Make every page on your site load 1 second faster. Start by taking every image on your site and compressing it. Please. It makes a difference.
Accept PayPal. Just because you hate it doesn’t mean they do.
Do a little basic typography: Increase line spacing, use a bigger font. Make your site easy to read.
Put no more than 15 words on a line. See above.
Put no more than 5 lines in a paragraph.
Break up your page. Use lists, images, subheads and such. Don’t give them one big blob of images or text.
If they ask you a question on Twitter or Facebook, answer it.
If they compliment you on Twitter or Facebook, say thanks.
Instead of giving them a discount, give them a better product.
Before you pay $45000 to redesign your web site, pay $4500 to make the existing site easier to use. Then use what you learned on the new site.
Don’t even imply that your customers have to log in before they can buy. Put that stuff at the very end of the checkout process, on the ‘thank you’ page.
Trade ‘elegance’ or ‘personality’ for ‘clarity’ and ‘obviousness’. Watch your sales go up.
Remove one feature that you wanted, but your customers didn’t, from your site.
Stop reading about marketing stuff and go do it.

The Internet Tough Guy is a feature in all Internet social forums. These are people who poison discussions with anger, hatred, and threats. Some are malicious. Some are crazy. Some are just afflicted with a rotten sense of humor. Whatever their motives, they're a scourge. It takes precious little trolling to sour a message-board. A "troll" -- someone who comes onto an online community looking to pick fights -- has two victory conditions: Either everyone ends up talking about him, or no one talks at all. And where two or more trolls gather, they'll egg each other on, seeing who can anger and disrupt the regular message-board posters the most.

It’s 2012, and the world is literally at our fingertips thanks to PCs, smartphones and tablets. This opens up a rapidly increasing number of opportunities for companies to connect with users.

For the content manager, this means pressure to specialize in all aspects of content creation, management, security and more in order to meet today’s user demands.

Here are the seven hats we find that today’s content manager must wear in order to develop and deliver the unique context-based experiences that users have come to expect:

90% of web marketers, designers, developers, SEOs and such are going to screw you.

Actually, I'm being charitable. It's closer to 99%.

1: Own your site
2: Know where your site lives
3: Own your domain
4: Own your PPC campaigns
5: Own your analytics data
6: Verify backups
7: Control your content
8: Know what you're getting
9: Define what 'good' is
10: Ensure support
11: Tune your bullshit detector

So news organizations large and small have begun experimenting with tweaking their Web sites for better search engine results. But software bots are not your ordinary readers: They are blazingly fast yet numbingly literal-minded. There are no algorithms for wit, irony, humor or stylish writing. The software is a logical, sequential, left-brain reader, while humans are often right brain.

The first headline a human reader sees: "Unsafe sex: Has Jacob Zuma's rape trial hit South Africa's war on AIDS?" One click down: "Zuma testimony sparks HIV fear." Another headline meant to lure the human reader: "Tulsa star: The life and career of much-loved 1960's singer." One click down: "Obituary: Gene Pitney."

Journalists, they say, would be wise to do a little keyword research to determine the two or three most-searched words that relate to their subject — and then include them in the first few sentences. "That's not something they teach in journalism schools," said Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch, an online newsletter. "But in the future, they should."

Just a few years ago, search engines could be fooled into believing your site was useful as long as you regularly published keyword-rich content.

Now, more sophisticated algorithms and the rise of social media mean the web is a far more demanding place.

1. High Bounce Rate
2. No Social Signals
3. Google Says So
4. Nobody will link to you

In Short…

The arguments in favor of original, well-written content are compelling and remain convincing as the years go by.

Successive search engine algorithm updates only prioritize good-quality copy; invest in your text up-front and you gain a natural advantage over the competition.

Recognize that failure is an option. Recognizing the inevitability of failure is absolutely prerequisite to achieving any of the benefits failures potentially provide.
View inevitable failures as preventable and manage the contradiction. Once an organization recognizes failures are inevitable, they must simultaneously view them as preventable. Accepting this apparent contradiction is essential if there is to be any chance of fostering the unending quest to prevent failures in spite of the impossibility to do so.

Remove the stigma of failure. The initial response to failure cannot be punitive. The pursuit of cause must not be driven by the desire or need to assign fault or blame. Leaders must foster a culture that makes it safe to fail if there is any chance of cultivating the trust required for folks to freely and readily share bad news.

Define failure and interpret it as a fact-based metric-driven indicator. To be exact: failure is an omission of occurrence or performance. Organizations must specifically define these omissions so the term is correctly and consistently applied.

Treat failure as a learning opportunity. The first impulse and the immediate response to failure should be to learn from that failure. This learning is used to correct, minimize, or overcome the failure and apply all associated insights to attempt to prevent failures in the future.

Most organizations start projects with an almost absolute assumption of automatic success, despite statistics and research that tell us such views are unrealistic. The roots of success lie in creating an environment and culture of cooperation and adaptability.

Before hiring prospective vendors, ask about concrete steps they take to incorporate project learnings into their own plans, thereby increasing efficiency and success over time. If your vendor responds with a blank stare to discussions of this type, send them packing.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to marketing brands online and the presence they need.

Build a website that houses everything - all of your text, images, audio and video - in one, centralized, location.
Use the existing platforms and build your presence within their community (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc...).

Personally, I advocate for owning your own space, building it and nurturing it and using those other/existing platforms to promote or extend the brand. Brands should own their content, community and type of conversation and not be beholden to the terms of service or whims of someone else.

Those big, lumbering websites with all of that functionality, flash and content could very well disappear into a mist of mobile before we all know it

And, while all of this is going on, it's not hard to imagine a world in the not-to-distant future where the website is all but an after-thought. Where the first brand interaction happens on the screen in your hand. Where that first brand interaction seamlessly lets you accomplish all (and maybe even more) of your goals without ever really needing to go to a full-on web browser.