A call to action is probably the most important yet overlooked compoment of a website. The term “call to action” is used to describe the words or phrases that ask the visitor to take a desired action like “buy now” or “sign up”.

Your customers need to be shown the way! Are you giving them that little push they need? Are your website’s browsers becoming buyers? If not, ClickZ has some good tips on getting it right.

Attention all web designers: here are a couple of really handy pages:

- The first is for referencing the 216 web safe colors. Simply roll your mouse over a color and the hexadecimal color value will appear.

- The second is a color conversion chart which allows you to convert Pantone spot colors to RGB color values (Red/Green/Blue) and Hexadecimal color values.

For all of those who celebrate Easter - Happy Holidays!

The business of religion is big - but do you know how big it is online? A new report says that 64% (82 million) of US Internet users have used the Web for spiritual and religious purposes. That spells opportunity for advertisers.

According to Media Post:

“Increasing numbers of Americans are looking to the Internet to find spiritual nourishment, and advertisers are beginning to capitalize on the opportunity afforded by the online exodus.”

Al DiGuido has posted a good article over at ClickZ with recommendations for selecting an e-mail delivery service provider.

There is a checklist of questions you can use when evaluating vendors but many of these are not going to be within the reach of small business.

The most important recommendation in my opinion:

Do you homework - read reports from research firms, talk to analysts, get referrals from trusted sources, ask for references and review the service providers IP addresses to see if they are keeping the off the blacklists.

Internet Retailer reports on a E-Tailing Group study which says that the main measuring stick used to gauge a website’s success is conversion rate (the number of browsers who beome buyers).

That was the good news. The bad news was that nearly 19% of those surveyed didn’t know what their rate was.

The results are not an indication that they don?t recognize the importance of knowing their conversion rate, says Lauren Freedman, president of The E-Tailing Group. Rather, it?s a reflection of the fact that the survey includes many smaller retailers who probably have invested a lot of resources in getting their sites up and running and only now are turning to a more sophisticated understanding of how the site operates.

Among retailers the retailers surveyed who knew their conversion rates, the average was 3-4%.

Yahoo’s Overture has signed deals with CNN.com, WSJ.com and ESPN.com for the licensing of its’ search technology.

- CNN.com will use Yahoo search technology, show Overture sponsored listings in search results and show Overture ads beside related news stories.
- ESPN will show Overture sponsored listings next to news stories.
- WSJ (The Wall Street Journal Online) will show sponsored listings above regular search results and beside news stories.

So if you advertise with Overture and have ContentMatch enabled, your ads may appear at the websites above.

Rumors that Microsoft will buy Ask Jeeves have been flying. But what has really been flying as a result of those rumors is the Ask Jeeves stock price. Ahhh - don’t you just love the hype!

Still, Microsoft merely talking about the rollout of its search offerings in coming months was enough to whip the search engine seas into a frenzy, again. Microsoft’s moves are just the latest in a string of major announcements by search industry players, each of which seems to push Jeeves’ stock ever higher.

The Mercury News is reporting that both Google and Yahoo (Overture) will soon ban advertisements for online casinos.

Casino related ads were hot sellers at both Google and Yahoo with some cost-per-click bids running as high as $10 US. Although it was a significant source of revenue for both these companies, it’s likely they were under serious pressure from government to remove the ads.

So.. the removal of these ads spells opportunity for those of you who run real world bricks and mortar casinos. Less bidders means lower costs!

The rumor was true! Google announced today that they will launch a free, web-based email service. This is a big diversification for Google, but with Yahoo and MSN moving onto their search turf, Google could likely not afford to sit still.

The service, called “Gmail,” will come with a whopping 1GB of storage for a very affordable - FREE.

Yes 1 Gigabyte!! That’s 100x more than some of its competitors! That’s 500,000 pages of email! That’s not an April fools joke! Of course the service will pack a powerful search engine that will enable users to search every email they have ever sent or recieved.

Google co-founder Larry Page said, “Gmail solves all of my communication needs. It’s fast and easy and has all the storage I need. And I can use it from anywhere. I love it!”

I am sure users will love it too. Google knows that “good” is simply the cost of entry these days. So they decide to turn free web-based email on its head by launching not just another service - but one that looks like it will be many heads above the rest.

What’s in it for Google? Well, the service should increase the companies revenues by displaying text advertisements matched to the content of your email. This will be good for advertisers but could have privacy groups crying afoul.

According to Google, key features of Gmail include:

Search - Built on Google search technology, Gmail enables people to quickly search every email they’ve ever sent or received. Using keywords or advanced search features, Gmail users can find what they need, when they need it.

Speed - Gmail makes using email faster and more efficient by eliminating the need to file messages into folders, and by automatically organizing individual emails into meaningful “conversations” that show messages in the context of all the replies sent in response to them. And it turns annoying spam e-mail messages into the equivalent of canned meat.