Banners are dead, long live banners!

Banners are dead, well at least the standard 468x60 flashing gif style we're so used to seeing online we've learnt to ignore them but real-world banners are very alive!

I need a nice, cost effective way of getting the Mobtex website offline and visible in the real world and for this I needed a banner and somewhere for it to live.

www.partybanners.biz is the site I ordered our banner from, I place the order on Friday of last week, 1.8m (72") x .67m (27") with my text on there to promote phone downloads like poly tones, realtones and mp3 track downloads, also to plug the free SMS and try to blast the URL infront of people OFFLINE - real people in the street or wherever my cunning plan leads the banner to be placed.

It turned up today, I am really impressed with Party Banners, the banner is 100% what I wanted, was a fantastic price and turned around in no time at all. I'm happy with them and it's not often I can say that a company has met what I expected from it with no questions asked and no stress. I can recommend them with no hesitation.

If you're thinking of banner advertising your website forget about the online options, browsers can disable ads, there's ad blockers and the human mind has modded itself to now ignore flashy gif icon banners. Try the offline option, for less than £35 you can have a real live banner, that's the cost of buying 20,000 hits from popups and expired traffic and will get your site offline and into the everyday lives of real people.

Now all I need is a spiderman costume and someone who's enough of a monkey to climb up Buckingham Palace and display it on the Queen's balcony ;)

If anyone reading this is a complete fool or from Fathers For Justice are you up for the job? There's no fiscal reward but we guarantee you will get on television and obtain a Criminal Record too. Apply here.

Promotional Banners from www.partybanners.biz

Ugly Websites

The surprising truth about ugly websites

An interesting article which says plentyoffish.com is doing $10,000 Adwords revenue a day!

Just don't get caught looking at it by the woman or the boss, "I'm not hunting a dogging partner, I was considering the use of the font" will not work as an excuse.

I don't think it's to do with the fonts or usability of the site, it's niche is that they don't charge in a subscription model environment - it's that alone that helps it bring in a whopping 600,000 visitors a day!

Accessibility policy introduced

I've just launched out accessibility policy page, now the frontpage of the site validates (as most pages do) to XHTML 1.1 and also meets Section 508 and WCAG Priority 1 2 and 3 - the mission is on to make all of the site fully accessibile now. It simply can't happen as certain features would be diabled, a lot of this accessibility thing is knowing when you should and shouldn't use restrictive technologies like javascript or flash. There's a place for both and they can be accesible but how few quality design houses ever marry flash, seo and accessibility together?

This tool here which I've already blogged was a great help to getting this sorted out, afterall specs are always a nightmare to understand from scratch and I found it to help me iron bugs out, it did involve getting my hands dirty to fix the code but at least I never spent three years with my head in W3C / DDA documents.

If you're putting stuff online then it has a global audience so your site needs to be accessible for those with disability, those who are blind or those who can't use a mouse. Simple enough in theory, with added SEO benefits so they say it should be worth the effort but what are the SEO benefits? I'm yet to discover, having validating accessible markup hasn't got me to number one on Google for ringtones or downloads yet but it says we actually stand up as one of the few who say "We do actually give a monkies about how this works to all people"

Affiliate scheme for ringtones

I'm pleased to say that I can now launch the Mobtex Affiliate scheme!

Here's the lowdown:

People signup using our very simple form then they link to us.

We remember they sent the client to us for 999 days.

If that customer buys we pay the person who sent them to us 70p as a finders fee and way of saying thanks!

It's as simple as that, it can be done with a hyperlink but for those who are more tech savvy there are also options to produce your own product pages by integrating our CSV, XML or SQL data feeds.

We'll give you a keyword on a UK shortcode which you can sell the content through, we'll provide you with links to our preview player which also includes our PayPal order form so you can earn revenue by passing customers to us from all over the world!

This is where it gets cool and a little techie I must admit......

Affiliates link to USERNAME.mobtex.net

Our site knows USERNAME is an affiliate click so drops a cookie that lasts for 999 days and redirects the users through to www.mobtex.net or the page they were sent to.

Once this users sees the order info the page uses the USERNAME value and prepends it to our keyword (MOB) on a UK reverse billing SMS shortcode, example, one of our users opted for username Y so his customers are instructed to send a SMS with our keyword and his ID then the product code. Example MOBY 100100

These sales are then logged, royalties and production studios paid then the affiliate who generated the sale will see an increase on the realtime stats we supply.

So far there are two users but this has been on the site for less than 24 hours so we will see how it helps build traffic, sales and long term partners for the business.

Dive Into Accessibility:

Dive Into Accessibility

More accessibility stuff.

Silktide: Sitescore Results

Silktide: Sitescore Results I love this tool, it lets you know how your pages are in terms of accessibility, inbound links, quality of markup, quality of content and much more.

Mobtex score 8 out of 10

The thing that holds us back is the low number of links we have being such a new site.

I really need to get more links out there to us.

Section 508 Guidlines & WCAG Priority 1, 2 and 3 tools

Cynthia Says Accessibility test tool. Covers section 508 WCAG Priority 1, 2 and 3.

An excellent tool.

The index page on Mobtex passes all the tests Cynthia threw at it, I now need to sort out the template driven bits on the site to make it all pass, afterall some would say accessibility is the new SEO.

Still need a million back links though for the efforts to be worth anything!

Free SMS Update

WOW - we've had it online about a week and we've already had over 250 people sign up to our free SMS text message service!

Today was mad, about 90 new sign ups, sadly some of those were duplicate accounts so I had to trim the fat and bar a few users. Afterall, why should they get more from it than anyone else?

Just gone midnight tonight we had a spaz-load of messages go out and I thought it was a bit too late to be sending them, I don't want to be running a late night stalking service here so I modded the platform to now only send messages between 0959 and 2259 - that way nobody gets annoyed by being distured late at night and the speed the messages are being cained will slow down a little.

I don't want it to slow down, I'm just scared seeing how fast traffic accellerated today and how many 5 pence peices we're going out the window with each message!

Social Bookmarking

mobtex's BlinkList page on Blinklist

I really dig all this social bookmarking stuff

Free SMS Text Messages

Free SMS Text Messages - Become a member, register with Mobtext now and get a content bundle free!

Well why not? The contract with our main SMS supplier is that we send a minimum of 1,000 messages a month, well we're a brand new site and we're not upto that volume yet so if we have to pay for them we might as well share them with whoever wants them, that way we can plug our site on the back of the message so we both win!