It’s been a while since I provided an update to this blog. I’d like to share some work that I’ve done for my clients and go over some of the basic technologies.

1. Xtown.ca

Xtown is an extreme sports facility located in Quebec, and they have an excellent indoor track for motocross, ATVs and more. For Xtown we’ve provided web design work, as well as PHP/MySQL programming work in order to allow them to manage members, bookings and payments on the website through the front end and back end. It is an intricate system which is fully custom developed just for this business!

Visit Xtown.ca for Extreme Sports, Motocross, ATV, SNOX and more in Quebec!

2. BrockSmeaton.com

Brock’s website needed a re-design, so we got to it to simplify and clean up the site. The menus were re-designed, and we switched to a side navigation with fixed layers on top and side for a frame-like look, but without the frames. We all know that frames are not good for SEO, right? Also we nixed the landing page, which has been a long tradition among realtor websites (and other industries) to make a grand first impression. Instead we have an index page that is part of the regular design template, with a cool javascript slideshow going through it.

Visit Brocksmeaton.com for West Vancouver Real Estate listings!

3. Alta Pacific Logo and Branding

Alta Pacific - Investing in Canadian Mortgages

Our newest clients, Alta Pacific Mortgage Investment Corporation, wanted a brand new logo as well as business cards designed for their new business. They provide impeccable services in investing your money into mortgage securities, which is a much more profitable, safe, and viable investment in these volatile markets we’ve seen recently. We also did a brochure for the company as well.

Alta Pacific Brochure - Investing in Canadian Mortgages

Visit Alta Pacific’s website for more information on Investing in Canadian Mortgages. We have not designed their website yet, but we hope to do that soon as the company grows!

TinyURL.com is a great service. It allows you to truncate a long URL into one short URL that you can easily distribute to friends and associates through social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Ping.FM and more.

The only limitation I saw with TinyURL was that, it allows for one URL per forward. I saw a friend of mine trying to advertise 2 different URLs at once through Facebook, and it was pretty messy and long. So I thought, “Why not forward multiple URLs at once with something better?”

And then I came up with Krunchd.com. Krunchd is a unique service that allows you to aggregate up to 30 URLs into one short URL, that resembles this:

http://krunchd.com/jeffkee

Once this is aggregated, you can always go back to edit the URL set, using a longer URL that we send to you by email. You can send that URL to your friends or colleagues to allow them to make changes to the URL sets on their own.

TinyURL on Steroids! Share multiple URLs at once.

What initially started out as a “TinyURL on Steroids” concept has now grown into somewhat of a collaboration platform, and now that we’ve introduced the “Top 10 List”, it also serves as viable content that will be picked up by Google, providing you with backlinks to your site.

The concept was simple, and the programming wasn’t so bad, especially with the help from my good friend Jordan Brill, who provided the domain name as well as the design concept.

One big difference between TinyURL and Krunchd.com is that we give you the option to set your own short URL hash. TinyURL will assign a random 6 digit alphanumeric character set. We provide that option too, but if you specify a hash, and it’s available, it’s yours to keep for the rest of your life. So go ahead, reserve your namespace now at krunchd.com.

As many of you know, I’ve been working on programming the TTZMedia’s Affiliate Banner System for the last several months for John Chow, and there’s always ongoing maintenance to do. Speed and load optimization, design fixes, and stats modules upgrades, referral program add-ons, etc.

One of the things that came up as we started accepting more affiliates who are not friends with John Chow was this : CLICK FRAUD.

So many affiliates are starting to take advantage of it, logging more clicks than they should, that are not deserved.

Here are some of the more obvious signs that I can disclose :

• One ip address has dozens, or in one case, 119 clicks over a 2 month period.
• You see a CTR of over 20%, while the views are logging quite a bit. If you had 5 view and 1 person clicked it, that’s 20% CTR. But If you have hundreds of views, or thousands, with a double digit CTR, there’s something wrong.
• We see multiple clicks from the same ip address that logged into the affiliate admin section.

There are more that I won’t disclose as that’s my algorithm secrets. BUT.

All of the above can be scanned and noted with very simple database management queries, and are easy to detect. Right now I’ve ran some scripts that I wrote this evening to zap these extra clicks, and there have been thousands of clicks removed already over the last hour or so, with more to come.

We’re not stupid. Those signs are easy to find. It’s very easy for us to determine whether an affiliate is messing with us or not. Proxy servers, automatic page refreshers are all gimmicks. We know. So does our affiliate provider, shopping.com. If the logs don’t match, you’ll be booted. Simple as that.

I’ll note roughly how many clicks are removed by the end of the evening.

ActiveX controls - a method of an embedded controlling system that gets deployed on your computer from a website so that certain websites can perform more robust functions - that’s what it is basically. It was a Microsoft creation, and when the internet was young and not as powerful, it was a goldmine for web-based software. Some major websites that use ActiveX controls is MLSLINK for realtors (Multiple Listing Service which provides real-time online listing data). Also, Quickbooks online (an accounting management system that tracks income and expenses) uses ActiveX control for their online platform.

It’s getting out of fashion. It’s in its dying breaths, because web languages have evolved enough to be able to handle very complex tasks in a visually friendly and speedy manner without having to rely on ActiveX controls anymore. I have observed how the MLSLINK system works and all of these functions could be performed just the same (if not better) using a blend of Javascript, AJAX, and robust server-side scripting using PHP or ASP.

Why use ActiveX controls to program your stuff, when other more common codebases can handle it all the same, and you have more learning resources for Javascript/PHP/AJAX online than ActiveX documentations? Also note that having to install ActiveX to be able to use a platform is a tedious task. The whole point of many web-based software is so that you can observe and modify your data from virtually anywhere in the world where you have internet. If I were using Quickbooks online, and I was in a hotel far away from home, it would take me a few extra steps to be able to use it at that computer.

Javascript, PHP, AJAX is more than enough to create very robust and functional data handling web-applications, and you don’t need to install anything everytime you use it on a different computer.

Down with ActiveX controls - in comes Web 2.0.

Jamie Harrop wrote a post on Daily Web Ideas on 7 ways to increase your pagerank. Great post I must say and I recommend reading it. He discussed how to get a better pagerank from an excellent marketing and advertising point of view.

On another note I’d like to toss in some of my own SEO ideas for better results - from a web developer’s perspective. Considering Jamie has already covered the other end, this is all I have left.

I cannot stress enough the issue of Keywords. No matter how good your pagerank, if your website is not picked up by the right keywords and phrases it’s useless. Use the right keywords in the URL, the <title> tag, as well as in your content (which include page titles, text, as well as deep-links). If your website is not a blog but a custom made business website, you really need to work on this. Make sure you employe Search-Engine friendly URL schemes. If you are a blogger on Wordpress, be sure to take advantage of slugs and other SEO-friendly Wordpress features.

When the keywords are scattered throughout your page, remember that the things that appear first in the code (which would most likely mean the stuff that appears towards the top-left corner of your screen) has more weight and influence than the other side.

Always use Google Webmaster tools to check for broken links, crawl frequency etc. and keep a track of them if you are serious about SEO on your business website. Make sure your robots.txt file is set correctly to allow good exposure. And don’t use cheap shady tactics like hidden text and illegitimate redirection. Note the difference between 301 and 302 redirects if you often move around pages and such.

Cheers.