Are you getting married soon, live in Venezuela, and speak Spanish? If you answered yes to all three questions, then Esta de Boda is for you!

We are proud to have launched this wedding hub for bridal tips, resources, and most importantly a wedding registry that can be fully personalized—brides can share ideas, information, and tips. We focused to design a site that assist the bride from engagement to the honeymoon and beyond.

How did we do it?

• Developed a seamless backend system for simple management of content, registries, and an ever-expanding bridal directory
• Implemented sharing features, privacy setting, and simple management system that brides can use
• We have added a social layer to suggesting gift, wedding tips, and a vast amount of content

We now have to have the obligatory Spanish translation:

Blue Fountain Media estamos orgullosos de haber creado la portal más completa de bodas para novias en Latinoamérica con consejos, boda tips, proveedores y herramientas que te ayudarán a planificar su boda. Entre ellas, encontrarás nuestra lista de bodas, la cual podrá personalizar, compartir y diseñar para que todo fluya sin problemas.

A friend recently asked me if he should use Twitter.com or a specialized program or website to engage with the Twitterverse. Here is my reply:

While Twitter is quickly updating their service to make their website more useful for tweeting, I would still recommend a service like TweetDeck or Hootsuite.com to manage your Twitter account for anything but the most basic experience.

For managing all the ongoing conversation, these apps allow you to organize the people you follow into groups and even set up saved searches (e.g. a perpetual search for anyone mentioning your company or favorite charity). TweetDeck and Hootsuite both let you organize tweets and twitters into multiple columns. TweetDeck lets you set pop-up notifications for particular columns so you can keep an eye on high priority items. TweetDeck is a desktop (and mobile) application that has to be open to run. Hootsuite is a website that lets you manage your conversation in the browser (think of it as Outlook vs Gmail, in a way).

On the tweeting site, these services allow you to easily add video, images, short URLs and other Twitter niceties that are offered by third-party services (i.e. not directly from Twitter) that have become an integral part of using Twitter. Additionally, these services allow users to manage multiple Twitter accounts (and even accounts from other networks, like Facebook & Foursquare).

The bottom line is, Twitter.com is sufficient for a very infrequent, basic user. But for anything more, you need to use a specialized Twitter client.

Suggested Twitter Clients

TweetDeck
Hootsuite

Blue Fountain Media CEO Gabriel Shaoolian was one of three experts called upon by The New York Times to offer advice in a case study on FreshDirect, the online grocer. Shaoolian was featured along with Harvard Business School professor John A. Deighton and Stew Leaonard, Jr., president and CEO of Stew Leonard’s.

In the article, published today, Shaoolian said:

“FreshDirect has a great chance to create what we call a stickiness factor, adding features that bring people to their site on a more frequent basis. They need to integrate social media marketing, give people the opportunity to tweet about certain items or post them to Facebook.”

In recent months, Shaoolian, along with several other Blue Fountain Media experts, have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Inc., Yahoo!, Crain’s New York Business, Fox Business, Women Entrepreneur, SmartMoney, YoungEntrepreneur.com and a number of other media outlets.

We are always happy to assist members of the media with our insights into web design, web development, online maketing, search engine optimization, online reputation management and other topics relating to conducting business online.

If you are a media outlet looking for help from the Blue Fountain Media team, give us a call at 212.260.1978 or send an e-mail to jon@bluefountainmedia.com.

Read Gabriel Shaoolian’s advice in the New York Times.

Goby.com: An Inspiration Engine

What is it?

Goby let’s you “create your own adventure” using their “inspiration engine”. Give it a category of activity, place, and time, and it’ll return a matching list of things to go out and do. In their words, “Goby is an inspiration engine all about exploring things to do with your free time, from this weekend’s adventure to your next week off…”

How can it help my website?

Goby’s creators clearly spent a lot of time thinking about how they were going to get people to understand the concept. The solution the came up with–the three-step process at the top of the page–works well at making it easy to start using the site without having to understand anything. Also note how they don’t require users to sign up to start using the site. This is great way to nurture a low bounce rate.

The oddly-shaped “book” immediately below the “what would you like to do” boxes, tries to show you some of the great content that the site has, but the text is a bit small and the section, overall, is difficult to understand. Perhaps it would be better to use a carousel to show a few key images of events and activities that Goby has suggested to past users.

How do I implement it?

Whatever you want your users to do on your site, make it simple and at the forefront of the site’s design. Clear explanations and calls to action help.

Watch this video for a walk-through and analysis of Goby.com

Ever wonder how views are calculated on YouTube?

Back in the early days of YouTube, view-counts were determined simply by how many times the page was loaded. You could literally press your browser’s refresh button over and over again to increase a video’s view count. It didn’t take long, however, for YouTube to get wise to this game and implement some changes. As the importance of video view-counts has increased, YouTube has begun to take the situation very seriously and has put into place all sorts of algorithmic and security systems in place to prevent the gaming of view counts.

Here is Google / YouTube’s latest official expalanation about how video view-counts are calculated (emphasis mine):

YouTube video views are important to all members of the YouTube community – both to uploaders, as well as viewers. Views reflect how many times a video is watched and are an important measure of a video’s overall popularity. Although the most famous YouTube videos have hundreds of thousands or even millions of views, most YouTube videos get less than a couple of hundred views. We want to provide a bit more information about the sophisticated technology that we use to count views consistently.

Unfortunately, there are people who try to inflate views artificially. Sometimes this can be attempted by other users, by spam bots/malware or even by the video’s uploader. To prevent invalid views from being counted, we will occasionally slow or, in rare cases, freeze the view count of videos when we detect an attempt to increase view count artificially. This is the normal operation of our system.
What does YouTube do to address this?

YouTube has sophisticated technology to count views consistently. If this technology detects that there has been an attempt to inflate a video’s view count artificially, that video’s view count will be frozen. During the time in which the view count appears frozen, valid views will continue to be counted.

YouTube even gives an explantion for why they’ve implemented these measures:

We’ve implemented this type of technology and view-count analysis in order to prevent abuse of the system. Video views are at the heart of the YouTube community and we want to ensure that we’re counting only valid views (and not artificial attempts to game the system). Ultimately, consistent view counts benefit everyone in the community, from the viewers to the uploaders.

You may also enjoy a post by our own Alhan Keser about how to be successful on YouTube.

EVENT: New York Tech Meetup
DATE: August 2010

Presenters:
Eventros – Connects you with other event attendees
Market Publique – A curated vintage clothing marketplace
Turnto – Shop with your friends on any site
Indaba – Web-based music production and collaboration
Philo – “Check in” to TV
Twilio – A platform for building SMS and voice apps
Texai – A robotic platform for being in two places at once
Bing – It’s a “decision engine”

Eventros creates an instant, temporary social network based around the event you’re currently at.

“Eventros connects you with the other people in the room at professional events.”

Market Publique is a curated marketplace dedicated to vintage fashion. They are committed to bringing the vintage community together by creating a platform that caters to vintage clothing needs. Lots of high-res images, cheap to list, easy to create page templates, only good stuff.

TurnTo allows ecommerce sites to easily integrate social features. See what your friends bought and, perhaps more importantly, see why they bought it.

Indaba Music isn’t quite a startup–they’ve been flying under the radar for a few years now–but that’s okay. Indaba is a community that lets users make and manage music online. Powerful collaboration and remixing tools let users work together to create their masterpieces. And when you’re all done, you can upload your hot new track to iTunes and other online music stores.

Philo lets you check in to TV shows, share what you’re watching, and gossip with friends about what you’re watching. In their words, “Philo gives you and your friends new ways of exploring television. Earn points and unlock awards for watching buzz-worthy shows.” Fun tip: Leave a comment about a show and use the phrase “OMG”.

Create powerful voice & sms apps using a web-service API. Bottom line: Twilio lets you use your existing web development skills, code, servers, and databases to quickly and reliably let your web-apps interact with the phone network via voice and SMS.

Texai is a knowledge-based software project to create artificial intelligence. Using Texai technology, WillowGarage is building a fleet of robots that let you go elsewhere. It’s like the movie Surrogates, but in real life.

Bing is trying to win the search-engine war by providing users with more data. They’re putting a lot of effort into creating map applications

In our continuing efforts to keep on top of what’s happening in the New York business world, Blue Fountain Media makes a point of attending a wide variety of networking and industry events. Among the very best events… anywhere… are the ones organized and hosted by the Greater New York Chamber of Commerce.

Last night’s event, held at the Chamber’s Coffee House (20 West 44^th Street), attracted a vibrant, fascinating crowd. In attendance from Blue Fountain Media were Chief Content Officer Jon Gelberg and Business Development Associate Gia Cantillana. The two had a chance to meet with a wide range of Chamber of Commerce members.

“Business is all about synergy,” Gelberg said.” In a few, short hours, I had that chance to talk with a bio-chemist, Broadway producer, caterer, videographer, graphic designers, advertising and marketing gurus and a host of others from the worlds of finance, the arts and a variety of business-related services.

“One day after the event, I’m already scheduling follow-up meetings with potential clients and service providers.”

Special thanks are in order for Chamber Executive Director Helana Natt and President and CEO Mark Jaffe who did a terrific job of organizing and hosting the event.

Again, we highly recommend that New York-based companies check out the Greater New York Chamber of Commerce.

Looks like we finally made it into the elite group of places that are hard-coded into Google Maps.

Blue Fountain Media was in attendance last weekend during the annual Granite Transformations Convention, held in New Orleans.

One of the lectures given by the Blue Fountain Media delegation was Alhan Keser’s introduction to stickiness on websites. Each time a person visits your site, you have a chance to convert them into a paying customer. But how do you get visitors to keep returning to your site? It’s all about stickiness…

Locating the URL, Title Tag, and Favicon page is easy once you know what to look for.

Here’s a preview of what this blog post looks like in various web browsers, with the URL, Title Tag, and Favicon marked in each one.

Different web browsers display this information differently. In some, the entire title tag is visible, while in others, it is only partially visible. In these examples, the title tag is the same as the title of the article (though they can be set to be different) followed by “Blue Fountain Media Blog”. So, the full title tag is “URL, Title Tag, and Favicon In Different Browsers | Blue Fountain Media Blog”.

The URL is the address of the website. It’s how your browser knows what page to take you to. In this example, the URL is “http://www.bluefountainmedia.com/blog/url-title-tag-favicon/”.

The favicon is a small image that helps indicate what page your on. This is especially useful when users have multiple websites open at the same time and is trying to move back and forth between them. It’s a powerful branding opportunity.

To summarize:

• Title Tag: URL, Title Tag, and Favicon in Different Browsers
• URL: http://www.bluefountainmedia.com/blog/url-title-tag-favicon
• Favicon: see image below
  

Mozilla Firefox

Google Chrome

Apple Safari

Microsoft Internet Explorer