I've written lots of posts dealing with online persuasion. But if your website doesn't appear trustworthy, you'll never get a chance to persuade anyone; visitors won't stick around long enough to enter into a conversation. So this week I'm going to backpedal a bit and cover trustworthiness.

It's not necessary (or desirable) to do everything presented here. And well-known organizations already carry an air of authority; they don't have to work so hard. (In fact, some of the items listed here would appear downright silly on a site like Apple.com.)

This "Trustworthiness Checklist" is intended more for small, new or otherwise unknown websites.

[More]

Summer, its oooooovvvveeeerrrrr. The weather is cooling off, the clouds are coming, and soon I'll have to go shopping for raincoats, or else buy a bus pass. 

In the blog world we have loads of stories from across the spectrum, including how Google ranks blogs, debugging GA tags, and hacking quantum cryptography with lasers.

[More]

A client recently asked for my input on a Cause Marketing (or "Corporate Social Responsibility") initiative they were considering. As some readers might be considering similar projects, I'll share my thoughts here.

There are several recent studies on this subject, but the one I find most compelling was conducted by K.L. Becker-Olsen and B.A. Cudmore*.

According to this study, three factors influence whether a cause marketing campaign will succeed or backfire: Fit, Motivation and Timing.

1. Fit

Customers must believe the campaign/cause is a good fit with the company that's sponsoring it. For instance, these campaigns might be a good fit:

[More]

Bit of a quiet week, no? Well, other than the whole wikileaks thing. 

Well, this week we have posts on writing blog posts for SEO, compressing JS and CSS into a PNG, analyzing search traffic with Google Analytics, and more.

[More]

The other day, some one in the office recommended I try Rapportive. Being a gizmo geek, I love installing plugins (yes, I am one of those people) and so I jumped at the opportunity to play with a new toy.

Rapportive's goal is to create "rapport" between individuals by giving them both more information about each other.  And it provides a host of information, including social networks, activity, and more. Take, for example, John:

[More]

"I give a great foot massage..."

We don't like uncertainty. We'll take a less-than-perfect choice over an ambiguous choice any day. It might take some convincing to make us buy a less-than-perfect choice, but at least we'll consider it. An uncertain choice? Forget about it.

Consider the real-world example of being set up on a date. Which would you go for?

1. Photo of an attractive but less than perfect person. Plus a description of how wonderful the person is: Kind, honest, successful, funny, smart...
2. Same description as above, but no photo.

[More]

Last week I posted some simple htaccess rewrites. This week I want to take it a step further and look at the RewriteCond property, along with three neat rewrites you can use.

As its name suggests, RewriteCond allows you to set conditions for a rewrite, including filtering by referer, saved information (in cookies), server information, and more. Each condition is applied to each rewrite rule, from the conditions line downwards, until it hits a rule marked as the "last rule" with an [L] tag. (For more tags see: Regex Character Definitions for htaccess) Following rules will be executed as well, but not with the condition applied.

The available conditions are:

[More]

I got some of the best news of the year yesterday: Brian Katz is writing more blog posts! He will be posting every Tuesday (hopefully) starting tomorrow, with my email/social media section being pushed to Friday.

In other news, this weeks roundup brings about new ways to link silo, HTML best practices, new GA intelligence features, and more.

[More]

"Do the Opposite!"

Last week I discussed Social Proof: the powerful tendency for people to "follow the pack" when determining a course of action.

It's important to understand how Social Proof works. Because it applies both to good and bad behavior. ("Sure, I threw some rocks at the cars... but everyone was doing it!")

If we don't understand the ramifications of Social Proof, we may unintentionally motivate people to do the exact opposite of what we want.

It's in public service messages that Negative Social Proof most commonly insinuates itself. Take the following messages for example:

[More]

Last month, while we were moving our site from our old coldfusion/flat HTML based website to our new Drupal hotness I took it upon myself to learn how to do some htaccess work. In the past we had written about htaccess, redirects, and rewrites, but in playing around a little more I realized that I really didn't understand a lot of it (hell, I still don't). So today I'm going to walk through some more intermediary htaccess rules you can use.

You can do a lot with htaccess, from error codes to banning IP's to password protection to setting MIME types. It's an incredibly versatile tool. What I am interested in, however, is rewrites.

301's redirect/rewrite seamlessly send users from one page to another, while sending information to the browser telling it that this page has been permanently redirected. For SEO's a 301 sends linkjuice from that page to the target. It won't always send 100% of it, but often it's nice and simple and clean.

[More]