dougandrews.co.uk

The good:

web pages are typically made to be viewed online, and not to be printed. Despite being able to piece together the various pieces of a page so as to display it correctly, try printing the page from a browser and you you might get just the header, or the format is terrible. Google Chrome manages to pass the page pretty much intact to the printer, bar css stored images. This is a great improvement.

The bad:

Chrome manages to lose all formatting when updating a blog via WordPress, which is a right pain.

The GoogleMaps controls (zooom in, move the map etc) don’t work in Google Chrome for images embedded in a website, although it works on the main Google Maps website.

Companies House have a new* website http://wck2.companieshouse.gov.uk/index.shtml – which unfortunately doesn’t work.

I tried to access the WebCheck service which allows you to view basic information about a company, but the link returns you to the same page you were on before despite it having a different URL.

The search box crashes to an unformatted white screen with an error message, regardless of the search criteria used.

Working as I do to maintain a website I am all to conscious that problems can occur – but these are two issues affecting the core functionality of the website, something that should not occur for any company, let along an institution of this size.

* it’s new to me – I followed a clearly now outdated link from our own site and was re-directed, but it may have been running a while

A report out last week showed that Yahoo was measuring the ‘spamyness’ of emails sent out by companies and printing ‘Warning: Unsolicited Emails against the search results for that company.

This is an unwanted and unsafe intervention. There can be many, many reasons why a responsible company with a perfectly respectable privacy policy can be caught unawares.

Example:

We get well over 1,000 emails every day, many of them Spam but once in a while there are genuine emails in there. The levels of Spam received meant we had to take the decision not to read any email sent to a non-registered email address i.e. spamspamspam@selfcateringhols.com will not be read, neither will dougandrew@selfcateringhols.com. We took this decision knowing that some people do still hand type an email address and send a genuine email which has a typo in it. Not wanting these people to feel they’d sent us a message and not had a response we set up an auto-reply to say that their email had not been delivered – but because we were getting spoofed emails from every Tom Dick and Harry our auto-responses to them were then being picked up as Spam! We have since stopped the auto response so that genuine emailers may well think we’re ignoring them, but what can you do – it is a no-win situation.

We never, ever send out an newsletter email to anyone unless they are registered with the site and have opted to receive them. Every newsletter has a link to auto-unsubscribe – and yet despite this we have had cases where a recipient has reported us for Spam to one of the ubiquitous Spam lists and we had to defend our position.

Corporations have a real responsibility – to act responsibly. The average person online – i.e. someone who uses the Internet for personal reasons but just wants it to ‘work’ without questioning ‘how’ it works – will simply believe what they say. For a major company to step in an brand another company as a Spammer, according to the results of an automated algorithm, is a very dangerous step and one that will have very real consequences to potentially legitimate companies.

This is a step in the wrong direction – it will never, ever, be possible to make the Internet 100% safe to individuals – without squeezing out all but the major corporations (and who’s to say THAT’s safe!!). People need to take responsibility for themselves and stop relying upon third parties to say what is right and what is wrong, or what is safe and what isn’t – there’s enough information out there on just about any company you care to mention if you can be bothered to check for yourself.

Google Knol was recently opened to the public as a rival service to the ubiquitous wikipedia – I had considered whether it would be worthwhile as a marketing and possibly SEO exercise to write something on there and so took a look to see what type of things had been put up.

It didn’t take long for the self serving marketing spam to make it up there. The author in this case claims an affiliation to simplylikehome.com but appears to be more affiliated to vrbo.com from her articles. I couldn’t be bothered to investigate further.

If I find time to write something I hope it will be more useful and less obviously just commercial rubbish. It remains to be seen how Google Knol deals with this kind of thing as anybody can rate your article, giving the potential for spammers club together to boost their own articles. Maybe Google is hoping that the wider public opinion will drown them out?

the new search engine cuil has launched the mixed reviews. It’s been ‘noticed’ because it has some high flyers from Google, Altavista and IBM involved but I’m not sure it deserves the attention.

The search results are visually difficult to read, as they are spread over two to three columns. The pictures provided with the results appear wrong (at least they did with selfcateringhols) and as for the results? We didn’t fair too well so they’re obviously to be questioned!

On the plus the contextual menu seems to add value when searching on a fairly specific theme. When searching for Barceleona apartments for instance I was offered links on the neighbourhoods of Barcelona, Antoni Gaudi and Modernism and a couple of other relevant links – although oddly enough the last link was to towns in Colombia.

When searching on a more general search (self catering holidays) the contextual menu focussed on specific geographical locations of the UK (Cornwall and Scotland), which is fine if that’s where you want to go but otherwise limited.

The most noise about the launch concerns not the search engine, the page layout or the results returned but the fact that it does not collect user data at all. This is an interesting point as Google’s system is clearly not popular in this respect, so any half decent search engine that adopts a similar privacy policy to cuil may well find itself with an automatic audience. I’m not convinced though that the offerings here are good enough to hold any potential new audience.

A couple of holiday property websites have come to my attention recently – one we were contacted by, the other I received a ‘newsletter’ (Spam?). In both cases the lack of attention to exactly where the paying visitors would come from was startling. They’re both advertising only websites pushing to expand their portfolio with free or heavily discounted advertising, but they have virtually ZERO incoming links and I imagine zero traffic as a result. As it stands any paying advertisers will be unlikely to repeat their subscription.
The latter (I’m consciously holding back here as they are my competition after all) had a really great looking website, they’d obviously put a lot of effort into it. I wish them luck but this is a bit like building a luxury 5 star hotel on the moon and waiting for the guests to roll in. With a total of 6 internal and external links registered in google nobody will find it!

I talked this through in depth with the first company who were at pains to point out how impressive the site would be (it was having technical problems at the time) but despite my best attempts they appeared to not grasp the point that impressive counts for very little if nobody can find it. Actually this is not the full picture as they did have offline marketing in place, so all is not completely lost, just an online opportunity seriously missed.

I’m amazed that people are still throwing so much misplaced money into the Internet without the basic fundamentals in place.