The Fun Friday Roundup 14th May 2010

May 13, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist Leave a Comment

What we’ve done in work

  • Configured & launched a Sharepoint intranet
  • Customised a WordPress search results template
  • Built a WordPress site for a new client
  • Simon gave Chris the nickname of ‘GA Baracus’ and threatened to make a logo for it…
  • Updating around 40 live sites for clients
  • Put out 5 quotes for new website builds and redesigns
  • Started upgrading sites to Drupal 6
  • Built lots of presentations using PPT’s and audio files using SlideShare
  • Setting up a new Support Web system in Cold Fusion
  • Planning A/B website call to actions testing for a client
  • Built a TON of web banners!
  • Remote client training for CMS

Read more…

Filed Under: Blog

Go Daddy's EU Hosting is Useless for Multiple WordPress Sites

May 13, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist 6 Comments

If you’re looking for a UK or EU based solution for hosting multiple WordPress sites then save yourself a huge headache and avoid Go Daddy’s new EU hosting plan.

The 2 major problems:

  1. The multiple locations, random selection, unwanted site migration and undisclosable details of the EU Data Centres
  2. The preview DNS functionality for domains you have not transferred to them

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Filed Under: Blog

The Fun Friday Roundup 7th May 2010

May 6, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist Leave a Comment

What we’ve done in work

  • Advertising for a new HTML developer and Word Press developer
  • Lots of office hunting
  • Migrating existing Blogger blogs to www.dotnetblogengine.net due to Google switching off the Blogger FTP service.
  • Tinkering with SlideShare
  • Completing 2 large Word Press projects and starting another
  • Designing about 1 million web banners
  • Integrating a site we built with a 3rd party CRM
  • In depth SEO analysis of a site for a new client
  • Updating around 60 live sites for clients
  • Creating a daily csv export of user data for a company in Oxford

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Book Review: Crush It by Gary Vaynerchuk

May 3, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist Leave a Comment

Crush It Gary VaynerchukJust finished reading Crush It by Gary Vaynerchuk.

About the author. Gary is, self admittedly, a love or hate type of character. He’s got a big personality, he’s very blunt and extremely passionate.

This is instantly recogniseable if you watch his interviews, keynote talks and online communication channel, Wine Library TV.

I can understand why some people might find him hard to watch. He swears quite a lot, if wine tastes like vomit he says it does and I can imagine a lot of people thinking he’s over the top and arrogant.

Personally I don’t mind swearing, I’d rather he told me that wine tasted like vomit before it cost me £27 to find out for myself and I think he’s just confident and doesn’t feel the need to waste his life trying to convince people it isn’t arrogance instead of doing more of what he loves most.

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How to Track Offline Marketing Campaigns in Google Analytics

April 30, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist Leave a Comment
Check out this article if you want to know: How to Use the Google Analytics URL Builder

If you are already familiary with creating your tracking links and want to track offline marketing campaigns in Google Analytics you have 2 choices.

Given that the tracking links are long and ugly and completely unsuitable for advertising you will still create your tracking link as standard and then you can either:

  1. Use a URL shortning tool
  2. Use a nice looking url using your own domain

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How to Use the Google Analytics URL Builder

April 29, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist 1 Comment

If you already appreciate Why You Should Use the Google Analytics URL Builder then below is a short guide on how to use and some things to consider about it’s application.

If you have a look at the Google Analytics URL Builder page you’ll see it’s very simple to use.

Enter the url of your site that you will be directing people to, enter your tracking terms in the fields underneath (only 3 are required) and then click the ‘Generate URL’ button.

Now you just copy the tracking code which appears in the box underneath and use that in your marketing campaign. You don’t need to do anything in GA itself. Just start using the link. Simple!

Here are some things you might find useful for tracking marketing campaigns:

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Why You Should Use the Google Analytics URL Builder

April 29, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist Leave a Comment

In our post about the key Google Analytics essentials we mentioned tracking your traffic using the Google Analytics URL Builder (also sometimes called the Google URL Tool) being one of them.

In it’s simplest form the tool generates links that enable you to track which on and off line marketing campaigns your visitors have come from and as a consequence what they do on your site.

There are a number of reasons for tracking your visitors this way and they apply to the majority of website owners and web agencies who wish to produce value rich reports.

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5 Google Analytics Essentials

April 27, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist Leave a Comment

Lots of people are (sensibly) using Google Analytics (GA) these days.

It’s free, packed with an ever expanding incredible feature list and as easy to install on your site as could be made possible.

The problem a lot of the time is that companies know they should be collecting data but beyond that are unaware of any configuration being necessary or exactly how they will use the data they collect in the future.

Now, not knowing which data that they collect is going to be the most useful to them in the future or knowing how they and other stakeholders will want that information presented to them doesn’t matter one bit. Reports can be produced or changed retrospectively. They are purely a way of presenting the data that’s been collected in a format most useful to the recipient.

The problem arises when the data hasn’t been collected properly in the first place. Simply adding GA code to your site is not enough.

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How to Make Windows Live Mail the Ultimate Gmail IMAP Client

April 24, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist 12 Comments

Below are step by step instructions on how to setup Windows Live Mail to be the ultimate Gmail IMAP client.

There are 15 steps in total and shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes to complete.

Using these settings in Windows Live Mail (WLM) will give you an amazing IMAP configuration that’s fast, reliable and easy to use.

If you are currently unsure which client you want to use then check out this post on why Windows Live Mail (WLM) is the best IMAP client to use with Gmail.

Windows live mail is free and can be downloaded here.

Once you have installed the programme and run it for the first time work through this setup list in order:

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The Best IMAP Client for Gmail is Windows Live Mail

April 23, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist 2 Comments

We use Gmail and it’s IMAP functionality for our emails and we also recommend it to our smaller clients who don’t use or have a need for an enterprise mail solution. Why? Because Gmail rocks.

NB: If you are looking for help setting up WLM you can view step by step instructions in the How to Make Windows Live Mail the Ultimate Gmail IMAP Client post.

Along with everyone else who uses IMAP we’ve tried just about every client out there in search of the perfect solution.

It’s an extremely frustrating process to work through the forum, tutorials and discussions of those who have tried before and peice together their guides in order to avoid encountering the nuances of each client that they discovered.

Before getting to the things about WLM that we love here’s why we just can’t use Thunderbird or Outlook:

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