Morning all.

It is the end of another week and time for some more of the best blogs we’ve been reading this week.

The first is from Woorkup and gives Best practices and tips for developing websites for the iPhone. This has been handy for me personally as I’ve been working on an iPhone version of Miromedia’s site which we are planning for launch in Q1 of this year.

Next up is a post from makeuseof.com. This one gives a very clear breakdown of the steps for creating RSS feeds for your site. I used this to create the Miromedia News Feed so it does work.

This post about the influence of the Swiss Style on web design is very interesting and covers a number of aspects where the Swiss Style impacts the modern web site from layout and colour to font styles. Although the post itself may look quite long there are a large number of images to illustrate the various points made in the text and give examples of some of the artists work.

Ever wanted to setup new shops in Magento? Why not read this article about how to setup multiple Magento shops.

SEOmoz are putting together a set of Search Engine Optimisation Best Practice guides. These are currently up for peer review and will be added to over the coming months.

Here’s an interesting website performance post from dynaTrace which is definitely worth a look

Away from work and with the imminent return of Herr Schumacher to Formula 1, I came across this old, bit interesting YouTube clip analysing the Schumacher driving style. For me he is up there as a potential champion for 2010, despite being the oldest on the grid his talent is unquestionable and in the 3 years since his retirement I don’t believe he will have lost any of his edge or aggressiveness.

Ok, so the children aren’t quite singing in Christian rhyme but we’re almost there.
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Here are a couple of useful links that we’ve come across whilst building our latest Magento installation:

Removing Product Comparison - Some pointers for PHP developers to remove the product comparison block from a Magento installation.

Magento SEO - This one is very interesting giving useful advice for maximising the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) performance for a Magento site.

Be Search Friendly
What is the point of having a great site if no one ever sees it? None of course!
Before creating your content do you keyword research, what terms your audience or users to your site are likely to search upon, and what keywords they will use. Build the structure of your content around your search engine optimisation with these keywords and keyphrases.
Read the rest of this entry »

The challenge was to increase Outline Skincare’s online presence to increase web traffic, generate sales and increase ROI, while actually driving down overall marketing spend.

Miromedia were recommended to Outline as specialists in search engine optimisation, pay-per-click, email broadcasting, link building, online PR, and social media

The solution was an online marketing strategy which included removing programming issues, managing and adding keyword strategies, content creation and restructure of page layout.

Benefits Since working with Outline when compared to the same previous year period, we have achieved:

• 46% increase in turnover when compared to this time last year
• 60% decrease in marketing spend

And most importantly this was all achieved during a recession!

To download the Outline Case Study please click here.

Permanent or semi permanent make up, as it is sometimes called, is an exciting, revolutionary treatment to enhance facial features. It is a highly skilled, state of the art form of cosmetic tattooing also known as Micro-pigmentation or intradermal cosmetics. Annalou is one of the UK’s leading clinics and with a quickly expanding client base they called upon Miromedia to design and build a new site complete with easy to use CMS and a powerful SEO redesign.

Utilising the new Miromanager 2 Content Management System for the new Annalou site, Miromedia where able to create a faultless and intuitive backdoor solution for Annalou. It is a CMS that will serve Annalou for the foreseeable future, allowing for effortless updates and image changes. Along with the search engine optimisation redesign, which is due to begin this week, Miromedia have also added a Facebook portal to keep fans of Annalou up to date with company and industry developments and gossip.

In life there are generally 2 groups of people: tidy ones and untidy ones. Those who fill the dishwasher, pop in a tablet, turn it on and those that leave dirty cookery stacked high in the sink to go mouldy and turn the kitchen into a festering hole. As a web developer you must be the former. You must be clean, both hygienically speaking and in terms of the markup and coding you produce.

Creating websites with clean and concise code which conforms to the latest web standards is paramount to producing high quality, fast and SEO efficient sites. A site that is created and can be validtaed using W3C’s validation tools will aid future proofing and accessibility. A badly created HTML page may work in the current crop of browsers but that does not mean that future version will be so forgiving.

Always write XHTML making sure it is as stripped down and lightweight as possible, use no unnecessary tags or attributes, after all a Formula 1 car has no radio or cup holders (it doesn’t need them). All styling for a page should be contained within style sheets using validated CSSand applied to the page using either class names or by tag Id. Not only will this help any future development that you may make to a site it also means that any other competent developer can look at the code and easily understand how it work.

Spending more time to produce the best output you can will not only benefit your clients but will also benefit your own team of developers, easing any future updates and giving SEO potential a head start.

I recently read an article published by The Times Online

According to their long tail theory

‘A study of digital music sales has posed the first big challenge to this “long tail” theory: more than 10 million of the 13 million tracks available on the internet failed to find a single buyer last year.’

Very interesting point, however this is not entirely accurate. Surely a better way to view this information is that 3 million different songs have been found and downloaded. And a better question might be - how many music shops have 13 million songs on their shelves?

Let me explain with a little more detail.

Finding a song, like many things, has become much easier using the internet. Buying one is easier too. And with online music retailers, like itunes, recording year on year sales increases, it is clear that more and more people are finding and buying music online.

Let us broaden the view from music to the whole internet search experience. Google’s latest stats do not back up The Times theory.

‘20 to 25% of the queries we see today, we have never seen before’.

So internet users are becoming more and more diverse in their searches as they become familiar with how search engines operate.

For example, once someone has used a search engine, would they search on ‘Golf’ if they wanted information on ‘Dunlop Golf Tees’. No one would go to the library and ask the librarian for ‘a book’ if they wanted Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’.

Dustin Woodard has done interesting research on the most popular search terms

‘It turns out that, at least in this particular three-month data set, the top 100 terms accounted for just 5.7 percent of all search traffic. Expand to the top 500, 1000, and 10,000 terms, and just 8.9 percent, 10.6 and 18.5 percent of all search traffic is involved, respectively’

With this in mind - Dustin Woodard says

‘This means if you had a monopoly over the top 1,000 search term across all search engines (which is impossible), you’d still be missing out on 89.4% of all search traffic. There’s so much traffic in the tail it is hard to even comprehend. To illustrate, if search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one inch head, the tail of the lizard would search for 221 miles.’

So search is alive, well and ever growing, despite what some articles may say.

Julian Wilkins

I have too been watching the US, UK and arguably, the western world economy unravel over the last few months and weeks. And rightly so, there is much concern amongst business owners about the direct impact this will have on the UK ecomony.
One of the questions I get asked on a more and more frequent basis is will Miromedia suffer? Being a marketing based business, Marketing is usually one of the first costs to be slashed.
My considered response is the same for all. In times of need, we all look to cut costs (it’s not a bad practise in good times too). However, do you really want to be slashing at a proven, scalable and direct sales channel that if exploited, can bring a substantial return on investment? Do you want to be reducing a marketing channel that is accurately measurable and can touch a huge and targeted audience for a relatively low cost?
If your looking for effective sales channels to market your products through, then the internet is not only the way forward when times are good, but also when times are bad. Yes, it depends on what business you are in and yes, it does have to be considered as a marketable product or service online. However, I’ll leave you with this thought. If your looking for value for money or price/service comparison, where do you look?

A hot topic at the moment is regional search - especially when talking Google. Research appears to indicate that online searchers are getting more practised at narrowing down search results by tacking on regional based keyword to key phrases, thus gaining more relative results to their locality. For example, searching for a Spa Break, the searcher would type ‘Spa Break Midlands’ rather than Spa Break.

This all seems to make a lot of sense. However, it appears that not that many site stakeholders are taking this seriously, or the few that are appear to be dabbling in repetitive duplicate content - only replacing the regional keywords within a standard body of copy and duplicating the page site-wide. Only time will tell if this is considered good practise or not. Surely, you could argue that each page is being targeted specifically to each region, town, city, and therefore has a specific and bonafide purpose within the site (not duplicate content)?

The Miromedia Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) team are researching this area at the moment, and have had some excellent success with work we have done in this area. However, we have taken the time to be create with each individual page and how we produce the onpage content.

If you check back soon, I’ll update on progress.