Newsletter March 2006

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Thanks to all who answered our call for contacts in membership based organisations. You're a well-connected lot!

Should we end up working with any of the organisations you suggested, you'll find that we're very generous with the Champagne.

Getting back to Google

As you may recall from last time, Google had fallen out of love with us (with good reason) and we'd evoked the power of the New Year's Resolution to put things right.

At this early stage, we're concentrating on improving - and adding to - the content on the website. (We've also experimented with Google Sitemaps... of which more further down the page.)

Delighted to report that we're seeing some progress: after ignoring our website for nearly 5 months, Google is now crawling the site roughly once a week... and we're back in the search results.

Countdown

Used appropriately, a countdown can be a great addition to a web page.

They can be effective in calling people to action: a countdown to a major annual event will carry the implication "Book now... time is running out!"

For users with JavaScript, we can even make it tick.

Follow this link to see a countdown in action.

Using Postcode Data

We're currently talking to an organisation that wants its website users to be able to search for service providers by a range of parameters - including geography.

By having the user enter their postcode, we'd be able to return a list of practitioners in his or her area - and even sort them by distance.

There's an demonstration postcode-based search on our website: Give it a try!

Google Sitemaps

As part of our "Getting Back to Google" project, we've been experimenting with a (fairly) new Google service: Google Sitemaps.

It works like this:

• We create a sitemap - in a form specified by Google - and keep it up to date.
• Google retrieves the sitemap and uses it to "inform" its crawling and indexing.

The sitemap gives us the opportunity to tell Google how we view the BRAINBOX website: the pages that we consider to be the most important; the pages that change most often, etc.

Whether it's actually having an effect is difficult to judge. What we do know is that Google is downloading our sitemap every day; hopefully the information is being put to good use.