Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

Once again, we've made lots of changes at ToolBarn. But now, I'm looking for some feedback. We've got a cache on our local servers of what most of the competing sites are priced at on every product we offer. If we show that, similar to Progressive Auto Insurance, are we asking for trouble? Two thoughts on why we should : 1) Establish ourselves as a destination. 2) Give our customers less reason to leave our site and look around. Two thoughts on why we should not : 1) We may not always have the lowest price. 2) We've got more traffic than most of these sites, so we'd be building their brand for them. Such a tough choice. We'll probably run an experiment at some point and see what it does. What do you think?

I started developing a mobile site for our local contractor customers yesterday. We'll see how it does, but so far I've managed to find a neat tool to view what it'll look like. Actually, you can view any site in it as it would be viewed in Opera Mini . For someone developing a site and not wanting to use a mobile device constantly to test it, this is great. Now, I just need to figure out what I want to show them for sure.

Ok, so I don't usually pay that much attention to the look of the SERPs on Google. I've noticed the yellow, noticed the 50 results earlier today, but I got a funky new look tonight. Blue lines and no background color for the ads. I wish they'd pick a look already and get on with it. Oh, and clicking on the image will give a clearer view. This one just seemed creepy to me. I didn't like it at all, mostly because it's so chopped up. Oh, well... it's their site to mess up I guess. One other change that was noticed on this version: No links for the other Google services above the search box, and it doesn't show me as logged in (or able to log in). Final thing I just noticed... on the "Standard" results, I show 294M results for the two word phrase power tools. With this new look, I only get 20M results. What happened to the other 274M?

Google started showing 50 results today on search result pages for me. I've never changed it from default, as I want to see what a "typical" searcher sees, so when it kept scrolling and scrolling I was confused. Is this another UI test? If so, I give it a thumbs down. I know how to change it to show 50 or 100, but I choose 10. Showing me 50 with the yellow ads is too many changes for me. Baaahh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What happens when you let a few computer geek types loose to run the marketing department? Well, that's what we've been doing at ToolBarn for a while, so it's been interesting. For example, the homepage now has some rotating buttons on it, which you can see here. First off, the very boring, I'm a geek look: Second, a little medical humor: Third, the off-colored humor approach: Fourth, the "We need lightning" button: And finally, the "Get a bigger tool" button: I'm not saying they're all terrible, but I think this is maybe why we need a graphic artist's help in doing some marketing materials. After all, we're just a bunch of geeks.

For those that aren't really familiar with Hitwise , they're a data collection agency. Through relationships with ISP's, they track user behavior. Then, they turn around and sell the information back to us webmasters. I got an account approved for my 2007 budget (not an easy task, let me tell you) and started poking around in there today. My first impression is that this is really amazing data. For starters, I've taken most of our top competitors and found all of the phrases that are driving traffic to their sites. For those of you doing your own sites, how useful would that be? I'm able to see if there are phrases that would make sense to target ourselves that our competitors are using. Secondly, once I've found a cool phrase, I can see what websites get what percentage of the traffic for that phrase. This is really cool for benchmarking how well we're doing for a given term. While this data is cool, it's also incomplete. For example, Amazon hasn't ...

I decided to start podcasting my other blog. This has meant a pretty big learning curve, but I already had the hardware I needed and much of the software. I've had several people ask what I'm using, so I'm going to list everything I can remember for now and I'll do some follow-ups later. To begin with, I'm using a Shure SM58 microphone . This is sort of the vocal standard in our local bands, and it works quite well for what I'm doing. I send this into a Behringer Ultra-Voice Pro . Like I said, I had the equipment. This item is discontinued, although most any vocal pre-amp is going to work fairly well. Just look for something that has a compressor, enhancer, noise gate and a voice optimized EQ. From there, I have some vocal effects that I'm not using, so I send the signal directly to my M-Audio Delta 1010 . This thing has really come down in price since I paid for it. I think list was around $1000 at that point, and I grabbed it for just under $600. This is p...

We've never really wanted to offer free shipping. After all, it something we get charged for every single order we send out. So we're running a test. Let's see what our conversion rates do. It's not actually free, but it is one penny. Close enough for me. Over the holidays, we had some manufacturers pony up and pay for shipping on a lot of the orders. Our conversion rates really went up. But this will mark the first time that any order over $99 (and under 75 lbs) will ship for 1¢ on ToolBarn. I've got my eye on it, and when I learn something, I'll report back here. But for now, it'd be a great time to buy something from ToolBarn .