New Look Website 05/26/2010
 
While working on building great websites for our clients, our own website had been neglected. We thus undertook to bring our site up to date with a fresh new look. We hope you like it!
 
 
With the massive upsurge in the use of real-time applications such as Twitter, FriendFeed and the recent homepage updates that were introduced to Facebook; being able to effectively search this information is one of the modern web's greatest challenges. 
 
 
As most people are aware, the number and quality of websites that link to your website is an important and significant factor in determining your search engine ranking.  Search Engines like Google count the number of links your site receives and apply a weighting to each of these links dependent on the site on which they are located.  For example, a link from the BBC website will carry a much higher weighting than a link from another local business.
 
 
What constitutes great design is a subjective debate and often varies from industry to industry. However, I am often asked - What's your favourite business website? (in other words, what's your favourite website that's trying to sell you a product or service as opposed to a News site such as bbc.co.uk or a Social Networking site like Facebook) Now, by design I mean 'look and feel' - there are of course many other factors that should be taken into account when building a website, not least 'ease of use'. However, the look and feel of a site is something that a user will garner in the first few seconds that they are on it and if they don't like it, they are unlikely to go any further.
 
 
When it comes to promoting your business online and communicating more effectively with customers or users, social media has become the focal point for many companies digital marketing strategy.  Utilising social media to achieve a positive outcome can often be a tricky compromise between self promotion and building relationships with new or exisiting clients and customers.  If your approach is too sales driven this can often result in users simply disengaging with your company and generating bad publicity.
 
 
The 'Cloud' is a widely used piece of terminology which refers to the internet in it's capacity as a warehouse for the world's data. Basically, you can either store files, software programs and information locally i.e. on your own computer, on your company's own server, on disc, etc. - or, data, files and software can be stored in the realms of cyberspace - The Cloud.
 
 

Corporate Blogging can be a powerful online marketing tool which not only provides an avenue for business' to communicate more effectively with their customers but also helps to improve a companies organic search results.  When done correctly, Blogging is a cheap and effective way of increasing a companies website traffic by helping to improve search ranking across it's keywords and other related terms. The article linked below explores how several companies across different industries have done just this and seen significant returns. 

 
 

Earlier this week Microsoft's Australian branch launched a controversial campaign to attract new users to it's recently launched Internet Explorer 8 browser.  It basically involves an online treasure hunt for $10 000 AUS, conducted via Twitter, the catch being that you needed to be using IE8 in order to be able to uncover the prize. The clues are released either daily or twice daily, there's no indication as to when they will stop however the competition closes on September 15 so I suspect it will be a few weeks before this date.

 
Wolfram Alpha 05/18/2009
 

Let me preface this post with a quick bio of Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the potentially revolutionary system I'm about to discuss:

"Stephen Wolfram (born 29 August 1959 in London) is a British physicist, mathematician and businessman, known for his work in theoretical particle physics, cosmology, cellular automata, complexity theory, and computer algebra." Wikipedia

He was a child prodigy who wrote his first article on particle physics at 16 and received his ph.D from California Institute of Technology at 20. Throughout his career he has built a revered reputation both as an academic and as a businessman, developing and marketing a ground breaking piece of software called Mathematica which solved complex mathematical, scientific and engineering problems. It's fair to say that he's a genius and a bit of a geek celebrity.

 
 

Microsoft’s Powerpoint is the ubiquitous product in the world of presentations.  They may have jazzed it up a bit with a few extra templates and features over the years but it’s generally remained unchanged since its inception.  Well if it ain’t broke...