Archive for the ‘Ramblings’ Category

5 Google Analytics Custom Dashboards & Segments

Monday, June 18th, 2012

Posted in Ramblings | No Comments »

Top New Zealand Facebook Pages

Saturday, October 30th, 2010

Hi all,

Just looking to build a list of the top New Zealand facebook pages by fan count. It’s somewhat of a manual task, so feel free to leave a comment with ones you think should be on the list.

I’ll start with these ones:

These fan number are as at 30/10/2010.

Do you know of any others with decent fan numbers?

Posted in Ramblings | 8 Comments »

Is Webuy.co.nz Dead?

Monday, February 8th, 2010

Today I recieved this in my inbox:

SITE PROBLEMS:

Our site has been incurring ongoing unexplained problems. We are at this time, unable to stop this continued onslaught. We do not have the expertise to counter what has been happening.

Over the past week the site has been down several times. Bugs have been appeared to stop functions.

Saturday night they attacked admin to stop anyone logging in. It would take our passwords and allow admin to appear but once clicked on a function took us out to re login.

Our members could login but could not enter mywebuy to relist or execute any of their functions. If they clicked mywebuy a 2nd time they are taken back to login.

Then to top this off the site was out for the third time in 3 weeks. We were down for 18 hours.

SOLUTION:

We are working on the problems and seem to have things under control, and sincerely hope to overcome next lot as they appear. However our funder has put us on notice that “enough is enough”. He has given Kiwis a previously unheard of and generous opportunity “a chance to own something worthwhile and to create wealth with no outlay”. The results have been disappointing for three and a half years. The funder when setting the site up for members to own said 2 years was the limit “use it or lose it”. He funded for a considerably longer period.

Hopefully we will get on top of things but if we don’t do so in the next few days it will be goodbye from the Webuy team.

Wish us well as you own the site and if any site deserves support it really is Webuy.

All that this says to me is that the site is down and out. They don’t have what it takes to fix the issues and this email shows that there’s little chance that these issues will be fixed. If anyone trusted Webuy.co.nz I would seriously think again. Whats your thoughts?

Posted in Ramblings | 39 Comments »

Google NZ Adds Movie Session Times

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

Recently Google has made a change that allows you to see movie session times within Google. Just search for the movie name plus your town/city.

google-movie-times

The information on Google is very basic, there’s no movie description, trailers or reviews.  I’ll be sticking with Flicks for now. Check out their movie trailers, movie reviews and competitions.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Ramblings | 1 Comment »

Trademe Epic Outage

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

Tonight the unthinkable for a lot of online New Zealanders happened. Trademe went down

trademe outage

In reply to this, twitter kicked into life:

trademe twitter

Will this rock the reliance on such a giant?
Somehow I don’t think so. Picture if Google had an outage for a few hours. Would people stop using it? Probably not.

However in recent weeks sella.co.nz has increased their presence by partnering up as an online auction component for the Big Night In telethon. What’s the chances of sella picking up some of these disgruntled trademe users?

What’s your thoughts?

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Ramblings | No Comments »

3deals.co.nz – How not to launch your site

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

A little while ago I signed up to recieve emails from 3deals.co.nz  - a 1-day.co.nz competitor. 

Anyway like the early days of 1-day, 3deals has fallen short. Either the servers not responding and dishing up a 404 error page or the page is not there so returning a 404. 

3deals.co.nz

 

Things you should do:

 

  1. Make sure you can handle the influx of traffic. Majority of it is going to hit straight away
  2. Make sure your site works!

BTW: Awesome thanks, now that the site loaded, i’ve missed out on getting an iPod for $1. Hopefully the site holds up better tomorrow.


Posted in Ramblings | 4 Comments »

NZ SEO – The Good

Thursday, September 18th, 2008

Following my previous post about my plan for NZ SEO – The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

This post has been the most difficult for me. Having to start over and over again, which is one of the reasons why this has taken so long to do.

“Good SEO” is up for interpretation. Over the last few years content management systems have become more search engine friendly and means it’s possible to have a well “on page” optimised site quickly and easily. What we usually see is a select handful of sites in their own niche dominate groups of searches for their niche.

On top of all that I consider results/performance as being a major factor in determining the success of a sites SEO. From a percentage of sales referred from organic search engine traffic, or the number of visitors received from organic search results.

Anyway as Google places more emphasis on local websites when searching in NZ, here’s something that’s of interest:

Trademe

As NZ’s most popular site it was hard to overlook Trademe.  Now I am not using trademe as the perfect example, because to be honest like most sites theres room for improvement. But one thing you come to notice about trademe is the reach that it has in search engines. Performing many searches in Google can bring trademe up in the serps. From a user point of view, trademe is used to buy new and used goods easily via an auction process. Many of the serp listings are for products that have been put up for auction, a big problem as most of these product results are expired/dated listings.

In the upcoming bad and ugly posts, it’s hopefully going to be a bit easier to nail out.

Feel free to spin your view on any Good examples of SEO in New Zealand.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Ramblings, seo | No Comments »

NZ SEO – The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

Following the comments from my post yesterday. I have been thinking about how to structure my shakeup of SEO in New Zealand. I want to be sure I don’t step on anyones toes, nor do I want to post some basic boring post that I wouldn’t want to read myself.

Here’s the plan.

Over the next few days i’m going to do an individual post for Good SEO, Bad SEO and Ugly SEO in NZ.

  • Good SEO
    Examples of plain run of the mill whitehat SEO that gets good results and respect from search engines.
  • Bad SEO
    Examples of sites with no thought about SEO whatsoever.
  • Ugly SEO
    Examples of implementation of spammy blackhat optimisation.

The purpose of these posts will be to enlighten readers of the state of SEO in New Zealand. I hope that no one takes offense.

I look forward to reading the comments.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Ramblings, seo | 6 Comments »

Google Chat Now On My Blog

Wednesday, February 27th, 2008

With the new development for google talk you can now chat to me online. Just click my little speach bubble to the right ->

Be interesting to see how long it stays on the site

Edit: Removed as it wasn’t working well

Tags: , ,
Posted in Ramblings | No Comments »