Ryan Carson Blog feed

Wow, I should really update this thing

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 08:56:28 -0500

So, 2 house moves, one baby boy, a marriage and a few trips to hospital later I guess I`d best update this blog a bit more often, really hadn`t I?

My son Triston is now 2 and a quarter years old and runnign around acusing havoc all over the show, i`m not palying quite as many video games as I`d like to and having to devote more and more hours to the business due to huge demand for websites.

Getting geared up for the change over to PHP 6 in the future which isn`t much of a problem for most of my sites, although still, chaning a couple of lines on over 100 sites still takes it`s time up!

I`ve been able to spent a little bit of time learning unity on the side and playing with that is great fun, still gotta create something worthwhile though for mobile devices, got myself an archos 32 to test out stuff on and I might see if android OS on PC can do anything for me also, possibly through virtual box.

Still playing Team Fortress 2, if you`re not then you should be, it`s cheap as FREE, no, really it`s actually FREE.

Now If you`ll excuse me Triston has found my mint copy of F-ZERO for the SNES. I`d best wrestle that away from his smushy little hands before he destroys it! (He loves DEVO now btw alex if you`re reading this ,hehe)

Technorati

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 17:20:29 -0500

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Meta Keywords? What Meta Keywords?

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 03:39:49 -0500

So, it was announced recently on Googles Webmaster Channel on Youtube that the worlds most popular search engine Google simply doesn`t use the meta keywords tag for when displaying results for it`s Google search web application.

According to the Youtube video Google hasn`t been using the meta keywords for a long, long time.

View Video on You Tube

However, that`s not to say that using meta keywords is a complete waste of time, far from it. Whilst google is the largest and arguably the best search engine out there, a percentage of people will still use others such as bing, yahoo, altavista, ask, etc, etc. Some of these search engines will more than likely still use keywords as part of their ranking criteria, unless of course they also begin openly broadcasting how they refuse to use the keywords tag also.

Either way, for the moment, as using meta keywords does absolutely no harm it`s still worth keeping them inside a website in my opinion. Maybe concentrating on a more precise description is a good idea now.

Ongoing Work

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 06:49:27 -0500

Refresh Creations Ltd keeps on giving me lots of website work to carry on with, too much sometimes in-fact and I have been looking around recently for freelance website designers to assist me with some outstanding website projects.

Recently finished is the new Firebird Promotions site (http://www.firebirdpromotions.co.uk/) Which is a rare example of what I`m going to term an "Almost E-Commerce" website. It functions on the admin side exactly like an e-commerce site and looks just like one also.

The reason why it is an "Almost E-Commerce" website is that it simply allows you to submit requests for orders as opposed to actual paid-for orders, at request of Firebird Promotions of course.

Whilst developing the Firebird Promotions Site I did have a good look around their products sold and I`ve found that I`m still just as fond of logobugs as I ever was ,since the age of about 7 or 8, perhaps I should order some Refresh Creations branded logobugs or, as I call them "puyo blobs" for promotion later on, although I am tempted by having some cheesily branded mugs or cups to give out to new customers as a surprise piece of advertising in the home.

It has proven to be handy project to allow me to develop my admin system further, previous E-commerce websites produced used a heavily customized piece of shopping cart software known as os commerce which is great, but some customers believed the back-end admin system to be rather unwieldy. Hopefully I can create a compromise between the two pieces of software to make a simpler piece of shopping cart software for my clients to use in the future. Sagepay and paypal integration should be fairly simple as always, Google Checkout, however, has long been a bug bear of mine. We shall see how things develop however.

E-commerce Oddities

Fri, 15 May 2009 07:48:45 -0500

Somethings in this world of websites are rather strange. Mostly thepeople. Or in some cases, the lack of people visiting sites can bequite disturbing.

Cases in point are as follows:

The first, and most recent site whispurr.co.ukis a luxury lingerie shop which has only just been out and is awaitinggoogles next PR loop (probably around the end of March / beginning ofApril. Since February it seems to have dropped off in regards to thenumber of visitors by an alarming almost 50%. Perhaps it is sufferingfrom new-site syndrome with the search engines even though it had beenequipped by myself with what I thought were some pretty handy tools.Most importantly, blog functionality, wishlists and the ability tocreate custom meta tags. The site has been live for almost 3 monthsthough now. After a nice sales blip in February it`s just not convertedany sales. Quite why this is, I`m not sure.

In complete contrast. A little known website, with roughly the sameamount of traffic, quite a lot older (by around 2 years) called LanaCotone has proven to be possibly the most effective site I`ve everseen! This last month it received barely over 250 unique visitors but completed a sale 58 times in the same period. That`s something else entirely!

Between the two we have some other e-commerce sites which attract a decent amount of business and many, many visitors which are around a year old now and notch up 10-20 sales a month. Is time the only healer for e-commerce, or have I missed something out big style on the whispurr.co.uk website. Only time it seems, and the site owners marketing of their business(es) will tell!