Professional Speaker | SpinWeb President/CEO
  
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Hopefully we all know that marketing spending is moving more and more online but it was nice to see Douglas Karr’s entry on this issue in the Marketing Technology Blog:
Marketing Spending is Shifting to Search
I’ve been telling my clients for years that the Yellow Pages is dead and that marketing budgets should be spent online. These stats are interesting validation.
I very much enjoyed this post from Unclutterer.com today:
Creating a minimalist workspace
I am a huge advocate of going as paperless as possible so I really enjoyed this post. Enjoy!
I’m sure all of us have gotten those messages from friends that say “My email address has changed… please update your address books. My new email address is blah@blah.com.” Sometimes it’s for a legitimate reason, but other times it’s because the person has changed Internet Service Providers (ISP). This bothers me because in this day and age, no one should have to be held hostage his/her ISP.
If you are using an email address like “bob@comcast.net”, “fred@att.net”, or “mary@sbcglobal.net”, stop it! You may decide to change ISPs someday or move to an area where your cable provider is Insight, rather than Comcast. If this happens, your email address will go away. For this reason, you really should be using a web-based mail service from one of the big (free) providers. I personally recommend Gmail. By using Gmail (or Hotmail, Yahoo!, etc.) you ensure that you will not have to change email addresses even if you move or change ISPs.
Now, all this is meant to address personal email addresses, of course. If you are using a personal email account for business use: shame on you! That’s also bad, but for different reasons that I won’t go into right now 
Don’t let your ISP control your email. Go get a Gmail account and free yourself!
I enjoyed Douglas Karr’s recently blog entry titled “What’s in it? Where is it? How? Web Marketing Strategies“. In it, one particular point rang very true for me:
Aesthetics of the site. The layout and theming of your site needs to reflect the professionalism and attitude that you wish to portray. I used to say not to worry about this – it was all about the content. I was wrong, though. Larger sites are seeing a gain in traffic with a new design. Want to open a Web 2.0 site? Make sure it looks like a Web 2.0 site!
Very true! This is one of those concepts that is sometimes difficult to explain to businesses or convince them that it’s important. I see so much effort being placed on getting traffic to a web site but often times not as much effort is placed on how the site looks once the user arrives.
Great design matters. The better your site looks, the easier it is to convince your customers to buy from you.
