The Google Mini Search Appliance box just arrived for the Mitsui O.S.K Lines project we’re working on with our good friends over at Longwater & Company. This is a nifty little piece of hardware and we’re very excited to work on this project. This appliance will be used to search their database of PDF’s that they send out on a daily basis to all their customers informing them of changes in tariffs, surcharges, and other advisories.
For those of you unfamiliar with the Google Mini Appliance, the solution is a self-contained server that is powered by the exact same algorithm that powers Google.com. It can search and index up 50,000 documents of your choosing, be it standard HTML pages, or 219 other different file formats. From PDF’s to Word Docs, HTML to CSV files, this can search, rank, and display them all. The real killer application for this solution is that you can apply your own custom look and feel to the system, so it can blend in seamlessly with your current site. The reason this is so important is that sadly search is usually the red headed step child of features with most content management systems on the market today. When the developers are faced with the choice between implementing exciting new features like AJAX menu drop-downs in their product, or work on something boring like improving the search results engine, they invariably choose to work on the sexy new AJAX menu drop-down feature. But, as the old saw goes, every cloud has a silver lining, and in this case, the lining is a deep shade of Google Blue. Being able to customize the interface allows you to quickly integrate it into your existing site infrastructure without having to rebuild your site from the ground up to take advantage of it.
We’re right now configuring it before we cart it over to our data center, take a look at the pictures below:
Interested in what the Google Mini Search Appliance can do you for your site and/or company? Give us a ring at 912-228-3265 and we’d be happy to answer any and all questions for you!
Today Old Savannah Tours announced that Gauge Interactive will be redesigning their current site. With a focus on ease of use, a fresh new design, and a revamped online ticket ordering system the new site will be the jumping off point for a comprehensive online marketing program. Read the rest of this entry »
Being a company which does most of its work online, a lot of our work is influenced by Google and the products and services they have to offer. We already work closely with their analytics software for tracking and monitoring out SEO on the sites we design and develop. When we heard about the new Google Mini Appliance, we were excited to see how that would fit into the products and services that we offer you the customer.
The Google Mini Appliance is a combination of hardware (a server) and software (the google algorithm that makes their searches work) all packaged into a box that you can purchase and install. Its just like buying a Dell with Windows installed on it, only this is much more powerful and much more specialized.
There are a few different ways the Google Mini can be used. For example, say you own a large law firm with hundreds of thousands of documents that you and your employees reference and research on a daily basis. We can install, setup, and program the Google Mini Appliance to search all of those documents (it can search over 200 different file formats) with the same accuracy, speed, and relevance that Google uses for its online search.
This has the potential to save you a lot of wasted time and effort constantly looking for something and not finding it. This same scenario can apply to many industries, whether your searching construction documents, case files, insurance records, patient files, or articles on a website, the Google Mini Appliance can search it all and return accurate results.
When used on a large website the Google Mini offers the flexibility of full customization. We can install, program AND customize how it looks so it fits in seamlessly with your colors, logo, layout, and branding. This gives you the power of google search under your name and reputation.
Stay tuned for more details about how we can make this a reality for your business. More details will be posted on our “Services” page within the coming weeks.
So whether using it online searching your website or on your internal office network, the Google Mini Appliance can be a powerful tool that’ll help you to save some time and cash.
Today marked the long-awaited unveiling of the new 2.0 version of the iPhone. The internet has been waiting breathlessly for the last 2 months for this day, and Steve Jobs delivered another of his seminal product unveilings (you want to learn how to present anything? Watch this guy work the crowd) and as usual, he’s out the change the world and this time I have the feeling he’s going to do even better than he did with the first iteration of the iPhone. Here’s why:
1) Mobile browsing is huge on the iPhone, 90% of all owners of the iPhone browse the web with it. Within 3 months of it’s introduction, it blew everything else out of the water in terms of market share. Now with the new version, it’s even faster with access to the 3G network. This is like surfing everywhere on WiFi which is going to make this an even more attractive platform for viewing content. Speed is king, and when you got that 1-2 minutes in the line in the grocery store waiting for the person with 60 items in the 10-item-or-less line, you want to have the speed to pull up something a) worth reading and b) quickly enough for it to be useful. Nothing sucks more than watching a progress bar crawl across a screen while web browsing. We all remember web surfing with a 28.8 Modem and nobody likes the equivalent of going back to it (Surfing over the slow, old cellular EDGE network)
2) Buying stuff through your phone. Steve has shoehorned another lovely way to separate you from your hard earned greenbacks, this time through the “App Store”. Now you’re able to buy games, applications, and more right from your phone. In that doctors waiting room for 30 minutes? Download a new game to keep yourself occupied, or download a new application to balance your checkbook while you wait. The developers who make these applications get 70% of the gross sale price, so it’s gonna be a cash cow for everyone, and a very easy way to empty your wallet. Why will it be so effective? Because every single iPhone user will have the ability to buy it, and it will be on standardized hardware so compatibility won’t be an issue, and payment is handled by Apple, they just drop the money into the developers bank account.
3) GPS in your phone. This is HUGE! Someone, somewhere, really really soon is going to build a great app that will allow you to see where you are down to 10 feet via GPS, and then display all the events that are happening around you, any merchants that have coupons/specials for what’s going on, and where your friends are. In terms of mobile advertising, this function alone is going to set off the equivalent of an atomic bomb in this fields revenue growth. The benefit for merchants and early adopters is that has very low barriers to entry for both price + ROI. The application that seems most promising right now is Loopt, a social-networking location-based system. Really cool, it will allow you to see and do pretty much everything you could ever want in terms of figuring out where your friends are. View the Keynote address and go in 27 Minutes and 30 seconds to see what it looks like and how it works. Welcome to the world of mobile advertising business owners, hop on board early and reap the benefits!
4) Its gotten cheaper. A LOT cheaper. As they say in the keynote, 56% of people wanted to buy the iPhone, but thought it was too expensive. Not anymore, the new price for the 3G iPhone is only $199. This will open up the phone to a huge number of people it wasn’t available to before, and even better, it’s now going to be available in 70 countries, so the global reach of this device is going to go up an order of magnitude, if not more. More people = more applications = more potential benefit for business owners looking to cater to that rapidly growing slice of the population.
5) Application development is easy. Companies that used to require employees to drag around enormous laptops for data entry, email, and CRM can now have a device that does all that and more in the palm of their hand. I know many hardened road warriors will be screaming at the top of their lungs to have these and drop those back breaking bricks called laptops. What’s really amazing is the trend in miniaturization recently. With a iPhone 3G and a Macbook Air, you can pretty much do anything you want to and still be carrying around less than 3.5 pounds (4.7 ounces for the iPhone, and 3.0 pounds for the Macbook Air)…viva la revolution!
All in all, an impressive day for Apple and the global community at large. Finally a device that will be equally empowering for phone owners as well as business owners, all in a hand held package that is so affordable that you can buy 3 of them with your snazzy $600 rebate. So get out there, help stimulate the economy, buy an iPhone 3G and help usher in the new era of mobile business and communications!
Everyone knows Google is and has been the internet darling of the last few years but very few people understand what it’s stratospheric rise in both the stock market and it’s dominance of online search has been powered by. Sure, it’s easy to use and by most peoples accounts (including ours) provides the best search results in a day-in-day-out basis but how is it making money?
The answer to that is in this great article by the New York Times. It breaks down the Google AdWords system and how it works. For those of you unfamiliar with it, when you do any search on Google you get a series of boxes on the right hand side of the page that are paid for by advertisers. What many people don’t know is how it works. It’s all based on a highly advanced auction system. Search keywords prices are determined purely through whatever your competitors want to pay for it. Brilliant system, and oh Lord do Google finances show it, in Fiscal 2007 Google raked in $16.5 Billion in revenues, 99% of it from those little ads on its site + its network of other sites who use its search results.
Sure, the amount of money Google is generating is interesting considering how simple its system is. What’s more interesting is how they are tracking what makes a “Good Ad” and all the factors that determine how Google places your ad, it’s not just based on how much you’re willing to pay. Here’s the meat of the article:
Traffic was growing rapidly, as was the average price that advertisers were paying for clicks. But Mr. Fox and others realized that measuring the average cost-per-click was not good enough. Users might be clicking on more high-priced ads and fewer lower-priced ads. That would cause the average cost-per-click to rise, but it would say little about the health of the overall system.
So Mr. Varian and Diane Tang, principal engineer in the ads quality group, helped devise what they call a basket of keywords. Much like the consumer price index, a basket of goods and services that economists use to track inflation, the measure is made up of a broad sample of keywords and is weighted to make it statistically accurate. This internal benchmark helps Google get a clearer picture of its performance.
As measurements improved, Mr. Fox’s team unleashed a stream of experiments meant to optimize the ad system. They evaluated changes to things like the clickable area and background color of ads, and the criteria for placing ads above search results rather than beside them.
Over time, the company also looked beyond click-through rates to rank ads. Google now takes into account the “landing page” that the ad links to, and, for example, gives low grades to pages whose sole purpose is to show more ads. Soon, the loading speed of a landing page will also be considered, Mr. Fox said.
These factors contribute to an ad’s “quality score.” The higher that score, the less the advertiser has to bid to secure top billing. For example, an advertiser who offers to pay $1 per click to attract those searching for “vacation rentals in Colorado” may receive more prominent placement than another who bids $1.50 for the same query but has a lower quality score. An advertiser with a very low quality score may have to bid so much for placement as to make it uneconomical.
Quality scores work as an incentive to advertisers to improve their ads, which benefits users and, in turn, benefits Google, Mr. Fox said.
Most interesting things are the amount of ads on the landing page being taken into consideration, and of extreme interest to us (since we started in the web hosting business) is the speed you web site loads being taken into consideration. We have been screaming from the rooftops for years that the speed + reliability of your web hosting is mission-critical to your site ranking well and, we’re sorry kids, $5 a month web hosting is not gonna cut it. That is why we spend so much money on top of the line servers, keep the server load as low as possible. We never put more than 400 customers on one machine, the industry average is 5000-10,000. Sure, it costs a lot more to do it this way, but the end result is sites up 100% of the time and load as fast as possible.
In conclusion, it’s extremely interesting to see that Google is taking the results of even paid advertisers landing pages so seriously. What does this mean to you? If your web site is chocked with ads, loads slowly/irregularly and is offline from time to time due to poor choice of hosting platform then you’re not only going to be ranking poorly on Google’s paid results and unpaid results engines, but you’ll also be losing money from potential customers. Update your pages design/hosting platform before its to late!
Most everyone has seen some pretty flashy websites in their day. They fly around the page, usually have all sorts of nifty animations when switching between pages, and generally look pretty impressive. Some of our favorites include 2Advanced and Web Agent 007. While sites like that are incredibly impressive, their main drawback (in our eyes) was that they were effectively invisible to search engines, an enormous drawback that really limited their appeal to companies who understood that while eye candy is great, the main thing that a website needs to do is rank highly.
Search Engines like Google and Yahoo are effectively blind. The only thing they can see is text like in this blog post. Now web technology has advanced to provide us a solution that has long been overdue. “Searchable” Flash Web Sites, powered by a full content management system like this blog. It’s called fCMS and really will open a new chapter in web site design. With the confluence of incredible animation and the ability to search everything in the site means that we’re going to see some pretty impressive sites in the coming years using tools such as these.
This is simply the beginning. The bright lads at Google have long known that while a lot of the information people are looking for online is text-heavy, the majority (in terms of file size) is in images, video, PDF’s, Flash, and downloadable files. Google and the other search engines are rapidly making progress in these areas. The one people are most familiar with is with PDF’s. If you do a search on Google for IRS Form 1099 the first result isn’t the proper IRS website, but the PDF form. As the years go on, we can expect more and more of the content that was previously available only by manually search on multiple sites. This will allow future websites to be increasingly content-rich and be rewarded appropriately with good rankings by Google.
The future is indeed bright for flashy, fun web sites.
Say goodbye to our old G5 and say hello to our new Mac Pro, our own 8-core tower-of-power! It’s a hard worker and has at least one good dance move…we’ll see how it works out. I am referring to our new Mac Pro! We had the need to upgrade an older mac that I have had for 4 years, and this is the one we got. They look the same, but the new computer should last us for an equal amount of time. Its got a lot more power and some really great features which will help us to work and communicate better between our offices in Savannah and Denver.
The more we work in this industry the more we realize that some very common problems are shared by a lot of companies.
A lot of people have been burned.
To quote a favorite movie “Every time you screw up, it makes us look like rockstars baby” (bad boys 2…hey I like it).
And its true…
Every bad site that gets produced makes our good sites look even better.
Some say that bad web companies hurt the industry, contributing to higher prices and lower standards. While that may be true, we look at it as job security. There are so many companies who have a website but the company, or the dude in his basement that built it for them didn’t put it together correctly at all and it isn’t making them any money.
Isn’t that what business is about? Well not entirely, but thats a good bit of it. We have expenses, you have expenses and we all need to pay them with a little leftover for some fun on the weekends. So its with regret and, paradoxically with joy, that I am writing this in the hopes that you are recovered enough from your full body web burn and are ready to fix your site.
I am here to tell you that it isn’t hard (its not easy but you get what I mean), we can most likely do it within your budget (yes you should have a budget for a website), and its not going to take 6 months. We try to have our sites done in 30 to 60 days depending on how long it takes to communicate back and forth.
So please, feel free to at least talk with us, let us know what you think! If you have been burned then tell us about it. Leave a comment below. Maybe we can help and maybe we can’t but its still worth a try. Who knows, maybe we’ll get some interesting stories out of this and we can all have a good laugh.
For now, we’ll just keep doing what we do and hopefully people will catch on to the fact that quality products are still offered in the industry of web design and development.
That’s right everyone, 3D. A company named Vivaty is working to develop an online platform for 3D content on Facebook. This could mean some cool things for the future of our online content.
If you’re like me (known to gravitate towards the x-box on weekends) then you remember when Super Mario 64 came out. If don’t remember, it was the first popular video game to use 3-D space. The Mario character could walk around and interact with the video game in full 3 dimensional space. Pretty cool. Well since then video games have made some pretty amazing strides, and so has the technology on the internet. As bandwidth increases and computers can handle larger file sizes and more media rich content, we are starting to see some pretty cool stuff happening on the frontier of the world wide web. One of those is 3D or 3 dimensional web space. Imagine looking at a website not like a piece of paper, but like you are looking into a room. Much like playing a video game, you can navigate through the site to pickup or interact with different things. Pretty cool.
For many of us, this is a really different and strange way to think about something we are so used to seeing in only one way, but humor me and lets do some brainstorming.
Imagine your website. Now imagine what it would be like to organize it much like you would an empty room. Imagine yourself as an interior designer placing items in 3 dimensional space. What does this do to the internet we are so used to? Maybe instead of a header we now have a desk. Instead of primary navigation, we now have an open space with different objects you can move to and interact with. Instead of links, we have doors or portals, “or something really cool that I don’t even know about” (old school). The possibilities are endless!!!
So chew on that this week as you go to that really crappy page that you need to see every day for work and you really hate. Sometime soon it might look like that favorite restaurant or park you visit on the weekends.
We are happy to report that we have just launched www.pciginc.com It was great to work with Rob to help him develop a new site which will work as an investment and not an expense. …read more
As web designers and developers, its our job to keep on top of new emerging technology and software which will affect and shape the internet and the way that people use it. Google, Microsoft, Dell, Hp, Intel and Philips are lobbying the FCC to allow use of unused “white space” on the television broadcasting airwaves to broadcast data content for use on mobile phones.
“White space” is the space between broadcast channels on the television airwaves. The technology utilizes these super high speed television airwaves, now vacant due to increased broadband use, to broadcast online data like movies, music, web-pages etc. With this shift in technology, new devices will be produced which will be faster and easier to use than ever before, changing the way that we interact with the mobile internet.
Google is also working on open source mobile phone software pack which they are calling “Android”. It’s software which will allow anyone to create their own mobile phone applications, meaning you could theoretically program your phone however you want. Icons, fonts, text size, etc. are all customizable. Essentially it will make programming your phone as easy as making a web-page.
White space combined with Android will bring a big change to the landscape of the internet we now use on a daily basis. It will make it more customizable, more accessible, more powerful, and more portable.
With the internet being used more and more on a mobile level, its not unreasonable to expect people to be doing things that they do on their home computers now on their mobile devices in the future. Things like shopping, reading, listening to music, blogging, and watching online T.V. shows.
This shift in technology will bring more people to your website on a smaller screen. Imagine viewing your website on a 2-3 inch screen. What will that be like? Will people be able to buy your product, subscribe to your service, read your blog?
A lot of websites are now being optimized for use on the iPhone, but with these new developments, it is likely to become a requirement in order to stay competitive. Its important to stay up to date with new technology and emerging trends. Prepare yourself and your business by taking this into consideration for your future web needs.
New York Times: click here to read article
Washington Post: click here to read article
We are happy to report that the Savannah Chatham Police recruitment vehicle (a 2007 ford explorer) was in the St. Patricks day parade on Friday the 14th and was looking good. It led the parade behind a group of motorcycle cops. The chief was proud to ride along in the vehicle and display it on the night before as well. Read the rest of this entry »
This job has been really fun for us to work on. Dean Fagerstrom and his team at the SCPD have been easy, attentive, and responsive to work with and the final product shows that for sure. I was able to go over to Image Is Everything (a printer here in savannah) where they are in the process of printing and applying the graphics to the 2007 Ford Explorer that the police are using for promotional events. Its Tuesday morning now, and it looks like everything is on schedule to be done for the St. Patty’s day parade on Friday. I don’t know about you guys, but I have already started doing extra pushups, maybe they’ll let me be a cop.
The traditional view of most companies is that a website is a “loss-leader”, necessary for being considered a serious business, but not anything that could significantly boost sales or generate a significant ROI. This great article at SEOmoz shows that getting in the mindset of seeing your website as a investment and profit center as opposed to a money-pit is a good idea for your companies continued financial health.
Some interesting stats from the article:
* 43% of retail sales are to either be influenced by or made on the Internet by 2012
* 83% of business use the Internet to research and find potential vendors
* 75% of users admit to making judgments about the a company’s credibility based on their website’s design
The 75% of users admitting to making judgments on a companies credibility based on the website design is an incredible number. Think about your own website: if you don’t like the design of it currently, chances are your customers don’t either and it’s costing you a significant amount of business.
When building a website for small business, or any business, it is important to focus on many different areas. SEO, Design, Usability, Content, Links, Blogging etc. This article talks about the important text of your “about page”. It is incredibly important to give people an accurate image of what your business is about and why you do what you do. They say that first impressions are everything, the about page can help to make your digital first impression memorable and profitable.
SEOChat.com posted a great article today for all you businesses out there who either do post their press releases online or are interested in doing so in the near future. It focuses on how to optimize those press releases you post online for maximum SEO advantage. Why should you care? Because it’s great content that’s on your website and therefore you want to have it integrated into your site-wide SEO strategy.
Many of you may or may not be aware of the struggle by Internet Service Providers to try and slow down your broadband internet connection whenever and however they feel like it, then their plan to turn around and shake down content providers like YouTube, Google, and more for big bucks in order for you to access those web sites at full speed. In the real world, we call this a protection racket, but when you have a business license and spend millions upon millions of dollars on lobbying on the local, state, and national level, they call it a business model!
The New York Times posted an article about how slowly, amazingly, it seems that the FCC is moving past its usual behavior of rubber stamping the wet dreams of the telecom industry and actually is threating to lay down some ground rules so at least this extortion at gun point will be somewhat orderly.
We feel really strongly about this topic (as you might be able to tell) as Telecom companies charge hosting companies like us an arm and a leg already for bandwidth costs so that no matter what traffic we’re getting, you get your site in just a couple milliseconds. It’s pretty hard to choke down the idea that not only should we pay what we do already to them, but now we get the privilege of paying MORE for basically providing the same level of service we provide our customers already. And to make matters worse, they want those negotiations to happen on a “per company” basis, so we’d have to negotiate specific deals with each ISP like Comcast, AOL, BellSouth, Qwest, AT&T, etc. in order to continue to keep the level of service. As you can imagine, each company would have different pricing, different terms, different bandwidth minimums and maximums, and minor contract stipulations. Yeah, I think we’ll pass on all that garbage folks, thanks but no thanks.
Fortunately, fellow Internet content providers aren’t taking this sitting down, and have organized a broad and pretty effective movement called the Save The Internet Foundation. Check out their website for more specifics and see how you can help.
All right fellow designers, developers, and anyone who likes to watch 2 skinny, geeky kids duke it out over the design and code of their websites; get ready for the XHTML Challenge!
The Idea is to pit two sites against each-other in an all out coded duel to see who reigns supreme over the fiber optic lines of the world. The sites are compared, judged on their code, then the public votes to choose the best of the two. Its an all out brawl ya’ll. I love the idea of having websites compete, the winner picked because of quality. Design AND code is taken into consideration. Its like going to buy a home and always taking a bunch of really good builders with you so you can see exactly how well the home was built. I think in today’s world anything which helps us to reward good, efficient and well thought work needs as much support as we can give. So check it out and maybe vote on a few sites you really like. Do your good deed for the day and reward someone’s hard work.
Here is an article posted by another company that does what we do. Its a great way to see if your website needs some attention. The focus of the article is on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) The goal of SEO, and subsequently our goal for your website, is to get your page to rank well on Google. This means that when someone types in “I drove my chevy to the levee and the levee was dry so I crashed, how do I fix my car?”, you show up offering automobile repair services. Provided that is actually what you do. There are many things which help your “page rank” and this article does a nice job of laying out some of them and some easy ways to get you out of the levee and into the limelight. Enjoy.
The Savannah Chatham Metropolitan Police Department (SCPD) has chosen us to design and develop custom vehicle wraps for the SCPD Vehicles. Read the rest of this entry »
The New York times posted a great article on small 1-5 person companies making the investment in establishing an online presence and shows how it is paying off for them in terms of both promotion as well as customer retention. Read the rest of this entry »
We are pleased to launch our new website! We have been working hard on it, and hopefully it will be a great way for people to learn about us and our services. Read the rest of this entry »
Gauge Interactive is one of Savannah, GA’s most cutting edge Web Design & Development firms. We offer enterprise level web design, web hosting, corporate branding, search engine optimization, and Interactive kiosk design.
