Entries from April 2008 ↓

I’ve recently been having some car trouble. The engine oil light came on and I’ve been drilling holes into my head trying to find out which oil to use as I didn’t know these were vehicle dependent (bare with me… I am going somewhere with this).

So using Yahoo Answers and various VW forums (I have a Passat) I went to the local Halfords and asked for some help in validating my findings. The assistant was very helpful and looked through a list of makes, models and years and told me I was correct.

Now here comes the whole point of this post.

On walking around the oil display stand the assistant picked up some Castrol oil and said “this is the one you need” I happily walked to the tills and bought my item. It wasn’t until I reached my car that I thought… There was loads of oil there with the same grade numbers on the fronts. Some were even Halfords own brands. So why wasn’t I offered one of these, no doubt cheaper products? I suspect that the answer is that the sales assistant has received some training instructing them in product recommendation based on achieving maximum profit. So basically I wasn’t given a choice of the other available products because this would reduce the bottom line…

Crafty indeed.

So how can this apply to our industry?

Well, I already only produce designs once commissioned (NO SPEC!) however I do often face the designers’ dilemma in showing a client a number of designs, one I love and two that are OK, leaving the client to decide because I believe in delivering value for money. However using the Halfords method, I suggest changing this to only showing the client one design as the one I recommend, in the hopes that it is accepted, that my profit margins remain high due to not spending time on other lesser comp’s and that I end up working on and spending more time on a design that has 100% of my confidence.

Anyone else had a similar experience?

If you’re like me then you love free blog sites. BayWords is a new site by the makers of The Pirate Bay, notorious for their Torrent site and debacle with the RIAA and other oppressive regimes.

Blog sites are great because they make link building a breeze. Now I’d never advocate setting up a load of sites just for the purpose of link building, however creating and maintaining a few blogs that are on-topic and used as a hub for aggregated news can make quite a powerful platform.

Anyway, the big thing about BayWords is their focus on freedom of speech… which may not mean a big thing to you right now, but with the web becoming ever more policed its nice to have a service provider that fights to retain the originality of your content. They say…

We’re proud to present a new service – baywords.com. Because of the need of freedom of speech and secure hosting facility of the words being said we could not agree to how people behave towards bloggers.

Many blogs are being shut down for uncomfortable thoughts and ideas. We will not do that. Our goal is to protect freedom of speech and your thoughts. As long as you don’t break any Swedish laws in your blog, we will defend it.

We will update the blogging system all the time to add new features and themes. If you need to contact us, you can do so here.

We decided that although the system is quite minimalistic right now, the most important thing was to get it up and running. So stay tuned for updates and please blog your heart out. Your ideas and your thoughts are the most important ones.

(Upcoming stuff: We will add support for your own domain hopefully. Captcha system will be installed. Stats will be better. Ads will be added, sorry about that but we’ll keep them as usual to a minimum.)

All in all… its worth having another platform to use. It just needs testing to see how effective it will be in an SEO application.

So its reported elsewhere on the Internets that Matt Cutts, Googles resident spin doctor has leaked information about the Google Dewey update. The change happened late March and has caused tremors in the SEO community with SREPS going up and down faster than … Well I’ll leave that to your imagination

My own personal viewpoint is that the latest update is Googles latest attempt to internalise all search traffic back through Google related services as I am now seeing Google Books results appearing a close second to the ever dominant Wikipedia listings. I say latest attempt as the previous updates based around self interest include showing Youtube content and displaying Google news prominently above other commercial listings.

Its sad times indeed.