Approximately two months ago, the “Canada, Get Your Business Online” initiative was launched. Supported by big names such as Google, the aim of the initiative was pretty self-explanatory; getting Canadian businesses to build websites. According to Google, 100,000 Canadian small to medium sized businesses were/(are) not online, a sharp contrast to the 80% of Canadian consumers who are online.
Whereas this initiative was definitely a step in the right direction, it may not have been the most effective way to address the online disconnect between Canadian SMBs and consumers. For those unfamiliar with the initiative, it offered both free website creation through a templated “What you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) website provider, and a year of free .ca domain registration, in addition to a few other perks. Read more...
In his latest video blog, Kevin talks about how building your website isn’t necessarily going to be a “Field of Dreams” exercise and how you can achieve a positive Return on Investment from your business website by accompanying it with a professional online marketing plan.
Reed Hastings, founder of Netflix, in a recent interview with Charlie Rose called 4K the next thing in video, while explaining how the rate of change in video is accelerating now that everything is digital. Coincidentally, Netflix now accounts for the largest portion of Internet traffic in North America, at nearly 30%.
4K refers to the next generation of high definition video, roughly four thousand lines of resolution across the horizontal. It seems a consensus for what to call the technology has not arrived. I suppose that’s not surprising since we still hear HD, High Def, Full HD, 1080p, etc. The next generation is referred to as 4K, 4K TV, Quad HD, and Quad Full High Definition QFHD. You can read how Wikipedia describes the situation. Read more...
In this video blog, John talks about an example of how he used LinkedIn (the social networking tool for business) in his sales process to turn a cold call in to a warm call.
A great practice to incorporate in to your Google Analytics review is a monthly check of your top landing pages. A landing page is the first page a visitor to your website sees when they are referred to your site from different sources. For instance, someone who lands on your website from a search engine might land on a different page according to what keyword they used to find you. {Did you know that Search engines index pages of a website not an entire website?} The traffic sources section will tell you where visitors are coming from to each landing page. Read more...
In July 2004 a billboard appeared in the heart of Silicon Valley posing a complex mathematical problem. The billboard was completely anonymous and read: “{first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits e}.com.” The answer was 7427466391.com which led the mathematically minded to a Web page posing another equation to solve. Solving the second equation would lead someone to a page on Google Labs which stated:
One thing we learned while building Google is that it’s easier to find what you’re looking for if it comes looking for you. What we’re looking for are the best engineers in the world. And here you are.
As you can imagine, we get many, many resumes every day, so we developed this little process to increase the signal-to-noise ratio. Read more...
We’ve recently had a request to have an image on a webpage that would scale to the full width of the browser window. Generally we avoid this sort of thing citing poor browser image scaling as the reason. However it’s a trend on the web and so we must investigate! I set out to see how various browsers cope with both scaling images up and scaling images down.
In each of the tests below you can compare how an image scaled by the browser compares to an image scaled by Photoshop by dragging the vertical line left or right. Read more...
I have been doing a fair bit of reading lately (actually listening to audio books) and one of the books I was listening to was asking the reader if you train to be great at what you do. Most people would look at you strange if you mentioned that to them. But if you think about it, whether you are a pro-athlete, a leading CEO, an artist or a scientist, if you are going to be truly great at your trade you have to train, you have to practice. Read more...
