Archive for February, 2010

Starting a Business Blog

February 28th, 2010 by Kieran
Photo courtesy pinksherbet@flickr

There are a plethora of blogs out there to wade through on the ‘net.  What will make your blog stand out?  What are some common mistakes made in setting up a business blog?  At ShuttleBox we set up just about as many blogs for businesses as we do other non-blogging software, so we are very aware of the pros and cons of blogging, as well as the right and wrong ways of going about it.  In this article we’ll look at some of the very basics.  If you’ve been around the blog-block before, please feel free to contribute your thoughts.  If not, then this article is for you.

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How We Tripled Our Traffic

February 16th, 2010 by Kieran

After just a couple short months, I’m thrilled to say we’ve tripled the traffic to our site.  Like any other successful business, we’ve been using various methods and tools to bring in the appropriate visitors.  The data has been gathered and analyzed via Google Analytics, and I have to admit I’m a bit surprised by the results.

Are those t-shirts you bought your employees a good form of advertising?  What about business cards and e-mail signature links?  Is tweeting worth the effort?  Being a relatively new business and having only been blogging for a handful of months, I consider these results to be based on a clean slate, not biased by historical efforts or data.  Let’s take a look!

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Using WooRank to Tidy Up Your Site

February 9th, 2010 by Kristopher

There are several tools on the web to analyze your website, it’s content, ranking, keywords, visibility, etc, but WooRank bundles up all that information into one clean, easy to understand interface to give you the most information on how to improve your web site’s ranking and visibility. WooRank not only tells you what is wrong, but how to change it, why it matters and who it matters to, providing the most comprehensive information to fix your site.

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OpenAvanti: Version 1.0.3 Released

February 6th, 2010 by Kristopher

ShuttleBox is proud to announce the release of OpenAvanti 1.0.3. This new release is a maintenance and documentation release. No new functionality or process changes were introduce in this release.

OpenAvanti is an object oriented PHP5 application framework that allows for expedited development by providing a solid foundation. You can download the new release from the OpenAvanti website.

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The Power of Keywords with the Google

February 2nd, 2010 by Kristopher

Any SEO scam artist expert will tell you that keywords and their position are extremely important to your search engine rankings. We here at ShuttleBox witnessed the power of keywords this weekend as we noticed that our website ranks 10th in the Google search results when you search for “hello kitty sweat pants.” How did that happen?

I made mention of hello kitty a few times in my last blog entry as an example of an e-commerce product, which catapulted us in the search rankings. Accidentally, of course. Maybe if we’re lucky, one of those teenage girls or mothers of teenage girls searching for hello kitty sweat pants might need some web development done as well.

We’re not holding our breaths.

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Google Drops Support for Old Browsers

February 2nd, 2010 by Kieran
Photo courtesy jkohen@flickr

Congratulations to Google for deciding to drop support for old browsers.  The web cannot bloom without some pruning of dead wood every now and then.  In a recent e-mail to Google App admins, Google announced they are withdrawing support for browsers prior to Internet Explorer 7.0, Firefox 3.0, Chrome 4.0, and Safari 3.0.

IE 6 was released nearly nine years ago in August of 2001.  With how dramatically things have changed on the web in the past nine years, it is hard to believe there are still folks who do still support it.  How long after a new product is released should an old product be maintained by the creators and supported by third-parties?  An equally important question, in my opinion, is how long should software dependent on old technologies be maintained before getting an overhaul.  Technical debt grows exponentially as the years go on, and it quickly becomes harder and less cost-effective to maintain old software than it would be to start over and do things the right way based on current standards and practices.  Read on to view the e-mail from Google.

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