Delicious Designs & Intriguing Interfaces

Symbols of Success: Yen, Euros, and the Pound

2009-09-22T11:11:00.000-07:00

Does this sound familiar? You stare at your keyboard, searching vainly for the symbol you need to display an amount in Yen, British Sterling, or Euros. Frustrated, you decide it’s just easier to spell it out. Or, perhaps you open up your web browser, Google for some currency converter website, cut and paste the appropriate character into your document and then to reformat it to match the typeface

Understanding Search Engine Optimization

2009-08-17T15:06:00.000-07:00

It’s estimated there are now more than 70 million websites and over 19 billion web pages on the Internet. For web surfers, finding the information they seek in this vast universe of data demands the use of search engines such as Google or Yahoo. It’s a credit to the programmers who code these search engines that most of the time, when you perform a web search, the key words you choose will

Time To Reconsider The Walking Fingers?

2009-07-12T10:34:00.000-07:00

A Yellow Pages ad has been a pre-ordained part of most companies’ advertising budgets for decades. But with local search capabilities becoming more refined every day, it’s a good time to re-assess your need to be locked into a print ad in a book that’s declining in use. The big search engine companies have recognized local search as the final frontier for contextual advertising. For purely

New Search Engines Make Their Debut

2009-06-03T22:35:00.000-07:00

A couple of new search engines made a brief appearance in the media spotlight before everyone went back to Googling for their answers. Here’s what they hope to achieve and why Google remains the one to beat. Bing – Microsoft’s Bright Idea Hoping to be a big part of the burgeoning local search market, Microsoft’s new search engine is called ‘Bing’ (supposedly the sound of the ‘eureka’ light-bulb

Marketing In A Troubled Economy

2009-05-22T10:43:00.000-07:00

2008 was a year characterized by change. It seems the roller-coaster ride will only continue in 2009. Our uncertain future has everyone seeking stability, trust, and value in business dealings more than ever. You can respond positively to this economic and market turmoil by highlighting the ways your company embodies those characteristics. It takes courage to maintain, or even increase, your

Three Internet Spelling Questions Answered

2009-04-11T16:12:00.000-07:00

Use these guidelines to keep your spelling consistent with common practice. Website or web site? The single word form (website) is now the standard, accepted spelling, per the 11th revision of the Concise Oxford Dictionary (July 2004). PDF or pdf? Use lower case .pdf when the extension is attached to a file name, but PDF (all caps) when generically describing a file in Portable Document Format.

Make A Case (Study) for Your Company

2009-03-18T09:58:00.000-07:00

Have we made a difference in your business? If so, we’d love to toot our own horn… by promoting you. We are always looking for new content to add to the case studies section of the Mastermynde website. Concrete examples of previous projects are an effective way to educate prospective customers about the methods we use and reasons we are successful. It’s also a great way to profile our clients and

The Function Behind Forms

2009-02-16T09:54:00.000-08:00

Letting your customers help you by doing a little data entry for you is a good strategy. A good place to start is with a contact form on your website. It’s simple, low-cost, and easy to add to any website. It lets your customers enter their own data into your system, making it easier to transfer those leads through to your contact management system, as they move from enquiry to prospect to

Business The Friendly Way

2009-01-08T22:44:00.000-08:00

The rise of online social networks has turbo-charged the benefits of doing business with people you know. It’s easier than ever to connect with like-minded individuals through common interests… and then progress to a business relationship outside of the interest group. Your social circle can also become willing partners in your marketing efforts, provided you understand how to make social

LinkedIn – The Contact Connection

2008-12-03T22:32:00.000-08:00

In a previous post we recommended LinkedIn as a valuable tool for anyone who can benefit from a network of quality contacts. If you haven’t yet created a LinkedIn profile, you may be missing out on lucrative opportunities. If you’ve taken the first step and created a profile, here are a couple of fast, easy things you can do to maximize the benefits LinkedIn offers. 1) Import your contacts from

Building ‘Link Love’

2008-11-20T22:31:00.000-08:00

One way Google and other search engines rank search results is by counting how many links point to a particular website. The ranking system also considers the relative popularity and content of the pages linking to you. These factors help sort the results of a search, putting the most visited (and linked to) sites first. The reason for this is the logical assumption that sites with lots of ‘

Measure Your Marketing

2008-10-12T15:26:00.000-07:00

The online measurement of customer behavior is revolutionizing marketing. With the right tools you can gain valuable insights about your customers and create effective, measurable strategies to increase profit. One of the most important metrics is your website’s ‘conversion’ rate. When we talk about conversion rates, we are referring to how many visitors to your website take a specific action.

Make the Most of Your Professional Network

2008-09-10T09:05:00.000-07:00

An effective means of marketing is through online networking. Among the most popular ways to do this is the website Linkedin. This service is essentially a Facebook for businesses. Professionals and companies create online profiles and members then use their network of associates, clients, and suppliers, to ‘link’ to a network of trusted contacts. With over 34 million members already and a new

Turning Existing Clients Into New Business

2008-08-15T22:20:00.000-07:00

Getting new clients is great. Getting existing clients to buy additional goods or services is even better! Selling to an existing customer can be up to twelve times less expensive than getting a new account. With new prospects, you have to stand out enough to pique their interest. You have to make your case and establish a relationship of trust with them. Finally, you have to set up the account

Social Surplus

2008-07-21T19:30:00.000-07:00

I just read this incredible article about social surplus and it's quite inspirational.Here's a quick excerpt:Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times

Audit Page Tracking Code

2008-07-12T23:18:00.000-07:00

This is just a quick reminder to audit your pages for tracking code from time to time. I just realized that the blog wasn't being tracked! This is not a big deal for me, however on a typical B2C website the more complete your statistics the better you can make strategic marketing decisions.

Not that it matters, but back to PR6

2008-05-01T21:13:00.000-07:00

Not that it matters, but it appears that the mastermynde.com website is back to a PageRank of 6. And oddly, many other pages that have been on the site for a long time are now unranked. This highlights that PageRank is not the only thing to concern yourself with when looking for link partners.

Osmo Wiio

2008-04-22T21:38:00.000-07:00

This article at 37signals.com very much resonates for me. It is an entertaining summary of Osmo Wiio's theories about human communication.How often have you felt that the following could apply to your communication?"If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which does the most harm."Go read the article now, it's worth it.

Clients Blogging?

2008-04-20T15:24:00.000-07:00

My friend and client Alex Curylo makes an interesting point, which is that many many many blogs fly under the radar and have few if any cross references on the web. I'm sure this is partially due to few people understanding how to properly promote themselves, others not caring, and of course general Signal-to-noise ratios.I'm inspired to start posting again, thanks Alex!

What do I do?

2006-09-11T23:40:00.000-07:00

I look at a lot of websites.I do web marketing for my clients and I've personally done cross-linking research for dozens of clients. This is how many websites I have looked at (solely doing this work!) expressed as a math equation:(for the sake of the equation let's express dozens as 36)36 clients X (10 to 30 key phrases) X 30 top ranking sites = 10,800 to 32,400That is a lot of websites.Here is

I'm hiring in the Comox Valley

2006-09-03T23:14:00.000-07:00

I'm looking for a junior web person - if that is you or someone you know, get in touch. See the linky-link for more details.

Internet Marketing as a Business Differentiator

2006-08-30T18:50:00.000-07:00

This article is intended for the layperson.With business in general becoming more global and with the number of businesses offering any given product or service growing it is important to differentiate yourself from your competitors.You can differentiate yourself in many ways. You can offer the highest quality, the cheapest prices, the best support,... You can value ethics, shareholder profit, or

#3 for vancouver web design today...

2006-06-14T21:16:00.000-07:00

I know it's been ages since I posted last - I have no defense except for my wife's pregnancy and our move to Vancouver Island. :)I can't promise I'll be posting much in the near future, I've been told babies are time consuming - but I'll do my best.In other news, I've been listed in the top four positions for "vancouver web design" on google for some time now.

Web Marketing Software

2006-01-25T20:42:00.000-08:00

I use a variety of online tools and software to help manage the web marketing process.I begin by using Digital Point's excellent Keyword Suggestion Tool to generate a list of key phrases. I use Advanced Web Ranking to track search engine ranking positions (SERPs) and to determine linking opportunities and do competitive analysis. I'm currently investigating Link Assistant to see if it will help

Google Local Canada, open for business

2005-11-01T10:43:00.000-08:00

It looks like Google Local is now open for business in Canada. (I find the process of submitting your business a bit strange.)Step 1: search for something with a locale specific phrase (e.g. vancouver web design)Step 2: click on one of the local resultsStep 3: scroll to the bottom of the page and click on Information for Business OwnersStep 4: add your businessStep 5: wait for an envelope in the