Meet The Team : James Web Developer

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James nearly joined the Royal Navy before luckily deciding that his career lay in online marketing (Phew!)

Qualifications: BSc Hons Multimedia Computing at Staffordshire University

Work experience: Prior to joining the Soula team, James spent a year out in Munich, Germany (during his sandwich year) working for the IABG, a Ministry of Defence contractor. Required to maintain and develop their department’s internal staff information portal, James worked on numerous other projects including improving communication between departments.

Joined Soula: 2008 as a Developer

Hobbies: An avid follower of extreme sports, James can’t seem to get enough of them. From exercising at the gym to playing football, if he could he would go snowboarding all the time. Outside of work, James likes listening to music and messing around with graphical design and digital art – anything do with multimedia

Some interesting facts about James: “I have got so many stories it’s scary. To sum up my best one though: I nearly became a fighter pilot in the Royal Navy; I once fell asleep while running home drunk (never a good idea); the first time I did a skydive my parachute failed and I once ate a fruit pastel sandwich – yum.”

Thinking on James when speaking to a female interviewee: “Yeah, I do the same as Chad, but better (flirt much!)”

TED Talk on Augmented Reality Maps

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Part of being an internet marketer is keeping on top of all the new technologies that are likely to have an impact on us in the upcoming year. A great example of this is understand how and why the iPhone would be so popular and trying to be early in the uptake of the App store.

Well after the TED conference this month I think we have found the next thing to be on top of. Bing’s map section specialist Blaise Aguera y Arcas talks us through the extremely exciting changes they have planned for the Bing maps system.

Continue reading →

Google Buzz

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For anyone that uses Google’s Gmail account you can now join Google Buzz, Google’s latest social media venture, “being an entire new world within Gmail”. Similar to Twitter, Buzz allows you to share either publicly or privately with your followers.

One of the benefits of Buzz is you can link your account to your Picasa, Twitter and Flickr account showing all your updates in Buzz. There is also the option to set individual posts to public or private or even to specific groups you have set up in Buzz so if you wanted to let a certain customer base know about the latest product release or sale you could easily share this information to all your followers. One of my current favorites is that you can associate pictures with Buzz in Google Maps and conversations will appear on Google Maps, allowing you to see what other people are saying nearby. Continue reading →

HTML5 and SEO

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If you’re in our industry and haven’t seen anything on HTML 5 yet you seriously must have been in a cave. It’s basically a new version of the core mark-up language on the web and it massively reduces the dependency on the plug-ins we are all so used to seeing.

HTML5 is already rocking the design and development worlds with people clambering to experiment with new functionality, APIs and more but we should always look at all the potential affects of such large shifts in our behaviour and this post aims to address some potential implications the new mark-up will have for SEO.

The first thing to consider is that HTML5 is still a baby really, most browsers have some level of support but few have total support and even then many functions are yet to be completed or fully tested. Because of this any SEO issues or benefits are very much speculation at this stage, while we are running multiple tests to help discover search engine reactions to HTML5 code until it is more mainstream I do not believe these will be definite. Continue reading →

IE6 to Die Out

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Working for a digital design company you soon hear of web designers love of all things IE6.

When designing a site you want all people that visit your site to see it the same which is why IE6 has been subject to a lot of hacks.  Google recently announced that they would join other browsers and no longer support IE6.  Googles shift coincides with a lot of problems concerning compatibility and outdated technology and was/is a concern for general security and stability. Continue reading →

RSS Feeds – Why do They Matter?

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You could easily argue that this niche is completely outside my field, but in many ways it is not.

You see, RSS feeds are a great way to increase the number of subscribers to your website. Either through subscriptions to your newsletters, news stories or to your online marketing campaign as a whole, RSS feeds can help you to create a solid base of subscribers who will happily spread news of your website across the internet. Continue reading →

Caffeine – Do Stupid Things Faster with More Energy!

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It’s been a week now since Google opened a web developer preview to collect feedback of their latest update – Caffeine. There’s not much to see when you first try out the sandbox. When asked about the update, Google’s Matt Cutts explained;

The Caffeine update isn’t about making some UI changes here or there. Currently, even power users won’t notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure. But some of the search results do change, so we wanted to open up a preview so that power searchers and web developers could give us feedback.

So what effect is this update going to have on Google’s SERP’s? Continue reading →

The Benefits of Copywriting Tutorials

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If you are looking for ways to improve your copywriting techniques and learn all the ‘no no’s’ of the business I thoroughly recommend trying any of the numerous e-marketing and copywriting tutorials that are currently on the web. Continue reading →

Do Bing Users REALLY Click More?

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A new report released by the ad network Chikita, analyses traffic and click-through rates of the major search engines.

Chitika looked through 32 million ad impressions across its 50,000 strong network during a week in July to generate its findings, which has raised some eyebrows and caused a lot of discussion in the search community. Continue reading →