The growth in the Mobile Industry over the last decade has made it paramount for all businesses to have Mobile Sites in order to reach this growing new target market.

Current local (South Africa) trends show that:

• There are ten million mobile Internet users in SA (Five million PC Internet users in SA)
• One in six Google searches in SA originates off a mobile device.
• In South Africa about 40 percent of mobile phone users have WAP-enabled phones.
• The top Mobile Applications currently in South Africa are: Mxit – with 15 million+ users – and Facebook.
• Mobile search and eCommerce will be a large area of growth in 2010.

In short, this indicates an importance for businesses to target mobile searchers and users of mobile applications.

Some of the best Mobile Site examples I can give include BBC, the Goal mobi site, and College Humour (N/B: “these examples obviously look better on your mobile phone – feel free to suggest your favourite mobile sites below“).

However, when creating a Mobile Site it is also imperative to build and optimise the Mobile Sites so it is user-friendly and accessible on the Mobile Web.

Mobile Design and SEO Best Practices
When designing a Mobile Site one aspect to consider is that one must understand that mobile searchers/users are different from PC searchers/users. In order to cater for Mobile users designers must:

• Provide an elegant experience by considering whether individuals possess a smart phone (for example an iPhone with fully featured web browsing) or a standard mobile phone (with stripped site features).
• Consider that phones are not used like PC’s – users are usually on the go therefore the site should be more goal oriented – Relevancy and Simplicity is key.
• Mobile designs are to conform to the new W3C standards in order to create mobile-friendly style sheets (CSS).
• Mobile Sites must be small, lightweight and fast-loading site – (< 20kb / page).
• Consider User Agent Detection –  this is another form of transcoding which takes into consideration the type of mobile phone an individual uses to search and provides more uniform browsing experience for various device types.

Once the Mobile Site has been built, Mobile SEO steps can now come into play. These include:

1.    Validating the page with the .Mobi Validator or the W3C Validator
2.    Following ‘traditional’ on-site  SEO Best Practices such as:

• Major keywords in the title tagging
• H1’s and body text
• Rich keyword Meta Titles and Descriptions
• Keyword-rich anchor text for internal links

3.    Mobile Search results tend to reflect ‘Local Search results’ – your site must be optimized for local type searches. Also submit your business info to local directories making sure your site is verified and included in sites like Google’s Local Business Center.
4.    Get the Mobile Site spidered and indexed – submit to major search engines:

• Google Sitemaps
• Yahoo! Submit Your Mobile Site

In short, the above Mobile Design and SEO factors are to be strongly considered when building a Mobile Site. These aspects help provide a solid Mobile Site foundation for your Mobile Campaign or Strategy. For further Mobile Campaign or Strategy enquiries, visit our Virtuosa website.

If you were a Indian Webmaster, why wouldn’t you want the Google Search Quality team to analyze your website and offer constructive advice on accessibility and improvements that can lead to better visibility for your website in Google’s search results?

According to the official Google India blog a new Site Clinic launched yesterday and will accept site submissions until 20 January 2010. Indian Webmasters can register their sites for the site clinic by simply filling in all the information requested on a form and by complying to some guidelines such as being registered on Google’s webmaster tools and by meeting Google’s quality guidelines.

There is also a Site Clinic especially for the Spanish-speaking market launched by the Google Webmaster Central blog in Spanish in September 2009.

For the rest of us, it seems we simply have to do the work ourselves via our own Google webmaster tools accounts and by meeting Google’s quality guidelines. Who said everything is fair?

Organic traffic is the web based traffic which you are naturally able to attract to your site without using any short cuts or paid submissions for the promotion of a website. This traffic is an unpaid listing on search engines or web directories.

Just the other day I came across a site that had a serious drop in its Organic traffic and this got me thinking of strategies that could be used help the site recover from this slump in Search visits.

Anywoo, I thought I’d write a short blog – (well 3 short tips to think about actually) – that you can employ in order to Increase Organic Search Engine Traffic to your site.

1. Choosing keywords –Choose your keywords wisely and implement them correctly. Get a mixture of longtail keywords as well with your niche keywords. Longtail keywords drive some major traffic to your site if focused on over the long term.

According to SEOWizz, “Carry out a keyword search using each variation to find more low competition longtail keywords … depending on the niche keywords, start writing and incorporate the longtails NATURALLY”.
WHY:
• 75% of all search’s are longtail keywords
• 20% of search’s everyday are completely unique to Google’s algorithm

The right keywords on your site creates powerful content that can be crawled and searched by search engines more efficiently – therefore giving better Search Engine Results Positioning (SERP’s).

2. Optimised Copywriting & Keyword Density – One method to increase traffic to your site through organic traffic is by having your copy re-written and optimised with the keywords you would like to target for that page. Bearing in mind that a web page can only be optimised for no more than 2 – 3 keywords (your primary, secondary and tertiary keywords), make sure you add unique content in your copy for your site as possible.

Other simple strategies to consider in your copy include:
• Header tags for your page titles (include your keyword)
• Linking keywords to other relevant pages on your site
• Bolding of important keywords on the web page

Click the image below to see an example of a Perfectly Optimised Web Page by SEOmoz

3. Analyze your competitors sites – It is vital that you take a look at the keywords that your competitors are ranking high for. The keyword tool you can use for this is the Google External Keyword Tool. This may give you an idea as to other keywords that you may have missed out in your research.

It would also be advisable to find your current position in the major search engines. Analysing your competitors ‘result positioning’ – SERP’s – on search engines compared to your positioning not only allows you to draw up a real-time comparison between you and the competitor, but will help you get a clear idea of where you rank for keywords compared to you competitor.

Note: I always think of it as a chance to be motivated or seat back a gloat at your competitors SERP’s.

Last thoughts: Always remember that a web page can only be optimised for no more than 2 or 3 keywords, and as SEOWizz says, “anymore than that and you’re simply giving your page too much work to do”.

For more resources on Increasing Organic Traffic, read:
• SEOWizz: Increase Organic Search Engine Traffic The Easy Way
• SEOMoz: URL Rewriting – Increase Organic Traffic By Using Dynamic URLs That Look Static

So, you’ve discovered the world of openGoo. It does a pretty good job overall but now you want to add some custom flavour! Where do you start? What are the options?

Firstly, I’d recommend running through the “Hello World” application tutorial (that can be found HERE ) as it gives you a quick overview of the control flow of openGoo. If you’re not familiar with MVC (Model-View-Controller) programming it’d be a good idea to take a few moments to read up on the principles of a MVC system, get the basic idea of what each component should be used for. I’ll be looking at the MVC of openGoo in a future blog post, for now we’re moving on to the Hooks.

If you’ve had previous experience with customization of a CRM / CMS / Web application you might be familiar with the concept of hooking / hooks. A hook is one of the easiest and fastest way to extend and application’s functionality in an upgrade safe way. And believe me, you want to keep your customizations as much upgrade safe as possible. Trying to figure out why a customization you did a year ago broke isn’t as fun the second time, it tens to ends in a complete rewrite of the initial customization. There’s nothing that frustrates me more than having to re-write code.

A hook is basically a place where you can “hook” in your custom code without having to change anything to the existing code. In fact, you don’t need to know how the rest of the package works to use a hook.

Using a hook in openGoo is as easy as 1, 2, 3.

1. Create a new php file in the ‘Application/Hooks’ directory, which will contain your custom code. Example: ‘opengoo_hooks.php’ , ‘myhooks.php’

2. Register your hook
   
   Hook::register(“opengoo”);
   
   The string used when registering the hook can be anything, as far as I can see its used as a key in the array where the hooks are stored. You could use this key to reference a specific hook later in your code, if needed. I’ll refer to this as the [hook_key] later. Also note it may be a good practice to name your php file “[hook_key]_hooks.php”.

3. Define the hook function.

function opengoo_render_upload_control($args, &$ret) {
if (upload_hook() == ‘opengoo’) {
$attributes = $args['attributes'];
echo file_field(‘file_file’, null, $attributes);
}
}

Note that the function name should be of the format ‘[hook_key]_[hook]‘.

In the above example [hook_key] = ‘opengoo’ and [hook] = ‘render_upload_control’.

Working example:

Lets say we want to customize one of the layouts on openGoo. For this example lets change the Login layout for illustration. Instead of overwriting the layout file in “Applications/Layout” we can simply define a hook to set the layout to be used to our new custom layout.

Default Layout of login dialog

First lets create our hook file. I created a file “example_hooks.php” in the ‘Application/Hooks’ folder.

<?php

/* Register your hook else it won’t fire! */
Hook::register(“example”);

/* Define hook functions */
function example_override_action_view($controller, &$ignored) {
/* Check which controller has fired the hook */
if ($controller->getControllerName() == ‘access’) {
/* Check that the action is ‘login’ */
if ($controller->getAction() == ‘login’) {
$controller->setLayout(‘example’);
}
}
}

?>

I’ve used the ‘override_action_view’ hook for this example. This hook gets fired by all the controllers. We want to change the layout of the login form so we need to set the new layout when the ‘login’ action of the ‘access’ controller is called. After we’ve tested that we’re at the right spot we can change the layout by calling the “setLayout” method of the controller.

You can use the getLayout method to see what layout is currently being used. In this example the original layout being used is ‘Application/Layouts/dialog.php’

Next step, we need to create our new layout ‘example’. Note you use the file name without extension to set the layout, openGoo automatically looks for the layout in the ‘Application/Layout’ folder. Create a copy of the dialog.php in ‘Application/Layouts’ and rename it to ‘example.php’. Open up ‘example.php’ and make some changes to the layout. I simply added an image below the dialog div and the word “example” to the H1 tags.

<img src=”<?php echo get_image_url(“jack.jpg”) ?>” height=”250px”>

I put the image of Jack, my trusty testing duck, in ‘public/assets/themes/default/images/jack.jpg’ the ‘get_image_url’ function fetches the image URL according to the selected theme.

Browse to the login dialog page and ‘Hello Jack!’. It’s that simple to add a duck to your openGoo login page.

Custom 'example' Layout

List of available hooks: ( for more detail take a look at ‘Application/Hooks/opengoo_hooks.php’ )

/*
* – render_page_actions: Called when drawing actions for an object’s view. Call add_page_action to add actions.
* – render_page_header: Called when drawing the page header.
* – render_getting_started: Add additional getting started help.
* – render_object_properties: Called when drawing properties for an object’s view. Echo the HTML to be drawn.
* – reminder_email: Called when an email reminder is being sent.
* – render_userbox_crumbs: Called when drawing the userbox (top-right of the page).
* – autoload_javascripts: Tells which javascripts should be load when the application starts.
* – autoload_stylesheets: Tells which CSSs should be loaded when the application starts.
* – render_administration_icons: Called when drawing administration panel.
* – object_definition: Allows to define extra columns for a system object.
* – render_object_description: Called when rendering the description that goes below the title in an object’s view.
* – permissions_sql: Called when generating the SQL permissions string for object listings.
* – can_access: Called before checking access permissions for an object.
* – object_edit_categories: Called when rendering categories for an object creation or edition interface.
* – object_validate: Executed before saving an object to validate object fields.
* – before_action: Called before executing an action to determine if the action will be called.
* – override_action_view: Called before generating an action’s view, so that you can change it.
*/

Fire your own hooks from your custom module:

To create and fire a hook from your own module, you simply call the static fire method of the Hook class.

Hook::fire($function, $argument, &$ret)

$function : String containing the name of the hook. Example ‘ render_page_actions’.

$argument : Arguments passed to the hook. For the built in hooks this is normally the current controller.

$ret : The value

Well that’s it for hooks in openGoo. This is meant as a starting point for customization, I’m sure there’s more to be added, any input is welcome. In the next blog I’ll be showing how to create a simple Bulletine Board type module.

OpenGoo is an open source web office developed by Feng Office and the OpenGoo community. It can be used for project management, including the scheduling of tasks and milestones, document storage, contact and calendar management, email receiving (POP3 or IMAP) and sending(SMTP) and runs on a PHP webserver with MySQL installed.

OpenGoo can be downloaded here and is easily installed on a websever, with minimal setup needed. If you don’t have experience with webservers it might be a good idea to get the sys admin to handle the install. Never the less the install is quite straight forward, with installation instruction located in the readme.txt file.

When installed on a local firewall, OpenGoo has the advantages of a web interface without having sensitive data being transferred to and fro a remote server somewhere on the internet. You have 100% control over your data, even allowing for custom encryption to be set for the more paranoid among us, whereas other online services limit your control. No internet connection is needed to use the application and thus can be completely isolated from the outside world. Or it could be installed on a remote server that is accessed by different people all over the internet.

I quite like the interface of OpenGoo. It uses the extJS framework to render the UI and site layouts. It utilizes AJAX to update content dynamically giving an enjoyable user experience.

So, this is a very nice piece of software, but what if we want to add some custom features? The one thing the project is greatly lacking is development documentation. There is limited information in the openGoo WIKI which isn’t at all satisfactory and quite frankly no help to the novice.

After browsing through the wiki, forum and blog, I decided the only way to get anywhere was to dive head on into the code. To my delight, the code itself is well commented and any PHP programmer that has some experiece with the MVC (model view controller) method of programming would catch on quickly to the basic structure of the application.

This is the first blog in a series of blogs on openGoo, that I hope will help other developers with their customizations. In the next blog I’ll cover how to create Hooks in openGoo and in another future post I plan to give an example of creating a custom “Bulletin Board” addon, explaining some of the MVC structure I’ve uncovered.

( Check out http://www.opengoo.org/ for more info. or http://demo.opengoo.org/ to check out the demo )

Full service digital agency Virtuosa announced today that an agreement to acquire IceBlue has been favorably concluded. Virtuosa and IceBlue have worked together closely over the past year with IceBlue bringing additional development capabilities to the joint projects. The buy-out was a natural progression when IceBlue MD Rex Green indicated his intention to sell to pursue other business interests.

“IceBlue have worked together side by side with Virtuosa for some time, so it was a natural move for us” MD Rex Green comments on the recent events.

The IceBlue team is a natural fit within the Virtuosa Group who already provides clients a full-service digital offering. The addition of the IceBlue’s team of developers enables Virtuosa to offer more specialized development and technological solutions to their clients.

The new Virtuosa team members will work within Virtuosa Design and Development Division headed by Bryce Hancock, Division GM and Creative Director, who is very excited about the changes ahead. “This has always been the vision of our company to constantly grow in the digital arena, by adding these developers’ specialized skills we compliment an already great creative team.”

Virtuosa and IceBlue clients can be assured that this recent development will not only further enhance our web development skills offering but also make us stronger in the digital environment.

Having recently experienced the burn of plagiarism, I started thinking of the ethics of the Internet. And the question of ethics of in particular reverse engineering like SWF decompiling. There are many different programs that do this and I believe they really do have their place in the arsenal of any developer.

These are exceptionally useful tools, firstly for events of where source files have gone missing and changes are needed. Tools like this can also be exceptionally useful for learning purposes, where one can see the source of a SWF to gather a greater understanding of how to create their own similar applications or see a different way of thinking. It is hard to work in a vacuum, and what better way is there to learn, other than from seeing what others do? Someone once said something like, it’s the dwarf that can see the furthest when standing on the shoulders of giants.

This is exceptionally useful, however it seems all too easy for people to cross from learning from others to stealing from others… Many people just find it too easy to copy and paste. The dwarfs are now trying to be the giants…

Whatever happened to the pride of achieving something, of presenting work to the world knowing that it hatched from the egg of your own creativity?

We all know that in terms of SEO, Flash is considered less than perfect, and completely Flash driven sites are considered by some in the SEO world as a complete ‘No no’, however the times are changing.

Whilst Flash might not be perfectly indexed, when we marry Flash, Ajax and server-side scripting we can start to really achieve great results. Google can index dynamic text and content passed through XML etc, and with new innovations like Asual’s SWFAddress allowing SEO friendly URL’s to navigate Flash, as well as adding the ever so important Back button functionality often missing in Flash sites.

Whilst the battle of SEO vs Flash continues, I predict that it will not be long before we can have our cake and eat it…

We have just launched our very first Facebook application, TrashCanKidz! It has taken a lot of time and a lot of effort from a team of passionate people.

The purpose of the Application is to start to raise awareness of the TrashCanKidz Project which is going to be released further on this year. The driving force of the project is to raise money for orphans around the world through the adopting of “virtual kidz” and eventually having a personalized ragdoll as customized by the viewer, the funds generated by this will help real world orphans.

The application was Virtuosa’s first Facebook application, and was built in conjunction with Ensight, IceBlue and Datacyte. Being our first Facebook Application it came with its fair share of headaches and complications, but we persevered and now it has been released. You can find this application at http://apps.facebook.com/trashcankidz/. Add it and start FREEING THE LUV!

Be sure to lookout for the full site when it is released, we are looking forward to hearing comments and opinions on it.

If you’ve got the time for a little bit of self-study, here are some great articles that you will find useful. I am simply mentioning the articles and have thus provided links to the original source.

Web Site Usability Checklist
Search engine promotion is important: most visitors use a search engine to find your site. But once they arrive, they have to be able to actually use the site and understand the content. Otherwise, your site is a waste of their time.

Remember, You Don’t Have Only One Homepage
A great reminder that when people search and find your site, you homepage is not really the only “homepage”. You need to analyze your site’s analytical data to figure out what pages your site’s viewers are landing on, what the bounce rates are and what page they are exiting your site from.

7 Essential SEO Cheat Sheets
An excellent compilation of cheat sheets most SEO’s, site owners, developers and bloggers will find useful. It includes links to a Web Developers SEO Cheat Sheet, Html and Xhtml cheat sheets, a Search Cheat Sheet including Search Engine Operators, a Website Usability Checklist, a WordPress Cheat Sheet, a mod_rewrite cheat sheet & a htaccess cheatsheet.

Are You Making These Web Analytics Mistakes?
I’d like to think this post is talking about retaining site visitors, useful ideas on how to use Analytical data, but this artile looks at the seven biggest mistakes of web analytics. What are you not using effectively in tracking site visitors?

What to Do and What Not to Do With Analytics Profiles
Some Do’s and Don’t that should be useful for novices in the web analytics department. Web analytics are more important to your online success than ever.