Blueclaw are looking to bring in a new web designer to join their expanding team. The role will be client facing primarily involved in the design of new Ecommerce websites. More about the web designer job in Leeds is available on our sister site Blueclaw Ecommerce.
Author Archive
Does the Google+ markup confuse the Googlebot?
This morning while trying to have a play with the Google author search I ended up on the image search results for my name and was surprised to see friends and colleagues of mine appearing in the results with our own Anna Francis even appearing before me. On the first page of results there are three pictures of me (orange) from various sites, three pictures of people who have me in their/are in my google plus circles, and one image that was previously my Google Plus avatar (but is out of date as I changed my profile picture about a month ago).
Clicking the images confirmed my suspicions that they were coming from my google plus page and were being seen as relevant as the images where located in markets next to the words “In John’s circles” or “has John in circles” and seemingly Google is seeing their proximity to the word John as making them more relevant then the actual profile picture of me on the page and the countless repetitions of my avatar next to my posts.
Obviously being a nosey web developer I couldn’t resist having a peak about at the HTML on the Google+ profile page and make some suprising discoveries.
- The main profile picture has no Alt text (the avatars next to the posts do)
- The page does actual use the Google recommended hcard microformat, however it fails to make use of the photo property which would surely have made it more obvious to the Googlebot which image on the page is most relevant.
- There is a lot of repetitive inline styling bulking the code (I’m just being picky now).
One would think if anyone would be getting the markup correct on their page then surely it would be Google but it seems even they have some work to do.
5 Optimisation tips for Google Shopping Search Results
Over the last few months Google has been rolling out changes to their shopping search (also known as Google Base or Froogle) introducing new features that allow users to make easier comparisons between different products or between the prices charged for the same product from multiple retailers. Along with these new features within the product search results, there also seems to be more and more products being displayed within the general search results page and with more prominent positions within the page.
These changes are resulting in Google’s shopping results driving increased levels of traffic to ecommerce websites and I have seen sites where the product search is driving as much as 15% to 20% of all traffic. Even better is that the conversion rate of these visitors is usually at least double that of other sources with customers already interested in your product before they land on your site. As such for most online retailers ensuring that you optimise your google base feed is a highly cost efficient way of driving more traffic and more importantly sales.
Firefox quickly follows up Internet Explorer with a new version
Hot on the heels of Internet Explorer 9′s release last week today saw the final release of Firefox 4 (another browser that seemed to be in beta / release candidate stage for ages).
With an updated UI making it look very much like Opera the latest Firefox version promises improved speed, more CSS3 support and a host of new features. Last week Microsoft were attempting to claim IE9 was the most advanced web browser, it will be interesting to see if they continue to keep up this claim when FF4 offers arguably more.
IE9 launches so upgrade now
Microsoft have been working very hard in the last couple of months working on their reputation, just a few years ago they were the big evil giant of the tech industry with their anti competitive business practices not winning them many friends. However times change and their seemingly unsurpassable dominance in home computing has been eroded most notably when it comes to the web browser. Where once they had a 95% market share it has now slipped under 50%, as faster more feature rich alternatives such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera have chipped away at their lead. Well the men from Redmond are fighting back with their latest offering Internet Explorer 9 and it is a big step in catching up in area they were being left behind.
Having learnt from previous launch issues (such as the much criticised Windows Vista) this has not been a rushed job. There have been a number of beta versions leading up to this official launch with Microsoft looking to involve web developers throughout the testing process. They have made use of social media channels and even throwing a big party at the South By Southwest conference in Austin Texas, their hope is no doubt to attempt to build a better relationship with the web development community who have been suffering for years now to deal with IE6′s incompetency. It seems they have realised that the key to the success of this latest iteration is that the developers get on board and make their HTML5 web apps compatible with IE9 and I for one applaud them for this.
So if you are still using IE8, IE7 or are even IE6 (god help you) then please please please, if you are not going to make the switch to chrome/firefox etc. then at least upgrade to IE9 and let we the web development community take full advantage of CSS3/HTML5 functionality.
On a side note it’s not been all good news for Microsoft however as they PR took a big hit the other night when they attempted to get twitter coverage by offering to donate aid to Japan earthquake victims for every retweet. This attempt to capitalize on the tragedy and suffering of the Japanese people seem to be a hark back to the bad old days of the evil empire and the twitter backlash resulted in the trending of the hastag #fuckbing.
The hand: I forgot to add perhaps the next google will be a ...
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