One thing I have learned over the years since I emigrated to the UK from America is this: In the age of the internet, being 3000+ miles away from your family does not necessarily mean that you escape knowledge of the minutiae of their daily lives. (Just as importantly, I find that I don't want to escape the minutiae of their daily lives. Learning about it makes the distance between us seem far less than it is.)
So of course, when my parents decided to get the carpets in their home cleaned, I knew all about it. Today, my father emailed me with a full report on how things went:
's website are to be believed, Jeff Martin's company is appropriately named.
Looking more closely at the site, I was surprised to find a lot of valuable information that Personal Touch is giving away for free. There's a guide to the most common carpet stains and how to remove them, a tutorial on different styles and fibres of carpets, and tips on how to keep your carpet clean. (I never knew, before reading that, that you're supposed to vaccum carpets in both directions. So there's my value take-away from their website right there.)
This site ought to be a blog. Jeff and his employees could blog on a regular basis about different jobs, show satisfied customers with their clean carpets, inform and pontificate about new developments in fibres and styles, talk about disgusting or funny pet-related stains, announce special offers...there is lots of scope for good content here. Running ads in the local media is one thing. But using Personal Touch's own medium - their website, in the form of a blog - to demonstrate their knowledge and skills, and to establish themselves as experts in the field, would take their business's success to a whole other level.
Personal Touch is selling its competence - in order to employ (and re-employ) their services, people have to believe that Jeff and his staff know their stuff, know what they're doing, and will do a good job cleaning their carpets. Scope for repeat business is high, which is why Jeff has figured out that making customers happy is worth doing - he wants people to be pleased with his services and to evangelise his company to other potential customers. Giving them valuable content that is easily linked to and passed around, updated on a regular basis and often amusing, would make that customer evangelism a million times easier and more infectious. Air conditioning contractors are doing it, so why not carpet cleaners?
Blogs are not just suitable and beneficial for monolithic, global companies. If an evangelistic customer like my father has me, all the way in London, totally sold on this small business and its services, imagine the value in making it even easier for local customers to evangelise to local potential customers.
Personal Touch's website oughta be a blog.
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So there I was entering "Removing from Persian rugs" into Google and up popped Personal Touch Carpet Cleaning site.
Whoose to say a simple web gateway presenting carpet cleaning tips and a nice, clear "Clean My Carpet Now" button isn't far more effective interface for aquiring new customers for Personal Touch's services than a Blog.
A blog would no doubt make interesting reading, generate interest, customer chatter, good customer research for Personal Touch to leverage, but when my baby girl has swallowed a candle and vomited a bile/wax combination - I need cleaning advice/service fast without the delay of a more interesting, but intrinsically cluttered gateway to Personal Touch's services.
Personal Touch's web site shouldn't be a blog nor should it be static - it should be both!
Whoose to say a simple web gateway presenting carpet cleaning tips and a nice, clear "Clean My Carpet Now" button isn't far more effective interface for aquiring new customers for Personal Touch's services than a Blog.
Let's not confuse format with content. You can have that "Clean My Carpet Now" page, but enable each discreet chunk of information - how to clean blood off fibre X, how to get candle wax off fibre Y - to be linked to individually. This lets the information be disseminated more efficiently and far more widely than saying, "Go to the main page and scroll down until you find what you're looking for." The permalink (permanent link) to each bit of wisdom gives those who link to it a handle to grab onto and pull the value out and pass it on.
A blog would no doubt make interesting reading, generate interest, customer chatter, good customer research for Personal Touch to leverage, but when my baby girl has swallowed a candle and vomited a bile/wax combination - I need cleaning advice/service fast without the delay of a more interesting, but intrinsically cluttered gateway to Personal Touch's services.
There's no delay whatsoever. Scenario: You search Google for, say, "how to remove baby vomit and wax from a rug". Google doesn't throw up (no pun intended) a link to the main blog - it gives you the permalink to that discreet chunk of information you're looking for. The fact that that discreet chunk may at one point have been featured on the main blog is totally irrelevant to your experience in this instance.
Also, I don't understand the "intrinsically cluttered" argument. Surely this is an issue of design and not determined by the use of blog software, permalinks, etc. I understand that, for your purposes when you are looking for solutions on how to clean a carpet, you don't want to sift through a page of blog posts to find what you're looking for. But there is no need to do so - posts to the blog should be categorised ("How to Clean Synthetic Fibres," "How to Clean Natural Fibres," etc - for example), and as blog software is database-driven, it's incredibly easy to search within a given blog for that specific information you require. Only an unreasonable jerk or technophobe would be disappointed or annoyed that the exact information they required did not appear as soon as they loaded the front page of any given website ("Damn, you mean if I want to know how to install XP on my PC, the front page of Microsoft.com doesn't have the full instructions? The web sucks!").
For more on this, read this post of mine from a couple of months ago.
One more thing:
Personal Touch's web site shouldn't be a blog nor should it be static - it should be both!
Both blogs and static/fixed content can be driven by blog software - indeed, check out the web presence we created for our clients the Social Affairs Unit. You've got static content, a dynamic blog, e-commerce, digital publications, etc - all driven by blog software. There are many implications of this, but perhaps the most important to the SAU is the fact that they don't need a webmaster to update any part of their site, from the blog to the static information to the e-commerce element: they can do it all themselves, and to say that they are not techies is an understatement. The lines that some would draw between blogs and static content are not as solid as they may appear.
Hey Jackie I'm going to shock you by saying I agree with you.
Forget about all the irrelavant side issues both blogs and non-blogs can be driven by blog software - er both blogs and non-blogs cans be driven all sorts of classes of software.
Let's get at the issue I am not confusing format with content - I am only interested in talking about format.
I also appreciate that Google and others should link directly to the relevant post, but in fact they frequently don't. Blog format web-sites are no better or worse than non-blog format sites in that matter, both occasionally take you to an inappropriate gateway.
I am talking about the ease of use, accessibility and UI effiency of the columnar, old-fashioned, hot-metal legacy format and style still used by most blogs, which hinders efficient communication for those of us capable of describing precisely what we are interested in e.g. "Cheap cars for vicars with no credit".
If I entered the above I would not want to read a post by some mad Islamic clerics on his blog, presented to me ranked one by Google because it had content about Allah awarding credits in heaven for those believers killing infidel vicars with hi-jacked cars and was linked by everybody in the blogosphere - thus destorting SE rankings.
You mentioned about Google filtering blogs to raise the quality of search results in an email to me - the very nature and format of blogs is driving the position of blogs higher than they should really be up the list of natural results in search engines. Now this isn't the \problem of the blogger, but Google need to look at their search algorithms because I want a quality search. One intelligent to recognise when I'm interested in spending some time on a subject and when I want to buy something now - because I know my need.
When I know my need like the above I want to go directly to a clear, simple format gateway to CheapCarsandLoans4Vicars.com with costs, inventory and pictures and a huge APPLY NOW button - simple as!
Forget about all the irrelavant side issues both blogs and non-blogs can be driven by blog software - er both blogs and non-blogs cans be driven all sorts of classes of software.
Actually, I sort of disagree with that statement. Lots of wanna-be bloggers especially from the techie community re-invent the wheel and try to do the blog in html. Well, nothing wrong with that in principle, however, they usually do not understand that the blog software has the functionality and format the way it does because it evolved for a certain purpose. And they usually do not fully understand that purpose, because simply no one really knows where blogs will end up, as a format, a few years from now. But for now, it does matter what powers the blog - a custom made software that usually sucks and a blog built in one of the widely available blog software packages.
Another point about blog software is its 'social' or 'cultural' impact - I can publish my content without reliance on any webmaster or a coder, what matters more is my writing, not coding skillz. That, at least to me, is revolutionary.
...the very nature and format of blogs is driving the position of blogs higher than they should really be up the list of natural results in search engines. Now this isn't the \problem of the blogger, but Google need to look at their search algorithms because I want a quality search.
Oh dear. Are you suggesting that blogs with their constant updates and stream of content are not a justified result of a 'quality search'?! What on earth makes you say that? Why would you want a dead ol' website, last updated in 2003 or something instead of a blog that keeps track of what's new in the area you are searching and allows you to access discrete chunks of information. No need to wonder where the website designer has hidden the content you are after...
Alternatively, you can use a SE with a different algorithm.
It's a good thing then that tBBC does not base the value of its offering on the fact that blogs come up higher in searches.
Forget about all the irrelavant side issues both blogs and non-blogs can be driven by blog software - er both blogs and non-blogs cans be driven all sorts of classes of software.
If you're saying that this is irrelevant in general, I disagree. If you're saying that this is irrelevant to your point, well, I still disagree. In addition to what Adriana has already said, the software that's used, and the capabilities that it extends to the user - primarily, the capabilities for permalinking and TrackBacks - are pretty important, especially from a networking point of view.
I am talking about the ease of use, accessibility and UI effiency of the columnar, old-fashioned, hot-metal legacy format and style still used by most blogs, which hinders efficient communication for those of us capable of describing precisely what we are interested in e.g. "Cheap cars for vicars with no credit".
I'd be interested in your vision for what format blogs should use - any examples? (That sounds sarcastic, but take my word that it's not!) I just don't understand how the fact that a web page - for that is all a blog is - can "hinder" how users communicate. It can either enable more or enable less, but I don't see how there's anything a web page can do to affect negatively an individual's ability to communicate.
What I mentioned to you was that some quite loopy people are demanding that Google change its algorithms in order to filter out blogs - my ability to communicate must have been hindered by the telephone in my hand ( ;-)), because I think such demands fail to grasp the fact that Adriana mentions above, and the following: It is only right and proper, to my mind, for search results to be ranked higher if they are on a site that is more frequently updated (not a morgue site), that has been recently updated (not a morgue site, likely a source of timely information), and has tons of other sites linking to it (more than a slight hint that others have found the information valuable and/or noteworthy). If you want morgue sites to be ranked with the same weighting as those that are dynamic, if you want sites that may have outdated information to be ranked with the same weighting as those that have been recently updated, and if you want sites that no one else takes much notice of on the web to be ranked with the same weighting as those that lots of other sites have found it necessary to bring to their readers' attention...Well, then don't use Google. Maybe Dogpile might be worth looking at for your needs.
Bottom line: I don't think you're going to get that mind-reading search engine - "One intelligent [enough] to recognise when [you're] interested in spending some time on a subject and when [you] want to buy something now" - anytime soon. The onus will always, to some degree, be on the user to know how to use search engines for the best results. And the onus is on site administrators, if they want to get as high up the Google rankings as possible, to understand how Google works and to make sure their site gets that high ranking - or hire someone else to figure it out for them (I hear there are companies around that actually make a fair whack on SE optimisation and marketing... ;-)).
When I know my need like the above I want to go directly to a clear, simple format gateway to CheapCarsandLoans4Vicars.com with costs, inventory and pictures and a huge APPLY NOW button - simple as!
Heh. Companies whose physical presence is limited to the internet (no bricks and mortar office for irate customers to visit when things go wrong) need to demonstrate their credibility in order to win over less trusting potential customers. You can still get your clean, simple format and standard e-commerce elements, and that "APPLY NOW" button can be there too (do you want it in Nunnery Black or Communion Wine?). So there not only is there no reason why that dream site of yours couldn't also be a blog, but I'd say that - for best results - it should be a blog.
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