Posts tagged ‘geek’

May 25th, 2010

Google Adwords for a wedding website? Why not?

When I created our wedding website, I thought keeping it relatively low profile was best. Since I’m neck deep in the internet most days, it never occurred to me that someone would quickly forget or not bookmark the wedding website while also misplacing both pieces of mail containing the url. For ease of use, I should have created a subdomain. It would be relatively easy to remember, as opposed to ymmat.com/mattandtammy.

Well, of course, more than a few relatives have lost the url and I noticed in my blog analytics that people were landing on the blog in search of the wedding website. When I first noticed it, I decided cranking the SEO on the wedding site would be a good idea, but there are enough other Matt and Tammy weddings that it’s still more or less absent from search results. So, I had the bright idea of using Google Adwords. If I can’t help our guests out one way, why not try another?

The ad, as you can see is very simple. Our names, the date, and the website url. The url is unique enough that people will hopefully notice. Besides, how often do you see an ad for a wedding?

As far as keywords, I used our names, the name of our site: ‘Matt and Tammy’s Wedding,’ as well as ‘Tammy and Matt’s wedding.’ Additionally, I used a few permutations of my domain with various wedding-related words and our parents names. When Dad vanity Googles himself, he’ll definitely be surprised!

I placed the ads in search results only with a cap of $5 per day for a run up until the day of the wedding. Obviously, I’ll keep an eye on it and move my daily cap as needed. I’m doubtful we’ll ever come anywhere close to our $5, but it seemed like a good place to start. I’ll be curious to see if anyone clicks through. Even if they don’t, I know when people do come looking, our site will now show up in the results.

January 27th, 2010

Early Adopters Anonymous

I’m an early adopter. I’ve been an early adopter since before I was the only girl in my dorm with a computer. I love technology and gadgets and cool geeky toys. I have my iPhone 3G, my PS3, my Roku, and my Kindle. There’s some functional overlap that’s happened over time. My Roku eliminated my cable TV use entirely and now, my PS3 offers the streaming Netflix functionality that drove my Roku purchase. I’ll keep them both because there’s always going to be more than one room in the house and you never know what kind of cool content Roku might offer next.

So, enter the iPad. It’s shiny, right? It’s a giant shiny gadget calling out to me and my insatiable geekery. But y’know what? Not seeing it. If I were a college/grad student and all my text books could go on the thing complete with graphics, maybe. But even then, the inability to multi-task is really capping my enthusiasm at lukewarm. No multi-tasking, no Flash, no HDMI, no widescreen movies, no webcam, no cam at all, and an additional $30/mo bill for me to have access to the web on the fly? No.

I can get on-the-go multimedia on my iPhone, which is also, shockingly, a phone. I’m already paying for it and adding a dataplan for the added functionality makes sense. My Kindle offers me instant gratification but doesn’t make me pay for it. Granted, it’s black and white at the moment, but that covers 99.9% of the books I read. My Kindle, which isn’t the DX, fits in my purse nicely – a not large purse. It is similar in size to a paperback. I’m not going to start carrying a bigger bag just to fit an iPad, which I can only use periodically whilst out and overlaps the functionality of my iPhone which I purchased from you previously. Carrying and paying for both monthly seems silly. And it certainly isn’t like the iPad can replace my MacBook Pro. I can’t very well play WoW on the iPad, can I?

Unless there are some developments between now and release, I won’t be in line and I won’t be buying one in the near future. I’m an Apple fan, don’t get me wrong, but either I’m not the target audience for this particular product (while I am for the vast majority of their products) or they missed the boat a tad on this one. Bummer, that.

Oh also, my wedding dress came in! This is unrelated, but more exciting for me than the tepid iPad news.

January 23rd, 2010

A week in review and some geeking

My week can best be summed up by the phrase “insanely busy.” Somehow in the midst of incredibly long, non-stop days at work, I managed to squeeze in a little bit of wedding planning – still finishing up music details and a few other things. Next project is bridesmaids dresses. I need to get that ball rolling.

For now, I’m simply happy to have survived. I’ll worry about things I still need to do tomorrow. In the meantime, I’m playing around with Bing’s recipe niftiness. Type in an ingredient and get a recipe. Clever and definitely a cool search enhancement. Bing is definitely making a play. They’re additions are clever and really showcase the power of intelligent search.

And in unrelated news, I really want one of these.


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