From my experience as an e-commerce consultant, I can tell you that page design is critical. Online retailers often test multiple variations of page templates to measure effectiveness. In doing so, there’s considerable strain placed on the web design team as they produce fully colored and refined Photoshop comps.

One solution I’ve found to be an effective tool in the e-commerce web design arsenal is a wireframe diagram. While I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this approach for other types of web sites, wireframe diagrams help designers take a rapid-fire approach to e-commerce page design.

Larry Becker at the Rimm-Kaufman Group recently published an excellent article on MultiChannelMerchant.com that discusses how getting back to pen and paper (or simple digital line drawings) can yield great results.

I’ve found the lo-fi prototype to be an effective tool when doing site assessments to show e-commerce clients how their pages should be laid out for maximum effectiveness. Wireframes take the subjectivity out of the design and make the client focus on page layout, not color and image choices. While color and images are certainly important, those are considerations for after a page layout has been determined.

A recent article in PC World suggests that up to 80% of blogs contain offensive content. While the article discusses spam in the context of corporate internet browsing and reading offensive posts at work, a real issue for business bloggers is preventing spam on their corporate blogs.

If you have a blog, you’re probably aware of the attempts of spammers to place their content on your blog by submitting comments on different blog posts. They aren’t shy about submitting long, blatantly obvious spam comments. Case in point – since I enabled comments on my blog in late December 2006, spammers have attempted to submit almost 10,000 spam-ridden comments to my blog.

Of course, I don’t want these to appear in the blog, so I use the Akismet plugin for Wordpress to filter these out automatically. I moderate all comments that get past Akismet, allowing me to approve and display only those comments that are not spammy in nature.

If you have a corporate blog that isn’t protected by some sort of spam prevention method, your blog is probably already overrun with spam. Installing a spam filter can help you filter out comment spam and restore the true content of your blog.

So why should you block spam in your blog?

• Corporate firewalls and computer software often block sites with profanity and objectionable content. By filtering out comment spam, and by writing in a professional, business-like tone, you will ensure that your web site is accessible to a wide audience.
• Poor writing and comment spam make your blog look unprofessional. Stay on topic, keep content relevant and use professional language. Don’t make your readers wade through objectionable content to read comments from real readers.

Internet Retailer reports that retailers are spending more on pay-per-click marketing and natural search engine optimization. 57.4% of marketers claim that search engine marketing performs better than other forms of marketing, including affiliate marketing, e-mail marketing and direct mail. Among the respondents to the Internet Retailer study, natural search engine optimization seems to yield higher conversion rates than paid search.

The pendulum seems to be shifting toward natural search engine optimization. I’ve found that both tactics can be successful, but both require ongoing expenses. A mix of both tactics seems to be the right approach for many companies. Optimizing for natural results is the prudent approach for core keywords, while paid search can supplement these results for keywords and phrases that are related to the core keywords. Regardless of the approach, customers clearly do not ignore paid search ads (“sponsored listings”), and as we learned in 2006, ranking in the top three natural results is critical as these links are most often clicked.