A summary of posts 6 to 10

6. How to market your website with a confirmation email?
If you ever made an online purchase or subscribed yourself to a website you surely received a confirmation mail afterwards. Of all these emails you’ve received, how many times did you read information other than the obvious (your purchased books, the thank you note for subscribing)? All I see is a missed marketing opportunity because these emails are a powerful tool towards your visitors.

7. How to avoid comment spam?
I’m sure you’ve seen them before, these mindbreaking questions you need to answer or impossible images to decipher just to comment on an article. After 5 tries the horrible thing finally agrees to what you’ve typed down.
As a webmaster you don’t want to spend too much time desciding whether the comment was made by a automated bot or not. As a visitor you don’t want to spend your time by solving a stupid question in order to contribute to a an article. In this article I’ll show you some of the most common solutions to reduce comment spam.

8. Fading navigation on the Google homepage
As you may well be aware of, testing and optimizing your webpages is incredibly important to ensure a good usability and performance. Google certainly is not an exception and is testing some new features, trying to improve the interface to a more efficient, simpler and intuitive search experience. Wonder how they did it?

9. Tagclouds, useful or just keyword spam?
It is not because I expect a huge increasement of tagcloud implementations, but before you even consider doing so you could read this blogpost. Tagging is not just about giving an article some random keywords.

10. User testing and thirteen ways of selling a book
It is commonly known that user testing (and evalutation) should start throughout the early stages of development of a website. It is cost-effective when these tests are conducted in the right point of development but that doesn’t mean you should stop testing once the website goes online.