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The company that dominated dial-up Internet use is coming to grip with the future. As broadband use increases dramatically, AOL has watched subscriptions decline and advertising dollars move to Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Facing approaching irrelevance, AOL has decided to act.

AOL Reinvents

In an effort to compete, AOL is reinventing itself as an open use portal. To date, AOL has always restricted use of its portal to subscribers. No longer. AOL is beta testing a portal that makes services and content available to everyone. If all goes well, the company will launch the service this month.

AOL’s Motivation

The growth of broadband use has correlated to the decline of AOL. It is estimated that as many as 20 percent of subscribers have left the service in the last three years. This loss, of course, correlates to a loss of revenues. As a publicly traded company, AOL must act or face a shareholder revolt.

Catch 22?

AOL is playing a dangerous game with the free portal. The company is risking losing more subscribers that have stuck with the company simply because they like the AOL portal. If “You’ve Got Mail” is now free, why would anyone pay for it? AOL is soon going to provide an answer.

Further complicating matters, AOL faces an extremely difficult transformation. There is a cliché ? If it walk like a duck, quacks like a duck and smells like a duck, it’s a duck.” At its heart, AOL is a dial-up connection company. How likely is it that AOL will smoothly convert into Yahoo, MSN or Google? Time will tell, but one can expect AOL to learn some hard lessons in the transformation.

What It Means For E-Commerce

The AOL development has little direct impact on e-commerce. As time passes, however, the new strategy could significantly impact Google. Google currently supplies search results to AOL and places Google Adwords on the system. As subscribers decrease, you can expect AOL to develop solutions to replace Google. Much like Yahoo did, Google will eventually be booted from the AOL platform. The loss of 20 million AOL users must be causing Google some consternation.

The Internet is a dynamic, evolving platform. The AOL transformation is just another step in the process. Only time will tell if AOL can adapt in the evolutionary process.

35% of visitors fail to achieve their goal when they visit company websites! By following 2 simple rules, you can increase your web-derived revenue by 1/3 or more!

Renowned website usability researcher, Jakob Nielsen, today (Nov 24) published results of his latest study. His test subjects used 139 websites. On average, they failed to find what they were looking for 35% of the time. Shockingly, 37% of users couldn’t even find company location details!

What was surprising was that users didn’t give up. They generally found the information they were after ? but they found it at a competitor’s site!

So how do you stop potential customers falling into the hands of your competitors? Nielsen is right when he suggests user research. Yes, it’s imperative that know what your users need at your site. But what he doesn’t say is how to structure your website so it meets users’ needs.

There are two golden rules:
1) Write first, build later
2) Write to your customer

Write first, build later
The real message on most websites is in the writing. It makes sense, then, that the writing should determine the structure.

Unfortunately, this is not the case for most businesses. For them, the writing is an afterthought. They structure and design their website first, then try to fit the writing to the structure. This flies in the face of common sense. When you speak to someone, you structure your speech around your message. You don’t decide on a structure, then change the message to suit!

For a truly usable website, you need to plan what you want to say before you create the site ? perhaps even write the whole thing. The message ? the writing ? should determine the structure.

Write to your customer
So how do you decide what to write?

Firstly, don’t think, “What do I want to say?”. When you’re writing a website, you have to think, “What does my customer want to know?”. It’s a very subtle difference, but it’s the key to engaging writing. And that’s what you want to do? engage the customer.

Most customers will want to know the basics:

- What do you do?
- What benefit do you offer them?
- Why should they choose your service or product?
- Why should they choose your service or product and not your competitors’?
- What does it cost?
- How can they contact you?
- Where are you located?

Your website has to communicate a lot of information. And to make matters worse, you’re going to have limited screen real-estate. Ideally, your customer won’t have to scroll ? especially on your homepage (all your information will fit within a single window). And you can’t fill the whole screen with writing, either. The design and navigation elements take up about a third of the window, and you should leave a bit for white space (you don’t want to overwhelm your customer). As a rule of thumb, you should expect to have about 1/3 ? ½ of the window at your disposal for the writing.

Chances are, right now you’re thinking, “How am I going to fit it all in?”. Well, that’s where your writing skills come in. Choose your words very carefully?

Websites can be an extremely powerful piece of marketing collateral. You can reach millions for just a few hundred dollars. Unfortunately, your competitors can do the same thing. It’s a level playing field, but there are a lot of players. It’s important that your thoughts are structured, otherwise your site will be a mess. If your message is clear, your site will be simple and easy to use. It’s all in the words?

8 More Reasons to Write for Your Audience?

1) There are approximately 550 billion documents on the web

2) Every day another 7 million are added

3) Workers take so long trying to find information that it costs organisations $750 billion annually! (A.T. Kearney, Network Publishing study, April 2001)

4) Reading from a monitor is 25% slower than reading from paper. (Sun Microsystems, 1998)

5) Helpful content develops site loyalty. The average person visits no more than 19 websites in the entire month in order to avoid information overload. (Nielsen NetRatings in Jan 2001)

6) 79% of users scan read when online (Sun Microsystems, 1998)

7) Information gathering is the most common use of the Internet – 73% (American Express survey, 2000)

48% of people use the Internet to find work-related information as opposed to 7% who use magazines. (Lyra Research, 2001)

Everyday, thousands of new surfers open their browsers for the first time, it is confusing in the beginning, but if you have some good advices in the early beginning, you can surf easier and faster with a friendly browser…

Tip 1: Surf in security.
The first action that you will do if you are new to the net is to open your browser to surf. If you have a PC, like most of the Internet population. You will have Internet explorer installed in your computer, but it is not the best browser available on the net, and it is in fact limited. You may think that it is hard to surf on Internet.
When you will discover Mozilla Firefox, you will be even more happy to surf on Internet, for sure.
One of the first reason you should use Firefox is the integrated Firewall, which protect you against spyware and other adawares.

Tip 2: No need to tape http://www.—.com all the time.
The second reason to choose Firefox is that you save time; for instance, when you went on ebay.com yesterday, you wrote: http://www.ebay.com with Firefox, you just tape “e” in the address bar of your browser, then http://www.ebay.com will appear in the drop down menu, it’s like magic, and it’s fun too.

Tip 3: See all your pages in only one window.
I really love this one; you can surf in tab. That is really powerful.
For instance, with Internet Explorer, whenever you click on a link, you have 2 choice: open the page in the same window, or open it in a new window. Firefox enable you to open several pages in one window.
Let’s explain: you are now looking yahoo.com, and you want to see the news, you just right click on the link, select open in a new tab, and you have now two pages in only one window. To switch between your pages, you just need to click on anyone of the page you want to look in, all that in the same window. You can open fifteen windows in one time if you want.
Better, you can bookmark(in Internet explorer, bookmark is favorites) a tab, and open it later. It is a very intelligent way of surfing. It is very efficient when you are doing some researches on a subject, on google for example.

Tip 4: All your downloads at the same place.
The fourth reason to choose Firefox is that when you download a file on your computer, sometimes, you want to open it, but you face a problem: Where did you save that file? With Firefox, just click on tools, and then you select download, and a pop up window appear. You just scroll to find your program. It will save you time and a lot of headaches.
However, it is recommended, for the first time, to save your download on your desktop, then after save your file in the folder you choose. You can download firefox for Free. You just type firefox in google.com and you’re done.

Tip 5: Don’t forget a good anti virus,
While you surf on Internet, some hijackers will attempt to damage your computer, by introducing a virus in it. If you don’t take your precaution, you may loose all that is stored in your hard disk. You can download AVG, which is excellent at download.com.

There is a lot to learn when you start on Internet, but take your time. And everything will go smoothly.

Cheap Solution for Better Interior Decoration

Have you ever been in such situation of wishing a better look at your home interior decoration, while you have no idea on how the best way to get it without breaking your saving? To buy a new furniture or having home remodeling project, there should be lots of money to be spent on it, however you can actually get the closely equal benefit just by applying the right choosing or rug on your favorite room to give you that better look on your room decoration in overall. (more…)

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