Zayna’s Pizza in Milwaukee, WI. Wait for it…it’s worth it.

There’s nothing more refreshing than authentic, home-grown HTML at the end of a long day.

Found on Digg.

Wal-Mart just launched a video download service on their website. Big deal. Yet another bunch of movies you have to watch on your computer instead of on your TV the way God meant you to (or, Heaven forbid, on your iPod). In any event, the reason I mention this is because they apparently don’t care about the growing number of people using Firefox. Here’s what their new site looks like to these useless consumers:

Not pretty.

Getting a reliable number when it comes to browser market share is notoriously difficult, but let’s just say for the sake of argument that Firefox users make up between 15% to 25% of the web surfing public. Now think about your business. Is there anything you do today that makes it hard (not impossible, but hard) for 15% to 25% of your qualified current or future customers to engage with your product or service? Of course not. Not on purpose, anyway.

Another example. As anyone who knows me can tell you, I’m always looking for my next car. It doesn’t matter that I’ve had my current car for only 18 months or that I have to keep it for another 18, I’m always looking. One of the cars I’m interested in is Toyota’s FJ Cruiser. Toyota has made two decisions that makes my interest in their car harder to satisfy than it should be. First, they utilize something called the Viewpoint plug-in to power their car configuration tool. Why? Why not Flash? MINI has probably the very best car configuration tool on the web and it’s 100% Flash. Why go with some other plug-in that most people have to install? I’m sure the Viewpoint sales guys have an answer for that, but the user experience guy in me says Toyota should have figured out a way to work around it. Funny thing is, the use of Viewpoint isn’t even why I mention Toyota.

The page that detects the Viewpoint plug-in doesn’t work with Firefox. I’ve installed the thing several times yet it never properly detects that I have. It warns me I need it before I click the link to bypass their warning and then keeps warning me I don’t have it even though the configuration thing seems to be working just fine. If I bounce over to Safari, it works. I assume Internet Explorer users don’t have any problems, either.

So now let’s do some math. The FJ Cruiser sells for about $25,000 (higher with options, but I’m being conservative). By choosing to use a technology that makes it hard for me, a Firefox user, to consider their product, they’re putting potential sales in jeopardy. I don’t know how many FJ Cruisers Toyota will sell this year, but let’s use a nice round number like 50,000. If each one sells for (conservatively) $25k and about 20% of web-based shoppers are using Firefox (and also assuming that two-thirds of car buyers are using the web in making their decisions – a number I just totally made up), Toyota is needlessly endangering upwards of $165,000,000 in sales.

Will anyone not buy an FJ Cruiser because the website sucks? I don’t know. Buy when you consider the ease in which nearly everyone online can be accommodated (assuming you plan and develop for them appropriately), why risk losing even one sale? This is not rocket science, people.

One of my favorite examples of bad email marketing (for which many of my coworkers will vouch) is Banana Republic’s practice of sending me lots and lots of emails promoting women’s clothing. Let me make one think perfectly clear: I do not buy women’s clothing from Banana Republic. I do buy a lot of my clothes from them (like, nearly everything – it’s Garanimals for grown-ups), but never have I bought a skirt, pumps, or a handbag. Trust me on this. I even use their Luxe card because I’m a points whore and like to get free stuff, so you’d think they’d have a really good idea of not only what I’ve bought, but also my favorite colors, waist size, and whether or not I buy on sale. But no, they’ve never seemed inclined to do anything with that.

Until today. This morning, I see that not only does my latest BR email have the word “pants” in the subject line (without the word “suit” immediately following it), but it also contains men’s clothing and actual personalized content. It recognizes me as a Luxe card holder and tells me how many points I have and how many more I need before they send me $25. Nice. This is a step in the right direction. Now, if only the info wasn’t a month out of date…

Fifteen web principles from the British Broadcasting Corporation:

1. Build web products that meet audience needs: anticipate needs not yet fully articulated by audiences, then meet them with products that set new standards. (nicked from Google)

2. The very best websites do one thing really, really well: do less, but execute perfectly. (again, nicked from Google, with a tip of the hat to Jason Fried)

3. Do not attempt to do everything yourselves: link to other high-quality sites instead. Your users will thank you. Use other people’s content and tools to enhance your site, and vice versa.

4. Fall forward, fast: make many small bets, iterate wildly, back successes, kill failures, fast.

5. Treat the entire web as a creative canvas: don’t restrict your creativity to your own site.

6. The web is a conversation. Join in: Adopt a relaxed, conversational tone. Admit your mistakes.

7. Any website is only as good as its worst page: Ensure best practice editorial processes are adopted and adhered to.

8. Make sure all your content can be linked to, forever.

9. Remember your granny won’t ever use “Second Life”: She may come online soon, with very different needs from early-adopters.

10. Maximise routes to content: Develop as many aggregations of content about people, places, topics, channels, networks & time as possible. Optimise your site to rank high in Google.

11. Consistent design and navigation needn’t mean one-size-fits-all: Users should always know they’re on one of your websites, even if they all look very different. Most importantly of all, they know they won’t ever get lost.

12. Accessibility is not an optional extra: Sites designed that way from the ground up work better for all users

13. Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes: Encourage users to take nuggets of content away with them, with links back to your site

14. Link to discussions on the web, don’t host them: Only host web-based discussions where there is a clear rationale

15. Personalisation should be unobtrusive, elegant and transparent: After all, it’s your users’ data. Best respect it.

Brilliant.

From Tomski, via Cuene.

David Pogue relates the following tidbit from the private audience he and John Markoff had with Steve Jobs and the iPhone shortly after its introduction:

Markoff: “What about all those plugins that live within Safari now, like Flash or like Java or like JavaScript?”

Jobs: “Well, you might see [Flash].”

Markoff: “What about YouTube?”

Jobs: “Yeah, YouTube—of course. But you don’t need to have Flash to show YouTube. All you need to do is deal with YouTube. And plus, we could get ‘em to up their video resolution at the same time, by using h.264 instead of the old codec.”

Steve thinks you don’t need Flash to watch a YouTube video? What does “all you need to do is deal with YouTube” mean, exactly? YouTube, like a awful lot of sites today, delivers video from within a player built in Flash. We do that, among other reasons, so we don’t need to mess around with crap like Window Media. If Stevie J. wants those of us compelled to buy an iPhone for reasons we can’t easily explain to be able to view YouTube videos, then it’d had better support Flash.

Honestly, as far as I’m concerned, any web-browsing device that doesn’t support Flash just ain’t worth it. Even Opera’s Wii browser supports Flash (and can “deal with YouTube”). Come on, Steve. Snap out of it.

More from Pogue.

There is an evil scourge enveloping the web. Its name is IntelliTXT. You may not know it by that name, but I’m sure you’ve seen it. Ever been to a site where some of the words are double underlined? That’s InteiliTXT. Here’s an example:

Note the word “gaming”. This image was taken from a website about video games, but even so, the word “gaming” seems so general that no reasonable person would expect to see it linked. As you can see, when hovered over, an ad for a computer pops up (some of these even have embedded video).

IntelliTXT’s website says they “enable every word to be an opportunity to engage with customers.” Why, oh WHY, is making every stinking word an “opportunity to engage” someone a good idea? Every word (or even every 100th word) shouldn’t be an opportunity to do anything other than read them. IntelliTXT creates a rotten experience by popping up stupid little windows even if you just happen to pass your cursor over them and distracts from the act of absorbing content by emphasizing some words over others in a way not controlled or even desired by the visitor or the content creator. It’s an unholy alliance of hyperlinks and Google’s AdSense and somehow happens to build on only the negative aspects of both.

Digg, our favorite social news website, has launched a new design today. Simple, functional, and absolutely gorgeous.

Check it out.

So I received the obligatory email messages from retailers in the few days leading up to “Black Friday” (which, no matter what your local news outfit tells you, is not the biggest shopping day of the year) and it amazes me that top tier retailers like Apple, Home Depot, and Nordstrom used the opportunity to merely stick a billboard in front of me. Why not offer email subscribers deals or offers not available to the general public? Like, how about giving me a measly extra 10% off if I bring in my email (or even 5%)? Or a free-while-they-last t-shirt or something? Seems like a missed opportunity to me.

Mike Arrington of TechCrunch weighs in on why some Web 2.0 companies succeed while others wither.

Via Digg.

I found this article over on Digg of the 50 most expensive adwords on Google (I’ll save you the trouble – “school loan consolidation” is on top at $69.16 per click). Beside feeling somewhat sorry for all the school loan consolidators who are are paying a lot of money today because a bunch of Diggers are clicking their ads out of sheer bloody-mindedness, I’m also somewhat perplexed by Ditech.

You know, Ditech. The loan people. Apparently there’s a lot of money in loans since the overwhelming majority of the 50 most expensive words are somehow related to debt. In any event, “Ditech” is the only brand name on the list. As of today, they’re paying over $46 every time someone clicks their sponsored link at the tippy top of the page when the very same link is a measly 100 pixels away at the top of the natural results. I suppose this demonstrates two things about the loan industry. One, there’s boat loads of money in it (duh). Two, competition is so intense in their world that Ditech is happy to fritter away a whole ton of money to get both the top results when someone searchers for their own name.