We are delighted to announce that we have recently acquired a large number of clients from Sabre Webdesign in Glasgow.
We are excited at the prospect of working on some great new web development and internet marketing projects with our new clients that include restaurants, photographers, florists, large ecommerce sites and public sector clients including the NHS, a few large national and international organisations.
We would like to welcome all our new clients and look forward to working with them.
Twitter has announced that it will be adding a new tweek to its current API for developers that will allow tweets that are maybe sensitive to others to me marked as NSFW.
Users will be given the ability to mark their own tweets as sensitive and filter any sensitive tweets out their timeline should they wish, users will also be able to tag other peoples tweets that you may find of a sensitive nature, which will then be reviewed by twitter who will decide if they are or not.
This is a smart move for Twitter as it becomes more mainstream and a popular social media platform for media distribution, it will also be important for users in an office environment who don’t welcome sensitive tweets.
“Beginning today you may notice a new boolean field in API responses & streams containing tweets: “possibly_sensitive”. This new field will only surface when a tweet contains a link. The meaning of the field doesn’t pertain to the tweet content itself, but instead it is an indicator that the URL contained in the tweet may contain content or media identified as sensitive content. During this initial testing phase, there’s nothing you need to do with this field and the field values cannot be relied on for accuracy. In the future, we’ll have a family of additional API methods & fields for handling end-user “media settings” and possibly sensitive content.”
Initially the functionality will only be available on Twitter.com however will come to 3rd party applications later.
Facebook launched its new business centre product this week following Google’s recent announcement this its now fast tracking its Google + for business service. The new service has been designed to help small businesses who wish to promote their business and engage with new and potential customers online set up a Facebook page, if they have not already done so. Many local businesses are still using profile pages as this is a much easier way to connect with Facebook users, however this is against Facebook’s T&C’s and it has been rumoured that Facebook will begin to shut these down shortly. “Facebook For Business” which was launched on Tuesday, gives users a step by step guide how to set up a custom business page, build a community online and create targeted adverts aimed at specific demographics. It also makes it much easier for you to find the various social plugins that can be used to promote you Facebook page on various other social platforms including blogs and your website.
If your business is looking for a custom Facebook page and would like to discuss further please feel free to contact our social media management team at 360innovate on 0844 414 0434
Google has announced that the beta for Google + profiles for business will come much sooner than originally planned. Christian Oestlien who is Google’s Group Product Manager, on Google+ confirmed that the beta program will be open to everyone and not just the select few that was initially planned.
According to Oestlien, the volume of applications to get early access to the test program for businesses was so high they felt it was important that all businesses had the opportunity to join the beta, which will be available to everyone in the next few months.
Google has taken steps to close down accounts that have been using G+ for business, this has included popular tech blogs “The Next Web” and “Mashable”, however they have said for the time being a business can pick a real person on G+ to represent a company and share links etc on the network.
It has been reported that the business profiles will launch some time in Q3 2011 , Google has been very quiet on what we should expect however a spokesperson has said “You can expect to see a level of analytics and measurement that you’d typically find in Google products as well as a nuanced approach to how things are shared. It encourages and enhances conversation, it doesn’t just put things in the stream.”
At 360innovate we are very eager to start using Google + as a company, we will also be encouraging various clients to consider the platform should they be looking to implement social media to their online strategy.
Will your business use Google +, what’s your thoughts?
Looks like Google is rolling out a nice little update to its search bar. We have been testing this new feature this morning and it seems to be intermittent just now which could mean that it could still be under development. The new feature will now make the navigation bar at the top of the page sticky, this makes perfect sense as users want the ability to modify their search queries and click other links that are part of the navigation bar while they are scrolling on the page.
This could also be the reason that Google has decided to remove the search bar at the bottom of its page. Hopefully this update will also be rolled out to other Google products like G+, Gmail and Google Reader soon, which will give users a universal experience across all of Google properties.
Yellow pages have recently started making a lot of noise about their new web design and online marketing services that they are now offering. For years, especially before the age of the internet, the Yellow Pages had been a faithful companion to many. Whenever you needed something you would automatically open up the Yellow Pages and all the information was there in front of you – a fantastic service.
Yell identified that with the popularity of search engines, (Google in particular), they needed to up their game. Yell’s solution was to launch the online version of the Yellow Pages – Yell.com. It was great to see Yell move with the times, but with the wide spread use of Google Places and better forms of online advertising, Yell are definitely feeling the pressure.
Yell Sites is a service that offers fixed price web design at a low cost. They offer 3 web design packages starting at £125.00 for a basic website. They also offer a premium package that costs £3000.00. These packages come with an ongoing monthly fee that could be as much as £100.00 although they are not clear about what this fee is for. Is the monthly fee for hosting or online marketing? If you stop paying the fee does the website get taken down?
They offer a search engine optimisation service. This is the process that is used to help your website climb higher in the search engine results page for specific keywords relating to your business. However, SEO is an ongoing process and isn’t just a case of including relevant keywords on your site and inserting a few images. To perform a successful online marketing campaign you must first analyse the target market and aim for keywords that are achievable within your budget. You then have to promote that website online by utilising various different methods in order for your website to rank highly on the search engine results page.
It’s great to see that Yell are moving with the times, and now moving away from traditional print advertising and focusing on online advertising methods for their customers. If you have a look at the newest edition of the yellow pages it’s about a quarter of the size of the traditional directory. Is this the end of the Yellow Pages as we know it? Will Yell eventually evolve to become a purely online marketing company?
After the recent page rank update and the update to Google’s interface we have noticed that several shopping sites, including Amazon and Play have been badly affected by having really nasty looking meta descriptions.
I initially noticed this issue while doing weekly checks on a clients site and noticed that visits had dropped slighty for certain keywords. So I ran a quick search and found something weird had happened to their listing on the search engine results page. Google had placed ‘Product 1 – 7 of 7 – ‘followed by the sites defined meta description. I immediately checked the meta descriptions on the page and had one of our developers look at the code, he could notice anything that immediately stood out.
So I then went on to search Google using the string ‘inurl:.cart.php?m=product_list’ and found 100s of pages that have been affected by the same issue! This tells me that this is not an isolated incident.
My colleague John McCollum, a developer here at 360innovate, discovered that it was also happening to Amazon. We then went on to find that it’s also affecting Play and Argos – there are examples at the bottom of this post.
Now, we understand why this would happen if you didn’t specify a meta description, or if your meta description was not relevant enough to the content of the page. But most of the sites we have found have had proper meta descriptions in place, so there is no reason for Google to add in this information before the listing.
I am unsure if this update was intentional or not, some people might argue that it is to add value to the result and provide additional information to the searcher about the number of products on the page. If this is Google’s intention the it should read a lot better and say something like ’10 products -’ followed by the meta description. Not “Product 1 – 7 of 7 -” followed by the meta description.
