Today is my birthday, and I decided to give you all a gift that few of you have been highly anticipating for a few months now. My most popular post on this site — probably by far — was last year’s Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2007 compilation. I spent about 3 days (and nights) on it (without sleep) and I was quite happy with the turnout. This year, I began starting to write this compilation in the first week of December. The collection begins with posts that start in January of 2008 and have been collected and shared in the last 12 months. Like last year, I’ve grouped them into different categories and written short descriptions on each post. There’s no order to the posts; I’ve used my bookmarks and a variety of social sites and peer recommendations to create this list. I hope this year’s list surpasses last year’s. Let me know how I did in the comments.

Here’s how this works: In the Internet Marketing Best Posts “series,” I take posts that are typically timeless — they’re not confined to a specific event or news occurrence — they’re valuable for the long haul in terms of Internet Marketing and creative strategy. Hopefully, you’ll see that these posts are still relevant in a few years down the road.

After months (and I mean months) of planning, the blog redesign for techipedia is finally live.

This wouldn’t have been possible if not for a few people, so I’d like to thank them for their awesome work.

First, thanks to designer Patrick Winfield of 10e20 for the excellent graphic design work. Pat was very patient, and as you can tell, he did an excellent job. Also, thanks to Chris Winfield for giving me a hand on this project.

Second, the backend coding, for the most part, was handled by web developer Cesar Serna, who also did a fantastic job.

Thank you so much for your hard work!

I know there will still be some tweaks that will be made in the upcoming days, but I’d love your feedback on the new design.

Last year, I ended 2006 with a great (and still pertinent) list of blog posts and articles that I felt were really the best in their class in the area of Internet Marketing. This year, I present you my favorite timeless posts of 2007, complete with descriptions about each blog post (which more than quadrupled the workload for me this time around, especially because I tripled the amount of links, but I had fun!) (Disclaimer: I’m certain that even with this list in excess of 250 links, I forgot a bunch of posts, so if you have any additional recommendations, please feel free to comment and I’ll add them!)

By the way, I still haven’t fully embraced video yet, so this will only include written articles. Maybe next year, folks!

Social Media Sites: General

• The Big Boys of Social Bookmarking: The Top 20 Sites (10e20): Chris Winfield ranks the top 20 social bookmarking sites by their Alexa rankings and gives a short description of what each does — in case you haven’t ventured beyond Digg.
• 24 Do-Follow Social Bookmarking Sites that Actually Work (Caroline Middlebrook): Get some powerful links on some of these lesser-known social sites.

Ever since I began surfing on the web (it’s been well over a decade now), I’ve considered search essential. More so, on sites with a large amount of content, I find myself searching within the site for ease of locating results, especially because even before I understood what SEO was, I knew that not every page was being necessarily crawled by the search engines. Consequently, I put a lot more faith in the on-site search rather than the results spit out by search engines.

I’ve found myself time and time again searching for a term in the email subscription textbox, only to realize after I performed the search that I actually searched within the “subscribe” textbox, which is above the fold. The “search” textbox is on the site, but it’s below the fold (which takes searching for, sometimes!)

I don’t know about others, but while I understand the desire to stick the subscribe button where it’s easily found, I don’t think it does much for usability. And usability should come first. It makes me feel that the web designer forgot to keep the user in mind because the goal is an immediate conversion rather than satisfying the user’s needs.

I find it ironic (and totally unplanned) that the blog topic I wrote on usability on at work today is featured in a similar light from the New York Times in today’s article about web site usability. They must have attended the conferences yesterday for World Usability Day. (For the record, that work blog had been a work in progress since yesterday, before I knew about World Usability Day as well.)

I’ll summarize my blog points on web usability guidelines:

1. Make the goal of your website (a product sale, for example) stand out at you on the landing page.
2. Understand the emotions of someone interested in your website and know that you are not your audience.
3. Include persuasive content. Use power words.
4. Design something memorable — in a good and catchy way.
5. Don’t add unnecessary bells and whistles that detract from your offerings.

The New York Times article reiterated important guidelines that I also touch upon, such as approachability (contact information being easily found), eliminating unnecessary design elements, and even mentions a bit of SEO basics (using quotes from Matt Cutts) as well.