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.