This month’s book review is Creating Web Sites by Matthew MacDonald. Sub-titled ‘The Missing Manual’ this is a step-by-step guide for beginners to help explain the elements required when creating and developing a website. It covers a wide range of techniques and factors that might be needed when setting up an online business, either in-house or when briefing and web designers.

Read the full review of Creating Web Sites.

In our May newsletter we discussed the issue of using relevant landing pages within a search marketing campaign to improve conversion rates. Now Google AdWords has introduced new landing page ‘quality scores’ to encourage advertisers to use targeted landing pages to improve user experience, whilst raising the minimum bid levels of low-spending advertisers.

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E-mail marketing has rapidly developed as a key online marketing technique over the past decade, being seen as a highly cost-effective form of direct marketing. This can still be the case, with careful planning and management, but the rise of e-mail spam now makes the task much harder and, together with email regulations, means that implementing a campaign can be fraught with difficulties.

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In late June Google launched its payment processing service, Google Checkout, which is currently only available to US merchants and customers. We’ve reviewed its main features and issues in anticipation for a UK launch.

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