Any frequent visitor to the WebEden blog knows that we’re big fans of Google. As we discussed last year, Google innovates at a hectic pace, bringing out – and evolving – products at a pace unmatched by other businesses. In the last year alone Google launched 278 fully fledged products or services, each of which would have been a big launch for any other company.
To help keep up with all the new and exciting stuff going on Google have launched a new website called Google New.
They’re using this website to publish news about their latest products and services.
It includes an aggregation of all their blogs and pulls in their latest posts. You can also search Google products, and there’s a product of the day too.
The site also includes a directory every product, advert, developer tools and blogs.
Take a look google.com/newproducts. Or watch a video all about it below.
This week’s top website – and it’s been a long time coming – is WhiskyMerchants.co.uk.
A keen Twitter aficionado and (obviously!) a whisky advocate, WhiskyMerchants.co.uk brings you “information about all types of whiskies, tasting notes, expressions and bottlers”. This includes lots of details about distilleries & their history, visitor centres and all the relevant contact details.
We like this site. It is PACKED with information and tasting notes about every whisky you could think of (and a few more besides). Despite this density the site is easy to navigate and above all displays an enthusiasm for the subject which is pretty inspiring. Take a look!
Website Address:
www.whiskymerchants.co.uk
When did you build your website?
Started building the website in January 2008 and been adding information to it ever since.
Why did you build a website?
One of my rivals had hijacked the advertising space on a whisky information site I was advertising on. So I thought why not build my own and use it to advertise my commercial website
I looked around for some website building software and came across webeden. after reading the positive reviews and the free trial decided to have a go.
What do you like best about your website?
The flexibility, I can add flash video, twitter feeds, news feeds, all this makes it easy to keep the website looking up to date. plus the ease of use, I am a one eyed one finger 50 plus (never been taught) webbie so if I can do it any one can
What is your best website building tip?
Use twitter and Google news feeds. these can be added so as to be always updating your website even when you cannot.
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If you want to be featured as our Website of the week, and get exposure to thousands of readers of the WebEden blog, visit the forum now!
At the back end of September 2009 we released a brand new control panel for you to build and edit your website.
It allowed more rapid access to certain features, with some new functionality too.
At the time we said that we would at some point stop support the old toolbar and phase it out. That point has been reached! When the next major release goes out (the new blog), the old toolbar will be retired.
Of course 90% of you are on the new control panel in any case, but for those who have stuck with the old one you will be automatically migrated to the new.
If you want to manually upgrade then you can do so by going to:
View
and then
New Toolbar
This is what it looks like:
Here’s what we think the new control panel is good for:
*Use the full screen browser for editing – you can move edit tools outside the boundary of your site
* Zoom in/out while editing – you make your site bigger/smaller to help ’see’ it in full glory
* Sticky edit tools – the Toolbar remains at the top and the Editor will remain on screen as you scroll up and down
* Show off-screen objects – if you drag something off your site (outside the boundary), you can choose to hide or display off screen objects (new under ‘view’)
* Detailed insert menu – more objects can be added in one click, including some new HTML snippets (’Insert’ menu)
* Quick pages menu – includes quick ways to add pages, copy pages and change page length, plus edit meta data (for search engines) more quickly (see ‘Pages’ menu)
* Links to other services – Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, AdSense can all be viewed without leaving your site (new ‘Services’ menu)
Are you a big mobile texter? Do you make use of predictive text? The feature -which guesses what word you’re trying to type saving you the effort of actually doing so – has made texting much quicker and more nimble.
With ‘Scribe’ Google have decided to bring that idea to documents, Scribe lays out possible endings to each word or phrase based on what you’ve already typed. As you type you can choose the auto-complete suggestion that best fits your sentence.
The suggestions also include what is ‘normally’ or popularly used to end each sentence.
There’s no doubt – as with predictive text – that this sort of thing takes a bit of getting used to. Having tried it myself it went from intriguing to annoying and then finally useful in about 20 minutes.
Last year we brought you news of Google’s plans in Social Search. Take a look at that post to see Google’s Matt Cutts talk all about what it actually is.
Finding out what your friends think
Briefly, Social Search is when results and content posted by people in your social circle are surfaced in the search results page.
For example, lets says you’re searching for an ‘Italian Restaurant in Reading’. It might be that recently a friend of yours has visited an Italian Restaurant in Reading and has made a comment about it on Facebook. Social Search would return a set of results that included the comments made by your friend, since they are relevant to the search results.
All of us are more likely to follow the recommendation of a friend than someone we don’t know, so social search is also about making search more relevant to each one of us.
Facebook and Bing in on the act
Now its the turn of Facebook and Microsoft’s Bing to socialise search. In the US they have just completed a tie up to make search “more social”,
What they plan is that when a user searches for something on Bing or using the web results in Facebook, if any friends have ‘liked’ an item related to that search that person’s image will appear alongside the search results.
Bing has added more depth to its people search too, by making the results based on the user’s Facebook contacts. So when a user searches for an individual, friends or mutual friends get shown higher in the search results.
In a blog post Facebook commented “Everyday most of us make decisions with the input from people we trust and this is a way to bring friends’ recommendations to online search.”
At the moment the change is just in the US – we’re yet to see plans for the UK.
Try it out!
Try switching your settings on Bing to US and trying out social search. Do you think there’s a future in it, something genuinely useful to people? Or is this just another search gimmick? Leave us a comment below.
This week’s best website is an international one – and one of the best we’ve seen.
Transform-Macedonia.net is the website for the Institute of Spiritual Development in Macedonia. It’s another strong design by Web Design studio Fractal Design. The site is tightly themed, uses great visual tricks such as a drop-shadow on the homepage video, and strikes a good balance between images, text and (that often forgotten necessity) space.
Website Address:
http://www.transform-macedonia.net/
When did you build your website?
Completed July 2010
Why did you build a website?
It was for a client in Macedonia who is opening an Institute for Spiritual Development in the country.
What do you like best about your website?
I love the relationship between vimeo and webeden created by the HTML snippet.
What is your best website building tip?
Because webeden is soooo accessible you can create amazing websites, but also clutter the screen with too many gizmos. Don’t get excited about the number of features. Think about the viewer. We all start on google because the blank space relaxes us – do the same with your website.
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If you want to be featured as our Website of the week, and get exposure to thousands of readers of the WebEden blog, visit the forum now!
Well you heard it here first. Despite what the techno-naysayers would have you believe, Facebook might actually bring a smile to your face.
According to research by BCS – The Chartered Institute for IT – social networking and Instant Messaging make us feel both happier and less isolated.
Access to Technology
There is apparently a clear link between well being and access to technology, with social networking providing the largest emotional benefit. It’s all down to the additional level of contact that Facebook and the like give you with your friends and family.
It doesn’t replace traditional stuff
The fear cited by many is that these new ways of interacting are replacing the traditional face to face stuff. This research indicates that it augments rather than replaces it.
“Social networking makes us happier.” was how Paul Flatters from Trajectory Partnership, which worked with BCS on the research, summed up.
“Given the immediate uplift in life satisfaction that people experience when using these sites, teaching people about how to use services like Facebook could be a more effective way of bridging the digital divide and getting people online.”
In response to the research The Chartered Institute for IT is planning to launch a getting-started guide to social networking as just one part of its Savvy Citizens campaign, encouraging people to get online.
Does Facebook make you happy? Is Twitter leaving you satisfied? Does Messenger bring a smile to your lips? Leave us a comment below.
The results are in, the numbers have been counted and verified. And the news? Well don’t hold your breath: according to online measurement firm ComScore, Facebook is where we all hang out. It racks up more time-spent than any other site, including all Google’s sites.
In August we spent 41.1m minutes on Facebook. which is 9.9% of total time online. That compares to 39.8m minutes on Google sites (which of course include YouTube).
Yahoo sites got up to 37.7m minutes of dwell time, which is down 12% on August 2009.
Both Facebook and Google are up massively -the pair received just 5% each in Auust 2009.
Both Google and Facebook have made a big effort to boost user time in the last year. Lots of businesses now use Facebook pages as a key way to interact with customers. It’s also a lot easier to share content on Facebook than a year ago.
Google for its part has broker deals with film studios, record labels, sporting bodies and broadcasters to show more long-form content on YouTube.
So is this a victory for great, engaging websites? Or a poor sign for the diversity of our interests in the web? are you using Facebook and YouTube more than you were a year ago? Leave us a comment below.
Do you use Google AdWords or Pay Per Click advertising to drive visitors to your website? The good news is that Google have launched a website to help you get more from AdWords.
The AdWords Small Business Center is a central learning hub that details AdWords best practice and gives you top tips to get a successful AdWords account.
It helps all-comers
It doesn’t matter whether you’re just starting out or an ad advanced user, there are insightful topics to help everyone get more from AdWords. These include strategies, writing compelling ads, and ways in which you can improve your website.
Keep up-to-date
The well-known ‘Inside AdWords’ blog is also streamed on the site, allowing you to read about new products, the latest trends, and how to take advantage to help your business.
Talk about it
Thanksto the recently launched AdWords Small Business Corner, you can also discuss ideas and advice with other SMEs. You can help others out, or find out what worked for their business.
We do that too
You may have noticed that WebEden recently launched a low cost AdWords PPC Service. Our team of AdWords pros are helping hundreds of SMEs to drive new visitors to their website. So if you want to use PPC to boost your traffic, but haven’t got the time to engage on the forum, take a look at our packages and then give us a call.
Last year we brought you news about a new type of search engine results called ‘Real time‘. The whole point of realtime search was to let you search the web for stuff going on right now. This is in contrast to the normal search results, which can show you a list comprised of websites ranging from a couple of weeks to several years old.
Getting Twitter Results in the main search results was a bit confusing. For that reason, and perhaps to highlight its commitment to realtime, Google have decided that these results deserve their very own homepage.
Google have also added a raft of tools to help customise the results.
To start with, you can refine the results to focus just on your location or a geographical area you specify. It also has a ‘conversation view’ which lets you follow an actual discussion on a real-time web service such as Twitter. The data is organised from oldest to newest.
Google has added real-time content to its Google Alerts service, so you can now be made aware if a subject appears on Twitter.
Here’s a video explaining how you can get more out of it.
Is realtime any worthwhile? Are you interested in seeing results for the real-time web? Is this just of passing interest or does it offer any practical help to your use of Google? Leave us a comment below.
