Giraffe Forum

More and more customers are going straight to specific pages on your website, rather than the homepage.
In 2003, 39 percent of the page views for a large research website were for the homepage. By 2009, it was down to 19 percent. In one month in 2008, of the 70,000 page views a technology site received, […]

The most effective web marketing is having a website that is useful, simple and fast.
An online game recently ran a series of ads featuring buxom women. When asked why it had buxom women in its ads since no such women appeared in the game itself, a representative of the company admitted that the women were […]

The words we use when we search are not always the words we like to read when we arrive at a website.
Over the years, I have discovered that the way we think and the words we use when we search give strong clues as to what we want, but only clues. The words that will […]

News shouldn’t be kept on a website longer than one month. After that it only gets in the way.
As we have analyzed search behavior on a number of websites, we have noticed that news keeps coming up very prominently in the first page of search results. However, customers were rarely if ever searching for news. […]

If your customers can’t find what they want on the first page of results, very few of them will go to the second page.
More people have reached the top of Mount Everest than have been to the 5,000th search result. It’s brutal out there. Up on Everest they suffer from oxygen deprivation, but on […]

Optimize for the searcher, not the search engine. Focus on your customers, not on the technology.
It is incredibly important to get found when your customers search. However, it is even more important for your customers to find what they are looking for. And it is equally important that when they find what they’re looking […]

The more you delete, the more you simplify. The more you simplify, the more you increase the chances of your customers succeeding on your website.
I recently worked with an organization that had managed to delete a substantial quantity of content from its website. It was not an easy process. In fact, it took years of […]

Intranet search is appalling because people don’t want their content to get found, and the organization does not value the importance of finding.
Why do so many of the best organizations in the world have ass-and-cart search engines? The quality of search is astonishingly bad within most organizations. And what’s even more astonishing, nobody’s in charge […]

Traditional advertising is broken because it charges us time, when time is becoming our most valuable resource.
Traditional advertising works well in time-rich, money-poor economies. It works less well in today’s money-rich, time-poor economy. There was a time when we were prepared to watch something that might be vaguely interesting.
We watched the car ad even […]

Installing Google for your public website or intranet does not replace the need for professional management.
The cult of technology can be disturbing. For years, a scruffy bunch of people within organizations went around muttering: “A Portal. A Portal. What we need is a Portal.”
Some of these people became seriously disturbed and could be […]