Digitally Refreshing

Working within a corporate can get lonely. Not because I am alone (I’m surrounded by great people here at PruHealth) but becuase I’m the only web designer in the building.

When we meet with our digital and traditional agencies I think what it must be like on the ‘other side’, working with differnt brands and technologies where new sets of challenges presents itself every week.

This is why, when I received an invite from EMC Conchango to attend a Fantastic Tavern event at the George, I lept at the chance.First up was DoubleClick who presented new banner technologies – all of which are in use now. Imagine being able to do a Health Insurance Quote within a banner? Well, now that I’ve seen something similar from DoubleClick I want to do it myself. We spend a lot of time and effort trying to get people to our website in order to complete a quote or research Health Insurance – perhaps we should spend some of those resources talking to our customers whilst they are in the comfort of their preferred webspaces – Facebook for example.

Then EMC Conchango took the stage and I watched Microsft Surface come to life. Designed by the experts at EMC Conchango and tested by children (yes, really!) – the possibilities seemed endless. I can’t wait for a version which I can roll up and take away with me – but that’s probably a few years off!

I’m certainly looking forward to the next Fantastic Tavern.

This is the third of three emails all with similar layouts but with different messages.

Interestingly, they know I have a bank account in SA (I live in the UK) so has someone purchased Standard Bank’s email database? I hope not, but if they had surely Standard Bank would know this – and then send out a secure message to it’s customers?

Here is an extract from the email

I searched the web for examples of this scam – to see if anyone else had posted about it – but there’s nothing out there. I can’t be the first – if you’ve seen this email too, post to this blog and let others know.

Here is the security alert page on the Standard Bank website  I see no mention of the email scam but there is a good page on email phishing.

Keep your eyes open for scams like this – always check to see where links in the email take you. In most cases banks will not email you anyway -  so always be careful.I tried one of the links to see what would happen and Google Chrome prevented me from visiting the page – thanks Google!

I long for another phone (but not an iPhone yet).

I’ve been using my HTC Diamond for 3 months.

I’ve persisted with the touch screen, I’ve researched speed issues, I’ve trauled forums, I’ve edited settings and I’m still unhappy.

I’m fed-up with having to restart my HTC Diamond to get the menus to work, or having to switch the power on and off (the small black button at the top of the handset) to kick start the thing into reposnding.

I spent 2 hours yesterday trying to figure out why Gmail won’t send emails, but will receive them (you have to actually delete the Gmail account and start again).

I hate the way Windows 6 Mobile pokes its ugly head through the HTC Diamond’s (redeeming) slick look and feel.

The browser is not good. This dissappoints me as I’m a desktop Opera user. it’s not clear when you’ve tapped a link, nor is it clear when something is happening – or how long it will take for a page to load – the green loading bar doesn’t work for me.

Screen gestures just aren’t clever enough, I end up tapping when I mean to scroll and vise versa. I don’t know how Apple do it, but gestures are practically flawless on my iPod Touch.

The Accelerometer, when used with the browser, is sluggish and jumpy.

The battery life is abismal – but this isn’t out of the ordinary for a device such as this.

I could go on, but this is turning into a rant …

Download now: http://www.google.com/chrome

Google have built a browser and they’ve called it Chrome. You can read the Google Chrome press release for all the technical and aspirational commentary. Read on for my take …

Things I like:

Tabs
Yep, all browsers have tabs – thanks to Opera (at least that’s where I first saw it years ago) but Google have done it better. Without getting into the complexities let me just say that now a tab can crash horribly and it won’t crash your whole browser session – fantastic!

Tear off tabs
What a pleasure, use this all the time – maybe because I have 2 screens in front of me and like to reference two pages at the same time. For example, I can see Chrome now whilst I write this – I don’t have to ctrl+tab constantly.

Most-visited thumbs on new, blank tab
A great interpretation of what Opera have been doing for ages. Last time I looked/updated which was several months ago I had to set up my favourites manually in Opera, which I did – but I lost interest quickly. Google Chrome does it for me, handy little thumbnails of my favourite sites laid out nicely for me.

A Private mode
Great for when you’re gift shopping for someone else who has access to the browser in your household. No more sifting through your history to delete that one ‘give-away’ website. Just launch the special private surfing window (it’s not a tab) and surf away.

It’s faster – by far
Check out these stats to see how quickly Google Chrome runs JavaScript.

There are things I need when I browse, such as Web Developer Tool Bar made popular by Firefox and Drag and Drop Attachments – but I expect these will come in time. I also wish that I could double click in the empty tab space to launch a new browser – but now that’s like clicking on the window itself.

So, I like Google Chrome (love it really because it will force M$ to build a better browser or knock it out of the market all together)

Just came across this blog post from Facebook – looks like they’re going to ‘Free your Facebook page’ after all!

It’s called Facebook Connect and it will let you take your Facebook page with you, where ever you go. Security comes to mind almost immediately, does this move just weaken the wall between your personal data and the rest of the world? I’d be interested to see how corporates block Facebook connect, if it can exist on any other web page will blocking techniques become futile?

Sir Tim Berners-Lee gave the web away to the masses. If it were to be commercialised by the likes of large corporates it’s growth would have been slower but I imagine just as vast. It would have been like the Web, but within a giant bubble with corporate branding which you had to pay (in one way or another) to enter and interact with.

Kind of like Facebook. Of course, the types of information found within Facebook is limited (for now) but there is still plenty to read, watch and learn from.

Facebook is growing into a concealed Web (behind a walled garden some say) wrapped in a brand. You even pay to enter. You hand over your personal details, photos, videos, news and gossip. Facebook can use this as they see fit – forever.

I would like to free my Facebook page and allow it to live independently on the web – keep the permissions so only your friends could see the page in it’s entirety, but allow it to link and be linked to by ‘outside’ pages.

Allow it to exist as other pages do ‘in the wild of the world wide web’.

You can kind of see this happening ever since Facebhook allowed Google to trawl through its members, here’s my Facebook page for example. However, to access the full version you still have to hand over your info as payment.

Titles like that just don’t make sense, but from an Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) point of view, it works just fine. There is a compromise between hitting the number one spot on Google and creating a site that’s readable and usable.

Through good SEO techniques I managed to get www.petereed.co.uk on the first page of Google, then it completely disappeared from Google and now I’m scaling the rankings once again – trying to get to the illusive number one spot. This is what I’ve learnt …

(please note: I’m refering to the .co.uk version of each search engine unless specified otherwise)

Everyone wants their site to be number one on GYM (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live Search). But the first question you should ask is ‘For which search terms?‘ – this is massively important. For example, if you search on ‘orange‘ (without the quotes) in Google you’ll never find Digitally Refreshing, however if you search on ‘orange broadband‘ (without the quotes) then Digitally Refreshing appears on page 12. If you search on ‘orange broadband sucks‘ (without the quotes) Digitally Refreshing rises to number one.

I wanted petereed.co.uk to hold the number one position in Google when the term ‘pete reed‘ was searched on, so I made sure that I covered the basics by placing the term ‘Pete Reed‘ into:

Home page content
Home page title
HTML title tag
HTML description tag
HTML Keywords (Google stopped using Keywords for search years ago)

I also blogged about petereed.co.uk, linked to his site from mine and correctly key-worded my article. I also made sure that every other rowing site in the UK and abroad knew about his site and also linked to it. This is of course a slower process as you’re inevitably relying on others to promote you. I also made sure that Pete Reed’s Wikipedia entry contained a link to his site.

Pete Reed’s site shot straight to number 1 in Google for about a day. I’ve noticed this behaviour many times with sites I’ve built but they soon drop down the rankings again. Pete Reed’s site settled at around 12th place and worked it’s way up to around 7th and that’s where it stayed for about a week.

Barriers blocking a number one spot were ironically Pete himself. Pete had written many articles on many different websites, he was also written about regularly. So straight away I was dealing with a mass of high trafficked, well linked, established sites. How could Google know that Pete’s own site should appear at the top of the results page? Google ranks on relevance and this is why the likes of his own Wikipedia page and other Rowing sites were outstripping my efforts. For a while even my own post was ranked above his site.

Not content with this position I started to tweak the content, insert more keywords, create another well worded heading and edited the HTML title of the site. I would have used more keywords but the owner of the site wasn’t happy with the aesthetic of the content – which is fair, you have to appreciate the balance between SEO and usability as illustrated in the first paragraph of this article.

I also submitted a sitemap to Google using a free tool supplied by 1&1.

To my great disappointment Pete Reed’s site then dropped to around page 4 of Google and then suddenly disappeared from Google altogether. I knew it had been removed from Google because I made use of the webmaster tools provided by Google themselves.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Peter Reed’s site was still holding number one spot on Yahoo! so what was going on with Google?

Now, as I don’t know how Google really works (no-one does despite what people may tell you) I can only begin to guess at what may have happened and I’m pretty sure I screwed things up when I submitted the site map.

Google doesn’t do duplicate content. If you were to duplicate the content of someone elses site Google will simply ingore you (or the original site – which is a disaster). Pete Reed has two domains, petereed.co.uk and the domain he registered first – petereed.org. So, Google naturally crawled the .org version and then I submitted a site map for the .co.uk version creating a problem.

Or so I thought. As it turns out this wasn’t the problem as after a few days of Pete’s dissappearance it reappeared in Google’s index. So, Google has quite happily indexed both domain versions of the site:

Go to Google.co.uk and search on the following terms:

site:petereed.co.uk
site:petereed.org

You’ll see that Google now contains many pages from each ‘version’ of the site (with the number of pages growing steadily).

So, was this dissappearance just a glitch in the matrix? Did Google make a mistake which it then rectified a few days later? Or perhaps submitting a site map for a Joomla installed site using a different domain to the domain which the site was installed into is simply a bad idea?

What ever happened as of the date of this article www.petereed.co.uk is ranked number one in Google.co.uk and 4th in the .com version. But, remember it won’t stay that way forever – as soon as a site becomes more relevant Google will demote you.

Now the next challenge, to become number one ranked site for the search term “olympic rower“.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working closely with Great Britain rower Pete Reed to build him a website in advance of the Olympics in Beijing this summer. Pete will be competing at the Olympics as part of Great Britain’s flagship coxless four boat. As double World Champion, he’s one of Britain’s brightest medal hopes and needed a website to match.

I’ve designed a website to reflect Pete’s personality and the challenges of his sport, whilst trying to capture the feeling of patriotism and excitement that surrounds the Olympics. His website needed to fulfil a variety of functions including corporate promotion, blogs, galleries and feedback capability, but retain the flexibility to change with him (and to be easily updated) and he moves through the next 4-year training cycle to the 2012 Olympics in London.

I built the site on top of the popular Joomla CMS. It was my first attempt at getting to grips with Joomla (version 1.5) and I had to do a lot of learning! If anyone is interested in dabbling with the popular CMS then get stuck in. The help forums, help pages and general instruction manuals are excellent – much better than they were this time last year!

I think it’s just about there now – check it out at www.petereed.co.uk and let me know what you think!