At the time they were the only company in Cape Town selling PVC Double Glazed windows. The website was a marketing tool for them, so the site was coded in xhtml/css and had plenty of keywords for Double Glazing. After a month of being online the site was the top result in Google South Africa for Double Glazing.

A few years later I asked the client how the website was doing at getting them new business and they told me the website was how they were getting most of their business.

Below are some screenshots of the project.

This is the origional homepage from 2007

This is an updated homepage

This is the products page

Here are some of the mockups.

The Homepage

The Contact Page

Apurimac Media - Partners Page

The first was the website was hosted internally on a 128kbit Diginet line that was shared by the support office. This resulted in very poor connectivity to the outside world, with multiple timed out and unsuccessful connections.

The other was SEO, as the old version of the site had several coding issues. So the new site was a fairly large xhtml/css project (60+ pages) that resulted in a good long term client and traffic growth. The site had ±200 visits per month which organically grew to over 6000 visits per month by 2010.

Below are screenshots of the design.

Pennypinchers Homepage

Pennypinchers Products Page

Pennypinchers Find a Store Page

Pennypinchers Province Page

Pennypinchers Store Page

Camry Owners across the US were asked to share their stories, their experiences and their special moments which happened behind the wheel of their Camry’s. These collective moments created a greater whole they call the ‘Camry Effect‘.

The site is a collection of Camry stories connecting nearly 7 million Camry drivers and is a javascript behemoth. Screenshots below:

Camry Effect Landing Page

If you want to browse your working files in MAMP you normally open your browser and navigate to http://localhost/. This fine until you want to view the project on a different machine or a virtual machine for that matter. This trick will help

Open up MAMP, go to preferences, click on PORTS, and change your APACHE port to 80.

You will need to input your system administrators password to get this to work, but now everyone on your local network (eg. Connect to the same wifi network) can access your dev environment by putting the IP address of the dev machine (the one with MAMP running) in their browser.

 You can get your IP address from System Preferences -> Network (it normally looks like 196.xxx.xxx.xxx)

This is a good trick in itself, but there are several problems with using an IP address when doing local network development with MAMP.

• IP address’s are hard to remember and easy to get wrong.
• IP address’s tend to change unless you set them manually.
• Even if you set your IP address manually, moving to a different network could cause problems.
• Also each time you change your development URL you will need to update any databases with the new URL which is a pain.
• In some instances browsing to your own IP address doesn’t work and most work around would result in a new IP address (time to update your database again).

But there is a neat fix for this problem that you can do on your Mac. If you go to System Preferences, click on Sharing, then just under and next to your computer name there is an Edit Button.

Click that and you can change the local access name of your mac. 

Change this to whatever you like, eg “nick” and anyone on your local network can then access your dev environment (eg your local wordpress site) through a much friendlier URL like http://nick.local/

The main advantages being that you do not need to update databases with new URLs, it’s easy to browse to a dev environment and your computer is named properly on the network.

But this trick brings with it it’s own (be it small) security risks, and you will need to input your administrators password each time you open and close MAMP. But there is another neat trick to get around that too.

Damian Gaweda wrote a post about running MAMP on port 80 the easy way and provided a very simple solution.

1. Open the Keychain Access app and click ‘+’ to add a new item. Call the item ‘MAMP’ and enter the account name and password that you use to log in to your Mac.
2. Download and launch the Apache & MySQL – No Password app

It’s nothing new that clever SEO experts create content and pages that is only for search engines, in an attempt to try to manipulate where they show up in the search results. These pages don’t tend to have great keyword densities, but aren’t very useful to humans. You should see where I am going with this. How can a machine know when a page isn’t that useful to a human if a human is trying really hard to trick a machine into thinking that page is for a human? How do we help out the bloating web?

This is a message I wrote to Google today. I wouldn’t say it’s a great idea, but I felt it was worth sharing…

If Google Search’s aim is to provide a user with the most relevant search results for a given search term, which I believe it is, then it would be nice for logged in users to be able to mark Google search results that are irrelevant.

For example. If you go to www.google.co.za, and search for “organic whey protein” then choose results from South Africa, Google’s returns some decent pages. However one article by “thatman.co.za” is an article made up of non-human readable english. I am sure it’s got a great keyword density, but it is not a relevant page for me and my search term because (I’m assuming) it’s designed for search engines, not a human.

If I, being human, could tell the search engine when a page was irrelevant, that information could be used to make search results more relevant to humans next time. Then if a search engine like Google cross referenced which users marked the same articles, you could give their feedback a greater relative weighting, as those users would more likely be providing accurate information, and less likely to be people trying to remove their competitors from search results.

I feel like it could work like Facebooks feedback on wall posts does, with a little tool that appears when you roll over a post, which has the tools to remove from stream or mark as spam or inappropriate.

I think that kind of thing would help.

It’s a hilarious take on viral video marketing.

What I found pretty interesting was that out of the 1,009,699,000 visitors in May 2011, 13.5 percent of the visitors were made up by South African users. That’s roughly 13.6 Million visitors from South Africa.

What’s interesting is that the population of South Africa is roughly 50 Million, and there are roughly 20 million people with access to mobile web. If the numbers are accurate, it means more than a quarter of the population in South Africa are already using google.

Good stuff!

It ties together stuff doing the domino thing, and cute (but really smart) animals doing cute and clever stuff, to eventually parallel park a car. So easy

So when a client referred to an article on Mobile advertising doubling by 2012, specifically about the negative sentiment of the commenters, it highlighted a much bigger problem. Mobile marketing is in danger of not being properly utilized because of irresponsible email and sms campaigns that on the whole are regarded as spam.

3 out of 4 comments about mobile advertising were negative - people truly believe more mobile advertising means more spam on their phones AND NOT more engagement and more utility

I believe the comments on this article highlight consumer sentiment of how personal a mobile device is to someone. Unfortunately we are all bombarded by SPAM so much on our email accounts that people tend to respond very negatively to the idea of the same thing happening on their mobile phones.

However I believe the negative commenter’s on this blog post didn’t really get the post, thinking they are simply going to get twice as many spam SMS’s in 2012.

The article is less about SMS campaigns and more about including display ads in mobile content. If the user is browsing a mobi site, or using an app on the phone, unobtrusive and relevant ads are displayed. It’s a different ball game to SMS campaigns.

Shazam for iPhone displaying inline mobile ads

The screenshot above shows an inline advert in the free Shazam app for iPhone. The relevance here is intention and engagement. If I am using the Shazam app, it is safe to say I am trying to find the name of a song (I am looking for new music) and generally in a musical mood. So in this instance of a Shazam search, the ad displayed is relevant to me – the ad displayed was for music. Hell, in this case the ad served is even for a local artist. It would be a huge stretch to classify this kind of mobile advertising as spam.

Mobile ads are also pretty darn smart too. The more we know about the person seeing the ad, the more relevant and engaging the ad can be. Mobile ads can target location, relevant content the user is searching for or looking at and can use the accelerometer (if the mobile device has one). By using all the information available at the time the ad is being served and displaying the ads unobtrusively, we enter a world where ads are not pissing anyone off AND awareness is brought to people that might find the content of the advert useful. When this happens you end up with people seeing the ad who has a high intention and have a much higher chance of actually wanting to engage with the content of the ad. Much like Google Ads when you do a Google search.

I believe (strongly) strategy is definitely not about spray and pray SMS campaigns that get sent to 1 000 000 people and pissing off 999 000 of them (possibly more), and only being relevant to a small percentage damaging your brand to the rest.

Strategy IS about the ‘idea’ along with engaging content that is emotional/authentic/humorous, that is presented to people at a time when they want to engage. If you can tick all those boxes, people will want to engage with your ad, and they will do so on their terms and both brand and consumer have a rich reciprocal conversation.

There are a lot of exciting times ahead in the mobile space. If anything we should be seeing less SMS spam (if only because of the CPA coming into effect) and more engaging content that is adding utility for consumers.