Named in the bible

Interesting fact: Queen of the South is the only football team named in the Bible.

Well, more accurately, the Bible mentions a Queen of the South and there is now a football team that shares this name. It's not like Queen of the South Football Club were around 2,000 years ago and someone thought they should mention his allegiance to the team.

Anyway, they are having trouble with their official website from what I can gather from the various unofficial blogs and supporters' message boards - the official message board is not available, possibly due to bad press.

A lesson for all you web site design companies out there trying to make that step up to professional service delivery: be careful what you promise.

And if you can't deliver what you promised, at least test your development site before you put it live.

Stirling work

The weekend just past was spent in Aberfoyle, Stirling and Falkirk helping Kit (website designer and video technologist) through his stag activities.

A good proportion of the minibus-load are involved in video and web-related work, including time-lapse photography expert Robbie Allen.

After a fear-fighting Saturday jumping of trees in harnesses we ate and drank in Stirling until we felt sick or tired.

Directory Listings

Is it good to embark on a link building campaign for when building your website's presence online?

There are numerous directory sites where concepts like relevant directory and page rank, non-reciprocal, reciprocal, all come to the fore. I am currently experimenting with these, especially the ones that don't require payment, but it's a murky business.

I can see that the Callisti website is listed on some of the sites as this shows up in search results. I am slightly concerned that it's wasting energy that could be spent in something more genuine. Being listed in 50 different phone books doesn't seem very substantial for some reason but maybe that's just me.

The more sites that we work on, the more courtesy links point to the site, which I feel better about as it is honourable. Let's face it, on today's date the site is currently indexed but unranked and this can take time.

I'm quite impressed with some of the automated link building systems - a collection of scripts and applications that have gestalt intelligent appearance but no inherent soul. Where am I going with that?

SEO and Google Adwords

Hi pop-pickers. Another busy day in and out of the office. One random event of note was my dilapidated car reach a milestone...

Or 150,000 of them to be precise. This was en-route to Barncleuch, Irongray in Dumfries and Galloway to consult with Chairman of the Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival about a number of issues.

On my return I found that a swarm of SEO jobs had come into my mailbox along with some hosting requests. I do love administration!

Aberdeen Media Website Development

What a strange day at the office. The morning entailed a rainy trip to the 'Making it Happen' discussion on the alternative futures for theatre provision in Dumfries (and by extension Dumfries and Galloway).

There were many representatives from local authority, theatre trust (involved with the intimate but delapidated Theatre Royal), community organisations, schools, etc. and a few from the Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival membership. This is a part time interest for me as I am keen to find a practical way of joining up the provision of creative arts and events information for the region and have somehow been co-opted on to the festival board.

Subsequently a London client of Callisti required some research to find an alternative quote for a large scale development (masquerading as another nominal company for NDA reasons) and I was fortunate enough to find AVC Media Enterprises based in Aberdeen.

After a good chat with their project interface character I was well impressed, and he was able to be helpful and informative in a way that I'd like to revisit. Their website is professional and exemplifies some of the clever applications they have put to use. More media oriented than most and, by the way, it was surprisingly hard to find a company (that was accessible) based in Scotland who could come close to providing what was being asked for.

Somewhere to dig for gold

I was thinking that there's gold in them there hills. Just not enough to warrant spending £1 million setting up a small mine to extract £0.9 million worth of gold. Some smart alec will find a cute way of making it worthwhile.

Not me though, I was too busy optimising the website for the Central Hotel in Annan. A freelancer of some local repute had passed on the work so I was happy to help. It was 6am, how could I refuse? The Basement bar/venue sounds interesting though so I should sample it someday.

SEO on many levels

I spent some of this afternoon thinking about sheep. Not because I'm surrounded by Scotland. The latest client has a number of web sites and the latest online presence is for pedigree Suffolk sheep.

There are some interesting facts to be found when researching for writing web-copy, and it wasn't something I could have predicted last week. Still, trawling through the DEFRA website for information on MV and Scrapie had it's neuronal pleasures...

Some kind of rural filmscape theme was trying to tie itself together in my head since the morning phone call from a travelling developer, wandering wild in hills near Keswick.