So for the final time here is our plea, Kelly is running to raise money for the Cardiomyopathy Association. Cardiomyopathy, which literally means “heart muscle disease,” is the deterioration of the function of the myocardium (i.e., the actual heart muscle) for any reason. People with cardiomyopathy are often at risk of arrhythmia or sudden cardiac death or both.

Kelly has currently run 20 miles in training, and besides worrying about where the extra 6.5 miles is going to come from on the day, is all but ready to complete the run. We have in the past offered the opportunity to purchase t-shirt advertising on Kelly’s and all of our team’s (who will be there supporting Kelly) t-shirts, we are getting these printed on Saturday 17th April so you still have time to get your logo on her shirt if you wish.

All we are asking is that you sponsor Kelly Frew for her run, any amount you wish, and you claim your space. I’ll also chuck you a fair few links back from this blog as a way of saying thanks. T-shirt advertising and links! What more could you want?

If you are interested please sponsor Kelly here: http://www.justgiving.com/Kelly-Frew and then email me your logo and site details: paul@ozido.com

Again a huge thanks to everybody who has already sponsored Kelly, I’ll report back how the run goes afterwards.

It took 3 hours to get from Peterborough to Stonehenge, 4 hours to get back due to the M25 being chocker, and despite not being able to find any promotional codes and having to pay £6 to get in and visit the site (£6 to look at rocks ???) it was actually a great day out and I thoroughly recommend taking the time to go and visit if you haven’t already. I don’t really have any meaningful insights into the history of Stonehenge that isn’t available on their website (http://www.stonehenge.co.uk) so i’ll just jump straight to the pictures I took.

Kelly Frew – Sponsorship Update

In my last post I mentioned that one of our team Kelly Frew was looking for sponsors for her London Marathon run in return for Tshirt advertising. A big thanks to everybody who has donated so far and if you haven’t already, join the likes of Bras.co.uk and Newquay Hotels UK and claim your T-Shirt Advertising now! (Full Details Here)

So let me start by saying you can sponsor Kelly Frew here: http://www.justgiving.com/Kelly-Frew

Cardiomyopathy is a weakening of the heart muscle or a change in heart muscle structure. It is often associated with inadequate heart pumping or other heart function problems.  You can find out more here.

Kelly has to raise £1500 minimum to enter the marathon which is no easy feat, so we thought it was time to get creative. Firstly every company / website / individual who makes a donation will recieve a logo printed on Kelly’s running T-shirt, I’ll also be down in London along with the rest of our team who will be wearing the same logo’d up T-shirts, so it’s a nice bit of exposure.

Secondary, everyone who donates will be plugged in my next 10 posts giving a fair bit of exposure and a few good links, T-shirt advertising and links? What more can you ask for.

No minimum donation required, every penny will be going towards the Cardiomyopathy Association
so it really is a worthwhile cause.

Interested? Make your donation here: http://www.justgiving.com/Kelly-Frew and email me at paul@ozido.com and let me know you’ve done so, we’ll take it from there.

Thanks for reading     )

Sponsorship Update

We have our first sponsors who have claimed their space on Kelly’s running T-shirt, so a big thanks to the following:

George Marshall who runs the Bras website Bras.co.uk

Joe Conner who runs the Promotional Codes website cantbarsed.com

About a week ago I was under the impression that everywhere in the UK had suffered dramatic snow falls, or at least that’s what the news was telling me. So as you do when trains are at their worst I decided to pack up my stuff for the week and head down to Newquay to see what it had to offer in the winter months.

After looking over Newquay Hotels UK I booked my hotel and the above picture was taken from my hotel room window. As you’ll undoubtedly notice, not a single snow flake in sight. The Newquay winds had kept the snow away, but deceivingly so as all the villages and towns surrounding Newquay were covered in the white stuff meaning we were actually snowed in.

13 hours to get there, 11 hours to get back it was a long old journey but it was great fun.

Essentially the aim of our product pages are to get the user to click through to the merchant site and buy the product, so it’s positive to see that users are indeed doing this. Like every industry the merchants we feature pay different commission rates, convert at different levels, run promotions, etc. So being able to divert a user through to a specific merchant whilst keeping choice available should products go out of stock and we not notice, means we are able to maximise our commissions.

The learning’s we’ve taken from our heatmap experiment:

1). You can’t really see because it is cut off at the top, but very few people click the big product image. Maybe having this link through to a high res image rather than the merchant and giving the user clearer direction will encourage this link to be clicked more. We will run an A/B split test to determine this.

2). We put a logo in the middle of the product description of the merchant we’re trying to encourage clicks too on the basis that the majority of users won’t get to the end of our copy. This has proven to be effective with a large majority of clicks going through this link (yellow gadgetshop logo at the top).

3). The biggest learning we took was from the logos we run across the bottom of the article to tell the user where to buy the product. We’ve always ordered these from left to right (as the eye reads) in order of which merchant we want the majority of users to go to. However we can clearly see that the majority of users are clicking the far right logo, with very few people going through the far left logo. We’ve tested this further today and switched these three logos around and regardless of which logo is where, the majority of users are clicking right to left. This is a big learning for us and will certainly allow us to divert our users more effectively in the future.

4). As we’re tracking every click a user makes you’ll see lots of random dots not on links, initially we put this down to user error, but maybe there’s enough clicks on the consumer review (grey box at the bottom) showing to think the user thought they could click that box to see more? I’m not sure on that one and will have to investigate further.

This is one days data on one page, we’re tracking the entire site so we’ve a lot of analysis to do and if anyone’s interested, I’ll share more of our learning’s going forward.

Now just because i’m a nice guy, you can find the click hotspot script we installed here:
http://www.labsmedia.com/clickheat/index.html

It’s free to download and use and we had it installed and gathering data in less than 5 minutes. If you use the script let me know, and I’d love to hear some of your findings from your own sites.

Let me take you back to Friday afternoon, 3 days ago, about 4pm to be precise. Now we had well and truly given up work for the day and found ourselves somehow in a pub discussing how to develop our gifts review website further. Whilst enjoying my lovely orange juice (27 days sober!) the conversation turned to building a gifts related community, helping people who are stuck for a gift idea to find the perfect gift and such. As the night wore on and the alcohol flowed, the ideas for the community flowed too well into the early hours of Saturday morning.

So I’ll fast forward to Monday morning when I received a link from one of my developers to our spangly new Gifting Community, completely tested, integrated into our current website and ready to roll.

So the forums are phpbb which is a ready made script, I appreciate that. But the script is pretty basic and I’m looking at complete design integration, search engine friendly URL’s, title tags, Dynamic META data, custom affiliate mod, quick reply integration, XML sitemaps, RSS feeds and a wealth of other mods on top to get them up to a required standard. Whats more by the time I had seen the integration, the PR girls had already started adding posts and drumming up conversation….

I sit here at 3am in the morning suitably impressed with what has just happened and thinking, that’s how development should work. I’ve seen companies take 3 months to change a title tag, how long does it take you to implement your great ideas? It’s worth thinking about.

What I’m Reading Today: Julian’s Puppies Will Destroy The Earth theory.

The actual not drinking of alcohol has been relatively easy. There’s been no real urges for it, no cold sweats and shakes in the middle of the night so on that front I’m going strong. What’s been real awkward has been other people’s take and perception of what I’m doing. It’s been an eye opening two week’s, so here’s some of the highlights:

Eliminating People’s Previous Perceptions
Everyone in my life knows I like a drink. My family, my friends, the people I work with, even our clients whom I’ve had many a nights out with know I’ve never been one to turn down a pint. So it’s been a job explaining to these people that I’ve given up for no other reason than I decided i drank too much and though I should do something about it.

This of course is never an acceptable answer. Have you got liver disease? Have you found god? Are in attending AA? Ive got some leaflets if you want them? Are you joking? are all thing’s I’ve heard in the last 12 days. A real eye opener as to how people perceive me, though not completely unexpected.

Apologizing
In the last 12 days I’ve had to apologise to 6 different people who I’ve met up with and they’ve got me a pint in before I’ve had chance to explain I’d given up. So apologizing has become a bit of a daily habit, along with the pre-empting phone call to everyone I meet now where I slip in that I’m not drinking anymore.

I even had to apologise to the barmaid in my local who pulled me a pint when she saw me talking to someone on the way in knowing that’s what I’ve had every time I’ve been in since I moved to this little village…

Friends
For the last year I’ve met the same friend in the same bar on the same day at the same time every week for an afternoons / evenings / nights drinking. So wanting to keep this important social event I decided we’d give this a go with me not drinking. What I didn’t expect was for her to not drink as well, so our usual slosh out turned into an orange juice fuelled deep and meaningful about the meaning of life. i must admit, I think I enjoyed it more not drinking.

Family
So Sunday lunch with my family was an interesting one. My old’s like a drink and had bought drink especially for me. I think i spent most of the afternoon saying thank-you but it’s something I’ve decided to do and I’m not going to drink, even to the point where the magners came out being waved in front of me… cheers for the help in this one guys! haha.

Weight Loss
In the last 12 days I’ve lost 6lbs (that’s nearly half a stone people).  Down from 13 stone to 12 stone 8lbs, something I’ll keep an eye on but I’m hoping this will slow down soon. Weight loss at that rate can’t be good. Did you know there are almost 250 calories in a pint of cider? Nor did I until I started looking into why I’m losing so much weight.

So yes, it’s been an eventful 12 days, it’s been strange not having a pint whilst watching the football or on a Saturday night as these were habitual, but all in all, still going strong.

Lets get this straight, the workers know exactly what they are doing by striking at this time of year. On the first day, mail centre staff and drivers will strike. The next day it will be delivery and collection staff meaning maximum disruption to service whilst each employee only loses one days pay. Whether these workers are right to strike or not isn’t for me to involve myself in, it’s how it has been dealt with by the leaders at Royal Mail that really frustrates me.

There are over 2.5 million unemployed people in the UK, a good majority of who would give an arm to get themselves back into employment, and we’re accepting these people walking out and striking over conditions THEIR union agreed to previously? If it were my business, anybody who walked out would be out on their ear with the option to reapply for thier jobs along with the rest of the unemployed people.

Sadly it isn’t as simple as that as the Royal Mail is owned by the government, a government who are badly struggling to stay in power come the next election and to take such a stance would probably mean the little hope they have left of staying in power would be out of the window, a sign we should privatise the Royal Mail maybe?

But what have the Royal Mail actually done to resolve the strikes? 40 days of solid chat with the union hasn’t resolved the issue so are they expecting another 40 days of chat will? The time for chat is never over, but you need to also take action. Bringing in unskilled tempory staff (which would have come in for Christmas anyway) has done little to stop the millions of letters / parcels stacking up in the extra warehouses they’ve hired to do little more than store them in.

When a business has such a monopoly on a sector (in this case mail delivery) like the Royal mail has, it has to do something pretty dumb to lose that overnight, something the Royal Mail are going to educate the world as to how to achieve at this rate. Whilst the Internet, particularly email, has been blamed for the problems facing the Royal Mail in recent years, it’s actually the Internet and the emergence of Ecommerce which has kept it going with such strengths, but maybe the royal Mail haven’t understood this and adapted?

The strikes have meant that retailers just won’t send their parcels through Royal Mail with the likes of Amazon, John Lewis, Tesco and a mass of other major retailers have simply switched to alterior courier companies, many of whom are cheaper to send with then the Royal Mail.

Here’s how I’d have handled it, rightly or wrongly…. I’d have simply stopped all services to EVERYONE other than my business customers. No pick ups from post boxes, no non business services at post offices, nothing.

I’d have visited my top 1000 customers and guaranteed them that their mail will be delivered without delay as usual, communicating to the rest of businesses that services will be as normal for them. Why? Simply because now that John Lewis, Amazon and everyone has left, who’s to guarantee that they are going to come back when there are cheaper services with the same convenience available to business customers? So if the Royal Mail only serviced it’s business customers, mail would be at a manageable level, I’d have just about the right number of experienced staff to keep it ticking over and we wouldn’t have these warehouses dotted around the country full of undelivered mail from a week ago.

As a consumer I’d rather Royal Mail had taken this action. At the moment I can send something, but never know if or when its going to get there, I’d rather than just stop accepting mail, that way I know where I stand.

Me, you and anybody who wants to send a postcard or a birthday card are going to be pretty annoyed by not being able to send it through Royal Mail, but other than a handful of people who will take it to heart and never use the Royal Mail again, we would return to them once the strike action was resolved simply because it’s convenient. Throwing a letter in a postbox is the everyday, it’s cheaper than alternative deliverers and we would return to doing it straight afterwards because of this, the alternatives just aren’t as convenient.

The only way a successor to the petrol car is ever going to work, is when it can be fuelled just like a petrol car, or as conveniently…

There would also be a massive pressure then on the staff at the Royal Mail who are striking because their friends, family, associates wouldn’t be able to use a service their working for…. because of their strike action. It would completely turn the tables on the strikers because the royal Mail would have a manageable workload.

No I wouldn’t be popular, but i’d be running a profitable service and I’d be being honest with all of my customers by saying “sorry guys, but whilst these strikes are going on we just can’t take your mail”, honesty goes a long way you know.

So for some time now I’ve been looking more and more at how much I drink in an average week, and actually it’s quite scary. I’ll have a drink at lunch, a drink if we’re at a meeting in a restaurant or bar, a drink if i’m on a long commute, a drink if I’m out with friends, a drink after work, a drink if I’m stressed (and I get stressed a lot!)….

The Internet tells me the average male should have 21 units a week, I must have been confused in thinking that was the daily allowance. So short of checking myself into AA, I thought now was time to take action and do something about it.

I contemplated for some time just trying to drink a bit less, but I know myself in social situations and don’t think this is the right course of action for me. If I’m out with the intention of just having one drink, I know I’ll say “oh go on then, I’ll just have another … then another…”

So I’ve decided to pledge publicly that if I’m out with you, in a meeting with you, or you see me in a bar, you have permission to come up to me and kick me. This is a one hundred percent alcohol ban, so don’t offer me one either… my liver needs your help!

The bets in the office are that I won’t last the week, so i’ll keep you updated as to how I get on….

Success rate was apparently 50% in the studio, but despite me following the instructions and doing everything as asked, it didn’t work for me.

Did you watch it? And did Derren Brown stick you to your sofa?

I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who genuinely got stuck and their experience.

Derren Brown’s Studio Audience Stuck

Derren Brown Makes Girl Choose Giraffe Toy From millions Of Choices At Hamleys In Tonights “How To Control The Nation”.

This Guy Believes He Is Stuck To His Seat

And Another Stuck…

(i’ll add more video’s from tonights show as I find them).