BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

Last few months I was hunted by some weird problem on my laptop‘s Firefox – random broken images. What was even more strange is that on the same page after each reload a new image (or group of images) could be broken. The issue was solidly recurring, but affecting random images and random web sites.

Uninstalled both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 from my laptop, wiped caches and other leftovers and installed Firefox afresh. Same issue. Again!

On the verge of dumping Firefox in favor of something else (Chrome/Opera/IE?) I realized that there’s a number of Firefox plug-ins that might have a say in this issue. Once I remembered a list of plugins I have been restoring from the backup every time – I got the rogue plug-in almost instantly.

LiveHTTPheaders, when POST is set to “Fast” dumps some of the slow-loading images. It doesn’t mean that only large images affected – I had spacers lost and design all messed up with hours spent hunting down bugs in old web site designs.

Live HTTP headers config screen – That’s where the problem is!

So, if you have a similar problem of Firefox not displaying all the images on a web page and you are using LiveHTTPheaders plug in – set the LiveHTTPheaders POST setting to “Full” (or uninstall the extension if you don’t really need it) – and your Firefox automagically will be healed!

These are the features ranked according to the number of top 500 retailers that are using them (as per Internet Retailer Magazine):

1. keyword search
2. daily/seasonal specials
3. enlarged product view
4. what’s new
5. affiliate program
6. advanced search
7. online gift certificates
8. rich media
9. outlet center
10. email a friend
11. coupons/rebates
12. top sellers
13. site personalization
14. alternative payments
15. store locator
16. wish list
17. customer reviews
18. catalog quick order
19. mapping
20. product customization

Interesting enough as well that most consumers (according to Forrester) are willing to decline paying for “flare”:

Fewer consumers are willing to pay for extras such as gift wrapping, or overnight delivery.
(26% of respondents said they would pay for expedited delivery prior to the holiday season, down from 45% who said they would do so in 2006.)

Generally, what this means is that consumers want to get their purchase faster, easier and with less extras then before. For most of the prospective clients that call us, top five requests for web site are:

1. Large pictures/ability for visitor to enlarge product image
2. Search engine optimization/marketing
3. Ability to quickly add and remove inventory items
4. Ability to post featured/for sale items
5. Ability to use various discount codes to track promotions

It is obvious that trends for small and large businesses are almost the same. The slight difference is attributed to overall approach to ways of doing business for small business owners and large retailers.

Short and comprehensive guide – how to create a link bait on your site. Thanks to members of SitePoint and DigitalPoint forums this all have been gathered.

1. Put together a list of web resources (forums, blogs) that are relevant to your topic
2. Put together a good post or article or eBook or anything of the real value. Give it out for free from your resource
3. Write a brief about your value post. Call it a press-release and submit it to proper catalogs (they called press release web sites)
4. Contact blogs you have gathered in step one. Give them the link to your content and press release.
5. Register or open new thread on forums you gathered in step one. Provide link to the content you have created. Answer questions. Be a good forum member. Don’t forget to put a link to your content in your signature.
6. Write couple of articles about whatever you have created. Use title of your free content as anchor text. Submit these articles to article directories.
7. Stumble, Digg, Reddit, put it on del.icio.us. If it’s a video, can be shown on video or can be featured in video – put it on YouTube. Don’t waste your time on Netscape, by the time you read this it’s probably long gone dead.
8. Guest-post on other blogs. Explain what and why you have created your content. Create buzz.
9. If you have ties via social web sites (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Jaiku, LinkedIn, etc.) promote your content there.

Most of these bullet points are very obvious to anyone who ever tried to get a decent amount of traffic to the web site. Still, not everyone manages to follow through these simple steps. In any case – this would be a good reference point.