I read with great interest last week when the independent Web Marketing Association called the 2008 United States presidential election, three weeks before a vote has been cast, to Barack Obama. The reason for this was that Obama's website won their WebAward over John McCain's website!

The decision to award www.barackobama.com the gong for 'Better Website' was made by 110 internet website experts, who sit on the Web Marketing Association's WebAward judging panel. And the fact that this same crew voted for Obama's website as 'better than Hillary Clinton's' during the Democratic primaries, and Obama ended up defeating Clinton, could mean the same path is set for November 4.

Let's take a closer look at both barackobama.com and johnmccain.com...

In 2004 Google exploded onto the email scene with their innovative free webmail offering, GMail. Microsoft and Yahoo quickly tried to play catchup, but GMail has been going from strength to strength ever since then.

But what's so good about GMail? Well, consider just a few of it's key features...

A month since its trial release, Google's Chrome web browser is gaining mixed reviews by web analysts. According to some users, Google Chrome is super-fast and easy to use; others complain that it is too bare, while competitors state their own products remain superior in the newly-congested browser market.

My personal tests of Chrome have been extremely positive, considering it is its VERSION 1 release. Google has again embraced the advantages of open source web development to deliver a product in a rare segment of the web they haven't yet cracked.

1. Splash Page

I’ve seen this mistake many times, where people put up a big banner image and a link "Click here to enter" on their homepage. The worst case — the "enter" link is embedded in the Flash object, which makes it impossible for the search engine spiders to follow the link.

This is fine if you don’t care about what a search engine knows about your site; otherwise you’re making a BIG mistake. Your homepage is most likely your website’s highest ranking page, thus is crawled most frequently by spiders. Your internal pages will not appear in the search engine index without the proper linking structure to internal pages for the spider to follow. Your homepage should include (at minimum) target keywords and links to important pages.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an essential ingredient to consider when selecting your web design company, as a poorly built website has ZERO potential for traffic!

You may have heard terms like CSS, Strong Tags, Titles, URLs, Meta Tags, etc without really understanding them. The key is not for you to understand them, but for you to make sure your web designers know them... and more importantly, use them!