Today I started brainstorming concepts for a new corporate website.  The current website is a few years old and is in need of some modernization.  It is also time to update  because frankly we have learned a lot in a few years about eye tracking, usability and marketing.

The current website has performed well and drives a high percentage of visitors to the contact page. The contact page in turn sends in a few monthly quote requests and an undetermined number of phone calls.  This is one of the areas I want to improve upon.  To do a better job of demonstrating the importance of the website, we need a better way of capturing all of the information from the contact page including phone calls. Another key goal is to differentiate the contacts from people who came directly to looking for a phone number and those who found us organically.  Those organic numbers are the key to how effective our search engine marketing strategies are.

Purpose is the concept for the new site.  There are really only a few reasons for someone to be on a printing company website.  I plan on leveraging that knowledge to provide a clear path to the information visitors are looking for, hopefully in a clever and memorable way. I’ll follow up more on that in part 2.  The conclusion to part one is stating my desire to protect the website visitors once again, from flash intros, auto playing video, sound and all other sorts of ideas people want to add to the website, yet hate it when they see them on a website.

What is the purpose for the new website?  The purpose is sales.

I made a post a couple of years ago about how frustrating my experience was when trying to cancel my XBox Live subscription.  The post still gets hundreds of visitors a month so I thought I would update it with some new information from a comment at the end of the post.  Thanks to David for his comment!

You can cancel the auto renew of the Xbox live gold if you go to xbox.com and login to your live account, click you gamertag, click contact information, click membership level, and where it says automatic renewel, click where it says on. You will then have to click through a few screens where they are trying to keep you but then you will finally be able to set it to off!!!

Let me get this straight. A top 10 list of websites with the best top 10 lists. I believe top 10 lists have officially jumped the shark.

I just noticed one of my sites dragging when trying to load and it seems the link to jquery-latest.pack.js was the culprit. After some quick research I see code.jquery.com has been redirected to Googles AJAX Libraries API. If you have links to code.jquery.com in your websites, now would be a good time to change them.

Here is a blog post from jquery discussing the move to Google’s API.

One of the big stories going around now is about VP candidate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account being “hacked”.  As it turns out though her email account wasn’t really hacked.  The person who broke into her account used social engineering to reset her password so they could access it.

This is a perfect example of the problem I blogged about back in January with using real information for your security questions. If Sarah Palin had not used real information when answering the Yahoo email security questions her email would not have been compromised by someone guessing her security questions.  Also keep in mind, Yahoo gives the same secuirty question challenges to everyone.  So if I want to social engineer my way into your email account I already know which security questions to start researching.

We just got back from a week at the lake recently so I am now starting to get back in the swing of things.  As you can see in the picture, coming back to work wasn’t high on my priority list.

Every year we go with some friends to a cabin on probably the cleanest lake I have ever been in. The only way to get to the cabin is by boat.  We have to ferry all of our supplies over on the boat and carry the trash off each day by boat.  You have to do the trash daily or you may wake up with a bear eating you or your food.  It is a small price to pay for the relaxing atmosphere.

My free Gmail account allows me to have a 64 bit password.  If you can crack it, you deserve to be able to read my email.

Well what about the important stuff, like my online bank accounts?  My banking account you say, funny you should ask.  My bank limits my password to 20 characters.