Sonet Journal

I had mentioned earlier in the year that Southbourne Internet was closing down and we were rebranding to Sonet Digital. I knew it was a going to take a while as we have been really busy this year non-stop and at times ‘burning the candle at both ends’ – it has not given me the time to start the migration and move I wanted.
A couple of weeks I decided to make a start and put the together architecture for the new site which will be at www.sonetdigital.com We are quite excited about the new site and it will feature a very neat design – hopefully that right combination of new media and business – integrated blog – white paper resource etc.
One of the main reasons we are re-branding and starting afresh is besides growing we have moved on with thoughts and attitudes and what we feel we should be providing our clients. Southbourne.com was always a smaller company even before we had our original hometown URL of Southbourne.com we were Southbourne Internet and smaller still.
Long Term VS. Short Term Web Projects
When we started it was almost overnight that Southbourne got plunged into a couple of big projects consulting – it then steadied out and since then we have built many smaller sites and a few larger ones. Some of our successes have been consulting on SEO and re-branding for various companies. Our philosophy regarding SEO has never been to take a short term project. We have always maintained that the best SEO projects should be over a longer period of time working to:
Establish partnerships and relations with our clients

• Taking the time to understand the clients market and its customer base

• Educating the client in the best sues of the web and compliancy

• Building a trust factor

The above is just some of many points that we feel aid in success for a Search engine marketing campaign.

Static Web Designers vs. Quality
The new company will emphasize this more. Besides SEO, design and development will be core for Sonet Digital. I have never been completely happy with using static designers that stay with one company. I am off the belief that each project is individual and should take on the most appropriate designer for the project. Besides having a static designer also stymies the versatility of a new media agency and the designs all start to become to identifiable. Sonet Digital will work with many designers from various agencies to freelances. It’s not about picking the best but the most appropriate for the job. To do this equitably we will share in the credit and profit for the design jobs. We will however, keep a static designer for updating sites. There will also be a static developer on board.

Food for Thought and Implementation

Two really neat blog post that had dropped down to my mail-feeds this morning both deal with URl, redirects and the debate for underscores or dashes.

Underscores vs. Dashes
First feed I had was from Google’s Matt Cutts with some good tips for Whitehat bloggers, Matt states that:

But note that I also said if you’d already made your site with underscores, it probably wasn’t worth trying to migrate all your URL’s over to dashes. If you’re starting fresh, I’d still pick dashes.

This reaffirmed our internal debates about this matter. It’s always one of those niggling issues whether to use dashes or underscores. Dashes it is then.

301 vs. 302 Redirects
Secondly a really good Whiteboard Friday session from Jeff Pollard at SEOMOZ. Jeff’s video about page redirection deals with the tricky issue of 301 redirects and moving those old pages to a new area. This is good stuff and though it’s fairly well know it certainly reaffirms why you should use a 301 redirect instead of a 302. A 302 will tell a search engine that it is only a temporary move. A 301 redirect will say that it’s a permanent move to the new page and the search engine will then transfer all its information about the page to the new area including link juice.

Both really good post and worth a read and to keep in mind when developing or redesigning new sites that change their URL structure.

I’ve been a member of Second Life for approximately a year now. Admittedly I don’t get down there as much as I would like, mainly due to a busy work schedule. For those of you not familiar with Second Life, it is in a nutshell a virtual world. Second Life goes further and has created its own currency including a stock market, financial exchanges and everything you would expect in a offline commercial world including the purchase of clothes (for whatever alter-ego you have dreamed up), cars, motorbikes, weapons (If you feel like a bit of action), slot machines, discos and bars, movies and just about anything you need.

A while ago I came across a presentation for the New Media Consortium (NMC) which is a virtual creative learning center/think-tank. Albeit the video is a little old now, it is still quite effective and representative of events in Second Life:

Could marketing in a virtual 3D environment become reality? I believe so and so do many others. A good example is In Game Ads – Activision’s popular WWII action game Call of Duty featured In-Game ads with BT Broadband in the guise of 1940’s styled wall ads, very effective and neat, while dangerous at the same time. (I stopped to look at one and immediately got shot by a German sniper). In Game Ads has the potential to garner large market share of advertising revenues, There are a games developed around most subjects and in particular sports with some of the PSP3 and Xbox360 games that feature Grand Slam Tennis and Formula 1 racing, it would make financial sense that the large gaming companies will be tailor-developing their applications to meet advertiser needs.

As for Second Life, it’s a source of de-stressing entertainment where one can take on as many alter-egos than you could wave a stick at.

Second Life let you choose your first name but give you a limited choice of last names, I ended up as a Vincent Leonov! More about Second Life can be read on their Official Second Life Blog