The colors you choose for your website affect how much your visitors like your website. You probably could have guessed that, though. It turns out that cooler primary colors make websites appear more orderly to users, which in turn can lead to users thinking that your site is more aesthetically pleasing and more usable, which in turn can make your site look more credible and trustworthy.

Researchers at Michigan State University did a study of how color choices affect user impressions of websites and their findings came out in the recent issue of the Journal of Usability Studies in a paper titled “An Empirical Investigation of Color Temperature and Gender Effects on Web Aesthetics.”

According to the study, using a cool primary color such as blue for the top part of the page and/or as a global element will make websites look better organized and aesthetically pleasing to users; using a cool color as a secondary color on the page boosts the website’s appeal over a warm color as a secondary color.

Attractiveness matters. Users often think that sites are easier to use when they are more attractive. Of course, the right color scheme to use also depends on context–what type of character you want, your users’ expectations, how the rest of your marketing materials portray you or your products.

This paper makes for a good read. It is good to read some research into how color affects design, and in its literature review, it points out a number of other papers that may be interesting.

Today, the Ann Arbor Chamber of Commerce is unveiling their new personality to the world – They are hip and ready to rock!

Who will be there: Local Michigan business leaders, politicians, and techie types growing companies just under your radar – like us! Based on networking with these people offline and online, I can say we are all helping force a change in Michigan’s economy and I think you need to do some offline social networking with these people!

Now we will be gathering to share stories, inspire business opportunities, seed an idea or two, share some laughter, and collect a pocket full of business cards. What happens next…we go to our computers with our business cards and perform a Google search, check LinkedIn or Facebook, read some articles to get more background information on the companies and connect with them using a social network device like LinkedIn. Can you see the cycle?

If you want to know if your networking event was successful, then go to your Google Analytics and check to see how many people came to your site based on your name and your company name that week…is there a spike? If so, you had a successful offline social networking experience!

So I will be at the Ann Arbor Chamber’s Open House from 4-6pm. I encourage you to drop in any time today to try out some face to face social networking!

Ann Arbor Chamber of Commerce – Open House
115 W. Huron, 3rd Floor, Ann Arbor
Friday, June 6, 11am – 6pm

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is a 2003 science fiction book, the first novel by Canadian author and digital-rights activist Cory Doctorow. In the novel, Whuffie, or social cash, is a constantly updated rating that measures how much esteem and respect other people have for you, and replaces money. It determines who gets the few scarce items. Unlike money, it never begets more of itself once in someone’s possession.

“Wiki-nomics” is the term used to describe some of the latest efforts to adapt such a system in reality. Yuwie is one example that attempts this without abandoning the notion of money entirely. It claims to be the marketing system of the future, paying users to blog, upload pictures, refer friends, chat, etc. Is it for real? It appears so, but details remain vague for now.

In a sense it seems unnecessary that systems like Yuwie would bring money into the picture at all. More than one blog post on social media as a marketing channel has pointed out that the transactions are valuable in their own right for the opportunities that connecting can foster. Social cash, in the form of online interactions like Friending, Digging, etc, may be a reality already, depending on who you talk to.

But to what extent can social cash replace traditional varieties? Is Marx soon to turn in his grave? Are economics really giving way to “Wiki-nomics”?

Far from it, say some adamantly. As the blog Now is Gone argues, at least for now, “there is no baseline for exchange rates. There is no common currency… The market is totally free – free for you to define, free for you to dissect, free for you to develop.”

But this answer is less than satisfactory as well. Just because a common exchange rate online has yet to be developed doesn’t mean it won’t be. What will be interesting is how to solve the inevitable issues of how social cash will interface with real money, assuming the latter sticks around!

Domain names are a kind of company collateral; they are an extremely inexpensive way to collect terms or phrases that might be useful in the future, even if they are not of value now. At an average price of $10 for uncontested .com domain names plus a low annual maintenance fee, spending a few hours a year exploring domain name options can be a good exercise for any company.

However, domain names that are not well maintained end up creating all kinds of problems. Even larger organizations consistently drop the ball when it comes to buying and maintaining them.

The problem is this: domain names may feel like an IT project, but really they are a marketing and company collateral project that happens to have an IT component. IT assets generally could care less about domain name purchase and maintenance and generally don’t prioritize them, which means that they are often hard to recover or manage in emergencies.

How do you prevent domain name registration problems from becoming a resource drain or even a marketing threat? Just follow these simple steps!

Step 1: Clean up your act. This involves two tasks:

– Use the same registrar and account for ALL your domain names. All domain name systems provide essentially identical service. The small difference in price from month to month that GoDaddy or Tucows is providing for uncontested .com names is probably not worth the headache of maintaining domain names across multiple registrars.

– If you do have domain names across multiple registrants, integrate them. This may cost as much as $60 per domain name and may require notarized identity information, but in the long run it’s worth it. This is also necessary if you are buying a name on a registrar at a premium that you really want.

Step 2: Protect and maintain your collateral. This involves three tasks:

– Treat domain name transactions as if they were legal identity transactions, such as setting up a bank account. This might seem extreme, but in fact domain names ARE legal property and the amount of headache and overhead in correcting problems with them is directly related to that fact. If you have the most paranoid, picky accounting person in your company manage the domain name registration and maintenance process, many of the typical domain name problems simply won’t happen.

– Treat your domain name login information as if it were irreplaceable financial data. Most passwords on the web are replaceable with low effort; if you lose them, most companies are willing to reconnect you with low effort. Not so with domain name registrars, who are dealing with what is essentially property. Losing your account data with a registrar can lead to transactions involving letterhead, notaries, etc. Keep your domain name registrar data–account ID, username, and password–in the same place as your other critical business information, such as your HR social security data.

– Commit to an annual automatic renewal of your core keyphrase names, and accept the possibility that you’ll lose ones that you don’t renew. It’s incredibly easy to poach unprotected domain names, so pony up the $200 or so a year you’ll need to keep your core ten domain names covered. If you have many more, it may still be worth it, but expect that if they are not renewed, someone else–most likely a poacher who will try to sell it back to you for twenty times what you paid for it, or, worse, a competitor–will get them.

Follow these easy steps, and domain name purchasing and maintenance will stay fun and easy…just like it’s supposed to be!

Can Borders take on Amazon? Borders recently parted ways with Amazon and started their own online store. This move allows Borders to shape their own online identity and to stop enriching their competitor. However, can Borders be successful on their own?

Amazon is not successful only because they sell a whole lot of stuff. Certainly, they do, and the name “Amazon” springs to mind for many people when they want to buy books online. Rather, Amazon has successfully harvested hours of free labor from their customers by getting them to rate and review books (who doesn’t check out the reviews before buying something?). Using Amazon to shop is valuable because so many other people have used it–the network effect at work.

In addition, their affiliates program lets bloggers refer their readers to Amazon to buy books. This arrangement makes Amazon money, and the blogger gets a commission. Amazon also offers an eCommerce API, letting people make use of Amazon’s product data and functionality. These are important factors in Amazon’s success, but this post will just focus on the customer reviews and ratings.

So what’s Borders to do in order to compete with Amazon? There’s nothing on their home page that explicitly tells me why I should buy anything from them instead of from Amazon (or anyone else). The prices seem comparable and it’s hard to improve on the quality of Amazon’s customer service–you buy a book and it just shows up at your door. As I mentioned earlier, Amazon is full of ratings and reviews, whereas Borders is full of unreviewed and unrated merchandise.

Borders has an advantage through their bricks and mortar stores which they are clearly trying to use. Their website makes the implicit promise that your experience in a physical Borders location will be extended onto the web. For example, Borders stores regularly get authors and musicians to visit and promote their work. They seem to want to bring this experience to their website through video.

Their “magic bookshelf” is also a bid to bring the experience of browsing shelves online. Actually, across the whole site, Borders has clearly got to supply an equal or superior user experience, and the “magic bookshelf” is probably part of this effort. Usability and good design are areas where they could try to take the advantage over Amazon, although it appears that they have chosen not to do so.

Borders also hopes to entice shoppers with their rewards program. I can’t really speak to how well this will work since I’m not a member, but I include it for the sake of exhaustiveness.

Will these strategies work? We shall see how well their physical stores support the website. I propose that ratings and reviews are a decisive factor. Borders should try and encourage the people buying things at their stores to then hop online and review the things they just bought. Another idea would be to set aside time for the staff at their stores to go online and write reviews. This would give their staff another outlet for their love of books, music, or movies, and would help get the ball rolling on their website. As a customer, looking at the reviews on books would be like going into the store itself and chatting with an employee and getting a recommendation. They can have reviews from real people that exist at an actual store in addition to the reviews from Some Random Person on the Internet.

It’s going to take time to build up an amount of ratings and reviews comparable to Amazon, and on top of that they must convince reviewers that it is worth doing it on the Borders site. After all, why spend your time adding content to a site if you’re already invested in another one and you’re not even sure this new one’s here to stay?

A few days ago, I read an article in the New York Times, The Humans Behind the Google Money Machine, and a quote continues to linger with me: “I wouldn’t quite go so far as to say we are recession-proof,” said Hal R. Varian, Google’s chief economist. “But we are recession-resistant.”

In the article, this quote speaks directly about how Google is faring in this economy. However the quote specifically made me think about our clients, especially those in the manufacturing industry. They are also recession-resistant online. Is Google protecting them because they continue to see the leads and sales coming in from Google AdWords and Google’s natural search listings? It certainly appears to be the case. Granted the clients do have landing pages that qualify and convert visitors into leads, which is not the responsiblity of Google but instead of us – their Internet marketing firm.

Our manufacturing clients are forward thinking innovators, they followed our recommendations and today they are on a fast growing path to increasing revenue. For example, Saline Lectronics (specializes in manufacturing mid-volume, high-mix electronic printed circuit board assemblies) , is enjoying this growth in many ways, this recent article in the Michigan Business Review “Advanced manufacturing makes gains in Michigan” says it all:

In Saline, meanwhile, Sciberras said Saline Lectronics is in contract discussions with a New Zealand firm that has identified the U.S. as a good place to do business because of the weak dollar.

“We have a company that is in town from New Zealand that looked us up and they’re thinking about bringing their whole production to the United States and they’re asking us to quote it,” Sciberras said.

I am proud of Saline Lectronics and all the manufacturing companies that have learned how to embrace the Internet as a vital part of doing business! No more excuses for those of you living in the world of manufacturing…Google can be your Money Machine if you embrace it!