In my last post for The Startup Gardener I wrote about Ghostery, a great tool for protecting the privacy of web surfers from the all knowing, all seeing Google. That’s all very well for web surfers, but many of my readers are website publishers. If people start using tools like Ghostery to block Google Analytics, how can you get meaningful visitor data then?
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Cutting Out The Middle-Men
Now You See Me, Now You Dont!
Last week at The Startup Gardener I wrote about how Google’s customised search results can confuse people into thinking their SEO efforts results are different from reality. During this post I discussed how Google and a number of other companies are tracking web surfers as they browse from site to site. I think that most people don’t realise that their movements are being quietly tracked by the likes of Google, and if they did realise they would probably be a bit miffed.
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Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder
A friend (lets call him Smurf) recently wrote to me with some great news, after doing some SEO on his site and it was now ranking in #1 or #2 positions for some heavily contested keywords on Google’s UK SERPs (search engine result pages). Great stuff! Or was it? When I went to see Smurf’s results for myself I found that I couldn’t duplicate them. For many of his terms he was not even on the first page of results! What was happening here? Continue reading →
Screencast: Create A Shiny Logo
I recently posted about how we created zizee’s logo in house with Inkscape. Since then I have had a number of people ask me about the techniques used to create the logo, so I thought I’d give screencasting a go and subject you to some verbal/visual ramblings for a change.
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Trust Violated = Permission Withdrawn
I wrote recently about how important our users / visitors trust is to us. If our users don’t trust us, they’re not going to use our services.
Following up on this theme, I’d like to tell you a quick story of how a software developer has turned me from being a big fan to losing me as a user by violating my trust.
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So They All Moved Over and One Fell Out
You may have noticed that we have recently moved this blog from zizee’s top level domain (www.zizee.com) to the subdomain blog.zizee.com. We did this to make way for our spanky new website. Continue reading →
A Rolling Stone Gathers Google Juice
One SEO tip that everyone seems to agree with is that search engines smile on those sites that have constantly updated materials. if your site is frequently updated, search engines see that it is a “living” site, that someone is putting effort into. Google and friends like this because it is a sign that they’re looking at site that is being actively maintained, and is not an abandoned site that nobody would visit.
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Logo-A-Go-Go!
Yesterday I put some finishing touches on the graphic design of ZiZee’s logo. I was originally planning on just letting everyone see the logo when I launched ZiZee’s website, but I figured why wait. So here our new logo… KA-POW! Continue reading →
Goodbye Singles, Hello Flying Car?
Last week the Singles (2000-2009 – I can’t bring myself to use the term N0ughties) decade was given a grand send off, and we’ve all taken some tentative steps into 2010. The future is officially here! And if there is one thing I’m very excited about, it’s the future 
Can you guess why? Well it’s not because I’m finally getting my flying car. Continue reading →
I’d Buy That For A Dollar!
So, you’re in the process of creating the next killer-app, you have the feature list all worked out, you’ve thought of a witty, search engine friendly name, got your hosting sorted, you’re going to make a killing! Or are you? Before you get too far along in your dev it will pay to make sure your financial model is up to scratch. First question: How much are you going to charge for this little beauty?
