We are all up in Snowflake visiting our partners with The Guru. Millions of dollars worth of windshields being sold with our amazing partners on this site. A special thanks to all our partners and wonderful employees who have turned this business into a huge success over the last several. Thank You

A few years ago, we got a checklist of proposed features from a client. They wanted the site “.mobi enabled”. We spent a few minutes looking at each other like dogs trying to understand calculus, and then realized, fundamentally, that we were looking at a “someone read a white paper” scenario. They wanted to get in on the big buzzword, but had yet to analyze the value proposition.

Nobody’s going to discount the growth of mobile. We’ve all got our collections of phones, tablets, and even the occasional netbook. However, a fortune thrown at mobile development will net you no extra revenue if it doesn’t serve a user purpose.
(more…)

Visits from mobile devices are up three times over the last six months on WindshieldGuru.com. The ever changing world of the Internet keeps us scrambling to keep up. Check us out on your mobile device tomorrow. We’re going live with a new mobile site today.

Web-Op started this cremation site in November of this year www.cremation-USA.com. You can see the growth in the chart above. We have opened a service office in Ogden, Utah and have been enjoying a pretty good amount of success after just a few months. We are ranking first page for hundreds of US cities already. Check out this one. We’ll keep you updated.

Ever wanted to show your visitors or staff where your traffic is coming from, without dragging them through Google Analytics? We’ve developed a simple package which processes your Analytics visit data and displays it as an easy-to-read map. There’s no coding required– just edit one file to add details of your Analytics profile, and away you go. It installs as a simple image you can embed in your blog, on a prominent page, or in a back-office dashboard.

It should run on any typically configured PHP hosting environment

See it in action at Auto Glass Guru

Get the zip download at our site. A Github repository is now available

I know you want the entire site to roll out on launch day. The huge cart with 5,000 products. A blog with articles stretching back to when Al Gore first breathed life into the Internet. A customer-relationship management package so sophisticated it has seperate responses for every obscenity an angry customer uses with your call centre staff. But is this the best choice for your company? Probably not.

A staged deployment offers you several benefits at no significant extra costs.
(more…)

If you follow Web-Op, you obviously have way too much free time. But you’ll also notice our global ambitions. We’ve started rolling out sites for Brazillian and Chinese audiences. We recognize that going overseas is far more than just slapping some extra stamps on your shipping envelopes and trying to schlep payment to the foreign-exchange counter at the bank.

One thing we can’t stress enough is not to simply take your existing site and run it through a translator, whether Google Translate or a college intern hired for sub-minimum wage.
(more…)

Recently, I spoke with someone who wanted a Facebook like button on their company page. While there’s no technical issue there, there is a bit of a conceptual gap. Her business was a very narrow, technical firm which is likely to handle less than 20 clients a month. What relationship are they hoping to have with their customers through Facebook?

It’s not meant to pick on her specifically, but rather to ask a legitimate question: are you using social media as a tool, or fighting what it represents?
(more…)

A conversion funnel is a structure provided by most major analytics packages, such as Google Analytics. It aggregates the click paths of many visitors as they follow a pre-determined course through your site. In short, it lets you watch as visitors more from “arrival on site” to the destiation your site exists to encourage– the conversion. Typically, a conversion is a purchase, a request for information, or activating a contact form.

Much like a funnel in the kitchen, a properly configured conversion funnel will start with a large opening– the 50,000 visitors who hit your site in a month– and narrow down to a smaller number– like the 200 who buy– at the end. At each step, it should get narrower. There’s value in all of these factors– how fast it narrows, as well as how many people enter and leave the whole process.
(more…)

I’ve been following the domaining industry for a few months now. You know these people. They’re the ones who invented ‘what you need, when you need it’. The low value “parked page” site stuffed with low-quality pay-per-click links, or the “mini-site” with three pages of cursorily-researched content and a whole lot of AdSense.

While it’s often seen as a grand investment strategy– building a portfolio of names and holding them for sale, it’s actually a very weak strategy.
(more…)