This is a fantastic opportunity for someone to grow an already successful PPC account for a fast-growing ecommerce business.  Depending on your experience, you will either take full control of the account, or will be coached into doing so. If you can add value to the business, the role will offer excellent career potential.

You’ll be working in a pretty down to earth team, where results speak much louder than words. Your overall goal will be to increase the revenue and profit generated from the clicks you’re buying and reporting will usually focus on this alone.

Candidate Requirements

Currently, the account has about 200,000 active keywords and 15,000 landing pages. To successfully improve the account (it’s definitely not perfect, so don’t worry about that), we feel the ideal candidate will have the following attributes:

1. A high degree of attention to detail
2. Very experienced with MS Excel and able to manipulate large amounts of data
3. Have profitably grown PPC accounts in the past (not essential, see below)
4. Excellent academic results (either science degree or exceptional school results)
5. Be adaptable to different types of work and be easy going

Ideally, you’ll have experience of successfully managing large and complex PPC campaigns, but if not, you’ll need some experience of managing large amounts of data in some other area.

Contact us to apply

We are pleased to announce the launch of www.sparesnextday.co.uk – a site offering consumables like hoover bags and moving on to a vast array of other domestic spares.

The challenge here has been in presenting products like vacuum bags for sale in a way that allows the customer to find their exact item easily, whilst offering a broad range of both genuine and compatible choices.  With an off-the-shelf ecom application, this becomes more and more of a challenge as the product range expands.

We are very proud to announce that Cartridge Save, has not only maintained its Hitwise Top 10 award for the first half of this year, but has improved its ranking to number 4 in the Shopping and Classifieds – Office Supplies category. Not only this, but it is the number 1 specialist printer consumables online retailer!

Cartridge Save have been working with us since 2003 when we launched their first ecommerce website.

Well done everyone!

We have loved building and improving Axiar over the years including acheiving its status as a Level 1 PCI-DSS compliant payment service provider. UPG is a great company and we know its in safe hands.

Standard release now follows:

UPG plc purchase Axiar

Universal Payment Gateway plc (www.upg.co.uk) thought to be the UK’s largest independently owned card processing gateway have completed their 3rd PSP acquisition in the last 12 months, following the successful acquisitions of the PSL portfolio and Secure Hosting Ltd. The purchase of Axiar Payment Solutions Ltd (www.axiarpayments.co.uk) in June 2010 increasingly adds to the portfolio of e-commerce specialist payment software companies.

Axiar has been delivering strong growth in the mid market e-commerce sector with a particular skill set in recurring payments for travel companies and high speed ecommerce merchants. The merchants being served by Axiar have been processing via UPG for some time and will continue to get the same great service. Of the transaction Miles Carroll, CEO of UPG plc comments “We are really happy to have completed the acquisition of Axiar and will see great benefit from the transaction. Axiar has a great reputation as a Tier 1 provider of payments and we see a really good fit within our stable of brands. We are proud of our service and have seen strong growth through the subsidiary brands and the movement of 2 existing PSP’s to the platform this year will make for a great year in 2010.” The sentiment was echoed by Jonathan Clark, MD of Axiar, “Like a number of PSP’s we have been using UPG as our route to the banks and found the service and systems to be excellent. The significant investment going into the UPG platform and the already rich feature set, made it the obvious choice for our clients; we are very pleased with the transaction and know our business is in safe hands”

UPG have been going through an expansion process and have added two new data centres to the pool in 2009 & 2010 with one additional data centre going live in November 2010. The business has invested heavily in IBM blade processing technology and Cisco networking systems and by Christmas 2010, over 100 new IBM servers and NetApps devices will have been deployed as part of the tech refresh; this investment in hardware and networking has made it possible to safely absorb the acquisitions into the gateway infrastructure.

UPG continues to enjoy double digit growth and has not ruled out further acquisitions during 2010.

Whilst exact numbers have not been released, it was confirmed that the deal was entirely funded from UPG’s cash reserves.

Simplifying Choices

Our work for Kiki James demonstrates this pretty clearly. We targeted this work to the two most popular areas of the site. Previously, viewing a given page within these areas didn’t fully demonstrate the range of products available. Much of this information was hidden within a dense hierarchy of product types, colours and sizes. By including the filter on the category page customers should get a much clearer idea of the choices available. It also makes exploring the products a much simpler affair.

There were a number of interesting challenges – most notably making sense of the data on the site, in order to be able to sort in a way that would be accessible, particularly to new users, who make up the majority of Kiki’s customer base.

Creating the options

A good example would be the colour selector. To date, there are something like 77 different swatches available on the site overall. We chose to simplify the selection; a smaller series of generic colours were chosen, and all the swatches in the category were organised under those, giving us 10 colours to choose from. We followed a similar process with the shape and size selectors, organising the data into a smaller set of user-friendly choices.

What was most interesting is that once the data was shown in a more open fashion by the filter page, it made it much clearer to our client that they needed to change some of the existing product titles, as well as add some extra information to make the data work with the filter.

Quick launch

We focused on getting this released as quickly as possible; we were confident that this would be a real improvement over the existing site. But also, by releasing early over a limited part of the site, we have a chance see how our current implementation works, and tweak it before we roll it out further.

You can see the filtering in action on the Leather Photo Albums and Leather Journals pages.

Firstly, we have Mockflow, an online wireframe tool. Includes versioning, collaboration etc.

So, if you’re wondering what this application’s like, how do we find out? They have a pretty good video on the homepage, that’s nice enough. And if you take the tour, you can see some screen shots that outline some of the functions of the site. Very nice.

But if I want to try it out, what do I get?

Hooray, another sign up form. Those never get dull.

Contrast this with Dabbleboard, another online collaborative working tool. Here’s the homepage:

But how do you find out what it’s really like to use? Well, all you have to do is go to http://www.dabbleboard.com/draw, and you can start right away.

Simple, and in terms of engaging your visitors, it’s much more better than asking for an email and a password. Of course, you do need to sign up to dabble board if you want to save your work; but by that point users will be much more committed to the application than someone who has read a landing page and watched a video.

• Sam – Denormalizing Your Rails Application
• Ed, Rob and Jon – Rocket Fuelled Cucumbers
• Damien and Ian – The Joy of Painting with Ruby

Other highlights included Getting the most out of ActiveRecord 3 with Arel, Breaking things with Ruby and Distributed Architectures with Rack, and, for Rob, listening to me snore. Poor chap.

Thanks to the organisers:

• Graeme – http://bit.ly/agAsR
• Paul – http://bit.ly/cqub9u
• Alan – http://bit.ly/bUOWbH

… and see you next year!

Firstly, setup a test email account on gmail. This works fine for normal or apps gmail accounts. Then you need to add these lines to wherever you do your basic actionmailer config. In our case, we added this to our development.rb as we’re just using this to test email output for the time being.

config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = {
:enable_starttls_auto => true,
:address => "smtp.gmail.com",
:port => "587",
:domain => "domain.com",
:authentication => :plain,
:user_name => "test_emails@domain.com",
:password => "your_password_here"
}

Voila, our emails are sent fine, which makes testing the output a great deal easier, especially if you have to produce html emails.

What we’re doing here is bascially just using standard gmail setup for configuing a mail client. Obviously you could just replace these options for another smtp server if you’d like.

Its popularity is due to many things, but chief amongst them is the speed at which you can put together a site in Rails, as well as the intelligent and vibrant community that are involved in it.

Whilst there are some well known success stories using Ruby on Rails out there, the sheer number and diversity of Rails apps is astounding. In celebration of that, and partly to satisfy our own curiosity, we thought offer our round up of some of the best rails sites out there.

1. Basecamp

http://basecamphq.com/

An extremely popular, browser-based project collaboration tool.

2. Twitter

http://twitter.com/

The ubiquitous social networking site.

3. Scribd

http://www.scribd.com/

The world’s largest social publishing company.

4. Fanpop

http://www.fanpop.com/

A huge network of music, TV and movie fan clubs.

5. Geni

http://www.geni.com/

A great family tree building tool.

6. Penny Arcade

http://www.penny-arcade.com/

A webcomic, largely focused on video gaming.

7. Pitchfork

http://pitchfork.com/

An online indie music mag.

8. Crazy Egg

http://crazyegg.com/

A heatmap tool that lets you visualize how users interact with your website.

9. Shopify

http://www.shopify.com/

A popular e-commerce platform.

10. Github

http://github.com/

A code hosting app with a strong social networking element.

11. Hulu

http://www.hulu.com/

A TV channel streaming shows and movies from NBC, Fox, ABC and more.

12. Backpack

http://backpackit.com/

From the makers of Basecamp, Backpack is an intranet for your business that lets you share anything and everything with your team.

13. Assembla

http://www.assembla.com/

A collaboration tool ideal for small teams.

14. Lighthouse

http://lighthouseapp.com/

A superb project management app.

15. Wayfaring

http://www.wayfaring.com/

A tool for creating and sharing maps.

16. CommunityWalk

http://www.communitywalk.com/

Another map creating tool, which lets users incorporate photos and comments into maps they create.

17. Insiderpages

http://www.insiderpages.com/

A place to find reviews of local businesses, from dentists to restaurants

18. Rentometer

http://www.rentometer.com/

Enter your address into this site to compare your rent with other local properties.

19. Menuism

http://www.menuism.com/

A place to rate restaurants and read food reviews.

20. Campfire

http://campfirenow.com/

An instant messaging tool designed for project specific groups.

22. Podomatic

http://www.podomatic.com/featured

A place to access a wealth of podcasts as well as event listings for many cities worldwide.

22. 43 Things

http://www.43things.com/

A straightforward site for setting personal goals and viewing the goals of others.

23. Big Cartel

http://bigcartel.com/

A simple, but trendy e-commerce platform.

24. DoodleKit

http://doodlekit.com/home

An uncomplicated and accessible website builder.

25. feed.informer

http://feed.informer.com/

An app for adding news and feed content to your website.

26. Inkling Markets

http://home.inklingmarkets.com/

A highly original site with a unique take on question asking and answering.

27. Swivel

http://www.swivel.com/

A site for sharing data in charts, graphs and tables.

28. Highrise

http://highrisehq.com/

High-tech customer relationship management software.

29. Mypunchbowl

http://www.mypunchbowl.com/

A suite of party planning tools for creating invites, buying supplies and much more.

30. oh, don’t forget…

http://ohdontforget.com/

A great way to send bulk and scheduled SMS messages.

31. Spiceworks

http://www.spiceworks.com/

A free, but professional quality solution for all things IT, from network management to software reporting.

32. Urban Dictionary

http://www.urbandictionary.com/

An online dictionary for pretty much every slang term used in the English-speaking world.

33. White Pages

http://www.whitepages.com/

An online directory for business and personal contact details.

34. XING

http://www.xing.com/

A place to network and make business contacts.

35. Justin.TV

http://www.justin.tv/#r=ytWUZNE

A site where users can produce and share videos through their own “channels”.

36. Slideshare

http://www.slideshare.net/

A place to share PowerPoint presentations, Word documents and Adobe PDF portfolios.

37. Jango

http://www.jango.com/

A free internet radio station.

38. AboutUs

http://www.aboutus.org/

A comprehensive wiki for the world’s best websites.

39. Luminosity

http://www.lumosity.com/

A suite of online games for brain development.

40. Guitar Hero

http://hub.guitarhero.com/

Website of the hugely successful computer game.

41. Chow

http://www.chow.com/

A recipe repository complete with restaurant listings and videos.

42. Bleacher Report

http://bleacherreport.com/

A magazine covering all aspects of American sport.

43. Sortfolio

http://sortfolio.com/

A place to find the perfect web designer for your needs.

44. More

http://www.more.com/

A style magazine for women, with fashion and make-up tips.

45. Howcast

http://www.howcast.com/

A place to find instructional, how-to videos.

46. Miley World

http://www.mileyworld.com/community/home

The home of Miley Cyrus’s official fan club.

47. iLike

http://www.ilike.com/

A site that provides concert alerts, recommendations and playlists, based on your favorite music.

48. Yardbarker

http://www.yardbarker.com/

One of the best places to find sports news, rumors and videos.

49. Viewpoints

http://www.viewpoints.com/

Find reviews on absolutely everything.

50. Tupalo

http://tupalo.com/

A place to find contact details and reviews of local restaurants, cafes, salons and shops.

And that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. With the latest version(Rails 3) imminent it’s clear that it shows now sign of slowing down just yet; no doubt we can expect to see even more exciting and sophisticated websites and applications added to this list in the future.

Photo by @gablaxian

Speak the Web came to a close last night in Manchester’s NoHo bar, with a five strong band of the Setfire crew there to take part. The event were definitely a refreshing change to some of the bigger, more expensive events that Speak the Web is partly a reaction to. Four speakers covered an impressively broad range of stuff – mobile, seo, html5 apis and Css3. The informal nature of the event lent itself to questions from the crowd and a definite lack of the them and us factor sometimes present at conferences. Oh and did I mention it was in a bar?

My favourite quote of the night was probably Andy Clarke’s gentle ribbing of the Brighton and London focus of many web dev conferences, with him pointing out they are not “the center of the f**king universe”. Hopefully with the success of Speak the Web and other events like Barcamp, we might be getting somewhere to shifting that focus.

I was a bit gutted to have to leave right after the event, being a bit over tired and generally a bit of a wuss these days. Nevertheless it was great to be there and I’m pretty sure that this isn’t the last we’ve seen of Speak the Web.