Variable Markup

In case you missed it, there was a good article by CNN Money that covers Target’s Executive team, why they are different and how they are preparing for the departure of their CEO. http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/18/news/companies/reingold_target.fortune/index.htm

I came across a useful free tool for creating heatmaps of your website design at Feng Gui.   The site allows you to type in your url or upload an image and it creates a heatmap based on what it thinks a real human would be most likely to look at.  The application uses a ViewFinder algorithm to create a saliency map based on objects in the field of view that stand out relative to neighboring items. 
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Sitepoint, one of my favorite web design communities just released a CSS Reference -http://reference.sitepoint.com/css for looking up syntax and semantics for CSS. 

Here’s another visualization which shows the ecommerce sites in the top 500 which use Adobe Flash on their site.   While this is not a clear indicator of good use of Flash, it does give a sense of how much flash is used.  I use it to look at the sites to see who’s doing innovative things with Flash.    Although, it could just show that they have poorly optimized Flash that is bloated.  The current retailers using the most Flash are SonyStyle, Nike, Dicks Sporting Goods, and Disney Direct. 

Changing the label at the bottom left corner to Retail Vertical will show the top use of Flash by retail category instead.

Update: I’ve moved the visualization to after the click as it was too much on the homepage. (continue reading…)

I’ve been playing around with the data visualization tools at IBM’s Many Eye’s project and came up with a visualization in a treeview that shows the top 500+ ecommerce sites split by category of retailer with google page rank.  It’s an interesting way to look at the data as you quickly see that apparel & accessories dominates number of retailers in the top 500.  Following the apparel category is Specialty/Non-Apparel, Housewares, and Computers/Electronics. 

 An alternative interesting view can be see by dragging the retail vertical to the position between google page range and site.  This will group everything by page rank showing that there’s only 4 retailers with a GPR of 9. 

Update: I’ve moved the visualization to after the click as it was too much on the homepage. (continue reading…)

While surfing I came across Beyond Alt Text:  Making the Web Easy to Use for Users With Disabilitiesfrom the Nielsen Norman Group.   It’s normally $124, but they are giving it away for free for the holidays.   Accessibility design has become increasingly important over the last few years with ecommerce websites due to rulings in the courts that sites such as Target.com must be accessible.   

 It’s a good time in the year to look at your site and determine if you are compliant. 

I haven’t been writing much over the past couple weeks because I’ve been focused on developing a new mashup app that will track the top 500+ ecommerce sites on the web.    Trying to keep up with what the top companies are doing is always a difficult and time consuming task so I decided to pull information together in one place.   I’ve written a few spiders as well as some mashup code with Compete, ZoomInfo, and Google API’s to build a dossier on each of the best sites. 

Please check out The Top Ecommerce Sites and let me know what you think. 

Currently I’m tracking on each site:

• Snapshots of the home page
• Google Page Rank
• Backlinks from major search engines
• Traffic via Compete
• Company data from ZoomInfo
• Types of technology used and sizes (i.e. html, images, flash, javascript)
• User submitted comments and reviews
• 1-5 Star ratings submitted by users
• References in the Blogosphere
• Google News

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Brandon over at “The life and times” wrote up a great article on Optimizing for Google Product Search (Formerly Froogle).   Definitely worth checking out. 

I just created a Google Custom Search Engine for searching the top retail ecommerce sites on the net.  Hopefully this will be useful in finding that special gift with the holidays coming up.  I added it to the navigation bar up top. 

Personally, I’m having fun looking at the search results that google is providing.  It’s interesting to look at the various ecommerce sites and their SEO optimization as it is clearly coming into play here.  When you take out the millions of other pages google would have included in the mix, you can start to compare multiple retailers and how they’ve been optimized for organic search.

I’ll have the top ~ 500  ecommerce retail websites in the search engine by Tuesday or so.  I’m currently up to 128 for testing purposes.  The top 500+ ecommerce sites in the US are currently in the search engine which should give a wide array of stores to search.   Over time I’ll add & subtract from the overall list to improve the searching.

I have another search engine in the works for retail industry research.  It should be done in the next week or so. 

If you try it out, please send me an email or leave a comment on how well it works for you.  I’m still trying to tweak it. 

I came across this site XinuReturns.com today that quickly shows you all sorts of SEO stats on your website in a dashboard type format.  From there you can drill into each individual stat so you can try to optimize your site, backlinks, indexed pages, page rankings, keywords and validations.