iknowthe.net | Internet and Ecommerce Consultant

I’ve been a big fan of (and subscriber to) Econsultancy for a long time now, and their Internet Statistics Compendium is a great resource, full of the kind of stats about internet usage, conversion rates, and broadband penetration that clients ask me about – and its great to have on hand.

I’ve not seen this before – spotted at the bottom of a google.co.uk results page. Interesting.

Seeing that Amazon.co.uk is now officially 10 years old prompted me to check the wayback machine for the first webpage I made. There were definitely earlier versions, which even included midi files, but here is my first website, all handcoded, with a definite attempt at SEO – check the source. I’m really quite pleased – I’ve seen worse SEO from an alledgedly reputable company very recently indeed.

I loaded up the metakeywords, but, hey that worked back then, at one point the site was number three for music in Metacrawler, and I think the title tag was too long for even way back then, but you could get away with it.

The tracking, which I recall was a later more sophisticated tracking than I first installed shows a date of 3rd November 1998.

So that’s a verifiable 10 years of SEO / html coding / internet experience. And I think my mantra of clean, human and machine readable content rich code still holds today – as a basis.

Of course the internet has changed hugely in ten years.

Here’s some Other things I wish I’d known back then, in no particular order:

1. Go for cash not stock (worthless stock options aside, this is now my second market crash)
2. Domain and intellectual landgrab was right, just do it cheap
3. Don’t work for anyone else
4. Unix is not that scary
5. Ebay has a better business plan and profit margin than Amazon.
6. MP3′s WERE going to revolutionize the music industry (just not until the ipod came along as a delivery mechanism)
7. Building my own opensource CMS would have been a good idea
8. I was right about many sites – beme.com and trinny and suzanna’s readytoshop.com – they were crap ideas. As was buyme100.com but I did win a smart car off them, so hey, it wasn’t all waste
9. Don’t remortgage your or your parents house to fund your dotcom dream / web 2.0 social networking moblog platform (delete as appropriate to the current decade)
10. If you can’t see a revenue stream yet, there isn’t one. Go do something else

E-consultancy has just published an interesting analysis of Asda’s online marketing. Its an interesting read – take a look. It just shows that even huge companies can still be in the dark ages of usability and conversion when it come to ecommerce online.