by Dave Wilkinson on July 1, 2009
My car is made by Vauxhall, a GM owned company. And it speaks to me.
When my lights are on, when my handbrake is up, when the car needs a service, when I forget to put my seatbelt on, I get told in no uncertain terms – PING – to rectify the situation.
All these PINGs are a little annoying, but they serve a purpose. However, the most important PING of all – to tell me I need fuel – doesn’t exist.
Sure, the car displays a little amber light on the dashboard to warn me of an impending breakdown on the side of the motorway. But I spend most of my drive to and from work looking at the road, not my instruments.
General Motors is currently in debt to the sum of $173bn. And it wouldn’t have happened if they’d just thought about their customers’ needs and installed a PING on Vauxhall fuel gauges.
Rant over.
by Dave Wilkinson on June 22, 2009
You may think that Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, is a complete waste of time given Google’s 90%+ market share. But Bing is different. Unlike Google or Yahoo, it aggregates content. Ian Lurie, who writes about SEO/online marketing at Conversation Marketing, puts it this way:
Microsoft’s Bing is the latest example of search engines as aggregators, rather than indexes. Go to Bing.com, search for ‘LA Lakers’, and you get a list of results. Roll over a search result, though, and you get a detailed look at the content on the listed site.
What this means is that you’re giving the person searching for results yet another reason NOT to click through to your blog/website. Why? Well now they can read the meta description the search engine serves up for your site AND an excerpt of the first 300+ characters of content on your page.
For a blog that displays latest posts on the home page, this may not be ideal (because people may not hire you based on your latest ‘I hate clients’ blog post).
This is the problem I’ve been having with Bing (displaying the wrong content, not hating my clients), so I decided to tweak my WordPress theme (Thesis) to provide a simple fix. Here’s what I want to have displayed at the top of my home page for prospective clients, blog readers and search engines to see:
Pretty simple, right. Yes, unless you’re using Thesis, which has a tendency to make the simplest tasks complicated. Thesis uses hooks to inject code into the theme, so you have to write a custom function to make anything happen. Here’s a walkthrough to help you out: [click to continue…]
