She Has Something to Do With Web Sites
This year my family went out in all directions for Thanksgiving. My husband, Eric, and I went to my Mom and Dad’s for dinner. Not 5 minutes into the meal, Dad asks, “What is it. Again. That you do again?” My sister, her son and my mom also had “some idea”. Eric took a stab at it. After his elevator speech, my Dad pauses from his turkey to say, “You call it Usability. What is that, exactly.” So I went into my elevator speech that included search engines and search engine optimization. I’m cross skilled, and naturally blend usability and seo pra

Cre8pc Blog: Tank Not Empty Yet (Just Busy)
When I started the Cre8pc blog, in 2002, blogging was nowhere as popular as it is today. Back then, blogging was still related to diaries and journals and often of a personal nature. Mine has evolved as trends change. Today, it’s the leading communication device that allows me to stay in touch with readers and friends. I used to post here every day and then a few days a week and now, if I’m lucky, a few times a month. In some ways, I’ve just run out of things to write about. Often, someone else has just done a better job of writing about something I find interesting and I leave it at that. Blogs come and go. We’ve all witnessed this as th

Spam Forums at Your Own Risk
With every industry, there is an underground of folks who find more pleasure in wrecking a good thing.  Search engine marketing is no exception. Somehow, the idea that humans can outwit search engines became a challenge and even a battle.  For myself, as an SEO who brings usability and user experience design to the mix, the key to marketing and web design is understanding what people want.  It’s referred to as user behavior. Search engine computers are programmed to look for signals about what we want and like. Yet, somewhere along the way, somebody decided to promote the idea that spamming search engines will help their web pages rank better.  To their way

Intuit Web Site Setup Service Misleading
I would like to thank Intuit for their hard work in bringing me new clients. It came as quite a surprise that you support my web site usability and SEO services. Imagine my surprise when I flipped on the boob tube for several minutes while making tea from the comfort of my (very busy!) home office and there you were, all professional sounding like, with your (dare I say it?) sly and devious commercial to small biz web site owner hopefuls. For the mere fee of $4.99 (or some such pittance), new web site owners can buy a web site designed and marketed by Intuit. In just under 3 minutes, you had me going there, by golly. Especially the part about being findable in sea

Ms. Dewey Search Lives On
Every once in awhile I long for the days when my sassy female search idol, Ms. Dewey, would tap on my monitor asking where where I was. Today was one of those days. If you remember, Ms. Dewey as a viral marketing campaign started by Microsoft 3 years ago this month. The site was an experimental interface for Live Search. It didn’t take searchers long to discover you could prompt her to say and do naughty, silly things with certain keyword searches. Looking to see if there are any updates on her demise (they bring back dead soap opera stars, why not Ms. Dewey?), I found her domain alive and well sitting in the first spot in Google SERPS. However, upon