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Geek and his Guitar

Aug 16, 2009 Fun, General 2 Comments

I joined guitar class recently, for reasons unknown I really wanted to do something which is not related to computer science,  I have been trying different stuff for a long long time and after a fairly satisfactory performance at photography, I turned my eyes towards music, especially guitar because some of my college friends were talking about it and I recently (read as 6 moths ago) watched Vaaranam Aaiyram. That was the right time when Suresh and Mathu were talking about joining guitar classes and the rest is history ( or at least I will try to forge some music history books to talk about my guitar life.. :) )

Its been a couple of weeks since I have joined, looks like the only good thing I know about guitar is that I am able to hold it properly and have been able to pick the right strings. The last class I attended, my teacher got very tired because he had to spend a lot of time to get the rhythm right. You can’t blame him, he hasn’t seen me as a student before, he should speak to my college Maths/ECE professors or my school Tamil teacher, they probably know how hard it is to teach me something which I have no idea about. But the good thing about guitar, which it doesn’t share with Tamil or other hard(useless) things is that I want to learn guitar, and never in my life did I ever wanted to learn Tamil. So, lets see how far I go with this new exercise.

I am now able to play a couple of movie tunes to some extent that people are able to recognize these as some kind of music, although they were not able to guess what music it was.

And these are my goals

  • I have to learn to play guitar really well
  • I have to learn to play “En iniya pon nila ve” Song
  • Gotta find the train in which Meghna (sameera reddy) is traveling, and the rest will be history

I am a firm believer in having simple goals .. he he :)

New huge monitor

Jul 8, 2009 General, Technology 1 Comment

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:

:)

Squeeze pages in web marketing

Jun 21, 2009 Technology Leave a comment

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.

Developers are born brave.

Jun 21, 2009 Fun, General Leave a comment

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

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

May 23, 2009 General, Technology 1 Comment

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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