Every now and then we get a distress call from a potential client, who has been let down by an existing agency, and are not happy with the progress of a project they have commissioned.
The special red Bat phone started ringing one morning, and we took a call from a local business who were near suicidal, after they had been repeatedly let down by a company redesigning their website, and they were really at the end of their tether. We sat down with the potential client, did a detailed spec of what they were looking for, created a detailed brief for the project and passed it to the client. They were initially sceptical that we could turn the project around in the timeframe we had detailed, but they decided to give oomagoo a go.
It’s not that often, from our experience, that you get clients in the design game who are actually up for a project which they have got you in to do, and actually know what they want and are prepared to allow your team to actually do what you do best, without sticking their oars in every 5 minutes. Enter the team at HSH (www.hsh.co.uk). From initial site wireframes, we got straight into the designs, and then within a heartbeat the guys were coding the site.
Initial Wireframe Design for www.hsh.co.uk
We decided to build the whole site on a Word Press framework, as we know that this would make the backend easy for HSH to use, and as such, it would mean they would use it. There is no point having an amazing looking web site, but them making it so complicated to use, that the client pulls their hair out every time they need to add something to the site. Also, with Word Press, it means that the client isn’t beholden to us, but can pretty much take the site to any half decent Word Press developer to continue work on, if we ever fell out. Thankfully we haven’t, and thankfully we hardly ever do.
So we now have a very happy client in Altrincham, who has a smart looking, very easy to use site, which will actually become a hard working business toll for them, and not a source of embarrassment for being so out of date.
And to make a great relationship even better, HSH are now referring oomagoo to all of their clients, who may need a new web presence for a new business they may have bought from them.
Great client, great to work with and a great business. A real pleasure.
 Vanessa Fox has posted some new features to Google webmaster tools over at the official blog
Requesting removal of content from our index
Posted by Vanessa Fox
4/17/2007 04:04:00 PM
As a site owner, you control what content of your site is indexed in search engines. The easiest way to let search engines know what content you don’t want indexed is to use a robots.txt file or robots meta tag. But sometimes, you want to remove content that’s already been indexed. What’s the best way to do that?
As always, the answer begins: it depends on the type of content that you want to remove. Our webmaster help center provides detailed information about each situation. Once we recrawl that page, we’ll remove the content from our index automatically. But if you’d like to expedite the removal rather than wait for the next crawl, the way to do that has just gotten easier.
For sites that you’ve verified ownership for in your webmaster tools account, you’ll now see a new option under the Diagnostic tab called URL Removals. To get started, simply click the URL Removals link, then New Removal Request. Choose the option that matches the type of removal you’d like.
Individual URLs
Choose this option if you’d like to remove a URL or image. In order for the URL to be eligible for removal, one of the following must be true:
The URL most return a status code of either 404 or 410.
Once the URL is ready for removal, enter the URL and indicate whether it appears in our web search results or image search results. Then click Add. You can add up to 100 URLs in a single request. Once you’ve added all the URLs you would like removed, click Submit Removal Request.
A directory
Choose this option if you’d like to remove all files and folders within a directory on your site. For instance, if you request removal of the following:
http://www.example.com/myfolder
this will remove all URLs that begin with that path, such as:
http://www.example.com/myfolder
http://www.example.com/myfolder/page1.html
http://www.example.com/myfolder/images/image.jpg
In order for a directory to be eligible for removal , you must block it using a robots.txt file. For instance, for the example above, http://www.example.com/robots.txt could include the following:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /myfolder
Your entire site
Choose this option only if you want to remove your entire site from the Google index. This option will remove all subdirectories and files. Do not use this option to remove the non-preferred version of your site’s URLs from being indexed. For instance, if you want all of your URLs indexed using the www version, don’t use this tool to request removal of the non-www version. Instead, specify the version you want indexed using the Preferred domain tool (and do a 301 redirect to the preferred version, if possible). To use this option, you must block the site using a robots.txt file.
Cached copies
Choose this option to remove cached copies of pages in our index. You have two options for making pages eligible for cache removal.
Using a meta noarchive tag and requesting expedited removal
If you don’t want the page cached at all, you can add a meta noarchive tag to the page and then request expedited cache removal using this tool. By requesting removal using this tool, we’ll remove the cached copy right away, and by adding the meta noarchive tag, we will never include the cached version. (If you change your mind later, you can remove the meta noarchive tag. )
Changing the page content
If you want to remove the cached version of a page because it contained content that you’ve removed and don’t want indexed, you can request the cache removal here. We’ll check to see that the content on the live page is different from the cached version and if so, we’ll remove the cached version. We’ll automatically make the latest cached version of the page available again after six months (and at that point, we likely will have recrawled the page and the cached version will reflect the latest content) or, if you see that we’ve recrawled the page sooner than that, you can request that we reinclude the cached version sooner using this tool.
Checking the status of removal requests
Removal requests show as pending until they have been processed, at which point, the status changes to either Denied or Removed. Generally, a request is denied if it doesn’t meet the eligibility criteria for removal.
To reinclude content
If a request is successful, it appears in the Removed Content tab and you can reinclude it any time simply by removing the robots.txt or robots meta tag block and clicking Reinclude. Otherwise, we’ll exclude the content for six months. After that six month period, if the content is still blocked or returns at 404 or 410 status message and we’ve recrawled the page, it won’t be reincluded in our index. However, if the page is available to our crawlers after this six month period, we’ll once again include it in our index.
Requesting removal of content you don’t own
But what if you want to request removal of content that’s located on a site that you don’t own? It’s just gotten easier to do that as well. Our new Webpage removal request tool steps through the process for each type of removal request.
Since Google indexes the web and doesn’t control the content on web pages, we generally can’t remove results from our index unless the webmaster has blocked or modified the content or removed the page. If you would like content removed, you can work with the site owner to do so, and then use this tool to expedite the removal from our search results.
If you have found search results that contain specific types of personal information, you can request removal even if you’ve been unable to work with the site owner. For this type of removal, provide your email address so we can work with you directly.
If you have found search results that shouldn’t be returned with SafeSearch enabled, you can let us know using this tool as well.
You can check on the status of pending requests, and as with the version available in webmaster tools, the status will change to Removed or Denied once it’s been processed. Generally, the request is denied if it doesn’t meet the eligibility criteria. For requests that involve personal information, you won’t see the status available here, but will instead receive an email with more information about next steps.
What about the existing URL removal tool?
If you’ve made previous requests with this tool, you can still log in to check on the status of those requests. However, make any new requests with this new and improved version of the tool.
LONDON (Reuters) – Spending on advertisements using the Web will overtake radio in 2008, a year earlier than forecast, according to new data released on Monday.
ZenithOptimedia, a media planning and buying firm, said it expects the Internet to account for 8 percent of the world’s total advertising spending in 2008, compared with 7.9 percent for radio.
Norway, Sweden and the UK are three markets were the Web already accounts for more than 10 percent of advertising expenditure and this is expected to grow to 11 countries in two years.
The Internet has its highest ad market share in the UK, where it is expected to attract 16.6 percent of advertising spending this year and 22.6 percent in 2009, ZenithOptimedia said.
Fastest-growing ad markets in the next two years are expected to be the Middle East and central and eastern Europe, with high oil prices providing a boost to several countries.
Qatar and Egypt are expected to see their ad markets grow by 304 percent and 221 percent respectively between 2005-2009.
Global advertising spending is forecast to rise 5.2 percent this year, on a par with its long-term trend, but this figure masks different growth rates in various media such as outdoor advertising, newspapers, magazines, cinema and television.
In 2008, the global ad market is expected to enjoy a short-term boost from the summer Olympics, presidential elections in the U.S. and European soccer championship — events that traditionally stimulate advertising spending.
Ad spending on the Web is expected to grow six times faster than traditional media between 2006 and 2009. ZenithOptimedia said apart from the Internet, only cinema and outdoor advertising are expected to grow faster than the market to 2009.
The company has downgraded its forecasts for newspapers and magazines as publishers spend more on online products and less in print, adding that newspaper spending is essentially stagnant.
If there’s one request that I always cringe at, it’s to disable a site because a customer decides that it is in his best financial interest to “close shop.â€? Later, if we own the domain name and get notifications about its upcoming expiration date, the customer may already be long gone and is not reachable with any contact information we may have for them.
I can’t say this has happened a lot, but it isn’t unrealistic either. If there’s one thing you should keep when you decide to shut down your business, it’s your domain name (and let’s hope you grabbed your website files too). But why? Believe it or not, it’s an important element for ranking in search engine optimization.
Consider the idea that you are creating a brand new website. The domain name is unheard of and therefore is unranked. You search for your domain name in Google and find nothing. Weeks later, your brand new site is still nowhere to be found. Time passes, and your site may start appearing in the search results, but the progression is going very slowly. Google is crawling your site with caution. They don’t know you well and are determining if you can be trusted.
An element of trust is important for ranking well on search engines. Trust can be conveyed through linking strategies, like when your site is linked to from a site that Google already considers to be an authority, but age, too, plays an important role.
Why should it matter? Simple. Considering recent studies showing the spammy nature of brand new websites, how is Google supposed to know that your site is more legitimate than the other spam site (including on their own domain)? It doesn’t. Google is not human. Trust comes with time. Spam sites don’t last for a long time and certainly won’t be linked to from authority sites.
The problem is that if you lose your domain name, it’s likely gone forever. If it expires, it goes into a pool and it will get snagged pretty quickly if the domain name looks like a worthwhile investment on the part of people who actually make it their business to buy domain names that could make them rich. If you’ve made a name for yourself and have to shut down without keeping the domain name under your ownership, but later, you realize that you’ve made a regrettable decision, you might have a hard time getting your “brandâ€? name back (especially if there are no associated trademarks). You’ll end up likely having to build a brand new name — and you’ll have to concern yourself with regaining that trust once again. If you don’t own the old domain anymore, you can’t set up 301 redirects to retain any rankings you might have. You’re back to the beginning.
Depending on the TLD (top level domain) you choose, your domain renewal shouldn’t be more than $15 per year in the worst case scenario. Even if you’re not sure you’ll ever use the domain name again, it’s a small price to pay for the time and money that you will have to reinvest in building your credibility in the search engines again.
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Google is looking for a head of national TV sales. The recruitment ad, posted on its website, says the winning candidate
Google is maneuvering aggressively as it seeks to find an entry point into the $65 billion U.S. TV-ad-sales market.
will build a “world-class national TV-advertising-sales team and lead the effort to both sell television solutions and shape a next-generation advertising platform.”
TV ad market
The ad goes on to say the search giant is looking for a candidate with “extensive senior-level relationships with advertisers, both with agencies and clients directly.” What it doesn’t say, at least not in so many words, is that Google is desperately trying to wedge itself into the $65 billion U.S. TV-ad-sales market.
Those close to some of the talks the search giant has had with TV executives said Google’s first priority is to persuade broadcast networks to let it sell their 30-second spots. To that end Google has had talks with the broadcast networks, cable programmers and several cable operators, including Comcast and Cablevision.
Start with scatter
“They want to start with scatter first and then move to local,” said one executive familiar with Google’s plans. Scatter refers to TV ad inventory that is not sold to marketers ahead of time, during what is known as the upfront, but is negotiated and bought each quarter. The price of scatter inventory rises and falls in relation to whether there is a lot or a little available, making it a market perfect for the auction-style ad system at which Google excels. The search giant has already attempted to apply its sales tools to radio and print-ad sales, and TV executives have long been wary of allowing Google to get a toehold in their business.
TV executives argue that they don’t want to see their products commoditized, and that auctions could depress pricing. Google argues the opposite, claiming it will bring new customers to the market, possibly increasing prices.
“We’ve acknowledged publicly we’re interested in pursuing TV,” a Google spokesman said. “But we haven’t disclosed any specific product direction. It’s an area we’re looking into.”
Worldwide talks
“Television remains the single most important source of information and entertainment for billions of people around the world,” reads one of the Google classified ads for a TV software engineer, underscoring just how important it sees the TV-ad-sales business. Its ambitions are by no means limited to the U.S. Google is also talking to the BBC about offering the broadcaster’s video content on a worldwide basis.
Google already has hired two senior executives from NBC — Michael Steib, who was general manager of strategic ventures at NBC Universal and is believed to be heading the TV auction business, and Jordan Hoffner, who was tapped to help Google become better at partnering on content.
Of course, there’s already a player in the online-TV-auction business: eBay, whose Media Exchange service is backed by a number of major advertisers, including Microsoft, Intel and Lexus. Media Exchange was tested in late January but has yet to win a commitment from a TV entity to sell live inventory.
Architecture of TV-ad-sales business
But Google’s TV ambitions go beyond auctioning 30-second spots. Google also is looking to compete with Microsoft by offering the architecture of such ad-sales ventures. Last week, the Television Bureau of Advertising unveiled plans to automate the archaic business of buying local airtime. Google is a contender to build that platform.
More significantly, Google is pitching a potential venture with Discovery Communications, now headed by former NBC cable chief David Zaslav. While details about that venture are scant, one executive close to the project said Discovery was “open” to a content partnership. But another executive said Discovery had to be careful about how such a joint venture would be received by the cable operators.
Google has many hurdles to overcome if it is to succeed in the TV business. First and foremost, it must resolve the copyright issues it faces with its newest unit, YouTube. Content companies appear to have a newfound confidence in the value of their video clips, something that executives say derailed talks between YouTube and CBS.
According to one analyst, Google is willing to offer somewhere between $70 million and $140 million to compensate media companies for copyright violations connected with YouTube, but CBS and others feel that offer is too low. The analyst said Wall Street is waiting on Google’s first deal with an entertainment conglomerate to decide what value to ascribe to traditional TV content as it migrates to the web. That may be a long wait.
“No one wants to be the one that lets Google into the henhouse,” said one network executive.
Apple Macs standard browser Safari could be making huge gains or maybe its holding steady in the browser wars; it all depends on whose stats you use. The same can be said of Mozilla Firefox, while Internet Explorer is losing ground in the US but seems to be holding its own world-wide.
The conflicting figures come courtesy of two web metrics firms, Net Applications and OneStat. Net Applications’ figures come from its live stats customers and sample over 40,000 URLs. OneStat uses a daily sample of 2 million visitors spread across 100 countries to come up with its numbers.
Net Applications’ numbers cover the US only and paint rosy pictures for both Firefox and Safari. Firefox has seen its market share bounce from 9.5 percent in January 2006 to 13.67 percent a year later, although the latter figure is down a bit from December 2006′s 14.0 percent.
Safari has seen even stronger growth, according to Net Applications. In January 2006, 3.0 percent of all web surfers were using Safari. A year later, that figure had grown by over 56 percent, to 4.70 percent.
Over the same time period, Microsofts Internet explorer is slowly falling despite releasing its seventh incarnation this year
. Starting at of 85.31 percent at the beginning of 2006,Internet explorer usage dipped to 83.56 percent in July and ended December at 79.64 percent, recovering modestly to 79.75 percent for January 2007.
OneStat’s figures tell a different story, both in the US and around the world. For the US, OneStat reports a much more modest decline for Internet Explorer, which dipped to 78.13 percent last month from 80.91 percent a year ago. Firefox saw a significant gain of 14.3 percent in the US, while Safari saw a much more modest rise of 3.7 percent, from 3.55 percent in January 2006 to 3.68 last month.
In contrast, the worldwide browser market share figures are much more static. Internet Explorer usage has remained almost static over the past year, dropping a mere 0.01 percentage point over the last year. Firefox has shown modest growth during the past year. The open-source browser was the choice of 11.69 percent of web surfers in January 2007 compared to 11.23 percent the year previous.
The biggest surprise in OneStat’s worldwide market share figures comes courtesy of Safari. Apple’s web browser, the choice of 2.02 percent of web surfers tracked by the firm in May 2006, dropped to 1.64 percent at the beginning of 2007. Overall, that’s a 12.7 percent decline from January 2006′s 1.88 percent figure.
There’s a big difference, especially for Safari. While Apple’s home-rolled web browser is doing very well in the US, it’s slipping around the world. That can be explained in part by the rapid growth of the PC market in countries where Apple isn’t a big player, most significantly, India and China.
Firefox continues to grow, no matter what the venue. In the US, Firefox is definitely making gains at the expense of Internet Explorer. Worldwide, some of those more modest gains appear to have come at the expense of Opera and Netscape. Firefox jumped 0.46 percentage points between January 2006 and 2007, while Opera dropped from 0.77 percent to 0.58 and Netscape dropped 0.03 percentage points to 0.13 percent. Meanwhile, IE’s 0.01 percentage point share dip was statistically insignificant.
Curiously, the release of Internet Explorer 7 last summer didn’t provide any additional momentum for Microsoft. IE7′s browser share soared from 3.18 percent in October 2006 to 25.01 percent last month, but all of that gain came at the expense of older versions of the browser, especially IE6, which dipped from 77.17 percent to 54.04 percent, according to Net Applications.
If there is any clear takeaway from the morass of statistics we just waded through, it is that competition between web browsers is alive and well. In the US and some Western European countries, users are increasingly willing to ditch Internet Explorer. In the US, some of those old IE users are apparently showing up on a different platform as well as a different browser.
Thats all for this week stats fans.
Have a great weekend. I really am off to the pub this time.
New owners of Youtube, Google have indicated that the bandwidth hungry video sharing site will be implementing copyright protection filters very soon. Google head honcho and extremely rich bloke Eric Shcmidt said.
“We are definitely committed to (offering copyright protection technologies),” “It is one of the company’s highest priorities,” he said.
“We just reviewed that (issue) about an hour ago,” Schmidt told news agency Reuters when asked what Google was doing to make anti-piracy technologies widely available to video owners. “It is going to roll out very soon … It is not far away.”
How will this effect Youtube? well is going to stop me going on there for one. If the site becomes exclusively the home of content created by its users its going to be a pretty boring affair. Who wants to watch opinions from some 12 year old emo on the state of her favorite depressing band.
So that means. NO music videos, NO episodes of tv shows, no Interviews from TV programmes, and NO sports highlights such as these absolute gems from last night.
I don’t know if you have ever heard about netvibes; don’t worry if you haven’t heard about it. Despite the fact it has four million subscribers plenty are still in the dark about it. And I was one of them until Christmas 2006, and that’s saying something, as I know pretty much everything about anything.
This service is free and gives the user the ability:
* To create a personalized page with the content they like.
* To put together data feeds and services from web 2.0 with a very simple interface
* To access your page anytime and from any computer.
It is also possible to:
* Browse, modify, and import your RSS feeds with our integrated RSS/ATOM feedreader. You can easily import an OPML file as well.
* To import, download and listen podcasts without any additional software
* To check your mail on one or many gmail account, to stick webnotes, weather and many more to come!
I have no idea how Netvibes expect to attract your average web user with all this RSS/ATOM /OPML nonsense. But I will try and explain it; basically Netvibes helps you read the Internet quicker. Obviously you can only read as quick as you can read, but this site cuts down the time on actually visiting websites, because Netvibes visits the sites for you and then displays just the news headlines from the sites you tell it.
It can check your email/myspace/bebo/ebay/flickr/traffic and travel and countless other sites all at the same time and then present the information for you in easy to digest chunks. So you can scan read the headlines quickly and see if there is anything of interest to you. It can also listen to Podcasts, but I have no idea why you would want to do that from within your web browser.
You can also go one step further and have tabs, so you can have multiple pages within the one homepage. For example you may enjoy reading about your favourite football team, or the soaps. Well you could have all your info for each topic on separate tabs.
Here’s an example of a tab on my homepage for the greatest football team in the world. Click on it for a big version
So make sure you do yourself a favour and check netvibes out. It WILL improve your life.
The Office of National statistics have reported that a massive 79.2% of Internet connections are Broadband. This indicates a rise of 3.4% since September 2006.
As Dial up connection fizzles out, the possibilities in designing for the web increase dramatically. With 3 million UK web users connected to cable Broadband, the packages available through many providers make the option of dial up even less attractive.
The days of frustratingly slow download times and crashes in your Flash are officially over for most of us. The increase in Broadband useage means that a lot of websites are more compatible with any type of user. Images can be larger, files bigger and download speeds faster.
It really is time for dial up users to step into this century. As friends try to telephone and can’t get through, social lives are at the peril of dial up as well as patience with its slowness.
Every now and then we get a distress call from a potential client, who has been let down by an existing agency, and are not happy with the progress of a project they have commissioned. The special red Bat phone started ringing one morning, and we took a call from a local business who were [...]
Every year we are caught out by the arrival of BETT, which is the UK’s largest technology educational trade show. One of our favourite clients (just in case they are reading this) are one of the main exhibitors at the show; so every November / December before we start the scribbles, brain storming we are [...]
Over the years we’ve had many many Search Marketing clients, all with different ideas, different businesses, some are new to marketing their website, others have come from other companies, disgruntled at how they have been treated. Usually they tell us that they were promised a number 1 ranking in Google for the term they asked [...]
We like to do a good turn every now and then at oomagoo, so when I was approached by my sons schol to help them with their web presence, I was only too happy to help. Stamford Park is one of those gems hidden in the streets of Hale, over 100 years old, and packed [...]
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