I’ve been noticing the use of the color red lately. As a single splash of boldness on a web design, designed to draw the eye toward a desired action or important testimonial.

And since reading the excellent Save the Pixel, by web designer Ben Hunt, and studying website attraction principles with the very clever Sean D’Souza, I’m starting to actually pay attention to what I like in the way of design, and why I like it.

Here are a couple of examples of the use of red on the web: Read the rest of this entry »

As of April 1, 2008, Google has tightened their rules on Display URLs.

There’s been a lot of confusion about what the changes will mean, because as my colleague Bryan Todd points out, the new rules look an awful lot like the old rules. So what we may be facing here is a serious attempt at enforcement.

Basically, here’s the deal:

Your display URL must use the same domain as your actual landing page.

So if you’re testing 3 different domains, how on earth can you do that? Each ad only gets one landing page. Sounds impossible, right?

Fortunately, there’s a way to pile multiple domain names onto the same website. For example, let’s say I want to test the following URLs:

askhowie.com

thegoogleguy.com

adwordshelp.com

And I want to send the traffic to http://askhowie.com/givemelotsofmoney

I don’t need to set up three different websites. I just create the page at askhowie.com, and do a neat trick called aliasing. Basically, it’s telling the internet to assign different names to the same IP address.

Once I’ve set up the aliases, the following pages will all contain the exact same content:

http://askhowie.com/givemelotsofmoney

http://thegoogleguy.com/givemelotsofmoney

http://adwordshelp.com/givemelotsofmoney

And that will be true for every page I set up at askhowie.com after that. No need to do any extra work.

I was going to spend a couple of hours creating a really clear tutorial on how to do the aliasing, but thankfully, Bryan Todd beat me to it. Check out his comprehensive guide to Aliasing, the Universe and Everything (well, that’s a big of an exaggeration, but I’m a little giddy at the thought of all the work he’s saved me.

A reader wonders:

I am a programmer and I wanted to use javascript to dynamically create custom landing pages.  Do you know if Google will treat my landing pages exactly like a user (by running my javascript) or will they all look the same?  Unlike PHP, the javascript will get executed in the user’s browser and will display my keywords and other info on the page for the user to see.   I guess it’s possible that it doesn’t matter if all Google does is track user behavior rather than landing page relevancy…

Here’s my answer:

"Sorry, I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about."

Fortunately, I was able to forward the question to my good friend David Bullock, a brilliant marketer who is also a formidable process engineer and tech-head.

Here’s his reply:

There is no good answer for this one. Google is trying to read everything, but it can’t see Java script right now. But the question is does it “see” and index the content that is generated.

Here’s a discussion on the issue of Java and Google, along with a test. 

Here’s a tool to let you “see” what the spiders see.

Thanks, David!