Archive for 2009

New huge monitor

Jul 8, 2009 General, Technology

I got a new 23″ monitor last week, its an Acer V233H which runs at 1920×1080 HD resolution. See pic below, after using this for a week at home, my dual 19″ widescreens at office look very tiny to me, (need to ask my boss for an upgrade… :) )

Dual setup at office:

:)

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Squeeze pages in web marketing

Jun 21, 2009 Technology

When it comes to direct marketing, squeeze pages tend to play a very important role in getting leads

Squeeze pages are typical landing pages, whose complete focus it towards getting user information(lead). Usually squeeze pages tend to not have any hyperlinks pointing to external content(not even the parent site), this helps not to lose a lot of traffic from the page. These pages usually have a form embedded or almost all links in this page point to a lead capture form.

Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squeeze_page

These pages tend perform exceptionally well when compared with normal landing pages but the whole concept of these pages is getting outdated. In this post, we will discuss about how squeeze pages will work or won’t work for your needs. Lets assume that by theory and science, Squeeze pages will *ONLY* work with narrow match campaigns.

  • Squeeze pages are quick to build and easy to trash
  • These pages can be optimized for any specific keyword(s), this allows creation page pages which are fine tuned for a specific set of audience.
  • These pages do not lose so much traffic in other diversions, instead , most of the traffic is either converted immediately or bounced. This makes the page best suited for targeted campaigns.

Here are a couple of reasons why squeeze pages won’t/shouldn’t work for you, if you are connecting your “broad match campaigns or organic search traffic”

The primary problem with optimizing landing pages in general for broad match or organic traffic is that, when you get this traffic, you also tend get a very large number of “specific search queries”. The inherent problem with these specific search queries is that they may not necessarily be the keywords that these pages are optimized for. This also tends to have a negative conversion rate effect on these pages.

Lack of information

These pages tend to have lack of sufficient information for decision making and there is no way for the user to gain access this information, unless he exits the page, once he does that, there is no re-entry option.

Bounce rates

Since these pages are highly focused towards single conversion point(s), these pages tend have high bounce rates for users searching for other/similar content, although the parent site may offer this content, since it is not accessible from these pages, bounce rates start to creep up rapidly for these types of pages.

Organic traffic should never be allowed to get into these pages, as it can show a very high impact on organic conversions.

Effort re-usability

Developing a page involves combined effort from various marketing units, although the re-usability ratio varies between organization to organization. It is highly affected by time consuming campaigns involving squeeze pages, its always better to integrate large campaigns into the parent website to offer highly effective effort re-usability. The overall amount of man-hour effort that goes into production of these pages if effectively reused  can be made to apply for the parent website, and can in turn be used to convert organic traffic into a highly effective lead source.

Maintenance

Just imagine a scenario when we create 100 or so of these types of pages and they are completely disconnected from the parent site and hosted at over a million locations. Maintenance is always a mess in these cases, these pages just cannot be maintained and they tend to get older soon.

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Developers are born brave.

Jun 21, 2009 Fun, General

I found this very funny image in one the foward mails hat i recieved recently, couldn’t resists to post it on my office door.

Developers are born brave

Developers are born brave

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Passed ZCE-wo-hoo-I am a certified PHP developer now

May 23, 2009 General, Technology

After days of preparation and studying, I at last took the courage the take the Zend exam last Monday (18th May). I have been preparing for this exam for quite some while, even though I have passed in all the mock exams, I was targeting for the ‘Excellent’ grade in order to confidently put myself in a position to take the exam.

About the exam

  • This is exam full of trick questions. So don’t expect direct answers, there is always a trick around.
  • The real exam can be a lot harder that the mock exams offered by php|architect
  • The certification guide will cover a lot of basics of most of the units, but is not all; you will need to buy additional books and materials in order cover the complete exam syllabi.

Materials

I had the following study materials at my disposal, this doesn’t mean that you will need all of them if you are preparing for the exam.

Zend sells the last three things in one package at a discounted price; you might want to check that out.

Benefits

It gives you a good sense of satisfaction and achievement. This to me is the greatest benefit. The preparation that I went through for this exam makes me feel like an expert in php. I don’t have to go back to the php manual for every odd function, now I can tell them by names.

Secondly it gives you recognition among the developers and others. They allow you to use a logo, which looks fancy on your resume (Checkout my CV). They also have your name listed in their yellow pages directory.

You can call yourself a Zend Certified Engineer, except when you are in Ontario, Canada for crazy reasons…. :)

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Trip to Ooty

Apr 17, 2009 Photography, Travel

Lazinees in blogging

The last time i blogged about travel was in late may last year after my stavanger trip, although i have been traveling to a few places i havent found time to blog about my travel experiences. Here is the list that i have missed to blog about , Hyderabad Trip – Jun ‘08, ECR Trip – Aug ‘08, Coorg Trip – Oct ‘08, Pondy – Jan ‘09, Bangalore – Feb ‘09, Thiruvannamalai – Feb ‘09,  ECR Again- Apr ‘09 and now Ooty Apr ‘09. Coorg Trip was really amazing, more than 2000 kms of travel on bus during 5 days, I can only regret that i couldn’t manage the time to blog about that experience. Bangalore trip was highlighted by our lunch experience at Nandinee. All done and said, lets talk about this trip.

The plan.

Shetty  (quoted among one of the greatest civil engineers of all time for creating the plan and the arch. design to build a flyover between Gwalior and Chennai) now wanted to build a flyover between Chennai and Bangalore, and we wanted to find a place where we can plant the foundation stone. After rounds of meetings we finally decided that instead of starting the flyover construction from the ends, we will start it from the center, the center point being Ooty hill.

- If i didnt get kicked for this, then there is a serious problem out there… he he :)

The plan actually was because we had a long weekend, and we wanted to celebrate a few events. so we decided to ooty, as it happens with every travel plan involving me, we had nothing inplace until we started out for the trip. the only things that are confirmed with us are the return tickets from coimbatore to chennai on monday night.

Thrusday evening

4:00 PM at office, I start off to koyembedu, so that i can catch the bus, which praveen told me to be a super deluxe, i will try to post a photograph of the bus here. This is by no means a super-deluxe bus. When we were boarding the bus, joseph asked the conductor, if it was a video coach. The conductor replied to him saying that this is a video coach, but the passengers should bring their own TV’s, he was true, there was a tv provision, but no TV in it.

From Ooty Trip -Apr 2009 (Friends)

5:30 PM The bus starts off from bus stand.

7:30 PM The bus halted 45 Mins in pallavaram, due to a small accident.

9:30 PM The bus halted 1 hour due to noise in the Tyre, this is getting us frustrated now, first the bus, now the delays.

6:00 AM next day, the bus which is supposed to reach Coimbatore already, hasn’t even touched erode yet.

8:30 AM at last we are in Coimbatore

Friday Morning

After the breakfast we start off on our second phase of our journey, the uphill travel through the mountainous terrain of the nilgiris. But wait, this cannot be as smooth as expected. We get to the bus stand to catch our bus to Ooty, this is where we get our first shock, there is a queue, at least 150 Meters long, and people waiting for more than 1 hour at the first few places. Now we realized that this wont work out for us. We wanted to find a alternative, all my efforts of trying to book a bus through redbus.in were ineffective since, they didn’t cover that route.

Joseph came up with a idea to get to connoor and then to reach ooty from there. So we took a bus to connoor, this bus was terrible than the previous bus, the standards of buses are getting sicker and sicker.

From Ooty Trip -Apr 2009 (Friends)

After 90 mins on our travel and say 13 kms off Connor hill top, our bus breaks down. Then we say, wow, this is what we are waiting for :) . they funny thing is that once we get down form the bus, say 20 of us, the bus starts up, and the bus leaves us, we were under the assumption that the bus will stop somewhere near to pick us up, there was nothing to worry, since the conductor was walking with us. But the bus didn’t stop for say like the next 750 M / 1 Km. We were walking , walking , and walking… the shades gave us some relief, although the uphill climb and the reducing air density as we climb upwards were talking a heavy toll on us, and finally the bus reached connoor and then we took the next bus to Ooty.

Friday Afternoon

A bus from Connor drops us in ooty now, tired and restless, we have been traveling on road for more than 20 hours now. We dropped into to the hotel room, to take some rest.

Ooty

If we had to go by speculations climate in ooty during this time is supposed to be terrible , it was really bad during the second day, when it got hot upto 28~30 C. But teh first and third days were ok, it was cold enough for someone who came all the way from chennai.

From Ooty Trip -Apr 2009 (Friends)

We did a lot of sight seeing and shopping during the 3rd day. I will have to write a separate blog about that in case i had to explain the details. It was a nice weekend getaway to relax ourselves from the fast paced offices that we work for.

The Down Trip

The down trip was not as eventful and the upward trip, as we had confirmed ticket through the travel and we had already exhausted all our energies to take any risk. We traveled form Ooty to Coiambatore on Sunday evening, to reach Coiambatore on sunday night. One full day rest at koovai on monday and repeat biriyanis at koovai thalapakettu, had spoiled our plans to visit the koovai kutralam. We didn’t manage to acheive the core goal of the trip which is the treat from shetty. But nevertheless it was great fun we had during the four days.

Albums

Ooty Trip -Apr 2009 (Friends)
Ooty Trip -Apr 2009 (Photography)

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