My own piece of the Internet
 
Category: <span>Uncategorized</span>

Category: Uncategorized

Latest Reads: 3 Feb 2013

Here’s a few things online that inspired, delighted, and interested me. Holy Grail of eCommerce Conversion Optimization – 91 Point Checklist and Infographic Despite continuing the trend of very very long lists as link-bait, this is an impressive list of optimisation tactics for ecommerce websites. Whether you’re selling pajamas, concert tickets, shoes or shaving blades; e-commerce today has evolved and humanized beyond just convenience shopping . It is therefore imperative that you stop seeing people who land on your store as ‘traffic’; but as real human visitors. People come to your store and engage at various levels (let’s call these …

Lessons from a failed lounge room startup

A mate of mine living in Amsterdam, was sick of being a highly paid IT contractor so he decided to start a business from his lounge room with his MacBook Air. Despite having no web design or development skills, it would be an online business. Nine months down the track he tells me how he went and what he learnt. What were you doing before you went off on your own? Working as a Contractor/Freelancer for IBM inside a Financial Institution working on Large complex transformation programs virtualizing Bank infrastructure. Wow that’s a mouthful. When people ask what I do …

A blog will change your life

I recently had a twitter conversation with Australian blogging royalty, Trevor Young. He reminded me that in the 1990s blogging was called journalling, which evokes images of hormonally confused teenage girls writing about boys and bitchy girls. It is an important distinction. Journalling implies something deeply personal, something from the heart written with integrity, authenticity and for an audience of one. Blogging on the other hand can be something deeply personal or not it is entirely up to the writer. A blog is written for an audience, of one, one hundred, or one thousand. The best blogs are written with …

Random default thumbnails for Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

I installed the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) and was frustrated by the stripey default thumbnail that was displayed if a post didn’t have a featured image. Unfortunately for me, this was quite a few. So what I ended up with was: Pretty ugly. So I did some pretty basic hacking and created a pretty awesome (just ask me) way of displaying random thumbnails if there isn’t a featured image associated with a post. Here’s what it looks like: Before I continue I need to offer a disclaimer – I am no coder so if you find anything here …

What I read last week

My reading was a mixed bag last week covering digital, business, and inspirational. Here’s some of it: The Dunbar Number, From the Guru of Social Networks – Businessweek Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar studied how the English sent Christmas cards and discovered that humans can only maintain meaningful relationships with a maximum of 150 people. Read more So You Want to Find a Coder… | Hartley Brody “Anyone who knows me knows that I love building stuff. And not only that, I subscribe strongly to the ‘do things, tell people’ mantra, constantly sharing my projects with the world.” Read more OPINION: …

Finding your own echo

  In 1921 Kurtz Woolf wrote to Franz Kafka: “You know as well as we do, that it is usually the best and most estimable works which find little or no echo immediately” I just read this great quote in a piece by Jeffrey Eugenides in The New Yorker and find it inspiring. Live your own life, follow your own dream; ignore fashion. Be big!

The power of vision

In the early 1990’s almost everything stopped. In Melbourne, tram drivers abandoned their iconic trams in the middle of the streets where they were to stand for almost two months like icons to a broken system. The then State Government had fucked up badly had to sell the state bank to the federal government. There were rumours that the government had stopped paying insurance for their tens of thousands of workers, and in shopping centres everywhere shops is simply closed the doors and called in the receivers. At the same time I left school and then quickly deferred university to …

How to beat online only retailers

I was cleaning my glasses the other day and they snapped in half. As a person with a very high prescription this was not good news. So I took myself off to the large Australian optical retailer, OPSM. The service was fantastic. Not only did they give me free contact lenses for a week so I could see, they made sure I had a comprehensive eye test and advised me to change the type of lenses I wore. Having done an online price check i know my flash new glasses will cost more, but I still walked out of their …

Does social technology liberate or enslave?

So does social technology liberate us or enslave us? I was sitting at my local weekend cafe having a long macchiato (I know, I know) and the kids were having some babycinos when I spied a young bloke with four women sitting at a communal table across from me. There was an obvious attraction between them, there was hair touching, flicking, and preening. There was much touching and mutual adoration with the eyes. And they all had good hair. I watched with the indifference of a parent with two toddlers, tired and incapable of adult conversation let alone the idea …

Facebook is for community, not advertising

I read recently that 13 million Australian’s visit Facebook a week. That is a pretty serious number and a good reason why marketers should take Facebook seriously. Right? Well perhaps, but not in the way you think. According to WebTrends, Facebook’s advertising click through rates (CTR) are 0.051%, which is well below Google’s CTR of 0.4% and the industry average of 0.1%. Still, with a reach of 76% in Australia, Facebook cannot be ignored. So what this means is that Facebook is not the place for your advertising dollars, but it should still factor in your plans to build an …