All of these are from today

As you can see, most of my visitors where looking for , which is a pet supply franchise chain. That’s because I blogged about how badly ’s Luxembourgish website sucks. Not only is it configured in a way that omitting the “www.” will get you nowhere, even if you make it to their website it’s difficult to locate their biggest store unless you know where to find it on a map (or keep zooming out). This quickly became the most popular post on my blog (pathetic, I know) which means that I’m obviously not the only one who had trouble finding what I wanted on their site.

So here’s a quick reminder of the very basic content you should put on your website (examples are geared towards a brick and mortar store).

The 5 friggin’ Ws – things you should definitely put on your website

Let’s simply take the well-known 5 Ws from journalism and reinterpret them from the perspective of a website visitor looking for information (which should also get us pretty close to the perspective of a search engine trying to determine your website’s ranking). Apparently these basics are so obvious that they’re often forgotten (either that or many people just have no clue of what to put on a website).

Who?

Who are you? Example: We’re “Zombie Megastore”, Luxembourg’s leading store for all you zombie needs.

What?

What exactly is it that you do? Example: We carry a large selection of… well, maybe I shouldn’t have chosen the zombie store example. Anyhow, here’s where you list the things customers can find in your shop so that 1. they’ll find you when searching for your city + a certain item or brand on a search engine and 2. they don’t have to call and ask if you sell product XYZ item before taking the trip to your store.

When?

Opening hours. If you’re closed on certain days, put this on your website. If you’re closing your shop for vacation, put this on your website (yes, I’m looking at you, Luxembourgish shop and restaurant owners who like to take long summer vacations).

Where?

Your address (you might want to include your phone/fax number, email, link to contact form, etc.).

Why?

This is the place where you might think you’ll have to come up with a wonderful story to justify why you’re doing what you do (“when my grandfather turned into a zombie, I realized there was no shop where I could buy thinks to make his… uhm… ‘life’ just a bit better”). That’s cute, but I suggest staying with the customer perspective and just answering the old basic “why should I buy from you”-question. It can be as simple as “we are the biggest store for zombie supplies in the entire state”.

That’s it, the basics. Of course a website can do much more than just answering these questions, but not answering them means you’ll lose potential visitors/customers every day.

Some checkboxes you might consider turning off in your campaign settings:

• Automatic matching (not available in all countries)
• iPhone ads
• Search Partners

Search Partners? Why wouldn’t I want Google to show my ads on sites like Google product search, ask.com and aol? Well, because they’re showing on ebay, too, even though Google doesn’t mention this in Adwords help.

I asked Google last year and got this reply:

“Our global search network includes Google Product Search, Google Groups, and search sites such as AOL, Ask.com, ebay.com/ebay.de and shopping.com.”

An no, you can’t chose certain sites, it’s all or nothing.

In our case, “nothing” was the right choice. Ebay customers are not our target market and we actually stopped selling on Ebay years ago. Why would we want to display ads there?

Instead of throwing tons of money at Google Adwords, we restricted spending to a sensible level, redesigned our main online shop and invested some time into SEO. The result? December turnover increased by 50% in comparison to last year while costs for Adwords decreased by 57%.

No, Google did not steal our Christmas.

Here’s a few I found through search engines, a blog post from 2005 by Marshall Kirkpatrick and an article in c’t magazine 4/2008 (page 170):

ChangeAlarm – free, typically checks for updates once per day

ChangeDetect – free and paid membership options

ChangeDetection – free, typically checks for updates once per day, does not detect changes in HTML tags

InfoMinder – no free membership, 30 day trial available

TheWebWatcher – free for personal use, monitoring intervals starting from 1h

TracerLock – no free membership, max 20 URLs, 4 US$/month

TrackEngine – free, 19,95 US$/year for 10 “bookmarks”, 4,95 US$/month for 50 “bookmarks”, possibly includes more frequent updates for paid services

WatchThatPage – free, priority accounts available for donation of US$ 20/year. Fastest update: once per day. There seems to be no limit on the number of pages you can watch. Pages can be organized in folders. Simple keyword filtering available. Refuses to watch pages with badly mangled HTML.

Yes, I know, most of these sites scream “web 1.0″ at you and – ironically – seem to be averse to change themselves (the latest news on TrackEngine are from December 2001, Merry Christmas!). They won’t really help if you’re in charge of large websites with thousands of pages. However, they might be appropriate for small websites, like this one which has been displaying “OwNed By un alien …” for months on the “liens” and “evenements” pages.

I’ll update this post after trying out some of these services (you can subscribe to my RSS feed here ). Please note there’s also tons of change detection software (running locally on your computer) which I’m not covering here.

At least, that used to be the situation until…  well, I have no idea when they actually changed this, but anyhow: It’s finally possible to withdraw money to a bank account in Luxembourg!

As you can see, you can alternatively withdraw funds to a credit/debit card (this feature had been announced on the Paypal Blog in September).

I’m just glad I didn’t go through the trouble of establishing a bank account in the U.S. just to be able to withdraw funds.

***

In other “news that I apparently missed”, Paypal competitor Moneybookers [affiliate link] is allowing merchants to accept payments with the French Carte Bleue. As far as I know, this is the first and only option to accept the Carte Bleue without the need to establish a merchant account (compte commerçant) with a French bank.

While most Carte Bleues (>90%?) are nowadays co-branded with the Visa logo, giving potential customers in France the additional option of using the Carte Bleue Nationale sounds like a good idea to me, especially if the implementation is as simple as it is with Moneybookers.

I’m about to change my company’s online shops’ payment pages and might post again in a few weeks about the acceptance of Moneybooker’s Carte Bleue payment option.

The solution: Expand the search bar (already available on all modern browsers) to include an Amazon.com search which automatically transmits your associate tag (also called Associates ID).

Too complicated, you say? Not at all. You can easily set up your customized search add-on in a few minutes.

This method works with Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7 as well as with any other browser compatible with the OpenSearch format, the screenshots were done using Firefox.

1. Log in to Amazon Associates Central
2. Go to Build Links, then Text Links.
3. In the Link to Search Results form, enter a random keyword and name and click on Get HTML:
   
   
4. In the HTML field, copy the first URL (starts with http://www.amazon.com/gp and ends with something like creative=9325):
   
   
5. Log out and go to Ready2Search, a website which will help you generate the search plugin:
   
6. Enter a meaningful search name (ShortName).
7. Paste the URL to the front of the search term field.
8. Still in this field, locate the keyword you entered in Amazon’s link generator and delete it (you’ll want the search keywords to be inserted there).
9. Now cut everything from your current cursor position to the end of the field (Ctrl-X) and paste it to the next field (the back of the search term).
10. Optional: Enter a description in the next field.
11. Make sure the input encoding is set to UTF-8.
12. Optional: On the lower right side, browse for an image and click on original color.
13. Now click on Make search plug-in.
14. If you only want to add the plug-in to your browser, simply click on OpenSearch plugin and you’re done:
    
15. If you want to make the plug-in available to others, scroll down, click on Download… and save the XML file:
    
16. Upload this file to your web space (mine is here).
17. Unfortunately, you can’t just give a link to your file to other persons, you have to use one of the following methods to enable them to install the plugin: Autodiscovery of search plugins or Javascript (please click on the links for details).
18. With autodiscovery, your search plugin will appear in the browser’s search box so that the user can add it:
    
    For this to work, your web page has to contain the following header:

    The title should match your plugins ShortName and of course you have to replace http://www.yoursite.com/associate.xml with the URL of the xml file you just uploaded in step 16.

19. With Javascript, you can make a “click here to add my search plugin”-link. The following code is a quick and ugly way to do it (adapted from the mozilla developer center’s example):

    
    Add my Amazon.com associate search

    Here, you only have to replace http://www.yoursite.com/associate.xml.

20. Click here to see a simple page which uses both options. Go ahead, install my plugin and use it frequently.
    
    Just kidding, but if you want to be generous you could set up another search plugin for your favourite charity (if they have an Amazon associate ID) and use it from time to time.

I had installed their software some months ago and found it to be very powerful and promising, but still a bit too buggy for my taste. I’ll certainly have a look at the new “solid and bug-less” release and post a review.

Now only Google knows if this is what actually happend, indeed there could be many reasons for being demoted on the search engine’s result pages, thereby receiving less traffic. However, while it seems to be unclear if selling links can actually damage your site’s ranking, Google’s disapproval of link selling has been very clear.

Note that I’m not saying “don’t do it” and I won’t even touch the ethical aspects of paid links. All I’m saying is “if you’re thinking about selling links, think twice, because there’s a chance your site’s ranking might suffer”.

You should be able to obtain information on certain types of companies on-line by visiting these sites (for more details, see directive 2003/58/EC). Searching is mostly free, but fees apply in many cases for viewing / downloading documents. Not all registers are equally comprehensive (yet?).

Austria: Firmenbuch (German only)

Belgium: Banque-Carrefour des Entreprises (in French and Dutch, free of charge). See also Coface Services Belgium.

France: The “Registre National du Commerce et des Sociétés (RNCS)” is mantained by the Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle (INPI). Official site: www.euridile.com (in French). See also Infogreffe (in French and English, fees apply), ORT (in French and English and Societe.com (free of charge).

Germany: The brand new Unternehmensregister is currently down now working again (in German), but you can also try the Handelsregister (in German, too, does not include the annual accounts).

Luxembourg: Registre de Commerce et des Sociétés (in French, free of charge).

Switzerland: Central Business Names Index – Zefix (in German, French, Italian, English)

United Kingdom: Companies House (in English)#

Other countries: Have a look at the following lists / websites:

• European Business Register (EBR) – List of partners
• Scottishlaw.org – Company Registrars
• RBA (Rhodes-Blakeman Associates) – Official Company Registers
• Company-Registers.info

As he writes, this would leave behind an essentially worthless company. However, here’s the main reason why this won’t  happen: Facebook is available in English only. Yes, we’re talking about university students and not about consumers in general, which have trouble understanding even simple slogans in English. Still, we have to face the facts: A representative study rated only 5% of the students as having very good or good English language abilities. I’m serious. Just look at my lousy English – my fellow students thought it was amazing (“You must have spent a lot of time abroad” – maybe so, but not in English speaking countries).

Loosing 5% or even 15% of their users wouldn’t cause irreparable damage to StudiVZ. You’d need a far higher figure to generate the positive network externalities which really make social networking site work. Facebook won’t get there unless they set up a German version. They probably won’t get this done until Tuesday, when StudiVZ is supposed to be back on line. Apparently they don’t even own the domain facebook.de.

Lesson learned: Security and internationalization should be on your mind right from the beginning of a web project.

Other than sending a fax, the solution I found was to connect directly to the mail server at Hinet (ms12a.hinet.net) from my e-mail software, thereby bypassing my provider’s mail server. On this illustration from Wikipedia, this would mean drawing an arrow from “Alice’s MUA” directly to “mx.b.org”. My first attempt failed (“relaying denied”) because I had forgotten to remove my own address from the BCC field. Since Hinet’s server (at least this one) isn’t an open relay, it only accepts e-mails for its own users (*@hinet.net). After I fixed this, sending the e-mail was no problem (and it actually arrived, too).

Luckily, it was easy to add an alternative mail server in my e-mail software (Becky!). Still, this wasn’t the first time I had experienced problems communicating with business partners in Taiwan who were using Hinet and I’m sure I’m not the only one. I’m really wondering how many potential deals were never concluded because of Hinet’s poor performance.