Archive for May 2009

Imagine this. You’re on holiday, you’ve been out walking, and you need to get back to the other side of town to your hotel.

You come across a bus stop, and you decide to wait for a bus. Whilst standing there, you decide to take a photo of your friends waiting with you.

You take the photo and then show the photo to your fiends. Hang on, what’s that on the photo? The bit of the bus stop in the shot has got a URL on it, inviting you to click on it. You click, and are presented with a bus timetable for this stop. Highlighted is the next bus going to your destination, and the length of time you’ve got to wait!

Amazed, you click back to the photo, and notice that in the background you’ve managed to capture part of a window of a local restaurant. Again, this part of the image has a URL, which you click on. Hey presto, you’re on the restaurant’s website, where you can check the menu and also get a money off voucher.

A bizarre view of a convenient future? This is one envisaged by MOBVIS, the Mobile Attentive Interfaces in Urban Scenarios project, which is currently mapping out streets in both Austria and Germany.

The service claims to be able to recognise pictures of surroundings and add URLs to anything in that image it can find information about.

It is a so-called ‘pre-emptive’ technology, designed to anticipate your need to search for information.

The MOBVIS project is funded by EC.

Scary picture of the future? Fantasy comic book idea? Or exciting project that could change searching and surfing habits? Please leave a comment below.

Do you run a business, or are you building a website for your business or someone else’s? You may or may not know, but thanks to Google Maps and some information lifted from the Yellow pages, there is already information about you that is appearing in the Google search results.

You may yourself have seen this. When you search for a particular sort of business in a specific place, you are often presented with a map along with a list of providers who fit the bill.

Here’s an example:

These maps really grab the attention of anyone presented with them. To start with, because they are a visual representation they stand out from all the other text on the page. Second, since they provide specific map based information to someone who has searched for a specific business type in a local area, they are likely to be extremely relevant to the searcher’s query.

These listings are compiled from a database called ‘Google local’, or ‘Google Business Center’. Since people are finding information about your business in this way, it makes sense to take control of those listings, and to expand or improve them.

Here’s a link to the Local Business Center.

The first thing to do is make sure the information is factually correct and up to date. However, you can provide additional incentives for people to both look at your listing, and then follow that up by looking at your website or visiting your physical shop.

These extra incentives might include photos of your business or a relevant topic, your business hours, and coupons or money off vouchers.

Google have put together a video that shows you the sign up process, and the benefits of the local business center.

Check it out and then start editing (or creating) your listing!

Let us know how you get on by leaving a comment below.

We covered the UK launch of Google Street View last month. The database of street level images from 26 UK towns and cities has been one of Google’s more controversial projects. There have been lots of objections that Google Street View is an invasion of privacy, since it takes photos without any individual’s permission, and in most cases without their knowledge. It has also been described as a helpful aid to burglars.

Despite this, its proved a huge boost for traffic to Google Maps.

The photos are taken from a panoramic camera mounted 12 foot high on the top of a moving car.

The residents of one village near Milton Keynes have turned their objections into direct action. Protesters from Broughton surrounded a Google Street View car to prevent it taking photos of their homes.

A local councilor said the camera was ‘intrusive’ and that people should have been consulted.

The protest was significant enough for the police to be called: “A squad car was sent to Broughton at 1020 BST after reports of a dispute between a crowd of people and a Google Street View contractor”, said Thames Valley police.

This isn’t the first time objections have been raised. Before the project even launched, Google had to satisfy all privacy concerns with the Information commissioner’s office.

For my part, there’s no way I’d get in the way of the Google Street View car. Aside from being a really innovative development in real world mapping, it’s been really exciting to travel along known streets and roads pointing out the homes of friends and family.

And of course anyone can remove images of their house from the database once it goes live, if they still feel like their privacy has been invaded

What do you think? Great innovation or invasion of privacy? Leave us a comment below.

Last week we announced the launch of a range of new features of the WebEden website making system. These features put your WebEden website at the heart of your social networking sites. The feedback so far has been very positive. However every new thing always takes a bit of getting used to, so we’ve put together video tutorial that shows you how to add members to your site.

Have a go and let us know how you got on!

We’ve written quite a lot on this blog about Twitter: what is it, how do I use it, and what, frankly, is the point? Well a business practice is emerging that might finally be able to answer that last one – what’s the point – and make Twitter a good place to do business.

The potential to use Twitter for business all lies in its ‘real time search engine’. Whilst you can search on Google for all information added to the web on a particular topic, ‘Twitter search’ allows you to search for what people are saying right now.

And that becomes quite interesting if people are either talking about your product or service, or asking a question that you can answer by pointing them towards your website.

For example, if you run a B&B in the West Country (yes, I’m back to that example!), then you could try looking out for any searches to do with ‘B&B west country’ or similar. When someone asks for a recommendation, then get in there and point them towards your site. Something like ‘have you had a look at Dave’s B&B in Somerset?’. This might get some direct sales, but is also an opportunity to promote your website to their followers.

You can have a look at Twitter search here.

But who has really got the time to be searching on Twitter, spending time waiting for potential customers to ask a relevant question? The good news is that there are a couple of services that will do this for you. These services send you an email alert for specific twitter searches. One of the better known of these is called tweetbeep.com, but we’ve also come across twollow.com too.

Here’s the personal bit. Since receiving this recommendation we’ve been trying it out. Whenever anyone mentions that they want some help building a website, then we ask them if they have had a go at webeden.co.uk. The upside is that we’ve generated a few sales through this. The downside is that you really feel like you’re intruding in other people’s conversation, and trying to sell them something. It’s something equivalent to listening to a conversation in the pub, and then interrupting to sell them a packet of peanuts.

If people are genuinely looking for help, then that’s fine. But how many of those ‘need help’ Tweets are a just rhetorical?

Is this the idea that makes Twitter work for business? Are you using Twitter to promote your website? Want to follow WebEden on Twitter? Leave us a comment below.

Whilst you were busy building a website, an important milestone in Internet history was passed last month. The Internet- in the sense of being a proposal of how to link computers and servers – turned 20 years old.

The chap credited with it all is Tim Berners-Lee. Whilst working at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, Tim published a paper that was an early blueprint of the web.

Berners-Lee’s idea was that a system that could be developed that linked computers so that scientists could share information. The computers could be linked using something called ‘hypertext’ – what we now just call ‘links’.

The web address off the very first website was www.info.cern.ch.

We’ve written before about how fast the web is growing, but where are we now? Although there is no agreed way of measuring the size of the web, it is generally held that by the end of 2008 there were around 200 million websites with around 30 million new ones being added annually.

I don’t know about you but that makes my efforts feel quite small. And a little daunted when it comes to getting to the top of the Search Engine Results page (SERPs). I’m off to study the SEO guide…

With a bank holiday approaching, there’s a lot of weather related chatter going on.  In the office we’ve been talking about stuff like how busy the campsites are, and how choked the roads will become. But as we’ve mentioned before, the weather has a big impact on the sort of things people search for online.

There is of course the obvious stuff: bad weather brings about a surge in searches for weather websites, as Brits look for a break in the clouds.

But also there is the range of activities that warmer weather brings with it. If search engines are anything to go by, the first thing on people’s minds when the sun comes out is the garden. The Hitwise ‘Hot Consumer Electronics List’ shows that garden related search queries have trebled over the last few weeks.

Here’s the top 10:

1  black and decker
2. lawn mowers
3. flymo
4. black & decker
5. petrol lawn mowers
6. petrol lawnmowers
7. petrol lawn mower
8. cheap garden furniture
9. lawnmower
10. lawnmowers

Of course the take away point if you’re selling any garden or weather related equipment is to have a list of keywords sorted out well in advance of this surge. You need to make sure your website is ranking well in the Search Engine Results Page (SERPS) for your important keywords – follow our search engine optimisation guide for the best advice. But owing to the length of time Google takes to crawl changes on your site, its best to make sure you’ re working on your SEO programme through the winter, so that come springtime you’re ready to take advantage.

For those of us not selling this stuff; is there a weather or summer related angle you could give to your site? For example, if you run a B&B take the opportunity to add in a page about the weather in the local area, and optimise that page for local weather keywords. You might well be able to pick up some extra traffic.

Have any of you taken advantage of weather related searches to boost traffic to your site? Leave us a comment below.

Do you ever want to make the same change on every page of your website? If you’ve got lots of pages then that can take a while.

That’s where the Page Master comes in. Changes in the page master affect every page of your site. Get to grips with this feature and your website building and editing experience is going to be a lot quicker and easier!

Have a go, and let us have your feedback!

A few weeks ago we asked you submit your website for our new gallery page. Thank you to everyone who has submitted their site.

The good news is that the new website gallery page is now live!

Please don’t worry if your website hasn’t yet been published; we had so many submissions that its taking a while for us to add them. We’re going to be adding a few more every week until we get through the list.

Keep watching this space! And thanks again for the submissions.

More exciting news here at WebEden! This time its strictly for the advanced users amongst you.

Our Sitebuilder developers have been burning the midnight oil and have produced an ‘HTML widget’ that lets you place pieces of HTML on your WebEden website. You can find it in the File manager and its called ‘HTML Snippet’. Beware though – its still in BETA, and there are some very good reasons why its not on full release yet.

What does it do?

It allows you to add HTML snippets to your site! Add your Amazon links, web rings, banner ads, friends list from Facebook or try any other snippets you find on the web. We can’t guarantee it will work for everything but it’s worth trying.

How does it work?

Place the widget on the page and using the ‘Setup’ tab on the ‘Editor’ paste in the HTML for  your snippet and click ‘Apply’. If a height and width is detected in your code you will be given an option to resize the widget accordingly. To view the HTML widget use the ‘Preview’ button on the ‘Editor’ or click ‘View my site’ on the toolbar. If a visitor is using a browser that doesn’t support the widget it will render as a broken image link and the HTML will be displayed just below your site along with instructions on how to fix the problem.

Issues

There are known bugs with this widget.

Currently the HTML widget only works correctly if you view the site using Internet Explorer 6 or above, with Flash Player 10. So for Firefox users, it displays the HTML content below the site so they can still see it, but its not ideal.

We’ve had some exciting news from Firefox that the bug that prevents the HTML widget correctly displaying in your site for Firefox users will be fixed in the 3.1 release of the browser, due sometime in the next couple of months (hopefully). This is great, as this bug was something we couldn’t fix ourselves.

The main bug that we’re looking at on our side is why some HTML snippets don’t load correctly, which seems to be mainly those that use external JavaScript files in the HTML. Hopefully we’ll be able to fix that too and open the net wider.

Once the HTML widget is fully robust we hope to be able to offer many different pre-configured flavours of it. There will always be the generic ‘paste in any HTML’ widget, but we’ll also do some that are focused on particular services.

Have a go, and let us know what you think!