I hate Brian F di Caprio

This absolute douche keeps spamming my work email with get rich quick schemes. Look at him! He looks like everything post 1982 has singularly failed to enter his cranium! I picture him listening to Phil Collins whilst getting aroused by spreadsheets. Here’s an example of his “work” amended in bold by my own subtext:

Its a fact that over a third of all self made millionaires are entrepreneurs who earn a massive income being in their own business.
Really Brian? Did I contact you asking for a fact?

What makes working for yourself so conducive to wealth building? Simply put, when you work for yourself you get paid based on your results, NOT your time. What is the difference? Well your time is limited, just as all of us have limited amounts of time that we can spend working.
How true…A pity that my time is taken up deleting crap like this from my inbox, even though I have asked you several times to unsubscribe my email

Results, on the other hand, are unlimited.
In fact, as an entrepreneur you can continue to achieve bigger results and to earn more money, all while working less and less.
So…more and more time to bleach your hair and teeth whilst listening to Huey Lewis & The News then eh Brian?

Seriously though, he looks like the kind of guy who would be pompous enough to Google his own name on a daily basis…so Brian f Di CrapWeasel, if you’re reading this, process your unsubscribe requests please (not that I ever subscribed!)

A delightful email….

Today, I came into a great deal of money. Well….I could have. This gem was sitting in my inbox:

—–Original Message—–
From: BARR. ANDREAW AND ASS. CHAMBERS [mailto:barr_andrwfra_esq@yahoo.com.hk]
Sent: 16 November 2009 19:20
Subject: INHERITANCE NOTIFICATION!!!

INHERITANCE NOTIFICATION!!!

On behalf of the Trustees and Executor of the estate of Late Engr.Juriaan Kugger. I once again
try to notify you as my earlier letter were returned undelivered. I wish to notify you that late
Engr. Juriaan Kugger made you a beneficiary to his WILL.

He left the sum of Thirty Million,One Hundred Thousand Dollars (USD$30, 100.000.00) to you in
the Codicil and last testament to his WILL. This may sound strange and unbelievable to you,
but it is real and true. Being a widely traveled man, he must have been in contact with you in
the past or simply you were nominated to him by one of his numerous friends abroad who
wished you good. Engr. Juriaan Kugger until his death was a member of the Helicopter Society and the Institute of Electronic
& Electrical Engineers. Please if I reach you as I am hopeful, endeavor to get back to me as
soon as possible to enable me conclude my job.

You are advice to contact me with my personal email: barr_andfraser_esq@live.co.uk

Await your prompt response.

Yours in Service,

BARRISTER ANDREAW FRASER ESQ.

PRINCIPAL PARTNERS: Barrister Aidan Walsh., Markus Wolfgang, Mr. John Marvey Esq.,
Mr. Jerry Smith Esq.

To cut a long story short, I decided it would be a bit rude to take it. Here’s my (open) reply:

Hi Andreaw,

(Your email says it’s from BARR. ANDREAW AND ASS. CHAMBERS…I like the spelling of your name. Say hi to the Ass. Chambers from me won’t you?)

Being as I don’t know the late Engr. Juriann Kugger, it seems a little bold of me to lay claim to any of his estate.

Maybe you could donate it to his beloved helicopter society, or you (and your Ass. Chambers) could keep it. I really don’t mind.

Anyway, I must go. I fear there may be a rumbling in my own Ass. Chambers.

Have a great day

I just did a little sick in my mouth…

“my eyes, my eyes!”

An interesting marketing strategy…..

So, here’s today’s scenario:

You’re a wedding and function DJ, who has a nifty sideline in bouncy castle hire. When you’re building your website, it’s important that you create something which shows you as professional, approachable and probably child-friendly. Right?

So…how are you going to achieve this?
Perhaps some nice pictures of you performing? A crowd of happy toddlers on the bouncy castle? Some happy people on the dancefloor?

…………………..Or do you just knock up a crappy animated gif of yourself pelvic-thrusting?

surely not the latter?

Another website design courtesy of Stevie Wonder

Ever wondered about wedding champagne flutes?

Me too.

Well, wonder no more courtesy of this beautifully executed site:

wedding champagne flutes

Keyword Density – How much is TOO much?

I happened upon a rather interesting website the other day…There are many differing schools-of-thought on the topic of keyword density:

It is widely accepted that for a website to be considered well-optimised, there must be an occurence of keywords that are relevant to the topic of the website. It stands to reason that a site about shoes will probably have some text containing the word “shoes”. Perhaps there will be variants on this, such as “pumps”, “trainers”, “brogues” or “stilletos”.

Fortunately, the clever people at Google apply something called “latent semantic indexing” which applies similar principles to a thesaurus when they are indexing websites. The more Google’s algorithms evolve, the more wise they get to people trying to scam their way into a high search result by cramming as many keywords into some text as they can.

For this very reason, most sensible copywriters will try to make their on-site text as natural as possible. Whilst they will of course try to put necessary keywords in, the text needs to appear natural and to be readable by actual human-beings as well as Google’s spiders.

Every now and again though (if you’re looking in the right places) you may find something like this:

keywordkeywordkeywordkeyword

Being the helpful citizen that I am, I made a comment under the name “Getting Out Of Debt” as I was concerned that they hadn’t got quite enough keywords in there!

A dramatic S.E.O. fail

Been a bit quiet of late…
Feeling compelled to share a great link exchange request email that a colleague of mine got for his attention as webmaster:

“Dear Webmaster/Site owner,

While browsing for “Keyword” I have come across your website.
I found its content relevant to our website (http://www.I’velefttheURLoutbecauseI’mnotTHATcruel.com). As per Google’s algorithm outbound link on relevant web page is crucial in determining websites Page Rank and search engine ranking. Could you please do me a favor by posting our details in your websites “LINK/Resource” page at
http://www.lefttheURLoutagain.com
Looking forward to positive reply/action from you!!

Thanks in advance!

Best Regards,

“Link Builder”

All I can say to this is a hearty WELL DONE to Mr Link Builder if that is his real name. You were browsing for “keyword” you say?

Are you sure you didn’t just forget to change your email template?

I’m not so confident that you will get much positive reply/action I’m afraid. At least you gave me a chuckle and for that I thank you.
……..

Another jaw-droppingly bad website…

So….here’s the scenario:

You live in California & you’re in a band. This may be an unlikely scenario (for the record, it is for me. I live in the UK) but let’s run with it:

You’ve got all the accessories (guitar…check, poodle-perm…check, unfeasibly tight trousers…check) but you need somewhere to rock out. Somewhere you can make stupid amounts of noise without the authorities turning up. The logical thing to do is look for a rehearsal studio, right?

Given that so many people harbour rock-star aspirations, there are a bewildering amount of rehearsal studios to choose from in California. Rather than go & check out 50 different places, you decide to have a look at a few websites…….Only to be met with this:

http://www.145studios.com/

Oh well, at least they’ve left an email address. Any web designers reading this might want to drop them a line.

A short but sweet manifesto

So…this is where I let you know the purpose of this thing I guess.

In my day-to-day worklife, I look at websites. Hundreds of them. Some good, some bad, some ugly.

This is a place where I intend to share some of the ugly ones. Not your run-of-the-mill, “urghhh, look at that!” type sites…..No. The ones where I actually feel the need to stop what I’m doing, disrupt a colleague & say “hey, come and look at this” type of sites. Those that are so side-splittingly bad, they’ve actually transcended “bad” and just become funny.

Theoretically, a commercial website should convey exactly what you want to convey about your business. Every now and again though, you’ll come across one that makes you think you’d have to have taken a pretty sharp bump on the head to consider using that company for anything!  Then again, some of these have been so badly made, they’ve neglected to provide any contact details anyway.

So, on to an example I guess. The following site made me hurt laughing:

http://www.classicweddingcakes.co.uk/

I think that the genius of this site is that they use the phrase “The only limit is your imagination”