So, I am sitting with my wife watching Lost at the weekend when one of the Flash-backs (or Flash-forwards - I get so confused) showed Jin running into a shop to get a toy. Who’s artwork should I see on the window but a good friend of mine (ooh ark at me) Simon Oxley.
Okay, so in the UK they don’t have much market share and all the more recent talk has been negative, but, this news about Yahoo and semantic search is an important one.
Semantic search technology should allow Yahoo to organise information better allowing users to find more specific information. The BBC use the following example:
The semantic web might mean that a search could be done for hotels in Lanzarote that allow pets, are five minutes from a good beach and cost no more than £75 per night.
Even more reason for us to start preparing content to be more descriptive.
As much as I love the big picture branding and strategy, I still see a simple piece of marketing that excites me.
Today it is a ’stress ball’ in the shape of a helicopter that we have just produced for a local company - FB Helicopters - one of which is now sitting proudly on my desk.
Simple things and all that!
You have to wonder if you need search on your site anymore as Google push their search further. I was looking for the weight watchers website this morning (not for me, for a friend you understand) when I saw this in the search results:
I’m looking forward to this website that has now gone live for Storepoint.
With a great product there is a real upside that we are hoping to generate as the previous website had little online presence.
Produced in our CMS system, the website will be updated on the fly, with additional value added content to drive traffic, as well as refined produce pages and case studies.
This website also has an e-commerce element, which is being worked on live as the website beds in.
From the 7th April 2008 certain postal prices are set to increase.
These include:
First Class Letter (upto 100g) 36p
First Class Large Letter (upto 100g) 52p
Second Class Letter (upto 100g) 27p
Second Class Large Letter (upto 100g) 42p
Special Delivery Pre 9am (upto 100g) £10.30
Special Delivery Next Day (upto 100g) £4.60
See Royal Mail for more detailed information including a pricing made easy guide.
With so many web agencies and programmers claiming their websites are 100% compilant with current standards there was no real fun way to measure it (unless you run the W3C validator). Now there is.
A web site has just been launched called xhtmlchallenge.com. The premise is very simple and very clever.
Just add your URL and a competitiors site URL and off you go. The site will check your sites Doctype, Markup Validation, Content length, Markup Ratio, Content Ratio and CSS Validation.
The site also allows users to vote on which site they think is the best.
So, me and Debs are off to Toronto in Canada for the first week of April to sit down for a few days of web strategy advice with Escape client - Advanced Inc.
Part of the trip involves presenting our “How To Formulate An Effective Web Strategy” seminar (now fully booked in the UK), which should also help the process as their own strategy takes shape.
If you are a company in Torronto and are looking for a web agency that can deliver, get in contact and maybe we can hook up on my spares days. I don’t mind having general chats with people and those who know me will know that I love the sound of me talking about the web so please feel free to use me while I am in tow.
It’s either that or a day at Niagra Falls!
You can contact me via the website.
People love a good rank. I know I often check my traffic rankings and web stats and as much as I tell people it’s not so important; I just can’t help myself.
One way of checking a websites traffic is by using Alexa, which bases it’s rankings on people who have visited a website - if they have the Alexa toolbar loaded.
Compete is another such system that allows you to be nosy; looking at other website’s rankings or comparing your website traffic with a competitors.
I still check my Alexa ranking regularly, and I won’t stop, but I also know it’s very vague and below the top 50k, I’d suggest it is easy to manipulate.
For instance, I launched a private project a couple of weeks ago - www.pervolia.org - a community website for a village in Cyprus. It went live on 29th February and already has an Alexa ranking for the week of 399,014 - all from 59 visits (Google Analytics) - and I am pretty sure, I have driven that ranking because I am using the CMS.
I used to have this conversation with Adam about his website which attracts A LOT of traffic. He would get a bit irrate when he knew he was getting tens of thousands of visitors a week, and The Escape site would still be higher on 100 per day. BTW, his site has since eclipsed ours.
MTV reported that even the Pros get it wrong after Comscore gave their verdict on Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” online release last year:
The band’s statement also dismissed the results of a recent report issued by comScore, a company that measures online consumer activity. The comScore report suggested that 60 percent of fans who downloaded In Rainbows — which the band offered as a “name-your-own-price” product beginning October 10 — paid nothing for the tracks.
In the statement, Radiohead said the comScore data was “wholly inaccurate” and that it “in no way reflected definitive market intelligence or, indeed, the true success of the project.”
