved!
I especially like Ellie Harrison's Tea Blog which she has updated daily since January 1, 2006. Each entry contains the thought which is most on her mind at the time she is sitting down to a nice cup of tea. Order a free limited edition 'Tea Stain' sticker, I did!
Thinking Strategically:::Page Titles
For thinking strategically about your web sight, I proposed, two months ago, that we look at the following elements:
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Traffic Quality
- Site Layout, Usability & Design
- Product Offering
- Market Strategy
So what are page titles and what have they got to do with this? The page title is the text in the very top bar of your browser, above the address bar, and it is contained within the HTML <title> tag. The page title is almost always used as the clickable headline for listings on search engine result pages (SERP). So, it is the humble page title that is your main tool to attract new visitors from search listings and to help existing users to locate the specific pages that they need.
The page title for the Green Mountain Organics product page above is shown here as an example. Zen cart automatically uses the product name and optionally includes the product price in the page title. Some browsers, such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer also supplement whatever you put in the title tag by adding their own name.
As Search is the most important way users discover websites and Search is also one of the most important ways users find their way around individual websites, choosing the words for a page title is important. Search engines typically show the first 66 characters or so of the title, so it's truly microcontent, they need to be short and quickly communicate the purpose of the site.
Page titles are also used as the default entry in the Favorites when users bookmark a site. Jakob Nielsen, called "a guru of Web page usability" suggests: For your homepage, begin the page title with the company name, followed by a brief description of the site. Don't start with words like "The" or "Welcome to" unless you want to be alphabetized under "T" or "W."
For other pages than the homepage, start the title with a few of the most salient information-carrying words that describe the specifics of what users will find on that page. Since the page title is used as the window title in the browser, it's also used as the label for that window in the taskbar under Windows, meaning that advanced users will move between multiple windows under the guidance of the first one or two words of each page title. If all your page titles start with the same words, you have severely reduced usability for your multi-windowing users. (This is something I just realized while looking closely at page titles for this Web Sight News. And so now I have a new project - for the web sites where I have kept the company name as first followed by the specifics of the page throughtout the site, I'll reverse that order to make it helpful in identifying individual pages for multi-windowing users.)
While you may have overlooked the page title and not considered it part of a web site, it has an important role in attracting visitors to your site. Next time you are browsing a web site, look at the page title!
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