We wrote about HTML Color Codes in the past and I provided you with a bunch of great resources for finding those codes at Tools for Finding the Right HTML Hex Colors: Color Codes, Charts, Wheels, & Wizards. What I left out was a resource that provides the Triple Hex codes for those of you who need to use them for CSS.

I recently discovered the following site that should be a great help: Hexadecimal Triple Color Codes. This easy to use site allows you to find any 3 digit hex color code by grabbing the x axis information (rg) and following it with the y axis (b).

There are 4 pages to navigate through to see all of the basic triple palettes. I hope you all find this helpful in your designing!

Tags: colors, CSS, hex codes, hex color codes, HTML, web design

What does a SEO Company Do?

I know, it sounds like a simple question, but someone who doesn’t know what an SEO professional does is likely to get screwed by some con man looking to rip him off. Most people will do a few minutes of research and find out that people who help others with SEO exist to help others climb in the search results of the search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc.

Last year, I wrote an article about how to work with SEO consulting companies, but after the events of today, I wanted to riff a bit more.

Last night I was contacted by the representative of an SEO company who was looking to help another company with their site’s optimization. He wanted to advertise on one of my sites and I quoted him the price. In response, he told me that the budget was tight and offered me a price that was 11% of our rate. I told him that I couldn’t do it, and got the following response:

If you really don’t want to accept $200 for the couple of minutes of work it takes to put up a[n advertisement], then that’s your decision.

Well no, I don’t want to take $200 for an ad position that is worth $1800. Does he expect to buy an $100,000 Porsche for $11k? It was simply a ridiculous request, and as someone who works consulting people on website optimization, he knows full well the value of advertising; it is not about the time it takes to place the ad, but about the value of the ad itself. The NY times could place a full-page ad on page 2 that I design, which would take 5 minutes of their time, but that position would probably be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. People simply AMAZE me!

What to Look for in an SEO Company?

Start by looking at their website. This is usually the fastest way to write off an SEO company. After getting an email from the guy, I decided to swing by his website to check it out. He was smart enough to never mention the URL of the company that he was trying to advertise, because I would have shared the following with them.

His website consisted of 3 pages: Home, Services, and Contact Us
The “Contact us” page didn’t work. The other pages were missing meta tags for keywords and description. By spending less than a minute on the website, I would have told anyone interested in hiring them for SEO to RUN! If the company you’re looking to hire isn’t fully search engine optimized themseves, why would they know how to help you any better? There is of course, more to SEO than simply adding META tags, however, on almost every occasion, when I find that there is some SEO that is doing a poor job, it turns out that they skip their own tags. It is a good screen to use to cut out the crap.

How do you Check Someone’s META Tags?

This is very simple, even if you know NOTHING about making websites or HTML. Just go to the menu bar of your browser and enter the VIEW dropdown — you’ll find either “Source” or “View Source”. When the source page opens up, you’re going to want to look for the HEAD tag, which is simply the word Head surrounded by brackets. Somewhere after the head tag and before the BODY tag, you’re looking for tags that start with META NAME.

Here’s an example of what the Meta Tags look like:

<META NAME=”KEYWORDS” CONTENT=”SEO, META TAGS, search engine optimization”>
<META NAME=”DESCRIPTION” CONTENT=”This is a description of the page using keywords”>

If you don’t see anything resembling the code above on their pages, then you know it is time to run.

Summary:
Had the customer of the company that contacted me, done the above before hiring the firm, they would have seen that they were not cut out to consult on SEO. If you don’t practice what you’re slated to preach, then you shouldn’t be charging folks for your services. Additionally, you don’t want to insult potential partners by offering them 11% of their going rate, because that might lead to a blog post about your nonsense . . . luckily for them I’m a nice guy and never mentioned them by name.

Tags: Keywords, meta tags, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, website optimization

I’ve had several clients of mine over the years host their websites with a company called Lunarpages. For the most part, their experience has been a good one . . . cheap hosting, reasonable uptime . . . the basics.

Unfortunately, I’ve been informed that Lunarpages has dropped the ball, bigtime!

According to my client, Charles Feldman of TheFeldmanBlog:

I had this once before where the site was down, remember, and I left messages on their 24 hour line but they never got back to me…same this time. And last time, when I called during the week to complain, I , of course, got a voicemail for the manager who also never returned the call.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but that’s not the type of service I’m looking for in a host. Sadly, it seems, reality doesn’t match up with the company’s promises. The following comes directly from the front page of the Lunarpages website:

There are thousands of web hosting services so why choose Lunarpages? When comparing web hosts it is important not only to consider a price difference of a dollar or two. Although we offer more data transfer and storage resources then you will likely ever utilize, we prefer to focus on something much more important, reliable web hosting and great customer service. Above all we take care of you personally and attentively with 24-7 award winning customer support. It’s all about making sure your website and email remain online and you are happy. It’s not just technical support to us; it’s about caring for people since 1998. Phone us any time and become part of the rapidly growing Lunarpages web hosting family. We are rated #1 in the world. Call us now and find out why.

Notice the text in bold (we bolded it to highlight) . . . doesn’t really match what I’m hearing from my client. The 24 hour customer support seems to be nothing but a voicemail system . . . WOW that’s revolutionary 24 hour support! I’ve called several times over the past 24 hours – particularly late night and early morning, and have not gotten a person on the phone. Isn’t that what 24-7 customer service means to you?

Hopefully someone at the company reads this and works to rectify the situation . . . either way, I thought it was important to let you all know so you can make an informed decision when considering this host.

Photo Credit: Control Panel by Tim Dorr

Tags: hosting, lunarpages, webhost, website host

I’ve been using the same mailing list software for close to five years now, a platform called Dada Mail, which is a perl script. While the software is free (GREAT!), it has a lot of limitations. I have little control over bounce rates, click tracking, and other essential bits of data which are important for any email marketer.

To be honest, I’m not much of an email marketer in the first place, and I’m guessing that if I had a more advanced platform, I’d likely be further on my way.

Shopping for a New Mailing List Solution

One of the most important features that I need in a mailing list solution is a software package or web-based system that will allow me to directly input data from my own forms. Most packages that I’ve found don’t allow it.

A Look at AWeber

Sadly, one of the most highly recommended email marketing software solutions I’ve found, AWeber.com does not have an API that allows this. Their package has EVERY other feature that I could want, including:

• Autoresponders
• Unlimited Campaigns
• HTML Email Templates
• Email Deliverability (NOTE: I’ve heard from a few people that their delivery rate is WAY higher than most other software)
• Blog Newsletters
• Email Web Analytics
• Subscriber Management

Essentially, they’ve got everything I need, and the price is decent ($19 for 0-500 subscriber and $149 for 10,000-25,000 where I fall in), but that API issue is going to keep me away. The only other downside I’ve found is that if you have multiple lists, duplicate subscribers count twice for their pricing schema. It isn’t a huge deal, but we often create lists that are subsets of our master list for marketing purposes and this could
end up costing some real money.

Is PHPList the One?

I haven’t found another web-based piece of software yet that does everything that AWeber does with an API so I can use it with my forms, so I’ve been hunting for server based applications instead. I hope to find something soon . . . there seems to be one called PhpList that has some promise, but I haven’t fully gone through and tested it yet.

Does anyone have any mailing list software suggestions? If you’ve read the post, you know what I’m looking for . . . let me know what you’ve got!

Tags: email marketing, mailing list, mailing list software