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.

I wanted to add our logo to a brochure so that visitors of our scales and balances shop would have a way of telling from where they had downloaded the brochure. This particular brochure had backgrounds in several colors, which is why the logo itself needed to have a transparent background.

Unfortunately, Nitro PDF Professional does not recognize the transparent background in image files (tested with version 5.5.1.3). The watermark has to be a PDF file to have a transparent background.To make matters worse, the simple graphics editor I had used years ago to create the logo had no PDF export option.

Here’s the workaround I used:

1. Export the logo in an image format that supports transparency (I used PNG):

2. Open the image with OpenOffice Draw (open source, free download here):

3. Export as PDF:

4. In Nitro PDF, choose Insert and Edit > Watermark > Manage Watermarks & Backgrounds:

5. Create a new profile and add a PDF watermark:

6. Choose the PDF file created in step 3 and adjust the settings to place the watermark where you want it. Don’t forget to choose Open a web link under Action if you want the watermark to be clickable:

7. Apply the watermark to the document:

As you can see, it looks pretty good on a blue background, too.

Note: You can move individual watermarks around using the Edit tool, but the clickable area does not seem to move with them.

External links:

• Nitro PDF Professional
• OpenOffice Draw
• balances.lu (in French)

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.

Apparently, some sort of Luxembourgish product and retail store search engine is in the works, too. The idea seems to be that you enter the product and it tells you where you can find what you want in Luxembourg and why you shouldn’t drive to Trier instead. Just kidding about the Trier part.

BTW, the young woman chewing on her shopping bag on goodidea.lu is file number 3563163 from iStockphoto [affiliate link].
Happy shopping!

Note: This blog here has moved to a new server at Hosteurope [affiliate link] (and has been updated to the latest version of WordPress), please let me know if something’s broken.

“SAS’s flight operations have always enjoyed an excellent reputation and there is a risk that use of the Dash 8 Q400 could eventually damage the SAS brand,” said John Dueholm, Deputy CEO of SAS.

According to Wikipedia, “in all, seven Q400s have had landing gear failures while landing during 2007: four in Denmark, one in Germany, one in Japan, one in Lithuania and one in South Korea.”

This makes me wonder if Luxair is regretting their purchase of three Q400 (with an option for another three) and the publicity surrounding their recent start of operations. Although I think it is highly unlikely that Luxair’s brand new planes will suffer from similar problems anytime soon (SAS was an early operator), passengers’ doubts about the safety of this type of aircraft could quickly offset all cost advantages.

Ironically, the planes were originally supposed to “reflect and emphasize” Luxair’s goals of establishing itself as regional carrier known for “quality and security”. Now they might very well have the opposite effect.

Note: For the latest rumors and news on the Q400, visit PPRuNe.org (direct link to thread). 

Auf Platz 2 der Amazon-Topseller im Bereich Software [Affiliate-Link] hat es Leopard dennoch geschafft. Was dies im Vergleich zum Absatz im stationären Einzehandel bedeutet, ist leider nicht klar. Mit dem Erscheinungstermin an einem Freitag dürfte Apple den Versandhändlern allerdings keinen Gefallen getan haben.

Der Gutscheincode lautet übrigens AMZNLPRDAPPL und gilt bis Ende November und für alle Versionen von OS X 10.5 [Affiliate Link]. Weitere Gutscheincodes gibt es im Amazon-Affiliate-Blog (für jeden zugänglich) oder über diesen Affiliate-Link auf Amazon.de.