Sam Davis | Blasted Thing

I’ve been busy for the past few months developing ShopperGuard, a new web-site which is an independent web-site verification tool for E-Commerce traders across the globe. Companies can sign up to ShopperGuard, and pay for one or many “ShopperGuard seals”.

A seal is then supplied to the user provided their web-site passes a number of stringent tests, which verifies everything from website security and encryption, the authenticity of postal addresses and telephone numbers - and it ensures the company is fully legitimate in terms of their T’s & C’s, Privacy Policy, Returns Policy, delivery schedule, and correct VAT and Company information.

A ShopperGuard seal benefits both the web surfers, and also the company whose website the seal is on. Firstly IBM-gathered statistics in 2006 showed that “70% of shoppers only use sites that display a security protection seal” - therefore I’d consider it crazy as a business to not get a seal and risk only converting 3 out of every 10 customers.

Indeeed, it’s the difference of conversion rate that sells the ShopperGuard concept, and we’re currently pulling in the final batches data to convey the effctiveness of this logo - as it is most definitely making differences to the sites we’re currently testing. We’ve got a number of clients on board at the moment, and one of the guys at Simply Bar Stools has been giving us estimates of 14-15% improvement since its inception.

So, it’s good for the business - but, decisively, it’s also essential for the customer. Seeing a security seal such as ShopperGuard is reassuring, and it provides peace of mind that they are shopping at a kosher company! With the confidence in our seal, the user will spend less time checking the identity of the company and more time deciding what to buy - which can only be a good thing for both parties.

A simple click of the seal will open a window which shows them the authenticty of the web-site. Plus, it has been designed in such a way that the seal can not be forged easily. We’ve got a number of different logo options to choose from, and as the service comes in at a much cheaper rate than other companies such as Hacker Safe, ISIS and Trust Guard - everything points to our product becoming a huge success. Will let you know more about it when it is live!

In the meantime, any inconsistencies or errors throughout the site would be appreciated, as this baby is going live this year…

Recently, I’ve been playing about with a great web-tool called Build a Niche Store, which gives you a great opportunity to piggy-back on to the Ebay affiliate scheme. Obviously, you can sign to become an Ebay affiliate at the drop of the hat, however the time is then spent on all the marketing and the website building - but this piece of software does that all for you!

Check out Abbey-Models, it’s a webiste which was created in no time - and it lists a number of Ebay auctions on the site from a chosen category, in this case, collectible cars. On this occasion, I have manually gone in to the code and ensured that only the sellers own listings actually feature on this site - but the whole purpose of the software is to embrace all sellers, and list categories and sub-categories on a niche subject. Your affiliate ID is inserted into the URL that sends the user off to Ebay, and then you gain commission on every Ebay item which is subsequently purchased.

However the beauty in this really revolves around the fact that the EBay listings on your page are shown as HTML and therefore searchable by the search engines. A lot of Ebay’s own scripts that they offer for affiliate marketing come in the form of Javascripts, which do not do the user any favours in terms of optimising their pages.

Similarly, a plethora of neatly worded articles can be easily imported in to the site, and, together with an intelligent Adwords campaign, building plenty of incoming links for natural SEO, this would provide an instant hit. The success stories I’ve already heard from this are staggering, so it is definitely worth checking out!

I swear this graceful old lady deserves a knighthood.

Not because she’s good at acting, but because she must have the patience of a saint, especially with the rubbish story lines that she is given. I’m convinced that if you were a fly on the wall in her dressing room, like clockwork, you would be able to hear a sigh of resignation every morning as she picks up the script only to realise that once again she is burdened with the task of taking part in more meaningless pub chat in the Rovers.

This woman, whatever her name is, does this day after day, and probably gets paid something like 50K for it too. The role is plain awful, and it is something pretty must any old biddie could do ad hoc.

Similarly, character-wise, apart from having a long lost husband - I don’t know anything about her.  I mean, does the poor cow live in the Rovers or what? I know she cooks a mean hot pot but thats about it! Granted, the actress and the character is old, but even still, I’m sure she’d appreciate something more challenging than taking yet another G&T order off Rita.

Her and Emily Bishop must wonder what they’ve done wrong.

I have officially decided that I’m never wearing this combination ever again on a night out. Once upon a time it was a casual yet sophisticated look which was just as practical as it was stylish. However, to my horror, I went out the other week into the Moon in the Square only to find that nearly every chav was now sporting the jumper/shirt look.

Given that chavs are recognisable from their crater-face skin and their general disgusting-ness, I have now taken a dislike to this kind of attire, as quite frankly, I do not want to be one of them. What are they going to copy next?

I’ve been experimenting a lot recently with domain aliases. In simple terms, a domain alias allows additional domain names to all lead to the exact same locations on your original website. For example, I am hosting the domain “blastedthing.co.uk”, and I also own the domain “htoamil.co.uk”.

I have added the htoamil domain to be a domain alias of blastedthing, so that if you type in the former, you would arrive at the latter - however the user would still see the htoamil.co.uk domain name in their address bar. Rather than use an ugly but simple framed redirection, you can use a domain alias, which enables the user to browse through the pages on htoamil.co.uk, and the page and file names in the URL mirror exactly what it would on blastedthing, but it retains the htoamil.co.uk domain!

By the way, at this point I should mention that the reason for buying the htoamil.co.uk address was simple - the amount of internet users who over-enthusiastically access their email only to spell Hotmail wrong is incredible.

But thats beside the point! The whole domain aliasing subject got me thinking. As we know, by using PHP, it is possible to read the address bar, and display different contents based on what the URL is. For example, as you can see with htoamil.co.uk, renting-advice.com, blastedthing.co.uk, or any of the other domain names that I’ve got - the site title is different for each one. So we are getting the same site on the web with slightly different characteristics - enough for Google to think it is a separate site perhaps….

As well as this being ideal for SEO, it also paves the way for new ideas. I mean, why stop with changing the site title only? Why not integrate colour changes, logo differences, textual changes too? I could implement these and lots of other functions which would effectively produce different looking sites with the same content.

That’s got me thinking, I’m off to play with Magento…