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At Fuse we are big fans of taking data and using it in interesting ways.  We have fond memories of the #uksnow twitter mashup and Will it Rain Today a useful real-time rain radar website.

Now we have a new one, Radar Virtuel, which has been brought to our attention after the eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull Volcano in Iceland.

Radar Virtuel plots the positions of aircraft traffic in realtime across the UK, parts of the USA and Africa.  Clicking on an individual aircraft gives you the flight number, company, model of plane, speed and much more.  Filters can be applied to the data in order to, for example, show only RyanAir flights departing from Paris and travelling to London which are flying below 25,000ft.

Viewing the site today is particularly remarkable as you can see areas of UK airspace being closed as the ash cloud heads south across the country.

The eCommerce team at Fuse today launched Dogwood London an equestrian clothing and online tack shop.  We moved close to a thousand products from the old e-commerce platform and imported them into a custom designed Magento based system.



Dogwood London supplies high-quality clothing and footwear, from some of the world's top equestrian brands.  In order to demonstrate the quality of the products, Fuse incorporated a hover and zoom image plugin, youcan see a good example here on these De Niro Ottaviano riding boots.  The zoom allows the user to view the quality of the leather and stitching without cluttering the page with large images and slowing down the loading time of each page.

The back-end provides much more functionality than Dogwood's previous system.  Managing customer details is straightforward, customers can checkout as a guest or store their details online (e.g. billing address, multiple shipping addresses and multiple credit card details) allowing easy one click re-ordering.  Customers who register can opt in or out to receive company newsletters, create wish-lists of products, set up product alerts and use the compare products features.

The Magento back-end means that the staff at Dogwood have a  whole suite of reports showing most viewed products, abandoned shopping carts, who is currently browsing the site, which products they are interested in, VAT reports and many many more.

Labels: equestrian, Magento, tack

Matt Cutts has posted a blog about Google's use of website loading times (speed) in their ranking algorithm. It comes as no surprise to most webmasters as Google made the initial announcement last year.  But they have now confirmed that it is live on the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Both posts point out that webmasters need not panic as it is not a major factor in the rankings, but where all other factors are equal it may give you an advantage over your competitors.

The Google Webmaster Central Blog provides a number of links to free tools that can be used to evaluate a website's speed and if a site is registered with Google Webmaster Tools, there is a new menu option giving specific examples of how to improve speed on each individual site.

The Google Webmaster Central YouTube channel have released a video in which Matt Cutts describes some of his ideas for effective link building techniques.  Here are some of the main points covered.

Building good content
Original research where somebody diggs deeper into a subject are always linkworthy.  Many bloggers are lazy and will just re-hash existing content without adding anything new.  If you can go that little extra and provide new insights, present new research, people will link to you. Matt uses the example of Google's Public DNS Service where a blogger called Manu took the time to test the speeds of their new service and published the data on his blog. Yahoo has recorded over 150 backlinks for his blog post already.

Controversy
Some people have made a profession out of hating somebody.  Whether it is Microsoft, Apple, homeopaths or the Conservative Party, having a good rant will attract positive and negative responses in equal measure.  A link is a link, so gaining hundreds of backlinks from people who disagree with your opinion will still benefit your website.  Matt points out that humour will do the same job, funny pictures, videos and blog posts will all attract links.

Participate in a community
Involve yourself in forums and answer questions that help other people.  People appreciate the help, and are often willing to link to somebody who has a good knowledge of their industry and is happy to spend some of their time helping others.

Social media
Spend time where your customers are, if they are spending 4 hours a day on Facebook or Twitter, you should be there too.  In some industries customer loyalty is so strong that having a Facebook group or page allows you to connect with more people than mass mail-outs or spamming mailboxes.  The customers will actively seek you out and sign up for newsletters and latest articles.

Lists
Spend some time building lists of valueable resources. "50 ways to build backlinks", these lists are a bit tiresome but the titles are eye-catching and they are easy for a reader to scan and pick out the information that they are looking for.  Spend some time writing "How to's ..." and simple tutorials.  Even if you don't get links from these, you'll have extra content.

Start a blog
Become an authority in your niche or industry.

Run a free service, build a free application, plugin, template, make a video
Providing something for free may seem like madness, but people will remember you and come back for help, updates and advice.  The beauty of all of these is that you only have to put the work in once.  You may be reaping the rewards in terms of links for the next decade or two.

Good site architecture
Don't make it difficult for people to link to your site!  It sounds obvious but if your URLs can't be bookmarked or if Google can't find pages on your site then you could be missing out on backlinks and returning customers.

The whole of Fuse is abandoning ship as a mighty 1cm of snow cascades from the skies.

The UK's obsession with the weather seems to be bringing twitter to a grinding halt and the roads are clogged with people leaving work early.

Here at Fuse we've been hooked on Ben Marsh's #UKSnow map which is a Google Earth and Twitter "mash-up" showing the slow grisly progress of the snowfall around the UK.

Twitterers are invited to tweet their postcode and a 0 - 10 rating for the snowfall in their area.

The result is a realtime map of snowfall which updates every minute and also includes photos and messages from the various twitter users around the UK.

Thanks to the person who tweeted and coined the phrase "snowpocalypse," genius!

The Nexus One is due to be unveiled today at Google's Californian HQ.

The phone is expected to cost a little over £300 in the UK for an unlocked version, or just over £100 with a two year contract from T-mobile, although so far, no details have been released about the phone's release outside the US.

Early reviews of the Nexus One have been fairly underwhelming, with most critics saying that it is no different to existing phones running the Google Android operating system such as the Droid from Motorola.

Details are sketchy but it has been confirmed that the phone contains a fast processor, camera, flash and accelerometer.