July 1st, 2009 by Glenn
I haven’t been paying much attention to Bing, Microsoft’s new entrant in the search engine race. After all, taking on Google in search …
It does go Bing
But a curious thing has been happening.
I get to see analytics for quite a few different websites. I’ve noticed that for a lot of sites, Bing seemed to have either caught up to Yahoo or overtaken it. A check of about 70 sites revealed Bing equalled or exceeded Yahoo in terms of traffic sent 48% of the time (according to Google Analytics).
When I had a look at Bing’s search results, they were fast and correlated closely to stable rankings I knew from Google.
By co-incidence, Google just started running a regional one box (map with 3 pack of related sites) on a moderately competitive search term that I monitor. Google has got it utterly wrong, and is displaying a map from a totally different place. On exactly the same search term, Bing is displaying accurate, relevant results.
This is a micoscopic sample, of course. But from my perspective, Bing is off to a much better start than anticipated.
Tags: bing, google, yahoo
Categories: Search Marketing
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June 10th, 2009 by Glenn
It seems that in the current economic climate you are better off selling exceptional quality rather than luxury.
That is the message from Johnathan Fields over on the Small Business Trends website in his post When Luxury Becomes a Four Letter Word.
The SmallBizTrends website is run by Anita Campbell, and is a constant source of relevant information for those interested in marketing a small business online.
Tags: anita campbell, luxury, smallbiztrends
Categories: Conversion
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May 30th, 2009 by Glenn
Sebastiano's Outdoor Kitchens - Get a Lifestyle!
Seb and Tash worked with us recently to launch their new website for
Sebastiano’s Outdoor Kitchen.
The concept of a pizza oven, wine and a backyard got my immediate and enthusiastic support! We enlisted the aid of Tracy Graffin to do the branding and design. She came up with an elegant and simple concept for Seb and Tash’s logo, based on a spatula element. The website design also came up beautifully.
The launch evening was an excellent concept, and I can vouch for the tastiness of Fabio’s pizza. Going by the quality of the pizza and the kitchens Seb and Tash deliver, I think they have a really successful business on their hands.
Tags: lead generation, sebastianos
Categories: OM4 clients
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May 30th, 2009 by Glenn
Joint Pain Relief website
Julia (with a bit of help from me) has recently launched a new website on the topic of
Joint Pain Relief for children.
This is a site that shares a lot of information that we have come to learn while on life’s journey. And we certainly hope it will be a lot of use to other parents.
Categories: Just Interesting
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May 18th, 2009 by Glenn
We set up most of our new clients with Google Apps and Google Mail.
It is an easy way to manage email, but you have to get used to the concepts first.
To assist the familiarisation process, I’ve just published a new article in the How To section that describes Google Mail setup within Google Apps.
Categories: Business Email
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May 3rd, 2009 by Glenn
Getting a good design for your website means asking the right questions. Of yourself and your web designer.
Ever since I read Seth Godin’s Big Red Fez I’ve paid a lot of attention to what he says about websites and web design (I paid attention to what he was saying about marketing well before that).
This post from Seth is short and sweet. And worth absorbing.
The First Question Every Web Site Designer Must Ask
Tags: big red fez, seth godin, web design
Categories: Design
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May 2nd, 2009 by Glenn
James has been busy recently with some new features for our OM4 websites.
With our new Image Rotator facility you can use a simple shortcode to put a group of images into a rotator set that will gently rotate in any page or post.
Too much movement on a web page can distract a visitor, so I recommend you use rotators wisely. We’ve provided an easy way to set the display time and transition time for the images so you can have a nice gentle rotation.
How To Article: Adding an Image Rotator
James has built the image rotator using WordPress (which has jQuery libraries incorporated) and definitely no Flash.
Tags: image rotator, jquery, plugins
Categories: OM4 Features
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April 27th, 2009 by Glenn
We’ve been building up our eCommerce capabilities for a while now, and have published new articles on how you can use them in your OM4 website.
Sidebar Shopping Cart
All OM4 websites now include PayPal based eCommerce support as a standard feature. You can manage online payments using:
- Add to Cart buttons with a shopping cart
- Recurring Subscriptions
- Donations
The shopping cart builds on the excellent work started by ZackDesign.
Here are some examples of the shopping cart in use:
There are new articles covering initial setup, and then use of the Shopping Cart/Add to Cart options, Subscriptions and Donations.
Tags: donations, eCommerce, moombaki, ningaloo holiday homes, quickshop, riverfly, sarah wiin, shopping cart, subscriptions
Categories: eCommerce
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April 25th, 2009 by Glenn
I’ve noticed quite a sharp change in screen resolutions from the Analytics logs on various sites.
The number of people using 800×600 resolution monitors or lower has got to the point where in most cases this segment can safely be ignored.
If you are designing for a minimum resolution of 1,024 px wide (which translates to a 984px wide web page layout, once you allow for scroll bars etc), perhaps 2 to 3% of your visitors might encounter the dreaded horizontal scrollbars. Not many. And if you are running a business website, are you that concerned with visitors who have such old technology?
Looking ahead, the next significant screen resolution to consider is 1,280 px wide. If you designed for this width, more than a third of your visitors would need to scroll horizontally - not good. So we are probably going to see 984 px width web designs the maximum width for a while.
Based on my set of stats, the following table shows the the main screen resolutions and the % of visitors who would need to scroll horizontally if you designed for this width:
| Screen Width (px) |
% Requiring Horizontal Scroll |
| 320 |
0.01% |
| 800 |
0.6% |
| 1,024 |
2.7% |
| 1,280 |
38.3% |
| 1,440 |
61.4% |
| 1,680 |
75.7% |
| 1,920 |
91.3% |
Down at the 320px level we are looking at the iPhone platform, and different rules apply here. Designing business websites for the iPhone platform means using a separate website, quite possibly yourdomain.mobi, so buy your domain if you can.
Tags: iphone, screen resolution
Categories: Design
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April 23rd, 2009 by Glenn
We’ve been using DropBox for shared folders for a while now. This is a simple and very effective service.
It works like this:
- sign up for DropBox (a 2Gb account is free) - if you refer others (as I am doing with my referral link above) you can get your free allocation up to 3Gb
- your DropBox folder is created on your Mac/Windows computer
- drop folders / files you want to share into your DropBox
- invite people to share one or more of your folders
- once they have accepted the invite, the contents of your DropBox folders appear on their Mac/Windows computer as well. Change a file on either side and it syncs to the other.
You can have a team of people sharing a folder.
Very simple, very effective and reliable. 2Gb of shared folders is free, after that you can upgrade to 50Gb for $9.99 USD/mth
The DropBox service is built on the Amazon S3 platform. I expect to see a lot more of this kind of service, as Amazon have done a great job with their infrastructure services.
Tags: amazon s3, dropbox
Categories: Online Marketing Resources
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