Over the weekend, we made a video ad. One of our clients sells pre-lit Christmas trees (just take it out of the box, fluff it up, and you have instant tree). So we set up the tree in my living room and wrapped up a bunch of empty boxes as presents. I also had two large halogen lights from a previous photography project. Stephanie bought a Sony tripod that includes controls for the video camera on the tripod's grip. I shot the video, she edited it, and we added it to Google ads on Sunday night. We will make another video this afternoon to post to YouTube and various other places, along with the client's website. 0 comments

Does your cat wake you up in the morning? Here's a very funny animated cartoon.

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Silo, internal architecture, theme structures: it's the same idea. Restructure your website so the pages are clustered in relevant groups. If you're rebuilding Ford.com, all the pages about Ford Mustangs go in one group, pages about F-150 pickup trucks in another group, and so on. This lets Google's spider identify the theme of the clusters so it can index and rank the pages better. I did this for andreas.com (avg. 30,000 unique visitors per month) a few months ago: traffic has increased to 39,000 unique visitors (the last 30 days). 0 comments

Thinking of building websites for PDAs? Want to see something new on your Treo or iPhone? Use your PDA to visit my website design tips for PDAs.

I was looking at my analytics this morning and noticed that my PDA site was very popular. I found that it's one of the very few pages at Google on how to do PDA web design, so I updated the site this afternoon and tested it on my Treo. Now I'll add Google Adwords for mobile devices to see how that works. For our clients, we'll do advertising on PDAs. 0 comments

Two Screens: I added a second monitor to my computer. It's now a 27" wide monitor :-) I can move windows from one screen to another. To do this, you put in a graphics card ($80-$150, depending on quality) that has ports for two monitors. Just add a second monitor. Very useful for work. 0 comments

Can you fool Google just a little bit? A client called us; one of his websites disappeared from Google. It didn't show up anymore for his top keywords. I searched at Google with site:www.NameOfClientSite.com; that showed that his site had been removed entirely from Google. The webmaster and the webdev team assured me they had not added spammer code to the site. So I opened the site's code and began to look for the problem. First, I checked the CSS. It was a simple CSS. No problem there. I looked at the index page. I began going through the site, page by page. In the sixth page, in the middle of the code, I found it. Someone in the webdev team used the ol' absolute:position trick to hide text in the website. By positioning the text ten inches to the left of the monitor and five inches up, the text was "displayed" outside the monitor. Visitors couldn't see it, but Google could. Thus Google blacklisted the entire site. The webmaster now knew what to search for, so with a global search, he found all instances of this code and removed them. The next step is to ask Google to review the site and add it again. Google however takes their time to do this (it's part of the penalty), so it may take 2-3 months, if he's lucky, to be in Google again. That's three months of lost sales. By the way, Yahoo also bans this trick, so he could have been booted out of Yahoo too. Don't fool Google, not even a little bit. 0 comments