Welcome to the second edition of our Cre8tive Community Weekly Roundup.

Cre8asite Forum Threads

Here are some of our favorite threads of this week.

  • A Question on Cookies

    Forum moderator Barry Welford asks and receives: how do cookies help your visitors? What can they do to make user interactions more efficient and intuitive? If you need information on the use of browser cookies, come on in and participate. This thread is off to a hot start at covering the bases, with cookie tutorials, cookie questions and cookie answers.

  • Search Radar

    Cre8asite moderator eKstreme says, “This is the best keyword expansion service I’ve seen - ever.” Search Engine Roundtable picked up on eKstreme’s mention of this beta tool, and offers screenshots. If you’ve tried it, visit our Search Radar thread and share your experiences.

  • Sitemap Diagrams Programs

    Back in February, Cre8tive member saschaeh started the thread, “Sitemap Diagrams Programs” - a discussion of sitemaps and programs to create visually rich site maps. The community came forth with links to programs. This week the thread was brought back to life when forum member lee.n3o offered up a link to a very clever free tool called bubbl.us, and EGOL suggested an alternative strategy:

    Instead of a standard site map, we are making “category pages” that have images, short summaries, and article quotes. These give a very colorful presentation of the website’s content. You can arrange in a variety of ways. We have experimented and found that making special categories for “newest” and “most popular” is helpful.

    Now, instead of making something for the search engines these are built into a functional page for the site and the massive amount of text that ours contain draws a lot of long tail search traffic.

  • Craziest linkbait idea you can think of

    A little game that attempts to encourage creative thinking for linkbait when the topic matter itself may not usually lend itself to creativity. Even the most boring topics were dealt with by swift and creative minds! Take a gander at these fun suggestions by Barry Welford:

    • Plumber - The Mystery Of The Non-Flushing Toilet
    • Car Repair Service - Was It A Body In The Trunk?
    • Flooring Dealer (carpet/floors) - All You Wanted To Know About Removing Bloodstains
    • Farm Equipment Dealer - Did You Bury It Deep Enough?
    • Private Investigator - Was This You?
    • Veterinarian - The Most Embarrassing Thing A Pet Has Done
    • Tanning Salon - What Proportion Tan All Over?

  • 30 Minute Backlinking?

    Member Flying Monkeys started a post about the 30 Minute Backlinks product. Is the 30 minute backlink product worth it? Could there be repercussions from using it? Does any good idea…once fed to the masses… immediately lend itself to being abused and then rendered useless? Can one turn a potentially spammy idea into a valuable idea by tweaking it some?

Cre8asite Member Highlights

Our kudos to Cre8asite Forums members.

  • WordPress Camp Vancouver

    Cre8asite Forums member Kulpreet Singh shared with us that he was a presenter at WordPress camp Vancouver. His talk was on using WordPress to create a custom library, catalog, or other mashup-type site. Expect a Cre8tive Flow blog post about the event within a few days.

  • Changing Everything Changes Everything

    This recent post by Cre8asite Forums moderator Ruud Hein was nominated as a favorite by community member khalidh. Changing Everything Changes Everything is from the Search Engine People Blog. It’s part of a series of posts explaining search engine behaviour from a plain and simple human point of view.

    Search engines are programmed by humans. So if you understand how humans think, what we fear, what drives us, you’re a long way towards understanding how search engines “think”.

    When confronted with extreme and sudden changes, search engines are programmed to become nervous and distrusting.

    The first thing they want to do when a site or its fingerprints (think links and link patterns!) change is look for signals that, OK, don’t worry, everything is A-OK

  • Persuasive Web Design
    This beautiful blog post by Cre8asite Forums owner Kim Krause Berg is adapted from an article she had published in the Search Marketing Standard, Summer 2007 edition.

    Branding is more than a logo or web site design. It’s the customers’ experience with products or services that counts and contributes strongly to word of mouth advertising and repeat sales. The customer experience doesn’t need to be a one-shot approach. Our experiences are culled from anywhere we learn to trust a company and feel comfortable enough to do business with them.

    Interest in persuasive web design is exploding due to user behavior studies. What jazzes us off-line, also works online. We want to be remembered. Marketers know this. The result is intuitive design. We want products on sale, services by credible companies, solutions to problems and answers to questions.

Thanks to Our Friends

We appreciate the Cre8tive Community for their continued support and involvement.

  • Search Engine Roundtable

    As I was compiling this post, Google Alerts sent me a link about a Cre8asite Forums thread I hadn’t read, and I thought “What would we do without Search Engine Roundtable?” Day in, day out, the Search Engine Roundtable’s dedicated contributors report on the most interesting threads taking place at the SEM (Search Engine Marketing) forums. Outstanding threads are reported, with a synopsis that provides greater detail. Search Engine Roundtable is a gem.

  • Coming soon: Mother’s Day Logo

    Mother’s Day is eight days away and we already have a lovely Mother’s Day logo ready and waiting. It’s a little pre-emptive, but I couldn’t resist the temptation to send out a hat tip to Risa Borsykowsky, the logo’s designer.