Rob’s Blog

SimpleViewer Picasa Templates Flash Photo Gallery from Airtight Interactive

In my quest for the coolest web gallery template I have found another Picasa template worth a note. SimpleViewer Photo Gallery from Airtight Interactive was quick and easy to install, I had it up in a few minutes. Similar to other templates its as easy as downloading the template package and putting into the Picasa Web templates folder and then exporting your photos from Picasa.

The SimpleViewer template is the perfect template for an art or photo gallery. It presents users with a simple and easy way to view 9 of the gallery photos and easily page through thumbnails. A simple click on a thumbnail will change the main image to the selected photo.

In my test gallery I have taken a series of photos from the Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo Community Gallery and loaded them into the SimpleViewer.

Click here to check my sample SimpleViewer Flash Photo Gallery for Picasa.

Experimenting with Youtube Adsense Units from Google

I recently discovered that Google has integrated Youtube with the Adsense services. This changes gives Adsense advertiser the ability to distribute Youtube videos with integrated Adsense ads in order to generate revenue. If you are not familiar with Adsense, you should be since this is the service that can monetize your content by presenting Google sponsored ads to your users. When a user clicks on the ad, Google gets paid by the advertiser and you get a percentage of the revenue.

Click here to see a sample of how you can earn money from integrating Youtube video ads to your website.

ECommerce Conversion Rates and Conversion Rate Factors - Part 1

A colleague of mine from a previous company asked me recently…
“How do I raise conversion rates on my ECommerce site by 10%?”
He went on to tell me that if he simply raised conversion rates by 10% it would result in massive revenue growth and how he was convinced that a redesign was the most effective thing he could do to raise conversion. While I agree that this could be a major opportunity we ended up discussing several other factors that should be considered when targeting your conversion rate for revenue growth.
The factors that should be considered are not simply the design and functionality of your shopping cart, they are much more and begin earlier than your checkout. Some conversion rate factors are listed below:

• Targeted Marketing
• Clarity of Marketing Message
• Page Load Times
• Presentation and Feel
• Selection and Shopping Tools
• Pricing and Competition
• Reputation and Brand
• Site Trust and Legitimacy
• Return Policy
• Delivery Times
• Shipping Costs
• Credit Card Processing and Card Validation

With all of these factors it is really hard to pick and prioritize where to spend your conversion rate improvement efforts. It was clear after this conversation that although an important factor, the shopping cart is only one factor affecting your conversion rate.
For more information on conversion rate basics have a look at this article from Bryan Eisenberg written on the ClickZ network.

Converting Videos and Copying Videos for PC and Mobile Devices

I had the chance to test the new version of DVD Copy 6 from Corel today and was surprised by the breadth of features that are packed into the product. Little did I know, with this product you can convert almost any video file format to any other video file format as well as copy your videos to popular mobile devices such as the iPhone, PSP and iPod, and its easier than you think.

See the list of supported file formats and features listed below:
DivX® HD Support - Import and create High-definition DivX® HD video files of up to 1280×720 frame size. Burn 2 hours of High-definition video to DVD discs with the original subtitles, audio tracks and even interactive navigation menus, that plays on DivX Hi-Def DVD players.
AVCHD support – DVD Copy 6 will recognize AVCHD video folders imported from you camcorder, and convert them to the format of your choice. Even import directly from you DVD-based camera.
XVid support – DVD Copy 6 now supports this popular P2P file format, giving you access to much more material.
Support for more portable devices – Convert your video to go! MPEG-4 and H.264 templates are available for the Apple iPhone™, as well as a variety of mobile phones and PDAs, and Zune™. Send video directly to iPod® and PSP® without intermediate steps.
TiVo® Support – Let DVD Copy 6 Plus take care of converting your TiVo Series 2-recorded files to DVD disc or mobile device.

All in all I think the features in this product make this software invaluable to anyone downloading videos and looking to convert and load them on to their iPod, iPhone, PSP and more. I urge you to download the trial and give it a try.

After you do please post your comments here so that others can benefit from your experience.

Very Powerful Open Source ECommerce Platform.

By far the best one I have seen to date. I had a quick look at the Magento ECommerce Platform and was truly amazed with the power. My hat is off the team at Magento. Out of anything I have written about to date this is by far the most exciting. Some of the customer facing features are…

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Customer Communication
• Ship to Multiple Addresses
• Search
• Product Comparison
• Layered Navigation
• Product Tagging
• Product Reviews
• Wishlist
• Checkout
• Shopping Cart
• Customer Accounts

From a quick look at the backend it has everything you need and more. Check out Magento when you get a chance.

Flash Photo Stack, another great Gallery for Picasa

Ok, I there is another very cool gallery, called the Flash Photo Stack, another great Picasa template from Paul van Roekel.
This gallery lets you arrange your photo in a stack of photo with users flipping through the stack.
Click here to see the flash photo stack gallery of me and my friends wakeboarding on the Ottawa river.

Carousel Gallery a Great Picasa Templates

Well again I am amazed at the some of the free photo gallery templates available on the web. This Picasa Carousel Template was created by Paul van Roekel with some help on the flash applet from Saverio Caminiti. I have never met either of these individuals but am blown away by the Carousel Gallery that they have created.
For details on the development of this template I suggest that you contact Paul as it is way over my head. And for the installation which is dead easy you can find instructions on his website.
What I can tell you is that it took me no longer than 5 minutes to install and export this gallery. I just grabbed a few photos from a recent trip to Cleveland and exported and I was finished.

Check out the Carousel Picasa Template Gallery here.

Ottawa Based Business Websites, Who gets the most traffic? Part 2

In order to further validate the busiest website in Ottawa I decided to check another sources, Alexa. Alexa provides similar data as Compete but as you will see below produces slightly different results.

According to these results, the rank is first gc.ca, corel.com and third canadapost.ca. I did to run the reports for all of the other Ottawa based business that I ran on Compete on the assumption that the magnitude of these sites is still much higher than the others in Ottawa.

From the looks of the Alexa data the gc.ca site is by far a winner but the trend for the site is definitely not positive. But I will say in Corel’s defense, there are some other sites not included here such as Ulead.com, Intervideo.com, WordPerfect.com, Designer.com, and many of the international websites.

Ottawa Based Business Websites, Who gets the most traffic?

Tonight I was wondering which Ottawa based business’ get the most traffic in comparison to each other. With companies like Corel, Nortel, Cognos, Canada Post and others we should have some good competition. So using the Site Analytics service from Compete Inc I decided to put the business listed on this Ottawa based companies list from Wikipedia to the test. I am not saying that this is a definitive list but it is definitely a start.

After reviewing the online traffic for many different websites it turns out that Corel.com and the Government of Canada Website are very close. With an honorable mention, third place finish going to Canada Post. Feel free to comment if you think that I have omitted a serious contender or if you think there is a flaw in the method.

Congratulations Corel, you have the busiest website in Ottawa according to the data provided by Compete.com

Holiday Merchandising, Black Friday, Cyber Monday

According to the Best Practices and Tips for a Successful Holiday in 2006 report from Shop.org each year consumers are starting their holiday shopping earlier and earlier in the season. If you have not seen this report I urge you to read it as it highlights which tactics are the most useful and most used based on survey results from a variety of retailers. I have highlighted some of key areas of the report below:

• Free Shipping - 79% of retailers will offer free shipping with conditions during the holiday period. Conditions will most likely come in the form of minimum order value.
• Email Marketing - Is viewed by the retailers surveyed as the number 1 tactic used to drive online sales with paid search following closely.
• Site Features and Shopping Tools - Buy online and pickup at the store and product customization are tied for first in this category.
• Catalog Mailings - This tactic is ahead of the rest by a good margin for those retailers with offline catalogs.
• Start of Holiday Shopping - Many online retailers said that shopping started earlier in 2005 than in 2004.
• Biggest Day of the Season - 20% of online retailers cited Dec 12th as the biggest shopping day of 2005.

So by now you are starting to see that the biggest online shopping day for this weekend is “Cyber Monday”, the first Monday after Thanksgiving. With potentially an even bigger shopping day expected on December 10th. At least this is what the Shop.org research says.

I urge you to read this report as well as any others and to comment on this post if you have any ideas, opinions on the topic of holiday shopping or online marketing for this holiday season.