What does this mean for you as a website owner? It means that more of your visitors will be browsing your site on mobile devices such as BlackBerrys and iPhones. The recent release of the new iPhone will increase this number.

So what? Good question.

How does your website work on an iPhone, or a cellphone? Have you checked? The biggest difference is that these portable devices have a much smaller display than your average PC or laptop. This can mean that your nicely laid-out pages are squashed, stretched, and otherwise moved around [obviously this is less of a problem on the iPhone, but it's true for most other devices].

Mobile devices tend to be slower than PCs, so loading times are longer. If your site relies on large images or flash animations these can make the browsing experience pretty lousy.

Unless you code your pages properly, your CSS stylesheet can be ignored. This means your fonts can be messed up too, for example with oversized letters in headings.

So here’s a list of useful guidelines to follow to make sure your website works well for your mobile visitors:

1. Design for the smaller screen. Go for less columns, and ideally no horizontal scrolling
2. Use a separate CSS stylesheet and switch to a mobile version
3. Design your pages for input with a stylus/trackball, rather than a mouse
4. Reduce image sizes, or remove them altogether
5. Disable flash animations
6. Make fonts compatible with the smaller screen size (especially headings)

If you follow these guidelines you’ll provide a better browsing experience for your visitors. Hopefully they will spend more time on your site and come back in the future for more…

Here’s an interesting question to ask yourself: would you share your bookmarks with a friend? How about 100 friends? How about 1000?

If the answer is no then don’t worry. It doesn’t make you a bad person. There are some good reasons why it can happen so read on…

Social bookmarking sites such as Digg, del.icio.us and stumbleupon allow internet users to vote on their favorite sites. You can even start your own based on Pligg. If these bookmarked sites get lots of votes (or tags, or diggs, or whatever you want to call them) they will make it to the top and get noticed. This is web2.0 in action.

How do you share your bookmarks? It’s very easy to do this. On most of these sites you have a profile page which stores all of the tags that you have created. Sharing or promoting your bookmarks is just a case of sending people to this page with a link.

So what would 100 people think of your bookmarks? Would they think you are a good Digger or a great citizen on StumbleUpon? Are you consistently tagging interesting sites that are relevant to the category that you choose? If so then the answer to the first question should be yes!

If the answer is no, it might be that:

1. You are bookmarking for the sake of it
2. You just Stumble your own stuff to get traffic. If you do, and it’s good stuff, then this seems OK to me. It can look a little self-centered though
3. You are bookmarking to try to raise your profile

Here’s an easier question: if you don’t feel happy sharing all your bookmarks with friends then how about sharing a subset of your bookmarks? Maybe they are tagged with the word “proud”, or “worth sharing”. Many of the bookmarking sites, such as del.icio.us, allow you to use tags.

If you can consistently show that you are finding interesting pages that are relevant to your group of online friends then you will get a good reputation and people will start to look at what you are up to. This leads to more visitors and more traffic to your own sites. That’s a good thing, and means you can say yes to the original question.

Just click the picture to download

Does your site provide the profits that you want? Do you get enough visitors? Can you find yourself where you want to be on Google?

If the answer to these is no then I’m guessing you’re not getting the results you want from your site

What do you do about this? There’s plenty of help out there. 1000’s of websites and blogs and books all offering schemes to help you. Did I say 1000’s? Actually I meant millions.

And there’s the problem. Which tips and schemes do you choose? Which do you ignore? Which do you start first?

The solution is to read my guide. I’ve written about the ideas that I have used to make my websites work. They are all tried and tested and they all worked for me.

I’ll show you how to start taking control of your website and getting the results you want.

The guide is free and all you need to do is click on the picture to download it.

In this guide I’ll show you how to:

1. Build compelling content that search engines love and which keeps your visitors coming back for more
2. Get visitors to your site using AdWords without spending a fortune
3. Learn how to shape up your style – including the psychology behind great color schemes
4. Find out how all of this might be irrelevent if you don’t have a unique and compelling product
5. Stop losing visitors – improve your site navigation

Remember: you should be getting the results that YOU want from your site. It’s time to get back in control and get a Better Website

A webiste is an artiste who works with the web. Its correct pronunciation is web-iste. It is often combined with other words like:

Webiste designer: an artiste who designs for the web

Free webiste: someone who does it for free

Family webiste: a webiste who is part of a family

Webiste development: what webistes do as they progress through their career

Do you believe any of this? I thought not. I invented the word purely to demonstrate that common words can often be spelled wrongly on the web. This happens a fair amount when people type queries into search engines such as Google. Why is this worth knowing?

Well, you can probably get a small-ish amount of visitors to your site by targeting a few common keyword mis-spellings. Webiste is just website with two swapped letters. There are a few searches performed each day on the mis-spelled version. Its only a few but this is a fairly common technique referred to as targeting the long tail of search engine enquiries.

Try targeting a few mis-spellings of you website keywords and see if you get any hits from the search engines. Let me know if it works!

It’s a great place for building focussed content and promoting it. Squidoo rates pretty high in Google and your pages can appear high up in search results.

It’s pretty easy to set up a lens and build some content, but making it successful and getting a good lens rank is a little bit harder. You can make some money if visitors click on the AdSense links which feature on your lens. This is what happened today!

I do know a Giant Squid and you can check out some of her lenses at EverythingMouse on Squidoo. A Giant Squid award is given by the folks at Squidoo to someone who creates top notch lenses (and lots of them). I’ll be following her lead as I develop more lenses and get started on promoting them.

1. Obsessively check your website stats

2. Book a round-the-world-tour

3. Go on your round-the-world-tour

4. Set up an AdWords campaign

5. Obsessively check your AdWords clicks and costs

6. Keep chasing links to your site

7. Watch an entire season of American Idol

What do you like to do while you’re waiting for Google? Leave a comment or you can Vote for your own ideas on my Google Alternatives Squidoo Lens

Part of the answer is to check in with your affiliate (or their provider) and look at your impressions, clicks and sales. But this is only part of the answer.

To get the complete picture you need to use your web analytics tool to track some key things on your site:

1. Page views on the pages with the affiliate links
2. How visitors navigated to these pages
3. Clicks on the links through to the affiliate sites

Why do you need to check these too? I knew you’d ask.

Page views should be approximately the same as the impressions reported by your affiliate. Hopefully your affiliate will report a higher number of impressions as visitors return to their site with the same cookie set. It certainly should not be less – this could be a sign that your tracking code is wrong

Navigation to these pages is useful to know because you want to know where visitors come from and which referrers are working for you. Your web analytics tool should be able to show which is the most successful, whether it’s organic search (Google etc) or direct referrers.

It’s good to start tracking the clicks out of your site. If you don’t track them they will just be reported as exits by your web analytics system. This will give you a terrible click through rate and make your efforts seem worthless! You can add tracking to your outbound links using Javascript onclick functions, or you can insert your own gateway pages that have their own tracking code.

If you can get started with these metrics then you can start to really understand your traffic and what it is doing for you.

Otherwise you’re just working in the dark…