webbage

I use a huge range of Internet start-up websites and applications. There’s something very satisfying about being the early adopter and introducing others to great services that you have found, whether it’s a tool for improving productivity (Evernote) or a social media site (Social Median, ok maybe not a “start-up” anymore. Congrats Jason Goldberg). Anyway, one start-up I thought was great was iwantsandy.com.

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Twitter is now 2 and half years old and is probably one of the most popular Internet start-ups in recent years.  Despite its constant down-time, America loves the micro-blogging platform and nothing seems set to topple it (yet). Personally, I can’t get into it (I have tried). In theory, I love the idea of it, but in practice it doesn’t work for me.

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I’m seeing a lot more of 2-dimensional codes these days. These codes work similarly to barcodes, but are able to hold much more information and also hold far more possible combinations.  Their greatest asset in my opinion is that they are usable by consumers through a camera on a mobile phone.  Using the reader software downloadable to your mobile phone, you can take a photo of the code and it will decode it into a message or action, like opening a web page, adding contact details to your phone or accessing other rich content.

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Since the launch of Webbage, it has been exciting and interesting to look at the visitor stats of the blog using Google Analytics. But the free tool from Google was tracking my behaviour as well because my home network assigns a dynamic IP address, thus rendering the IP filter tool in Analytics useless.  This seriously skews the figures considering the amount of times that I check the site. I want to see how many actual visitors I am getting to the site. Now I can with a handy Firefox add-on.

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Reading my daily Tech Crunch email a while back, I came across an early beta development project called Spotify.  A music player/library where all the music is held in a massive online database that you stream from.

Hmmm, this sounds like another clunky, slow site that tries too hard to give you things you don’t need when it can’t even find you a song you want to hear, I thought.  Or it plays a live, badly recorded version of the song.  Or one of those sites that you have to pay for when you don’t even know what you are going to get.  Or an illegal site that gets closed down within a week of you finding it.  (Rant over).

Not Spotify.  This is the future of music, with no doubt in my mind.

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I gave into temptation and bought myself a 16gb iphone 3G.  I’ve wanted one for ages.  How could you not want one?  Especially if you’re a bit of a geek like me.  For me, it really is something that I don’t need.  I have lived without one till now.  I don’t need to check my email every 10 mins when I’m not in the office and I don’t really need access to the internet when on the train.  I just want it, and I’m so glad I’ve got it.

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When a client asked what sort of creative testing can be done to enhance an online channel I immediately referred to usability testing; with out a doubt the most insightful way to test a website and various creatives, but this is something I have little experience in.  Google Website Optimizer also came to mind.  A free tool enabling you to do anything from A/B testing to multivariate testing (which is basically testing numerous combinations of changes at once) with great simplicity and a plethora of options and results stats.

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It is essential to make sure that canonicalisation (multiple urls for identical pages) does not occur on your website.  The most common instance of canonicalisation is when your site can be accessed using www. and without using www. (ie http://www.webbage.co.uk and http://webbage.co.uk).  Search engines will see these as seperate pages, but with the same content.  This means you will be penalised for duplicate content!

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I have been researching SEO tips and techniques a lot recently and can safely say that I haven’t even scratched the surface.  There are a lot of blogs out there preaching their SEO knowledge as gospel, but the funny thing is, no one really knows the true secret of search engine optimisation.

Throughout the life of this blog, I intend for SEO tips and techniques, debates and theories to be added requently.  For now, here are some basic tips for website/business owners looking to start optimising their site to appear on the likes of Google, Yahoo and the rest.

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A really useful new tool that I found today is Notifu – a message delivery service that can send a message via SMS, IM and email to any number of contacts.  The x-factor of this app is that it can send text messages to a group of people for free. It even works in the UK (which is great now that Twitter has stopped its sms service outside the US).

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