Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Theory and Reality of Google Wave

Nov 13, 2009 Fun, Technology

Comparision of Google wave in Theory and Reality

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End of an Era: Geocities is shutting down on 26.Oct.2009.

Oct 25, 2009 General, Technology

Most of today’s’ internet users may not know what Geocities and meant to internet. Geocities was simply a “free” webhosting service, which allowed you to upload your own html files (and they will put their ads on your behalf), they gave you an URL, which looked like http://geocities.com/<username> , and you can share your website with your friends family etc, this was all that they offered, just in lines of an equivalent of what blogspot.com is today.

But this is 90’s, there were no Blogs, no RSS, no Web 2.0, and no Social Networking, (I think there wasn’t any CSS too, but not sure). What Geocities offered was a comprehensive platform using which you can build your own websites, and it was relatively easy if you knew a bit of HTML and were able to tweak some of their codes. Compare it to today, Geocities at that time, was an equivalent of today’s blogger and WordPress put together.

I am talking nine years ago, just the time when I stepped in to my 11th grade. Computer science at that time was not exactly so dependent on HTML, although it was a period of the internet boom, but general knowledge levels about internet and HTML were not that high. And if you wanted to learn something new and latest, you had to get to a library, get a book and learn it, YouTube and Wikipedia were non-existent. And when it came to books on internet programming (I am not joking,”Internet Programming” at that time was not about PHP or ASP.net, it was about creating static HTML pages) almost all of them referred to Geocities as a starting point, because the website was simple easy to use, almost anyone can put-up their webpage on the net. Geocities was able to offer the ease of use for creating simple web pages. These days we talk so much on this usability, UX and all these things… they were just not existent then, of course, the sites didn’t look good by today’s standards (you are allowed to call them awful), but they were cool at that time…

Geocities is of a lot of sentimental value for me, for various reasons, this was where I created my first ever website, first learned what is hacking (finding workarounds to disable those crazy geocities ads), first came to know about communities, what impact websites could make, this was at a very early age of my life and this to a lot of extent has had an impact on what I am doing today [doing almost the same things in the n'th iteration .. he he :) ].

Yahoo has recently been in a cost-cutting mode, and ideally geocities is facing a tough challenge, having lost most of its user base to technologies like Blogger and WordPress. It had to shut shop sometime, time has come now for us to bid farewell to my internet teacher. Let see if i will write some wave or cave, when wordpress/blogger shuts shop in the coming future :)

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Books..

Sep 5, 2009 General, Technology

We are shifting to a new geo-location nearby, so I was stacking and packing all my personal belongings this Friday, and when I started to stack those books, it was quite tall…

I have realized that the number of books I am reading recently had increased, you see the pile is as tall as my CPU tower.

The best books that I would recommend are

* Code Complete – for general software engineering

* Head Start Servlets and JSP also Head Rush AJAX

* PHP In Action – (not in the pile above)

PHP In action was especially very good. I got this book assuming that it will help me learn hard-core PHP to help me get certified. But this turned out to be the other way around, this book took me through some of the fairly advanced concepts of object oriented programming and PHP became incidental just beacuse the book was titled so.. certaily it goes by the saying “A good solution can solve any problem” likewise “A good programming language book can be used for any language”

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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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