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The Pringle

The parts between search, social and marketing

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Brett Pringle

Recession & Retrenchments

Posted by Brett Pringle on November 20, 2008 in Business

I’m sure by now everyone has heard of some friend or business that has had a hard time recently with the global financial crisis, it is on everyones mind at some point or other (i bet it is at every payday at least when bills need to be paid).

In September this year i was appointed Director of Search for MediaVision, great step up the corporate ladder after all the long hours and hard work, yet within 2 weeks in this role 1 or 2 large UK clients decided to play it safe with their finances, cutting down costs and as you would expect the marketing budget is the first to go.

WordPress aquires PollDaddy.com

Posted by Brett Pringle on October 16, 2008 in Wordpress

A little surprise popped up in my twitter feed this morning, Automattic aquired PollDaddy.com! Ok, it is not as if Google decided to give away free money (Sorry all), but for any blogger that longs for blog interaction, this is definitely your next step and something worth getting excited about.

So what does this mean, well, from the video above, adding Polls to your blog are just that much easier, you are now able to create a poll directly from within the wordpress admin area (for those without a PollDaddy account, not to worry, WordPress kindly allowed you to signup through the admin area as well )

Search market share facts and figures 2008

Posted by Brett Pringle on October 15, 2008 in Search Engine Marketing

I have my moments when i end up on a hunt, trawling through the SERPS to find figures or statistics on search engine market shares or even research completed on how search user behaviour has changed. 2008 has seen alot of changes compared to previous years, we know Big G leads the pack, and others follow suit, however it’s been a very interesting hunt the last week or 2, surprised that you cannot find some of the information i stumbled upon in 1 central point, post, article or whitepaper online.

Google UK

Google dominates within the UK market, by March 2008 Google was leading with 74% market share, which has climbed since last year up from over 65%. Now currently close to almost 80% of the market share within the UK.

WordPress 2.6 Released – some new features

Posted by Brett Pringle on July 17, 2008 in Wordpress

So WordPress 2.6 was released, and congrats to the new release, some really great new features added, some so small folks might not even notice, such as the word count feature appearing while creating your posts, revision history of posts, allowing easier collaboration on posts and comparing revisions.

One great new feature that got me all excited was the ability to sort your media library, drag and drop style, Ajax is amazing when put to good use

Updates like these just get you all excited to try and make use of the features, full avatar support as well for commenters across both gravatar, identicon and monsterID. Been dying to implement the avatar feature on the company blog for sometime, and this will be the perfect time. For those wanting to add it as well, found a great writeup this morning on how to enable the feature with some very basic PHP changes here, Gravatar Support.

Training and education in the SEM industry

Posted by Brett Pringle on June 18, 2008 in Search Engine Marketing

I took a look from an “out of the box” perspective the other day, after explaining to a collegue the possible reasons for a website’s homepage to not have been crawled or indexed by Google, i just realised how the market has changed since i first started.

Initially just a writer for the company, and listening to my boss in the UK office explaining SEO back then for employment/recruitment industry was rather frustrating at the time, not being able to understand why and how it worked. The goal was to know what he knew, and to then know even more and be a key asset to the company in the future (personally i would be great and possibly a leader in the industry someday). Now it’s only been over 2 years, but the conversation i had made me think of what “newbie’s” to SEM get “thrown” in front of their screens when doing research compared to a few years ago when i was reading and learning.

Just a funny

Posted by Brett Pringle on May 19, 2008 in Just for Fun, Mobile

Not really a good excuse to post on the blog, but i had to share. Lovely to have a mobile that takes fairly decent pictures.

Spotted this car parked at the robots down the road from the house, snapped a shot. Amazing at what the traffic cops will stick a ticket on, when there are much more serious things for them to do

Anyway, will start posting properly within the next few days after the last final tweaks to the blog. CSS… oh boy

New Blog – installation

Posted by Brett Pringle on May 17, 2008 in Wordpress

Hey All,

After a bit of begging, finally have my own domain and blog. Since friday afternoon, the setup has, well, been a nightmare. Seems the new version, 2.5.1 of wordpress has massive changes including no author Bio page appearing anymore as in previous versions. Plugins are not compatible yet, so i’ve had a very limited choice in what to add to my blog from an admin side.

One frustrating issue, having to find a theme for the blog. Finding a appealing/eye catching design takes awhile, but actually loading it up and seeing what the design looks like live is disappointing. Thousands of themes later, and all i can come into conclusion is, the plain designs can’t handle what you really need. So be prepared for the look and feel of the blog to change somewhat as i get to grips with PHP and some basic design.