Quite a few things turned out live recently - ranging from tiny but efficient micro-sites to full-blown recruitment websites. It’s been busy, but fun - as usual…
Alex Strang of HB RIDA has written a thoughtful and interesting article regarding online marketing during these tough times.
Improving your own web site’s performance reduces your reliance on the job boards and leads to lower (or at least more controllable) marketing spend.
By online marketing, we mean SEO, Email Marketing (newsletters and job alerts) and XML/RSS data feeds to job search engines — anything that gets your jobs in front of prospective candiates. These solutions do not have to be expensive, especially compared to more traditional forms of advertising; and they are certainly more measurable.
I’m a little biased, but Alex - I couldn’t agree more!
With lots of inevtbable talk of Google’s interest in buying Twitter recently, the recent announcement of Google Wave somehow caught me by surprise. Google have for some time needed to get their hands on the likes of Facebook and Twitter and other such platforms, but Wave seems to be just the unique approach you’d expect from Google.
A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.
If you have 1 hr 20 mins, you can find out much, much more by watching the video below
We have previous experience of using osCommerce and CubeCart for developing e-commerce sites and both have their strengths and weaknesses. osCommerce suffers from having too many developers working for “free” and we often find we have to finish developing part-written code, which can be annoying when you are working on a fixed price quote! CubeCart is a great, sensibly priced and properly supported system but can be a little too basic for some sites, although we do recommend it for small sites with basic needs for its ease of set up and use.
We feel Magento has a lot to offer online retailers and certainly helps create a feature-rich online shop with very sophisticated back-office functionality. Some of it can look a little daunting at first, but once you get to grips with it, you can see how the advanced functionality can help you run your site. Magento is commercially-backed for those looking for support, as well as being open source, thereby allowing developers to download and develop for free. There is a community of plug-in developers selling add-on functionality for various functions.
We all get the emails. The spam filters luckily pick up 99% of the emails that could hit our in boxes advertising ‘that’ product… beginning with V… that spam filters are taught to bear down upon at even the hint of a “Viag…”
For a number of years, the more innovative spammers have played a game of euphemism … carefully worded double entendres that imply a product to eradicate erectile dysfunction, but never mention any of those rude words that spam filters so easily spot.
Like most of us, however, my colleague Dave has to trawl through the spam box from time to time and we occasionally encounter a spam workaround so much that it makes us giggle. One of note was “Make your snake so iron in could pierce a hole in ceiling…” (so hard to picture!)
However, our favourite was one that landed in the spam box last weekend… instead of the usual “grow your big sword” type subject line, we got one that just said: “we’ve run out of euphemisms today”
Simply superb. It makes you want to open the email it’s so good. Someone clearly fed up with their innovative spamming job, and has a sense of humour!
BUT there is a lesson here too - for all you email marketing people - MAKE YOUR HEADLINES SNAPPY so that people WANT TO OPEN THAT EMAIL!!!
The government’s budget commitments are good material for making people cross - usually more so than they make people happy (but it does happen!).
The UK government has signalled its commitment in Tuesday’s budget to ensuring everyone in the country has access to broadband speeds of two megabits per second by 2012. Earlier this year Lord Carter set out his interim recommendations for Digital Britain, in which he proposed a Universal Service for broadband.
The news articles from 1999 talking about the expectations of 2Mbps are here. It looked realistic then; before youtube, iplayer, and the likes. What’s round the corners waiting to make 2mbps look ridiculous? Oh hang on.. by 2012, it already will be. Good inside the box thinking.
The fact that YouTube and ITV have been unable to monetize the sensational rise of Susan Boyle is a bit of a blunder. It shows the archaic ways that business is still done between old and new media.
By some estimates, video of Boyle’s performance of “I Dreamed a Dream” on Britain’s Got Talent has already asmassed more than 100 million video views on the Web. However, according to The Times, ITV (who owns the rights to the show) - and YouTube - where most of the views have taken place – have been unable to reach a revenue share deal, meaning no ads have been served, and more than a “million-pound windfall” has been missed.
The delay is apparently over advertising formats. ITV wants pre-rolls and YouTube doesn’t. The Times quotes ITV’s online director: “We don’t want to be part of YouTube’s standard terms and conditions, because content like Susan Boyle is unique … I think both sides are being hard-nosed and commercial about it.” YouTube, the article notes, prefers overlay and text ads, which have been increasingly showing up on videos around the site.
Time some heads were banged together. Forget Simon Cowell, this calls for Sir Alan Sugar.
We’ve been working on this for some time in between client websites and have finally got it finished! Our new improved portfolio showcases our most recent and best work, along with glowing testimonials from our happy clients!
Our previous work and testimonials are really important to us — happy clients introduce us to new clients and repeat business. We believe this is the best way to get new business.
Please check it out and let us know what you think!
I’m tempted to think that this is down to someone putting all their eggs in one basket, but it’s a very sad tale nevertheless.
You’ll have seen for some searches - predominantly ones involving a town name and a service - that Google Local listings have changed recently. Google used to display three local results with a link to more, but their research told them that people weren’t sure what those results were.
The Guardian is showing the way again with UK news sites by publishing today its ‘Open Platform‘ Exciting times - giving developers and bloggers the power to display deep, full text, video and audio content from guardian.co.uk on their own sites. Dying to have a play with this but I’m a bit busy at the moment!
