We hope you guys had an amazing Christmas and New Year. Things are getting busy again here at the Ziller office – and to be honest, we haven’t stopped! We’ve got some massive projects lined up for 2012, and with our business getting larger, our ideas are as well. I’d just like to give you a heads up on a new project we’re working on in partnership with a company called The Trees and The Forests, a reputable digital marketing agency in Sydney. The project is called Ten Very Special Things, and we’re proud to say that we’ve both designed and built the website.
Ten Very Special Things is a not for profit charity eCommerce website, where users can register to sell a unique or interesting item via the store, designate a charity, and allocate a percentage of sales towards that charity. We’re pretty sure that this hasn’t been done before, and we feel that the website is going to be a huge hit throughout the online community.
Check it out for yourself. The site isn’t live just yet, but you can keep tabs on the web page here.
On October 10 this year, the Ape Conservation Effort held the first annual Gorilla Golf Tournament at the Brookfield Country Club in Roswell, Georgia. Ziller were proud to sponsor a hole and help raise money for gorilla conservation.
The Ape Conservation Effort are a Georgia based not-for-profit organisation, which is comprised of a number of volunteer members who like Ziller, share a passion for animals and a commitment to saving the great apes of the world (bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans).
In addition to supporting the Gorilla Golf Tournament, Ziller are also a proud partner of The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. Please check out their website to read more about their cause and plight for gorilla conservation.
The team here at Ziller is extremely excited, and proud, to announce that one of our recent projects has been nominated for 2 categories in the Online Retail Industry Awards. In light of this great news, we thought we’d shed some light on the client’s background and reflect upon both the challenges and achievements of the project.
Joe Button is a specialist online retailer of custom-made business and dress shirts. The company is founded by three entrepreneurial individuals who have shared the same passion, and frustrations, for business shirts. When the team at Joe Button approached Ziller, their needs were clear; they wanted to create a unique online shopping experience that allowed customers to build the perfect business shirt that would compliment their build with a flawless fit.
Due to the highly dynamic nature of the website, we were challenged to push our talents to the maximum to develop a capable, unique solution that met the needs of the Joe Button team. When we were briefed, a primary feature of the website was clearly the user’s ability to freely build and customise a business shirt to their liking, utilising different fabrics, colours, sizes and styles.
By all means, the challenge faced by our team was monumental. But for us here at Ziller, we simply just can’t say no to a challenge!
Conceptually, the client wanted a simple, elegant feel to the website to reflect the conservative, classy nature of business and dress clothing. Utlising the client’s brand guidelines, we managed to produce a design concept and information structure that is both visually pleasing and easy to use:
The second part of the project, was engineering what’s under the hood. The Joe Button website was another one of our websites to roll-out using our custom built and very own ‘Zorilla’ CMS. If you’ve had a look around the website, you’ll notice that one of the stand-out features is undoubtedly the 3D rendering of the dress shirts when you ‘customise your own shirt’. This was one of the most challenging features of the website to implement. Over 15,000 photographs of shirt sections were taken, and then developed and rendered onto 3D models. Once we got the modeling done, we then had to create algorithms to calculate every possible shirt combination the would appear to the end user. If you have a second to spare, try the feature out for yourself.
Pretty cool, right? Aside from the obvious fact that they also stock a shirt named the ‘Patrick Bateman’. Total 90’s glory, right there.
Anyway, we’d like to wish the team at Joe Button the best of luck in their nominations for ‘best new online retailer’, and ‘most innovative online retailer’. We’ll be cheering them on.
This is just a short update, but if there is anyone in the neighbourhood between July 27th and 29th, then Trent will be attending Mozcon Seattle as part of his tour of the U.S. This is kind of a big deal for us because it means that we get to mingle with some of the industry’s finest, including the founder of SEOmoz: Rand Fishkin. If you’re just starting out in search marketing, then I would suggest subscribing to the SEOmoz website. They’ve got a ton of great stuff, and through them, we aim to learn a lot more about search through this convention.
So, if you’re in America, namely Seattle&emdash;drop by and say hi
We thought it would be cool to make our next blog post a little more personal. Recently, Trent Allan, the head honcho hear at Ziller, gave a speech at a Toastmasters presentation talking about what he is most passionate about – Google search. The objective of the speech was to generate interest in how the world’s biggest search engine works, and how it ties in with search engine optimisation below. You check out the vid below. We’ve also featured a clean transcript for you to take away from the video – enjoy!
Transcript
“I’d like to talk to you today about the logic of Google search … The purpose of my speech is to tell all of you a little bit more about the Google search engine and how it works, to tell you a little bit about the structure of a search engine results page, tell you a little bit about how Google goes about finding all the websites that it includes in its search engine, and lastly the ways in which it organises all of the results listed on the results page by order of rank.
To begin with, let’s look at the structure. Now if you could all visualise the Google results search page, on the left you have what is called the organic or natural search results. Up the top, and down the right, you have the paid results. Now the difference between the paid results and organic results is that basically the top and the right search listings are advertisements. You pay to get placed in that area of search, however you can’t pay for high inclusion into the ‘organic’ listings on the left. You can however pay people to optimise a site to rank higher organically, which delves into SEO, but you can not control the exact outcome of where and when you will appear higher up in organic search results.
Believe it or not, 90% of Google’s profit is actually made through paid search – or the ads on the right. This is an extraordinarily important part of Google’s business, and because of that reason they need to make sure that their search engine is the damn best search engine there is because if they start delivering incorrect results, people will not pay to get listed, and they would subsequently lose their primary revenue stream.
Obviously in order to be the best, Google needs to have a vast knowledge of the most relevant websites to include for search results. To calculate which sites to include, Google regularly crawls and identifies websites at different frequencies. Known as the ‘crawl rate’, this facet of search dictates how frequently the search results relating to a website are updated. For example, sites that are perpetually generating content, such as news websites for example, would be crawled and have their search results updated probably 10 times more than that of a standard website with static pages. This is because Google identifies that certain websites will be updated more than others.
Now that you have an understanding of how Google crawls websites to include them in search and update them, let’s look at how Google actually ranks them in terms of priority, or rank. For example, if you go to Google and punch in a search term. Let’s say, ‘public speaking tutorials’, for example. When you punch in this search term the search engine will return listings ranked in order of 1-10 on the search engine result page. Google’s job is to make sure that the first result listed for that search term is of maximum relevancy to what you searched for.
There are 2 main factors that determine the rank of a website search result for a keyword. These are relevancy and popularity. Relevancy obviously refers to the relation of the topic of a website to the search term. If we searched for ‘public speaking tutorials’, then we would expect that the content contained within the pages of the website ranking 1st are close to 100% relevancy to what we’re searching for. Once Google has determined how relevant the website is to the search result, then it begins to look at the popularity of the website being listed. For example, if a lot of people are linking to the website and sharing links to the website, Google can identify that the website is highly sought after and therefore should be placed conveniently at the top of the search engine results page for the relevant search term.
The way that popularity, as mentioned, is based on links. For example, if website A links to website B, then Google considers that a link ‘vote’ for website B. One funny story of link popularity is back when George Bush was running for election, what a bunch of guys figured out is that if you linked a whole heap of anchor text using a keyword to the Whitehouse website using the keyword ‘moron’, when you Google’d ‘moron’, George Bush appeared as the very first search result. This was 10 years ago though, and Google has changed their algorithm so that your website must include instances of that keyword before it can be considered to rank strongly for a specific keyword.
I hope by now you have a better understanding of how Google works. The reason why I brought up this topic is because it’s popular conversation between friends, and it seems that a lot of people are interested in this general topic so I thought it would be cool to bring up. I’ve talked you about the structure of the search results page, and how Google goes about finding the websites to include, I’ve spoken to you about the crawl rate, I’ve also talked to you about the ranking factors, popularity and relevancy, and yeah… While this knowledge obviously won’t land you a job at Google, at least now you can walk away with a better understanding of how it all works and the significance of what it does. Thanks.“
If you work in an office, regardless of your profession, there’s always something that you keep close by to act as a bit of a muse. Here at Ziller, we all have unique personalities, and what better way to show what type of person we are than by showing you what we’ve got sitting idly by the sides of our computer monitors.
Leo Alvarez – Project manager and Web Designer:
The blue-eyed gorilla mascot…
This guy sits atop Leo’s desktop and stares at him with hungry eyes all day, it almost looks like he’s been deprived of bananas. I don’t know what the story is here, as Leo’s been known to sit in front of this little guy and lay into some fresh fruit. It sounds kind of cruel, but I think it’s strategic.
You see, Leo has been known to cook really good food as well… This might attribute to the fact that Mr.Blue-eyes gorilla always has a furious look on his face because he’ll never get to eat any. Our theory is that Leo likes to keep Mr.Blue-Eyes really angry.
Gorilla fury is what inspires Leo to design amazing websites, it also gives him strength when times are tough!
Mark Kemp (me) – Online Marketing (SEO) and Content Development:
Super Saiyan Trunks (Dragon Ball Z)
Super saiyan Trunks, if you don’t know him, is from a really lame TV show known as DragonBall Z. Now, a lot of people think I’m super nerdy for being into something so childish, but I still think it’s cool. The story behind this guy, is that when he gets blonde hair (turns into a super saiyan), he can go all “Hulkamania” with his enemies. He also has a wicked sword.
Trunks sits by the side of my desktop, looking like he’s about to power up and destroy something. It’s excellent inspiration for me, because when I work through those late nights and I’m feeling a little bit drained, I look over and catch a glimpse of some DragonBall Z glory. When this happens, my black hair turns blonde and windswept, I start flying around the room, and I blast energy beams at my computer.
Well… Not really, but that would be cool, right? Trunks is cool because he shows me that there’s some light at the end of the tunnel when I’ve got a lot of tasks to work through!
Do you have a desktop mascot? Who gives you inspiration..? Tell us! We’re interested to know.
I’ll update this again when I get some more photos from the Ziller team.
It’s been a while since we last updated the Ziller blog, but there has been a lot happening here at Ziller over the past few months.
To give you the low down…
Our most exciting thing to share at the moment is our attendance at this year’s PubCon 2010, in the one and only Las Vegas! Our head gorilla, company owner, or ‘silverback’ as you will (Trent), was privileged enough to be able to sit down and collaborate with some of the most esteemed search engine veterans on the web.
If you’re not too sure what PubCon is, it’s a consortium of the best industry leading search engine optimisation and social media innovators ever assembled. Held annually, PubCon is an extremely valuable learning opportunity that allows search marketers to learn more about their chosen profession guided only by the best in the business, as well as attend exclusive workshops.
Who do we mean by best in the biz..? Take a look at the lineup and see for yourself – even Matt Cutts will be in attendance!
After fraternizing with the who’s who of internet marketing, the guys here at Ziller are eagerly awaiting Trent’s return with a large compendium of innovative ideas to sink their teeth into.
With internet marketing, it’s all about staying ahead of the curve, and we’re keen to maintain our advantage over the competition with the knowledge we’ve attained from this year’s PubCon gathering.
In fact, Ziller the gorilla has already started brainstorming some ideas back at HQ:
Who knows, before long he may have his own exhibit set up at PubCon Vegas 2011. We think it would look a little something like this…
We would like to thank everyone who voted for Ziller in the 2010 Sydney City Business Awards. Unfortunately we were unable to take out the big award but none the less were very proud to once make the finals for the Information and Communication Technology category. We had a great night at the awards dinner and hope to be back next year.
We are very proud and honoured to be the Westpac Surry Hills Business of the Month for July. Ziller are a long term customer the Westpac bank and are proud to be presented with the award.
