The Stairwell

There's a lot to learn from Tim Ash about online sales conversion and effective landing pages. His latest book, Landing Page Optimization is a treasure trove of hard-learned facts about maximizing site exposure and, more importantly, maximizing conversions once someone has 'landed' on one of your site's pages. Published this year, it also goes deep into the Google AdWords account program and how small web site managers can take advantage of it without spending fortunes on key word purchases.

For our readers and clients, however, the one thing that seemed especially prescient, as everyone grows ever more nervous that they're not doing / spending enough to elevate their site the rankings, was this:

"...the main contributors to your high ranking are all off-page factors that have nothing to do with the text, design, or appearance of your page. Such off-page factors include authority of your domain name (including how long it has been active), the number and quality of inbound links to your page from other respected web sites in your industry, and the presence of keywords in your page title. If you will have properly addressed these factors, you will gotten 80-90% of the potential SEO benefit."

This might be helpful as 2009 web site marketing budgets roll around and tempers begin to flare.

One of our friends is in the news recently - Scott Hemmeter is the founder of a company called Arrowpointe Maps, www.arrowpointe.com. For the past 3 or 4 years Scott Hemmeter has been investing his company's resources into developing software that allows users to visualize Salesforce information on interactive MapQuest maps. If you are a salesforce.com user, this is a must-have. The story is here.

Scott Hemmeter is formerly of the Chicago area, and now resides in sunny California.

From our front-end web developer, Steve:

The potential power of web applications has grown a considerable amount in recent days with announcements like 280 North's Objective-J and Cappuccino javascript frameworks. Demonstrations are available at 280 Slides - a wonderful online slide presentation app. 280 Slides feels so much like a desktop app that one forgets they are on the web at all. on the web. We even started using interactions like 'command-z' for undo and all the copy, cut, and paste keyboard shortcuts without even realizing it.

Another framework that has come into the spotlight is Sproutit's Sprout Core. Its a full MVC javascript framework that was used in the recently announced Mobile Me web applications at Apple's WWDC. These apps are also being marketed as a desktop experience on the web and the video tour of the applications certainly supports that claim.

Admittedly none of these frameworks really offer anything new that hasn't been done before, they're just being packaged differently. They put the javascript at the core rather than just add some splashes of animation and functionality here and there. They also make all of the "magic" happen independently of the server. This brings an interesting twist to Safari 4's new "Save as a Web Application" feature which allows web application developers to build an app using all web technologies and run it on a Webkit framework as a desktop app. The user would not know the difference between these Webkit applications and regular desktop applications. Moreover, they would be cross platform, working on Mac as well as PC by default.

Pretty cool.

It has been some time now, but this story can finally be told.

Late at night and over the weekends, holidays and any other days, Ted and I worked on a side project that inspired us all last year. We didn't publicize our work even to our friends and clients because we didn't know how it would turn out or where it might lead.

This idea grew in many surprising and ways and soon came to take even more of our time than we anticipated. But the results was worth it. What came of our efforts with our partners, AH and DV, was he world's first on-demand, comprehensive browser and operating system exploratory testing software available by subscription. With it, a web or other applications developer could explore and record their web site's presentation and functionality in every browser and operating system known to man, with tools like side-by-side views, onion-skin comparison overlays and even sight-impaired simulator filters. One could even record a live session on a web site and save the video for documenting errors to others. What's more, this application allowed for detailed reporting of all results in a media-rich environment that could be shared with fellow testers. We loved how it helped us in our web work - it was the tool we always wanted but never had - and we were very pleased with how it turned out.

We named it meer|meer.

As a subscription-based software offering, it was so popular in its beta phase that we attracted the attention of a very large software media company based in San Francisco which, after weeks of discussions, and for an undisclosed amount, purchased the entire application. Soon we hope this versatile and fun-to-use testing tool will be an every day necessity for millions of web developers around the world, resulting in better code and design for all users across all browsers and platforms and thus, just maybe, a better internet.

We wanted to thank here all the people who helped this barn-burner become a reality - you know who you are! JH, DV, EV, PT, BA, SD, Helen, Kate, AH, RN, PS and TC. And best of luck to our friends in San Francisco as they work to take the product global.

The Google Technology page is so simple that you have to read between the lines:
http://www.google.com/technology/

Here's the original paper at Stanford (fascinating!):
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Or, you can try to figure out the algorithm and break it down:
http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html