For those in San Jose attending the SES show, please stop by our booth (#803 and shown in the picture) and say “Hi”. This place is going to be busy busy tomorrow and we’re excited to be a part of it this year.

San Jose is beautiful and the weather is perfect! Cool at night, warm during the days. The way we’d all like to have it.

UPDATE**
Look who our neighbors are!

Today we’re hitting the road on our way to SES San Jose. We have a great group (Enrique, Eric, Juan, Matt & Ron[me]) on the way so if you happen to be attending SES this next week, look for our booth and stop by to say hi.

We have quite a few conference parties to attend and chats with clients, so probably the best time to catch us will be at the booth or after the expo hall closes wherever the crowd tends to migrate.

We hope to see some of you there and be sure to grab one of these really cool shirts we’ll have at the booth!

New website, new customer backend . . . and our poor blog was feeling very left out. It is something we have wanted to do for a while, we just had too many other project taking up our time. I personally hated the last theme being used and after a couple suggestions yesterday to change our blog, I made it my personal Saturday project.

There’s something to say about not reinventing the wheel, but there is nothing wrong with tailoring a proven product to do what fits best. I’ve been looking at blog themes, customizing blog themes and just writing our own theme. The one theme I felt was clean and well built was the old Copyblogger theme which is available for download. One great feature is the ability to use the custom.css for easy changing of the look. I took the theme, made the customizations to fit our overall look, and have it up and running.

We’ll probably make a few more tweaks once our graphics guy gets on it. (He’s real picky!) Ok, it’s time for me to get out.

So far so good with the upgrade. A few small things here and there, but overall things went great.

The control center is back online and you can login to see the new look and all spend $10k each. 🙂 Feel free to post your thoughts here. We’re ready to listen.

Also, if you happen to come across any weird bugs, please send any errors or problems to admin ((at)) linkworth ((dot)) com.

UPDATED:

Thank you to everyone who gave things a spin and were able to give us great feedback. There was a tiny bug that was confusing what account types people had, causing navigation to not function properly, but everything was adjusted and working fine within 45 minutes.

We have some colorful comments below where most love the upgrade, a couple long time customers aren’t up for a change, and mixed bag of other interesting comments. It appears we might have accidentally deleted a group of comments by accident as we’ve had a few people tell us their post was gone. We apologize for that, appears to be a user error (us).

computer messAt 2:00 PM Central Standard Time (-6 GMT), Friday August 16th, we will be performing an upgrade to our control center. The expected downtime will be approximately one hour.

During this downtime, the only part that will not be functional is our control center. All ad feeds will be unaffected, along with the website, blog and forum.

If there are any changes, we will make an announcement as soon as possible.

We are excited to say our long overdue control center upgrade is finally here. As time gets closer, we’ll make an official downtime announcement for the upgrade.

We’ll have two parts of our upgrade and I wanted to throw a bone with an “at a glance” peek of what you might see.

First phase we’re calling NCCv1, will be out this week and here is a quick view:

The second phase which has been labeled Dv2CC, does not have an exact completion date, but we’ll say before 2008. It might look a little like this:

We hope everyone enjoys the new look and simplistic layout!

Just checking in from sunny Miami on our last day of the Affiliate Summit. It’s been a great trip so far and we learned a lot from this conference in how we want to restructure our own affiliate program. We listened to several super affiliates in how they view affiliate programs and how they like to see them setup to make it attractive. It was close to what our original ideas were, but definitely more input and ideas to add to our restructuring. If you’re a current affiliate or just plan to be an affiliate in the near future, keep a lookout for our new program. There will be commissions paid on both advertiser and partner referrals. We’re also going to make it as lucrative as possible.

Also along the way we flew through D.C. to see our boy Juan “The Colombian Crusher” Gallego get married off. The wedding was great, the families were great, the hospitality was more than it should have been and most importantly, the bride and groom looked awesome! A HUGE congrats to our developer Juan and his lovely wife Julianna on their marriage. Now if we can just get them back to Dallas!

Tonight, our last night in Miami, we’re headed to Dolphin Stadium to see The Police. We picked up the tickets last minute and somehow scored some really good seats. I’ll chime back in and let you know how the show went. Until next time.

How has LinkWorth helped you? We want to hear from all of our customers by way of a testimonial. If you’ve noticed on our home page, in the bottom right corner, we feature a testimonial with each page view. We would love include your comments about LinkWorth too, so if you have something to say, please say it!

To submit a testimonial, just login to your account and click on the TOOLS menu option, then click on the TESTIMONIAL menu option. Further directions on on the submission page.

Use it as a way to say something nice about LinkWorth or use it as a way to say something nice and get a free plug.

Changing your website design can sometimes be well worth it, sometimes be a wrong move and other times be a big waste of time. How do you know if it is the right thing to do? I’m definitely not here to tell you I know the exact answer, but I’ll definitely fill you in on what we did to decide it was time.

1. Ask your customers for suggestions to improve your site. If you find customers having a hard time getting around or quite a few make comments about the look and feel, it might be that time to either improve or redesign.
2. Track the traffic and conversions. If you notice you’re getting one conversion with thousands of visits, there is something that can be improved to convert a higher percentage and a new design could be the trick.
3. Compare your site to other sites within your market. I compare it to my senior year in high school when I was looking around at all of my friends hair styles one day during lunch and realized I was the only one sporting a mullet. At that point, I realized it was time for a redesign of my hair. If your site is the mullet of your market, stop feathering it and try a younger, more hip style.
4. Read up on new technologies and see if there is a more proficient way to display your content. For example, designing with tables is a thing of the past and CSS is now the cool kid on the block.
5. My last tip is a simple, but great idea. Ask a family member, friend or business associate that has no idea what your website does and have them to go through and make notes about parts they find confusing or difficult. This might cost you a case of beer or maybe a few bucks, but it is well worth it. As a webmaster, what might be trivial to you, could be the most complicated task to a typical visitor of your site.

As Matt mentioned in the previous post, we recently launched a new front end of our website. All of the suggestions above were used and it all pointed to the fact our old website just sucked. And to prove the differences between our old site and our new site, I pulled our tracking info we have for the month of May ’07 compared to the month of June ’07. We launched our new site on June 1st.

This first screen shot is for the month of May. You will see we had a fair amount of “pay per click” traffic over the month.

Now this next screen shot is for the month of June. Our new design was up and running on June 1, so this is our PPC conversions after we chopped the mullet off. Traffic is pretty much the same, but notice the conversion numbers:

So in summary, if you currently sport a mullet, I am not saying it doesn’t work for you. I’m just suggesting maybe you ask your friends how it looks and if they understand it. Oh yeah, (a shameless plug) make sure you notice the conversion rate of our LinkWords program. It is our highest conversion percentage of all marketing techniques we use.

. . .blame it on the next guy! Some of you have been asking us about the first LinkInTxt crawl and we have good news and bad news. Which do you want first? Ok, ok. I’ll give you the good news first. The good news is we were just a few hours away from a successful complete crawl with literally thousands upon thousands of keywords ready to be bought up. During a test, we found the most unique keywords one could imagine, meaning it will work for almost any niche website out there.

Now I guess the time has come to announce the bad news. Did you hear that business.com is for sale to whoever has a spare FOUR HUNDRED MILLION in their pocket? Oh right, the bad news. 🙂 Unfortunately, there was a miscommunication with our server administrators regarding a routine hard drive corruption test that required a restart of our operating system. This restart occurred this morning about three hours before the entire process was going to end. We expected there was a way to simply resume the process, however, since it was ended abruptly, it corrupted all of our data. Can you say “BUMMER!”

Where does this leave us? “On the road again . . .” crawling again. Smarter. Wiser. Faster. If we want to go tech-talk, we might call this LinkInTxt v2.1.