New MySpace Mail Competes With Leading Webmail Services

Posted by Karen May on July, 31st 2009

MySpace is now offering its 130 millions users with a webmail service.  The social networking site hopes to rival with popular webmail services like Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

Existing MySpace users can a create a MySpace Mail account with their current user name, using a myspace.com domain name.  They can now upload photos from their profile to email, and send audio and video attachments. Unlike other webmails, MySpace Mail offers unlimited storage.

MySpace has been battling to stay afloat in a very competitive market, and launching a webmail may just do the trick. The site has recently made key web design changes to best compete with leading networking site Facebook. It has retrenched nearly 30 percent of  its domestic workforce and a significant number of its global staff was also axed.  The job cuts were part of MySpace’s move to keep a stable financial stature amidst recession.

MySpace topped the [...]

Hulu Traffic Trumps That of Networks

Posted by Karen May on July, 31st 2009

For the first time in its history, Hulu has surpassed NBC, Fox, and ABC website’s traffic. the data was reported by Compete’s Seth Madison.

Hulu is a video streaming website of TV shows and movies from popular networks NBC, Fox, ABC, among others.  The site has gained prominence shortly after it was launched.  Although it has not achieved YouTube’s success as of yet, the site is slowly climbing the race and has shown strong growth over the past few months.

Hulu’s video views have significantly increased, and its market share and its market share is gradually showing good numbers. Its skyrocketing traffic is a product of effective SEO techniques and relevant web content.  It still got a long way before reaching YouTube’s spot in the industry, but is apparently racking up a huge edge with good branding design and ad strategy.

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Facebook Gets Twitter Updates

Posted by Karen May on July, 30th 2009

Twitter users were baffled when their tweets were automatically posted in popular social networking site Facebook. The change was too abrupt causing negative reactions from users who felt their privacy was violated.

Twitter has not explained why tweets are suddenly popping up on Facebook profiles. Although Facebook has an application that links Twitter to the site, it still doesn’t spell out why users who are not using the application gets automatic Facebook updates.

Twitter has made several tweaks on its web design but redirecting posts to Facebook isn’t one of them. Apparently, Twitter sees Facebook as competition. On the other hand, Facebook is looking for ways to ditch Twitter threats. Both companies have been thinking of competitive strategies to rise above the other.

On that note, it seems remotely possible that Twitter has even thought of Facebook integration. Although Twitter does not disclose how it plans to compete with existing [...]

Google Takes the Fall for Malware Spread

Posted by Karen May on July, 29th 2009

Google pays a high price for popularity, with cybercrooks seeing it as a perfect tool to spread malicious messages and links over the web. Google Hot Trends, for example, is being employed by criminals in creating links affiliated with trending search terms on different websites, which redirects to their malicious sites.

Google’s PageRank algorithm considers links as additional points for search results ranking. Although website owners hire SEO specialists to boost their rank on Google, some are just too hasty to climb notches higher by using malicious links. These links allow huge traffic because of the popularity of the search terms.

Google  has been having problems with link spam and PageRank exploit for quite some time. It has superseded rival engines Yahoo and MSN, now known as Bing, in terms of market share. However, it has become a magnet to spammers and scammers over the years. Indeed, popularity has many snares, [...]

MySpace Boosts Events Platform, Overtaking Evite

Posted by Karen May on July, 28th 2009

MySpace has been widely criticized for its stonewalled growth and lack of stability. During its heyday back in 2006, the social networking site had its 100 millionth account in no time. About a year after, its web design was overhauled, where several features were improved to compete with rival Facebook.

Among the most notable changes made were the recreation of MySpace Music and Myspace profile. While these two were deemed the site’s best features, an unrequited Events Platform was slowly taking the spotlight.

The platform has overtaken Evite, a social-planning website for creating, sending, and managing online invitations. Evite claims it is the top event planning site on the web, with about 600,000 invitations sent per day.

However, sources say MySpace has towered Evite’s numbers, with 700,000 invitations sent per day. With a recently launched application and booming Events Platform, MySpace would undoubtedly bounce back from the pit, at least [...]

Twitter Uses ‘Tweet’ on Website

Posted by Karen May on July, 28th 2009

Amidst Twitter’s popularity in the web industry, the company is making significant changes on its home page that will most likely spark mixed reactions various groups. Twitter has been making such a fuss about the word “tweet”, trademarking it to thwart third party developers from using the word.

Although not considered a major web design change, replacing the word ‘updates’ on the right sidebar of the page with ‘tweets’ will definitely be noticeable. Twitter also changed the individual profile  pages.  “Twitter 101″ was also added to the page. This is built for businesses who want to boost their web presence through venturing in micro-blogging services.

The changes are critical for Twitter’s statistics. Unofficial reports say the site gains enormous traffic but new users don’t seem to stick around.  Studies also show that only a few of its members are posting a huge chunk of “tweets” per day.

This might prove beneficial [...]

Dramatic finish to three-year-long Netflix contest

Posted by Dave Wiltshire on July, 27th 2009

The Netfix Prize has almost come to a close, with the winning team set to receive a $1 million reward. The aim of the contest was to improve the algorithm used by Netflix to recommend films to its customers by at least 10%. The popularity of the site and size of the reward attracted an array of talented computer science teams to the contest.

The 10% barrier was finally broken by BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos late in July. The rules of the competition stated that this marked the start of a 30 day period where teams could make final submissions to the contest. BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos and another team, named The Ensemble continued to better each other’s scores throughout this period, with The Ensemble looking almost certain to have prevailed. The final result will be confirmed by Netflix within the next few weeks.

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Magento Web Design For Qpaints

Posted by Dave Wiltshire on July, 27th 2009

Qpaints are a new company created by an established car renovation specialist looking to enter the ecommerce market selling for Car paint and other vehicle refinishing products. So far we have created a new brand design and website for a powerful Magento ecommerce website which will be built in the coming months. Ongoing we will be supporting  Qpaints in the search engines with SEO strategy and implementation to improve visibility and sales.

Here is the Web Design so far

Web Design | Qpaints

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A learning experience – Iheadphones the perfect ecommerce project

Posted by Dave Wiltshire on July, 24th 2009

As web designers we rarely get the opportunity to be involved with companies that are already number one for their target search term in an ultra competitive market. We have just undertaken a redesign for the Iheadphones website who are looking to retain their number one position with improved web design with better stock management capability (Magento web design) and search engine performance.

The level of SEO built into this site in terms of content conversion and url architecture has pushed us further than we have gone before and really further than we have ever seen online before which is a great opportunity for a web designer. We spend a lot of time researching techniques that will improve performance for our client sites significantly and even incrementally as we know that every inch counts in life. When you add up all [...]

Evolution of the web designer

Posted by Dave Wiltshire on July, 22nd 2009

As a web designer nothing gives me more pleasure than redesigning sites that we created years and years ago, it feels like housekeeping!  I started my life as a designer on a placement for another company, and one of my first ever web designs was for a company called JMC Recycling. Obviously five years ago web design style and software was a world way from where it is now.

We have been given the opportunity to revisit the site and the opportunity to show you visually where we were and where we are now web design wise.

Here is the NEW web design.

Web Design | JMC Recycling

Here is the OLD web design.

Web [...]