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Hey it's Black Friday - may the sales be with you!
So how are your sales going today? Is today taking your business out of the red and into the black like it's supposed to do? I certainly hope it is but if you're in any doubt as to what Black Friday is all about then go back to Monday's column to see.

For us here in Australia this Friday is just another day and most retailers will see a gradual increase in sales leading up to Christmas rather than having sales explode on one particular day. This year many Australians seem to have started their Christmas shopping early but I think some retailers will be watching their sales figures with some trepidation. We've had a couple of interest rate increases this year and that is sure to impact on sales leading up to Christmas.

On a brighter note though the sun is shining, the birds are singing and it's a beautiful day; even the tropical cyclone that is hanging around off the coast is heading south instead of west.

Fast Loading Sites and Graphics
One of major juggling acts that any webmaster has to cope with is being able to balance the loading speed of web pages with graphics that not only help sell the product but also look professional. All too often a website has big images that might look good but take so long to load no one is going to stick around to see them.

And then there are the images that are the exact opposite. They may have looked good once but the file size has been reduced so much that now there are jagged edges and ghosting and the images look so bad that they send the completely wrong message.

Lately Steve and I have been playing around with Photoshop CS and now it really is possible to have great images and great loading time. In fact you don't even have to slice and dice the images to try and decrease the time it takes them to load.

Full-width headers that contain photos of outdoor scenes that come in at around 34kb are now possible. Bigger background images of around the same file size are also quite achievable. I know that any Photoshop product is going to cost an arm and several legs but if you want to build your sites up to the point where they look professional enough to make surfers feel comfortable then an investment in something like Photoshop CS is money well-spent.

Webmasters and Alexa
I came across another discussion on an SEO blog the other day about Alexa. Most of the people who were commenting could not seem to understand why so many people put so much emphasis on their Alexa ranking. Doesn't everyone know that Alexa ranking means zip? Doesn't everyone know that Alexa rankings can be manipulated?

Sadly all those people were showing was that they're out of touch with the rest of the world. Of course, those in the industry know that Alexa rankings don't mean much and of course we all know that Alexa rankings can be manipulated.

But what we don't seem to know or understand is that ordinary people - even people like venture capitalists - don't understand those things. What they do understand is that Alexa is a seemingly independent site that can give them some idea of a site's value.

They don't have to pay for the information, they don't have to wait for the information to be sent to them and they don't need someone to decipher a pile of facts and figures. All they have to do is hit the Alexa site and type in a URL and there are facts and figures set out for them in terms that they can understand.

It's there in black and white - it's in 'print' on the screen and so it has all the power and authority of the printed word ... so it must be right.

That's why Alexa rankings will always have some importance and why ordinary people - who often happen to be the ones who control the money - will always use them. So don't be afraid to quote your Alexa ranking and, by the same token, don't be afraid to quote your Google PR either. You may not impress people who know how the Web works but you stand a good chance of impressing those that you really do want to impress.

And right there is a major problem for everyone in the online industry. We lose touch with our client base and begin to talk in terms they don't understand.

For most of us our target market aren't SEO gurus out there who understand the subtleties of the Web. Our target market are the ordinary people out there who only understand what they see before them if it's set out in language they understand.

So if you want to increase your sales, or make an impression on the Web, talk in the language of the ordinary people. It might be cool to sound like an expert and dazzle people with your brilliance but, in marketing, you will make more money connecting with ordinary people at their own level.