Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Buyers Market

"Excuse me sir, I couldn't help but notice that you're somewhat more than comfortably overweight, are you sure you should be making a purchase of pastry based goods?"

I was quite taken aback by this. A till operator in my local supermarket chain telling me off for my lifestyle and advising me on purchases! Jeeze! Some people have mas huevos.

"Ahhh, no I'm happy enough thanks" - I reply, guiltily sliding an apple turnover into my rucksack.

"Hey you!", shouts a proprietor of gentlemans apparel perpendicular to my exit, "Yeah YOU!", pointing towards me. "Those clothes you're wearing are SHIT. Seriously, how the fuck do you expect to get laid wearing THAT!? Come on, look at this! Fuckin' smart huh?"

The suit, shirt and tie he's pointing at in the shop window are quite admirable and I can see how my normally disheveled appearance would be addressed by such a purchase. But still… that's quite an aggressive delivery for a salesperson. Besides I've never had much truck with that "clothes maketh the man" line.

"Eh? Ah… no… no, I'm not really looking to buy a suit". I move along, the suit seller already yelling toward another shopper who seems to have irked him with their lack of dress sense.

The uncommonly cold (for this time of year) air hits my lungs and makes my teeth grit as I skip through the opening from the shopping centre to the towns main street. Looking up from my rucksack, having retrieved my wooly bunnet, I find a strangely lecherous young man standing in front of me. It seems he's a florist, his left hand clutches a bunch of decrepit looking flowers, his right is, well… 'occupied' at the front of his trousers.

"My sister's just turned sixteen" he says, "loves these flowers so she does, buy them and who knows what luck you might have!" I ponder over the daffodils he's clutching, and notice the sickly way light is glinting off the stems, realising they're made of plastic, further flaws become apparent, wire pokes though the faux stems, the edges of the cloth petals are frayed and close to being completely unraveled.

I express disinterest to empty space as he's moved on to another potential buyer for his 'flowers'.

"Your job is pointless!", shouts a woman from a recruitment agency window. "You make very little money and have no prospects!", "Selfish BASTARD!" - this particular retort emanates from one of the many charity shops I amble past, "HEY BALDY!" beckons a barber I've not visited in five years. "Kind cxc ind anal ymn inv" comes the muffled call from the owner of a corner shop, confused, I look at the magazine he's pressing against the window depicting a naked woman with what looks like a… is that a GOAT?

Have you ever wondered, as I do, what it would be like if the retailers of the worlds streets adopted the same strategies of those who attempt to sell to you from your inbox?

Saturday, November 22, 2008

Counter Measures

The ways spam can be sent to you are many and varied: from the hijacking of your associates yahoo or hotmail accounts, unexpectedly allowing your email address to be added to an unscrupulous mailing list, or just displaying your email address on your website for all to see.

NEVER put your email address on the internet. You may wish to make it easy as possible for your customers to contact you or to attract sales. All you will attract is flies to your inbox.

The workaround for lacking an email address on your website is the ubiquitous contact form.

Even these are are vunerable - as is illustrated by the first sentence of this article, received by a client via a form on their website intended for inquiries regarding their wares. This, along with "amateur boy dick" and "young gays" had very little to do with their daily business.

It's a misconception that people visit your website in order to send these messages, fortunately not so. One of the points of spam (when it isn't an out and out scam) is that you will hopefully click a link in the spam email, go to that webpage and click legitimate advertising in that page, earning the owner money. For it to be worthwhile thousands of these messages need to be sent out. Even in the current economic climate it's still not worth it for an individual to find and fill in these forms. So it all happens with little programs that run around the internet, looking for forms to fill in and send. This may conjure up images inspired by the movie Tron, thankfully this software is considerably more dumb, for now.

I've developed several techniques to overcome this automated process.

Look at the contact form of sites I've recently developed and you will find a question: "What colour is grass?" ("¿De que color es el pasto?" on websites en Español). Within my programming that sends the form contents to you is a bit of code which makes sure this is answered correctly, if not, the entry is rejected. As the form requires physical interaction with the page (clicking on a pulldown menu and selecting the answer) this cannot be carried out by an automated process.

The benefit of this over the more standard "Captcha" method (where you have to type in the numbers and letters displayed in an image) is that Captcha can be so obscure at times it's too confusing for even a human to decypher, and at some point Optical Character Recognition software (OCR) will become sophisticated enough to overcome this.

To counter any future developments in spambot software I'm extending this feature to generate a random selection from a large pool of questions, so until we have artificial intelligences patrolling the internet trying to sell you "Herbal Male Enhancement Pills" from a canadian pharmacy, your email should be quite immune to spam, at least where your website is concerned.

So, if you're looking at my customers websites and wonder why they want to know the colour of the sky, or what sound a cow makes before contacting them, it's all just part of the fight against online villainy.

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Chart Topper

There are many misconceptions people have about the internet and the relationship their website has with it, these generally revolve around how people find their site and if applicable, start buying their products.

A primary aim of site owners (myself included) is a position on the first page of a web-search. There are many companies who promise this as a service, but here's where that promise may be misleading.

Say I own the first website to sell Broccoli online, you'd expect me to be No.1 in a search engine ranking for "Broccoli". Of course there is a huge amount of detritus out there on the internet that will impede that. Eventually once my site has matured it will likely crawl up the ranks and get to a more noticable place than the 54th page of results.

Meanwhile, I recieve an email from a company offering Search Engine Optimization services (SEO) saying - hey, we can get your site into the top ten of Google search results. So yeah, sounds like a plan to me. I pay them and sure enough, my website is listed in the top ten, well, my company is. Via their directory website. Which is full of advertising.

So OK, all's well enough, I have the online presence I desired. What happens though when another Brocolli seller decides to sell online? do they automatically get the No.2 Position? I've been around longer, sure my site only has two pages which haven't been updated since the site was launched, but I was there first. Sorry, wrong.

And here's the real crunch. What if I'm the eleventh company selling Brocolli to approach an agency offering SEO that 'guarantees' me a place in the first page top ten of Google search results?

SEO is internet snake oil. If you want your site to be reaching your potential audience it takes work. There's no magic button or switch that announces your arrival on the internet with a gala opening, no queues of people lining up to see what your selling, you have to knock on the door of every one of your potential customers and let them know you're out there.


A search from "Digital Ink" currently brings my website in at fourth place out of 1,250,000