Areatrade
Our thoughts, rants and inside knowlege of web design & development!
Our thoughts, rants and inside knowlege of web design & development!
Jun 23rd
Good reviews on your Google Places listing will encourage potential customers to choose your company, they can help create a positive image of the company, and people are more likely to choose your business over one which is similar but has either no comments or negative ones.
There are several ways to get customers, who are satisfied with your products/services, to review your listing. You could use a newsletter to suggest the idea, or when you send a receipt or confirmation email of a recent product purchased, you could suggest that they review your business on Google Places.
You will need the link of your listing for them to review it, to find the correct link, you need to go to your Google Places Listing page, and in the top right hand corner, there will be a tab, marked “Link” click this and it will automatically copy this for you, you can then paste this link in to emails/newsletters etc and send this link to clients.
If you are interested in getting reviews to your Google Places listing, contact Areatrade. We understand how important social media is. Areatrade can create your listing, optimise it and help with getting your clients to review the listing.
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Jun 22nd
Google Places is a free tool, set up by Google, to help businesses appear online. Once your business is listed on Google Places, you will see the many benefits:
If you are interested in setting up a Google Places listing for your business or you want to know more about any of the other social media and search engine optimisation services that we offer, contact Areatrade.
Jun 21st
Ryan Dunn, 34-year-old star of popular student stunt programme Jackass, died in a car crash in Pennsylvania on Monday morning, and within minutes of his death, he had appeared as a trending topic on Twitter.
Dunn – @ryandunntv on Twitter – used not only the microblogging feed, but also the picture-based social network Tumblr – posted a link (which has since been removed) via Twitter to a picture of himself drinking with friends on his Tumblr, hours before his crash.
As news of his death spread, celebrities and Jackass fans alike were posting tributes over the Twitterverse – with one user of photo-sharing service Flickr snapping the wreckage of the car.
Although film critic Roger Ebert has drawn controversy for his harsh comment – “friends don’t let jackasses drink and drive,” @ebertchicago said, most of the tributes spanning the social networking services Dunn used – Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr and even Facebook – have been overwhelmingly positive, remembering his sense of humour, friendly manner, and willingness to shine in the eyes of the camera.
Jun 17th
At Areatrade we are always extremely proud to launch new website design projects; our latest website design is for a specialist security company, Chiswick Security. They specialise in all aspects of security including, key cutting, security grilles and door repairs.
We built the website using WordPress as it was the ideal platform for this site, we were able to create a clear, attractive website that was easy to navigate.
Visit the website http://www.chiswicksecurity.co.uk/ and let us know what you think.
If you are interested in any of our design services including website redesign and ecommerce web design, contact us here.
Jun 14th
The effectiveness of social networking has reared its head again in the United States Congress. Congressman Anthony Weiner has reacted to his mistake in unwittingly sending an allegedly indecent message – and image – via Twitter, forgetting to hit the ‘direct message’ button. Thanks to the speed at which social networks run, the image was gotten hold of by other users of the popular micro-blogging network, and subsequently re-tweeted around the world.
President Obama, who has called for the resignation of Weiner, is familiar with the impact of social media himself. Throughout his presidency, and even his initial electoral campaign, Obama has kept his supporters updated via his own Twitter account (@BarackObama has over eight million followers worldwide), his Facebook account, and YouTube – a speech by Vice-President Joe Biden concerning health reforms was an instant success on the video-sharing website.
Weiner, who initially denied that the indecent image was posted by him, has apologised via Twitter, but Obama is still insistent that “if it was me, I would resign.” Interviewed on US channel NBC about the incident, a clip including Obama’s comment has been seen circulating – appropriately enough – on YouTube.
Jun 7th
The team at WordPress.com have been working hard with the guys at Twitter to unveil the new Follow Button to the online world for the first time.
The new Follow Button is designed for your readers to easily follow you on twitter without ever leaving your WordPress website. This is a huge benefit for businesses that previously had to redirect users back to their respective Twitter accounts and risked losing customers once they had left the company web page. The new Follow Button will act similarly to the Facebook “Like” button. You can incorporate the new Follow Button into your site by:
The new Follow Button should help increase your site’s reach and exposure. If you would like to know more about incorporating this feature in to your website or would like to know more about the social media services that Areatrade provide, contact us here.
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May 27th
Introduction
Facebook, if used correctly and efficiently, can be a great tool for generating interest, brand awareness and sales in your company. With more than 500 million active users, Facebook offers a huge platform for your business.
As a business, you will use a Facebook Page rather than a personal profile page. This allows you to invite Facebook users as fans and also promote your website and blog posts.
Ideally you want to be posting as regularly as possible, not excessively, but with the intention of updating your fans and keeping them interested in your business.
Before you start posting you should develop a content strategy. If you think of your Facebook page as being similar to a magazine, then your fans are following your page because they are waiting for something interesting to read.
What should I write about?
May 2nd
In a surprising display of the power of our ever increasingly connected world, a user of the popular social networking service Twitter posted live updates on what later became clear was the raid resulting in the death of Osama bin Laden. Sohaib Athar, known to his followers as @ReallyVirtual, posted the following tweet at around 1am local time:
Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).
Sohaib continued to post updates on the strange events, completely unaware that he was in fact reporting on the top-secret US military operation to capture Osama bin Laden, dead or alive.
The abbottabad helicopter/UFO was shot down near the Bilal Town area, and there’s report of a flash. People saying it could be a drone.
The most entertaining of his tweets from last night must be this tweet describing his moment of realisation that he had in fact unwittingly live blogged one of the most anticipated military operations in the last decade:
Uh oh, now I’m the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it.
The startling tweets can be read on his twitter profile, and they clearly show how powerful the medium of social networking is and the startling speed at which information can spread across More >
Apr 26th
The recent discovery of a “location history database” built into iOS (the OS employed by the humble iPhone) – which effectively tracked users’ locations and activities – has finally been addressed by the Big Apple himself: CEO of the company, Steve Jobs.
According to the website MacRumors (macrumors.com), a concerned reader wrote directly to Jobs regarding a file built into iOS named “consolidated.db”, which keeps a record of precise locations via longitude and latitude co-ordinates. A visualisation of this data, which could be effectively used to pinpoint an iPhone user on a map, was created by enterprising researchers via a program for Mac OS X, sparking media attention and rather a large amount of paranoia in iPhone users. The anonymous reader who wrote to Jobs cited the idea as “unnerving” and threatened to switch to Android – an OS designed for smartphones which is becoming an increasingly popular rival to the iPhone and other competitors such as the BlackBerry – unless Jobs gave a response. “[Android] don’t track me,” claimed the reader.
Steve Jobs’ response was to call the idea that the information could be circulated “false”, saying verbatim that, “we [Apple] don’t track anyone.” While there is no evidence to suggest More >
Apr 12th
According to data released recently by eagle-eyed Experian Hitwise, Google’s grip on the search engine market – leading to the colloquial use of “to Google” as a verb – may be slipping, due to competition from the name that keeps cropping up when computers are concerned – Microsoft.
64.42% of searches in the US routed through Google in March, claim Experian Hitwise, and while that is still two-thirds of the market, a sizeable 30.01% can be claimed by Microsoft – 14.32% via their well-publicised search engine Bing, and 15.69% from Yahoo!, which is technically owned by the Microsoft corporation. In a smooth and virtually silent virtual coup, Yahoo! is now powered by Bing.
Bing, ridiculed by some as an acronym for “But It’s Not Google,” also appears to be doing well in terms of successful searches, 80.32% of its users clicking on a search result, whereas the idle Googler only has a 65.91% chance of finding an appropriate website via the search facility. As a result, Google appears to have flatlined somewhat, their market share down 10% since August 2010.
Bing, on the other hand, is up massively from 9.9% of searches as the last year ended, and although Google still controls the More >