Normally, abandoned shopping carts make e-commerce retailers frown. Not in this case, however. Check out this video on You Tube and you’ll have a whole new view of the abandoned shopping cart (and a good laugh).

This post from internet entrepreneur Jason Calacanis was just too good to pass up, even though it doesn’t have anything to do with web site effectiveness. Jason shares 17 tips for running a startup on a budget, and I’m sure that we can all learn a thing or two from this list.

My favorites:

Buy Macintosh computers, save money on an IT department
It’s no secret that Microsoft products require more maintenance and support, which is why I switched to Mac early last year.

Buy cheap tables and expensive chairs
A good ergonomic chair and a trusty computer is all most office dwellers need to be productive (comfortably, of course). I picked up a few desks from an ad agency that moved into a new office and purchased two Humanscale Freedom chairs, which keep me comfortable all day long.

Outsource accounting
Who has time to fiddle with the books (unless, of course, you own an accounting firm)?

Outsource to middle America
Small firms can only do so much in a day, so building a reliable team of 1099 contractors gives you a way to quickly ramp up your productivity for large projects while saving the costs of employing a team you can’t keep busy full-time. And a contractor in Nebraska won’t charge as much as one in NYC.

I’ve also discovered two other ways to save money and be more productive:

• Use Skype for voice calls and iChat for video conferencing.
  I can call phones all across the country using my iMac’s built-in microphone for only $3 per month. I can also hook a Skype phone into my router for cordless Skype calls. That beats a $40+ per month Verizon bill.
• Buy software brand new on eBay.
  This tip from my CPA saved me about $70 on QuickBooks — you can pick up software brand new on eBay much cheaper than stores.

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The Nielsen Norman Group — a well-known group of usability experts — is kindly offering a free download of their report titled “Beyond ALT Text: Making the Web Easy to Use for Users With Disabilities.”

You’d normally drop $124 on this report, which details 75 best practices for designing web sites for those with disabilities.

In my opinion, every web site should be designed and coded with accessibility as a consideration. This report will give you the fundamentals and you’ll be able to figure out how your site stacks up. Business owners, download a copy and send it to your designer as their holiday gift.

Research shows that if your company is going to be successful selling goods or generating leads online, your web site needs to be credible.

So how does a web site become credible in the eyes of its customers? I recently found a document from the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab called the Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility.

The document lists ten guidelines to boost your site’s credibility, based of course on years of research of over 4,500 people.

The document is a good starting point for evaluating your existing web site’s credibility or to plan for a web site redesign.

And non-profits — these guidelines apply to you as well. You need people to understand your mission and donate, and a credible web site is paramount to accomplishing these goals.

I truly understand the importance of using a “call-to-action” in web page links and emails. For years though, I’ve tried to avoid using the words “click here” in links and images on web sites. I assumed that if people could recognize a link on a web page or e-mail, they would know it’s clickable.

If the data is right, I am wrong. I read a Marketing Sherpa experiment (via Copyblogger) that suggests that “click here,” or “click link words” as Marketing Sherpa calls them, can lift clickthrough rates by 8% or more. I’ve always been a proponent of writing so that people know exactly what action they should take, but that’s apparently not enough. Using the words “Click to …” or “Click here to …” can significantly improve the rates at which these links are clicked.

Perhaps including the words “click here” draws people’s attention, or maybe “click here” more accurately informs people of what they are supposed to do. Regardless, I’ll now be considering using these “click link words” more frequently in web copy I write.

Looking for a good read on marketing? Ad Age has just the thing for you — its Power 150 media and marketing blogs. Included in the list are some of the more popular blogs (and personal favorites) like Duct Tape Marketing, the SEOmoz blog and GrokDotCom. Our friends at RKG even cracked the list with their blog.

Here are some others that I follow, and while these aren’t on the list, they should be because of the quality of the information they provide:

• Campaign Monitor Blog: This marketing blog primarily features e-mail marketing tips.
• Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog: Ecommerce blog covering usability, design and marketing.
• MarketingVOX: How did they miss this one? Features the latest online marketing news.
• Marketing Experiments blog: A more quantitative look at online marketing.
• Smiley Cat: Christian Watson’s Web Design Blog: Discusses topics in web design.