by tyler on 11/22/2011
It was recently brought to my attention that if you visit the Merrill Lynch corporate site using the Google Chrome browser, you would get a “Incompatible Browser Detected” error. That can’t be right. One of the biggest financial companies in the world probably gets hundreds of thousands of pageviews from the Chrome browser every month. Here is a screen shot of the error.
Notice the browser versions they do support; IE 5, Netscape (what is that?), and Firefox 0.8. Talk about being out of touch with current web trends. Netscape doesn’t even register on browser market share reports anymore and Chrome is closing in on FireFox as the second most used browser behind the free falling Internet Explorer.
The only question that comes to mind after experiencing this would be, is this a corporate policy that the internal tech team is fighting? Or is this choice coming from the internal tech team because they are too lazy to get the site to work with modern browsers? Either way, this is lame.
by tyler on 11/18/2011
Local designer and close friend Gabe Shultz won the Best Identity at the CSCA’s Creative Best awards show for rebranding the United States Virgin Islands (USVI) soccer team. The rebranding was a side project that Gabe did for fun.
A recent conversation with Gabe was around the strength of the NY Cosmos soccer brand. A team that had a ton of success in the NASL in the 70′s. The team has been relaunched with the backing of Umbro and is selling a ton of merchandise, but is not part of a professional soccer league (rumors that they are trying to join the MLS are on and off). The brands success is based on the individuals involved (Pele, Eric Cantona, and Cobi Jones) and its heritage.
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by tyler on 11/9/2011
I don’t know how I first came across Lot18, a startup that provides daily deals on wines. I assume it was an article in techcrunch or another blog. The first thing that caught my eye would have been the mention of a new wine site that offers exclusive access to fermented grapes. When I discovered the site was invite only I was a bit aggravated, but Lot18 allows you to sign up and be invited in the future. I got the invite 10 minutes later.
When I first joined, the site focused strictly on wines with the occasional wine glass set for sale and had 2 tabs, “Featured” and “Select”. I still don’t completely understand the difference, but haven’t really tried either. I just know that the “select” wines often seem more expensive than the “featured” wines. The site now offers high quality foods (coffees, meats, desserts) and wine excursions. Thus the addition of the “Gourmet” and “Experiences” tabs.
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by tyler on 07/21/2011
The comparison is theirs, not mine. Plum is a site that allows you to rent(?) boutique baby clothes and return them as your infant growths to the next size for bigger wears. I came across Plum a week ago and instantly found it interesting because I have a 2 year old and one on the way. The rate that kids grow out of clothes is astonishing. Plum has quickly grown faster than anticipated as they have now started a waiting list for new members.
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by tyler on 05/17/2011
I was recently working on a site that needed to redirect 4907369 domains to one new site. We had to figure out an easy way to track all of the 301 redirects in Google Analytics.
After researching the subject and having issues finding solid answers, I decided to post a solution with 2 options on how to create a simple tracking referral system in analytics.
The first option, also known as the “formal” option, is to tag the redirect with an abundant amount of referring data, “?utm_medium=link&utm_source=redirect&utm_campaign=oldsite.com”. An example redirect domain link would be, http://www.newsite.com/?utm_source=redirect&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=oldsite.com.
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by tyler on 03/27/2011
Which country do you think Mac OS X has the largest market share? My first guess would have been the United States with Canada second. I was wrong on both accounts as the US is ranked third and Canada fifth. Pingdom.com created a few graphs based on StatCounter data.
Switzerland has the highest Mac OS X market share with 17.61% followed by Luxembourg with 15.79% and then the United States with 15.36%. Europe actually has 5 of the top 10 spots for OS X market share. Which shouldn’t be a huge surprise as Europeans are not big Microsoft fans as is shown with the Firefox market share numbers on the old continent.
When OS X market share is broken down by continent you see a different story.
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by tyler on 03/20/2011
GSW sent 17 strategist, designers, developers and project managers to South by Southwest (SxSW) 2011. For many of use it was our first time at SxSW, (including mine) and we had a blast. The trip was inspirational to be completely honest as we worked out ways to bring the newest technologies to our healthcare clients. We documented our trip on WhatsYourDigitalIQ.com, GSW’s innovation lab site.
Here is a list of the blogs that were published during our trip:
by tyler on 03/7/2011
The JCPenny link scheme / black hat / blame the seo firm / manual Google slap has been covered to death (and in case you missed it, here is the original NYT article and Search Engine Lands excellent recap).
A quick recap if you don’t want to read the Gone with the Wind versions. JCPenny was ranking first for every product they sell (kidding, but way too many). They were ranking 1st for generic terms like “area rugs,” “table cloths,” “furniture,” “home decor,” and the best one, “Samsonite carry on luggage” ahead of Samsonite. The NYT asked a search expert to look into it. Ultimate conclusion was there were hundreds of paid links on spam sites with great anchor text pointing to the corresponding pages on JCP.com. NYT reports findings to Google. Google back hands JCP. JCP blames their SEO firm and says they have no knowledge of such activities.
The first thing I thought when I read the article is how links, even those on spam sites that should hold little to no value, still have a tremendous amount of sway in the rankings even though Google is suppose to curb the strength based on quality of the site. Then, I assumed that JCP is a big sites with many natural links and is in good standing with Google so those spam links may not stand out in their overall link graph.
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by tyler on 07/31/2008
In my never-ending quest for more web data, I have added Quantcast to my arsenal. Quantcast is a mix of traffic rankings and analytics that gives you an additional data point when researching competitor movements and shifts in traffic segments.
I prefer to use multiple data points when calculating both traffic for my sites and competitor sites. There are not many options that provide realistic data when comparing site traffic. Alexa.com and Compete.com are the two “best” options for traffic rankings currently. Compete also gives you an estimated number of visitors, as does Quantcast. You will notice large deviations in the data for some sites, but that is expected as traffic estimation is difficult.
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