Web metrics: Average Time on Site: The Longer The Better?

Last Updated by Michelle Sullivan

Sorry to hear that your viewers stay on your website so long!

Web usability | Viewer's longer stay - not always a good thing

The story

A marketing/web coordinator has just finished his first web traffic analysis and report, and he is very pleased with the company website performance / web metrics in the last few months. The best item of all he thinks is the “Average time on site” item — telling him how long on average his viewers stay on the site. It’s about 5 minutes, so people must find his company website interesting and stay long to find more information.  Read more...


Web metrics: Website traffic – The More The Better?

Last Updated by Michelle Sullivan

With this post and some other posts about web usability and web metrics I take a different approach. Instead of going straight to the point and talking about web metrics and web usability, I chose a lengthier but more unexpected route — telling story for a change. Hopefully, you find it useful and interesting to read.

Sorry to hear that your website has tons of traffic!

Web usability | High traffic - not always a good thing

The story

A web designer guaranteed his client “I’ll optimize your website so that in the next couple of months you’ll get tons of traffic to your online store!” A couple of months later, the client came back to see her designer and requested “Could you… somehow de-optimize the site so that it gets less traffic?” “Huh????”  Read more...


Free Softwares – Free Photo Editor

Last Updated by Michelle Sullivan

Free photo editors including both photo editing softwares and
photo editing online applications

Photo editor icon

If you have a high resolution stock image or an image from your digital camera and wonder how to put it on the web with smaller size, then you need to use a photo editing software/application allowing you to crop, resize, and do some other photo adjustment/enhancement. Here are some working, reliable and completely free image editing software and image editing web-based application.

Things worth considering while deciding which freewares to use: who owns/creates the software; whether it’s still being upgraded and supported? the size of the installation file? the functionality? other users’ ratings…  Read more...


MS Excel 2003 Custom Colors, Custom Chart Colors & Custom Color Palette

Last Updated by Michelle Sullivan

Apply RGB colors / custom colors/ custom color palette to MS Excel charts and text.

Excel custom chart color

Updated article for Excel 2010: Excel 2010 Custom Colors
The article below was written for Excel 2003; it’s still accurate and useful for Excel 2003 users. If you’re using Excel 2010, please click on the above link for a more relevant article.

Using consistent colors and color palette across different marketing tools and materials — ads, sale literature, web pages, spreadsheets and charts,… — are significantly important and beneficial. However, most of the time your business colors are not included inside Excel default color palette. If that’s the case, you’ll need to replace the default colors in Excel with your customized color palette. Here’s how:  Read more...


Favicon – Create Favicon For Your Website

Last Updated by Michelle Sullivan

Create favicon — address bar icon, or bookmark icon for your blog, and website.
Updated for Photoshop CS4

Favicon - Address bar icon

This is to show you how to create and add your own favicon to your website or blog – including your Blogger/Blogspot, WordPress… The process is really simple and nearly the same for a website or a blog. First you need to create a favicon with Photoshop or with other tools; then upload the favicon to your website.  Read more...