The 2010 Search & Social Spring Summit kicks off on Monday, May 3rd to Tuesday, May 4th. Are you excited? I’m excited. I never quite understood why people skip sessions, even days of these conferences once they get there. Since #SSSS is just two days long, I really hope everyone who attends decides to get the most out of the conference and stay through all of the sessions! But, we can’t eat sleep and breath Search & Social Spring Summit the entire time we’re here. Whether you’re skipping class or finding something to do after the festivities end, there are a lot of things that will keep you entertained throughout the Tampa Bay area. Here are just a few, with driving directions from the DoubleTree Hotel where most of you will be staying.
Tampa Bay Eats & Drinks
Miguel’s Seafood & Grill is one of the best Mexican restaurants I’ve been to in the area. Inviting atmosphere, friendly staff and most importantly, excellent authentic Mexican cuisine that my wife and I can’t seem to stop craving. My favorite is the Seafood Chimichanga but she always wants the Enchiladas Del Mar, filled with crab meat and cream cheese with a delicious ranchera sauce. Directions
If you plan on making a trip to Clearwater Beach, you’ve got to stop by Frenchy’s Rockaway Grill. One of four locations on the beach, this one has always been my favorite. They serve up strong Rum Runners and a She-Crab soup that tastes just like butter. My favorite is the Conch Fritters but the Grouper Reuben is also nearly as good as the people watching. Directions
The last great restaurant on my list is Whiskey Joe’s Bar and Grill, only half a mile from the DoubleTree. They have been closed for years due to renovations but the new location is much improved. It seems like a higher-class sort of joint, but you can walk in with shorts and a T-shirt and nobody is going to look twice. Try the Beer Cheese soup or just the beer on the deck. You won’t be sorry. Directions
Tampa Night Life
When the #SSSS social events but you want to keep the party going, you’ll be pleased to find that Tampa does not lack in social spots. For decades, Historic Ybor City has been the social center of Tampa with dance clubs for virtually every musical genre and people watching like you wouldn’t believe. If you’re not sure where to start, try Centro Ybor which offers a little something for everyone. Directions
If you’re looking for something a little less… insane? Try Channelside in downtown Tampa. Here you’ll find a variety of fun places to throw back a drink, eat a nice meal or do something a little different. My personal favorites are the Channelside IMAX, Splittsville and Howl At The Moon. Piano bar + buckets of liquor = ….well… I don’t exactly remember. But it was fun. I know that much. Directions
A Little Culture?
Maybe you’ve had enough eating, drinking and general partying. Maybe you’re looking for a little culture. If so, check out the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg for a slow, quiet walk through the mind of a madman. I mean genius. I mean madman. I mean both. A great deal of Dali’s work lives in St. Petersburg in a beautiful location on the water. You can miss it, but you’ll regret it if you do. Directions
The Tampa Museum of Science and Industry, or MOSI, is another great place to get your culture into full swing. This is a great place to learn about a host of different things related to (you guessed it) science and industry and while it looks especially great for kids, I think geeks like most of us can appreciate learning new and awesome things. MOSI helps those of us from Tampa learn those new things every day. Directions
So if you must skip sessions or if you are planning a trip around the conference, don’t hesitate to check out some of the places I’ve mentioned. Let me know what you thought of them and if you happen to find any other cool things to do in the area, don’t hesitate to drop a comment so I can get in on the action.
Today’s Sunday Stumble comes from Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller. Back in November of 2005 he wrote a thought-provoking piece for NPR that really puts the God question a little bit differently. Many Atheists say they don’t believe in God, but he frames it a bit differently. In Penn’s words, he believes that there is no God.
So how is believing there is no God any different from not believing in God? Jillette points out that not believing in something in easy, but believing is where the work comes in. When you believe that there is no God, it opens up a lot of doors. Take all of the sorrow, pain and suffering in the world for example. Believing that God is all-powerful then means that God is responsible for the suffering, since God is responsible for everything. Believing there is no God, however, implies hope that these problems can one day be fixed, or at least be improved.
I think I’m going to take a paragraph out of Jillette’s NPR piece and believe that there is no God. This means we’re responsible for our happiness, we’re responsible for making the world a better places, and the only safety nets in this existence are those we create for ourselves. I can’t sit around for the rest of my life waiting for God to come and fix things when there is so much suffering on the Earth. Who’s to say he’s going to fix my problems? Believing that there is no God, and that these problems aren’t undoable, means that I can change them for myself.
So bring on the joy, the pain, the suffering, and the peanut butter & strawberry jelly sandwiches. I love it all. I love my wife, the child I’m hoping to be a Father to in the coming months, the new home I just bought, and all the work I’m going to have to put into it. I’ll believe in all the wonderful things that make up this world that I do believe in. Just like Penn.
When I was younger, I was very interested in the Buddhist religion. I bought a Buddhist Bible and took it with me everywhere I went. Sure, it make me feel just a little bit cooler since I was into something none of my other peers seemed to know a thing about, but it wasn’t just for show. I learned a lot about how to lead a more calm life that wasn’t so filled with suffering and desire.
We all struggle with suffering, desire, and how to compromise between the two throughout our daily lives and Buddhism is an excellent way to help put those things into perspective so that you can walk a more righteous path. Buddhism isn’t about being better than anyone else, and it isn’t about anything other than your own personal journey to enlightenment.
The Essentials of Buddhism is an excellent page of the web that touches on some of the core principles behind Buddhism. Following these principles will absolutely help you to lead a life composed of less suffering and more, that’s right, enlightenment. If you’re a faker like Tiger Woods, then Buddhism will make you look a little bit cooler like it did for me when I was 18.
If you have an Ecommerce business, your website exists as a means of converting visitors to buyers. That’s what you want, right? Then why insist on implementing design, content and other things your visitors don’t want, don’t need, and won’t tolerate?
Analyzing the Bounce Rate of the various pages on your website is an excellent way of determining how you can decrease that overall number so your visitors get more out of your home page, product pages, help pages and more.
Identifying Issues That Increase Bounce Rate
Website flaws that contribute to a high bounce rate can mostly be identified immediately, just by looking at the page in question. Is it too long? Is there too much text? Does it load too slow? Most of the time the most obvious issues are going to have the greatest impact when they’re fixed. When you’re ready to dig a little deeper, check out your Web Analytics program to see which of your pages have the lowest bounce rates. I don’t like to worry about those pages that have few views, so it’s better to focus on the more highly-trafficked pages. Why does one page with 1,000 views in a month have a bounce rate of %27 and another with the same views have a bounce rate of 88%? Compare the two and take instruction from the better page.
Specific Contributors To High Bounce Rates
Whether you’re just looking at your page or comparing it against a page that has a lower bounce rate, you’re most likely going to find some common problems that we all experience. They may be easy to fix, or virtually impossible. Regardless of how hard it might be, it’s definitely worth it to go through the effort. Do it yourself or outsource your work to someone who can.
Page Layout and Design can impact your website in a very bad way, if done incorrectly. You want your pages to be light-weight, easy to navigate, easy to extract information from. If users have to scroll down your page through a sea of text to find the sentence that pertains to their issue, you’re probably going to lose them before they ever even get there.
Too Much Text is also a bad thing. You might think your visitors need to know everything about each and every product, but they don’t. Remove blocks of text that you find on all of your product pages, put that block of text on its own page and simply provide a link on each of your pages to that page. You’ll find that your pages are smaller in length, less overwhelming to visitors, and more keyword-dense which is a great positive side-effect.
If you insist that your visitors need to know everything about every product or service on every page, then at least make it easier for them to navigate. I personally like tabbed navigation menu’s for product pages. Tabs for Overview, Specifications, Licensing, Return Policy, so on and so forth. The user simply clicks on the link and the space below the tabbed area is populated with the relevant information. This text is still searchable by spiders but only visible to your visitors if they want it to be. If they don’t care, they don’t click, and they don’t get bogged down.
Page Load Speed is another up-and-coming factor in bounce rate. How long are you willing to sit there and wait for a page to load? Personally, if the page isn’t loaded within about 7 seconds, I’m off and onto the next search result. You can trim your page load time by limiting the number of images, making sure those images aren’t huge, limiting the amount of text, and also limiting the amount of scripts you’ve got running in the background. There are some you can’t do without, sure, but most of them you really don’t need.
There are more factors in a high bounce rate than what I’ve identified above, but if you first address what I’ve laid out, you’ll see your bounce rate drop like a Bear falling out of a tree. Finally, if you’ve got any of these things going on below, remove them immediately!
- Auto-play videos are the most annoying thing in the world. Let me decide to click play. If you just start talking upon page load, it’s taking longer to load. And how do you know I even care what you’ve got to say anyway? If I did, maybe I’d call instead.
- Auto-play Music is just as annoying as above. If I managed to find your auto-body shop online, do you really think I want to hear your Indian Bollywood music? Even if you had Little GTO on loop, I’m moving on.
- Huge Header Logo’s are a massive waste of space and load time. Keep it small. I get that you want your logo to be associated with a peaceful babbling book or whatever, but the whole point of instilling a sense of calm in me is to do it via your layout and content, not by flat out showing me a giant picture of it. See Bing. Pretty pictures are nice but if I want to see them, I know where to find them online.
That was fun. I’m going to do another write-up of things you shouldn’t have on your website because it seems a lot easier to come up with the cons rather than the pro’s. We all love putting the wrong things on our websites and then wonder why nobody likes it. Put the right things on your websites and join me in judging the rest of the web!
Streaming video is here to stay, and it’s only getting faster, smarter and better. There are a multitude of sites where you can house your videos for all to see with the most widely-used being YouTube. The great thing about having your videos on YouTube is the fact that it’s literally a video search engine with millions of registered users, and millions more who view anonymously.
Blogging is also here to stay, and like streaming video, there are a million different platforms from which to launch your blog. Blogspot has been around for years and hosts millions of blogs for a pretty decent price– absolutely nothing. This makes Blogspot a very attractive option for companies and individuals looking to launch a blog to reach out and connect with their audience.
A nifty Blogspot feature lies in the ability to upload a video directly to your blog. Hosted by Google video, viewers can simply click play, sit back and watch whatever little gem you’ve cooked up with your video recording software. YouTube has the same attractive (free) feature and while these platforms are very different, they both offer what this blog post is all about: Streaming Video.
So which is the better platform to upload your videos? Let’s run through some of the pro’s and con’s.
Video Upload Simplicity
Both YouTube and Blogspot offer some very easy-to-use features that allow you to upload videos with a couple of simple clicks. YouTube is more involved with features that let you add descriptions, keywords and so on. Blogspot, on the other hand, simply places the video in your post after it is uploaded. So, while it may be easier (and faster) to upload a video directly to Blogspot, you’re going to be hard-pressed to find that video in any searches. With YouTube, visitors enter their search terms on the site or in a traditional search engine as the video can be found via search in either method.
Visitor Usability
I don’t care who you are, nobody is going to tell me that uploading a video directly to Blogspot is better than YouTube for this simple fact. To my knowledge, you cannot view a Blogspot-hosted video in full screen. This is a huge negative, especially if your video has text captions and no audio. Get out the magnifying glass, because you’re definitely going to need it. YouTube allows viewers to expand the video to full screen mode to get that full experience we have all come to require.
Video Statistics, Anyone?
Last I heard, Blogspot has no method of showing webmasters any information on views including how many times a video has been watched, where those viewers reside, or how popular their videos are in comparison to other relevant videos. YouTube, however, recently came out with YouTube Insights which gives you access to all of these things. Even if you choose to embed your YouTube video on a Blogspot blog, your own WordPress blog or even your website, you can view a plethora of statistics that will not only give you additional insights into the viewing habits of your audience, but will also give you valuable hints as to when your videos are most commonly viewed.
In my opinion there is no real battle here at all. YouTube wins, hands down. It’s so much more flexible than Blogspot with respect to video upload, it gives you a wealth of information about your viewers’ habits, and it can be designed specifically to suit the aesthetic requirements of your brand. So if you’re conflicted on whether to upload your video to YouTube or Blogspot, choose YouTube. If you have a Blogspot blog and still want to see your video there, simply copy and paste the embeddable code and your problems are as good as solved.
Here’s a parting question: If Google owns Blogspot, Google Video and YouTube, and you can expand YouTube & Google Videos to full screen. Why is this feature not available on Blogspot? Comments aren’t only welcome, I’m willing to beg. I must know!
