Categories: Cardinal PathTechnology Services

Tweet Visualizations, Panda 2.2, and The Perfect Landing Page – The Monday June 20th Roundup

So we had a bit of a kerfuffle in Vancouver last Wednesday. A little riot. Fortunately few people were hurt, and the only critical case was a guy who jumped (not thrown nor pushed) off the viaduct. However it brought out a lot of anger from Vancouverites, sad to see their city self immolate with a raging heat of drunkenness, dissatisfaction, and general will to destroy.

Then, like waking from a heavy night out, the city rose, cleaned itself, and went to work. Our day of destruction over, and barely a hangover to go with it.

Welcome to Vancouver, folks. Where even our darkest is just another shade of grey.

Anyhow, this week also brought some excitement from the web, with Inspired Mag showing how to create visualization maps out of tweets (something I wish I had the forethought to do before the riot), suggestions of Google’s Panda 2.2 update, tracking repeat customers, and how to make a perfect landing page.

Create

We start the week with a super cool how to from Inspired Mag on creating geovisualization web apps from tweets. Twitter, it seems, collects and geocodes tweets, so with some minor coding you can pull this data out and display tweets on a Google Maps based map. Very, very cool.

Attract

Social media Today has a “right on” post today entitled Your Facebook “Friend Requests”: Bad for Business… Annoying to Me! which, rightfully, complains about businesses who are still using personal pages instead of organization pages, then trying to “friend” users in order to get them on board. This is so totally the wrong way to do it, it’s wrong in every which way, shape, or form. There are so many advantages to using corporate pages, including not annoying me with friend requests.
Search Engine Roundtable believes that this weekend we saw the Panda 2.2 rollout last week, and has summaries of a bunch of peoples reactions to it. Some people are seeing their traffic back, others seeing further drops.

Analyze

Fellow CPer Justin Cutroni posted last week on 5 GA custom variables for ecommerce sites. These included custom variables for tracking coupon codes, payment methods, shipping methods, repeat customers and purchase history.
In response to Justin’s post, L3 Analytics came up with their own way to track repeat customers using events occurring on a user login.

Optimize

Kiss Metrics has a post on the anatomy of a perfect landing page. It’s really just a wonderful infographic pointing out the best practices for creating a high conversion landing page.
To follow up, Six revisions has an exploration of color schemes and how to use them online, including several pages of great examples of color use in web design.

Kent Clark

Some have compared him to the Dalai Lama, others to Kublai Kahn. When he isn't teaching third world children how to purify water with nothing more than a plastic bottle and a garden hose, he is creating mad waves for surfers off the west coast with little more than a paddle. Some say there is a boat involved, others that he walks on water. Little is known about his background. he appeared from nowhere 15 years ago and claims heritage from a land with neither want not need. He makes little comment, stating only that it was a pretty cool place. Fire does not burn him, cold does not hurt him. Words could... but they don't. When he passes, pedals fall off branches. When he speaks, hair tugs at skin, pulling just slightly in his direction. He does not sleep but he does dream. He has muscled his way into the lives of the famous and whispered his way into their hearts. And in the wee hours he plays oboe softly, as if to sooth the night to sleep.