His take was that utilizing the PowerReviews branded “star system” gave customers a greater sense of trust because they recognized this review feature across sites.  From a design perspective, we maintained our point of view.  However, the bigger conversation prompted the questions what is the purpose of reviews and how much does it matter that they maintain their own identity in order to provide better reassurance versus fitting well within the site design.

Fast forward to this week and Google’s announcement regarding their deal with PowerReviews and the option for users to now select Ratings and Reviews as a filter when searching for products.  Internet Retailer estimates that PowerReviews currently works with approximately 1,000 online retailers and almost 3,500 websites.  With this type of adoption and now with everyone’s favorite search engine giant jumping on board, the question becomes should retailers stick with the “star system” PowerReviews provides and maintain a slightly separate identity from their site, or continue to try and brand these product review systems as their own?

Now take this back to the client we were discussing.  Does his average customer find this review system more credible because they recognize the PowerReview system on his site from other online stores and therefore finds these reviews more credible?  How does this help or hurt the overall branding of the site?  Does the online shopper really care?

As we have seen, eCommerce remains a constantly evolving experience.  But, despite the nature of change in this business, maintaining some familiarity is the key to adoption.  Just as we would never encourage someone to change the colors of some of the top assurance badges (because users recognize them), maybe there’s an argument to setting aside brand with Product Reviews and Ratings as well.

Sounds like a great testing opportunity if you ask me…

In addition to this feature, Version 1.9 will also allow you to enjoy a handful of other new tools:

• Gift Registry module
• Advanced attribute management capabilities
• Solr Search
• Improvements to the full page caching module

Get more information or register for the Magento Enterprise 1.9 Webinar this Thursday, July 22^nd check out this link:

While Magento’s team made it clear they were doing all the right things to obtain their PA-DSS certification, it’s even more exciting to see the continued evolvement of this young platform as this is the third enterprise update of the year giving users  new features that are the result of a great ongoing g dialogue between Magento, their partner channel, and their customers.

Stay tuned to see what’s next…

Wow? Indeed. Lovelace was born in 1815 in England. For the literary nerds out there, you’ll be excited to know that she was the daughter of noted poet Lord Byron! Lovelace received an extremely unusual education in that she was tutored by renowned teachers in mathematics and science from an early age. Unusual because she was female, and math and science were not the typical courses of study for girls in the early 19^th century. To make a life story short, Lovelace met and corresponded with Charles Babbage, who referred to her as the “Enchantress of Numbers.” In 1842-43, Lovelace translated Luigi Menabrea’s Italian memoir on Babbage’s Analytical Engine, appending notes that included a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers with the machine, which would become the first computer program.

This is a very important historical moment for science and technology and for women. Most of us, have probably heard how there are gender disparities in the hard (male-dominated) and soft (female-dominated) sciences. Fields in computing and web technologies have also reflected these disparities. It’s often said that men build and create the internet while women use it. Whenever we meet with clients who sell tech-heavy products, sure enough it’s a development team of men; while, women have a stronger role in the marketing areas and areas peripheral to the technology itself.

I’m not making a case that men don’t make great developers and that women don’t make great marketers. I’m making the case that there are probably many women who would make great developers too, but for many reasons (e.g. societal expectations and pressures) that I won’t get into, never got the chance to get their hands dirty, to get knee deep in code.

Rather than blog about someone specific I thought I’d present a challenge to all the women in the web/online tech fields. I challenge all the women out there (myself included) who are currently working in support roles in technology to go learn how to code. Code or program something, anything, from start to finish. If you’re an administrator for an IT department, learn HTML and CSS. If you’re a student slicing websites, get pumped up on jQuery and javascript. Already a female coder ripping through PHP and MySQL? Write your own plug-in. Are you one of the numerous female gamers out there? Try skinning a UI for your favorite game.

I implore you to take this challenge, not only because technology is going to remain the wave of the future, but also for the sake of female empowerment, and eve more so, for individual empowerment. You may find that tracking through lines of codes, reading shorthand full of logic and queries is something you’ve never experienced before. And something you really enjoy. Maybe it won’t be, but at least you can say you did it. Lovelace’s story has an unfortunate ending: ten years after writing those notes, she died from uterine cancer and bloodletting. She never got to fully explore the possibilities of either Babbage’s inventions or her own understanding of computing. You still have time. I give you permission to go, try, experiment. And maybe you’ll be the first at something too.

My sources:
Finding Ada – Founders of Ada Lovelace Day
Ada Lovelace – Wikipedia

Before I get too critical in my review, I want to stress that I truly think the new JosBank.com has come a long way in comparison to the old site. In terms of usability and shopping experience, the new website is light years beyond that of the old one. The new imagery, navigation and advanced functionality implemented in the redesign have helped JoS. A. Bank push beyond the limitations of their old eCommerce site and expand their reach on the web.

Overall

The layout of the website is clean, elegant and modern – three qualities I would expect from the website of a 104-year old men’s clothing retailer. This new look is extremely important for the JoS. Bank image as a whole, as it puts the quality of their website on par with the quality of their clothing and the neat, organized and classy look of their physical stores. In comparing their old website to their physical stores and their products, there was always a huge disconnect.

I did want to point out one technical issue I came across during my review. After purposely typing in a URL that doesn’t exist, I’m extremely surprised to find that the site doesn’t have a standard 404 error page, let alone a custom, user-friendly page. This happens when I go here – http://www.josbank.com/ties or type in anything after the main URL that isn’t a specific page. This can be especially hurtful when there are older links from other websites sending traffic to pages that either never existed or don’t exist anymore. The best practice would be to first set up a 404 error page to handle this issue, and next to customize it with a friendly error message and instructions on where to go next – top categories, bestsellers, contact form, etc. Considering the project was a large undertaking and employed the help of tech giant IBM, this is a big oversight in my opinion.

Home Page

When you land on the JoS. Bank home page, you’re greeted with a large, colorful banner displaying their most recent promotion – currently it’s a buy one get two offer on all sportcoats, pants, sweaters, sportshirts and outerwear. Considering that they’re known for promotions like these, particularly through email, I think it’s a smart move to display them front and center. If you aren’t interested in the latest promo, they present you with their top three categories – men’s suits, men’s dress pants and men’s dress shirts – right underneath the main banner. The imagery and category names stand out well enough, but I think the call to action could be more prominent; that is, turn the tiny “Shop Now” link into a button and make it bigger.

While the home page has some strong elements to it, I still believe it’s lacking. JoS. Bank’s home page appears to follow the same path of many other clothing retailers online – keep the home page short and sweet. With the breadth of products and promotions that they have to offer, why not put a little more onto the home page? If I were part of the JoS. A Bank’s web marketing team, I would strongly consider pulling in additional categories, bestsellers and a prominent store locator on the home page.

Click the image below to see what I envision as a better performing home page for JosBank.com:

Category Page

When I click through to a category page, I am presented with clear product images, pricing and color options. I especially like the “quick view” option where I can get a little more detail of a product before going deeper into a product page. Quick view is becoming more popular these days with large e-tailers, and I think it’s a positive addition to JoS. A. Bank’s website. The category refinements at the top could use a little more copy to stand out – i.e. “Refine your Sportcoat Selection” – but I am most certainly a fan of the functionality itself.

On-page SEO is one important element missing from the category pages. There is no h1 header tag for the category name and the URL’s are not keyword-friendly at all (I’m currently looking at the Sportcoats page here: http://www.josbank.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/SubCategory_11001_10050_9203500). These are two very basic elements of on-page SEO, and they definitely should not be difficult ones to implement. From an experienced retailer with a large online marketing team, I’m quite surprised at this disregard of SEO on the category page.

Product Page

The new product page is a key part of the redesign for me. In a one-column layout, they efficiently present all the elements I would expect to see on a product page, and some I never even considered. Some of the elements include a crisp product image with the ability to zoom, unique product description, related products, recently viewed items and my favorite product page feature – matching apparel. The matching apparel section is a creative upsell that is well-suited for an apparel and clothing accessories retailer; the layout of the section itself does an even better job of selling, letting visitors see the product, choose all the necessary options and add it to their cart right from the main product page. In comparison to the rest of the site, I think the product page needs the least amount of work.

Checkout Process

After I select the options on my Executive 2-Button Silk Sportcoat and add it to my cart, I’m presented with a mini cart pop-up, which immediately catches my eye. I’m asked whether I want to continue shopping or proceed to the checkout; I choose to checkout and am directed to my shopping cart. The shopping cart appears to have almost all of what I consider to be eCommerce best practices in place, including the product image and details, shipping & tax information and a clear call to action to proceed to the next step. Similar to the product page, the shopping cart presents “other products you might consider” neatly arranged in the right column. I really like the placement for these products; I can see what’s available, but they don’t cause me to lose focus on completing my purchase.

One issue I do have with the shopping cart page is that the coupon field is too prominent. I would recommend reducing the prominence of this field with the goal of making it visible to those who are looking for it, but no one else. Making it stand out like that may encourage visitors to leave the site in search of a coupon code, or feel slighted that they didn’t get one.

The billing and shipping pages are pretty standard – with the main navigation and other calls to action removed from these pages, there is little to distract away from the process at hand. Once a visitor gets to this step in the checkout process, the only goal should be pushing them along to convert into a sale – JoS. Banks clearly recognized this goal and did an excellent job with it.

I would like to see some more internal store policies in clear view within these final checkout pages. Information like shipping policies, return policies and any sort of money back guarantee should be clear – otherwise you risk losing visitors that can’t find this information or go back in the process looking for it. These policies would fit in perfectly right underneath the “cart details” in the right sidebar.

Do you have an opinion on the new JosBank.com? I’d love to get some more thoughts on this major redesign from all points of view. Please share your opinion(s) using the comments below, and I’ll be sure to respond to any questions as soon as possible!

I am really looking forward to this panel as both Bryan and Tim rock! I always learn a thing or two from such great minds. It is also an amazing chance for 3 lucky winners to really improve their web sites.

Ready to throw your site in the ring? Submit it here:
http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/newyork/form-makeover.php
Entries must be received by Friday, March 13.

Hat tip to Chris Montcalmo at his Monty’s Mega Marketing blog for being one of the first to notice the holiday dividers. You can find them on terms like Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, menorah, Christmas tree, and snowman. Looks like they nailed down most of the religions and celebrations during these holiday times.

…but wait. What about The Rest Of Us?! Certainly Google employees don’t want to listen to an Airing of Grievances from their Festivus celebrating brethren.

Phew, Google’s included the Festivus Pole in their SERPs as well.

Frank Costanza would approve (no tinsel, because its distracting). Have you found any others?

Check out the screenshot below to see the ad along with Google suggest:

Have you noticed anything different with Google lately?

And what advice would you give someone getting started in online media and marketing?
“My best advice would be to learn – and execute… Too many resumes that come across my desk seem to get the concepts, but no real experience. If you’re trying to jump into online marketing then read as much as you can. Then find someone – uncle, aunt, spouse, etc… who you can help with their web site. Be your own case study and document the results.”

There’s plenty more where that came from. Head over to The Online Beat for the full interview. Good luck with the site Joanna!

Back in August, the official Google Adwords Blog, Inside Adwords, detailed 3 changes to the Adwords algorithm that would begin testing immediately, and be pushed to all users in about a month.  Just yesterday, the Adwords blog team posted that the changes would be going live in the coming days.  The three changes are:

• Quality score will now be calculated at the time of the query, as opposed to the previous static per-keyword method.
• Keywords will no longer be marked inactive for search.
• The “minimum bid” will be replaced with the “first page bid”

Quality Score Changes

A keyword’s quality score is calculated by factoring in the historical performance (CTR), landing page relevancy and load time, and keyword relevancy. Now, all of those will remain a factor, but instead of determining a quality score before-hand, the score will be calculated at the time of the search query allowing Google to more accurately display your ad when its most likely to be clicked (or so says Google).

Google is often accused of not being transparent enough when it comes to their quality score calculation. Unfortunately, with this change in the algorithm, those accusations will likely continue. Google gives the following real world example of how the change plays out:

Nancy’s Dairy advertises on the keyword ‘milk.’ Nancy’s ads perform better on the keyword ‘milk’ in the U.S. than in Canada. Her ads also perform better on the query ‘milk delivery’ than on ‘milk,’ and better on certain search network sites than on others. Instead of one static Quality Score and minimum bid that determines whether the keyword ‘milk’ is eligible to trigger an ad for all search queries, we will now determine eligibility dynamically, based on factors such as location, the specific query, and other relevance factors. For that reason, Nancy’s keyword ‘milk’ will be able to trigger an ad for search queries where it’s likely to perform better, i.e., in the U.S., on ‘milk delivery’ and on certain search network sites.

This change gives Google more control and more transparency, which plenty of people will not like. When Google makes money on every click, yet don’t disclose the reasoning behind the appearance of an ad, SEMs become testy. Google says “Your ads will be more likely to show when they’re relevant and less likely to show when they’re not.” If you trust Google, who could complain about this. If you don’t, the lack of transparency is frustrating.

Keywords No Longer Marked Inactive For Search

This change should not cause too much of a stir. Here’s an example: If I were to begin bidding 7 cents per click on the keyword “Pepsi” with an irrelevant ad and unrelated landing page, Google would mark the keyword as “inactive for search.” A combination of the very low quality score I’d surely receive, and the high avg. CPC bid from competitors, would keep my ad from showing.

Now, technically the ad could show. No ad will be marked as inactive because with this newfangled real time quality score calculation, under some ridiculously unlikely circumstances, my ad could be deemed relevant. Let’s say that historically my ad’s CTR is 90% for searches coming from Antarctica, during the hours of 3 and 5 AM, from AOL search, on users with Pentium 3 computers, running Windows 98. Well, then, Google may decide that my ad is relevant to that user, and thus display the ad.

Minimum Bid Replaced by First Page Bid

This change, in my opinion, comes about as a result of the other two. If keywords are no longer being marked inactive, then the need for a minimum bid is greatly diminished. Instead, Google will inform the advertiser of the minimum bid needed to reach the first page of the search engine results page. For keywords with low competition, this number will likely be low (maybe as low as the now defunct minimum bid). For high competition keywords, this number could be significantly higher than the minimum bid was.The way I interpret this change is that it is simply an information metric, and not a barrier to the first page. For instance, any keyword with a first page bid of $2 is that high because the competition has bid that number up that high. A keyword that has a high first page bid will almost certainly have a page full of ads when searched on Google.

Edit: Actually, this is not true. A keyword with a first page bid of $2 will not necessarily have a full page of ads. If Google gives a very low quality score, the first page bid could be high as well.

Conclusion

When Google says “Your ads will be more likely to show when they’re relevant and less likely to show when they’re not,” your reaction depends on your trust in Google. Taken at their word, it sounds like a great change. If you’re a skeptic (and it is your money they’re dealing with, so maybe you should be), you might raise an eyebrow.

In 2004, he simply stated, “We are not building a browser.” Later in 2006, he changed the wording just a bit:

It looks like people have some good browser choices already. We would not build a browser for the fun of building a browser.

2 years later, Google must have found another reason to build a browser other than fun, because Google Chrome was released.

Google Chrome

At around Noon PST, Google entered the internet browser market, joining Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla’s Firefox, Apple’s Safari, and Opera (as well as a few other smaller browsers.) Web designers need not worry about an additional browser to test. If your site renders correctly in Safari, then you’ll be ok in Chrome, as they’re both built on the WebKit platform. Chrome’s default search engine is Google (naturally), but it can be changed in the settings, which is basically the same as Firefox’s method for handling searches.

There are plenty of cool little features in Chrome that might pull some people from the industry leaders. One of my favorites is the ability to save a web application as a desktop, quick launch, and/or start menu icon, which will launch that app in its own window, much like any other native program.

Chrome is available as a Windows download now, with a Mac and Linux port said to be just around the corner.