Voodoochilli Design

How have you been through the recession? It seems to me that being small, efficient and most importantly smart helps during times like this.

It’s been really hard lately keeping up with all these blogs I run lately let alone do much personal work. This is a shame as I have quite a lot I want to get done! The reason for this, believe it or not is that we have been inundated with work. A client of mine believes this is because smaller companies like ours are very attractive during times of financial crisis as our overall costs are lower than bigger companies with larger overheads.

Although it is true that by being competitive a company is likely to survive where more bloated companies cannot, I do not believe this is the only reason smaller companies are doing well right now. I think it all has to do with people being smarter with their money. Companies need to make money – this we all know, and when there is a downturn in the economy it becomes harder and harder for the majority of businesses to keep going as at the end of the day they are all affected in some way by the the demand and disposable income of the general public. When times are hard it affects the average family quicker than anyone and this has a knock-on affects to nearly all business. People just don’t spend as much when they are feeling the pinch.

So with shrinking advertising budgets due to lower turnovers what should a business do to survive? Keep pumping more money into the same methods of selling? Or try something smarter? It really does amaze me that some clients approach me with successful businesses that have only recently considered getting an online presence. A website can not only act as a non paid salesman for a company, it can also be used as a tool to increase efficiency and do many of the tasks that normally take a lot of time, money and effort. Why post or fax documentation that is needed before a sale when your website can email it straight to your customer, for free and within minuets? That’s just one example, and I am sure you can think of loads yourself, you get the point, I think this kind of thinking will benefit companies prepared to adapt to a changing financial climate. It’s survival of the smartest.

I just got this message when viewing my email.

“You are using this feature to spam other users. Continued misuse of Facebook’s features will result in your account being disabled. If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit our FAQ page.”

What a load of rubbish! Besides it’s hard enough to cancel your own account!

I find it really quite funny that people actually believe the story about some Google boss accidentally  sending the email with the details of their new browser. The comic within was great, certainly a finished piece as far as I could see. And then, the launch of the browser the next day – funny how it was ready in time regardless of this so called accident. All in all what a great bit of publicity. It got a lot of attention on the national news here in the UK – after all news agencies love a story like when a big company supposedly makes a big mistake.

Besides the drama behind this beta launch there is a very good application waiting to be taken up by the hordes of internet users. You would expect no less than brilliance from the company with the reputation for innovation that Google rightly boasts. There are many things done right with this browser. Immediate impressions are of a clean interface with usability at the forefront of the design. For example, a pop-up window, when blocked will actually be placed at the bottom of the page, so if it was actually a requested page then it can easily be dragged up to full view. My only concern with the interface is it somehow looks a bit flat. I guess Google were thinking that its best not to distract from the real reason you are using a browser: to view websites. The icons and buttons are clean and simple, they get the job done.

Page load times seem fast which in my mind is a good indication of a good browser rendering engine. The HTML rendering does need a few tweaks though as some hyper links are showing incorrect colours and attributes as set in CSS style sheets. Still, this is only a beta version.

The browser also has many other features that take a little while to notice at first. For example, a built in spell checker and the ability to drag text areas as you can in safari.

All in all first impressions are very positive and I look forward to further developments.

I got a bit of a shock this morning when I realised google had gone black. I seriously thought that something was wrong with my computer, maybe a weird insternal style sheet or something! Well as it turns out its Earth Hour later today – from 8pm local time, when we should all turn out lights of to save electricity and raise awareness of global warming. google one Google!

Interestingly the UK version of this site has the following information not shown on the US version:

How green can you be? The UK’s carbon footprint is over 500 million tonnes of CO2 per year. Individuals account for 45% of this. Calculate your carbon footprint and find out how you can reduce it by turning off unused lights and other carbon-reducing actions.

Indeed, on the US version there is no link to the carbon foot print calculator, I wonder why? National politics maybe?

Today I closed my account with Facebook. I could write a dissertation on the reasons I hate Facebook so much, but to keep things short and sweet I thought I would write a little list. Even closing my account was hard: it is closed apparently, but I can reactivate it meaning all my data is still stored on their servers. So essentially its not closed, its just not visible. Anyway, to the list:

1. The “You have not registered yet” message. God this annoys me big time and its the number one reason I have closed my account. How presumptuous is that? You accidentally mistype your password or use your other email address and the site assumes you have never registered with Facebook before. Who is that stupid? I can imagine it now: “Hmm I was sure I was a member…maybe I was getting mixed up with Ebay – they are both websites after all?”

EDIT: Maybe the facebook team were listening to me as they have got rid of this

2. Vampires. Bloody vampires and Ninjas. At first I thought it was different, kind of interesting, but now I realise pressing a “bite” button on a website just doesn’t do it for me.

3. The amount of email. No wonder Facebook gets so much traffic – the sheer amount of emails about said vampires gives my spam filter a hard time.

4. People contacting me I was hiding from. Well OK, its a social networking utility, but I don’t like it when cousins I didn’t like as a kid start sending me messages.

5. Vulgar fun wall pictures and video clips. Maybe I’m alone on this one but in my mind a good user experience isn’t spending half an hour deleting badly drawn pictures of dicks.

6. It’s a waste of time. Facebook is inherently addictive – this is the sites main purpose, to keep you coming back. Its not really about connecting people, its about traffic. I have spent way too many hours of my life on that website and I want them back!

7. Integrated applications. Facebook comes with a cool little API allowing developers to create web applications that integrate into the site. The only problem is most of them are buggy. Every time I try and add a little app someone has written it always says there was an error.

8. Privacy concerns. They have a hell of a lot of data about people, their names, their friends, photos, which school they went to, where they work – the list goes on. There are 1.7 billion photos of people for god sake! A good hacker could make a lot of money…But its not that I’m worried about. As they put it: “We may share your information with third parties, including responsible companies with which we have a relationship.” Responsible is a lose term and open to personal interpretation.

9. I didn’t think of it. Enough said.

10. Gifts, pokes and all those other stupid little things that make it annoying!!!

My account is finally closed and I won’t be logging on again! Oh, I just remembered all of my photos are stored on there and I need to get them back…

EDIT: I’ve had to open it again…God damit! It seems people I know now use the site to actaully organise things like weddings and events. Who’d thought…

We have made a little site that helps you improve your SEO ranking on your own site! Give it a go! www.metapig.com

Our little web forum is growning slowly and building speed. It’s interesting how these things work out – exponetial growth, but as always its so hard to get the initial members in the first place. Exponential growth systems are facinating, it works like this: A site that has say 100 members has 10 times the refereal power of a site that has 10 members. By that I mean a percentage of each member is likely to invite someone to join or tell other people about the site (or indeed link to the site). A site with 1000 members has 10 times the referal power of a site with 100 members. The more members you have, the more members you get. This is what makes sites like Facebook and MySpace so massive. Well our site has only a few members at the moment but every day there are a few more, lets see how things pan out.

It seems to me that many sites have recently showed a slight drop in Alexa rank lately. Facebook as mentioned in my last post has slowed down slightly and I have noticed this on many other big sites. Is Alexa tweaking the way it analyses statistics? I’m losing interest in Alexa rankings to be honest, but this is something I will keep an eye on.

Facebook fascinates me, not because of the countless annoying messages I get on it about quizzes and vampire fights, but because of its exponential growth. This exponential growth pattern occurs because the more members it has, the more people are referred, and the cycle continues. However I believe this may be about to change.

Having signed up myself a few months ago, I am now totally bored with the site. I’m not the only one either, many people I have spoken to have said the same thing. Facebook was very fun at first but is now a bit tedious.

There is a possible downturn in traffic too. Please see below.

It is widely known that Alexa is not very accurate at measuring the traffic levels for smaller sites, but for one of the major contenders such as Facebook, we can assume these statics are fairly reflective of the overall traffic trends.

It could be a seasonal trend, maybe every December sites such as Facebook received lower traffic, possibly because people are preparing for Christmas, who knows. It is interesting to note that MySpace.com does not have the same downturn. Personally I think Facebook could be in trouble.

Before I get started on this, let me answer some of the comments I will undoubtedly have if I don’t state this: Yes I know Google Page Rank isn’t as important as it once seemed. It puzzles me why, whenever I talk about Google Page Rank I get at least one person telling me how unimportant it is, well if its so unimportant why do you care so much? I do believe Google is playing down the value of Page Rank recently especially because people have attempted (with varying success) to change their page rank by buying links from others. However, as they are the World’s leading authority on search engine placement, forgive me if I show a little interest in how they measure the value of a page and its content. And yes, I do realise that Google PR does not seem to directly affect search engine results and traffic.Right, that’s out of the way, now I can get down to business.

Why do I think this?

Ok, the site I am talking about is our online portfolio for artists website, Voodoochilli.net. For years the site has had a Google Page Rank of 5, but a few months ago this went down to 4. I understand that Google has done some updates recently and that the measurement of Page Rank is probably logarithmic meaning that a Page Rank of 5 is much higher than a Page rank of 4. I also realise that these Page Ranks aren’t fixed numbers, the more websites that have Page Rank the harder it is to compete. I should also point at that we have not lost any considerable amount of traffic since the Page Rank was reduced.

I have a few reasons to believe that our site might have been penalised. Firstly it does surprise me that the Page Rank has reduced when in fact the site has many more back links than previously. According to Google’s Webmaster Tools the home page has thousands of relevant back links and many of them are from PR5 and PR 4 websites. Being a community website, it’s nature is to grow, and the amount of incoming links also grows with it. Indeed the site appears to be growing at around 150% every year.

My second reason for suspecting that Google may have penalised the site is that all of the links I have in the Google Directory no longer show any page rank, whereas other peoples sites do. This is consistent with what I have heard happening to other people that have been penalised 1 Page Rank point.

My third point is an interesting one. I have lost the link now, but in my web statistics logs there was record of a lot of incoming links from Googles server – I am not sure if it was someone else’s Web Master Tools account or the discussion groups on Google, but for some reason, there was a lot of traffic coming from Google regarding our website (and we are not talking about your usual search engine traffic). I suspect someone reported our site for having paid links – something it used to have.

Why would Google have Penalised me?

As mentioned above, the site used to have paid links. I was never aware that this was a problem and certainly didn’t think Google would penalise because of it. The fact that there is a link in Googles Webmaster tools to report other sites that are selling paid links means that Google doesn’t like this one bit.

Google States:

“We work hard to return the most relevant results for every search we conduct. To that end, we encourage site managers to make their content straightforward and easily understood by users and search engines alike. Unfortunately, not all websites have users’ best interests at heart. Some site owners attempt to “buy PageRankâ„¢” in the form of paid links to their sites. Buying links to improve PageRank violates our quality guidelines.

Google uses a number of methods to detect paid links, including algorithmic techniques. We also welcome information from our users. If you know of a site that buys or sells links, please tell us by filling out the fields below. We’ll investigate your submissions, and we’ll use your data to improve our algorithmic detection of paid links.”

I can see the reasoning behind this – Why should people be able to buy their way up to the top? I guess the flip-side argument would be – Why shouldn’t someone that’s worked hard building up their site be allowed to sell links on their site? Some people in the SEO world have speculated that this whole issue is to play down the value of other text link exchanges schemes leaving Google with a clear monopoly.

Where to go from Here?

I have removed all references to advertising on that website, with the exception of Google’s own Adsense programme. I have contacted Google via the “Request reconsideration” link in Webmasters’s tools and I am eagerly awaiting their reply. Who knows, maybe they will tell me it hasn’t been penalised and I am getting worried about nothing. I have also been on the discussion boards, but no one has given me an answer yet.

I would be very interested to hear other peoples experiences on this.