Web Hosting Provider Announces

The 1st Annual Weboo Awards

The blogger staff at Website Source, the leader in web hosting and insider information, has dauntlessly forged ahead to announce the 1st Annual Weboo Awards for the most odious, silly and significant activity on the W3.

And so, without further ado, Website Source presents the 1st Annual Weboo Awards to the following:

For Most Overused Selling Tool

The long-form sales letter, aka the Glazer-Kennedy style sales letter. This non-stop sales letter is loaded with hype, bogus testimonials, carefully-positioned bullet lists and more PSs and PPSs than a love-sick teen’s letter to his girlfriend.

For Most Odious Web Design Practice

The dead end link. It always takes you to an order page and the only way out is to use the back button on your browser. Many seniors and other web surfers don’t even know there is a back button on their browsers so, this design practice leaves them with no alternative but to “Place Your Order Now” or close the program and restart.

For the Dumbest Web Design Practice

The flying order page wins hands down. This “design” element appears immediately upon user access to the site. It often covers the actual sales copy, in effect, asking (begging) people to sign up or opt in without knowing what they’re going to get.

The Sleaziest Marketing Ploy

This year’s winner is the back sell, which has been spreading like a fungus across the W3. A give-away (newsletter, e-book download, etc.) is used as bait to collect opt-ins. Once the sucker (sorry, viewer) opts in, s/he is bombarded daily with emails, mysterious pop-ups that pop up at just the wrong moment and endless spam, though technically this back sell doesn’t count as spam. The recipient opted in.

The Most Dangerous Web Activity

It’s still #1: placing an order.

Sure, users can pick up viruses and other forms of malware injection just about anywhere despite firewalls and anti-viral software. But the buyer is most at risk when and after providing sensitive, personal information, especially that credit card number.

Site databases can be hacked or someone can just walk off with your laptop and your business, and of course, all of that personal information stored on the hard drive.

For the Most Common Use of Unnecessary Technology

Well, it can only be the sales DV that appears on the site’s home page. There’s usually some good-looking talent sitting on a boardroom table telling you all about the benefits of joining, buying, subscribing, calling or doing something.

These animations eat up bandwidth, increasing download times. It’s like watching a commercial on TV except you can’t find the remote to turn it off. In many cases, there’s no close button so you HAVE to listen to the spiel. And, in one case, if you click off the home page, then return to the home page, the DV plays all over again – every single time.

And they’re overly long. Some run five minutes before the visitor has a chance to look around.

Just because your Lamborghini can do 200 mph doesn’t mean you should finish your commute in under 6.34 minutes. Just because a technology is available, you don’t have to use it simply because the competition is. Put technology to its best use, i.e., how to assemble the product. Now there’s a good place for a DV.

For the Highest Pile of Steaming Hype

SEO gurus, take a bow. You can’t swing a dead webmaster without hitting some ebook download on how to improve your site’s performance on Google, Yahoo and other key search engines.

We work in the SEM industry. We study it, stay on top of the latest news, fads, trends and mystical theories on how to improve your site’s page rank (PR) on search engines.

Here’s a fact: no one completely understands SEO. One expert will tell you that you need fresher content while someone else insists that the only way to improve site performance is by adding links.

Our experience has shown that SEO is a process, not a goal. Adding new and useful features always helps. A blog adds site stickiness. Good content always works. In fact, the web is so crammed with hyperbole that good, informational text is often lost in a sea of affiliate links.

The Most Frightening Trend for Small Site Owners

If you haven’t checked out Google lately, Google something and you’ll notice that many entries on the SERPs have small boxes as part of the descriptor text. For example, let’s say you wanted to watch your favorite music video.

All you do now is Google the clip and click on the direct link. The video plays within the Google SERPs, which means visitors may never even reach your site unless you can provide some tempting eye candy on Google to go along with your site’s description.

Check it out. Then, call your site designer and get some product pictures up on Google like yesterday.

And our last Weboo for 2007 goes to:

Google’s Purchase of YouTube for $1.8 billion Dollars.

First, it’s not fair. The site had hardly been up for 24 months before the owners saw a payout of $1.8 billion dollars. So totally not fair.

But what’s really a little scary is the use of You Tube content on Google (see above) and vice-versa. This year, we saw litigation against the dissemination of free information. You Tube got nailed for allowing copyrighted content, primarily from Comedy Central, to be displayed. Instead of taking advantage of this unprecedented example of positive viral marketing, a suit was filed against You Tube to stop showing this content. Now, if you want to see Jon Stewart’s funny gag from last night, you have to log on to the Comedy Central site.

For years, the web has pretty much been open space, a lot like the wild west. But now, big business and its high-priced legal firms have discovered there’s “gold in that there content” – a trend that is only going to continue.

One of the best aspects of the W3 is that it provided free access to all kinds of good stuff. Now that the lawyers have moved in, it’s only a matter of time before we’ll see a proliferation of pay-per-view sites on the web.

Right now, you can watch entire TV shows on your computer – free. Enjoy it. This year’s final Weboo indicates that what you get free on the web today is going to cost you in the future.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, this ends this year’s Website Source Weboo Awards. We’re so glad you could join us and please drive home safely.

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