September 2008

Don’t try to fool the Search Engines – white hat SEO

Nobody likes a pushy salesperson. And it doesn't matter if it's someone trying to sell you a car or someone blocking your way past a kiosk in the mall, these sales people have a commonality that is persistence and the belief that they can persuade you to buy anything and/or everything. Maybe they can fill your head with so many claims or talk fast enough that you will be convinced or at least moved enough to make a purchase. The internet is loaded with websites that follow this same belief. If they inundate their visitors with claims and boasts and incomprehensible numbers and figures, they'll persuade you that what they are offering is exactly what you need.  Has anyone ever seen a web hosting company that claims 99.9% uptime? Try asking them how this figure is calculated. Just like when you look at a store from the outside and you feel it might have something that you want inside, when you enter you realize that it is not what you want at all. You make a hasty retreat. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) practices work the same way. You can fool someone while they are searching, but once they enter, if it’s not what they are looking for, they are gone.

Read More

Blogging from my iphone

Well almost a week into my phone switch and I am in heaven (as close as I can get to heaven at the Newark airport). Being a devoted Treo fan for years, I was scared of making the change to an iPhone. The browser sealed the deal though. No other mobile device comes close. Not to mention all of the apps and the interface. While it has taken a few days to get used to typing on the screen, I actually feel this is superior to my last Treo 680 (I haven't tried a blackberry to compare). But the HTML rendering of email is much more eye appealing than the plain text of most blackberrys. There is not a mobile device available that is suitable for anything more than microblogging, however I would have never attempted blogging from my treo at all and I have had data access for years. Even if there was a way to do it (other than the wordpress email plugin).

Read More

How to make an old bike new again

old  cycling videos homepageA new coat of paint and a little oil can go a long way...
We began working with Lou Lamoureux (the transplant athlete) several months ago. He has been running his  e-commerce website (www.cycling-videos.com) and selling training and fitness videos and books for several years.  He started small and did all of the work himself up to the point that he contacted SoFla Web Studio. 

Read More

Google gets shiny with Chrome

What a great way to start our new blog. After years of assisting our clients with their online marketing efforts, we have finally started to practice what we preach and begin blogging ourselves. In a similar fashion Google, which has been helping all of with just about everything online for the past several years, has finally built their own browser... Google's Chrome Browser is an open source alternative to FireFox and IE (the big two browsers at this time). While the thought a 3rd party in the browser wars is enlightening (and yes I know there are others such as Safari, Opera, etc... but they don't really count) it is too soon to tell if google will actually have something new here. Google does have a golden touch with certain things (Adwords anyone?), but they also have a lab full of a few more tarnished projects which havent reached their fullest potential (more on some of these in a future post) The implications of google getting into this realm are huge (especially for Microsoft). Google is known for thier insatiable thirst for data and I am sure the service agreement that we will all agree to when we install thier browser will, in its most "non evil" legalize state that google will watch and record everything you ever do on the internet for all of infinity.

Read More