Accenuate the Positive
37Signals gives a great example of accentuating the positive when communicating with customers.
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Is it time for Microsoft to turn itself upside-down?
TechCrunch wonders if it’s time for Microsoft to change its culture. They have an interesting analysis:
The trouble, I feel, lies in the middle layer of the cake — as it does so often in real life (damn the jelly). The issue is that the best ideas often occur on the lowest levels, as much because those levels are highly populated as that they are the youngest and freshest, and these ideas must trickle up…. Unfortunately, when you factor in the inevitable corporate friction, you’re looking at years of development for a product which may or may not even be worthwhile. By the time the sausage is made, everyone has already moved on to quail…
Microsoft is simply too big and too inflexible to really push truly interesting products out the door as fast as they need to. This isn’t any sort of big revelation, but it’s a problem with a solution: turn the company upside-down…. The Microsoft method of slowly advancing employees’ responsibilities has created so many middle men that there is hardly any other kind of person working there any more.
GoldenComm Visits Google Headquarters
Yes, people really do work at Google – and, we love them (especially when they work for our clients).
Pictured above: Audra Gussin (GC) and Beth Hardy (Google).
Beth heads up GoldenComm’s Account Team at Google. Basically, our advocate and advisor. We want to thank Beth, Chris and all our team members at Google who work hard for us (and our clients). You are so appreciated!
Google owned GMAIL down!
If you were lucky enough to catch this incredible event, Google owned, GMail was down for about 10 minutes this afternoon just a little after 1pm PST.
Today September 1, 2009, Google's Gmail server is down.
The Most Common SEO Mistake of Company Websites.
One of the fun activities we do at our SEO Seminars is the “60-second Web-o-Rama.” During these 60 seconds one lucky (or unlucky) participant allows me to critique their website on the big screen, in front of everyone. I basically pretend like the participant is not in the room, and I ramble off what I think about the optimization of their site in a 60-second rant.
In over a year conducting these seminars (about 30 of them in total so far) I have noticed that the most common SEO mistake that people make is putting their company name as the first thing in their index Page Title Tag.
The index page (e.g. your home page) title tag (definition/description below) is your first and best chance to tell the search engines what your page is all about. Don’t use this as an opportunity to tell the search engine who you are (they already know that). A much more effective use of this precious real estate is to tell what you are and/or what products/services you offer.
The title tag is easily found by looking at the top-left of the browser. The above image is GoldenComm.com’s index page title tag.
Or, you could look at the HTML code… in this case, it looks like this:
<head>
<title>Strategic Website Design Firm and E-Commerce Website Company</title>
</head>
In general, page title tags should be 50-70 words and focused on your keyphrases (that includes spaces, btw). One more additional hint… every page of your website should have a different title tag (probably the second most common SEO mistake of company websites).
Now that you know… check out your company’s Index Page Title Tag and make the appropraite adjustment!
St. Louis SEO Seminar
Jason Lavin (GoldenComm's CEO) currently in action at the SEO seminar in St. Louis
Jason, expert and guru of Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing, hosts another seminar. Currently, he is teaching about ad verbiage and landing pages, and how that plays in Google AdWords and Analytics tracking. Today’s SEO seminar is hosted at The Charles Knight Center at Washington University, in St. Louis, Missouri. The town is terrific, the facility is STUNNING, and the weather could not be better for us!
Check out Golden Communication’s next SEO Workshop and Register today!
GSC’s Holiday Party!
Welcome to 2009 everyone! It’s back to work, full force.
GSC had our annual holiday party at Flemings Steakhouse, where amongst the Filet Mignon, Prime Rib, Lobster, wine, and deserts, we all shared some great laughs and celebrated our amazing 2008 year together. At Golden State, we definitely work hard, but we know when it’s time to let loose a little! The GSC team has one full new year ahead of us – E-commerce websites to develop, SEO and SEM strategies to continue, Blogging, Programming, Strategic Website Designs – oh it’s going to be an exciting one!
Also present at the GSC’s Holiday Dinner was Randy Bergstedt, VP of Marketing at Star Trac. We invited Randy to be our “special guest” at the dinner for being a great client, and to celebrate a new 2.0 initiative that GSC and Star Trac will be working on together in 2009.
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- The GSC Team with Randy Bergstedt
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- Randy Bergstedt (right) & Jason Lavin (Left: GSC’s President)
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- Andrew Nguyen, GSC Chief Technology Officer
A GREAT surprise we all received was from Jason. We all got to choose from a selection of UGG Boots, which were provided by one of our fantastic clients, Dan Goodman of Eilatan.
We really missed a few of the team that were not able to come (MIC, Aaron, Richard and the Clarion team).
GSC wants to thank both Randy Bergstedt and Dan Goodman for being a special part of our holiday party and our company. Happy New Year everyone!
GSC Gets Its PageRank Back
If you study Search Engine Optimization, one important factor is Google’s PageRank of your site. PageRank (a trademark of Google) is more or less a numeric value (0-10 – 10 being best, zero being worse) that Google awards your site, based on the relevance of the site based on what your site says it is – wow, that’s a mouthful.
You can read more about Google’s PageRank algorithm on Wikipedia.com or google.com.
GSC's PageRank
Every now and then, Google “refreshes” its PageRank rankings (not exactly posted when or how they do this). Shortly after Thanksgiving, GSC’s PageRank went from “4″ to “zero” – urgh. Not good for anyone, but especially not good for us, because we actually teach a Search Engine Optimization Seminar – so for us to have a PageRank of zero – is, well, hard to explain.
But, when this happens, know that it’s temporary (if you’re practicing ethical website optimization). Sure enough, we got an nice year-end boost from Google and our PageRank re-appeared today at a “5″ – a great way to end 2008.
Behind an internet meme
Several months ago, a friend and I built a site based around a very nerdy inside joke we had at work. A code issue that web designers often face is making a layout work in all browsers using only CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Using CSS is the standard, proper, acceptable way to create a website’s layout. An out-dated method of creating websites’ layouts involves a bit of HTML called a table. Tables, for all their clumsiness, tend to work more consistently across browsers than CSS. Tables also do things like vertically align content to the bottom of a cell while CSS will only do this in conjunction with JavaScript.
Of course, there’s a huge logical problem with using tables for layout: the layout of a site is not actually tabular data. And we coders don’t like that bit of bad logic. Also, while tables solve the initial layout problem, they are significantly harder to update.
That said, there often comes a time while coding a site when a designer might entertain the wish to give up and use tables. So we made a site based around that frustration we felt when browsers wouldn’t obey our CSS. Brian created a flash widget that gives a designer 47 minutes to wrestle with CSS. After that time, the widget buzzes and provides the table code for the designer to use.
The whole thing was a joke that we just got bored enough to execute. But here’s where the story gets interesting… After sitting dormant for 9 months, suddenly someone found the site. And not just someone but a very popular code blog called Ajaxian. In one day the site’s visitors leapt from 0 to 400. The next day the site was picked up by a reddit user. At the end of the day, we had about 35,000 visitors.
The Google Analytics graph tells the story:
Impressive, huh?
More impressive is that within one day my Google Page Rank shot up to a 5. And while the instant popularity of the site caused envy in my friends who wished their sites could get 35,000 visitors in one day, I knew it wouldn’t last. Friends encouraged me to put Google Ads on the site, make t-shirts, anything. “This could be another dramatic hamster, Todd!”
But I declined. Give Up and Use Tables is a pretty pure form of internet meme. It’s a site that does one thing — execute a really nerdy joke. We had our day — literally one day — and that was it.
Or to put it another way:
The long graph shows the decline and fall:
It was a fun 24 hours. Golden State even received several referrals from the wave of traffic that hit the site. There are some lessons to draw from this on internet trends, viral marketing, and link-sharing. But I’m still basking in the fun of our joke entertaining so many people (and even inciting real argument). And while Brian and I might have let the domain lapse and the site disappear, Golden State has taken over hosting and will keep it as a geeky museum piece.
So if you’ve ever felt cross-browser frustration with CSS, feel free to succumb to your urge and Give Up and Use Tables.
Orange County’s HOT 25
Steve Churm and crew put on a great event at The Island Hotel in Irvine on Wednesday night for Churm Media’s annual “HOT 25″ event. Churm Media is one of GSC’s favorite clients and we have been working with them for the last two years. Currently, GSC helps Churm Media with seven web properties, OCmetro.com, OCfamily.com, inlandempirefamily.com, SouthlandGolfMagazine.com, OCMenus.com, BodyBeautifulMagazine.com and ChurmMedia.com.
Way to go Churm Media… LOVE the energy that you bring to Orange County Business!