Find Your Holiday Supplies More Efficiently On Google
Posted by System Administrator on 12/13/11Tags:
With less than two weeks remaining to wrap up holiday gift shopping, many consumers turn to the Internet to find their last minute items. Search engines like Google offer immense specificity when finding certain products, enabling users to comparison shop amongst a global mall of e-retailers.
In addition, search engines offer tremendous efficiency in finding the highly specific items that are not always available locally. Although search engines are set-up for optimum user-friendliness, there are a few techniques that can enhance your searching and help you find the things you need in minimal time.
Below we outline four seasonal search tips that can significantly improve your holiday Googling.
Word Exclusion
Let’s pretend you need to find pair of Guess brand jeans, but you want to exclude any results that contain the word women. To do this, simply insert the “-” sign in front of the word you want to exclude.
Example: Guess jeans –women
Explicit Phrase Search
Perhaps you are seeking sources for holiday party supplies, but specifically for Christmas. You would likely get better and more specified search results by submitting an explicit phrase search. To do this, enclose the search phrase within double quotations.
Example: “Christmas party supplies”
Website Specific Search
In many cases, you know the e-store with the lowest prices, but you just need to find the product. For instances like this, simply use the “site:” modifier (just be sure that there is no space between site: and the website’s URL.)
Example: site:moosejaw.com mens Arcteryx Fission jacket
Find This OR That
Let’s say you’ve narrowed your choice of golf clubs to either Titleist or Nike, but you still need to do some comparison shopping. This would be the ideal time to use the “OR” operator in your search to render results that contain only Titleist and Nike brand clubs (note that OR must be capitalized.)
Example: golf clubs Titleist OR Nike
By implementing these four search tactics in your holiday shopping arsenal, you can start crossing off last minute items Christmas items in little time. These simple techniques can help refine your search queries for better quality results.
Military Clothing and Sales Website
Posted by System Administrator on 03/24/11Tags:
I love what I do for many reasons. I love building websites, I love SEO work and Internet marketing, and I love providing a service to our clients that makes a big impact on their success.
One of the ancillary loves of my job comes in the form of learning what our clients do. "Business" in general just fascinates me, as I'm always interested in learning how things are made, how products are sold, and just learning about the history and different business models of each of our clients.
We have a great mix of clients, from non-profits and municipalities to online retailers selling everything from first aid kits to wedding dresses. One of our very successful clients is an online retailer called Truly Unique Military Surplus & Collectibles, Inc., also known as The Supply Sergeant. They sell military clothing, combat boots, and pretty much anything related to military apparel.
In process of working on the site, we've learned many things along the way. Interesting information and facts on the military in general, the various uniforms and different requirements each branch has, and lots of product specific knowledge - I can now tell you the difference between jungle boots, jump boots, and tanker boots!
What initially spawned my thought process for this post was the term used in the title - military clothing and sales, and how this term relates specifically to this particular industry. This is one of the many little tidbits of knowledge I gained from working on this site. To a normal civilian, this term looks like more of a basic description or even an incomplete sentence. However in the military, the term 'military clothing and sales' is used to represent the shop on a military base where enlisted personnel go to buy their uniforms and apparel. Used in an example sentence: "I went to the Military Clothing and Sales on my post and picked up a new boonie."
Trivial to most I'm sure, but I find little things like this to be interesting in the least and is just one of the many reasons I love what I do!
YUIConf 2009: Great presentations, free beer and pizza!
Posted by Phillip Ball on 11/03/09Tags: YUI , JavaScript , Exponent
Last week I was very excited to attend the first ever conference of the increasingly popular YAHOO! User Interface Front-End Development Library of Tools: YUIConf 2009 held at YAHOO!'s Campus in Sunnyvale, CA. I've bean using YUI for several years now, integrating YUI's 2.x codeline in to Exponent CMS, and have begun integration of YUI's very impressive 3.x codeline as well. There was a heavy focus on YUI's recent release of YUI 3.0 GA, touting many great features such as speed over other libraries, an "Evolved" Events system, and a unified foundation for building widgets. Other aspects of the YUISuite were covered as well, including presentations of PHP Loader, YUITest, and YUIDoc. The Keynote Speakers: Brendan Eich and Douglas Crockford speaking on the history and standards of Javascript (ECMAScript), comparing the journey the Lord of the Rings and 12 Angry Men.
My focus at YUIConf as a Front-End Developer for OIC and Exponent CMS was to dive a bit deeper in to how to most effectively use YUI, attending the classes I felt would best benefit Exponent as a product. The first day of the conference I attended classes detailing YUI3's core a bit more in depth presented by the YUI Team's Matt Sweeney, Luke Smith, and Satyen Desai, breaking in the middle to catch Matt Snider of mint.com talk about his Storage Utility shipping with YUI 2.8. After Brendan Eich's over-the-top nerdy keynote on the history and future of Javascript, the presentation podium opened up for "Show and Tell". A good hand full of YUIers, including myself, took the rest of the evening presenting our works using YUI.
Day 2 for me was spent exploring a bit more of the peripheral projects of the YUI Suite: YUI Loader, YUITest, and YUIDoc presented by Chad Auld, Stephen Woods, Ron Adams. I was very impressed with all three, asking a batch of questions each session to get a bit further in to proper set up and overall direction of the codeset. My day ended with Dav Glass' exciting presentation of community involvement, including a step-through of the new YUI Gallery, which allows YUI community members to host their YUI 3 modules on YAHOO!'s CDN servers. The evening ended with a Keynote from Douglas Crockford, who elaborated on the struggles of the standardization of ECMAScript over the last 10 years.
YUIConf 2009 was a great success in my mind. The presentations were very well put together, and the presenters had full knowledge their topics at hand. Questions asked at the end of each session were repeated by the presenter as to make for more informative videos in YUI Theatre. The YUI Team seems to have a very keen focus on the current state and future of the web, making solid cases as to why their tools are so powerful and useful. I left the conference feeling very confident in OIC's choice to use the YUI toolset in our projects, and very excited to further integrate YUI systems in to Exponent CMS.
