The Art Director of Agence CCC contacted the Bureau for a web designer recruitment in Mauritius. The web designer must be “enn jack” in web/graphic design. The Mauritian agency is called AVStel and is situated in Port Louis. Here is a great proposal for a web design job in Mauritius!

Profil du poste

L’agence sur l’Ile Maurice est AVStel ltd (39, rue Saint-Georges à Port Louis) et est rattachée à l’Agence CCC basée à Paris.

Webdesigner, maîtrisant les outils, langages et logiciels liés à cette profession. Curieux et passionné par le média Internet et ses évolutions (CSS3, HTML 5, …) et ayant également une très bonne approche graphique et faisant force de propositions dans ce domaine.

Connaissances

1. Logiciels : Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, (Fireworks)
2. Langages : HTML, CSS, XHTML, Ajax, (ActionSript)
3. Seraient des plus : Connaissances du média vidéo pour internet (formats, codecs, serveur FMS, …) et du CMS Joomla

Missions

• Apporter une aide “graphique” aux développeurs lors de leurs demandes ponctuelles (boutons, bannières, etc…)
• Aider le Directeur Artistique aux diverses réalisations pour le web (interfaces de sites, bannières, emailing,…)
• Aider à la mise en place d’outils technique/graphique (player vidéo, calendrier interactif, salon virtuel, …)
• Assurer des missions d’entretien et d’évolution graphique des sites existants (Cardio-meeting, P&P, IFDA, …)
• Assurer des missions de gestion de contenus pour nos sites (mises en place de textes, vidéos, pdf, etc…)

Cette personne sera intégré au service informatique (développeurs PHP, MySQL, Joomla, Ajax, Air, …) et rattaché au Directeur Artistique parisien.

Exemples

Exemple de site que nous réalisons : www.bellaplastie.com , www.preuvesetpratiques.com

No related posts.

We’ve been telling you about the future collaboration between Yahoo! and Bing in a past post: Is the Yahoo! switch to Bing an anti-google strategy?. Well, it is now official, the first tests have been made in the USA and Canada as stated by this morning’s post on the Bing Community Blog. According to Yahoo!’s post on Yahoo! Search Blog, 25% of the paid and organic traffic now generated on the US Yahoo! search results are from Bing.

Preparing your site for Bing & Yahoo!

It seems that there will be some changes in the way the Bingbot will be crawling websites. One will have to concentrate on only one bot when it comes to search engine optimisation now. This means that the Yahoo! Slurp will be killed and that webmasters will have to make full use of the Bing Webmaster Center to optimise their SEO on Bing. If one has not done it until now, it will now become an important element as all will go through only one pipe now

For webmasters, it’s important to be familiar with how the Bing crawler interacts with your site. After the full algorithmic transition is complete, you only need to optimize for one crawler (Bing), as we will provide Yahoo! with results from our index.

Bing Webmaster Center, the new place to be.

With this new roll out, the Bing Webmaster Center will prove to be a valuable source of information and will also be a great toolbox for the optimisation of one’s website. Even if you rely a lot more on traffic generated by Google Caffeine, you will have to make sure that your indexation and your presence in results pages at Bing’s are really correct as the same elements will be used in Yahoo!.

Related posts:

1. Yahoo! Search will be switching to the Bing engine – anti Google Caffeine?
2. Microsoft Bing for you!
3. Is Google stepping up to Microsoft Bing?
4. About the Microsoft-Yahoo! partnership.
5. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for “coming soon” pages.

When I launched the new template used on this blog some weeks back, a discussion started out on the use of FIR, the Fahrner Image Replacement technique, on the H3 tags I used on the widgets in the different sidebars. Actually, these are not widgets per se as they are hard coded as small included files to maximise load time. An internal recipe if you want. Anyway, the main idea behind using FIR, which is a really old technique, is that I wanted the specific use of images just for these H3s. As pointed out in the comments, I did not go for heavy DOM scripting driven font apps such as Typekit or Google Fonts just because I had no need for these. If I had specific fonts to use for bigger portions I would have used those or Cufòn.

Usability and SEO.

FIR is not the only technique you can use for replacing text with images. You have several techniques which you can find out with a simple Google search. There’s also the sIFR, the Scalabe Inman Flash Replacement, which used Flash to replace text defined by web design guru Shaun Inman. There are 2 reasons why I like the Fahrner Image Replacement technique: usability and SEO. Its use maximises these two core elements. How? Simply because when all CSS are deactivated (which is the case for screen readers) the content is still present. This therefore keeps the content that is associated with the H tag. You can relate to this past article if you want more information on the importance of H tags. Please keep in mind that the way I use the FIR solution is a bit different from the original versions. As a matter of fact, I play more on semantics to reduce the use of unnecessary HTML tags.

Implementing FIR.

Basis.

The FIR implementation is fairly simple. You need to have an image file bearing your graphical text. The magic occurs with the use of CSS to get the text out of the way and replace it with this image. This is an all CSS technique which means that if there is any CSS failure, the fall back will just be the plain text. So here is a piece of simple code:

<html>
<head>
	<title>FIR technique</title>
</head>
<body>
	<h3>This is the text to be replaced</h3>
</body>
</html>

The replacement image is the following:

Hiding the text.

Now let’s get into the CSS-fu. First of all we need to “hide the text”. We cannot use the visibility attributes because we will not be able to exploit the H3 box that is generated. What we can do is reposition the text inside that box. Actually we will reposition it outside the box and even outside the screen, so far that no simple user screen can show the text. Here is how it goes (you will notice that I’m not using a separate CSS file for this just for the sake of the example):

<<html>
<head>
	<title>FIR technique</title>
	<style type="text/css">
		h3{
			text-indent: -9999px;
		}
	</style>
</head>
<body>
	<h3>This is the text to be replaced</h3>
</body>
</html>

The text-indent implementation throws the text at 9999 pixels on the left of the screen, so it will not be visible at all.

Replacing the text.

Still with CSS, we need will now get the image to occupy the space left. The image does not actually occupy the space, it sits as a background image and we will be tweaking the heights and widths to adjust to the image.

<html>
<head>
	<title>FIR technique</title>
	<style type="text/css">
		h3{
			text-indent: -9999px;
			background: url(replacement.png) no-repeat center left;
		}
	</style>
</head>
<body>
	<h3>This is the text to be replaced</h3>
</body>
</html>

The background uses the URL attribute to call the image. The no-repeat attribute says all that it does and the center attribute centres the image vertically and the left attribute sets it to the left. If the image were too large for the containing box we would be using paddings to increase its size. Here for example, we are increasing the top and bottom paddings by 10 pixels each:

<html>
<head>
	<title>FIR technique</title>
	<style type="text/css">
		h3{
			text-indent: -9999px;
			background: url(replacement.png) no-repeat center left;
			padding: 10px 0;
		}
	</style>
</head>
<body>
	<h3>This is the text to be replaced</h3>
</body>
</html>

See the final result in action here.

Related posts:

1. [Festive Hands] The structure.
2. Simple link styling using CSS.
3. The secret of strong and em tags.
4. You should be (over-) using the H (heading) tags.
5. Dropping unnecessary tags in your HTML code.

Let’s go back to some old school and traditional form of customer acquisition on the web: email marketing. Many might think that the age of email marketing is over. Email marketing actually is one of the most powerful vectors of conversion generation still in use. It is one of the reasons why newsletter subscription forms have never disappeared from websites. An email marketing campaign can be a great tool for conversion and also a tool to increase client confidence in your products and keep them coming back to you.

Email marketing campaign target.

To maximise an email marketing campaign the first thing to do is to maximise WHO must be contacted in priority and how to personalise the messages sent out. This calls for the indentification of influential people, the prescribers. Those are the main targets as they have different levels of influence on the prospective clients. There are 3 levels of influence.

Level 1 influencers for your email marketing campaign.

These are those influencers who are in immediate interaction with your clients and who have a real impact on their business. They are those who will have an influence on the choice of your products or those of your competitors. They will be the ones inciting the client to chose a brand compared to another as their own work depends on that.

For example, for a small business management tool publisher, accounting experts are level 1 influencers as in at least 1/3 of cases, they are the ones who influence on the software the company will be using.

Level 2 influencers for your email marketing campaign.

This level of influencer is in contact with the your final clients and can influence their choices. This, however, has very little impact on their own activity.

For example, a washing machine manufacturer can counsel a client on the type of washing powder/liquid to use but this will remain at the level of counsel, it doesn’t impact on how this manufacturer will build machines. A specific garment manufacturer for instance will be a level 1 influencer at this point.

Level 3 influencers for your email marketing campaign.

Level 3 influencers have direct or indirect contact with clients but are merely a link in the whole system. The final client’s choice has no impact on their activity.

For an insurance company, for example, a car dealer is a level 3 influencer because the choice of a car insurance has no impact on whether the final client buys the car at this dealer’s or not?

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5. 5 tips to a successful seo-oriented web project.

Targeting a site’s readership, especially when one has a blog, is not an easy task. On going over some websites, I have seen that many would publish their level of hits or visits in one day. Some are pretty awesome when imagining some 30,000 visits in one day. Everybody would dream of that. This would mean huge monetisation programmes, nice level of side income, “influence” and all that goes with it. When delving into SEO and community management, one has to take into consideration another parameter, which might actually be a better indicator than the level of traffic. This indicator is the bounce rate. Bounce rate is what really defines the success of a website. If people are entering and leaving your site in less than 5 seconds, you might need to have a serious talk with you community management and your SEO experts.

Bounce rate fluctuations.

You might have noticed that a bounce rate can either fluctuate a lot on a website or stay put over a long period of time. This goes with the quality of your traffic. Most of the time, the fluctuations will be of more or less 10%. Higher fluctuations and, at that, frequent ones mean that there might be something weird happening on your website. Even if these are not what you would first look at, I sincerely think that important bounce fluctuations should be used as alerts on the health of a website.

3-5% Bounce rate?

Now, you might have come here to see if it can really be done? The answer is “yes”. This very blog, the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius, has been set up to do this. After the first weeks of its launch I tried to find a way of making this site stand out. There were too many odds against it as there is no real web design community in Mauritius but the idea was to get to that very small web engaged community out there. And it worked! The aim was to target that specific traffic and this is what is happening today. Below is a screenshot of one year’s publications. 3.19% bounce rate over a whole year.

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2. When social media killed Google.
3. Optimising your site to get Google sitelinks.
4. Beating Google Adwords competition by using your competitor’s brand name.
5. Failure of the web design community in Mauritius?

In terms of traffic management I primarily focus on organic traffic as it is the type of traffic that is really targeted and that comes to a site to really use the content that’s generated. The Web Design Bureau of Mauritius has always been proud of its 3% bounce rate over 2 years. Now, Google Adwords and PPC traffic is a whole different thing. Getting your fingers in such a cogwheel implies that you’ve tried and tested the techniques on small or medium sized campaigns before entering the big picture. My biggest picture has been a 1 year campaign at 3000€ per month for a client. I will not be giving a lecture on how to use Google Adwords and make the best use of it. There are better people than me when it comes to explaining this subject, I can just invite you to meet them over at PPC Hero.

Beating the Google Adwords competition.

So what is this beating the Google Adwords Competition about? When you go on a Google Adwords crusade, you usually have competitors on the same line, bidding higher than you to reach the top positions in the sponsored links to drive traffic to their site. Now, the big problem is: where do you hit the hardest to get the Google Adwords treasure? The answer is brand name! As weird as this might seem I’m going to give away one of Google’s most mysterious tricks to beat Google Adwords competition with the use of brand names. I stumbled on this by chance and readily understood the implications. This one is not a secret but it is not talked about too much.

Use your competitor’s brand name.

Provided you’re not going to fight Ebay, Amazon or Coca-Cola, you can use your competitors’ brand name to divert their traffic to your site. Here’s how this goes, you can use your competitors’ trademarked terms as keywords in Google Adwords. This depends on whether they have set a record at Google’s to have the keywords reserved or not. Many companies, maybe even your’s, don’t know that there’s this little loophole in Google Adwords and have not done the necessary to shut down the traffic diversion. This is all explained in this discussion I found in the Google Adwords archive. Many big companies seem to have arrangements with Google Adwords, otherwise anybody can bid on a trademark as a keyword. This smells fishy, especially if you’ve registered your trademark, but it actually is true.

Real life experiment.

I wouldn’t be giving out this trick to beat Google Adwords competition without being 100% sure that this can be done, would I? I did a test on Google. One big trademark would be the famous Kawasaki motorcycles. I just typed the trademark name in Google and, hey presto, Google Adwords showed me what their competitors (or sellers) were doing with the keyword.

Related posts:

1. What will change in 2010 with search engines ranking? (Google speaking only? Not sure …)
2. When social media killed Google.
3. Google MAYDAY update is affecting long tail keyword rankings.
4. Yahoo! Search will be switching to the Bing engine – anti Google Caffeine?
5. Optimising your site to get Google sitelinks.

We’ve been talking a lot about the Google Maday update as well as Google Caffeine, the new algorithm. Though this would seem like talking over and over about the same thing, we must take into consideration the huge impact that this new algorithm has on the whole web, search engine optimisation and users ecosystem. The web is an ever changing entity and the “addons” that influential web companies publish always have an effect on the way users will be interacting with websites. This is what Google did by launching Google Caffeine.

Fresh content, the new El Dorado.

Let us jump back to what Google told web professionals on Google Caffeine some two weeks ago. The core elements to take into consideration are:

[Google] Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index. [...] Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.

This means that the way the Google index worked before, though not completely removed, is currently pushed aside to favour a new way of indexing. This new way of indexing takes information as it is published, analyses it and sends it directly into the first (freshest) results that the search engine will be delivering to its users. The impact is that fresh information will always have a lead, be it small, on the old system of having capitalising on age for a page indexed on a given theme.

Impact on companies.

This crosses one of my everlasting belief that companies need to produce more fresh content to keep up with the pace at which the whole system is running. A company can have a website and be communicating on it but if the new deal is that the company regularly publishing content on its own field gets the topmost ranks in search engine results pages then the cards are being redistributed.

This also means that everything like tests and sandboxes are being shattered to pieces (though Google Caffeine must have a sort of filter on that). A younger company with a younger website publishing fresher and to the point content will now be able to compete with the old mammoths. Result: increased competition directed by the Big G. Could anyone have thought that Google Caffeine would have had that much influence on business communication models?

Blogs are not crutches but tools.

Right oh! The solution, as anybody would have imagined is to implement professional business blogs on company websites. Blogs have the flexibility of being readily editable and can produce a lot of tools to improve indexation, social media interaction and drive leads. These are the new tools for indexation and traffic and community managers will be the new guardians of web traffic and notoriety.

It will now become a standard if one wants to stay in the race as Google Caffeinee is implementing it. New search habits are bound to crop up and new SEO techniques will show their face. What business need to understand now is that blogs might be the best way to catch up with the others. As things go, many companies will be launching up blogs with a lot of content copied and pasted from other sites or from their “paper material” but here things will be different. Real blogging rules will have to be used, those levers defining the quality of content and the targeting of traffic will become real in business spheres and those who will be using these as tools rather than crutches to their SEO will be those getting something out of Google Caffeine.

EDIT 24-06-2010. To illustrate the words.

This edit comes 18 hours later. I’ve been following the indexation of this article and as shown above, this post has, for example, hit Google’s first search engine results page when searching for “google caffeine” just after publication just because of the freshness of the article.

Related posts:

1. Yahoo! Search will be switching to the Bing engine – anti Google Caffeine?
2. When social media killed Google.
3. The new Yahoo! & Bing search engine is being tested.
4. Optimising your site to get Google sitelinks.
5. What will change in 2010 with search engines ranking? (Google speaking only? Not sure …)

WordPress 3.0 is the new current hip. Everybody is switching to the new platform while fearing crashes or great upheavals in the world of blogging. I’ve been a bit worried about all this for some days before taking the leap of the full WordPress 3.0 upgrade. Everything went on really fine until…

Errors through CommentLuv.

I was commenting on a blog I usually visit. When I activated its CommentLuv app, I was greeted with a “No last blog post found” error that got my eyes growing like saucers before starting squinting in pure disbelief, as if staring for 2 minutes at the error message would give me explanation. First thing I did was to check my RSS feed where I found a nice error on line 5 at column 6: XML declaration allowed only at the start of the document error. It dawned to me that the WordPress 3.0 update might have generated this error.

Recurring feed error.

After some research, there seems that this type of error is frequent in WordPress, whatever the version. So I went out to try several feed correcting plugins for WordPress but whatever the solution tried (even that of clearing all WordPress files from blank lines) it didn’t seem to be able to clear the errors out. According to all that I read, it all comes from some trailing blank lines in the feed code. Having tried everything in vain, the only solution to this was to go back to the good old hand coding.

The fix.

Fixing this error was not an easy task but I found an article over at www.w3it.org. The code is fairly simple and its implementation is easy. All in all it takes the feed generated by the WordPress core and clears it all up from any blank line held around.

What you need to do is to open this file:
wp-includes/feed-rss2.php

Open this file in a text editor and look for this line:

header('Content-Type: text/xml; charset=' . get_option('blog_charset'), true);
$more = 1;

Just underneath it add this code

$out = ob_get_contents();
$out = str_replace(array("\n", "\r", "\t", " "), "", $input);
ob_end_clean();

That’s all! Short and sweet. This code clears all empty lines and hey presto, your feed is restored.

Other feed files?

You might be asking why the wp-includes/feed-rss2.php file? Just because it is the one that is really used in the WordPress feed. You can however do like I did, I opened all the other feed files and stitched them up with the same code.

Related posts:

1. Easy Adsense inclusion with WordPress shortcode.
2. Grab your blank wordpress template.
3. Automatic inclusion of Google Adsense ads in WordPress content.
4. [Festive Hands] The structure.
5. Speed up your web pages via the CSS file.

It is now official. The Yahoo! Search portal will be switching to the Bing search engine by September 2010 according to the latest thread on Webmasterworld. The portal will be integrating and testing Microsoft’s tool in August and September before going on a full fledged launch.

Long tail keywords.

The Yahoo! and Microsoft partnership has been and is still seen as a battle of dollars to break the “monopoly” held by Google in terms of search marketing. However, there seems to be a reason to the acceleration of this partnership and it is called “Google Caffeine“. Remember the Google Mayday Update? This was the test run for Google’s new algorithm called “Google Caffeine“. The ultimate objective for Google is to be able to understand what a user really means when the it types a specific keyword. This would call for distinct research in language usage. This also explains why the “Google Caffeine” text mainly affected long tail keywords, these being more specific.

A breach?

The big problem of the “Google Caffeine” launch, if this can be qualified as problem, is that it cleared up and re-indexed a lot of pages based on long tail keywords. The “assumed” result has been the throwing out of a large number of huge traffic making pages from big websites. This being said, a lot of professionals have had direct recourse to paid search traffic, increasing ppc sales. Many have seen this as a breach in Google’s monopoly as it resulted in a certain loss of confidence in the search engine. You might look at the comments on my post on the Google Mayday Update and you’ll see that a lot of persons being concerned by the ferocious way Google managed to do this. And here might be Yahoo!’s opportunity to gather all the stray lambs around its search church.

Related posts:

1. The new Yahoo! & Bing search engine is being tested.
2. About the Microsoft-Yahoo! partnership.
3. Microsoft Bing for you!
4. Google MAYDAY update is affecting long tail keyword rankings.
5. Is Google stepping up to Microsoft Bing?

The Web Design Bureau of Mauritius has entered its third year since last week. While several important events are being handled for better delivery of content, the new in-house built theme is currently being tested. This cannot be launched in full blast because we are actually waiting to be transfered to our new upgraded green server with increased space and load times in Geneva. However, you can catch a neat preview of the whole thing.

Pretty much of this theme is hand-coded to reduce the input of plugins and widgets and most of the plugins used are here to maximize the user’s experience of the site. The index has also been cleaned up and there are still some pages to be set up. Please bear with this cranky bit for some time and stay connected for future posts.

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