With the launch of Google's new browser - Chrome - earlier this week, a new big kid has moved into the neighbourhood and upset the browser wars version of leapfrog. The new kid has new rules and wants to do things differently!

Designed for the Web 2.0 world, it should appeal to people already using web based applications, whether such as Calendars, CRM whatever. For most of them, the browser is purely a window into the application and needs to be fast, robust and with minimal clutter. Chrome ticks those boxes far better than IE or Firefox.

If however you like to customise your browser experience with lots of add-ins, toolbars and third party extras, then you'll stay with Firefox.

And for the majority who don't understand why there is more than one browser, they'll stay with whatever version of Internet Explorer is on their PC!

My personal view is Chrome will be number two browser within two years.

Andy Wooles of WSI has been invited to run a series of Internet Clinics in conjunction with the Chester, Ellesmere Port and North Wales Chamber of Commerce.

This is their invitation email

Email marketing can be a very powerful tool for customer retention and development. It can help to build awareness of the full ranges of products and services a company provides.

With a sign-up button on your web site, it adds another conversion tool to increase the effectiveness of the site.

Email marketing can complement the existing channels of communication with customers, prospects and business partners, so reinforcing your brand and encouraging loyalty.

It is said "Selling is being in the right place at the right time, Marketing is getting you there!!"

The challenge is to make your email marketing informative and effective for your target audience. A recent blog post at SEOMoz reviewed an assortment of e-newsletters to give a personal view on their effectiveness - th ...

Once you have implemented a web analytics system such as Clicktracks or Google Analytics, it is very easy to be seduced by the volume of data being collected....and fall into the trap of assuming that gives you a complete picture.

However 'clickstream' data, as it is often termed, gives you the facts - how many, when, what pages, how long etc etc. - Quantatitive measures of the visitor activity on your web site.

So what is missing?

The 'soft data' -  why did they visit? did they find what they wanted? what did they think of your site? etc etc -
Capturing qualitative measures of visitors' thoughts and opinions.

There are a number of ways of collecting this data, the most effective being through a web site exit survey asking a few simple 'open' questions.

If you would like to discuss this area of web analytics in more detail or add an exit survey to your site, give me a call.

There are hundreds of search engines around the world and lots of companies offering automated submission services to get your site into their indexes.

But are they all relevant for search optimisation?

The important question is which of those hundreds of search engines do your site visitors use? A quick check of the web logs of your site should reveal a somewhat predictable answer.

Most people in the UK use Google - approximately 80% of all searches. 
Adding in the searches through the two runners-up - Yahoo and MSN Live take the  total to more than 95%,
And Ask will contribute a few more percent.

Just four search engines are probably generating 98-99% of all searches in the UK.

The focus of commercial web site optimisation therefore needs to be towards these engin ...

There was a great post from Rand on the SEOMoz blog recently about the 'last pre-internet generation'.

Essentially it pointed out that for anyone born after about 1980, then their childhood was affected in some way by the internet (assuming they lived in the affluent Western world!).

I remember a conference in the mid 90s in the US when the 'show stopper' was a live demonstration of ordering pizza over the internet, with the pizza actually delivered half and hour later!!!

1995 also saw the birth of eBay and Amazon, and MySpace came along four years later. These three sites are still pushing forward the boundaries of the internet.

Rand's post highlighted the world before websites, search engines and social networks, such as looking for information in encylopedias, dictionaries and phone books. What about the lost art o ...

Its simple question that reveals a lot about a business and their internet presence.

Most enterprises can provide a 'soft' or qualititive answer - 'we want sales enquires and we know we get quite a few from the web site".

However far fewer have established targets or success criteria - "we aim for an average of 10 leads a week, and have achieved that for the past month".

Similarly most companies with websites, if pushed, can usually find some usage statistics - "4132 page views last month". However few look at measures which are meaningful to the business itself - "number of forms submitted, number of unique visitors, number of brochure downloads...."

Web Analytics enables a company to manage their web presence like any other resource - setting targets, monitoring results, implementing improvements. By setting and measuring business related outcomes, ...

They say a picture tells a thousand words. And we all know that the search engines love text and largely ignore the graphics. But what about us humans?

Here's a really neat web site which will 'vacuum' all the words off a web site to leave just the graphics - www.netdisaster.com  Just enter a URL and then select the 'Text Sucker' option - no permanent damage is done, but it really demonstrate how much we rely upon the text on even the most graphic rich site. The site will also throw all manner of other very graphical plagues over your site as well.

So good web design balances the power of graphics and words to attract and persuade the visitor to explore the site and take the action we desire.

So the Number 3 in Search is hoping to buy the Number 2!

In most markets, that still leaves them miles behind Google for search volume and advertising revenues.

Perhaps in time, they might provide a viable option for UK Pay Per Click clients. However they might also give Google an incentive to try even harder!