SEOBook.com in the past asked whether you should set up multiple web sites, or concentrate on just one.

Here’s a problem I’ve been grappling with for years:

• For a given web site, do you buy all related domains and misspelling domains related to your site?

The answer is no! (Took me a while to come to a decision, and of course some others don’t agree.).

Don’t purchase misspelling domains. A prerequirsite rule for that is: don’t have a web site name whose spelling isn’t obvious.

Don’t purchase 100 similar domains. It’s not worth it. Get a good domain for your site, and stick with it.

You won’t be able to surpress competitors just by buying up similar domain names. There will always be ways for them to purchase alternative domain names with clever usage of keywords. Moreover, they don’t need a domain containing the target keyword if they publish good quality content.

Instead of buying up domain, concentrate on your content for your visitors. Go on the offensive, don’t be defensive.

It’s not any more.

Flickr was probably my favourite site online for a while. It was fun posting images. Commenting on photos made it a “social” Web 2.0 poster child.

But by now, 2009, it’s left itself behind. Features introduced by sites like Facebook and Twitter seem almost obligatory these days, but Flickr hasn’t caught up.

1. It’s a photography site whose photos are only 500px wide. Ugh.
2. You can’t tag friends in photos (such as Facebook).
3. Your logged-in home page attempts to give you a “friend stream”, but it just doesn’t seem to work. A more genrealised “universal stream” might work better.

But is there a good alternative yet to Flickr? Nothing mainstream has emerged, anyway.

Lots of web sites are designed to be interacted with. But it’s putting that interaction to the test that often gets forgotten about.

A user to your site will probably have never met you, and will never ever have visited the site before, but needs to use it immediately, no exceptions.

You can do the granny test: sit her in front of your web site, and if she doesn’t understand what to do, simplify.

There’s a lovely little tool to tap into the wisom of the crowds on this dilemma. It’s called CrazyEgg (nice name), and I first read about it on MicroISV on a Shoestring.

CrazyEgg lets you “visualize your visitors”:

• Run a test on a page over a certain number of visits (say, 1,000 people).
• And see what people are clicking on the page, even if it’s not a link they’re clicking on.

Seems simple, but to see a heatmap of where the most clicks are going is very revealing.

CrazyEgg to the rescue

I’ve been running such tests since last month. One of the tests was on an inner page of Irish-Sayings.com for people who were not logged in. The idea behind it is that you can listen to some sayings for free, but are asked to sign up for once-off membership to hear all 900+ recordings.

Some recordings are listed as a “taster”, but cannot be listened to without logging in. Here’s what the list looked like:

A simple list of audio not available without signing up.

Simplez, right?

It’s just a simple text list. The English is in black, and the Irish is in green to highlight it.

Along comes the CrazyEgg heatmap after 1,000 visits:

Heatmap of the text link, every click makes that areas "hotter".

Feck! People were actually clicking on the green text, presumably trying to listen to the audio. It’s not just a couple of clicks, there have been dozens of clicks recorded on the text. Visitors are getting confused! Or more specifically, I’m confusing my visitors.

The design has been like that for at least a year already…

The Solution

Quite simple, I changed the Irish green text to italics for another way of highlighting it. You can see the result here, for example:

http://www.irish-sayings.com/cats/people/love/

The result: hopefully happier visitors who don’t get confused by the design.